I had a friend in college who'd gotten sucked in by a Christian fundamentalist cult, and she got depressed and her parents got her therapy, and she realized the cult was what was making her feel bad all the time---so she had transferred from her old college where this had happened to our college.
I think she told me about it because the church I was raised in, and was still in in college, had a lot of the features of your classic cult. Not all of them, but enough to fall into the pretty darned weird category.
They had me believing, as a kid, that all my little kid friends were going to hell unless I could convert them to "The Truth."---among other strangeness, but that's a pretty fair example.
Everyone who wasn't a member of their denomination (which wasn't a denomination, according to them, but was The Church) was going to hell---sometimes for as little as having the wrong denomination name over the door.
I wouldn't say it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Oh, it was good to have honest parents who thought it was important for everyone to try to be a good person, and you learn to sing pretty well (if you can sing at all) in a church where all the music is a capella, but it was not exactly a positive experience, overall.
