Secrets of the Two by Twos

A news investigation into the religious cult she was raised in gives Kelly Thompson new perspective on the world she narrowly escaped.

An early Two-by-Twos convention. Via Workersect.org

When I was 15, I chose to go to hell.

I was born and raised in the high-control group ABC Nightline investigated in SECRETS OF THE 2x2 CHURCH part of the IMPACT x Nightline series currently airing on Hulu. Watching the episode decades after leaving the group against my family’s wishes was a surreal experience. I never dreamed this religious sect would face any reckoning.

The documentary uncovers rampant sexual abuse and coverups. Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) was exposed when, in June, 2022, a minister, Dean Bruer, was found dead in a motel room in Oregon with incriminating evidence of a double life as a sexual predator. Close to a thousand predators have since been accused, and the FBI began a global investigation into the group in February of this year. But what impacted me much more than the sexual predation and grooming women and children experience, as a matter of course in the sect, was the indoctrination in extreme fundamentalism from birth that underpins the culture in which abuse thrives.

The 2x2s, as outsiders refer to them, is a nameless, home-based New Testament Bible movement that originated with William Irvine in Ireland in the late 19^th century and claims to be a direct continuation of 1st-century Christianity. Most members are third, fourth, fifth generation, or beyond. The 2x2s insist that salvation is exclusive to those who receive the gospel message through their itinerant ministers (called workers) and are baptized through their movement. The unmarried workers practice celibacy and travel two by two, based on their interpretation of Matthew 10, hold gospel meetings in rented spaces, visit home meetings, and rely on members for food and lodging.

Watching the episode decades after leaving the group against my family’s wishes was a surreal experience. I never dreamed this religious sect would face any reckoning.

Third generation born and raised, I was taught I could remain inside and go to heaven or leave and lose my soul to eternal damnation. There was no third option.

Still a child at 15, I had no way to deconstruct the totalizing indoctrination of the 2x2s I experienced from birth. Like most 2x2 children, I was sheltered but unprotected. Most of us attended public schools, which, given the dress requirements, was an isolating experience, especially if other 2x2 children didn’t live in the same area. I subsequently rebelled despite my parents' control and began running away from home at 15, which required accepting eternal condemnation since I’d been conditioned to believe it was my only exit. I was ill-prepared for the world outside the cult, conditioned to black-and-white thinking, unable to form adult psychology or hold contradictory ideas in tension. It was an agonizing choice and the only one I had.

Kelly Thompson at 11, four years before she’d leave the Two-by-Two church.

I wanted to be like the other kids at secular school, to dress like them, to watch TV, which was against our religion, and to attend forbidden activities like movies, roller skating, or even just extracurricular activities. I wanted to fit in, and I wanted to have fun. Instead, my life was constant toil and struggle, attending Bible study and singing hymns, being godly, and being lonely, too, especially as a teenager. At 15, I decided that the “choice” I was given by a God who demanded such was not a choice at all, and I was willing to go to hell over accepting the only path that God provided to heaven. How was heaven or hell any choice?

We attended a church convention annually, a four-day event, and an opportunity for teenagers to socialize a little between meetings. Every year, on Saturday nights, the meeting was tested, and insiders were given a chance to stand up and profess their lives to Jesus. Without fail, one of the ministers would preach a sermon on the danger of death, telling stories of young people killed in car crashes on their way home from the convention. Stories about young people who didn’t take their chance to profess to serve the Lord and then were killed. It was too late, the sermon would go, too late for them. The month after our shared 11th birthday, my friend Ronnie, whom I saw every Sunday at the meeting we attended, was killed in a go-cart crash. I was told he would go to heaven, as he had not yet reached 12, the age the Bible says we must “go about our Father’s business,” as Jesus did. I was so distraught I didn’t die like Ronnie had, before 12, so I too could get a free pass to heaven.

The documentary uncovers rampant sexual abuse and coverups. Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) was exposed when, in June 2022, a minister, Dean Bruer, was found dead in a motel room in Oregon with incriminating evidence of a double life as a sexual predator. Close to a thousand predators have since been accused, and the FBI began a global investigation into the group in February of this year.

Universally, we all fall on a spectrum of degrees of indoctrination, and many never recognize it in ourselves. My story, though extreme, is a microcosm of the conditioning we all experience. As Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true,” but how do we find the self denied us and align with it amid so many messages designed to control us against the “false personas” we may unknowingly embody?

Deconstruction, Former Fundies, Ex-Evangelicals: today, in 2024, there are several ex-member movements raising awareness and abundant information regarding indoctrination, religious trauma, spiritual abuse, high control groups, and cults across social media. There was no such thing when I left.

It would take years of struggle and suffering to reach a precarious maturity and even more years to develop emotional intelligence, withstand uncertainty, and discover and nurture my intellect. It took until the dead minister and “Bruergate,” as it came to be referred to in survivor groups, for me to finally recognize that the religious sect that my parents and other family remained in was a cult. I consider myself fortunate because my conditioning in the truth, as insiders refer to the nameless church, which caused irreparable sorrow and harm along with the splintering of our family, could have destroyed me. As it was, though I eventually found recovery and balance, I struggled with addiction and had difficulty making a living, parenting, and fitting into society, as so many adult children of cults do.

Watch the episode…

There remain children in the 2x2s as I write this, their development warped in ways that are soul-killing, spiritual abuse as damaging as any sexual assault — and often, in addition to sexual abuse. I hope they will not have to experience the same violation so many of us did.

It would take years of struggle and suffering to reach a precarious maturity and even more years to develop emotional intelligence, withstand uncertainty, and discover and nurture my intellect. It took until the dead minister and “Bruergate,” as it came to be referred to in survivor groups, for me to finally recognize that the religious sect that my parents and other family remained in was a cult.

The slow arcs of justice and mercy are working through countless of those of us who have fought not only to survive but to speak truth to power for decades, costing us community, family, and reputation. We are judged as “lost souls” and as immoral because we dared to stand against all odds and follow our own North Star to liberty and light.

Wednesday night was our Bible study, and the ABC Nightline episode debuted on a Wednesday night. I watched it for the girl I was, who so courageously chose hell, who was so ill-equipped for normal adulthood in secular society that I went to hell for a time in my life. For the girl I was, who was willing to go to any lengths to find my way out of the black and white world I’d been born into.