Sacrificial Seductions: Female Bodies as Exploited Sacrifices

This article examines how the Children of God (CoG) — a millenarian high-control group founded in the United States in the late 1960s — mobilized spiritual doctrine as a structural mechanism of gendered domination, commodifying the female body and entrenching its exploitation as spiritually obligatory. Drawing on feminist narrative analysis of written testimonies submitted by seven women survivors, encompassing both first- and second-generation members with years of CoG involvement spanning 1972 to 2010, the study traces the doctrinal architecture through which bodily and sexual submission was reframed as sacred duty, rendering coercion experientially indistinguishable from spiritual devotion. The study traces how doctrinal authority saturated interior life and extended its reach beyond exit through internalized self-surveillance and the absence of any evaluative language not derived from the institution itself, giving voice to the experience of those subjected to it. Among the most significant findings is that second-generation members — born into the group with no prior selfhood outside it — experienced the sexualization of their bodies not as something imposed on a pre-existing identity but as the very medium through which identity was formed, making post-exit life not recovery but original self-construction. Together, these findings demonstrate that gendered exploitation in the CoG was not incidental to its spiritual project but constitutive of it, with implications for both cult studies scholarship and survivor support practice.