When Everyone But You Starts Crying: Wrestling With Whether I'm in a Cult or Just Broken

Dear friend,

There's a specific kind of panic that sets in when you're the only one not crying.

I was in grade school the first time it happened. A Chinese church—my first time visiting. We were sitting in a circle, and someone started praying. Then someone else. Then the weeping started. One person, then another, then suddenly the whole room. Tears streaming down faces. Hands raised. Voices trembling with gratitude for Jesus Christ, for his grace, for his sacrifice. I sat there, dry-eyed and confused, watching this wave of emotion crash over everyone but me.

Years later, at a church retreat, it happened again. Same pattern. Same collective breaking. Everyone around me overwhelmed with joy and thanksgiving for Jesus. And there I was again—outside the circle, wondering: Am I in a cult? Or worse—am I broken?

That gut reaction has followed me ever since. Walking into churches where thousands pray to a man named Jesus. Watching people weep during worship music. Hearing believers talk about God as if they just had coffee with him this morning. Transubstantiation—the belief that bread literally becomes flesh. Prayer—talking to someone you can't see. From the outside looking in, it looks like collective delusion. Like they've justified thoughts in their heads as God's word. Like they're talking to an imaginary friend.

But here's what troubles me: I don't feel this way about Japanese Buddhism or Shinto.

I don't get that cult-alarm when I see people praying at temples, reciting sutras, sharing tales of kami. Giant golden statues of a fat Buddha don't trigger suspicion. The belief that you must register at your local shrine or your spirit will wander after death? The idea that you can anger spirits? None of it sets off warning bells. Why?

Maybe it's just familiarity. Maybe it's cultural conditioning—what you grow up with feels normal, what you don't feels strange. But the numbers complicate this comfort: there are approximately 70 million practitioners of Shinto in Japan, 376 million Buddhists globally, and 2.4 billion Christians worldwide.

If we're measuring "cult" by minority status, I'm the outlier. My Japanese religious framework is the niche one. Christianity is the global norm, has been for centuries. So when outsiders look at my world—the shrine registrations, the spirit beliefs, the ritual bowing—do they get that gut reaction? Do they wonder if I'm the one in the cult?

I want to learn to fight this resistance. Or maybe—maybe the resistance is truthful. Maybe it's protective. Why does my body physically recoil? Why must I not just mentally, but also physically be conditioned to resist God so much?

It hurts.

I've been trying to sit with this tension by looking at Scripture—specifically at the early church, when Christians were the cult. When they were Jews who believed something their entire community thought was blasphemous. When believing in Jesus meant risking family rejection, social exile, even death.

In Acts 17:16-34, Paul walks into Athens and finds a city "full of idols." He doesn't bulldoze their beliefs. Instead, he stands in the Areopagus and says: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD."

He meets them where they are. He acknowledges their seeking. Then he introduces them to the God they've been searching for without knowing it.

The Athenians had the same gut reaction I do:

>Acts 17:32 says, "When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered."

They thought Paul was babbling about foreign gods, introducing strange ideas. To them, Paul was the cult member.

But here's what I keep returning to: the resistance itself might be part of the process.

Jesus says in John,

>John 6:44 , "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them."

Not "unless they have the right feelings" or "unless they cry at the right moments." The drawing. The pulling. Maybe resistance is what it feels like to be drawn toward something your body doesn't yet recognize as home.

The early Jewish converts experienced this. In Acts 15, the church had to convene a council because Jewish believers were wrestling with how to follow Jesus while maintaining their identity. Was following Christ a betrayal of everything they'd been raised to believe? The answer wasn't "abandon your questions." It was "let's work through this together."

I might be wrong if I'm expecting certainty before belief. What if doubt is the doorway? What if the crying circles aren't about having arrived, but about being honest enough to admit you need something beyond yourself?

A Brief Culture Glance:

There's something here about how culture conditions our definitions of "normal" versus "cult." In Japan, collective ritual feels like tradition. In America, it feels like conformity. But both involve surrendering individual certainty for communal practice. Both require trust that the people around you aren't collectively deluded. Maybe my resistance isn't about theology at all—maybe it's about learning to trust a community whose emotional language I don't yet speak.

What I'm Trying (You're Welcome to Join Me):

1. Naming the resistance instead of shaming it. When I feel that gut-alarm in church, I'm trying to journal: "What specifically triggered this? The music volume? The hands raised? The weeping?" Specificity helps me separate cultural discomfort from spiritual discernment.
2. Reading Acts like an anthropologist. I'm studying how the early church handled people who thought they were crazy. How did they respond to accusations of being a cult? How did they invite skeptics in without demanding immediate emotional conversion?
3. Asking one person who cries during worship: "What are you experiencing?" Not to judge, but to understand. Maybe their tears aren't delusion—maybe they're accessing something I haven't learned to access yet.
4. Sitting with Philippians 2:12-13:

>Philippians 2:12-13 "Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose."

Fear and trembling. Not certainty. Not arrival. Just showing up while scared.

1. Praying the prayer of the father in Mark 9:24: "I believe; help my unbelief." Admitting that both belief and doubt can coexist, that God might be big enough to hold both.

Examen:

• Where this week did I feel the physical resistance to God? What was my body trying to protect me from?
• When have I experienced collective emotion (even outside church) and felt safe rather than suspicious? What made the difference?
• If my resistance is actually God drawing me closer through friction, what would it look like to lean into the discomfort rather than run from it?

A Collect for Guidance (Book of Common Prayer 2019, p. 23)
Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A Personal Prayer:

Jesus, if you're real—and I'm not sure yet that you are—meet me in this resistance. I don't know how to cry when everyone else is crying. I don't know how to feel what they're feeling. But maybe you don't need me to. Maybe you just need me to keep showing up, keep asking, keep sitting in the circle even when I don't understand. Help me discern the difference between wisdom and fear. Help me trust that seeking you, even with suspicion, might still count as faith. Amen.