Nate and Steph face an angry rainbow-flag crowd while weighing the LGBTQ cult question alongside icons of the saints.

Is LGBTQ a Cult? What’s Wrong with Praying to Saints & Icons + Why Do I Believe in God?

What actually makes a group a cult? That question hijacked this TikTok Tuesday episode when a caller accused Nate and Steph of being in a Christian cult. They pushed back, and Steph flipped the accusation right around onto the caller’s own LGBT community. When the caller insisted a cult needs a leader and hers did not have one, Nate’s snarky reply — their leader is the devil — was meant to end things, but instead kicked off a full breakdown of the LGBTQ cult question using actual peer-reviewed criteria, while listeners lined up with questions on praying to saints, venerating icons, and the age-old challenge every apologist eventually has to answer: why do you actually believe in God?

Before the LGBTQ cult debate even started, the episode opened with Nate revisiting the previous day’s marathon discussion on substitutionary atonement, laying out a short, logical case for why the wrath of God cannot be separated from the cross. From there the conversation covered whether Christians are grafted into Israel, whether the modern political state of Israel carries biblical weight, and whether deconstruction stories hold up under basic scrutiny. It was a full docket even before things got heated.

Is LGBTQ a Cult? What the Peer-Reviewed Research Actually Says

The caller opened by accusing Nate and Steph of being in a Christian cult. Steph turned it right back on her: if Christianity is a cult, what does that make the LGBT community? The caller pushed back, insisting a cult needs a leader, and hers did not have one. That claim does not hold up against the actual clinical literature. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s eight criteria for thought reform, first published in the Cultic Studies Journal and still hosted by the International Cultic Studies Association, along with psychologist Margaret Singer’s conditions for coercive control, both treat a singular charismatic leader as one possible feature of a cult, not a requirement. A closed, self-policing system, a school board, or a decentralized online movement can produce the same coercive dynamics.

Run the criteria against what Steph laid out on air and the pattern holds up: milieu control, restricting members’ access to outside information and dissenting views; loading the language, reducing complex disagreement to slogans like “love is love” that shut down further reasoning; demand for purity and dispensing of existence, drawing a hard line between the “pure” in-group and a corrupt outside world; and the treatment of former insiders, like the gay men who publicly said they wanted no part of the T-plus expansion of the movement, as “hateful bigots” to be shunned rather than engaged. Sociological consensus, per the same ICSA literature, treats coercive control as a spectrum rather than an all-or-nothing checklist, meaning a group does not need every trait, including a leader, to qualify. For the theological framework behind how Nate builds these answers, see the podcast’s Statement of Faith, and for more on how these exchanges stay pointed without losing charity, see Graceful Disagreement: How to Share Truth with Love.

The Golden Calf Sales Pitch for Sainthood (and a Word on the LGBTQ Cult Callback)

Nate’s basketball-team explanation of intercessory prayer to saints deserves its own highlight reel: God as a busy head coach, Paul as the team captain with “juice,” and the believer stuck riding the bench hoping enough all-stars vouch for him before the final whistle. It is a generous read of Catholic theology delivered with a straight face, right before Nate reminds everyone that praying to the dead traces back to a shaky proof text about a pirate ship. Somewhere, a rosary is quietly disagreeing.