High-control religious groups don't share one denomination, one doctrine, or one organizational structure. They can be Christian or not, centrally governed or a loose network of independent congregations answering to no one but a single pastor. What they share is a pattern, not a belief: unquestioned authority vested in one person or a small circle, isolation from outside relationships and information, and a real cost, spiritual, social, or financial, attached to leaving. If you grew up in one, or found your way into one as an adult, a lot of what happened to you probably has no name where you live now, but it has a name here.
This site began with stories from people who grew up in or left Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches, and that history still shapes a lot of what's here — our early glossary terms, our early stories, and the section below on IFB specifically. But the pattern we're describing isn't unique to that movement, so we're actively growing to include accounts from every high-control religious tradition.
We're not trying to litigate theology. Plenty of people who left still hold some form of faith, and plenty don't. What the stories here have in common isn't a belief, it's an experience: a closed system that controlled behavior, relationships, and information, and made leaving costly.
"Independent Baptist" and "Independent Fundamentalist Baptist" (IFB) are not the same thing. Independent Baptist churches are simply congregations that govern themselves rather than answering to a denominational body, and plenty of them are healthy, ordinary churches with no resemblance to what's described here. IFB refers to a narrower movement within that broader category, identified by a specific cluster of beliefs and practices: the ones named in our glossary, like KJV-onlyism, chain-of-command teaching, or affiliation with the IFB Bible college network.
Most of our early content focuses on that narrower movement. If you've had a good experience in an independent Baptist church, that's not in tension with anything here, and if your own experience was in a different tradition entirely, high-control or not, we still want to hear from you.
Write it in your own words, any length. Publish under your real name or "Anonymous," whichever you prefer. Nothing goes live automatically, every submission is read by us first, and it'll be added as-is, unedited except for typos, unless you ask for changes.