A Feather in the Fog

This biography examines The Exclusive Brethren (aka Plymouth Brethren), a cult religion that originated in England and Ireland around 1828, eventually spreading to nineteen countries with the largest populations in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the United Kingdom.



Exclusive Brethren believe they are the chosen people who will go to heaven. All others are  deemed unclean and live as contaminated Worldlies. The leader of the Brethren, The Man of God, is the supreme authority who maintains an incorrigible stranglehold over all areas of the members' lives including who to marry, where to live, and how to earn money. Challenging the Man of God results in having children taken from parents and total ex-communication from the cult.

  

Despite daily conditioning from birth, uncompromising rules, and abuse, one woman has the temerity to escape-fully aware of the foredoomed misery she will experience on the Outside. This book follows her from birth to adulthood, portraying her escape and living on the Outside, near Portland, Oregon.  She experiences clashing, paradoxical feelings of joy associated with her newly discovered freedom only to battle obsessive urges to return to the cult from which she bravely fled.