Why Growing Up Around the Children and Grandchildren of Religious Leaders Made Me Distrust New Religious Movements

I was absentmindedly browsing YouTube when an advertisement for a religious organization began to play.

It spoke of saving people, living rightly, and other admirable teachings. As I listened, I remembered a classmate from elementary school.

He came from a family that held a very senior position in that religion, and even as a child, I could tell that they were wealthy.

He was also extremely spoiled.

The adults around him indulged him, and he carried himself as if he were special. Unsurprisingly, his classmates disliked him.

When I entered junior high school, I met someone similar from a different religious organization. I heard that he was the son of one of its highest-ranking leaders. He, too, was wealthy and rather selfish. By junior high, however, an overbearing attitude could easily make someone a target for bullying. He was spoiled, but not so much that everyone hated him.

My sample size is two.

Still, during an impressionable period of my life, I encountered the same pattern twice:

The children of important religious figures were rich and spoiled.

Even now, whenever I hear a new religious movement talk about “saving people” or “renouncing desire,” I cannot help wondering:

Then why do the people at the top have so much money?

Why Do Religious Leaders Spoil Their Children?

This is what has puzzled me for years.

If you preach humility to others, you should teach humility to your own children. If you warn people against material desire, you should not surround your children with luxury. If they behave arrogantly, you should be the first to correct them.

That would at least be consistent.

What I saw was the opposite.

The parent was important, so the child received special treatment. The adults around the family could not speak firmly to the child, who eventually came to regard that treatment as natural.

Within a religious organization, a parent’s authority also acquires an aura of sanctity.

Founder, spiritual leader, teacher, guide—special significance is attached to that person’s words and decisions, and the same atmosphere extends to the family.

“The teacher’s son.” “The future leader.”

It is difficult for followers to discipline such a child as they would any other child.

Adults bow to them before they have accomplished anything.

In that environment, growing up with a sense that “I am no different from anyone else” may be the harder outcome.

And Somehow, Leadership Becomes Hereditary

Another thing that troubles me is hereditary succession.

The founder’s child becomes the successor, and then that person’s child becomes a central figure in the organization. The children of senior officials also seem to become senior officials themselves.

This raises a simple question:

Is spiritual ability hereditary?

A founder may possess compelling ideas and an unusual ability to attract people. That does not mean the founder’s child possesses the same qualities.

Yet a blood relative becomes the successor anyway.

The larger the organization grows—and the more assets, facilities, and followers it accumulates—the more this begins to resemble the management of a family enterprise rather than a religion.

The first generation, after all, gathered followers and built the organization themselves.

The second generation did not.

They were born into an established religious organization, complete with followers, facilities, and money. Adults bowed to them. Before accomplishing anything, they were already treated as “the teacher’s child,” and in time, they inherited the position as well.

As a child, I saw two small glimpses of that world.

That is why I find it difficult to take calls for humility at face value when they come from new religious movements.

Look at the Leader’s Family, Not Just the Doctrine

I have little interest in new religious movements to begin with. I am interested in some Buddhist ideas, but only at the level of practicing meditation on my own.

Still, if an organization claims to save people, free them from desire, and teach them to live rightly, I think its leader’s family may tell you more than its doctrine does.

How do they live?

Are the children given special treatment?

And why is the next leader also a blood relative?

Anyone can write impressive doctrines. A promotional video can make them sound even more impressive.

But the way an organization treats its leader’s family reveals a great deal about what it truly values.

It tells other people to abandon desire.

It preserves status for its own family.

It tells other people to be humble.

It treats its own children as special.

I do not know whether divine wisdom passes from parent to child.

But status and money seem to be inherited with remarkable reliability.