A twenty-four year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico opened up on TikTok about her life growing up inside of a Christian cult.
Marissa Martin decided to publicly discuss her childhood after realizing how lucky she felt for the positive tone of the feedback she generally receives from her audience except for Christians that go on the defensive when she hits one of their hot buttons.
She started her discussion, while testing a drink of iced matcha mixed with raspberry syrup, by thanking her viewers for their generally positive tone. Then she moved into talking about the one thing that could reliably elicit online “hate”: talking about the cult where she grew up.
The cult, she says, was a Christian cult, so it’s perhaps natural that Christians bristle when they hear the term “cult.” However, she said, it wasn’t just a garden-variety conservative church, but an extremist sect. She emphasized the term “extremist.” Her family, she said, were members of the Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) church.
The IFB is an association of local churches with strict fundamentalist doctrine and an insular culture, and was the subject of the 2023 expose documentary series “Let us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals.” The series focused specifically on the rampant presence of exploitation of women and children that is common across congregations in the IFB.
In her comments, Marissa discussed the strict dress code that, among other things, governed the allowable range of color for believers’ footwear: casual shoes were required to be solid white, but permitted formal shoes to be solid black.
Girls, she went on, were required to wear skirts that reached their mid-calf, and were not allowed to show their ankles. They had to wear pantyhose and crew socks, and were not allowed to show their shoulders or collarbones. Music, movies, and socializing between boys and girls were also heavily policed.
She also endorsed the Let Us Prey series as being an accurate reflection of the things she saw and experienced in the IFB.
