I grew up in sort of a cult: a Mennonite community in Lancaster, Pa., where bishops kept members in line with doctrine and cultural traditions. It was the 1960s, and most of us young people knew we were under the bishop’s rule once we were baptized. Every part of our lives could be subject to his scrutiny, his will, his powerful personality.

So I should have been prepared when the Trump cult came calling.

At the private Mennonite high school where I studied, a bishop’s wife ruled the study hall. As we entered Room 100, she appraised the length of our skirts. Were our knees covered? Were our sleeves long enough?

The “Rules and Discipline of the Lancaster Conference of the Mennonite Church” clearly stated the expectations that members of the Mennonite cult must follow.

We were sometimes subjected to religious tirades from our “godly” teachers. My algebra teacher admonished us girls: “I can hardly teach you without thinking impure thoughts. Your skirts should be longer.”

We needed, always, to be aware that we could be disciplined at any moment for the slightest infraction. Except in the English teacher’s class, where we read poems and stories, pathways to a larger world. There I could relax.

In college I studied writing and literature, loving the possibilities of other worlds. I acted as the nurse in the play Medea at Eastern Mennonite College and later played a Mennonite mother and tour guide at Dutch Family Festival, a Lancaster summer theater intended to share Mennonite and Amish religion and culture with tourists from New York City, Philadelphia or Baltimore.

In my adult years I moved further from the cult I grew up in. Georgetown University promised the broader world I hoped to enjoy. I loved living in Washington, three hours from my home in Lancaster.

While at Georgetown, I spent part of a summer visiting a college friend who was teaching at a school for the deaf in Kingston, Jamaica, under Virginia Mennonite Conference. On a hike to the top of Blue Mountain, the highest peak on the island, I met the writer/photographer I would later marry.

We called our two children our “little Jamericans” and worked hard to make sure they knew and loved both their Jamaican and Pennsylvania Dutch cultures. We added the poetry of “Miss Lou” in the Jamaican patois to the Emily Dickinson poems we loved as well as the stories of Anabaptists like Dirk Willems, who saved his pursuer from an icy, watery death. We ate both jerk chicken and shoofly pie.

We attended a Mennonite church with people of diverse cultures and backgrounds — a delightful experience of Mennonite faith and global impact in Goshen, Ind.

There is so much to love about my life and the beautiful diversity of my experiences. But I can no longer reminisce about my immigrant-yet-American family, or the challenges of my childhood culture, without fear. The country I love is now in the hands of a wannabe dictator. Thanks to the onslaught of Executive Orders, DOGE and the narrowing of judicial options in lower courts, Americans are realizing that democracy may not be as unassailable as we thought — in things large and small.  

I worry along with my neighbors if my private health information may be available on a random site online or if my grandchildren will still have COVID and flu vaccinations recommended by the CDC. I wonder if my own grown-up Jamericans or their multiracial spouses might be targeted in an immigration raid due to the color of their skin.

But when I honestly ask myself, why am I so uncomfortable? — in the middle of the obvious, unsettling series of national crises at home and the mounting realities of war around the world — I realize that my dis-ease has a familiar quality. Because along with the niggling in my brain when I hear the personal stories of government workers who have lost their jobs, I am experiencing the same discomfort I lived with in my childhood and teen years.

Who will get me next, and for what misstep?

I feel the anxiety crawling up my chest as I watch the news of an immigrant father torn from his three Marine sons, Treasury Department files confiscated by young acolytes of Elon Musk, thousands upon thousands who will die of HIV if their medicines are withheld, the malnourished children across Africa who are dying now without their regular rations of Plumpy’Nut, the people starving in Sudan.

My Mennonite Colombian friend texts me, “The world is watching evil at its best.” Which is, of course, its worst.

I am again in a cult from which I cannot easily escape. The Mennonite bishop is now the president of the United States, and his district ministers have names like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi. Their purpose is to destroy and control, to exclude and other, to make the intolerable so commonplace that indifference replaces outrage.

I know what it is like to live inside a cult. I don’t want to do it again.

I text my Colombian friend: “Like a great beast, Evil is running rampant through the streets, licking up hope and joy wherever it sees them.” I want no part of it. Not now. Not ever.