Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

Escaping the Moonies, and Rebuilding his Life: Ingo Michehl gave the cult his flute, his country, and six years of his life

Ingo Michehl spent six and a half years as one of the Moonies' most productive fundraisers, selling laser-etched foil pictures out of a Ford Transit van at a twenty-fold markup, sleeping five hours a night, and believing every dollar liberated God's suffering heart. Recruited off a San Francisco street corner at nineteen while visiting America from Germany, he came out the other side with a master's in counseling psychology and a career helping people leave high-control groups, playing music, traveling and working on his dream to make a film that is educational about cult mind control and liberation. LIke Ingo, I too was deceptively recruited by this Korean cult that still has great wealth and influence, including in world politics. He exited when a Chistian shared information with him that contradicted his beliefs in the Moonie ideology of the “Divine Principle.” Ingo was liberated from a mind control cult by a stranger who cared and warmly interacted with him and encouraged him to think for himself. This episode is valuable as so many people are beginning to wake up from their own information silos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Escaping Shincheonji, Korea's Covid Cult with Chris Vishoot: A survivor of the Korean doomsday cult on lies, waking up and helping others break free.

Shincheonji recruits through what looks like an ordinary Bible study, and most people who walk through the door have no idea that it is a destructive cult. Chris Vishoot found out only after three and a half years as a devoted member. In 2018, a woman he met on a dating app invited him to what she called an innocent class on scripture. Within a year he was driving an hour each way to an unmarked building in Seattle, sleeping three to four hours a night, and reporting on Bible study students he had once sat beside as a recruit himself. Chris grew up in a Christian household that expected the world to end at any moment. He graduated from the University of Washington with two engineering degrees, and by his mid-twenties he found himself asking a familiar question: is this all there is to life? Two friends had died young, and Chris, an agnostic at the time, was searching for something bigger. That search is exactly what recruiters for the group are trained to find and use. Chris is now one of the more credible Christian ex-Shincheonji voices in the country. He runs Bible Vaccine Center, helps moderate the r/shincheonji subreddit for former members, and works with pastors whose congregations have been infiltrated by recruiters posing as ordinary Christians. In this internationally criticized group, we talked about how he got in, how he got out, and why he now helps other people leave the same group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) with Anthony Forte: A decade inside the Korean doomsday cult WMSCOG, an arranged marriage, and the exit that followed

Anthony Forte spent more than ten years inside the World Mission Society Church of God, rising from a new recruit stopped on a Queens, NY, sidewalk to a leader who trained others to recruit the way he had been recruited. He joined at 25, during a stretch of his life when he felt behind everyone around him. He stayed through an arranged marriage. He left only after the research he did during the pandemic exposed cracks in a doctrine he had built a decade of his life on. The World Mission Society Church of God, known to researchers in this field as WMSCOG, teaches that Ahn Sahng-hong, a Korean man who died in 1985, was the second coming of Christ, and Zahng Gil-jah is “God the Mother,” a living deity based in South Korea. Members are told they must accept both figures, keep the Sabbath and Passover, tithe, and recruit new members to earn a place in heaven. Anthony rose through recruiting and teaching, eventually overseeing a team of members, before he found his way out. A year into membership, leaders promoted Anthony to team leader and turned the conversation toward marriage. His pastor pushed him toward a Korean member who would need a visa sponsor, framing marriage as a path to greater blessings. The wedding took place in October 2012; the same year the group had told members would mark the end of the world. “I only have two more months on Earth anyway,” Anthony remembered thinking. “Might as well do this big action and please God, so I have a better chance to get into heaven.” He and his wife communicated mostly by text for quite some time, since she spoke little English. “It was very difficult,” he told me, “to marry a stranger.” This is a very insightful interview and of great interest to folks who themselves with involved with a Bible group that claimed to have the “Truth.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

6,000 Images and No Idea It Was a Crime: Clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen on why autistic people become both the victims and the unwitting offenders of the online world

A person on the autism spectrum leaves a file-sharing program running overnight because they want cartoons or anime. By morning, thousands of images have downloaded onto their hard drive, some of them child sexual abuse material they never chose and, in some cases, never even opened. Months later, the FBI is at the door. A judge stares at the download count and asks how anyone could not understand what they were doing. My guest Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen, spends her working life answering that question in courtrooms across the country. She is a clinical psychologist with thirty years specializing in autism spectrum disorders and has conducted forensic evaluations of autistic defendants since 2009. Her new book, co-written with defense attorney Elizabeth Kelley and digital forensics expert Michele Bush, is Cybercrime and the Autism Spectrum: How the Online World Creates Victims and Offenders. I met Dr. Cohen at the International Academy of Law and Mental Health Congress in Montreal, and I asked her on the show the moment her presentation ended, because so much of what she described maps directly onto the recruitment tactics I have studied for five decades. Dr. Cohen's first point cuts against the instinct to sort people into predators and prey. “Most people on the spectrum are both victimized and offenders at some point,” she told me. Cyberbullying, financial scams, and sexual exploitation run in one direction. Chat rooms that ask for “a picture of a child in your family” run in the other, quietly moving an autistic person into possession of CSAM they may never have sought out. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create distribute or possess. CSAM includes both real and synthetic content such as images created with artificial intelligence tools. Because many autistic individuals catalog and organize obsessively, agents who search a seized computer often find the material sorted into folders, which reads to an outsider as intent rather than what it frequently is: a hyperfocus trait turned against the person who has it. This is a justice issue and more people need to learn, please. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

God, Law, and the Cult of Power: Marci Hamilton on what it will take to restore the rule of law in an era of authoritarian religion

The First Amendment gives you an absolute right to believe whatever you want. It has never given you the right to act on those beliefs in ways that harm others. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the one that the religious right has spent decades trying to erase, and it is the distinction that Professor Marci A. Hamilton has spent her entire career defending. Marci is a Professor of Practice in Political Science and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in constitutional law. Marci is an intellectual leader against extreme religious liberty. She is the founder of CHILD USA, a nonprofit academic think tank dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect, and a leading national expert on clergy sex abuse and child sex abuse statutes of limitation, which she ran for a decade. The core argument of God vs. the Gavel is one that sounds obvious until you see how hard it is to actually enforce: religious organizations, like every other institution, must obey the law. No mandatory exemption. No special carve-out because a leader claims divine authority. Marci put it plainly: the very first free exercise case in United States history established that belief is absolute, but conduct is not. Conduct can harm others, and a functioning democracy does not allow anyone to use religion as a shield against accountability for harm. The cases that matter, she told me, are always about harm. Psychological harm is real. You only need to sit with a child sex abuse survivor once to understand that. This is a most important conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices