“It looked so normal, it looked so much like a lot of Wednesday night bible studies that I’d been to in my life and it was at first and then it just morphed,” the One Tree Hill star said.
One Tree Hill’s Bethany Joy Lenz was always looking for a place to “belong.”
Despite being a lead in one of the most beloved television series in the early 2000s, Lenz found herself looking for more.
While sitting down with PEOPLE to promote her memoir Dinner for Vampires Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!), the 43-year-old opened up about how he got involved with an ultra-Christian group she calls a “cult.”
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“I was an only child and my parents were wonderful people with a lot of their own stuff to deal with,” she told the publication.
“It was just a gap, it was of all the wonderful thing they did as parents this was a gap in parenting like we all have in parenting. It just so happened that this gap intersected with my experience growing up in the Evangelical Church and so I was looking for a place to belong that was also attached to a higher spiritual experience,” she continued.
Lenz spent a decade in the “cult,” which she says was led by a pastor in Idaho who ended up controlling her career, life choices and her bank account. Initially, however, she said finding the group felt like “water in a desert.”
“We crave that kind of intimacy,” she said.
“The idea that someone out there says, ‘No matter what you do or how badly you might behave or what dumb choices you make, I still love you, and I’m here for you,'” she added.
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“It looked so normal, it looked so much like a lot of Wednesday night bible studies that I’d been to in my life and it was at first and then it just morphed,” she recalled. “But by the time it started morphing I was too far into the relationships to really notice and I was very young, I didn’t question the group. I questioned my marriage”
The actress said she doesn’t like the term “brainwashing,” but referred to the whole experience as “high control.”
“I adjusted everything around me to fit what I wanted to believe,” she revealed.
While she’s mentioned this time in her life on her One Tree Hill podcast, she opens up about the entire experience for the first time in detail in her upcoming memoir — adding that she doesn’t think of it as “brave.”
“I think of it as important. Living silently in the suffering I experienced, I don’t know if that helps anyone,” she said, hoping it will be help others. “I think of this more as the right thing to do.”
As for what her costars said of the decision to be a part of the “cult”, Lenz recalled that she “could see it on their faces.”
“But I’d justify it, like, ‘I couldn’t possibly be in a cult. It’s just that I’ve got access to a relationship with God and people in a way that everybody else wants, but they don’t know how to get it,'” she explained.
Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!) comes out Oct. 22.
