chapter : The Totem Pole and the Silent Hour

MARK: You remember, David, back when it was still—I don’t even know what to call it—normal? I mean, normal for us. The impossible little secret of it all. If a sister liked a brother, or vice versa, it was something you just felt. It was accepted, in a way, but only if it stayed tucked away, hidden under the surface. If you knew what was good for you, you never let it show.

DAVID: Oh, I remember. That crushing tension. It felt like you were constantly broadcasting your true feelings, and any close look from a senior brother or a discerning sister could read the transgression right off your face. The only way you survived was by having that one chosen friend—that confidant—the one you thought you could tell, maybe, your desire for that certain sister. But even then…

MARK: Even then, you couldn’t trust it. Because in the back of your mind, you knew that friend might just be measuring the value of your confession, calculating the social leverage. The fear of being ratted out at a meeting for being “in the dark” about some supposed fault. That’s how you gained a higher place on the social totem pole—by pushing someone else down.

DAVID: That whole existence was defined by that pole. And the meetings were the main event. You mentioned the two types: the typical, expected routine, and the sudden, paralyzing “Stu is coming” meeting.

MARK: Yeah, the routine ones were almost a relief, in a twisted way. A couple of times a year, we’d do the family cleanup—the physical labor—like normal folks. But the weekly meeting was about cleaning up souls. It was pitched as prayer and going to war against every wrong thing, but it usually ended up being a messy, confusing battleground between the sexes, or just an exercise in organizational dominance.

DAVID: The brothers vs. the sisters. It was always structured that way. And the purpose wasn’t to solve a problem; it was to find a scapegoat.

MARK: Exactly. I ended up near the bottom of that pole over the years. Some of it was my own doing, those few stupid mistakes, but mostly it was because Stu had locked onto me. I got mocked openly at meetings for talking fast or being anxious. It was tough when the standard was set by him—a flawless presentation that he often made up on the fly, all in a relentless attempt to control us. This was the specific psychological torture that wore down our minds. Every time he pointed out a flaw—a stutter, a nervous tic, a poorly chosen word—it wasn’t just a critique; it was proof that you were fundamentally lacking, incompetent, and spiritually unfit. You learned to self-police every breath and thought, which just amplified the anxiety he was mocking in the first place. The goal wasn’t perfection; the goal was complete mental and emotional dependency on him for validation.

DAVID: Stu’s control was never more palpable than during those surprise sessions. He could manufacture the atmosphere of a police interrogation just by walking into the room.

MARK: Like that one surprise meeting. The silence. He remained absolutely silent for an hour except for one question. “What is up with the brothers? Why is it so silent?”

DAVID: I was there. The air just went dead.

MARK: He just sat there. And we all sat there, scrambling to think up an answer that might get met with Stu’s approval. Otherwise, we might spend who knows how long going back and forth, arguing over what was really motivating us because our opinions weren’t met by his divine approval. Brother after brother would stand up and say some blather that no one understood the point of. The occasional sister would put in her two cents, desperate to identify the problem. We exhausted ourselves of any more opinions.

Chapter 2: The Unfailing Teaching and the Public Prop

DAVID: It’s that memory—the hour of paralyzing silence—that always slams up against another memory for me. Just a few years earlier, I had a diner sit-down with Stu. He was encouraging us to marry. I remember him saying, almost kindly, “Any Christian brother and sister could marry and have a reasonable expectation of having a successful marriage as long as Jesus is the center of the relationship.”

MARK: What a lie.

DAVID: A complete contradiction to the poison he was selling later. It’s too bad he lost that part of his “unfailing teaching.” I suppose it became inconvenient once he needed to prove his own superior control.

MARK: You saw what he did in that silent meeting. After we had completely exhausted ourselves, when we were all slumped down in intellectual and spiritual defeat, Stu, sitting there in the middle of us with his wife—twenty years younger than him—he started to fondle her sexually. Right there, in the midst of us.

DAVID: It was a shocking, calculated display. It was never about affection; it was a power move that silenced the room more effectively than his initial question.

MARK: Exactly. It was probably designed to show who was in control of the “maneuvering woman”—a direct shot at his own younger wife, and a nudge to the brothers who were fifteen to twenty years younger than him. Look at the ripple effects of that moment:

• For his wife: She was reduced to a prop, a visible possession. He was using her body to humiliate her publicly and demonstrate that the “maneuvering woman” had been subdued and controlled. The toll on her was invisible, but the violation of her dignity was palpable to everyone watching.
• For the Brothers: We were all fifteen to twenty years younger, most of us were single, and navigating that impossible internal conflict about the sisters. Stu, by publicly claiming and displaying his young wife, was essentially “sticking it to us.” He was asserting his alpha status, his virility, and his ability to control what we desired. He was saying: I own the standard, I own the teaching, and I possess what you cannot have. This was the “middle retard program meeting” where he felt most dominant over us younger men. He used her body as a trophy of his control, a stark contradiction to his teaching about Jesus being the center of marriage.

DAVID: That’s the real trauma, Mark. It was the constant psychological pressure. Usually, it was always the brothers that got beat up, that were targeted for humiliation. But occasionally, Stu would turn his attention to the sisters and choose one of them to pick on, too. No one was safe.

MARK: We spent years in that environment. Just one meeting like the silent one is enough to break a mind. Imagine what happens after a few years of meetings like that—the constant self-doubt, the fear that your own friend might turn on you, the normalization of a leader using public sexual acts to prove his power.

DAVID: It leaves an invisible grip, doesn’t it? The lesson was clear: you are not whole, you are not competent, and any kindness or security we offer can be revoked at any moment, replaced by public shame and a display of absolute dominance. We learned to be silent, to fear honesty, and to chase a validation that never came.

Chapter 3: The Price of Silence

MARK: The worst part of that was the immediate aftermath of that display. That absolute silence, once the physical movement had stopped. It wasn’t just an hour of quiet anymore; it was a total psychological zeroing-out. We had just witnessed our leader use his wife as a piece of furniture, a demonstration tool, and we had to pivot instantly back to discussing the state of our souls.

DAVID: Exactly. We couldn’t acknowledge the spectacle. To acknowledge it was to acknowledge the abuse of power, and that was the one thing you absolutely could not do. The air felt thick and unclean. I watched his wife—she didn’t move. She just sat there, a portrait of forced stillness. The violation of her dignity was a lesson to every woman in the room: maneuver and this is where you end up.

MARK: Someone, some poor, desperate brother, must have broken. After a minute or two of unbearable silence following the fondling, someone finally stood up and offered some grand, abstract opinion about our lack of “corporate vision.” It was a hail mary pass, something completely detached from reality.

DAVID: And that was the signal. Stu finally leaned forward, the performance having achieved its goal. The true answer was never about our vision or silence. It was about his need to confirm his absolute authority.

MARK: He dismissed the poor brother with a flick of his wrist. He looked around the room, making eye contact with every single one of us—especially the younger ones—and then gave his final, infuriating pronouncement. He said the silence wasn’t due to nervousness, or organization, or a lack of spiritual zeal. He claimed it was a subtle, unaddressed form of “inner rebellion.” He said the brothers were silent because they secretly resented being told what to do, and that resentment was a seed of spiritual death.

DAVID: Right. “Inner rebellion.” It was brilliant, because it was unprovable and unfixable. How do you argue against an accusation that your silence proves your guilt? We were silent because we feared him, and he used that very fear as evidence of our sin. The answer isn’t a solution; it’s a psychological trap.

Chapter 4: The Poisoned Permission

MARK: But he wasn’t done with the mind games. After many guesses and a sister or two trying to figure out the riddle, Stu finally prepped us for his actual, crushing answer. He made us walk a tightrope, knowing the unspoken was that we were all crabs in a pot, pulling anyone back down who tried to climb out of the mental mess. We never touched the issue of sex because it was taboo, and frankly, i think that was because Stu was projecting his own guilt onto us.

DAVID: Projecting his guilt for sure. He was building his own harem, stealing the attention of the prettiest women for himself. Of course he had to make sure the rest of us felt guilty and ineffective—it was the whole point of this pirate’s goal. He needed us to feel unworthy of the very thing he was indulging in.

MARK: So, after all the psychological exhaustion, he dropped the bomb. He told us that amongst all the brothers, our unspoken, underlying thought was: “Sex and Jesus don’t mix.”

DAVID: That blew the lid off the cover of our minds. It was tearing us apart, this whole subject, because it’s the way we were designed as humans—to yearn for affection and reproduce. We’d been disobeying our own natural, human needs to follow this guru’s teaching. It was a tough thing to face, realizing how fooled we’d been.

MARK: But the immediate reaction—that’s what I remember most. Right after that heavy truth, the air felt lighter. Suddenly, he had given us permission. We went back to the brothers’ wing and sprang for relief with the heavy metal and rock and roll of the day.

DAVID: We thought we had the guru’s permission to have a girlfriend, as long as she was a COBU member. Or so we thought. Love was suddenly in the air, the birds and bees were singing, or so it seemed. A few couples crossed that Rubicon and actually told each other they liked one another.

MARK: I was still too afraid to admit openly that I liked any sister, even though I did. And definitely too afraid to admit that any of them were attractive. Though, in the back rooms, brothers still admitted it to one another. I remember one brother and sister even rode along with me to visit my parents.

DAVID: Then he left on his broom. Party time. The next few months were a brief, beautiful illusion of normal. A few couples hanging out, and the single ones just existing in this strange, temporary “DC Center happy” sort of living. We’d forgotten the cost.

Chapter 5: S&G Photo and the Entrapment of Guilt

DAVID: Speaking of costs, Mark, you mentioned the “conscience-pinging” from before. We need to detail that emergency meeting at the Ramada Inn, because that was the blueprint for how he entrapped us, not just emotionally, but financially.

MARK: It was a couple of years earlier, but the memory is sharp because of the sheer audacity of the lie. We were called into this emergency meeting, and Stu immediately launched into a tirade. His accusation: We had failed to buy the church pastor a car.

DAVID: He was demanding an account, essentially shaming us for being spiritually stingy. But the truth was right there, visible to anyone willing to look. S&G Photo. That camera business he started was taking off, raking in a lot of money. And he was absolutely using church resources to do it, all while claiming it was his own private business.

MARK: He was effectively stealing from the congregation’s time and labor. The entrapment mechanism was brutal: He created a false financial and moral obligation for us—buying a car for the pastor—while he was secretly enriching himself with communal funds. He was shifting his own covetousness onto us.

DAVID: And look at his labor force. He recruited his harem—the prettiest sisters—to be his wife’s “helpers” or assistants. These weren’t spiritual duties; they were sales roles. They were the labor that helped buy and sell his cameras, using church vans for transport, and consuming our communal labor.

MARK: The worst sting was his moral comparison. He was using his own ill-gotten wealth as a yardstick to measure our spiritual zeal. He wasn’t just blaming us; he was blaming the brothers for being “too lazy” to create their own businesses, all while seeing his own enterprise built on deception and the exploitation of the sisters he had surrounded himself with. The goal was to keep us poor and feeling guilty, ensuring our dependence on his “spiritual success.”

DAVID: It’s his pattern. He uses his own sins—greed, control, and sexual indulgence—as the material to craft the whip he uses to beat us. He gave us the illusion of an attainable standard—get a girlfriend, start a business—but immediately reserved the reward, proving that only he could possess both spiritual authority and worldly pleasure.

Chapter 6: The Atmosphere of the DC Center

MARK: You have to remember what that place felt like, David, because that atmosphere was the constant, low-grade torture. The DC Center was our world. It wasn’t a church; it was an enclosed system of guilt and surveillance.

DAVID: It was a physical and psychological cage. We were housed together in close proximity—the barracks for the brothers, the separate dorms for the sisters—all under the constant, suffocating blanket of accountability.

MARK: We lived on those milk crates—a symbol of the cheap, temporary existence he forced on us. Everything was communal, meaning nothing was private. Every conversation, every interaction, was potentially audible, potentially reportable. It created this perpetual, exhausting performance of piety. You couldn’t just be. You had to constantly project an image of zealous righteousness.

DAVID: The common areas were the most dangerous. That’s where the “social totem pole” was built and reinforced. You could be working a mundane task—cleaning, organizing camera gear, whatever—and feel the unspoken judgments of every elder or ambitious peer passing by. It fostered paranoia. We weren’t a family; we were competitors in a strange, spiritual popularity contest.

MARK: And the noise, or the lack thereof. When Stu was gone, it became the “DC Center happy” chaos—the heavy metal, the rush of youthful energy trying to reclaim its space. But when he was present, the whole place instantly locked down. The energy dropped, the conversations went to whispers, and the common rooms felt like waiting rooms for the electric chair. That’s the invisible grip—the silence he cultivated even in the walls.

Chapter 7: The Humiliation of False Freedom

DAVID: But that all ended. It always does.

MARK: It ended when the great Pubah Stu decided to return. I didn’t expect anything but the norm. I had been conditioned to accept that whatever he said was true. I had learned not to keep accounts, suppressing the funny feeling that something he said or did just wasn’t right.

DAVID: That’s why the conscience-pinging is so important. We learned to swallow it and forget it. He was betting on that learned amnesia. We all gathered in one of the big rooms, happily sitting on our milk crates for his return meeting. He walked in with his entourage and sat down. He only waited five minutes this time before gracing us with his wisdom.

MARK: He dropped the question, quiet again: “So I hear that you all have been picking and choosing?” Then he sat quiet, waiting for an answer. None of us had a clue what he was talking about. We had done exactly what he implicitly gave us permission to do!

DAVID: Then he blasted us with his short spiel to ingest: “So I hear that some of you have been fooling with relationships. That is good, I suppose, but what happened to your love for Jesus?”

MARK: The conditioning was being implemented on a more personal, targeted level. We had been conditioned to believe everything he said was golden nuggets of wisdom. Then he launched into a tirade for an hour about how we had abandoned our love for Jesus and put this relationship before him. Years ago, he managed to get a lot of us to abandon family and friends—a separation that weakened our resolve.

DAVID: Now, he was enacting a separation from another deeply meaningful relationship: our yearning for love and affection. He indulged himself publicly in Chapter 2, stole from us in Chapter 5, cast his shame on people twenty years younger, gave us a tiny taste of freedom, and then snatched it away to solidify his inv