The Cult Dossier · No. 177 · Second Generation / Born In
The Second Generation
SGAs; second-generation adults; the born-in
Wherever a group lasts twenty years · Every group in this dossier that outlived its founding cohort
XVIII. THE SECOND GENERATION — THE ONES WHO NEVER CHOSE
Whatever the group taught. THE POINT OF THIS ERA IS THAT THE CONTENT OF THE BELIEF MATTERS LESS THAN THE FACT THAT NOBODY CHOSE IT.
Who led it
None. This is a category, not an organisation.
What it worshipped and taught
Not a doctrine but a POSITION. A convert walks in with a life already built: a name people knew them by, a job, relatives outside, a memory of ordinary weekdays. A CHILD BORN INTO THE SAME GROUP HAS NONE OF THAT, AND EVERY TERM IN THE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF CULT MEMBERSHIP CHANGES MEANING WHEN APPLIED TO THEM. Recruitment did not happen. Isolation is not a tactic imposed on them; it is simply the shape of the world. And leaving is not a return.
Who was in it
The born-in members of every long-lived group in this file, and specifically: RICKY RODRIGUEZ (L212), JENNA MISCAVIGE HILL (L188), ELISSA WALL (L197), REBECCA MUSSER (L199), CAROLYN JESSOP (L198), NANSOOK HONG (L194), SARAH MOORE HAMILTON-BYRNE (L200), and CELESTE JONES, KRISTINA JONES and JULIANA BUHRING (L196).
How it ended, or where it stands
NOT A GROUP AND SO IT HAS NO FATE. It has a population, and the population grows every year a group survives.
The dead
—
Of note
THE FINDING THAT ORGANISES THIS WHOLE ERA IS ONE SENTENCE LONG: A CONVERT CAN GO BACK, AND SOMEONE BORN IN HAS NOWHERE TO GO BACK TO.
Recovery for an adult who joined is described in the literature as reconnecting — with a former self, an old name, a family who remember them from before. FOR SOMEONE RAISED INSIDE, THERE IS NO BEFORE. THE IDENTITY IS NOT COVERED OVER BY THE GROUP; IT WAS BUILT BY IT. That is why the literature treats their recovery as a separate problem, and why an intervention designed for converts fits the born-in badly.
IT ALSO EXPLAINS A GAP IN THIS DOSSIER'S OWN SUBJECT MATTER. Era XIV records twenty years of argument about whether adults were brainwashed into joining, an argument that collapsed in court in 1990. THROUGHOUT THAT ARGUMENT THE PEOPLE WITH THE STRONGEST CLAIM TO HAVE HAD NO CHOICE AT ALL WERE THE CHILDREN, AND ALMOST NOBODY WAS LITIGATING ON THEIR BEHALF. The deprogrammers seized adults off the street. The courts were right to stop them. Nothing comparable was built for the children, and the entries that follow are what filled the space instead: a book, a marriage, a bleach bottle, and two Supreme Court cases pulling in opposite directions.
Recovery for an adult who joined is described in the literature as reconnecting — with a former self, an old name, a family who remember them from before. FOR SOMEONE RAISED INSIDE, THERE IS NO BEFORE. THE IDENTITY IS NOT COVERED OVER BY THE GROUP; IT WAS BUILT BY IT. That is why the literature treats their recovery as a separate problem, and why an intervention designed for converts fits the born-in badly.
IT ALSO EXPLAINS A GAP IN THIS DOSSIER'S OWN SUBJECT MATTER. Era XIV records twenty years of argument about whether adults were brainwashed into joining, an argument that collapsed in court in 1990. THROUGHOUT THAT ARGUMENT THE PEOPLE WITH THE STRONGEST CLAIM TO HAVE HAD NO CHOICE AT ALL WERE THE CHILDREN, AND ALMOST NOBODY WAS LITIGATING ON THEIR BEHALF. The deprogrammers seized adults off the street. The courts were right to stop them. Nothing comparable was built for the children, and the entries that follow are what filled the space instead: a book, a marriage, a bleach bottle, and two Supreme Court cases pulling in opposite directions.
Its timeline
- Roughly year 20 of any group THE SECOND GENERATION APPEARS, and the group's problem changes. Recruiting adults requires persuasion. Retaining people who were born there requires only that nothing else ever becomes thinkable.
- 1970s–1990s The anti-cult movement (150) argues almost entirely about ADULT CONVERTS — whether they were coerced into joining and whether they could be taken out. THE CHILDREN INSIDE THOSE GROUPS ARE LARGELY ABSENT FROM THE ARGUMENT, and from the litigation it produced.
- 2000s–2010s Survivor memoirs by born-in members begin appearing in numbers, and SECOND-GENERATION ADULT (SGA) comes into use in the counselling literature.
- 2013 A GROUNDED-THEORY STUDY OF FIFTEEN SECOND-GENERATION ADULT FORMER MEMBERS, by CYNTHIA MATTHEWS and CARMEN SALAZAR, is published online in the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COUNSELLING (vol. 36, 2014). It records harms converts do not carry in the same way — abuse and neglect across the whole of childhood, disrupted attachment, missing education — and notes how little attention the born-in had received.
- Present The distinction is standard in the recovery literature and almost invisible in the law, which still asks whether an adult consented.