attends The Alliance For Women In Media Foundation’s 50th Annual Gracie Awards Gala at Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on May 20, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
By Kayla DeKraker
Bethany Joy Lenz may be known for her role as Haley James Scott on ONE TREE HILL, but something much darker was going on behind the scenes at that time.
“I was on GUIDING LIGHTS for two years, and then I moved out to LA. While I was there, I also got [cast in] ONE TREE HILL. The community that I had started to become a part of was a group of young, professional actors that wanted to just meet together and do a Bible study,” she said on the “Jesus Calling” podcast. “They met on Saturday nights in someone’s home. I thought, ‘Okay, that’s pretty normal. I’ve seen a lot of that in the modern evangelical church.’ And it went really well for about a year.”
But, what Lenz thought was a normal Bible study quickly turned in to something very different.
“Six to eight months in, these leaders wanted to keep us in a place of submission and looked at us as children. We were treated as such,” she recalled.
Lenz explained that she wasn’t allowed to make simple decisions, such as what car to drive or where to live, without getting permission from the group’s leaders.
“It took me a long time, and I didn’t start really realizing how unhealthy the situation was until I had my daughter,” she said. “I refused to allow her to experience this, and that’s when I got out, got into therapy, and my whole relationship with the Lord completely shifted at that point.”
Related: Bethany Joy Lenz’s Memoir to Recount Escape from Cult: ‘Story of Forgiveness’
But life was far from easy after escaping.
“I was thirty, I had a baby and I had no money. Everything had been embezzled by the group,” Lenz explained. “All of those things combined with the 10 years of experience that I had been coerced, manipulated, love bombed, gaslit, abused — and I finally broke.”
Lenz’s experience gave her a faulty perception of God. “I believed that if I did all the right things, if I checked off everything on the Christian girl list, then God would be pleased with me, and I would have a good life,” she said.
Thankfully, she eventually realized, “It was a totally false version of the gospel. It was the counterfeit which put me in the driver’s seat of earning my happy life that I thought God owed me.”
In reality, she couldn’t do anything to earn God’s favor.
“That intimacy is what will sustain you, and that intimacy is what will then bleed out of your life into the other people around you,” she said. “I really believe that there’s nothing more important than understanding what you believe. It will affect everything else in your life.”
Though initially afraid to question faith, she learned that God isn’t shaken by our doubts.
“You need your brain in order to have faith. God is so big. He’s not afraid of us thinking. The more you think, the more you understand, the more Christianity makes sense out of everything else in the world,” she said.
“I think, at the end of the day, I had faith [in God] before I met the people in this group, and that’s the thing that eventually led me back out,” she shared previously.
Lenz recounted more of her story in her memoir, Dinner for Vampires, last year. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
“I’m astonished and grateful,” she said.
Lenz’s story is a reminder that even if you’ve experienced hurt or manipulation at the hands of those who claim to be Christians, God can redeem that and lead you to a life of faith and healing.
Read Next: Actress Bethany Joy Lenz Reveals How Childhood Faith Impacted Her Life
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