Charlene Lamy Edge Speaks about The Way International

Greetings, readers. I'm posting this important announcement especially for any of you who are cult survivors like me. The announcement is in the form of a letter from Dr. Janja Lalich encouraging us to participate in a confidential survey whose results will help to educate counselors. I took the survey myself and submitted it last week. I'm grateful to Dr. Lalich for the wonderful work she does and for her support of my cult memoir, Undertow. At the end of this post, you'll find her bio and the endorsement she wrote for my book. Note: The deadline for taking the survey is August 31, 2026. A letter from Janja Lalich, PhD Professor Emerita of Sociology Founder & CEO of Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion Hello, I’m writing to encourage all survivors of cults, coercion, and/or extremist groups to [click this link:]  please participate in this study . This survey research was formulated by Dr. Natalie Fabert, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. Dr. Fabert...

  Greetings, readers! We're still celebrating ten years of Undertow's story in the world. Today, I send a million thanks to all the good, thoughtful, and intelligent people who read the manuscript back in 2016 and made time to craft their responses to the story. I'm honored by the careful attention they gave it, and for the instructive insights they shared. And I'm grateful to them because they took a risk: they stuck out their necks to help me promote this disturbing story of cult deception and abuse. If you care about my story and the sorts of people who found it worthwhile enough to blurb it, read on. But first... What I tell people about Undertow I wrote this book to educate, inspire, and heal others. Undertow is the only memoir by a former Way leader who was also a biblical researcher trained by The Way’s founder himself, Victor Paul Wierwille (1916-1985). I was committed to Wierwille's fundamentalist cult for seventeen years (1970-1987). Why do I say The Wa...

Photo by Charlene Edge Greetings, readers. The following essay is about love. I post it here because it conveys some things about how my experiences in The Way affected me. I wrote it in 1990. Maybe its value to you, readers, is that it shows what happened to me soon AFTER I escaped the cult in 1987. I haven't posted much about that, about how I "deprogrammed" myself from Victor Paul Wierwille's cult. Note : I do not use AI to compose anything I write.  About Love: A Conversation In December 1990, I was on the verge of divorce. Despite unimaginable stress at home, for a college class final project, I managed to write about the assigned topic: love. That collapsing marriage, my first one, was to a man I met in the fundamentalist cult, The Way, when I was eighteen and he was twenty. Our cult-saturated union ended in April 1991 when I was 39 years old. Divorce wasn’t easy, like most people tell you, and for me it had been a longtime coming. If you’ve read my memoir...

THe following Endorsements are found in the front pages of the book, Undertow . Praise for Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International “In  Undertow,  Charlene Edge has written a brilliant and engrossing warning to the future by dissecting the past. There are really two books here: one is on a cult called The Way (one of the largest fundamentalist cults in America with about 40,000 followers [in its heyday]). The second book is an examination of the dynamics of all personality, religious, and political cults. By looking (from a heart-wrenching insider’s point of view) at a misuse of power in one specific group, Edge has written a book that unpacks a far greater truth. What she exposes to bright liberating daylight is just how our political and religious worlds actually function based on the mesmerizing enticement of belonging to an in-group. This is a brilliantly written and timely warning against falling into the tr...

First, a few words about Undertow If you’re not acquainted with my story in Undertow , here’s a section from the Preface of my book: In its heyday in the 1980s, The Way International was one of the largest fundamentalist cults in America, with about forty thousand followers worldwide. Founded in 1942 by a self-proclaimed prophet, Victor Paul Wierwille (1916–1985), who marketed the group as a biblical research, teaching, and fellowship ministry, The Way still operates in the shadow of its dark history. I knew Wierwille personally. As one of his biblical research assistants and ministry leaders, I am a witness to his charisma, as well as his abuse of power and manipulation of Scriptures to serve his own agenda. I discovered his sexual abuse of women and chronic plagiarism. Today, those underbelly facts are hidden, denied, or otherwise squelched. The years of Wierwille’s authoritarian reign and the chaos after his death provide the context of my story. Former Way devotees endorse Underto...

  Fundamentalism , by James Barr, is book that helped educate Charlene concerning Victor Paul Wierwille's claim of inerrancy of Scriptures and other aspects of Christian Fundamentalism. Greetings, readers! Today, let's flash back to a few of my posts about Christian fundamentalism. Note: The featured photo is of an outstanding book about fundamentalism, by James Barr. Studying it soon after I left The Way helped me understand my experiences in the cult, especially in the Biblical research department, which I tell you all about near the end of my memoir,  Undertow . I wrote about Christian fundamentalism... ...because The Way International, the Bible-based cult I spent 17 years in, fits into that category of religious ideology. How's that? The main reason is that The Way's founder, Victor Paul Wierwille (1916-1985) promoted the claim that "the Bible" is inerrant. Which Bible? He didn't say, other than "the original Scriptures," which were lost or ...