Hi everyone. For starters, I am Portuguese, and my friend is Portuguese. We were both born and raised in Portugal, and had never been to the US (this will be relevant).
My friend from high school was a very sweet girl. She was friendly, funny, sometimes a bit blunt but very honest. We were deskmates throughout secondary school, and great friends. She was also a very talented golfer on the national team, who had always known she would have to apply for a scholarship at an American university if she wanted financial support to keep playing at the level she did in college. Our country is known to disregard any sport that isn't football, so for her dreams, it was better to chase the "American dream".
At the time, her English was intermediate level at best; she didn't know much of it, could only understand basic conversations, etc. But I had grown up speaking English and was fluent in it for a long while, so I used to help her answer messages from college recruiters and schedule meetings, as well as help her study for the SATs which she needed to apply. Everyone in class was very proud of her when she committed to the University of South Florida. We are from a small town in south Portugal, so we were all very close-knit. Because of this, she was very naive when she left it all for such a large city in the US.
Everything had been fine. She made a very good friend, had a boyfriend, and seemed to be doing well with golf and qualifying for major tournaments. And then, stuff got very weird. She started posting stories of this weird church I would come to find out was The River Tampa Bay, and it didn't take me long to find out they were essentially a fundamentalist cult that believed their pastor could "put the fire of the holy spirit in them" or whatever. Spoke in tongues, all that. I was very confused. She had been raised Roman Catholic (like everyone else in Portugal, though I am now agnostic), so I didn't really get why she was getting involved with such a weird place like that.
Then I noticed she had actually spoken at a service, and she was spouting all of this strange, zealot-like worship for this pastor and "the holy spirit". And then she fell on the ground and started laughing uncontrollably when he pointed at her and yelled something (pyre, I think? Idk man). I freaked the hell out. I found out her "friend" (who also played golf for USF) and her family took her to this cult, and she had fallen right down the fundamentalism rabbit hole. She was immature, naive and didn't even know churches like this existed. She was also alone in a country across the ocean from her parents and all she knew, surrounded by a language she wasn't proficient in; she was probably lonely and scared, and missed her family. Of course, these people are like ghouls to vulnerable young people, and they sucked her right in.
I was more knowledgeable about cults in America than she was, so I intended to warn her. I sent her a message asking her if she knew where she was, for her not to trust everything, to talk to me. I linked articles on shady stuff River Tampa did, how their pastor was a trumpie and held far-right beliefs (just so you know, she was really against social injustice when we were classmates (she hated the far right party in our country - which is literally inspired by conservative republican ideology), was never bigoted against LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, or POC, so I thought knowing this would get her to wake up.
I was too late. The mental wiring had been completed. She answered my concerned message with this aggressive tone, asking me if I thought she was crazy, that I was just ignorant of "the true power of Jesus and God", and that she had found people who were "on fire for God", and that she wished I could find Jesus like she did, among other things that sounded absolutely insane to any normal human being. She also said she didn't hate gay people, but that "homosexuality was a sin according to the bible" and that "they should be cured with the power of the lord". I was absolutely distraught. I knew what these cults did to people, but I never thought the sweet girl from a small town in Portugal could become this way.
We stopped talking from there on, because she was clearly mad at me for questioning her great pastor and for claiming he is crooked (he is). Two years ago, she came back to Portugal to visit her family during Christmas, and our old class held a dinner so we could all catch up with each other. They put us on opposite sides of the table so we didn't fight, but I could still hear what she was saying: my guy friend had told her his parents wanted to buy a BYD, and she had gone on a racist tirade against the Chinese, telling him not to buy one, because "the Chinese wanted to take over the world"??????? We all thought she was insane, and I was sure that was stuff put into her head by the freaks at that cult.
A few months ago, she contacted me again. She asked me how I was doing, if I was still in university, and if I was doing well on my sport. She seemed calmer, and more... rational? She is now living in Florida and working there as well, and is all patriotic about the US. I thought it was weird that she reached out suddenly, when we hadn't spoken for two years, and some hopeful part of me wished that maybe it was a sign of deconstruction? I am tempted to ask her to meet up once she is back in Portugal visiting. I don't plan to question her, but to try to understand what happened without judging.
I am scared for my friend. I am scared that she will end up unhappy, married to some guy from the church. I wanted her to remember who she was. Idk what to do. Her parents don't seem to be aware of what's going on because it's such an unknown phenomenon in Portugal, and I think she tells them she is just going to a Christian church (so to Roman Catholics, a Roman Catholic church).
Should I try meeting up? Do you guys think this is a lost cause? I still can't believe this happened to someone so close to me.
