Starving for Jesus, Part 2
Revisiting the dark world of Gwen Shamblin Lara
Edited by David Swanson
Maria Zenovich, director of “The Way Down,” the HBO documentary series that tracked the rise and the cruelties of the Remnant Fellowship Church, faced a unique quandary in finishing her film. (I reviewed the first installments, initially released in September, 2021, here.) The principal antagonist of “The Way Down”—the emaciated, altitudinously-haired, self-proclaimed prophet Gwen Shamblin Lara, who founded the cult-like church in 1999—died as the film was in the editing stages. It wasn’t a peaceful or expected death—no long illness that would have allowed her the time to shore up a succession plan. Instead, Lara, her second husband, and five other members of church leadership, including her son-in-law, perished in a fiery private-plane crash over Percy Priest Lake, in Nashville, Tennessee. According to widespread reporting at the time, the plane was en route to Palm Beach, Florida, where its passengers intended to join a MAGA rally featuring Roger Stone and antivaxx activist Simone Gold. Instead, they wound up as human remains, fished out of the lake’s usually placid waters.
The crash, on May 29, 2021, bookended the original “Way Down” series, framing a dark portrait of a congregation under the sway of a charismatic leader and self-proclaimed prophet; what would happen to those still enmeshed in the Remnant Fellowship was a question left unanswered. In April 2022, almost a year after the crash, HBO Max released a two-episode followup, covering the aftermath—and featuring a plethora of new sources who had reached out to the filmmakers after Lara’s death. As the documentary first put me on a path to exploring child abuse in a Christian context, I decided to check out the sequel. Like the initial documentary, it raises more questions than it answers, but the questions themselves are extraordinary.
In her role as undisputed leader of her church, Gwen Shamblin Lara had preached a familiar spin on the prosperity gospel: she drove home to her followers the notion that any misfortune that came to them was rooted in personal sin. And because of the Remnant Fellowship’s origins in Lara’s weight-loss workshops, this doctrine meant that much of that sin was made manifest in weight gain. In lieu of established science—which has long demonstrated that extreme diets don’t work, leading, ultimately, to regaining any lost weight, and often adding more—Lara shamed congregants who regained weight. In the words of one of the documentary’s subjects, she hid such individuals away “better than the KFC secret.”
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Fasting, of course, has a long, well-established place in religious history. But the practice is a fundamentally spiritual pursuit, not a corporeal one, and the Remnant Fellowship’s conflation of morality and body shape—a more explicit, religious version of the creed that saturates American society in general—led to a fanatical culture of disordered eating in the church. One woman admitted that the extremity of her fasting under Lara’s guidance led to permanent kidney damage. But it wasn’t just weight gain that reified sin for Lara: another former parishioner recounted a time in which the preacher brought forward a woman who was suffering from cancer, and announced that the woman’s disease had been brought on by a sinful existence.
And then their founder—alongside her husband and other church leaders—was gone, perishing suddenly and violently and in a manner that even the casually faithful might consider providential. For some members of the Remnant Fellowship, the cognitive dissonance of a holy prophet drawing down such apparent divine punishment shook them loose from the church’s embrace. The former congregants who reached out to Zenovich express how Gwen Shamblin Lara wounded them, in body and spirit, her church convincing them they were cursed, and tearing families apart. And so, at the news of her death, these are the emotions that guide their response. One woman says she is happy Lara cannot hurt anyone again. Another says, simply, that she is glad of the death. It is a harsh legacy to have those who knew you rejoice in your demise. Still, over the hours of anguish harvested by Zenovich into a shambolic narrative of religious cruelties, the viewer is led to believe that such ire is richly earned.
Many of the film’s new interview subjects had left the church years before, but only felt empowered to speak out once the cult had been decapitated, and its founder’s charisma no longer bound her congregation together. Zenovich attempts to paint a picture of where the church might go now, bereft of Lara’s outsized persona. Her daughter, Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah, whose husband perished in the plane crash, took over as nominal leader of Remnant Fellowship after Lara’s death. In footage from a never-aired reality-show pilot filmed in 2018, Elizabeth appears cadaverous, her body skeletally hollow, her face grave-pale and sunken-eyed. Since the documentary aired and her mother died, Elizabeth has served as a leader in absentia, calling in virtually to church services, and offering a pallid shadow of her mother’s rousing, ferocious sermonizing. The church, likewise, appears as a shadow of itself, bereft of the savvy entrepreneurship that led Lara’s original “Weigh Down Workshops” to take Christian America by storm.
It’s telling, if unsurprising, that Lara’s final act was a headlong rush into MAGA’s crusade, a conflation of her physicalized prosperity-gospel with Christo-fascist politics. By all indications, her reign was one of imposed authority over the lives of her congregants, one that did not scruple to interfere in marriages and the relationships between parents and their children. Lara vigorously espoused abusive child-rearing practices, and her church came to the defense of a pair of parents that brutally killed their eight-year-old son in an overzealous show of discipline. The politics of cruelty, and a personal discipline rooted in shame, meshed powerfully with the ferocious force of fatphobia, the closest thing in America to a fully secular religion. This unholy union made Lara a juggernaut—and an irresistible leader to those who sought to submit their bodies and spirits alike to an external authority. It was her particular genius to combine two uniquely powerful drivers of American behavior, and forge a multi-million-dollar empire from it.
By the end of the documentary, Zenovich finally poses the question of how Lara came to wield power over so many. Her appearance—a sort of zombie Dolly Parton, hair “teased and teased and teased” to towering heights, lips thickly lined, insect legs tottering in towering heels—would seem to make her an unlikely leader of thousands. Yet both a psychologist commissioned by the filmmakers and the ex-members themselves make a plea not to judge solely by externalities. “What people need to understand is that everybody is vulnerable,” psychologist Adam Brooks says in the series’ final episode. “At a certain point in your life—when you’re a little bit low, or in a time of transition—a leader comes along and meets you at the right moment.”
Gwen Shamblin Lara’s genius was an ability to exploit any number of vulnerabilities: to seize on omnipresent bodily insecurity, particularly among women; to exploit a need for community and faith; to champion the conservative politics so ubiquitous in her Southern home-base; and most of all, to proffer, in her own frail frame, a surfeit of confidence in her own role in God’s plan, a closeness to His will. It was that certainty—a rare quality, if one that came with many cruel addenda—that drew so many to her; and for some of them, it was only her death, in the most dramatic of circumstances, that allowed that hold to ease, for them to reveal their grief and rage in all its forms.
The five-part HBO documentary appears to be "part two" but I can't find a part one -- did it have a different title?