Cult Culture
I lived through a cult.
A real, religious cult that teaches women they cannot be leaders, sexuality is a choice, and hate can be disguised as righteousness.
This cult idolized Donald Trump, told grieving women they were murderers because they made the most difficult life decision of abortion, and they truly believe heterosexual couples should have more legal rights than homosexual couples.
My sophomore year of high school I was fighting an eating disorder and a domestic violence household. Desperate for stability and love, the culture of this cult was intoxicating.
While the faith I established is something I still value and practice today, the experiences I had in the 10 years I spent in religious cults equipped me to spot out cult culture in companies instantly.
The churches I attended in my 10 years of cult life convinced me of five very dangerous values to structure my life around:
We have this completely correct, other churches/denominations do not. You are lucky you found us
Anyone that is not a white, cis-gendered man is less valuable. You’ll learn your place through social pressures and outright manipulation (note: when I was a junior in high school a youth leader came to me to make sure I knew women were not allowed to run for president. She made sure I said it out loud before walking away. When I was a youth pastor parents always went to the man I dated instead of me because they couldn’t fathom that I was the pastor and he wasn’t)
You cannot trust yourself. You are fallible, you are not the source of truth, and you should be terrified of pride
Your body is not yours; it is your future spouse’s. Think about marriage every second of the day, let that be your only goal, and everything you do to your body is something you will have to tell to your future spouse (to this day the women that I sat through purity conferences with still tell me how scarred they are, and we recount what it was like to be told that our husband’s would think we were used if we even touched ourselves before marriage)
Heterosexual, cis-gendered men are leaders, everyone else is a helper. Know your place
As with the rest of my trauma, years of therapy rewired my brain after the severe brainwashing. That, and deciding to take Greek and Hebrew because those were the languages the Bible was originally written in. It’ll change your life when you realize the word homosexual is not in the original text of the Bible at all, not once. The Greek and Hebrew word is actually pedophile, but I’ll digress the theology.
Surviving a religious cult and being an HR professional in Corporate America have more similarities than you might think.
In the last 15 years the obsession with company culture has become cult-like. Terms like “culture-fit” and “Googli-ness” are standard practice. Values have turned into danger zones, HR teams became culture police, C-Suite into manipulation maniacs, and we stand by thinking because our employees can log off and go home we aren’t perpetuating a cult.
We convince employees exactly what I was convinced when I was in the religious cult:
We are the best company around, there’s no one else like us, you’re lucky to work here. Even if you’ve worked in tech for 15 years, we’re different. (If you haven’t read Chad Sanders experience as a Black man at Google, you’re missing out)
Anyone that is not a white, cis-gendered man is less valuable. You’ll learn your place through social pressures and outright manipulation.
You cannot trust yourself. You are fallible, you are not the source of truth, and you should be terrified of pride. Check your work 8,000x. Never make a mistake, catch every typo before it happens. “Collaboration” is code for “you can’t trust yourself to see a project through from start to finish so you’ll get major kudos if 14 other people touch the project too.”
Your body is not yours; it’s ours. Give up your health for this company. Sit for 10 hours a day, have so many meetings that you can’t eat regularly, then be so exhausted that you can’t workout. We pay you, and in return you give us your entire body - corporate prostitution disguised as work ethic and topped with ergonomic assessments. Think of this company and that 2.5% raise every second of the day.
Heterosexual, cis-gendered men are leaders, everyone else is a helper. It’s called teamwork.
In both religious and corporate cults you are given pious points based on how strictly you abide by these dangerous values. Points can be taken away, too, so don’t get comfortable. Whoever has the most points will be promoted…hopefully.
And don’t get it twisted - companies with a lack of culture can be cult-cultures too. Laziness breeds white supremacy, and that cult has the most blood on its hands here in America.
So when a Mexican woman who’s already a survivor of a cult refuses to attempt to gain any of the pious points, she is clearly not a culture fit.
“Woke” companies might thinks she’s a culture-add, but the chaffing of rugged and untamed individualism is historically too uncomfortable for cult-culture.
It is important for me to give space for the companies that allow real expression to the table, that fight for a culture that demands respect for humanity while also holding itself accountable to the cult it can so easily become. They are there, I have worked for them, and they are doing hard and holy work.
But you, HR warrior, are culpable in all of this, and that is why you feel so much discomfort after all these years. The amount of times we have allowed our recruiting process to be deeply bias because we are rushed, the performance evaluation systems that allow managers to do a shit job of assessing actual work product, not having difficult conversations with the C-Suite, not firing the asshole on your own team, not doing anti-racism work in your own soul, not leaving a company you should have left years ago, not trusting your own talent and capabilities, refusing to sell your body to a company, …we are culpable. And it hurts.
I picked HR because I really, really love people and believe that type of love can change people’s worlds. I didn’t pick it to be strategic, administrative, or important.
I picked HR to wash the feet of people that barely know my name so they’ll feel cared for; I picked HR to surround myself with people that don’t look, love, or believe like me… and be changed and inspired by them hourly; I picked HR to show others what a confident and talented woman in this field looks like; I picked HR to wipe people’s tears away and give them hugs even though I’m not a hugger; I picked HR to pull magic out of my own employees and watch that magic spin the world faster; I picked HR to debate, fight, argue, get angry, and then grab a drink with that person right after; I picked HR to take the hand of every brown girl and tell her “your career can be your once in a lifetime love - you are whole without a spouse, let’s love loud today"; I picked HR to chafe the fuck out of cult leaders.
I picked HR to stop cult-culture.
This Easter weekend my hope is that you sit for a few moments and ask yourself what type of culture you’re the ambassador for, and if the real bones of those values are dangerous. Then…do something about it.
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
