Episode #84: How to Have Relationships with People Who Have Different Perspectives from You During the Election Season, with Sarah and Nippy from the A Little Bit Culty Podcast
We've tried to hold two seemingly oppositional positions during our podcast series "How to Practice Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass".
1) We do not support fascism, most notably showcased by the 2024 Republican Party.
2) We support having relationships with people who think differently (and may vote differently) than we do.
To help us navigate this, we invited Sarah and Nippy from the A Little Bit Culty Podcast to join us. They talk with us about the parallels between leaving NXIVM and leaving the Evangelical Church/Republican Party. And they also talk about ways that Progressive folks can effectively dialogue with folks leaving harmful organizations. We also talk about ways that Progressive folks can get in their own way.
Parallel Process & Christian Nationalism (3:00): Jeremiah starts us off, “21st century Christian nationalism relies on creating an us versus them perspective around a number of political issues, such as abortion, religious liberty, culture wars, and a libertarian economic structure. Sometimes in order to understand something, it's helpful to talk about a parallel process. How does what's happening in one organization or system repeat or mirror itself in another system?”
Progressive Circles & Moral Superiority (5:00): Jeremiah says, “Progressive circles have their own version of moral superiority, and also the ensuing avoidance of hard conversations. Nippy, Sarah, and I talk about how structures in progressive circles prevent healthy dialogue and the ultimate humanization of everyone.”
Proselytizing (10:00): Sarah shares, “I knew that we were pushing NXIVM and that we were proselytizing. The thing that we're pushing is Keith, right? And here I am, like judging Jehovah's witnesses going door to door, when we were doing our version of that hosting networking parties where we could also recruit."
Breaking the Delusion (13:00): Nippy describes, “I felt like NXIVM was a great idea, bringing ethics to the world and those sorts of things. Once your wife comes to you and says she's been branded and lied to and coerced, all that delusion immediately evaporated and like, we're not doing that. My delusion was revealed to me abruptly. And so I was immediately on a mission to protect my family.”
Struggling to Assert (20:00): Sarah says, “So after we left NXIVM, I was very much averse to telling anyone that they needed to do anything. Teachings of NXIVM were often like, "You have no needs other than survival needs, right? There's no emotional needs, there's no connections, safety, security, support. Those are all things that you've made up based on your own trauma and deficiencies." So for me to come out and be like, express any of those things was even hard. So I was grappling with that.”
Creating Change (28:00): Jeremiah reflects, “It's really, really beautiful to listen to both of you talk about and make reflections on like, this is how I wanted to use my own emotional experience to both communicate what was going on and also the hope that that would create change in a larger system. And in some cases it did for both of you, it seems.”
Reaching Out (31:00): Sarah and Nippy recall an interaction, where Nippy tells Sarah, "There's going to come a time where you have to like, walk over the dead bodies and you're not going to be able to help everybody." Sarah responds, "Like, and I was really trying to help everybody.”
Parallel Process (35:00): Jeremiah notes, “Nippy, what you're describing again, just wanting to name the parallel process going on in the larger system as more and more information comes out about the Trump administration and the corruption at minimum that that's happened with that, that the doubling down that's happened with a larger group of people. Just wanted to keep in mind that as we're having this conversation, that there's a larger kind of macro version of that going on.”
Not Defining (38:00): Jeremiah continues, “Julia and I are both therapists first who happen to study Christian nationalism. One of the ways I think that the field of psychology has really harmed 21st century discourse is through the language of diagnosis and the utilization of diagnosis as a weapon of power. You're in a cult. You are racist. You are fill in the blank without defining what that actually means.”
No Nuance (40:00): Nippy says, “Whatever group presents themselves, it's kind of a, you're with me or against me. Us versus them. They don’t really leave room for nuance. And in the last four or five years, you've seen it in climate change. You've seen it in politics. All these things that are coming up right now demand that you take a side if you don't then you're somehow guilty of some sort of internal crime.”
Exiting a High Control Group & Covid (46:00): Sarah says, “Ccoming out of a high control group--you, me, Nippy, and your listeners all did this. Okay. Now we're free. We don't have anything controlling us. Let's just say, let's take an example of COVID. That happened. And my first instinct was, "Wait, you're going to tell me what to do to my body again? Go f--- yourself". And people go, "Oh, you're an anti-vaxxer." And I'm going, "Wait, you're calling me a name. You're putting me in the us versus them. I don't like that one bit." And it was very easy for people to know if they understood my story, why I would be a little bit defensive.”
Informed Decisions (48:00): Jeremiah notes, “Understanding that any sort of decision that we make, there's a lot of tensions that are there. And it's important to talk about those, not from the perspective, say, of positioning myself in one group, but from the perspective of helping people to understand, these are really complicated things that we're working through that have relational impacts that have family impacts. And we need to talk about the nuances of them so that people can make more informed decisions.”
Deconstruction (56:00): Sarah discusses, “I had a friend say, "What if a little bit of that [information about Keith] is true?" That was a bit of dissonance. It was like sort of cracking the plate … Of course you wouldn't be here if there weren't good things. You're not willing to look at the bad. And I realized that that was true somewhere in the back of my mind. So I see that right now, both sides aren't willing to look at whatever side they've chosen has done some shady shit.”