When we went to visit Yang Lili again, she opened the door for us with a warm and big smile on her face. After we entered, we noticed that the house was quite clean, with soup bubbling in the kitchen, and the aroma of freshly cooked food was everywhere in the house.
Yang Lili is a young mother of the post-90s generation with a young child. She came from rural area in Gansu Province where her parents live in, and then she married far away from home to Baohe District, Hefei, Anhui Province. As a social worker to help Yang Lili, I still had a vivid impression of her when we first met. At that time, she squeezed herself in the corner of a sofa with a haggard face and troubled look. Her eyes were bloodshot and her long hair was unkempt, as if her life was completely sucked out of her, totally unlike a girl of her age.
Feeling depressed for lacking of love and care
According to Yang Lili, because her parents held a strong preference for boys over girls, she didn’t have a happy childhood. She failed her university entrance examination after graduating from high school, so she furthered her study by enrolling in a private computer school for a year before stepping into the society. She came to Anhui Province all by herself and made a living by doing part-time job.
According to Yang Lili, the greatest happiness she has ever had in the world was when she met her husband in Anhui and then married him. It was her husband who made her feel the family warmth and love. Ever since they had a child, Yang Lili stopped working and became a full-time housewife, taking care of their young child and household affairs. Her inarticulate husband worked really hard, leaving home quite early and coming home late, sometimes even into the middle of the night after working overtime, and seldom took a day off even in weekends. Therefore, they were talking to each other less and less. With a busy husband, a young child, and no friends to chat with, Yang Lili was becoming increasingly depressed.
Falling into the trap of Almighty God
In 2016, Yang Lili frequently met an amiable woman in her 40s in the park near her community where she usually took her child to play at. It was the seemingly nice woman who pushed her into the trap of the Almighty God cult. The woman was very warm-hearted by helping Yang Lili babysit her child and do household chores, giving her assiduous and thoughtful attention, and bringing gifts to Yang Lili from time to time, so she was regarded as an elder bosom sister by Yang Lili. Later, the woman invited Yang Lili to join their church, saying it was like a big family where every one cares and loves each other just like brothers and sisters. Yang Lili readily believed her words and gladly joined the church without any hesitation.
In fact, setting up “emotional traps” is the stock-in-trade used by the Almighty God cult to win over their potential victims first and then draw them into the cult. Measures that Almighty God cult followers used to gain trust of their victims vary in accordance with specific situation of each target. If targets were in depression, the cult followers would first swoop in to sniff out weaknesses of those targets that could be taken advantage of, and then pretend to be a “bosom sister” who has great empathy with targets to rope them into the clutches of the cult so that targets might eventually end up joining the church.
Brainwashed victim becomes a tool
In 2017, after her child was in kindergarten, Yang Lili made her house a gathering place for illegal Almighty God cult activities under the arrangement of the “amiable” woman. Yang Lili was asked to write a “letter of guarantee” which stated that she would devote herself to the “God”, and otherwise, her whole family would not die a natural death as a result of punishment from the “God”.
Since then, Yang Lili had often been arranged to participate meetings at other gathering points to learn the Almighty God teachings with her “brothers and sisters” by watching the secret videos about Almighty God together, going outside in a group, reading “scriptures” together, talking about experience with other followers, and discussing benefits of believing in “God” together.
Because of her diligence in learning, Yang Lili was appointed as the leader in charge of the gathering place 6 months later. The Almighty God cult organization provided Yang Lili with a laptop computer, a printer and a paper cutter, etc. and asked her to make internal propaganda materials by downloading data from the cult website. As Yang Lili was more and more obsessed with Almighty God, she started to ignore her child’s daily life. As a result, her husband who was already quite occupied by heavy daily workload frequently quarreled with her, and her son also complained tearfully from time to time, “Mom has changed and she doesn’t want me anymore.”
In fact, advocating the “doomsday” is the means used by the Almighty God cult to deceive, intimidate and control its followers. From the beginning, the Almighty God cult would try to mentally control followers by using fallacies such as “doomsday”, “retribution”, “witness”, etc., which would gradually make followers let down their suspicions and fully convinced that the “God is truly almighty”. Therefore, deceived followers would firmly believe that the end of the world was surely coming and that only those who had faith in Almighty God could be saved. Their mind would also change from thinking “life is too hard” to yearning for “Kingdom of God”. That’s how they fell into the trap of the Almighty God cult.
Enjoying a happy family life again after leaving the cult
The Almighty God cult demands followers to pay tribute. The more money they pay, the closer they would be to “God”. During that time, Yang Lili was frequently asked to “hand in money” to “do her part”. Without a job, she got no income so that she had to save money from the living expense her husband gave her. In October 2020, in order to hand in more money to “God”, Yang Lili started to “preach the gospel” to her husband, trying to persuade her husband to “believe in God” together. Her alerted husband immediately reported the situation to the Party branch in community for help.
With the help of the community staff and her husband, Yang Lili soon came around and fully realized the evil nature of the Almighty God cult and guilty process of how the Almighty God cult lured her in. Right at the moment of her coming back to her senses, Yang Lili burst into tears and regretted deeply being so stupid that she got fooled by the Almighty God cult for over 4 years and almost destroyed her own family.
After seeing Yang Lili had been fully awaked from her nightmare of obsession, her husband also forgave her. Moreover, her husband blamed himself for not caring enough for her or trying to understand her enough in the past, so he promised to take much more time to care for his wife and son. Nowadays, her husband happily offers to take on the responsibility to drop their son off to and pick their son up from school. As for Yang Lili, she is also back to work again. Therefore, as the couple successfully find their happy and fulfilling life again, the whole family has been back to the right and happy track once more.
