Those Who Escape the Cult

Daniella Mestyanek Young, Uncultured

Daniella Mestyanek grew up in a Brazilian compound with dozens of other children and adults, but not really in Brazil. Her home was an international colony of the Children of God, a strange Christian splinter group notorious for its isolationism and weird sexual mores. When she finally escaped the group at age 15, she found it had warped her thinking and left her permanently vulnerable to exploitation by powerful, amoral people.

Mestyanek, who writes under her married name Young, divides this memoir into three main thematic parts. Each involves her increasing awareness of private abuse and covert violence hiding behind smiling systems. Her time with the Children of God (proper name, The Family International) is perhaps the strangest and most pointed, as it differs most remarkably from her audience’s likely experience. Yet it sets the tone for power abuses which dot her entire life.

The Children of God arose as merely one among the Jesus Freak youth ministries of the 1960s. However, the group’s leader, David Berg, like his rough contemporaries Jim Jones and David Koresh, internalized his culture’s Woodstock-era grandiosity, and believed himself a prophet. He began issuing apostolic decrees which his adherents believed carried God’s signature. His pronouncements became increasingly weird, especially when he gave God’s blessing to sexual exploitation.

Unlike comparable cults, the Children survived years without a conflagration. Because of this, not only was Daniella Mestyanek born into the religion, so was her mother; Daniella was a third-generation True Believer. Except she lacked the fervor her faith community demanded. She asked questions, demanded respect, and felt free to express her doubts—challenges which a leadership appointed by God couldn’t accept. This resulted in increasing tensions.

The problem isn’t that Family leadership believe themselves right; it’s that they believe themselves chosen by God. Such absolute leadership cannot brook doubts, questions, or challenges. The longer little Daniella defies their dictates, the more brutal and repressive their tactics become. Tactics include isolation, physical violence, and sex. But rather than force her back into line, these tactics harden Daniella’s resolve to leave.

Daniella Mestyanek Young

Once out, and forced onto her own resources at only fifteen, Mestyanek must negotiate another power dynamic that also doesn’t permit doubts: the American education system. It takes time, but she eventually learns school’s intricate, unspoken rules, even when the occasional petty dictator uses those rules against her. She achieves the book learning she always wanted, but which her religion denied, since Armageddon was always happening soon.

Her formal education, however, culminates in graduation into two new power dynamics: marriage, and joining the Army. Her first husband makes her feel included and desirable, two traits she never felt previously, notwithstanding the Family’s mandatory sexual inclusion. But she quickly realizes that he considers her a consumable resource, not a partner. The Army authorizes her to stand on her own two feet, which empowers her to escape him.

If this sounds familiar, I appreciate my long-term readers. Lauren Hough’s memoir is pointedly similar, with the arc out of the Family, and into the only organization bold enough to provide the structure she needs—in her case, the Air Force. Both women find strength enough to free themselves from learned shackles, which in Hough’s case means her closeted sexuality. But they achieve that strength only after enduring systemic abuse.

Mestyanek initially flourishes in the Army. She rises through the ranks quickly, and becomes one of America’s first women officially authorized into front-line combat. But she also quickly notices the overlap between the Army’s conditioning, and the Family’s. Both rely on name-calling, shame, and in-group behavior to enforce desirable behaviors. Both are riddled with sexual violence. And both actively squelch independent women.

This isn’t a surprise revelation; Young declares this realization early. She doesn’t, however, deeply analyze the parallels; this isn’t a scholarly monograph on cults and their organization, it’s Young’s memoir of coming to grips with patterns of power and abuse in her life. Our author becomes aware of the power structures most of us take for granted, and rebels against them. But this isn’t a how-to, it’s her life story.

As such, Young’s memoir makes for gripping reading. She struggles to maintain her identity when confronted with powers that see her, a woman, as a lesser person to exploit. Though she escapes from the unspoken rules governing life in the Family and the Army, she’s still, in the final pages, finding her own beliefs. She gives us reason to believe that we, too, can escape the exploitation dominating our lives.