r/cultsurvivors

I’m really struggling with something in my relationship and I honestly don’t know if I’m overreacting, so I’d really appreciate some outside perspective.
I’ll keep everyone anonymous because this is an ongoing situation.
My boyfriend has become deeply involved with a particular spiritual/religious figure online. He believes this person is essentially a Messiah and has developed an extremely strong belief in what this person says.
At first, I tried to respect it as a spiritual belief. I don’t think someone having unusual religious beliefs automatically means there is something wrong with them, and I don’t want to be the kind of partner who tells someone what they’re allowed to believe.
The problem is that it has gone far beyond simply having a belief.
This person has started influencing my boyfriend’s actual decisions and relationships.
My boyfriend has taken things this person says and acted on them, including ending relationships, distancing himself from friends, and pushing people away. It seems like this person has increasingly become an authority in his life, and I’m becoming worried about how much influence they have over him.
He has also said things about how devoted he is to this person/belief that have genuinely frightened me, including essentially saying that he would die for it.
I’m not saying he is currently suicidal or that he is going to hurt himself. I don’t believe that is what he meant. But hearing your partner say that they would die for another person or their beliefs is still incredibly difficult.
The hardest part is that he doesn’t see this as a problem.
From his perspective, he’s made these decisions because he has reached some kind of higher understanding. If people around him disagree with him, he tends to interpret that as them not understanding him or not supporting him.
And this creates a horrible situation for me because I don’t want to become another person he cuts out.
He has a particularly strong reaction to feeling that people don’t trust or support him. If I tell him that I think he’s being manipulated or that I don’t trust this person, I’m worried he’ll interpret that as me not trusting him.
I don’t want to tell him what to believe.
But I also don’t know how I’m supposed to sit back and watch someone else become increasingly influential in my boyfriend’s life while his relationships with the people around him deteriorate.
I’ve tried to understand what he’s actually getting from this person. I’ve tried to listen rather than immediately argue. I’ve tried to understand the ideas behind it instead of just calling them ridiculous.
But I’m finding it increasingly difficult because this isn’t just about an ideology anymore.
It’s affecting our relationship.
It’s affecting his friendships.
It’s affecting his relationship with his family.
And it’s changing the way he sees people who disagree with him.
I’ve also become worried about the possibility that the more people challenge this belief system, the more isolated he might become.
If everyone around him says, “This person is manipulating you,” and he already believes that nobody else understands what he’s discovered, I can imagine him becoming even more defensive and withdrawing further.
So I’m genuinely stuck.
Do I confront him about it?
Do I stop discussing the spiritual side of it altogether and focus on how his behaviour is affecting our relationship?
Do I just keep supporting him while making it clear that I don’t agree?
At what point does respecting someone’s beliefs become enabling something that is actively damaging their life?
I love him. I’m not looking for people to tell me to immediately leave him or to tell me that he’s crazy.
I want to understand whether there is a way to approach this without making him feel attacked and without pushing him further towards this person.
If you’ve ever been in a relationship where your partner became heavily involved in a spiritual movement, religious group, online ideology, or another person who had an enormous influence over them, what did you actually do?
What helped?
What made things worse?
And how do you set boundaries around something like this when the other person genuinely believes they’re doing nothing bad?

Most people think cults work through weird beliefs or charismatic leaders. They don't. The actual mechanism — coercive control — comes down to four techniques:

1. Control the environment — isolate people from outside input (Jonestown was a literal jungle with no road out)
2. Control the information — make people distrust their own judgment so they outsource it to you (Jones ran fake attack drills for exactly this reason)
3. Manufacture a crisis — a constant, urgent enemy makes sacrifice feel noble instead of coerced
4. Offer one total solution — never partial, because the real goal is proving submission, not solving anything

None of this requires gullibility. Lifton, Cialdini, and Haslam & Reicher's research all point the same direction: it works on smart, ordinary people because it targets the environment around the mind, not the mind itself.

What's unsettling is how cleanly this maps onto engagement-optimized platforms — an algorithm can run all four at once, on millions of people, with no human intent behind it at all.

Made a video going deeper into the Jonestown case and the modern parallels — happy to share if that's okay with the mods, or glad to just discuss here.

I am looking for former members of the Rodney Howard Browne cult in Tampa who left 2017 or later. I’d love to hear your story of this cult.