The Whipping Cult

Another notable thing about The Whipping Cult is that journalists of the day actually called it a cult, which was a rare distinction back in the day. Today the word has a more secular connotation and we recognize groups with no religious affiliation like NXIVM as cults. Back then, editorial standards seemed to only deploy “cult” when the situation fit the precise dictionary definition of a small religious organization with an unorthodox doctrine with the obvious kicker that whatever they were up to was clearly and obviously against societal standards.

In Minnesota, where The Whipping Cult exclusively practiced, the word “cult” had never been used in the newspapers to describe an organization in the region before Marie jumped into the frame. Readers were sensitive to the term it seems, particularly if it involved a Christian group. Of course, there were cults in the area before The Whipping Cult, they just evaded an official classification. Marie’s church was just such a catastrophe The Minneapolis Star’s hand was more or less forced into the editorial decision. Post-Whipping Cult, the paper wouldn’t use the term again for well over a decade. That’s how special The Whipping Cult was. 

How the ball got rolling was with a new interpretation of scripture that a few individuals became so enthusiastic about, they were booted out of church.

Marie and her husband Pat were voted out of their own congregation which only made Marie’s ideas more extreme. An opportunist in exile, Marie got few impressionable friends of hers to follow. The newspapers of the era fail to mention what the specific views were that caused Marie Doyle to get tossed from an institution like the Baptist church that typically bends over backwards for conservative white ladies who commit scripture to memory like she did. It may be a hint, however, that her favorite passage from the Good Book was Proverbs 20:30: “The blueness of the wound cleanseth away evil and so do stripes the inward parts of the belly.”

“The Whipping Cult” is a name the press used. The church she created never got around to giving itself a name.

ii. Alice

Like cults do, Doyle’s grew quietly. The “church” was located in a not-so-big house in the Minneapolis suburb of Lauderdale. By the time this cult got busted up, seven adults and seven children were living in the single family home. Every few days, members who lived in the city would come over to gather in the living room, sing traditional songs, recite Bible passages and, of course, that signature on-brand activity they were crazy about. There’s a reason they weren’t called The Singing Cult or whatever. They believed in the devil and they believed there was only one way to drive him out of a “sinner.” Literally. With a whip.

So, The Whipping Cult would gather and beat the living shit out of each other all the time, and the singing? That was what they used to drown out all the screaming that came from the whippee so the neighbors wouldn’t get suspicious.

The cult likely would have gone unnoticed to the wider world until the whippings turned deadly if not for a woman named Alice Christensen, who almost died in 1950. Alice and her husband were one of the young couples in The Whipping Cult, and Alice was pretty displeased about the church her husband dragged her into. She was so upset about it, in fact, that she started the car she shared with her husband in their garage with the door closed and the car’s windows open and proceeded to nap in the driver’s seat until her exhaust-poisoned body was discovered by Mr. Christensen and she was rushed to a hospital.             

When Alice was being treated by her early 1950s physicians, they noticed fresh welts from a beating she received at the house in Lauderdale. When questioned about her injuries, Alice spilled the beans about Marie Doyle and her operation. Alice told the doctors all about the church and the whipping practice and named the people who were responsible for her injuries.

When the doctors heard Alice’s story, they did what was a more common treatment way back then for a woman who’d just been brutally abused: they sent her to a room with padded walls against her will indefinitely. They concluded she was nuts. However, even though the professionals thought Alice was insane, it was a crime that she tried to kill herself. The police had to fill out a report and interview people close to her. A reporter at The Minneapolis Star caught wind of this bizarre story and followed up with interviews of their own.

What the Star found were a whole bunch of happy congregants who didn’t understand what the fuss over Alice was all about. These people were unashamed that they were in the church and that whipping was involved, and they stuck to their version of events: The Bible gave them the green light to flay each other with a three-foot whip and Marie Doyle said it was what God wanted, so there was nothing wrong with it.

Everyone also admitted that Marie was in charge and when questioned, Marie seemed to take extreme pride in her church. She simply quoted some of the scripture that she was using to justify the violence when the reporters asked her what the whipping was about. The First Amendment is pretty damn clear about the right to practice whatever religion you choose to in America. It’s also impossible for there to be any crime in whipping someone if the person being whipped is cool with it and everyone interviewed thought whipping was cooler than Elvis. A woman in her 60s named Anna Halverson defended the whippings to the Star. She said the beatings helped free her “from the bonds of Satan.”

Here’s what else they wrote: