Edwards on effects of discipline

Discipling Movement from Cult Awareness This attempts to show how discipline in practice leads to authoratarian structures. The article quotes Edwards on the effects:

• Young men and young women learned how to rebuke and criticize one another when they were in an authoritarian movement. This is something no one should learn well. Sometimes rebuke gets to be an almost savage thing. Christians, especially young ones, ought not to do such things to one another.
• Pride in people's hearts was appealed to, cultivated, watered, and fertilized.
• Men and women who left those movements lost all hope in even the theoretical honesty of Christian workers. That is doubly tragic. If you lose trust in Christians, you have absolutely nowhere to go.
• Families divided--splits, separations, divorces.
• Christians lost--or never got a chance to lay hold of--the wondrous, unshackling experience of liberty in Christ.
• Fear and confusion became the order of the day. --Young men and young women who might have grown up--and grown old-serving the Lord as workers were ruined . . . forever.
• Across our land have grown up little pockets of Christians who are bitter and shipwrecked. They seem to be able to find one another, move near one another, and fraternize together--like glazed-eyed beings in Dante's Inferno--forever dining on nightmares, partaking of mutual cynicism and hopelessness. That is the saddest of all scenes. . . . There appears to be an almost total disregard--by the leaders in these groups--of the mounting and appalling destruction resulting from authoritarianism.26