I Lost My Family To A Terrifying Religious Group. Now It's Happening Again — With Trump.
In 1974, amid the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the final years of the Vietnam War, my parents became swept up by an apocalyptic, fundamentalist religious organization called The Move of God. I was 15.
I initially thought their involvement with The Move would be simply a passing phase, like my mother’s sudden and ultimately failed plan a few years earlier to move the family to Australia, or her determination on another occasion to win a jackpot by solving a scavenger hunt sponsored by a local AM radio station. I remember crowding with my siblings into the backseat of our Ford Fairlane while Mom zipped around Topeka chasing down clues. She often entertained big ideas that led to nothing, so I didn’t immediately worry about her latest flight of fancy.
Granted, the holy roller prayer meetings I witnessed in our living room that spring, complete with praying in tongues, witnessing and dancing around in praise of Almighty God, were, to this high schooler, outlandish and supremely embarrassing. I couldn’t imagine my parents would carry on like this for long.
That’s what I believed would happen until the day I heard the disembodied voice of Sam Fife, the defrocked Baptist minister and founder of The Move of God claiming he would never die. In angry rants emitting from the tinny-sounding speakers of a cassette player Mom kept on the kitchen counter, Fife warned that demons roamed the earth in search of human hosts. These proxy devils, he said, existed everywhere and could inhabit any human being. More than a little shaken, I asked my mother about Fife’s strange monologue.
“Shhhh. I’m listening,” Mom said, waving her hand at me as if she were swatting away flies.
When she reached across the Formica countertop to turn up the tape’s volume, I knew something ominous had crept into our lives — and I had no idea how to make it stop.
Every day, as Mom prepared the evening meal, she would click the on-button of the tape player to hear Sam Fife deliver a sermon about one bizarre thing or another — like that God had selected him and his congregation to serve as warriors in the ultimate and final battle against worldly evil. Once they slaughtered the unbelievers — as described in the Book of Revelation — he said they would establish a theocratic world government and rule with God for a millennium.
Fife’s speeches demonstrated a deep contempt for women. He said that they were responsible for inciting the sexual appetites of men, and implying that any abuse they might receive was their own fault. They must cover their bodies and avoid adornment of any sort, he said, so as not to attract male attention. Men, he claimed, were heads of the household, just as God was head of the Church, and thereby, women were commanded to submit to their husbands. Fife even bragged that he hit his wife whenever she got out of line. In a recorded sermon, he once claimed, “I whipped her every time she broke the law.” In the world according to Fife, women were fit only for making babies and tending the home — and to be slapped around, apparently.
Fife crafted an atmosphere of peril to hold his flock captive. He said the devil was out to get them and that he — and only he — could save them from Satan’s army of demons. The fear Fife instilled in his people led to a mandate to abandon nonbelieving friends and family members.
Mom and Dad bought it all: Fife’s lies, delusions and conspiracies. They left the Catholic Church and began governing our home according to his edicts. They dropped dear friends, distanced themselves from extended family, and associated almost exclusively with other members of The Move of God.
Mom completely reformed her wardrobe. Her Jackie O shifts, strappy sandals, and colorful jewelry were replaced by midcalf-length skirts, baggy shirts and sneakers. She stopped wearing makeup and styling her hair, and pressured my older sister, Catherine, and me to do the same. “Flaunting your face and body,” she told us, “tempts men into sinful thoughts and actions.”
Practically everything that had been normal in our home was now forbidden or condemned as sinful: public school, friends, parties, movies, television, birthdays, holiday celebrations, secular music, popular fashion, secular books and magazines.
My younger and more dependent brothers and sister fell into line, obediently leaving their public schools for a fundamentalist Christian one. Catherine and I refused. We told our parents we’d run away from home before we’d go to that school. Our parents, at a loss for what to do, consulted one of the elders of The Move.
“It’s too late for them,” Brother Patrick told my mother. “They’re lost.”
And just like that, we were liberated — and also exiled.
Our parents gave in and allowed us to stay at our high school. Though I felt immense relief that my parents’ expectations that we conform to their religious views had been dampened by Brother Patrick’s verdict, I felt estranged from them — particularly my mother — in a way that I hadn’t before. Before The Move, I’d always made my parents proud. Now, though I was still a bright student with many friends and a promising future, they expressed mostly disapproval of me. That was devastating.
Throughout high school, my sister and I, now allies in rebellion, resisted everything about The Move. We spent as little time as possible at home, escaping via school, sports and friends whenever we could. Then something unexpected happened. Catherine met Luke, a handsome young man and member of The Move of God. She fell in love and became one of them.
Just a year after their meeting, Catherine married Luke at a Move commune — they called it an “End of Times Farm” — in the backwoods of Arkansas. The couple recited their vows outside a wood-sided sanctuary while my parents, siblings, a gathering of strangers and I looked on. We stood on a dirt-floored common yard encircled by dilapidated cabins and dented trailer houses. A fortress wall of dense pine forest loomed in the background.
After the ceremony, family members and citizens of the commune smiled and laughed with the newlyweds. Kids chased scrawny chickens around the yard and ignored their mothers’ appeals to stay clean. Everybody was happy — everybody except me.
Is something wrong with me? I wondered. I couldn’t fathom the possibility that the Catherine I knew — the girl never afraid to question authority, the girl always with a mind of her own — would ever be happy as the second-class citizen she would surely become in The Move. She’d taken a vow to “submit to [her] husband in all things.” Now she would live with that promise. And I would be alone — alone without a family or a confidante in the nightmare my life had become since Sam Fife arrived at our door.
Catherine and I rarely saw each other after the wedding. She and Luke moved to a Kansas Move compound, a place where I was not welcome and not at all eager to visit. We lived in different worlds now, with no common enemy and no common cause.
Though I’d moved out of the family home, I visited Mom and Dad and my younger sister and brothers every Sunday. I was now 18, an adult in the eyes of the American legal system, which meant my parents could no longer force me to attend prayer meetings or anything else regarding The Move. I think they finally believed what Brother Patrick had told them: that I was lost and going to Hell for my rejection of their version of God.
On Sundays when I visited, I helped Mom fix a big afternoon family meal, just as I always had. I set the table with our best tablecloth and special serving dishes. Then, after dinner, we sat around the table telling stories. Those Sundays were melancholy affairs for me. They brought back memories of a time when we were a cohesive unit. A happy family. A time when I still belonged.
Then the worst thing that could possibly happen did.
A year after Catherine’s wedding, my family left home and moved to an End of Times Farm in the wilds of Alaska. Dad quit his job, cashed in his pension, sold the house, and gave away all of their worldly belongings.
On a golden day in October, my family boarded an old blue-and-white-painted school bus for the long trip north. As I looked on, I knew I might never see them again, and I felt a deep sadness about that. I also knew that I didn’t have to lose them. If I accepted The Move’s distorted reality and submitted to their domination, I would not have to say goodbye. But that would mean abandoning the freedom to think for myself — the freedom to decide my own life.
I watched the bus disappear into the Kansas horizon.
Two years later, I received a letter from Alaska bearing my mother’s distinctive handwriting. “We’ve left the farm,” she wrote. “We’re staying in an apartment outside of Fairbanks for now.”
I couldn’t have been more thrilled. She didn’t explain why they left and I didn’t ask. The story gradually emerged that the elders of the Alaska farm had used my parents for their money and for their labor. Those in charge wielded their power like tyrants and behaved as if the rules they forced on others did not apply to them. After Dad and Mom understood the mistake they’d made, they packed the Subaru with their few belongings and, with my younger siblings, left the farm for good.
Not long after that, Catherine, finally fed up with submitting to a controlling husband, filed for divorce. She left both her husband and The Move behind without looking back.
Over time, all my family members moved back to Kansas. We formed a kind of extended family, adding spouses and grandchildren along the way. We celebrated life events and holidays and mourned the death of our dad together, but a faint anxiety of unfinished business hung over all our gatherings. We never talked about what had happened to us. For my part, I believed that to be best. What would uncovering old wounds do but remind us of pain we never wanted to feel again? It was enough to know they’d left The Move behind them. However, sometime around 2010, when Mom and my younger siblings took up the same kind of right-wing politics as prescribed by Sam Fife, I worried.
Then, in 2015, as I watched Donald Trump float down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, I felt a stab of recognition. Under the guise of a politician with a fake tan and bad haircut was an angry man, an arrogant man, a dark and dangerous man — a man so like Sam Fife that I immediately knew I was facing the same threat I had faced as a young woman all those years ago. Then, when Mom and our three younger siblings declared their enthusiastic support for Trump, I felt overcome by the terrifying possibility that my history was repeating itself. Only this time, the entire country would be at risk.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, I knocked on doors, made phone calls, registered voters, wrote essays and posted on social media about the dangers of a Trump presidency. I did anything and everything I knew how to prevent his ascension to power.
After he won the election, I saw more and more Fife whenever Trump opened his mouth. The lying, misogyny, apocalyptic language, fear-mongering and the enthusiastic embrace of conspiracy theories all set off ancient alarms inside of me. I fell into a deep depression. For months, I lived with the same fear I did as a teen, in a panicked certainty that my life was slipping away from me. When the despair became debilitating, I sought therapy and revealed to my therapist — and later in a memoir — the full story of what happened to my family and me.
Now that Trump once again threatens to take the reins of the federal government, the possibility of living under the eye of another misogynistic authoritarian regime feels frighteningly real.
And when I imagine the freedoms Trump will endanger should he regain power, that future looks untenable.
Trump has already arranged for the overturning of Roe v. Wade by appointing a slate of radical right-wing justices to the Supreme Court. According to Project 2025, a document linked to Trump that many allege he will use as a blueprint if he wins a second term, he and his party plan to further encroach upon women’s independence by banning birth control and IVF. The 922-page document published by a conservative think tank also lays out plans to gut health care, DEI and LGBTQ rights, public education, voting rights and environmental regulations, among other unthinkable reversals.
Even more alarming, the scheme advocates for establishing a kind of state-sponsored religion to be imposed on every one of us regardless of our beliefs. As described by The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an American civil and human rights organization, a new Republican administration would “preference an exclusionary interpretation of Christianity ... stripping rights from other communities.”
I’ve seen and heard all of this before. Trump and the Christian Nationalists working to elect him espouse many of the same ideas and use the same language as The Move did. They share the same beliefs and envision the same dystopian future under an authoritarian theocratic government. That vision didn’t end well for my family — or for many others in The Move. I don’t want to see such a future for me, for my family, or for my country.
The other day I called my mother. “Mom,” I said after a few niceties, “I wrote an essay about our family and The Move. HuffPost is interested in publishing it.” I braced myself for a brusque rebuke followed by a hang-up. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Mom and I generally enjoyed a good relationship, but religion, politics and The Move were hot topics for us. To my relief, she didn’t raise her voice or hang up on me. Instead, we engaged in a rational discussion about what it might mean to expose our story in such a public way. In the end, my mother told me, “Pray on it. After that, if you feel it’s the right thing, do it.”
I don’t have much inclination to pray, but I honored my mother’s advice and gave prayer a try. After a few days, I felt I had my answer. I don’t know if it was the prayer or the respect Mom showed me or the years of letting go of secrets that got me there. But the answer is now clear. It’s time to finally have those hard conversations. It’s time to break the silence.
Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned in this essay.
Cyd Chartier is a writer who has also worked in documentary film. She has an MFA in narrative nonfiction and is the author of a recently completed memoir, ”The Hallelujah Bus.” Cyd lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and two rescue cats. For more from her, visit www.cydchartier.com and find her on Instagram @cydceecee and Facebook.
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