Most of us think we’d never join a cult. Never.
But never say never.
In this episode of From Fact to Fiction, I talk with author T.O. Paine about his real-life experience living inside a cult—and how those experiences shaped his thriller The Teaching.
Discover:
What actually defines a cult (and why it’s hard to pin down)
The difference between peaceful and destructive" cults
How intelligent people get drawn in
The role of grief, hope, and belonging
Why some cult experiences don’t feel harmful—until later
The real-life experiences depicted in The Teaching
WATCH above or on YouTube.
LISTEN on From Fact To Fiction: Thrilling Book Reviews Podcast
READ the transcript below, lightly edited for length and clarity
BUY The Teaching
CONTACT T.O. Paine: topaine.com
LISTEN to Brooke Walker’s, podcast (T.O. Paine’s sister-in-law), How to Leave a Cult.
And, if you are enjoying From Fact To Fiction, please let me know. Add a comment, like this post, or send me a note.
Introduction
LINDA: Hi, everyone. Welcome to From Fact to Fiction.
I’m Linda Whitaker. I write speculative and near future thrillers laced with science and technology under the pen name L. M. Whitaker. I also host this podcast, From Fact to Fiction, where we unpack the truth behind my favorite specialty thrillers.
Think Steve Berry, Michael Crichton, John le Carré. And while these works differ in specialty—from historical to techno thriller, medical to spy thrillers—each immerses the reader in a new but realistic world.
And the best of these blend fact with fiction so well, you don’t know what is, what could be, and what’s totally impossible. It would take an expert to know.
And that’s why each time we meet, I’ll pair up with an expert and we’ll select a new specialty thriller. We’ll not only talk about why we love the book, but unpack the truth behind the fiction.
Our Book - The Teaching
Today, our book is called The Teaching by T.O. Paine.
The Teaching is inspired by the author’s real-life experience in a cult.
This novel follows Raine Harkin, who spent her life in a secluded religious community in northern Nevada, believing its teachings without question. But when she finds a terrified girl in the woods and the girl vanishes after gunshots shatter the silence, Rain’s world begins to unravel.
Threatening messages warn her to leave, and as she searches for answers, she uncovers a dark truth. Not all the Haven’s teachings are true, and its secrets may be deadly.
Our Expert - T.O. Paine
LINDA: Our expert today is the author himself, T.O. Paine.
An award-winning author of six fast-paced thriller suspense novels. He’s a member of International Thriller Writers and holds a master’s degree in computer information systems.
He’s run 50 marathons in 50 states, ridden his road bike over 10,000 miles, up 10,000-foot mountains, and completed an Ironman.
And of course, Tony is also a former cult member, and his real-life experiences inspired his book and make him our expert today.
Tony, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today.
T.O. Paine: Thank you, Linda. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk about this.
It is so perfect for From Fact to Fiction because over half of The Teaching is fact.
Even though it is a fully fictional thriller novel, rather than most thrillers or like a lot of movies, they say “based on true events,” really none of the events in my book are very true because it’s about the missing girl and kidnapping and things.
However, everything else—the setting, the religious type of practices that we performed—are real. I didn’t directly write characters that were actual real people. They’re all a combination, though, of people that I lived with, different behaviors and things incorporated into new characters.
What is a Cult?
LINDA: Before we start talking about your book, I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page, because we hear the word “cult” tossed around a lot today, often on the political spectrum.
So would you mind defining for us kind of what you mean when you say a cult?
T.O. PAINE: Yeah, for me, it’s very difficult to define a cult. I think it’s difficult for anyone. There’s such a wide range of gray.
Some people will feel just a few things make something a cult, and other people feel like it takes a lot.
One of the biggest things—and it was true in the cult I lived in—versus like a religious organization or even a small group of people who like to get together, cults are typically based on people following a leader.
A human, or a couple of humans, who are very influential, very charismatic—Jim Jones and Kool-Aid, all that—versus other religious and spiritual organizations or even communal living organizations that are way less culty.
They tend to follow a doctrine. Like there’s that separation. There’s a book, a Bible, some collection of something that is not human-based.
That’s one of the big differences. People fall in love with their leader and then they begin to get influenced and start doing things.
And that leads me to another thing. I learned living there that there are really two kinds of cults.
There are very peaceful cults—people who live communally and they do so for years—and that’s where it gets blurry, because some people say, well, they just live different. They just do weird things and share everything. They’re not really a cult.
And then there are what’s known as destructive cults, where at some point the cult—if it’s a doomsday cult, you know, it’s leading them towards some day where everyone’s going to die—or more often than not, it’s like the one I lived in, where they’re taking advantage of people’s finances.
LINDA: Do you have any idea how many cults operate today?
T.O. PAINE: So it kind of depends on the definition, but it is shockingly large.
I would consider—well, there’s like a range that’s between 3,000 and 10,000, depending on how you define it. And in my definition, it’s like 6,000 or 7,000.
However, there are a lot of them, and I mentioned the financial thing—there are a lot of cults that will start up, they only have 10 or 11 people, and they will purposely operate for a year or two just to try to suck money out of their members, and then the cult goes away.
So that ups the number of cults, because it doesn’t take very many people to have a cult for a short time.
The Facts Behind the Fiction
Tony’s Experience
LINDA: Let’s get into the facts behind the fiction of The Teaching.
Your firsthand experience makes you an expert on cults—or at least those of a certain type. Can you tell us a little bit about your own experience?
T.O. PAINE: Yeah, absolutely. It is perhaps a little bit different because—though it’s still popular now to be in a cult—back in the 70s there was a lot of cult movement and belief. And the cult I joined was actually formed in the 70s.
My story is a little different because my wife and my two daughters—we did not join until I was 35 years old.
My wife was the first child of this couple, and she was put up for adoption.
When she was 21, her parents contacted her and said, “Hey, we’re your birth parents. And by the way, we’ve been living in this cult for the last 20 years, ever since you were born basically. And we also went on to have four other kids who we raised in this cult.”
Of course, they didn’t say the word “cult.” They said, “We’ve been living in this loving communal society and a lot of people are accusing us of being a cult, but we’re not.”
So she met them when she was 21. I met her when she was 22.
And then we suffered some life tragedies—we lost a couple of children—and we were seeking something more in life, and help and hope.
And she had this family, and the teacher—the leader of the family. (This is one of those things that’s portrayed in the book that is true)
The teacher was a person who died in the 1500s, a doctor in England. And the voice of this doctor from 500-some years ago would be channeled through the leader of the cult that we were in.
And every Sunday we would go and we would listen to teachings from this spirit speaking through the leader.
So that’s how we came to be in the cult. And like a lot of people who join cults, one of the big reasons is hope. Looking for a different way of life.
Also, my wife wanted to get to know her real parents, which was also a huge reason.
And the cult stuff slowly slipped in. We lived there for about four years.
LINDA: Wow—that’s just so unusual.
Did you start with kind of a skeptical mind? Or how did that progression work?
T.O. PAINE: Yes, it’s pretty amazing.
People will believe what they want to believe. And anyone who’s lost a loved one wants to believe they’re in a better place.
Our first daughter we lost to cancer. And whether my wife and I ever actually fully believed that the leader was actually channeling someone or not, that still is pretty blurry.
The leader was a woman, but she channeled a man’s voice—this doctor from the 1500s—and he was able to tell us things about our daughter who was on the other side.
And that is a powerful thing.
Obviously, you can see where that could become very manipulative.
Writing The Teaching
LINDA: Absolutely. Because you want to believe. You miss them.
Well, what inspired you to open up your life and write a fiction novel? I mean, half of your life and half of a story, of course—but what inspired you to do this?
T.O. PAINE: Part of it was after leaving—and we had a lot of very good reasons to leave—I felt like it was an important and valuable experience, but I didn’t want to write a memoir. Because I’ve always liked Stephen King, Joe Hill, and I could name a hundred other thriller-type horror authors—I always wanted to do that kind of writing.
I also felt at the time that it wouldn’t be very safe for me to write directly about what had occurred, so I wanted to fictionalize it.
And it was the real things—every Sunday us going and listening to this spirit—and then the manipulative aspects.
The cult I was in wanted tithing. They wanted financial security. They wanted money. There was never any talk of doomsday or anything like those types of cults.
It was more about getting people—and we noticed over time, the people joining were often in their 40s or 50s, and they came from wealthy families who were due inheritance.
So I wanted to write about that, but not directly.
I wanted to make it entertaining and have fun being a fiction horror-type writer.
LINDA: And you did succeed.
I was struck by the fact that the leaders lived at a higher standard of living than everybody else. And of course, that’s not new. If you look at big religious organizations where leaders have jets and giant mansions—it’s similar, maybe on a smaller scale.
That wasn’t surprising to me.
T.O. PAINE: And in real life, the leader’s house was three times the size of anybody else’s cabin.
Everyone pretty much lived in just different, weird mountain cabins, but their cabin had been added onto and rebuilt where it was gigantic.
And that is true across so many cults.
Life in the Cult
LINDA: In the book, the cult [is comprised of] a small number of families that go for generations, and kids are born into the cult and stay in it.
That sounds like what your wife experienced. Did you see multi-generational families?
T.O. PAINE: Yes, absolutely. Because it began in the 70s, there were at least two generations of kids who grew up in the cult. Which is actually incredibly rare.
And that also added to their attractiveness, because people saw families and stability. They lived near a small town, blended in, went to school, sometimes had their own school on the compound. It wasn’t really that strange.
We used to call it the “cult of beer and cigarettes” because people drank beer and did normal things. No big fences, no arsenals.
So kids grew up believing they were just part of a different church.
And I remember asking my brother-in-law, “How do you believe this?” And he said, “Because it’s always been this way.”
But most cults last less than 10 years—they’re not generational. Eventually people get frustrated when promises don’t come true.
But our leaders kept it going for over 30 years. They even trained others to continue it.
But like I said—when the leaders go, the cult goes.
And that’s what happened in this case.
LINDA: I liked in your book that you didn’t expose how much of the religious and spiritual aspects that people believed—including the teachers themselves. I like that. Maybe some people believed fully, some maybe didn’t, but were there for the community and all levels in between.
T.O. PAINE: Yeah, you never know what is in someone else’s reality, in their head.
I don’t know how many people fully believed or how many times they doubted that that was a real voice, but when we would meet—like when we would have our Sundays and sit in a completely pitch-black room, as described in the book—and then the voice would come out, it was like therapy.
It was like a big group therapy session.
And the voice would pick out people to talk with them and know things about them that the voice wouldn’t have known otherwise, or the way it seemed.
And say, “Oh hey, Jake, I know you’ve been having problems with your wife,” who—and she’s sitting right there with you now—and here’s what you should do.
So whether you believed or not, people were feeling like they were getting helped.
The religious part of the goal was about past lives. They believed in reincarnation.
You come to Earth, you’re separated from the one entity of everyone and everything, which is God. You come to learn what you need to know in order to be a full part of that one entity.
And the goal was to live and learn and follow the teachings so that when you die, you never have to come back.
And so all of the lessons are to make you a good and better person.
There was nothing destructive about the lessons. It was all good therapy advice. There was nothing evil in what the spirit would tell people to do.
Other than occasionally the spirit would complain if somebody hadn’t been tithing enough—but only a tiny little bit. That didn’t really become noticeable until later for us.
It was actually very helpful, and it actually helped my wife and I, inspiritual kinds of ways.
That is like—you know, not often people say, “Well, it wasn’t all bad, my cult,” but it wasn’t.
LINDA: In the book, aside from the reincarnation and the trance, there was no other specific religion chosen. It wasn’t Christian—all religions were welcome?
T.O. PAINE: Yes, which I think was one of the brilliant things—they were very accepting of anyone and everyone. It didn’t matter what their background was.
We had a few people that came all the way from Russia that found the leader and joined the cult.
There were people from a lot of different places and a lot of different religious backgrounds.
The idea was that just the teaching—following that—you go to your one true God.
And if you want to believe it’s this God or that, or there is no God, but you should follow these things so you don’t have to be reincarnated, none of that baggage mattered.
LINDA: How did they get new people? How does someone from Russia find your little community?
T.O. PAINE: Yeah, right?
So I thought about it, and I wasn’t there in the 70s. We came in 2006, so that was quite later.
My wife’s siblings and other people would know way more than I do, but I think in general, when you get the first four or five people into a cult and believing it, then it really becomes word of mouth.
Those four or five people meet people and make friends, and then they get interested, and it just starts grouping.
In the case of this cult that started in the 70s, in the mid-80s the leader was going on tour to radio stations, trancing, and they would have her trance on a radio program and talk about the teachings for entertainment.
And then people would hear that, and I believe they got some people from that.
LINDA: That is surprising.
T.O. PAINE: They had two or three little pamphlet-type books, and they got pretty popular in that little sect.
LINDA: Underlying your book is mistrust of the outside world. So when a girl goes missing [they do not call the police]. Was it someone from outside?
There are a lot of interpersonal dynamics between people living in the cult and the outside world.
That made for great tension in your book.
T.O. PAINE: Yeah, that’s one of the things I wanted to do also with the book—have the perspective from inside the cult.
Rather than most cult movies or stories where somebody is abducted into the cult, I wanted to show that the people in the cult were the normal people, somewhat.
And that somebody who had been living in the cult was abducted out of it into the normal world. And they wanted to find out why.
So it flipped the script a little bit.
LINDA: Yeah, it was great.
“T.O. Paine’s sister-in-law, Brooke Walker, produces a podcast aimed at supporting members of cults. In her How to Leave a Cult podcast, she chats with psychology professionals and fellow cult survivors to unpack cult tactics, illuminate warning signs, and provide support and healing to those who have left similar toxic situations.”
The Crisis - T.O. Paine’s newest novel
LINDA: Thank you very much for coming today and joining us on From Fact to Fiction. I appreciate it so much.
You’ve got five other suspense thrillers, and a new one—do you want to tell us about your new one?
T.O. PAINE: Sure.
I have a copy of it here. It’s called The Crisis.
This would be the fifth novel that I published. [Tony also has a novella].
And like you said, The Teaching was the first.
Every book has gotten a little bit less dark and a little bit more fun.
From The Teaching, which was kidnapping and really dark and evil things, to the latest book, The Crisis, which is “Smokey and the Bandit meets the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
It’s more of a crime detective fiction.
That’s a Wrap
LINDA: Well, thank you so much again for joining us.
And I hope everyone out there—thank you for joining us on From Fact to Fiction, and we will see you next time.
T.O. PAINE: Thank you, Linda. Appreciate it.
And remember, if you have a thriller you want us to review or you want to be a guest author or expert, please contact me. I would love to talk to you.
