I accidentally ate lunch with a cult
Content warnings: Non-descriptive mentions of child abuse, exploitation, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and religious trauma.
Christmas has been tough for my wife and I the past few years. Our pay has steadily increased, but so has the cost of living. The past few years, rather than giving each other gifts, we have decided to share experiences. We get each other something small and we pick something to do. This past holiday, my wife and I stayed home and cooked an amazing full Christmas dinner together.
For Christmas of 2023, we decided to give each other a trip. We put together a rubric because we're both teachers and huge nerds. We needed to make a full itinerary with rough costs, plans for each day, and accommodation options, and then present it in an eye-catching way. We hooked up my wife's laptop to our TV and, in the gentle glow of our Christmas tree, showed what we made.
My wife used Canva (if I remember correctly) to create an amazing 10 day trip to New England. I put together a google site about a trip to Colorado. I had been before, but my wife had never really been in the mountains before. We decided to take the trip to Colorado for our fifth wedding anniversary, and save the more expensive New England trip for another year.
We spent a week in the Mile High City aka Denver, Colorado.
One of the Denver days had us in the nearby community of Boulder, Colorado, to go shopping in the Pearl Street markets. I had left this day intentionally vague, intending for us to wander into one of the eateries that sounded good when it struck us. Sandwiches sounded tasty, so we walked to the nearby Yellow Deli.
We're both fantasy nerds and the place looked like it was straight out of The Hobbit. Our waitress was a warm, cheerful woman who talked up the food options, and touted their yerba mate. I ordered my go-to sandwich: a Reuben. This sandwich did not disappoint. The bread was fresh and delicious, the sandwich perfectly constructed. My wife and I got two different flavors of yerba mate so we could share. In a trip full of delicious food, this cozy little hideaway fit in perfectly.
Hey babe, did you know we ate at a cult?
I sat down to write post cards from the trip a few weeks later. One of my friends is in love with Boulder, so I wanted to recommend him the restaurant, but I had trouble remembering the name. I searched for Boulder, Delis, and Pearl Street before I eventually found it. However, the context I found it in was surprising: an article from the Denver Post titled Twelves Tribes' businesses like Yellow Deli exploit cult followers for free labor, ex-members say.
According to the Twelve Tribes' home page, they are a network of tribal communities who live communally on farms, where all incomes are absorbed by the community. They are a Christian cult, explicitly claiming to attempt to live like the disciples of Yahshua (a potential translation of the original name of Jesus, according to wikipedia). They are open about the fact that, if you join them, your possessions become the community's.
The cult has communes globally, and operate many different business outlets including the Yellow Deli. According to the same Denver Post article, cult members work at these locations unpaid as, by the group's own admission, all business incomes belong to the community. Everyone is, on paper, a co-owner of the restaurant. None of them receive a pay check.
There is an appeal to living communally. But anything that sounds too good to be true, sadly, often is.
In their own words
I am going to be taking the information from this section directly from their website, mostly from the Beliefs section.
In their cosmology, man is the highest life. Their website's belief page has enough purple prose to rival my nature writing:
"The vast universe, with countless trillions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, orbited by countless planets, and for what? As beautiful and glorious as they are against the velvety darkness of night, the stars were not only meant to gaze upon in wonder, but to colonize, forever and ever..." - The Twelve Tribes
They believe Yahshua intended man to abandon everything for the mission of spreading 'the Fruit of the Spirit'. They view their church as a nation of farm and communities. In order to welcome the return of the Messiah, they must create a "set-apart nation" that lives among civil governments that protect human rights. However, society is violating the natural law "to the point of calling evil good and good evil". Thus the need to be separate. While people in secular society can be righteous, they can't be holy. The Twelve Tribes are striving to be holy, and you can join them.
Accusations of Abuse
This site's rhetoric already sounds like cult language to me. I would love to genuinely live in a communal society free from wealth and money, but I don't. I can't. And any community that purports to live this way by requiring your possessions and incomes should instantly invite skepticism. It could be real, but overwhelming experience says no.
According to the Pacific Standard, the group champions the virtues behind corporal punishment. Children within the cult are to be punished with whips from canes or sticks, depending on their age. Children are expected to work, inviting allegations of child labor. This is justified by cited biblical text.
The same Pacific Standard article also claims that the cult's dismissal of modern medicine meant that children have died within their community. Allegedly, girls are expected to marry early and have children.
From the Denver Post article I referenced earlier, while the cult does take in people who need help and nourish them, they also exert substantial psychological pressure. Members are allowed to leave, but heavily dissuaded from it. Like many cults, when a member exerts too much individuality or asks too many questions, all that kindness allegedly goes to the wayside.
A report by NBC claims that some leaders have engaged in sexual assault against children. It's difficult to say how widespread these actions are as the cult is insular and distrusts the outside world - a view built right into their belief system. This isolation can create an environment of grooming and exploitation.
Finally, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, this southern born cult has a troubled relationship with race and sexuality. While they do try to recruit people of color, the SPLC alleges that the group's inner teachings describe race based chattel slavery in the United States as a positive thing, and preach that homosexuality is a sin punishable by death.
Final Thoughts
While I initially had a moment of amusement when I learned of the Yellow Deli's cult ownership, those feelings quickly yielded to disgust as I read deeper. I can deeply understand the appeal of communal living, and it's something I would want in a better world. I can even comprehend the desire for authoritarian structure in a chaotic and often confusing world. Yet when children are exposed to structures and systems that are inherently abusive, any sense of sympathy goes out the window.
Parasitic groups that remove member agency should be aggressively challenged as predatory.
Cults prey not on the ignorant, but on the hopeless. Many of the followers still in the cult claim they are happy and fulfilled with their lives. Yet you also have to consider the intense behavioral policing, social isolation, and indoctrination that are inherent in destructive cults. If everything outside of your bubble is considered to be wicked, why would you risk losing everyone and everything you know by questioning your belief system?
Some people do - and they manage to break out. Many more do not.
Hopefully this writing will help you avoid eating at the Yellow Deli, should you find yourself in the position to do so. If you have any experiences or opinions you'd like to share with me, I would love to hear from you: catsmusings@proton.me
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far~