Credit: Dangerous Minds / Priscilla Rice

At the risk of sounding out of touch and old as I actually am, any cult or religion with its salt is more vibes-based than anything else.

While anyone involved with organised religions may roll their eyes at that and point to the mountains of dogma, commandments and rules propping them up, I would respond by asking about the number of immensely powerful people who’ve bent those supposed rules to their own ends.

Not only that, I’d ask about the fact that each of those powerful people (powerful men, let’s be real here) will look you in the eye and swear blind to you that they’ve actually got the exact right interpretation of the God’s honest truth because the man himself told them so. They may be lying, they may genuinely believe what they’re saying to their core, but they’re still successfully turning people away from other belief systems and towards them, not because of any accepted dogma, but through sheer force of personality. Through sheer force of vibes.

Take a man, Sam Fife, for example. Born in Miami, Florida, Fife was an army vet who graduated from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in March 1957. Essentially, setting him up as a Southern Baptist missionary whose job was to spread the word of God. Fife was a man whose idea of the Good Lord and His word wasn’t one he came to himself. The Baptist Theological Seminary he graduated from was essentially a university teaching him precisely what version of The Word to spread, and for a while, spread it he did.

He went back to his home town to spread the word of God, using a gospel that was targeted at youth and young people alienated by the dramatic way the world was changing as the 1950s became the 1960s. He did everything his Seminary had trained him to do, at least until 1963. At a prayer meeting that he himself had organised, he received what he would call, for years after that, his true divine revelation. One that would finally tear him away from his Southern Baptist roots.

Principally because his revelation went against what his Seminary had told him. If you asked Fife, he would tell you that God had told him personally that the world was ending, and only he could save a faithful few from the oncoming apocalypse.

For the rest of the 1960s, Fife began building a devout cult following based on these revelations, taking his messaging wherever he so pleased and moving on from the Southern Baptist world he’d preached from for years. This was entirely his own movement. The irony of it being that it was built around the idea that everyone had their own personal role to play in spreading God’s will on the planet, and by listening to your inner dialogue with God, you were enacting his will.

Fundamentally, this is a cult, though, so Fife was there to tell you what your dialogue with God was, and it often involved donating all your money and personal possessions to his church. Funny that. In 1971, Fife upped the ante dramatically. He went from preaching that the apocalypse was coming to the apocalypse was here and that his followers needed to prepare for the second coming. Thus, he and his thousands of followers upped sticks from their homes and moved to a number of wilderness retreats.

These were normally farms in Canada, Colombia and Alaska and, like any cult worth their salt, the fact that the world didn’t come to an end and Christ didn’t return to Earth only strengthened his followers’ belief in him. Fife’s time on this world would come to an end in 1979 in a plane crash, and his legacy was one of infighting and psychological, physical and sexual abuse as a number of his most trusted followers tried to take over in his place.

This led to a splintering of a number of different rival factions, which always says a lot, doesn’t it? You’d think if Sam Fife actually had beliefs, that everyone who followed him so loyally would be on the same page. However, they weren’t. Probably because these people never have beliefs, it’s all just charisma, luck, and that word again, vibes.

It may sound silly, but they’re powerful enough to get people to do anything.