At the Word of Faith Fellowship, in Spindale, North Carolina, the only word that matters is that of Jane Whaley. While they bill themselves as an evangelical Christian church, to those who have left, outsiders, and experts, Word of Faith is incontrovertibly a cult. Jane Whaley is the cult’s charismatic leader, regarded by some members of her congregation as a prophet. She, along with her deputies, control every facet of members lives. Her preoccupation with “the unclean,” the group’s euphemism for sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions, appears to be matched only by her propensity for abusive actions. Weiss and Mohr demonstrate that even after decades of reported abuse, news stories, fraud, and other crimes, local law enforcement bends to the will of the cult. Broken Faith follows a family through twenty years of membership and subsequent escape, and discusses the stories of other survivors who are actively involved in attempting to save those who are still inside. 

There’s something fascinating as well as horrifying about how cults rise to power and the way that people find themselves trapped. Weiss and Mohr’s skill as journalists is on display for the entirety of the work, simultaneously providing a focused narrative on the Cooper family and a broad view of the practices of the cult. The massive scope of Jane Whaley’s power is hard to capture in the book, and until I did some additional searching for references to the cult in the popular press, I assumed that this was a cult of a size that you would see on a television drama - a handful of families living in a compound. In reality, Whaley has hundreds of followers in the United States, and possibly thousands more internationally. After forty years of existence, multiple generations have been born into this cult, and her absolute power over their lives does not seem to wane, only to increase. 

Highly recommend to those who enjoy true crime, or those interested in the phenomenon of religious extremism taken to the point where it becomes a cult of personality. While descriptions of abuse are not particularly gory, they are graphic and a cornerstone of life within Word of Faith. 

I received a copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley for an honest review.

When it is snowy and cold outside (and my car is buried under 2ft of ❄️ ), superspeed readers like me can read 250+ pages/hour, so yes, I have read the book … and many more today. LOL

I requested and received a temporary digital Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley, the publisher and the author in exchange for an honest review.  

From the publisher, as I do not repeat the contents or story of books in reviews, I let them do it as they do it better than I do 😸.

An explosive investigation into Word of Faith Fellowship, a secretive evangelical cult whose charismatic female leader is a master of manipulation

In 1979, a fiery preacher named Jane Whaley attracted a small group of followers with a promise that she could turn their lives around. In the years since Whaley’s following has expanded to include thousands of congregants across three continents. In their eyes, she’s a prophet. And to disobey her means eternal damnation. The control Whaley exerts is absolute: she decides what her followers study, where they work, whom they can marry—even when they can have sex.

Based on hundreds of interviews, secretly recorded conversations, and thousands of pages of documents, Pulitzer Prize winner Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr’s Broken Faith is a terrifying portrait life inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, and the harrowing account of one family who escaped after two decades.

Wow, this was one crazy book: it is so outlandish that I can barely believe that it is a true story. What is even crazier is that people still belong to this "church" and follow her rules. This is a cautionary tool as well: there are other nutty, abusive, equally crazy "churches" out there are maybe one will come to see that theirs is going that way or already is an abuse of power.) The book is expertly crafted and its writing style would be readable by so many people and book clubs as its content is firey and could cause some serious blazes with its subject. (Maybe skip the wine at book club when discussing this one or skip to the hard stuff right off!)