CW: This blog post and the docuseries it covers discuss themes of weight loss, disordered eating, child abuse, and religious abuse.
The culty content keeps coming with HBO's The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, a new docuseries that investigates the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood, Tennessee, and its strange leader. The "church" evolved from a weight loss-focused workshop to an evangelical Christian spinoff to a full-fledged cult, all thanks to its enthusiastic founder. The Way Down traces the rise and fall of Gwen Shamblin, the cult's body-obsessed leader, as she transforms Remnant Fellowship into the dangerous high-control group that it still is today. Some spoilers for The Way Down to follow.
Gwen Shamblin, a woman whose body kept shrinking as her hair got bigger, rose to prominence in the 1990s with her Weigh Down Workshop curriculum. The "workshop" essentially teaches (that’s right, it’s still going strong) that humans glorify God with their bodies, and that only thin bodies are good; therefore, the skinner you are, the holier you are. And people did lose weight. Like, a lot of it. Some members in the series talked about losing close to 200 pounds.
How did they lose the weight? By "transferring their relationship with food to a relationship with God." Gwen taught people to pray any time they are hungry, and to "stop bowing down to the refrigerator and bow back down to Him." Basically, Gwen encouraged her students to starve. As I was watching, I wrote, "This is just evangelical anorexia."
Gwen was right about one thing: If you don't eat, you will lose weight. An example she used several times as evidence of this truth? Concentration camps. You know how some people will be like, "I didn't like Trump's tweets, but he got the job done"? Gwen has that same energy, but about Hitler.
Gwen's combination of weight loss and worship was doubly manipulative; it took religious guilt and piled it on top of restrictive eating guilt to create a loyal following of undernourished zealots. At its peak in the late 90s, Gwen's workshop was being taught in thousands of churches, and Gwen herself was basically functioning as a preacher and religious leader. This all means one thing: Gwen was making lots of money, and she seized every opportunity to make more of it and to give herself more power.
I'm spending time describing this workshop and Gwen's role in it because it's vital to understanding how Gwen became a cult leader, and how Remnant Fellowship became a cult. Plenty of people in the evangelical Christian world were also totally on board with the religious part of Gwen's teachings up until 2000. That year, Gwen spoke at a convention for the Weigh Down Workshop where she (probably not even on purpose) denied the Holy Trinity, a key tenet of many Christian denominations. Half of the crowd left, and many religious leaders spoke out against her. I'm just screaming at my TV: "This is the only piece y'all have a problem with?!"
So, as any money-hungry narcissist would do next, Gwen started a "church" in Brentwood, Tennessee, the wealthiest area in the state. People who had taken her workshop at other churches were gaining weight back, so Gwen told her followers it was important that they go to her church specifically. Much like in other high-control groups, members moved from all over the country to attend Remnant Fellowship.
This places looks creepy af, right?
Also following the pattern of other cults, Gwen began to isolate her church members from the outside world and exert more control over them, including the way they disciplined their kids. Gwen and the church leaders (surprise—a bunch of rich, white men) encouraged the violent corporeal punishment of children that caused children who grew up in the cult to live in constant fear. If you think I'm saying these people spanked their kids occasionally, that's not what I mean. At least one child died as a direct result of the application of Gwen's disciplinary advice.
Of all of the cults I’ve learned about in the past year, Remnant Fellowship is the one of the more multilayered groups. The abuses and authoritarian control techniques are coming at members from all angles: religion (God won’t like you if you’re not thin), body shame (Gwen and other church leaders will shame and punish you if you’re not losing weight), restrictive/disordered eating, and physical abuse. And that’s just what we know so far.
Overall, the first part of this series does a good job at tracing Gwen's abuses over time to make the case that she 1) knew what she was doing all along, and 2) did not care about anyone except Gwen. But the show does ultimately leave us hanging (for good reason). The series was in the final stages of production when Gwen and six others died in a plane crash in May 2021, causing the team to have to change direction and leave viewers on a "to be continued."
Reports indicated that after Gwen's death, more victims and ex-members came forward because they were no longer afraid of retaliation, so I anticipate the next two episodes will feature these narratives. The one thing I really wanted more of in the episodes we have so far are members' stories. They're there, but it's not as wide of a swath of people as I'd like to see, and I could tell the show had barely even scratched the surface on the child abuse accusations. So while the three episodes we have cover a lot of ground, they're almost a teaser for the story that remains to be told.
Sanford Myers / The Tennessean