Very apt critique, thank you. I love phrases here:

"a cult conversing about itself pretending it's objectively independent"

"fixated on protocols of control"

Now, to religious people that might just seem like good sense. The religion sees itself as a judge of everything, inclusive of itself, and control of the world is the goal. The sacred text is seen as a legal document, a constitution for life.

The Bible, as hard as they try, doesn't get them there. Evangelicals turn to clown clerics like Bill Gothard to provide the desired theology.

I was reading about the Gloriavale Christian Community in New Zealand, which is a much more coherent approach to Evangelical Christian yearnings—a cloistered community in which heterosexual reproduction is seen as divinized and men in control.

They insist on the KJV translation of the Bible, I suspect, because it's practically unreadable, and can't be cited in self-critique. The sacred text for daily use is created by the clerics and is called "What We Believe."

The instability in Evangelicalism is in never having attained such an internally regulating text, despite Scofield's efforts, and the religious culture, for all its aspirations, was left to improvised clerical rulings. It was not really serious about being a religion.

https://www.apologeticsindex.org/6022-gloriavale-christian-community