The Cult of Mission Trips
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Hello Sounds Like a Cult Pod. This is Hallie from Alabama. The cultiest thing about mission trips is when mission trip attendees post pictures on their social media with individuals from impoverished countries they specifically visit for missionary purposes and almost 99% of the time it includes children. To me, this promotes the culture of white saviorism which thrives within Protestant churches.

Most of the pictures that I've seen are from young adults, and while they may see it as a way to try to get likes on social media, it has more harmful implications if the children are not able to consent to having their pictures taken.

Hi, my name is Kat. I'm calling from the Seattle area. And I think the coldiest thing about missions and mission trips, specifically Mormon missions, since I grew up Mormon, this is my experience. They are so isolated from the rest of the world, their families, everyone that they know. And they're just surrounded by church people.

sayings and verbiage and that kind of culture. They take little things that don't mean anything and make it seem like God's trying to tell them something.

Specifically, like the term personal revelation, which is a really big thing that the Mormon church pushes. Basically saying that like God will tell you something relevant to your life and you need to follow it. Hi, my name is Taylor. I'm from South Carolina. And as a Christian, I think the cultiest thing about mission trips is how we will visit countries that are already predominantly Catholic and tell them that they need to be saved. ♪

This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host, Amanda Montell, author of the books Cultish and The Age of Magical Overthinking. Every week on the show, you're going to hear a little analysis of some fanatical fringe group from the cultural zeitgeist, from Tradwives to Stanley Cups, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?

And if so, which of our cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watch your back, or a get the fuck out? After all, this is a show about the cultish spectrum that has emerged in our contemporary culture. Cults are traditionally thought of as the Jonestowns and the Heaven's Gates, these satanic compounds where freaky people who have nothing in common with us go brainwash themselves and die. And, um,

And while that is definitely a valid definition of the word cult, the truth of the matter is that cultish influence often shows up in places you might not otherwise think to look, like our corporate offices and our online forums, and certainly subcultures having to do with mainstream religions. Religions that maybe were once considered a cult in the United States, like Mormonism or even Catholic,

but that are now overall accepted. There are many jokes in religious studies about the blurry line separating cult from religion, from culture in general. Jokes like cult plus time equals religion, or a cult is a group where the leader thinks he can talk to God. A religion is a group where that leader is dead. The truth of the matter is that the boundaries separating mainstream religion, secularism,

secular religion like Swifties and people who can't get enough of their pickleball tournaments or whatever, and sort of classic cults are ever porous. I probably don't need to do a ton of convincing these days to communicate the point that cultishness is everywhere. Now, today we're covering the cult of mission trips, and I gotta say, whenever I get to do a hashtag religious trauma episode of Sounds Like a Cult, it's my favorite. I've

It's kind of weird and inappropriate to classify it as a favorite thing to talk about because it can get kind of dark. But listen, I just love roasting pockets of mainstream, institutionally accepted Christian society that...

should be known more broadly as cultish because so many truly jacked up rituals and traditions and ideologies from Christianity, all kinds of different denominations of Christianity dominate our society and are so interwoven with our upbringings, our childhoods in this society.

that by the time we get to our adulthood and maybe have decided to leave those traditions and rituals behind, we might not necessarily be given the space to process how culty that shit really was. I say we, I did not grow up in a Christian community.

But my fascination with evangelicalism in particular, some listeners might know, was planted when I was in middle school. I became best friends with a girl whose mother belonged to an evangelical megachurch, and I would go with them all the time to services out of anthropological fascination. And ever since then, I have been obsessively unpacking the role of

of Christian cultishness in American society. And it shows up in so many places, which is why hashtag religious trauma keeps emerging on this show. We've done episodes about purity rings, celebrity mega churches, hell houses, church camp, youth groups, and Cincinnati.

nuts naming all these topics. But one of the main reasons why Christianity is so good at dominating so many aspects of life is because of its missionary aspect. And today, we're addressing that directly by covering the cult of mission trips. Now, I know how

how important and personal and urgent and sometimes even triggering these religious trauma themed episodes can be for folks. Because so many of us are hoping to finally get the last word in about how fucked up some of these experiences really were and continue to be.

And just in the spirit of setting expectations, I want those listening to know that today's overview and interview are going to be shaped around the personal experiences of my guest co-host today, whose experience by no means represents everyone, but is one that I felt was really, really worth sharing and hearing about today.

stick around for today's interview in a bit. It is with an author named Tia Levings, who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist community. She's a survivor of church-sanctioned domestic violence and went on to become an important voice in the ex-evangelical community. She's the author of a book called A Well-Trained Wife, My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. And in the interview, we focus on her experience and her observations of mission trips in the community that she is

specifically able to speak to. But I'm also going to drop some sources in our show notes for those who would like to further deep dive into the cult of Mormon mission trips specifically or other voices that are important to the subject matter. Just wanted to get that disclaimer out of the way because as always, this show is a

a funky tonal balance. It's a more lighthearted approach to culty subject matter just for the sake of approachability. But sometimes we land on these subjects that are just closer to the heaven's gate side of the cultish spectrum and that can be intense. So I don't want to disappoint anybody. This conversation is one that I hope you enjoy and feel validated by and fascinated by, but is surely not the

representative conversation about the cult of mission trips. Okay, enough of my babbling. What am I doing right now? Speaking in tongues. Time to get into the history, background, and culty analysis.

First of all, what the fuck is a mission trip and why are they considered a good idea? So mission trips are an age old American tradition where young people are tapped to travel to various communities. Sometimes they're here in the United States, but most infamously, they are overseas in developing countries to quote unquote help people.

while actually just attempting to indoctrinate those people and oftentimes causing more harm than good. Mission trips are common in evangelical communities. They are very common in the LDS church, aka Mormonism, a highly, highly, highly missionary denomination of Christianity.

The LDS strongly encourages slash obligates, but doesn't technically require their young male acolytes to go on a mission trip at some point in their late teens or early adult years. Cue the song, I believe, from the Book of Mormon, Cult of Theater Kids, shout out, that musical makes me LOL, but also oof.

It's funny because it's true. Mission trips for Mormon men are typically two years long. Women are also allowed to do them, but for women, it's only 18 months. Mormons go through a whole training process in order to prepare them for this godly mission. Oftentimes, the training involves learning the

language of the country where they're headed to. It's framed that your country assignment is ordained by the Heavenly Father, and the goal of these mission trips is to spread the word of Jesus Christ while also ostensibly serving this community that may or may not need any help at all, and certainly not by a little white boy whose underwear was given to him by his church. Temple garments, anyone?

Oh my. Mission trips are sometimes called voluntourism. It's the sort of thing where you kind of get like a free trip to Costa Rica or wherever under the guise of building new schools and homes and teaching the children there about the Bible. But really, it's just a chance for some 16-year-old who has never done a single load of laundry in their entire life to go on spring break and build a one-room schoolhouse because Jesus said so.

It's all just one big opportunity to party with your friends with a big, fat, heavenly superiority complex, possibly traumatize some people who never wanted to meet you, and then go home feeling like Hercules. According to some estimates, as many as 2 million youth and adults per year participate in mission trips.

At least those were the numbers before the pandemic. This includes both overseas trips and trips to poorer communities in the U.S. All of that is according to a piece in The Conversation by Caroline Nagel titled, Mission Trips Are an Evangelical Rite of Passage for U.S. Teens, But Why?

The origins of this whole tradition have to do with a Christian tenet called the quote unquote Great Commission, aka Jesus commanding his disciples to baptize more disciples in all nations. That's a little Bible quote from Matthew 28 colon 16 dash 20. I do not know how to quote that Jesus-y Dewey decimal system. And I love that about me. Okay. Missionary

Colonies have truly been a thing in their modern form since the mid-1800s, when colonization was truly colonization-ing.

Missionaries really started to become a thing in the mid-19th century as the world was truly becoming colonized, but they didn't really blow up in their modern form until the 1980s. And I can't help but think that it's no coincidence that mission trips blew up during the very same era as the human potential movement, aka when multi-level marketing companies really adopted their identity as this object.

entrepreneurial endeavor, this American dream pursuit. Multi-level marketing companies are just an essential oils themed domestic mission trip. All these ideals really go together. I was gonna say like a communion wafer and wine, but the Catholics don't really do this shit.

In 2008, it was estimated that U.S. Christians spent $2 billion on their mission trip endeavors. That's according to a Huffington Post piece titled, Short-Term Mission Trips, Are They Worth It? From 2011 by Dr. Dennis J. Horton. Mission trips are worth it.

Mission trips are honestly getting shorter and shorter. They commonly take place in countries that already have established Christian organizations to support them. These are termed local partners. And it's kind of pitched that by going on these mission trips, not only can missionaries expect to promptly transform the people that they are quote unquote helping and saving, but that they themselves will be transformed by this work, aka be closer to God. It is painted as a win-win-win-win

win-win when really it is a lose-lose motherfucking lose. As if the culty aspects do not wear themselves on their temple garment sleeves, let's get into a tiny bit of analysis before we head into our interview with Tia Leavings. First off, the gaslighting false promise of saviorism to disguise white savior imperialist colonizer shit is...

probably the number one culty thing about mission trips. There are all of these euphemisms used to paint taking long naps and like hammering one nail as hard labor. I love when evangelicals say they're quote unquote, "Walking with the poor." It is so manipulative. It is so expansionist. It is such a clear, obviously culty way of establishing a sense of superiority and exclusivity in the minds of those in the in-group, AKA these missionaries.

In a blog post for Medium titled "Why I'll Never Go on a Mission Trip Again," Cult of Mission Trip survivor Mariette Williams wrote, "The poor people around us were simply there to help us appreciate our lives back home. They became props in our journey to fulfillment." Extremely dehumanizing. Most missionaries are not taught anything substantial about the realities or values of the people they're assigned to quote unquote "help."

and I cannot wait for you to hear an example of how bad that can really get from our guest later. Caroline Nagel for The Conversation wrote, quote, "In effect, what mattered to the volunteers and organizers was simply that places were poor and foreign rather than the reasons why poverty was so entrenched." It is such an unbelievably cultish tenet to imbue your followers with this sense that they are saving the world when they are at best kind of doing nothing.

And at worst, actively harming and traumatizing those communities they believe they're saving.

and carrying on that unscrutinized mentality. From my understanding, the whole experience of a mission trip is also extremely infantilizing. You round up these kids, or very young adults, who've never before been independent, have oftentimes led a very sheltered life. You slap some matching t-shirts on them, a la a Disney adult family skipping off to Space Mountain. These matching t-shirts will be like bright green and saying things like, here I am, send me,

In preparation for this episode, I watched a bunch of missionary horror stories and confessions videos on YouTube. Some crowdsourced experiences via Exmolex on YouTube included giving these young missionaries bedtimes, giving them a teeny tiny radius that they weren't allowed to go past like a little baby playpen, meanwhile expecting them to save these populations without any life skills or tools to actually do so.

So many of these youth group graduates and church campers who go on to do these missions are, to say the least, not skilled carpenters, okay? They are not plumbers. They are not electricians. They are church kids working.

wearing matching lime green cotton, singing Amazing Grace in a school bus in poor harmony. According to this Caroline Nagel piece from The Conversation, critics of short-term American mission trips have argued that these godly endeavors basically just dump unwanted, useless goods on these host communities. They are extraordinarily culturally insensitive and commonly assume that locals need this American expertise—insulting—

Meanwhile, these shoddy construction projects often push out local workers and often result in building structures that aren't even safe to be in. Again, these trips are basically just vacations and they're not cheap ones at that. You have to

I read in a piece for the Berkeley Beacon titled Stop Going on Mission Trips by Juliet Norman that on the website for this one mission trip titled Mission of Hope, they list the cost of this one week-long trip to the Dominican Republic at $895. That's not including the cost of airfare, but it's $895.

And the way that the mission trip activities and inclusions are listed literally make it sound like a group spring break vacay. Albeit one that is, let's just say, very wholesome, to put it nicely. They list all the delicious meals that you're going to get and your beautiful lodging and a beach day. Meanwhile, you show up to the Dominican Republic and this vacay for the Lord that you were promised is off.

Often not what is actually delivered. Anyone in the cult of backpacking would be horrified. This shit is giving into the wild. These young people show up, oftentimes grossly unprepared, to areas that are unsafe, weather that is uninhabitable. They show up without the right clothing, without the right materials, without the right common sense skills.

Again, from this Exmolex YouTube video, I learned that some of the unsavory experiences reported by those who've been on mission trips included parasites, passing out from exhaustion, sleep deprivation with lasting long-term effects, 90 degree heat, and 90% humidity. There were reports of getting held at

knife point or gun point. And some cult of missionary survivors were diagnosed with PTSD afterwards. Via Exmolex, one story was reported where a missionary asked to leave the trip due to being sexually assaulted by a trainer, which unfortunately is not at all an uncommon experience and enabled by the unquestioned deference to authority that these folks are conditioned to have

in the church from a very young age, this missionary's request was denied. They were told no because there was quote, "no such thing as an honorable release." AKA, if you go home early, your peers would assume that you had done something bad like premarital sex. How imprisoning is that? It sounds like a fucking cult.

Ooh, honey, from this exposition alone, I'm really leaning get the fuck out with this cult of the week, but I want to give it a fair chance. And so with that, I am delighted to introduce this week's guest, co-host, and interviewee, a survivor of multiple different subcultures of evangelical life. Please welcome Tia Livingston.

Hi, I'm Lauren. I'm calling from Virginia. And one of the cultier memories I have of high school mission trips is that we used to wear matching outfits as a group. We would have a logo designed for our trip and it would say mission and then the name of the country that we were invading. And we felt very cool in our matching outfits and we all had to wear the same color pants too. We wanted to, you know, really look like a unit even though it was

pretty obvious that 20 to 30 American teenagers walking around together in a foreign country, we certainly stuck out. But we really wanted to show our unity and cultiness by wearing the same outfits.

Hi, I'm Cammie from Baltimore and one of the cultiest things about my Mormon mission and I think a lot of Mormon missions is that you get sent to this foreign country where you barely can say hello in the language and then you get there and the mission leadership takes your passport and locks it away for safekeeping and then sends you off to a city several hours away. So you cannot leave. Literally, legally, they have trapped you there and I think that is really scary.

I'll tell you a story about two girls on a mission in Texas. They were companions. One of them had a dream that she got married to a guy in their mission area. She woke up, told her companion, oh my gosh, I had personal revelation that

I'm supposed to marry this guy. Well, turns out the other girl had a crush on that same dude and was convinced that she had personal revelation that she was going to marry him. They got into a fist fight over it. It was that bad. All because they thought that God was telling them, you're going to marry this guy. Guess what? Neither of them got married. It's just, it made them delusional. Delusional. I really don't think anyone outside of that

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Well, Tia, thank you so much for joining Sounds Like a Cult. Could you introduce yourself and your work to our listeners? Yeah, I am an author and an activist. I wrote my memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, which was the story. It's my escape from Christian patriarchy. It's the story of how I got into and out of a high control cult that's

kind of taking over our country right now. So it's extremely timely. And I also educate on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism and how we can be less fundamentalist in our thinking. Could you do us the kindness of telling us a little bit more about your personal backstory and how you first started to question the culture and teachings that you were raised in? So some listeners may be familiar with Shiny Happy People on Amazon. My story was included in that documentary.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist megachurch that became more fundamentalist and more politically nationalist in the same span of years that I grew up. And so when I was married, it was in that evangelical world where we didn't really get to know our spouses very much before we got married to them. And so I was quickly in an abusive situation but had no language or vocabulary to understand that and no way out of it.

And then I was mentored. My coping mechanism was to turn to an older, wiser woman for guidance. And that landed me in Bill Gothard's Institute of Basic Life Principles, which is the IBLP cult. And then from there, we followed the evangelical through line through reformed theology. And if you're familiar with Doug Wilson in Moscow, Idaho, and what's happening there now, his federal vision was getting planted back in, this was in the late 90s and

I eventually was in a very high control cult church that I had to be excommunicated from, formally shunned. And then I escaped at midnight with my children from this violent marriage in 2007. And then 10 years of trauma therapy to get out of it. So tracing back to where I first started disentangling

is not a clean line. It's a process of awakening. I have a big dividing line in my story, which I call it my BC, which is before Clara. My third baby died in infancy. Talk about her all the time. Clara's a big part of my story, but she is the force that unlocked my mind. And it still took me seven years to unlock my body,

But I was starting to question what I had been taught and indoctrinated into at that point. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for what you're doing now. I hear not stories exactly like yours, but I hear stories about escaping from religious fundamentalism, not infrequently. I pursue them, that's why. But every time I hear one from recent history, I can never get over the shock of just the fact that this is all happening in the United States right now. I mean, I personally live in like a pretty...

progressive bubble in Los Angeles, and yet there are still even things like this happening here. So it's just pretty frightening. I mean, this is a show about the cults we all follow, which...

is often a pretty lighthearted concept. We're talking about the cult of Peloton and stuff like that. But Christian fundamentalism is on this spectrum of the cults we truly all follow. Oh, it absolutely is. It's all the same thing. That's why my work's expanding to fundamentalism in general, because people are attracted to a formula and a promise. They want a shiny promise that's going to solve their problems. And that's true whether it's an MLM or whether it's groupthink at their church or

I grew up in the shiniest Southern Baptist church. Our pastor was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. It was wealthy. It was beautiful, lovely aesthetic. Everyone there was well-meaning. And there's parallel cults, you know, like we definitely had an MLM rising in our church. But I call what I lived through the cult without walls because that's how we existed. It's an America within an America. If you're familiar with The Handmaid's Tale, which I'm sure you are, like Gilead had a precursor and everything in The Handmaid's Tale really happened.

Atwood used that as her real model. And she said that everything in the book has already happened. And my life was that. My life was the prequel to The Handmaid's Tale. So my book is a harrowing story, but it's on the same spectrum as anyone who's ever reached for a pretty promise and an easy formula that's going to result in this happy outcome. How many mission trips did you go on over the course of your mission tripping? Yeah.

My mission tripping. I mean, like we have eight years of Saturdays proselytizing and then three weeks a year for four years and then scattered trips here and there. Like it's just part of your culture. And you would go mostly overseas. Were you ever doing missions in the U.S.? Like how, where in the world was Carmen Sandiego? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I wasn't that much of a missionary. I got to stay stateside for most of it. And there's an undercurrent of how exotic of a place do you get to go serve. So it's a really big deal if you get to go to Haiti or if you get to go to Mexico, you know, you get to go to another country because you have to get a passport and then you're traveling, you know, under this holy, sacred reason to travel. And so it's condoned by God and you're called by God. Now you're called by God to go on vacation.

I got to go to Louisiana. I got to go to Texas. And I got to go to Kentucky. And I got to go to rural Virginia, you know, really exotic places. Well, God did not want you to go on vacation. No. So you went on a permanent vacation from God. No.

I am just joking. Yeah, so you named some political figures in sort of like summarizing your story briefly that not everybody might be familiar with. Could you sort of identify those folks and their role in your story and then the broader cult of just American politics?

Christian fundamentalism at the moment. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you really tip of the iceberg. There's a thinking called dominionism. It's dominionist theology, and it teaches that Christians are to have dominion over the country and of the whole world through proselytization. So the evangelical mindset, this is why we have missionaries. It's the idea that each one can reach one, and you should lifestyle witness. The Duggar Show, a lot of people are familiar with the Duggars on TV. They were doing something called lifestyle evangelism, which is where they're showing you this way of living.

The purpose behind it all is so that they can take dominion and everything that they do is positioned to achieve that through different flavors of marketing, whether that's one-on-one relationship that you might have with your neighbor, it might be something that you see on TV, or it might be where you go to church on Sunday and you get preached to how you should, you know, be in the world, but not of it is a scripture verse that's used a lot.

And so these key players in this world, you know, are certainly all the big Baptists and church names that we see kind of circulating now, but they're longstanding, multiple decades. So a lot of the seminaries are rooted in Texas. And so we have a lot of like Texas scandal happening right now with church abuse and things like that. But they're tied to movements like Bill Gothard's Institute of Basic Life Principles, his evangelistic method. They did a really great job of showing this on Shiny Happy People with a map.

People would come to these conferences for biblical principles. So they were coming from multiple denominations and faith groups because they believed in the Bible. And then they would go into their churches and they would spread their gospel within churches. So these churches were becoming more conservative and fundamentalist. They thought they were just following the Bible. It's not like through the lens of Jesus anymore. It's just biblical.

straight on biblical Old Testament hardline solution stuff. And then they have spinoff ministries. So like at the time, I think it's really important to remember the internet was just being born and it was rising. So Bill Gothard led to a man named Michael Pearl, led to a man named Doug Wilson, who has a big,

big, big empire in Idaho and everything that they're doing from the representatives they send to Washington to the way they change the prayer in our schools, you know, and the 10 commandments in schools and the speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, and all of these, it's like two degrees of separation for everybody.

Forget six. We don't need six. They're all in the same bed. Oh, my God. Yeah. We had this interview on the books for quite a while, but I'm sure that one of the reasons why I wanted to push it up was because of the Oklahoma ruling that the Bible must be taught in schools. I'm just like, we gotta talk about this. Okay, so...

On Sounds Like a Cult, we've covered many, many sort of furtively cultish ways that Christian fundamentalism shows up in everyday life. Those sort of lifestyle missionaries that you talk about show up in so many covert ways. We've talked on the show about everything from hell houses to trad wives.

And you've gotten into this a little bit already, but like, why do you think fundamentalist Christianity has so successfully continued to insert itself in seemingly innocuous corners of everyday American life? Like, what is responsible for this unsquashable rebranding prowess?

Yes, and they do rebrand every 10 or so years. I think it's important to look at the multi-generational nature of it so that you have a nostalgia that's built into it, an attractiveness that this is an old value or that life would be simpler if we were simpler.

which is a major tenant of fundamentalism. They're going to make your world smaller by eliminating distractions and things that they deem could be damaging to the ideology. So when there's chaos happening, which there definitely has been chaos in our times, people tend to gravitate towards order and structure and easy answers. And so where they might otherwise be trailblazers and try something new,

If they've come from a background where evidence has been shunned, we're not allowed to talk about the fruit. We're not allowed to hear from survivors. We only hear from the top-down authority structure, which in our country is dangerous because in Christian homes, it's a top-down authority structure. But now in our country, our government is becoming more authoritative.

at first can feel comforting and stabilizing, but then can turn really ugly when the authority structure in place is oppressive and denies rights and forces everyone to comply or you're out. So I think that we keep seeing it come back because this idealism is what people reach for when they're scared.

And the trad wife lifestyle, you know, I was a proto-martyr type trad wife. We didn't call it that. We called ourselves traditional wives, which is all that trad is short for. You know, and I was a homesteader, homemaker, home birther, home canner. I had chickens and...

gardens and all of that and wore dresses all the time. And I would have been a trad wife influencer if I'd had social media. It just hadn't been born yet. So I think this young group that's just grabbing on and resurging this movement is doing the exact same thing we were doing in the 90s. We just had had Y2K happen in 99, 2000. And we were terrified the end of the world was coming. And so we're all grinding our own wheat and stocking up on it.

all the things we need for survival skills. And when I look at the prep movements, the preppers now, I'm like, I get why you're doing what you're doing. You're scared. Yeah. I mean, honestly, same. No matter where you are along the political or religious spectrum, like I get wanting to can and grind your own wheat at the moment. God, seriously. No, I think because of this foundational missionary aspect,

It is the job of a good Christian, it sounds like, to meet people where they are. And that once meant going door to door, going overseas, and sometimes it still does. But if you can do missionary work on TikTok and you're like a young, charismatic, handsome individual, you don't even need to leave your bedroom to proselytize. Right. So when...

Pivoting to talking a little bit more about missionary work and mission trips. When I say the cults of mission trips, what rituals, traditions, or beliefs immediately come to mind for you? Yeah. So missions work makes me laugh because it's a cult that's supported by cults, which is like probably an exception because cults by nature claim to have the rightness of everything.

and the right answer, and we're the exclusive, we have the truth, we have a corner of truth. But when you're dealing with missionaries, now you're dealing with the A-list, the most devout in the cult, and then they become their own cult. Like, the whole expat and missionary mindset is like, they are the elite, and they're recognized as the elite, so that everyone else is understanding like, well, we can't do that with our lives, but we can at least financially support them.

we can at least make sure that they have what they need to go out and tell the world. So it all comes back to Jesus's great commission, go ye therefore and make ye fishers of men and tell the world and spread the gospel. And so all of Christianity is predicated on missions work. But what comes to mind for me is like really bad things like Rene Bach and white saviorism and little white teenagers going into a sea of brown and doing mission tourism. It's all sales. That's

also true. Like if it's all Christianity, it's also all a sales and marketing model that leads to colonization and arrogance and its own subset of dysfunction. Like if you've ever talked to like missionary kids that grew up in missionary kids, they're disenfranchised, isolated. Some of the worst cold stories because now they're in countries where they don't speak the same language and they have no resources. And sometimes they're under very duplicitous reasons too. So it's actually dangerous to be where they are. Hmm.

You mentioned the name Renee Bach. Yeah. Could you expand? Yes. Renee Bach is kind of like the poster child for the disaster case. Previously, I think I would have used Elizabeth Elliot, who went to South America, and Jim Elliot was killed by the jungle unreached people. And then she went back down with her baby daughter, and she converted that tribe and

There's a whole lot we could say about the Elliotts. And they were like the poster children for missions that went bad. And they claim it as a redemption story for a long, long, long time. And now we have Renee Bach. And Renee Bach was a young white woman who went to Uganda. She had absolutely no medical training. And she decided to treat starving babies without any medical training. I think over 100 children died because of her malpractice.

and she's facing all kinds of legal stuff for it now. And there's a documentary out about it, but you know, when you look at pictures of her, she just looks like any young life, white teenager who decided to go to Africa and save the Brown children. And I get the bleeding heart. I get the empathy, but it's with that missions mindset that,

I have what you need. I will bring you the solution. It's still the same like formula and everything that I do for you will be reciprocated with your belief in my system. You know, it's that transactional service. Yeah, yeah. So the Bible quote that you cited just now, I don't have it memorized, but it references fish. Yes, it does. It does.

So that reminds me of some reporting that I did for Cultish about the children of God who were sort of referred to as a sex cult. And it was helmed by this guy named David Berg. And he really latched on to that particular Bible verse and corrupted it to coin this sort of missionary practice called flirty fishing, where he would basically coerce his female followers to like

bait men that they would meet in bars or wherever with sex, hoping to convert them and recruit them and the whole thing. And that is a sort of like well-known cult example. Children of God is not a cult that we would cover on Sounds Like a Cult because everybody's like, yeah, that's a cult. This show is more for the cults that are...

the spectrum in our upfront discussion. Flying under the radar. Yes, exactly. And yet that example and all the examples that you're naming now, you know, from children of God to like the handsome missionary TikToker make me think like basically ever since Christianity became the dominant religion, missionary work and recruitment and conversion have been a big part of its business. But my question for you is why do you think that some sects

like Mormonism and Bill Gothard's corner of Christianity are more hyper fixated on mission trips than others. Yeah. So interestingly, in my story, I made a conversion point from evangelicals, which is all proselytization. They go, you therefore, and spread the gospel.

to Calvinism. And Calvinism believes that you are chosen, predestined ahead of time. And so your focus shifts to just being an attraction. You are now trying to establish a presence. And then if people are chosen, they'll come to you. So what that looked like in my life was altar calls stop.

stopped. Missionary work stopped. Church planting didn't stop. They still like there are reformed church plants all over the world and they're insidious because they do kind of the same thing without the outreach tentacles. They still take over. They still have saviorism. They still colonize all of that. Like the Puritans example, colonization is still there, but they're not going to go out in a predatory way and go like trade food for belief, for example. So

I think at that time, it was very comforting to me because I was uncomfortable with the idea that we would only go places, we would only offer aid in exchange for church membership and conversion. That felt really dirty to me. If there's a storm and we're going in as a presence, then we're just going in, period. We're not going to pray with you. We're not going to tell you anything. And there are groups of Christianity that take that viewpoint where they're not there to convert. They're there to serve, which is, I think,

probably the closest thing to ethical you can do for that kind of work. But no, the idea that you're only going to help somebody if they agree with you, if you sell them, you know, and it is like flirty fishing because you're still using bait. You're just, it's a question of what's going to be your bait. Okay. And so some denominations have a more passive approach versus a more entrepreneurial approach. Yeah. Yeah.

Are there any religions besides Christianity that do these kinds of mission trips? I mean, because my radar is honed in on like fundamentalist attitudes and like the way that we adopt these same things without the same external clothes. I have been in

like, quote, blue groups that are going in. It's just a different ideology they're preaching. So I think that Christianity is so dominant that it's really, I don't know if the margin is worth mentioning, but I know that if you're going in to spread an idea in exchange for something in return, that's one thing. And then if you're going in to just help humanity, that's another. Yeah. I mean, you see, like, we've done an episode of the show on the Peace Corps,

Like you could argue that that is a form of secular mission trip. Yes. And I'm sure they get culty. Oh, 100%. Yeah. No, check out that episode. But then the argument can be made that like in the United States where Christianity is so dominant, can you really have like an institutionalized mission trip program that is secular? Like it will always be flavored secular.

Christianity to some degree, right? Right. I have met people who go in just to serve, like they believe that Jesus's message was to serve the poor. And so they serve the poor and they leave or they strengthen the environment and then they leave. Like they're not there to overtake, but that's so rare. And I don't touch it. I don't touch it now. I'm like, I would much rather donate and give in ways that are actually strengthening what's there. So those people can help themselves. Yeah.

You know what happens during the summertime? I get a little spendy. I get loose with my cash. I'm like, oh, it's hot outside. I need to buy seven swimsuits. I need to buy a new console table and I need to buy a new TV.

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Just go to the App Store or Google Play Store and download the free About It app to start earning cash back and use code CULT. That's I-B-O-T-T-A in the Google Play or App Store and use code CULT. My name is Nina and I'm from the Bay Area. And the cultiest thing I find about mission trips is someone who engaged in them before is the nature of some of these mission trips can be super exploitive. They can prioritize the experience and the

satisfaction of the volunteers over the actual needs of the community that they're serving. This can look like taking exploitive photos for social media gain, not protecting the identity of the community that they're serving, promoting a poverty tourism mindset which could be controversial, or engaging in activities that the local community may not find beneficial especially on a long-term economic level.

Hi, my name is Michaelene and I have so many years of experience on mission trips and I think that the cultiest thing about mission trips is that there is a pressure to be as vulnerable as possible with people you just met three days ago. I worked for multiple Christian organizations in the past and one in particular that made it a quote-unquote tradition and part of the mission trip experience that every student on the trip shared their testimony or their life story. It was not required but it was highly

highly encouraged. I have been victim to it myself and have witnessed many times in which individuals felt pressured into sharing the deepest parts of themselves even when they weren't comfortable doing it. I can even think of a time in which a student came out and told their group about their

sexual orientation and that student shared it because they were in a vulnerable space and that information was later used as a reason for that student to not be a part of student leadership the following year. So don't even get me started on the lack of alone time that you have, the constant exhaustion that can lead to spiritual manipulation, but also just like the

The reality that you think that you're crying because it's the Holy Spirit moving you, but realistically, you're actually just an introvert and you're getting four hours of sleep a day.

Can you talk about the missions and ministry that you had personal experience with? What did that work look like? And what strategies were used to recruit people to be a part of it? Yeah, and this is like such an interwoven part of my upbringing. So in my big mega church, the way it looked was they were preparing us for the mission field. And so to be a missionary is to be called. You have a special calling on your life and you're chosen. So, you know, like with your young teenagers, you don't know if you're called to be a missionary or not.

So they give you lots of practice. And so what that looked like in our city was they sent us out in groups of two going door to door all day Saturday. We would knock on strangers' doors. And they'd take eight busloads of kids and drop us off in neighborhoods. And I'm thinking now as a parent and as an adult, I can't.

cannot believe that they did this. Like we just went all over city. Jacksonville is an enormous city and they just dropped us off and we went knocked on strangers doors for eight hours. And then we came back. And if we did that every Saturday, we got a ski trip. You know, it was always rewards based. And then twice a year, we went on week long missions trips. And I still see youth groups do this where it's like missions tourism.

So you get to go somewhere cool as long as you have some missions type activities. So we would go survey and proselytize in other cities. And then we would perform our choir and orchestra stuff for them. And we would just show them what great kids we are. Like, we're just wonderful. We have such blessed lives. Don't you wish you were us? And this is how you can be like us if you pray this special prayer. And then we would...

leave. And then there was the top tier of the missionaries, and those were families that had been called to the mission field. And so then some of our efforts were like raising money to support their cause. They would come on tours back from their countries and tell us what life was like. And it was always with this arrogance that they were there to save this poor country. And we should, number one, have adoration for the missionary, and we should really feel sorry for the country that they came from.

They have traditions and religions and backgrounds in their own countries, and we just learned it's like a conditioning to disrespect across the board.

they're wrong because they don't think like us, period. So we just need to find the way in so that they'll believe us and they'll convert and they'll come to our churches. And they have a huge stronghold in the Philippines. Like my church is where Tim Tebow went to, the football player. And so the Tebow family, that's a good example. I mean, they've like taken over the Philippines. They have a massive, massive ministry in the Philippines. And Timmy Tebow, you know, like

His mom taught me how to sing scripture. I'll never forget it. She used to wear like a stocking lipstick. And she would sing Bible verses to us because she was in my homeschool group. And then they would pray, ask us to pray for Timmy Tebow because he was a good basketball, a good baseball player and a good football player. And he was going to be a football player for Jesus. So we should pray that he could go to UF and become a Florida Gator and play football for Jesus. Yeah.

Stop this. Oh my God. And look what God did. Look what God did.

Yikes. My God. Okay. So you mentioned sort of how kids of missionaries who are out in the field can be really isolated, that sometimes they're there under like sketchy circumstances. Can you talk about some of these like worst case scenarios? Like what were the cultiest, in a bad way, aspects of the missions trips that your church spearheaded or that you heard of?

Yeah, it's interesting you just used the word spearheaded. So I'll go back to the original story of the Elliotts. So the movie's called The End of the Spear. And so Jim Elliot is this young, closeted gay guy. We know this now from old journals. This is all the truth eventually comes out. But at the time, he was a young newlywed seminary student who went with a group of men to the jungle to tell these people who had never been contacted by the outside world before about Jesus. And as soon as their plane lands, they get speared to death.

And then two years later, Elizabeth Elliot takes her two-year-old baby down to the same place and decides to live among the people. Take the gamble that she's not going to get speared too and her baby going to get speared too. And then they proselytize and they raise. So like I'm raised with that stupidity. Like that's not even good risk assessment. You know, like who does that? What mother does that? Takes her baby in there.

So by the time I'm an adult, I'm like not supposed to question that there's a family in our church that's going to Yemen, which is a very, very closed country. You are not allowed to be there as a Westerner, certainly not as a Christian. And they went in under the guise of some sort of water program and they had four children and one of them had a heart problem.

and they did this anyway and we were supposed to laud them for being so courageous and by then you know I had I was a heart mom my baby had that same heart defect and I was like you have to be kidding me you're not going to go live in the desert under like where you could be killed any day just because they found out who you really are and so the the dishonesty that is so bred into it and the

the dangerous risk taking on the behalf of the people that you're supposed to be protecting. I would definitely consider my own children the higher priority there, not anonymous strangers. But that flips it. It flips it because you're not supposed to value your children as much as you value the lost people that you're there to save. And it just doesn't jive in a mother's body. I don't think, not mine, not mine. Yeah. Like what are they thinking? Like what is going on? I think

I think this is where it's super important right there. Why it matters we talk about outcomes because they will always lead. Those organizations will always lead with the shiny new young generation, the new people coming up to spread the message. But what we have to look at is the minefield of actual survivors and evidence because what happens most of the time,

is people have a breakdown. That couple from Yemen ended up divorced and they're in America trying to struggle and their kids are grown up and whatever. And that's not an unusual story. These stories, the whole ex-evangelical movement, which is a massive movement, is made of people who believed they were supposed to proselytize and value other people's conversions more than what was happening in their own lives. And it led to a crisis of personality and it led to a crisis of faith and it broke everything and they had to deconstruct it completely.

That's way more common. But what the churches do is they push all those people away as bad apples, failures, shunned. You know, I was formally shunned when I was excommunicated. And instead, put the new onus on a new batch of 16-year-olds. These are the hope for the future. And it's always young kids. You know, they're always the teenagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's something that's so insidious about this because, like...

When you're out and about, you can tell when a group of kids is like a mission trip group of kids. Oh, yeah, you can. Like they have like a vibe. Yeah, it's a Chick-fil-A vibe. It is. Listen, you said it, not me. It's a Chick-fil-A vibe. And, you know, it's not totally...

unfamiliar to me because like I went to theater camp and like theater camp kids are just as annoying as mission trip kids and we're popping around singing schoolhouse rock all over whatever so there is something in adolescence that is super

so geared toward community and fanaticism. And that's, you know, why teenage girls are like the biggest fans of One Direction or whatever. Like there is something thirsty for communion and purpose and ritual in all of us, but especially in youth. And so when I see these mission trip kids, I'm like, it's such a shame because they're

buzzing of energy and like want and desire that they have is so universal and is so human and it's being taken advantage of in this really jacked up way and it's it's like hard to look at I call it zeal they're so zealous and they're and it's all

always the soldiers. It's always the, you know, armies are made of young people. There's a stage in development and human development that makes all that group think very exciting. You know, theater kids aren't trying to take over the whole world, but missionary kids, that's what they've, they're being taught. They're being taught that way that they

are to take over the whole world and their energy is being completely exploited. But it is on brand. The Bible stories I grew up with, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into a fiery furnace and they were young teenagers who were sent to a conversion camp. You know, it's like Mary. Mary was 13 when she had Jesus. Like, it's part of it. It's not separated. Yeah. And like, that zeal can be weaponized in such an insidious way or it can go Greta Thunberg. It can go in so many different directions. Right.

but we can't sort of like minimize how teenagers in particular are so susceptible to cultish influence only for the fallout later to be like rejection by the community that you gave everything to. That's why it's our responsibility. Like as a mom, what I did was recognize that this is a developmental window in their brain. It is to be protected. I am an adult who is supposed to protect

that zeal and that interest and make sure that they have resources to learn, step outside their worldview, broaden their worldview. I don't think we change that teenagers are that way. I think what we have to become is better guardians of that. Yeah, so true. And it becomes even more challenging, I think, in the age of social media missionary.

work, right? Oh, sure. Lord love them. They're the best ones at it. TikTok adoptees are young and us oldies, you know, like we can figure it out. We can use it, but they're going to always be the early adopters and they spread ideas really quickly. For better and for worse. For better, for worse. What happens if a missionary is literally unable to convert?

They're fired. Like, what if they could? Okay. Yeah, they're fired as failures. They're probably brought under, like, some rehabilitation and some coaching that happens. They're brought in on furlough so that they can come back and fix their marriage problems, put their kids through some remedial stuff. You know, whatever's broken, they're given a chance to fix it.

That is how I met the Tebos because they had some family issues that their kids weren't thriving in the Philippines. And so they had to bring them home so they could speak English and have like an American life. Their kids were depressed and other things that I'm too distant to know. But that was the whole story was that they're home on furlough so that they can fix these problems. And then if that doesn't work, if you don't renew your commitment to God and feel that excitement again, then you're just fired.

And that's their livelihood. Oh, my God. This Tebow tea is really piping hot. Jesus. No pun intended. So how did you come to realize that mission trips might be doing more harm than good? You know, what was that specific piece of your story like? Mm-hmm.

Yeah. The background is that I kind of like how water wears something down. Time after time, I was like, I've started to find world cultures really beautiful and not I didn't want to take that like arrogant view that something was wrong with them and that I had the answers. But on a personal level, the last mission trip I went on was to build houses in Mexico.

And we actually built the house. We stirred the concrete with our hands and we erected this house in Rosarito. And one of the workers there heard that I was a doula. So a doula is somebody who helps women have babies with aftercare as well and early childhood. And I've had lots of babies. So

I did part-time work as a doula and they heard that. And there was a baby, a mom and a baby that were struggling in their congregation. And so quickly, like in the span of an afternoon, I find myself off the job site being taken to this woman's house somewhere deep in Rosarito to help diagnose why her baby is not thriving. He's like two days old and he wasn't nursing and

And I get into this house and we go into this really deep, dark house. And I'm realizing as I'm doing it that...

Their mindset is that I somehow know what I'm talking about just because I'm white and American. And I'm supposed to have the posture that I have the solution for you just because I'm white and American and a mother and have some experience with babies. But a doula is a support role. It's not a medical role. So I can't actually help a baby that's failure to thrive. Now, I get it back there. It's 90 degrees, 95 degrees, so hot outside.

And this baby is in so many layers. And the first thing I do is I take the baby and I take all the clothes off of it. And the mother starts screaming and crying. And then the translator says, in our culture, we keep our babies bundled. And I just stood back and I was like,

you need to take the baby to the hospital. It's not nursing. It's going to dehydrate. That's all I can tell you. And that was my, like, I'm done. I'm not participating. And I haven't, that was 12 years ago. I have not participated in any other missions type endeavor. I've given to a lot of charities, but I won't, I won't do that ever again. Right. I didn't know. Right. I don't know how they take care of their babies. You know, like,

Yeah. No, that culture clash sounds like it was actually traumatic for everyone involved. Everyone. Not helpful. Not helpful. Yeah. I've got one more question for you and then we're going to play, if I dare suggest it, a game. It's a

funky tone that we have here on Sounds Like a Cult, but if you get it, then you get it. With more and more criticism surrounding missions trips, both in and outside of Christianity, like I couldn't help but notice as I was doing research for this episode that like there are a great many churches that are vocalizing critiques of these behaviors, but

How do some churches continue to justify them? I think it gets justified because the establishment can't continue without missions work in some capacity. Like an evangelical model needs evangelism in order to thrive. And so they have to keep growing. And as their own country becomes more restrictive, they're looking at other countries to take over and spread. It always comes back down to that dominionist model.

of they're supposed to spread Christianity throughout the world. So I think that's why it persists. I think the obstacles start to come up when you have what just happened in Haiti with those young missionaries being killed, and they went in there and they're tangling in regimes and problems that they really have no business in. Or the other thing that will happen a lot is they'll go in for a short term, provide a bunch of relief, and then leave. And there's been no infrastructure help whatsoever.

Again, all with this transactional, you know, we will help you colonization mindset. So I think it's the more the certainly in America, the colonization conversation continues. We're starting to look at these systems and like, oh, we shouldn't be doing this. This is actually not helpful. But then that's a direct existential threat to their organization. So it's a really a sticky a wicket. So we're going to transition into a little game. There's no way to lose this game. It's just a classic sounds like a cult game called What's Cult Here?

So I'm going to read a list containing some of the Christian fundamentalist quote unquote cults that we've covered on the show before. And I'm going to ask you whether you think that is cultier or missions trips are cultier. Okay. What is cultier? Mission trips or purity rings? Purity rings. Why? Just longer standing and more difficult to extricate from your thinking.

Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. Okay. What's cultier? Mission trips or church camp? Oh, that's so hard. I'm going to say church camp again because you can't get it out of your system. I've gone to therapy for church camp. I haven't gone to therapy for missions work. Wow.

Wow. This is illuminating. I'm so glad, despite my discomfort, that we decided to play this. Okay. What's cult here? Mission trips or celebrity megachurches? Mission trips. Okay. Because real people get hurt, not just plastic surgery and butt implants and prosperity. Like, they're going to fall on their face, but people die and other things. So, yeah.

They're the same thing. They're the same thing. Yep, it's a tie. Mm, trad wives.

Tradwives, yeah. Because I feel like missions trips are kind of maybe dying and tradwives are on the come up. And you can't leave your tradwife life. You're stuck. Right. Last round. What's cult here? Missions trips or hell houses? I mean, hell houses remind you of what happens to you if you don't go on a missions trip. So, yeah, that's a snake eating its tail. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Yes, no, all of these things work in tandem. A hell house for those who haven't listened to that episode and are blessed not to know are like just sin themed haunted houses that also teenagers put on for churches and youth groups. It'll be like instead of having like a graveyard room and like a witch room with a cauldron, it'll be an abortion room and a premarital sex room. Yeah.

They're real fears. They're real fears leading to real damnation that keeps them motivated. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. But also like a fun activity for Christian theater kids to do in October. Cool. Okay. I have one more question for you, Tia. It is the ultimate sounds like a cult question. Out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. Oh.

Which cult category do you think Missions Trips falls into? It could be Watch Your Back based on location, but I'm going to say Get the Fuck Out.

Yeah. It's kind of feeling like a fundamental get the fuck out. Like there's no way to do it ethically. It's a get the fuck out. Get the fuck out. You don't belong there. That's not where you should be. If like you doing your absolute best and like going the hardest for the mission results in death and or excommunication from the very institution you're trying to support, that's so bad. Right. It's so bad. If you really want to go to the beach, just go to the beach. Don't.

God does want you to go to the beach, but he wants you to, she wants you to send yourself there. Tia, thank you so much for your time and for your work. If folks listening want to keep up with you and all your many endeavors, where can they do that? The easiest is Tia Lovings writer on all the social platforms. My sub stack is tialovings.substack.com and my website is tialovings.com. And your book is a well-trained wife.

It is, and it's available everywhere books are sold. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Thank you so much. Well, that's the show. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Bye.

Sounds Like a Cult is hosted and produced by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of The Podcabin. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. This episode was made with production help from Katie Epperson and Reese Oliver. Thank you as well to our partner, All Things Comedy. And if you like the show, please feel free to check out my books, Word Slut, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism, and The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality. If you're a fan of Sounds Like a Cult,

I would really appreciate it if you leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I am so excited to tell you about this iPhone game that I am newly absolutely obsessed with. It's called June's Journey. If you're a true crime fan, but you don't like anything too violent, I feel like this game is totally going to be up your alley. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery game that takes place in the 1920s. So the aesthetic is very colorful.

and vintagey. It centers on this protagonist named June who has to travel back to her family's luxurious island estate to solve the mystery of who murdered her sister. And you participate by finding hidden clues to help uncover the murder mystery. And I love that you also get to decorate the island estate as you go, which makes the game so fun and aesthetic and relaxing. I feel like I'm generally pretty bad at iPhone games.

but you truly cannot be bad at this one. I like to play it when I want to be on my phone, but I don't want to be on social media. I just want to relax and find something fun and distracting. It's great for that. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android.

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