A Cult Checklist Got Nearly 13,000 Hits in One Day

David Anderson
4 min readApr 27, 2022

Yesterday, one of my blog posts — published eight months ago — got nearly 13,000 views.

That spike is from April 26. 13,062 views overall, 12,896 were for the one post “Word of Faith and a Cult Checklist.”

About 20% of that came from this post on Reddit, which showed a list of crazy rules at some church called the Word of Faith Fellowship.

A fairly long list of things required of and forbidden to members of the Word of Faith Fellowship
https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/ubuc8o/when_you_violate_a_dont_you_will_be_told_we_dont/

For some reason, it seems to have driven a lot of traffic to one blog post titled “Word of Faith and a Cult Checklist.” It was not about that church in particular. I was involved in a movement called the Word of Faith back in the 1980’s and 90’s. Today, it is more likely to be called the Prosperity Gospel. I have written a lot on my blog about the Word of Faith/Prosperity Gospel. My sister once thought it was a cult, and I wanted to know myself. I found a cult checklist in an article called “Characteristics Associated with Cultic Groups” from the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). I edited it a little for clarification on some points.

The idea for the post was to go through the checklist and answer according to my experiences with the Word of Faith movement. I cannot comment on the Word of Faith Fellowship, because I have no experience with that particular church. But their “do and don’t” list above sounds…

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David Anderson

David Anderson is a blogger, award-winning author, bible geek, and novice crypto investor. Doubting Thomas is my patron saint.