“Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok© Cult” documentary by Jessica Acevedo, 2024
I’m looking at YouTube© and I’d been watching groups of
people dance to the funny, political and danceable song “Rasputin” by Boney M. In the
feed I also saw some videos of these frenetic but precise dancers doing Michael
Jackson style moves, dancers named Miranda, Vik and B’Dash (James) dancing to
other tracks. Oddly, this documentary is
about those three, the hell-fire church they belong to and the exploitative cult
it became.
 |
| Ex-members |
Miranda’s parents had spent years promoting the dancing of
their two daughters Miranda and Melanie.
The sisters eventually move to L.A. when they get older and instead of getting
hired by a dance troupe, they start doing TikTok© videos together, which
garner followers and later advertisers.
All is good and they join a cohort of excellent dancers in the city
doing a similar thing. Gradually Miranda is drawn in by B’Dash into a church
and the 7M production company, which promises companionship, housing and a
career. It’s run by a South Korean
pastor, Robert Shinn. The church is
called SheKinah which follows a form of strict fundamentalist Protestant theology
that claims everyone sins thousands of times a day. To cure their ‘sins’ and go to heaven they
must follow the pastor at every turn or they will go to hell. The church condemns them to hell if they
leave the church or don’t agree with the pastor. They fear being cursed by God’s man
on earth and that is a heavy burden for a parishioner. The Bible becomes their text.
Now to an atheist, this is pure abuse disguised as ‘truth.’ But these young people actually believe this
nonsense and are in fear for their mortal souls. Miranda’s parents were nominal Catholics, but
when Melanie tells them about the church, which she refused to join with her
sister, they are apprehensive. In line
with this, Miranda is told by “Robert” to cut all ties to friends and family,
to ‘die’ to live again and be saved. So Miranda stops talking to her family. This
is the advice given to all members of the church.
What follows is a run-down of how this particular cult
worked. The church members inform on
each other over ‘infractions.’ They are forced
to live in various houses owned by the church, and are moved every 9 months or
so. They do pay rent for their shared
room. Friends are separated. All of the
members are controlled by ‘mentors’ over what they buy or eat or where they go
or how they look while dancing. Their communications are monitored and some
people are shunned for not performing well.
Female members of the church testify to repeated sexual demands by
Robert during ‘massages.’ You don’t want
to disappoint God’s man on earth! So
sexual abuse was endemic. The kicker is
the economics.
 |
| Miranda, Vik, B'Dash |
The Church takes almost 75-80% of their earnings as dancers
or employees. Robert and the Church own
a number of businesses where church members work for next to nothing too … a real
estate company, café, flower shop, mortgage company and the like. 7M Films, which is also owned by Robert, made
an amateurish show called The
Millionaires’ Club, and tried to promote members as singers and actors, but
struck it big with the dancers. The TikTok© dancers bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars and appeared in big
venues – TV shows, the Super Bowl, music videos, adverts and even one movie, Road House 2. For their own use they got
between $15 and $100 dollars every week or two.
Their accounts are controlled and deductions are made by the Church, 7M
or directly to Robert, which are ostensibly separate, but really one entity
controlled by Pastor Shinn.
All of this slowly leaks out to Miranda’s family and they
start trying to contact her. She has
nothing to do with them. They reach out
to other families who report the same situation. Eventually their intrusive efforts at
contacting their children start bugging the man of God. Whispers start even within his churches’
closeted walls, along with internal, public accusations of sexual abuse. Robert
decides that for publicity purposes he will allow occasional sterile ‘meetings’
with parents or siblings. Nevertheless several
groups of members quit and some of them are interviewed in the
documentary. But Miranda, Vik and James
(B’dash) never quit. Most of their YouTube©
videos are dated before the documentary’s release in May 2024 but they still
maintain their personal sites.
This situation ends in the filing of a civil suit and a
criminal complaint alleging labor exploitation, fraud, sexual abuse and
more. The problem is that a cult is not
illegal. Those who ‘willingly’ comply
are responsible under the law. The key
is what constitutes coercion – what level of pressure, what kind, what are the
consequences of disobeying? If you went
along with demands for sex, is it ‘consensual’ or coerced? The clearer violation might be financial
exploitation, but as SheKinah says, many people ‘willingly’ donate their time
and energy to religious or non-profit institutions – even political parties. Complaining
about being paid a sub-minimum wage might have a time-limited value too, as the
suit covers many years.
So the success of this lawsuit, which will probably go to
trial in 2025, is unknown given our ‘hands off’ legal system in regards to
religion. The church even sued these
ex-members for defamation – a tactic familiar to anyone who has opposed
Scientology, which sues anyone who criticizes it. They also intentionally brought out the
‘race’ card, claiming the family opposed Miranda’s relationship with the
dark-skinned dancer James. Not true, as
the family had him over a good number of times before the Church intervened. They were not invited to their daughter’s wedding
to James, which was held under SheKinah’s auspices. Many of the original church members were young
Koreans, so there is an ethnic side to this.
Much of the evidence in the documentary is of tape recordings of
Robert’s sermons.
Cults are kind of a fun-house, extreme version of what goes on in capitalist society. Even some diets, like the carnivore one, are accused of being cultish. Are you in a cult? This blog has covered Scientology, Bikram
Yoga, the Rajneeshees, NXIVM, FLDS, Remnant Church, Children of God, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Hasidim and certain MLM schemes and businesses like Brandy Melville. Certainly for personal political,
emotional or real reasons people cut ties with their families, sometimes for
good reasons, many times not. But when a
church orders its members to do so, that is a different kettle of fish. Capitalism
lives off of labor exploitation, lost wages, unpaid wages, low wages and the
like. SheKinah seems to be a front for a
rip-off financial racket, using religious language to severely control its
employees. This is not rare at all. Take heed.
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use the search box
in the upper left to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “cult,”
“religion.”
The Cultural Marxist / November 17, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment