Glenn Close Comes Clean About Cult Upbringing; Leader and Founder of Group Thanked Heaven for Hitler
Actress Glenn Close recently spoke out about her religious upbringing, which included several years in the Moral Re-Armament organization, a group often classified as a cult.
"I wouldn't trust any of my instincts because [my beliefs] had all been dictated to me," Close told The Hollywood Reporter. "I haven't made a study of groups like these, but in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that's interesting to me because my memory of the man who founded it [Moral Re-Armament] was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair."
In fact, the MRA was formed by Rev. Frank Buchman, who organized the group around four "absolutes": honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. He taught that only a select few who had special guidance from God were without sin and had a duty to teach and change those around them. The group formed in the 1930s as a spiritual element to the World War. Buchman famously once said that he was grateful for Adolf Hitler.
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"I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism," Buchman stated.
Buchman watched over his "flock" with a severe eye, according to Close, and things were very limited and detailed.
"You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire," she explained. "If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel, from the time you're 7 till the time you're 22, it has a profound impact on you. It's something you have to [consciously overcome] because all of your trigger points are [wrong]."
Close's father was a heralded member of the group, chosen to serve in the heart of the Congo, where he stayed for 16 years. During that time, relations were incredibly strained between Close and her father. She blamed him for getting the family into the cult to begin with; the actress left the organization in 1970.
"I had nothing to do with them from that point," she said. "And I wouldn't have anything to do with them."
