It hasn’t been easy, but Bethany Joy Lenz has managed to reestablish her connection with faith after a decade in a religious cult.
“I was done. I walked out of that group and I questioned everything — my whole upbringing, all religions,” Lenz, 43, told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview ahead of the Tuesday, October 22, release of her memoir, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!). “I’m a really deep thinker. I spend a lot of time using reason to try and understand behavior patterns and belief systems. And I was done with God.”
In the book, Lenz, who was raised Christian, detailed what she calls a “supernatural” moment that solidified her foundation with God. She was 19 years old and had quietly asked herself in a Union City café in New York City if this “Jesus stuff” was real.
“In the empty café, in my empty booth, someone sat beside me. There was no flesh. No body to touch. There was only the deep and familiar presence of someone who leaned in and spoke tenderly into my ear,” she wrote. “The voice was gentle and masculine, joyful, weighty, and … did I feel breath? ‘Never doubt that I am real,’ I heard.”
She maintains that the moment cannot be explained and returned to the feeling after she escaped the cult.
“I absolutely could not explain it through any measure of reason,” she told Us, noting that she returned to that event after she left the high-demand group. “It was almost like God was saying, ‘Are you gonna trust your instincts for the first time or are you gonna keep denying it? Are you gonna deny what you know is true — again?’ So instead of abandoning God, I just became extremely angry with God, which at least I was being honest. And I think from that point forward, I was able to grow in a really authentic faith that I’m still growing in.”
Bethany Joy Lenz Michael Kovac/Getty Images for AdoptTogether
Lenz wrote about her anger with God as she navigated a three-year custody battle with her ex (one of the sons of the cult leader) following her exit from the group around 2013.
“Every day of those three years was emotionally exhausting. Every day I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into a tar pit of fatigue. At my lowest point, I stood one night on the balcony after smoking a cigarette, thrust up two middle fingers into the air at God, and screamed, “F— YOU!” Tears poured out of my eyes,” she wrote. “I couldn’t hold in my anger anymore. … ‘I did everything right. I did everything You asked me to do. And this is what I get!? Well, f— that. And f— Jesus and f— church.’”
Lenz experienced emotional and financial abuse during her decade in The Big House Family, but she believes that the spiritual abuse was the worst.
“When you screw with someone’s ability to trust God — to trust that there’s a greater force out there that loves you and can contain you and hold you — then you’re left flailing in your humanity,” she told Us. “I’ve never been atheist, so I don’t know what the mindset is for somebody that doesn’t believe in God. But for me, the idea that I have to rely on my flawed humanity to be the thing that I trust in, overall, is really esoterically unsatisfying. It’s a flawed logic to me. I don’t know how I am supposed to just go through life being like, ‘Oh, yeah, my gut and my instinct.’ I know how flawed I am.”
Lenz explained that she’s still “unlearning” a lot of things she was taught in the group, but the first thing she had to do “was establish my trust with God again.”
“That took years and I’m still working on it,” she said. “I’m still finding areas in my life where I’m holding onto control so tightly and realizing this is because I don’t trust that God’s actually got me [and] that I can let go. And if I make a mistake, it’s a mistake and there’s a plan B. And if I don’t make a mistake, great, I made the right choice.”
Dinner for Vampires is available now.
