Captive in a Bubble.
Two members of a high-demand, fundamentalist religion are on opposite paths: a young woman joins the church and molds her life to its teachings, and a senior church official experiences a faith crisis when he discovers he’s been manipulated by the church his entire life.
Thousands of people follow these paths every year, joining or leaving churches in real life. Captive in a Bubble is a peek into this world of faith, faith crises, and life inside a cult.
“Made me laugh… made me cry… kept me turning pages long past my bedtime.”
FOREWORD by main character, Sally
A friend, a co-worker, a neighbor may be in a cult, and you wouldn’t even know it, for they appear on the outside to be normal people – good people, even – and they are. Not only would you not know they’re in a cult, they don’t know they’re in one: trapped, controlled, manipulated, robbed.
Cults of all shapes and sizes have one thing in common: a devotion to a particular person or object, be it a cinematic universe or a deity’s earthly representative. Cultists believe they possess a truth – perfectly harmless when nerds argue about which superhero would win a one-on-one battle, or whether the original or the reboot is the real canon.
Harmful is the cult that teaches its members that they possess an eternally consequential, yet unverifiable, truth that everyone else is missing; that it’s been delivered by an inerrant person with unverifiable godly authority; that the price of knowing the truth is strict obedience to the one who delivered it; and the reward for faithfulness is an unverifiable eternal bliss while the consequence of unfaithfulness is destruction.
Consider the bubble: a clear capsule that keeps the inside and the outside separate until something bursts it to nothingness. When one is in a cult, one is in a bubble. One feels safe. One has knowledge and purpose. One can see all there is. The single good thing I can say about living the lie inside the bubble is that when I believed it, I knew what life was all about. When the bubble popped, I knew nothing.
Sally
