I’m happy to announce that on November 22 the Special Offer starts for ordering Undertow. For 30 days (until Dec. 22) customers in the USA can place orders at my website and receive a signed copy in the mail.
Later, all customers, including overseas residents, can find Undertow at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other vendors’ websites and can order it from brick and mortar bookstores, too. (IngramSpark is the print-on-demand company distributing my book.)
Undertow is $24.95 plus tax and shipping. There are 31 photographs included.
Transactions will be secured on my website through PayPal.
The e-book version is scheduled for early 2017.
What makes Undertow different?
“Avoiding tabloid cult tropes, Edge instead reveals, with maturity, honesty, and insight, the ways that fundamentalist groups twist the very words that honest seekers of truth believe.” —Robyn Allers, author and journalist
If you think cults were around only in the 1970s, think again. On the International Cultic Studies Association website, we read: “Research studies suggest that about one percent of the U.S. population (three million persons) have been involved in cultic groups at some time in their lives. We estimate that about 50,000 – 100,000 people enter and leave cultic groups each year. [EACH YEAR!] Similar percentages appear to hold true for Western Europe.”
Destructive cults harm people every day while we’re not looking. Maybe you have a friend or family member who suffers from emotional abuse after leaving a high-control group, religious or otherwise. Perhaps you are a mental health counselor or educator seeking to help people who have left such a group. Undertow is an insider story that sheds light on this experience.
“Charlene Edge’s personal story, Undertow, is a wake-up call to moderate Christians (and everyone else) about the dangers of the respectable-looking kind of fundamentalism that conducts Bible study but in reality twists Scripture to produce self-serving doctrines, demands obedience to a cult-of-personality leader, warps believers’ personal identities, and potentially damages members’ long-term welfare. With nonprofit status, such cults are here to stay. Read Undertow and be warned.” —Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land
Undertow’s insider story
Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International™ is Charlene Edge’s riveting memoir about the power of words to seduce, betray, and, in her case, eventually save. After a personal tragedy left her bereft, teenaged Charlene rejected faith and family when recruiters drew her into The Way International, a sect led by the charismatic Victor Paul Wierwille. The Way became one of the largest cults in America. Charlene gave it seventeen years of her life. Believing that God led her to Wierwille, she underwent his intensive two-year training program, The Way Corps, designed to produce loyal leaders. When Wierwille warned of a possible government attack, she prepared to live off the grid. She ignored warning signs of Wierwille’s paranoia and abuse—he condemned dissenters as the Devil’s agents, he required followers to watch pornography, he manipulated Way Corps into keeping his secrets in a “lock box,” he denied the Holocaust, and he surrounded himself with bodyguards.
Committed to The Way, in 1973 Charlene married a Corps graduate and they served across the United States as Way leaders, funneling money into Wierwille’s bursting coffers and shunning anyone who criticized him. As obedient Way Corps, they raised their child to believe the doctrines of Wierwille, the cult’s designated “father in the Word.” Eventually Charlene was promoted to the inner circle of biblical researchers, where she discovered devastating secrets: Wierwille twisted texts of Scripture to serve his personal agenda, shamelessly plagiarized the work of others, and misrepresented the purpose of his organization.
Worst of all, after Wierwille died in 1985, shocking reports surfaced of his secret sex ring. Amid chaos at The Way’s Ohio-based headquarters, Charlene knew she had to escape—for her own survival and her child’s. Reading like a novel, Undertow is not only a brilliant cautionary tale about misplaced faith but also an exposé of the hazards of fundamentalism and the destructive nature of cults. Through her personal story, Charlene Edge shows how a vulnerable person can be seduced into following an authoritarian leader and how difficult it can be to find a way out.
