Gwen Shamblin & the Nodes

January 4, 2024

If you haven’t heard of Gwen Shamblin, watch the HBO Max docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin and/or the lifetime movie Starving for Salvation. Both detail the insane rise of weight loss guru turned cult leader of what can only be described as a Brentwood, TN Stepford wives church of anorexic feminine conformity.

I want to talk a little bit about this cult for a few reasons. It typifies the wealthy Nashville suburb of Brentwood and the mentality of conformity meeting “god” Christianity, contemporary southern belle mentality, and wealth. However, this cult started with a book GS wrote called The Weigh Down, which merged the idea of being hungry with the notion of being empty inside and needing to fill that emptiness with god.

These ideas made her a best-selling author who got her tentacles into over 14,000 churches in the US. Her brand of letting god take the fat away was incorporated all over the country by these churches until she committed the heresy of saying there was no trinity, thus eliminating Jesus and focusing entirely on god. She lost half her staff and most of her weight loss empire because the churches that ran them sent her packing after that comment.

Gwen ‘s heresy of denying the trinity isn’t new to Christianity and was a source of tremendous backlash in the early Catholic church. It is also a heresy that comes up in a branch of the Pentecostal religion called Oneness and the nontrinitarian Jehovah's Witnesses and the Latter-day-saints who see Jesus as a separate deity, claiming that it was the council of Nicaea that invented this idea. The problem with this is it was also the council of Nicaea that decided which letters went into the New Testament, all of which were written at least 300 years after the death of Christ. It is this council that curated the very book they feel they need to adhere to literally. This council also invented the idea of Jesus as a god. They borrowed the idea of the trinity from earlier religious traditions, namely the ideas of the triple-faced goddess seen in all early Western religions because Christianity is built on the foundation of Judaism. It is a capital sin to worship anyone or anything other than Yahweh, aka Jehovah. You are allowed only one god in that system, and Jesus always said he was “the son of man,” not a god, but how could he not be a god and do all those fantastic things?

To the Romans, who were used to turning all their leaders into gods, it made no sense to follow an ordinary man; he had to be a god. Hence, the invention of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit trinity which made Jesus the same as his Father. It is the only way to rectify the Old Testament with the new while turning Jesus into a god. The fact that you need to be either very smart or have a divinity degree to understand this is why it comes up in different forms throughout the history of Christianity. In the case of the Pentecostal Oneness branch, they threw out Jehovah in favor of Jesus. They are a “Jesus only” iteration, which makes no sense with their literalistic interpretation of the bible. I could go on about how ridiculous it is, but I won’t.