Those of us who balked at the mandates and been stymied by the inexplicable transformation of former friends, family members, and brothers and sisters in Christ have struggled to understand how this schism could have happened. In fact, I’ll divulge a secret that has gained much traction among the injection refuseniks as a means of understanding what has happened to formerly reasonable people. This is the theory known as “Mass Formation,” which could informally be labelled a psychosis.

The man most recognised for bringing this theory to light is Mattias Desmet, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. Essentially, with certain preconditions in place, people become vulnerable to essentially fall under a kind of hypnosis whereby no matter how stupid, senseless, or even harmful the proposed solutions are, people unite in conformity. The wide adoption of the premise among this population only serves to validate their distorted thinking. The preconditions that lay the groundwork for Mass Formation are:

• The masses must feel alone and isolated.
• Their lives must feel pointless and meaningless.
• They must experience constant free-floating anxiety.
• They reside in a constant state of free-floating frustration and aggression.

I am not here to somehow mock or belittle anyone, but to share a genuine explanation for a reality that is otherwise incomprehensible to us. Of course, it is only a theory and requires knowing the internal mindset of an aggregate of the members of many nations. As I claim no special insight into the collective thinking of a vast swath of the population, I can only comment on external observable reality and what I glean from my interactions.

Yes, clearly people feel alone and isolated and this situation predated the declaration of a pandemic. It is undeniable that the lockdowns fertilized and watered the soil whereby their they were made ready to cede increasing power to the Svengalis who held them in thrall. This was able to happen because of the reality of a pre-existing free-floating anxiety and outright fear of death, government retaliation, and social disapproval. I have long ago seen that compliance, even among Christians, was somehow surreptitiously added to the fruit of the spirit.

The decay of civility and the growing anger and animus from the left has been manifest incrementally each year; but seeing this attitude on open display among Christians has been arguably the most surprising aspect for me. This includes people I served alongside for years who acknowledged on a theoretical basis much of the corrupting and corrosive influences plaguing our nation, yet failing to consider that the authorities behind this forced perversion would sink so low as to lie to them. They would rather believe that their friends had simply lost their minds than imagine that Caesar’s proclamations and iron-fisted controls could be guided by anything beyond compassion-informed beneficence.

I feel least equipped to assess the existence of a generalized malaise about life and a loss of meaning. I do know that the secular world has embraced hedonism over virtue and they have grown more superficial, selfish and driven by immediate gratification as the culture has spiraled into these vapid pursuits. Based on the level of fear I’ve seen from believers and unbelievers alike about death by COVID, I certainly can conclude that professing Christ-followers are manifesting a far keener investment in surviving rather than thriving. Taken together, these proofs point in the direction of validating Professor Desmet’s theory of a pervasive lack of meaning.

What I feel better qualified to address is what I am seeing as the cultish behaviour among Christ-followers with regards to COVID and the mandates. I do see signs that those going along with the “experts” direction on the coronavirus bear the hallmarks of a population indoctrinated into a cult. I believe that this actually gives context to some of the perspectives offered by Mattias Desmet when applied to the Christian teaching regarding false prophets. We know there are deceivers and that even the elect can be enticed away, so falling prey to those guided by deceitful spirits and teachings of demons is a danger. (1 Timothy 4:1)

I want to deal with the characteristics of a cult and how I see it as applicable to the unquestioned surrender of rights and freedoms to those self-identifying as the saviours that would lead us out of a “pandemic.” This list is drawn from a website that sought to summarize common aspects found in a cult and I believe they apply here.

• Opposing critical thinking: People are asked to believe things that run contrary to rationality. The injections are necessary for personal protection, but your injection doesn’t work unless those around you have been injected too. While the virus carries a very low risk of death or serious illness outside of those who are already gravely health compromised, everyone must lock up and take an experimental injection to be protected. The demand that healthy people “shelter in place” to prevent an outbreak. Reliance on notoriously unreliable tests used to determine whether healthy people are sick. Determining that churches, gyms, small businesses, weddings, funerals, graduations, birthday parties, and other social and family gatherings are dangerous; but abortion clinics, liquor and cannabis stores, and huge box stores are perfectly safe – especially when you rope off sections of the store that contain what the philosopher kings consider “non-essential.” Other people must wear masks to keep you safe. In some cases, masks protect you walking by yourself down a street, driving alone in your car, exercising, and even swimming or showering. The wizards of smart can prognosticate one and two weeks or even a month into the future to pronounce it is safe to drop or re-institute a standard. One can spread a virus walking to a table for a meal, but the danger and mask is lifted once seated. A “vaccine” now requires regular boosters and, despite the fact that those with the injections are now more likely to get the disease people took the product to protect them from, then those at fault are the people who didn’t get the shot. I could go on, but I think I made my point.
• Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving. The imposition of lockdowns and mask mandates have been accepted with full compliance along with the assumption that every other citizen is a potential disease carrier. Once the injections came along, those in the circle of compliance were willing to meet and even show their proof of “vaccination” for exclusive privileges. Those who didn’t comply with the COVIDIAN leadership were not allowed to join in the “vaxxed” games. I refer you to Dr. Suess’s story of “The Sneeches” for a perfect illustration of the machinations that were instituted against us.

I personally faced a situation where, even while the evidence that the injected were just as likely to pass on the virus, family decided to exclude those without the jab from attending a Christmas get-together. The stated concern was for the welfare of 2 high-risk individuals. In the end, they agreed to allow the non-jabbed to pass a magical COVID test to attend without explaining why this policy would actually keep those they wanted to protect safe. After all, everyone could spread the virus and the tests were to determine if one was latently carrying COVID. The only rationale was based on the fact that since those in charge called it safe; then it must be fine. The three individuals that arrived at these rules of engagement were health care workers.

It turns out that the cult leaders lifted the mandates more as a temporary compliance reward – only to reinstitute them because the virus they were “vaccinated” against was still spreading. Even with the rules enforced for all in clear acknowledgment that the injections didn’t work, the inoculated still harboured fear of the purebloods. Even now, if a mix of people who got together managed to contract COVID and even one member is not inoculated; you can count on the fact that they will be presumed guilty for the outbreak.  

• Emphasizing special doctrines outside of scripture. In this case, I don’t want to be guilty of the very heresy being raised. I don’t believe this applies specifically, but what has been evident is selective application and distortion of scripture. The call to obey civil government without questioning under the guise of following Romans 13 has made this admonition sacrosanct while ignoring the glaring limitations on this teaching. The same is true of the duty to “love our neighbours as ourselves” which carry an automatic acceptance of the government narrative which, if untrue, is merely a ploy to induce compliance from those who have fallen under the spell of groupthink with no commensurate discernment or investigation of reality. This misapplication of biblical guidance was thoroughly debunked in the linked article.
• Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders. Certainly, were it not for demands that expert status be granted to designated authorities, we would not be in our current circumstances. Not only have we transitioned from being a post-Christian and post-truth culture, we have also, of necessity, become post-evidence. The demand of obeisance to these hand-picked arbiters of “the science” and personal freedoms is irrational. All it took was for political leaders to confer limitless decision-making powers to a handful of bureaucrats who just happened to share the same passion for catastrophizing COVID and the imposition of severe restrictions. One’s qualifications to dispense advice on mandates and bodily autonomy was arrived at through an ideological conformity test.

This should be no surprise as this is precisely the MO that has long been applied to standards for social policies. They are the living embodiment of the “no true Scotsman” paradigm. This is the logical fallacy whereby one sets the terms of whether someone is within or outside a certain group based on the presumption of conformity to a position; for instance, all women are assumed to be pro-abortion. Any man that insists abortion is wrong has no right to speak since he’s not a woman. Men who advocate for abortion are defenders of women’s rights and deserve to be heard as allies. Women who oppose abortion are not true women and/or have  been subjugated or duped by the patriarchy who trick them into abandoning such an essential and self-evident right. This is the mentality behind the COVID response. Ultimately, anyone who warns about the dangers and limitations of the mandates is marginalized and deemed to be purveyors of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. The only way to not be guilty of such labels is to agree with the party line. Data and evidence are irrelevant.

People accepted that the crisis was real because everyone allowed to give voice fed that narrative. When powers were claimed to censor dissent, this coup was possible because the messaging required panic over an existential threat with the promise of an elixir that would rescue us. Lacking was any awareness that these leaders were creating a feedback loop whereby the “expert class” could be trusted because they all sang from the same viral hymnbook. Anyone not harmonizing with their claims could not be trusted by virtue of their dissent. It was a head’s we win, tails you lose framing. It was perfectly rational for the wizards of smart to emerge from their scrum with the colour code du jour that would determine what freedoms would be denied that week, month… Like the head of any cult, they alone had the special knowledge to guide us through the COVID maelstrom. They did not offer evidence, but assured us they did the grunt work that the great unwashed couldn’t do – since we lacked the requisite presumption of authority to read data and invent social policy. Keep in mind that the Prime Minister who told us that budgets balance themselves and promised to grow the economy from the heart outward was part of the brain trust who set the conditions under Covid.

Forgotten was the fact that when a handful of people with nefarious motives happen to hold the power, wealth, and control over information – in addition to the stated desire to control and decrease the population – then getting you to trust them and marginalize dissent is all that is needed for great evil to be carried out. The “trust the experts” narrative is an easy sell when your ability to censor, monitor, threaten, bribe, intimidate, and coerce is absolute.

• Dishonouring the family unit. Cults are famous for ensuring those they seek to control must not be swayed from the hive mind by reducing the influence of those who might jolt the cultist from the spell they are under. Alert family members and close friends are the greatest threat to monopoly control over the false teachings of the cult leaders. By turning everyone around them into potential spreaders of disease, they were able to isolate the individual from their support system and make them fearful. Comfort was found in associations with their “new family” who collectively clung to the talismans that unified them. The closing of churches, forbidding access to public gatherings, etc. ensured there was no mass resistance able to be built through people getting together and possibly questioning the narrative.

Once there has been a realignment of relational lines, then you have created a community founded on affirmation of a specific way of seeing the world. In order to salvage any semblance of a connection, either the dissenter needs to come around to your way of thinking or the subject needs to no longer be discussed. Anyone seeking to present non-affirming information is a perceived threat and can no longer be trusted as an ally. This is the same technique applied to the GLBTQBECONTINUED agenda where anything short of full affirmation of their worldview makes you an enemy. Before long, huge numbers of people have rejected even what they scripturally know to be true by bending over backwards to give their full support for what God labels as sin.

This explains also why the specific focus on heavily fining churches and enforcing measures to stop public get-togethers and, worst of all, protests like the Freedom Convoy. Having gone to Ottawa, there was an undeniable atmosphere of camaraderie and sense of being part of a family. Despite the diversity of race, religion, (or non-religion), ethnicity, sex, age, income, injection status, or any other demarcation, this celebration of diversity and freedom was vilified. Most of the public were sanguine with the police violently attacking peaceful protestors for overstaying their welcome in Ottawa. We threatened the narrative and if we were justified in our case that the mandates were both unnecessary and harmful, this would mean that the compliant would need to admit they had been fooled and acted abysmally toward those trying to warn them. The party atmosphere was an indictment of those who had been silent as friends, family members, and fellow citizens losing their jobs, ability to travel, right to open their businesses. It is much easier to complain about the party atmosphere and go along with the ad hominem attacks than question why the politicians didn’t have the courtesy to meet to defend the merit of their regulations.

This brings us back to the issue of the mythology around the injections. Again, if the injections work, why does everyone need to get it? If they don’t work, why does everyone need to get it? If you do have a negative view of the Freedom Convoy attendees, why? Do you attribute some malign rationales to their advocacy for personal choice? If so, what is your justification? If the measures were necessary, why was their no outbreak from this massive “super spreader” event? If you failed to see this was about bodily autonomy, doesn’t this prove the theories of mass formation and cultlike behaviour? If you are a believer, where is your love for your neighbour – let alone your enemy?

• Crossing biblical boundaries of behaviour. In many cases, this includes the hypocrisy of the leaders who demanded compliance to standards from their followers that they themselves didn’t abide by. In this case, since this is a secular cult, they did not rely on biblical language. These leaders largely sought to purge any Christian influence from the culture while imposing their own godless philosophies. Trudeau has been the voice and face for Team Mandate. This is the same man who did not permit anyone who did not support baby killing to run under the liberal banner. He is also the one who made it illegal to counsel anyone against gender dysphoria and who ensured that one can be charged – or parents even lose custody of their child – for “misgendering” (aka, rightly affirming their biological reality). He’s the one who said that anyone not knuckling under his mandates was holding fringe, unacceptable views that are not Canadian and should not be tolerated. He also called a peaceful protest an occupation, invoked the Emergency Act (previously titled the War Measures Act) and seized bank accounts for those who showed their support for the convoy – after sending in goon squads in riot gear to put down the peaceful protest.

Through this strategy, they have divided and neutered much of the church, thus making this takeover a cinch. We had already become comfortable ceding ground to the culture with most believers concluding that being conciliatory was the highest virtue. The church crossed biblical boundaries by embracing discrimination and ignoring the maltreatment of brothers and sisters in Christ and reasonable unbelievers under a perverted interpretation of loving their neighbours. Those in charge were only able to deceive because the church has long ago adapted to acting within the ever shifting and narrowing Overton window where oligarchs politicize morality and admonish Christians who attempt to uphold biblical standards to keep out of politics.

• Separation from the church. Many have already written the church off as non-essential and embraced the easier option of “worshipping in place.” Many have delighted in taking on the role of scolds and tattle-tales willing to sell their former friends off for the recognition of elitists and fellow cultists who believe salvation is found in sacrificing the welfare of others for peace of mind about a perceived threat to their physical and emotional health. Certainly, churches are divided between those willing to put their freedom to worship in the hands of their trusted Branch COVIDIAN leaders and those who recognise a totalitarian effort toward a one world government is happening under the noses of believers and with the complicity of the church. Of course, those who align themselves with a cult become a competitor of the true Christian church that will not sacrifice convictions for comfort or fall for the words of false teachers and heretics.

What we do know is that the majority of citizens – including Christ-followers – are not willing to rationally evaluate the veracity of information they are being told. While the prospect of this level of mesmerism may be difficult to swallow, alternative explanations are arguably even more disturbing and would require a complete reassessment of whatever we thought we knew to be true about our former friends and family members.

In essence, if believers have fallen under the spell of leaders that they somehow deem to be charismatic and credible; at least then it is possible to deprogram them and assist their return back to the state of rationality. If, however, they have come to decide that their willingness to break bread with you is conditional on adopting an extra-biblical position to avoid any possible conflict with the zeitgeist, then I think we are at an impasse.