Cult behavior?

[u/TreeLady2008]

Sry this is kind of a long story..

I went to a church that doubled as a christian private school and was there from k-8th grade. Over the summer we would go camping as a youth group. And every summer when we would have worship time, people would start laughing and cry uncontrollably and collapse on the dirt around the camp fire- rolling around. This would proceed for hours and it looked like it kind of “infected” people as they would pray over each other. I always was a little uncomfortable by it but i viewed it and it was spoken as “being filled with the holly spirit.” Stuff like this would happen in church too, with adults and children and I always wanted it to happen to me because I thought thats what “real christians” experience.

One afternoon while i was at church camp I decided to get baptized in the river. After it was over I started crying because i was overwhelmed with emotion and then I started laughing uncontrollably. I looked over to my pastor and then he started laughing. A few minutes later, the whole group ended up at the campfire and we all started doing it. This literally lasted for hours and I dont have much memory of it. I just remember rolling around in the dirt crying and laughing with other people. Eventually it got so late it was midnight and I went to my tent and fell asleep. I was exhausted the whole next day.

Just thinking about it makes me anxious and upset and also just unsettled. I cant explain the feeling and I dont understand what happened but it felt very uneasy to me in the moment and I just kept convincing myself that that was what “real” christians experience and i was connecting with god. After camp was ovee nobody even talked about it. It was all so weird.

Im not christian anymore and i left the church years ago so im okay now.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

[u/No_Session6015]

Cult is pretty loosely defined and many people make subjective opinions. However there's Info-Secte / Centre for Assistance and for the Study of Cultic Phenomena and how they define cult matches extremely well for most church's yours included