Perhaps one of the most insidious aspects of TWI’s indoctrination was to instill (by a gradual but firm process) in followers a deep trust in wierwille. This is rather obvious even in PFAL, where wierwille worked so hard to convince students to suspend critical thinking. With his silly notion that the Bible prohibits private interpretation he asserts the Bible actually interprets itself, thus laying the groundwork for students to firmly believe that what wierwille taught was the ONLY CORRECT or AUTHORIZED interpretation of the Bible, the Scriptures, the Word, or whatever you want to call it. Given that even the simplest definition of “interpretation” is explanation, clarification, analysis, and evaluation – for one to claim that the Bible interprets itself is absurd! Folks may not still be in TWI but they may still be held captive in the bizarro-fundamentalist mindset wierwille instilled in them.
It was merely a mental sleight-of-hand via wierwille’s charisma, logical fallacies, cobbled together plagiarism, and the unabashed incompetency of a narcissistic zealot that he got a lot of folks to think he was giving them a true understanding of the scriptures. I think that the more one’s misplaced trust of wierwille grew – the more wierwille’s subterfuge agenda took root in the person – like being intertwined. Perhaps a cult leader’s power is in part derived from the followers – their misplaced trust helps to cement the bond – or whatever “hold” the cult leader has on them…
The depth and degree of wierwille’s “hold” on followers varied – for numerous reasons besides length and depth of involvement with The Way, since we are all individual and unique. Like any exploitative cult leader, wierwille was parasitic and he based his “ministry” on deception and manipulation; in the long run however, “holding” onto dedicated followers is unsustainable, in my humble opinion. People get fed up, frustrated, tired of being used and lied to, or they see through the bull$hit of PFAL, or start looking into red flags they’ve known of for a while… or for any number of other reasons – so they leave. Whatever manipulative “hold” TWI had on them is now broken…yeah !!! that’s the best kind of severing ties – when you cut the ties with a false church/family like TWI !!!