How a cult recruits TikTok influencers

Because you don’t — I hope — use TikTok you will never have heard of the Wilking sisters. But back in the day (2020) they were huge, their homemade videos of dance routines performed at their suburban Michigan home attracting 127 million views. A yearly later, it all turned sour.

Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult opens with one half of the sibling duo, Melanie, talking tearfully about her terrible loss. You think at first that Miranda has died. But no, it’s almost worse, for Miranda has become a living ghost — still present on social media, but dead to her family and friends, and unrecognizable from the girl-next-door she used to be. She has been sucked into a religious cult called the Shekinah Church.

This particular cult embodies and capitalizes on the peculiar madness of our age. It specializes in recruiting kids who perform viral internet dance routines. The church’s LA-based founder Robert Shinn first tried his hand at film and pop production but his business only really took off when he started exploiting this new, niche sector. His business, 7M, has all but cornered the market in smiling, gyrating, terpsichorean brain-death.

Another phenomenon that has proved invaluable to Shinn’s business model is the current Christian revival. All manner of unlikely public figures are claiming to have found God — former seedy comedian Russell Brand, for example, who was recently baptized in the Thames by Bear Grylls — and the youth are renouncing drugs and rock’n’roll for Jesus. Part of Shekinah’s lure are its late-night Bible studies classes, four-hour invitation-only church services and uncompromising messages, e.g. “You’re not Jesus’s family till you’re dead to your loved ones.”

Whatever those Bible classes are teaching those impressionable dancers, it is clearly very selective. They must surely be glossing over Jesus’s words on how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Shinn likes to pepper his services with announcements like “Robert’s done a commercial for toilet paper and guess how much he’s getting? $37,500!”) Nor do they appear to pay much attention to the Ten Commandments: cult members are discouraged from honoring their father and mother with home visits and Shinn himself appears not averse to coveting his neighbor’s wife, according to some of the allegations made by ex-cult-members.

Because, for obvious reasons, Shekinah/7M members weren’t interviewed, the three episodes of this Netflix investigation focus mainly on the heartache of their abandoned family and the musings of those who have left the cult.

As often with these mini-series, there’s far too much of it (one episode would probably have been enough) and there’s a shortage of action, which generally has to be contrived in scenes such as the one where the Shinn family are ambushed in a Korean restaurant and served writs. I did appreciate the moments of much-needed unintentional comedy, such as when one member of the clandestine writ-serving crew radios another to tell her “the butt of your white Tesla is sticking out like a sore thumb.” She tries — and fails, utterly — to re-park it more discreetly.

As you watch, you do feel sorry for the victims. But mulling it over afterwards, I couldn’t help wondering: didn’t the parents put their girls at risk by steering them, from a very young age, towards a career in something as famously toxic and exploitative as showbiz? It also occurred to me that, compared to the behavior of most industry Svengalis, Shinn’s is relatively venial.

Consider, if you’ve been following them — though to do so requires a strong stomach — the sexual abuse horror stories which have emerged in the court case of rapper P. Diddy. Study the financial history of every pop artist from the Beatles to Michael Jackson and you realize just how badly they are ripped off by their management. Sure, we’re supposed to be shocked that Shinn charges his dancers a 20 percent management fee, then takes another 30 percent for “tithe; Man of God; offering.”But this is standard industry practice — the only difference being that they don’t dress their theft up in Christian euphemism.

But for me, the most telling part of the entire series was a still shot of a mom, hugging her lost son (who’d been granted a rare day release from Shekinah), with her smartphone clutched in her hand. Isn’t that the real problem here? In a world without these pernicious devices, kids might actually do something useful with their lives instead of wasting their talents chasing careers as TikTok “influencers.” And perhaps if we weren’t so perpetually glued to our screens we might wake up to something far more disturbing than anything in this mini-series: that it isn’t just the dancing kids at Shekinah who are being brainwashed and manipulated by forces we don’t quite understand; it’s the whole bleeding lot of us.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.