Welcome to Too Good to Be True, an investigative podcast about exposing the scams, schemes, and financial cults trying to separate you from your money.

Well, hello, and welcome back to separate you from your money.

Well, hello, and welcome back to Too Good to Be True. I am your co-host, Ryan Hulahan, and I am a journalist and drag artist here in New York City. And I am Julia Lorenz Olson. I'm an accredited

financial counselor and the co-creator of Two Sense with PBS. So what are we talking about this week?

So this is kind of a maybe extended part two of a subject that we got into last time.

So I talked about my kind of personal relationship to the evangelical Christian landscape and how it shaped my own relationship to money

in season one. But today, I want to dig a little deeper and darker into the more kind of

fringy territory. So today we're talking about the role of money in fundamentalist groups and cults.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, well, why should I care? I'm not like interested in joining a cult. I did not grow up by the mentalist, right?

I have a morbid curiosity, but ultimately I'm not in a cult and I'm actively avoiding it.

Yeah, good for you. Well cult and I'm actively avoiding it. Yeah.

Oh, good for you.

Well, so I think that what we're going to find out is that lots of the behaviors that are

systematically pushed onto people is essentially economic and financial abuse.

According to the National Coalition on Domestic Violence, domestic abuse occurs to almost 10 million men and women a year. And obviously,

this is across all different kinds of, you know, faiths or not. And 99% of those cases involve some form of economic abuse. So here's the

definition of what economic abuse is. And this is, again, according to the National Coalition

on Domestic Violence, they phrase it this way, quote, economic abuse involves maintaining

control over financial resources, withholding access to money,

or attempting to prevent a victim or survivor from working and or attending school in an effort

to create financial dependence as a means of control.

So we are going to see this just run rife on like a community level when we dig in a

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