Recently, a very good friend sent me a copy of the movie “The Wave”. This movie was made in 1981 and is a dramatic presentation of a sequence of events which took place in Palo Alto, CA in 1967. In a high school class in April of that year, a history teacher led his class in an experiment after their lesson on Hitler’s Germany, the Holocaust, and the tragedy surrounding those years. The class experiment was prompted after a student asked the teacher – How could the German people sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all around them and claim to not know anything about it? How could they do that, how could they say that? (paraphrased)
As I watched the beginning of this obviously dated film, I was instantly drawn in by the questions and thus followed closely for the answer. Why? This line of questioning is only slightly different from the questions I receive from people asking- How could anyone get caught up in a cult? How could intelligent people be swept up in a religious cult or any other cult, for that matter? John, how did you get into Word of Faith Fellowship (WOFF). Why does this matter and how does this movie answer these questions? We shall see if it does. Also, in the last few weeks, I have met several new folks that have no knowledge of WOFF, Jane Whaley or that religious cults even exist in America. Eventually, questions come as to my back ground and how I ended up where I am today. I continually search for more accurate and helpful ways to explain the cult phenomena in America as I have experienced it.