Cult Documentaries

One of my guiltiest pleasures is consuming the stories of people who led and who followed cults and restrictive religions (there’s a pretty fine line between the two, I would argue). This year, I ate up (pun very much intended) “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin,” a four-part documentary that debuted on HBO in September. This documentary chronicled the story of Gwen Shamblin Lara, who took her entrepreneurial Christian-based weight loss program called The Weigh Down and turned it into Remnant Fellowship, a cultish church outside Nashville, where she aimed to control every aspect of her followers’ lives. I also delighted in “LuLaRich,” about the founders of LuLaRoe multi-level marketing scheme peddling brightly-patterned leggings. There is more than a passing similarity between the things LuLaRoe told its followers and what Shamblin told hers. Yes, I said it: MLMs are cults, too.

You should join the cult-doc fandom because where else can you both comfort yourself by thinking, well, I would do anything for love, but I won’t sell leggings, and frighten yourself by thinking, well, WOULD I sell leggings — or my soul, in the case of Remnant Fellowship — if that woman with the crazy hair (because all women in cults have crazy hair) told me to? It’s a real exploration of American greed at its best and worst.

The iconic moment of cult-doc fandom this year came when DeAnne Stidham (whose maiden name, she gloriously reveals, was Startup) and her husband Mark casually dropped, mid-monologue, that two of their children married each other. They kept going, but the rest of us stopped, open-mouthed, and frantically texted each other. Did that really happen? Did they really say that? It did not matter, in the end, that the happy couple were not blood relatives. In a world where so many of us think we cannot be shocked any more, cult docs provide plenty of mental jolts.