A gay man who was raised in an extremist Mormon-adjacent cult known as The Order has opened up about his harrowing experiences from childhood to his young-adult years.
Nephi Robinson, of Utah, went on the podcast and YouTube channel Cults to Consciousness to talk about what it was like growing up in The Order - a polygamous, incestuous community based in the Salt Lake City area.
The Order was founded in 1935 by Elden Kingston, who was among the Mormons who reportedly disagreed with the church's banning of polygamy and split off to form his own fundamentalist sect.
After Elden's death in 1948, he was succeeded by John Ortell Kingston. John died in 1987, and the cult was taken over by the current leader, Paul Elden Kingston.
For his part, Nephi's dad is Paul's older brother, John Daniel Kingston, while his mom was John Daniel's third wife out of a total of his 14 spouses.
Nephi Robinson spent most of his life in the incestuous fundamentalist Mormon-adjacent cult The Order before finally escaping at age 33
While Nephi was his mom's second kid out of her 13 children in all, on his dad's side, Nephi estimates he was roughly the 13th oldest out of between 100 and 200 children fathered by John Daniel.
Notably, in 1999, John Daniel pleaded no contest to beating one his daughters, then 16 years old, after she attempted to escape the cult as she was being forced to marry her own uncle, per Southern Poverty Law Center.
Before Nephi had hit his teens, he was already put in the position of playing parent to his younger siblings and half siblings.
That said, he admitted that he doesn't know all of his siblings - and has even had awkward encounters with those claiming to be related, whom he didn't recognize.
His mom, meanwhile, had to work at one of John Daniel's 'stewardships,' or business ventures, to support herself and her 13 kids, while additionally paying rent to her husband - who, Nephi estimates, stopped by the household roughly once per month.
Nephi also got his first job at 11 years old at a cult-owned coffee shop. There, his mom made sure he got paid, which apparently wasn't the case for a lot of kids.
But, at the same time, as soon as Nephi starting making money, it was also on him to buy his own clothes and, later, pay for college tuition and all necessary books.
On the occasions that John David would come by his mom's house, she'd get a phone call giving her a heads up, and then she and her kids would get to work cleaning the house and preparing dinner for him.
His dad, John Daniel Kingston, had 14 wives and between 100 and 200 children
Nephi recalled how 'strange' his parents' interactions were - John David would 'treat her like she was dumb' and 'talk down to her quite often,' while, at the same time, he 'tried to act like he was friendly.'
'And sometimes he was friendly!' Nephi continued, adding that, thanks to the unusual situation, he never understood the 'concept of a father figure' in his childhood.
'When he was there, we had to make sure he was taken care of. And he would be nice to us for the most part... but you really had to watch, because it felt like you were on eggshells. Because he could change in an instant, and somebody's getting slapped.'
His visits were 'stressful' for everyone around him, Nephi recalled. 'As soon as he was "home," it was a hostile environment.'
Later, Nephi realized that his dad's visits were, sickeningly, very much timed to coincide with whenever his mom would have the highest chance of conceiving.
Horrifyingly, by his teens, Nephi's bedroom was directly under his mom's, and it didn't take long for him to put together what was going on behind closed doors during his dad's visits.
Nephi described that a woman's status is very directly linked to how many kids she has - adding that it's commonplace for women in The Order to have fifteen plus children, and estimating that his own mom's brood of 13 was probably around average.
John Daniel Kingston (front and center) signed as a witness to the weddings of his teen daughters
The Order was founded in 1935 by Elden Kingston, who was reportedly among the Mormons who disagreed with the church outlawing polygamy
Most girls would be betrothed, if not married, by 16, and pretty much everyone would be betrothed or wed by 18.
While first wives would generally get a big wedding celebrations, that was not so much the case for 'plural wives' - who were also only recognized within the religion, and not legally.
With Nephi's mom was a 'plural wife' - as his dad's third - she essentially 'made up' his last name, which was apparently 'pretty normal for a plural wife.'
On Nephi's birth certificate, his father was listed as the fictional Phil Robinson, and he recalled how the household would occasionally get letters addressed to 'Phil Robinson' demanding child-support payments.
All the while, Nephi began to realize early on that he felt attraction to other men - but wasn't about to admit that to himself, let alone anyone in his community.
Even at the non-religious public school he attended, football players would go around beating up kids who were gay.
'I just believed that, whether I enjoyed it or not, I needed to go and start a family and do my job,' he said.
'I felt a lot of shame for it,' he described of his sexuality.
'I tried so hard to not be. I fasted and prayed many times... The way I understood it, I was instilled with something that is anti-marriage, and anti-life and anti-procreation, and terrible.'
He added that he 'really latched on to his role as an older brother' as a way of finding his reason to exist.
'Being gay was such a terrible thing that I just did what I could to deserve to be alive, I guess,' he recalled with sadness in his voice.
When it became evident that Nephi was struggling during high school, his dad arranged him to start college early, forging his birth certificate to make it appear as though he was older.
Nephi then got an associate's degree in manufacturing.
Only after graduating was there 'a discussion' about what Nephi wanted to do with his life - though John Daniel was always going to have the final say.
There was also the matter of pairing off Nephi with a wife in The Order and his engagement ultimately last five weeks before he tied the knot.
When it came to 'procreation,' Nephi admitted that was something he 'really didn't look forward' to, emphasizing he just simply does not feel sexual attraction to any woman.
Even so, he went on to father seven children with his then-wife.
'I so enjoy having kids. It's the most fulfilling thing that I do with my life.
'But creating kids is definitely one of my least favorite parts of my life, is conceiving kids,' he admitted.
And, after he got married to his first wife, 'there was still a lot of pressure to get married again,' said Nephi - both from his dad and even his first wife herself.
Host Shelise Ann Sola asked Nephi how he's doing now, to which he said: 'I'm doing pretty good'
That said, pressure from his dad to take on more wives only let up in 2011, when Nephi came out to John Daniel.
At first, John Daniel tried to say that Nephi was gay because he'd been eating 'too much chicken,' because he 'worked too much' - and also speculating that his now-ex-wife was a 'hard person to love.' (This, despite that it was John Daniel who'd been putting him to work, and who'd set him up with the wife.)
More generally, Nephi described that most of the girls around his age were partnered off with the same five or so men with the Kingston surname.
Two of Nephi's wife's older sisters went on to marry his own father as well.
From his wife's ultra-religious perspective, Nephi's lack of interest in taking on more wives also threatened her own chances of getting into the celestial kingdom - which is the highest-ranking level of heaven in the Mormon religion.
'Towards the end, my ex would tell, me: if I'm not going to do what I needed to do to gain my salvation, then I needed to leave. Because I'm not worth it. She and the kids deserve a chance to gain the celestial kingdom.
'And if I'm not going to provide that for them, then I need to leave,' Nephi recalled, adding that she told him that several times 'toward the end.'
And indeed, Nephi left, and divorced his wife - and she's now achieved her dream of becoming a plural wife, he said.
'She was still capable of bearing children so she's going to get remarried, and she did,' Nephi explained, adding that she was engaged to another man just over a year after their separation.
'There's a lot of mechanics in that world that I guess are good enough for people. And if you're going to be there, you should follow the process of that world,' Nephi reflected of people, like his ex-wife, who stay committed to the cult and its practices.
'I think when you're in an organization, being on the fence is probably the worst place to be.
'You either need to fit in, and enjoy what you have - or you need to leave, because there's a certain set of rules and the way you do things. And she fits in with that world, so. That works for her.'
That said, Nephi also saw first-hand the harmful repercussions of the cult's distrust of the outside world, and mainstream medicine specifically, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer in late 2013.
When his mom was diagnosed with cancer, Nephi's father ignored her doctor's advice, and instead put her on an increasingly intricate treatment plan of his own design
'It's my understanding they had a treatment plan for her,' Nephi said of the doctors his mom had initially seen.
'And she did bring that to [John] Daniel, and Daniel had his own program that he wanted to do.
'But it's also, there's a whole lot of history behind that too. Because there's a whole process to fasting. And fasting is a really big part of that culture. Like I'm talking multiple-day fasts. So it is expected that if you are sick, then you can fast to kill that illness.
'So Daniel helped come up with a program for her to follow, based on the fasting system. And he did do a lot of research and a lot of things, but it became Daniel's program, and not what the doctors suggested,' Nephi continued.
'Whatever the doctors say, then that's what we're not going to do. Because they're doctors and they don't know what they're talking about. We are the ones that have keys to Heavenly Father. Daniel is connected to the Man On the Watchtower.
'So, whatever God wants her to do, is going to come from Daniel and not from the doctors,' Nephi explained of the cult logic at play.
Daniel 'did a lot of his own research,' Nephi explained, and prescribed his mom 'different systems' involving a lot of fasting and also 'different machines.'
One machine was supposed to be put on 'the affected area' and would create 'electric pulses' that were supposedly curative.
Daniel also came up with a diet for Nephi's mom to follow.
The 'worse her condition got,' Nephi observed, the more control was exerted over every aspect of her life through an ever-more 'detailed regimen.'
As she declined, she was also told to eat more and more 'disgusting' things.
'Her diet got to a point where she had to eat at exactly this time of day, exactly this. Everything was so detailed out for her, and her body wouldn't always respond to it, and she would throw it up a lot of times.'
Nephi estimated that, as she was dying of cancer, she was also being kept on a diet of under 500 calories per day.
'We just watched her pretty much die a slow, long and painful death,' Nephi said sadly.
'Instead of recognizing that it wasn't working, and doing something else, when people would say, "Oh, she's coughing up blood, we've got to take her to the doctors, we've got to do something" - he would just say, "No, we've got to buckle down even harder, we have to lean more into the program,"" Nephi explained of his dad's attitude toward his mom's declining condition.
Then he'd make the program 'even harsher.'
'It got to the point where she had 24 hour supervision, and people were always there to administer the program to her. But they weren't even very consistent,' Nephi added.
One time, he'd been assigned the 'night shift' to watch over her.
He had nodded off briefly - after all, he'd been working 12-hour shifts at one of John Daniel's companies.
When he awoke, he heard something rustling in the kitchen, and discovered his mother sneaking grapes.
She then begged her son not to tell on her. And Nephi, recognizing that his mom was basically being starved to death, did not.
As for Nephi's overall relationship with his dad, he felt as though he earned his dad's attention and interest in a transactional sense.
He was mostly ignored by his father as a kid, he felt.
But, as he reached his teens, they developed more of a rapport - especially as Nephi began working directly for John Daniel.
While he 'tried' very hard to gain 'favor' with his dad, he was always certain he 'never wanted to be like him,' Nephi said.
'I never did like how he was. But I did everything I could to tie to him. So I felt like we did have a pretty good relationship. And I did do a lot of work for him,' Nephi described.
A couple years before he left The Order, Nephi had even become the CEO of his dad's 'biggest legitimate company.'
'But it always felt like, I had a relationship with him because he needs something from me. And he feels like he is entitled to my life. And everything that I have, and ever will be, he is entitled to that, and he is supposed to direct that.
'And I'm supposed to fit in with him, and basically offer it up to him. And I feel like I did that a lot. And so the relationship was a fairly good one,' Nephi described.
Later, however, as Nephi had made up his mind to leave, his dad summoned him for a series of meetings.
At this point, his dad had already been aware that Nephi was gay.
'He seemed like he was pretty sad about it. And in one of the meetings, then he was explaining to me how if I leave then basically I'm going to go to the deepest depths of hell.'
When Nephi asked him what was in it for him, and what he had to look forward to if he stayed, his dad said to him: 'You will never experience love in this life. And that's just sort of the situation that you have. But if you don't choose this life, then you're going to go down.'
His dad then drew him a diagram of how deep into hell he'd wind up if he left - but also demonstrating how he could 'sort of' ascend to heaven if he stayed.
Ultimately, Nephi left The Order at age 33.
'You invest so much of your life. And I think one of the things that's hard about leaving later in life - versus being a teenager or 18 or around 20 - when you leave later in life, you realize that you've brought kids into this world.
'That whole courting program, when I left, my oldest daughter was 10-and-a-half. And I was recognizing that in less than two years, she's going to be on the dance card' - the dance card being the first stage of the dating process.
'And even guys my age are going to be approaching me for her, whether they are married or not. And I started to think in my mind, "How am I going to respond to my friends coming to me about my daughter?" And I started to play that out in my head.
'And the courting system is one of the main reasons I left. Because, I thought it through, like there's no way I can expect her to do this, and feel like I'm doing a good thing by her.
'In some ways, it does feel like you're trafficking your own daughter. And as you watch how some of the other men do it... Like that's something that I just was not capable of doing,' Nephi emphasized.
'I would so much rather her have the options, you know? Get to know the guy. Go on a few dates. And figure out what kind of person you want to be with. And then, consider what marriage could be like after then.'
But, Nephi went on, in the strict rules of courtship in the cult, and 'wanting what's best for her,' he could be as 'fair' as possible - and it would still not even come close to being 'fair to her.'
At the juncture that he got out, he then had to contemplate the repercussions of how he 'brought kids into that program.'
With that, he began to realize 'how much I helped this person who is the most abusive, the most dishonest person I've ever met. And how much I've helped him. And I think one of the things that's hard is you have to realize you were not a good person. You have to accept that you were part of the problem,' he described.
'When you're an adult, you either have to recognize that it's a problem, and that you were part of that problem.
'Or you can just convince yourself that, even though you're now old enough to think logically, even though you're an adult and you're responsible for your life and doing the best you can for your children, you have to recognize that you didn't.
'And then make a whole new path and change everything for your kids, and everything you're doing, you have to change everything.
'Or, you have to sort of just give in to it. I feel like you just have to break psychologically. I felt like for me to stay, I would have to go crazy. Probably crazy in a way that still looks sane. I could have acted sane.
'But to recognize what you are dealing with, and still be there, it's so hard. And I feel like that's a lot of people that have invested so much of their life there.
'Even if they have information where they can understand that it's not good, they're probably going to choose to stay, because that's still easier than leaving,' Nephi reflected.
As for other members of his family, multiple people kept coming to him, reporting that they'd have 'directives' via their dreams, with many 'leveraging' his dead mother, as well as emphasizing that he'd become cut off from his kids.
'They were showering me with their love, and their threats at the same time,' Nephi summarized. 'Especially Daniel. He would try to control everything about your life, by threatening you with everything that you have.'
While Nephi was indeed going through a larger 'faith crisis,' he ultimately would cite his sexuality as the main reason that he was incompatible with living in The Order.
His first month out of The Order, Nephi was sleeping in his car. Within the next few months, his grandma had gotten word that he'd left and she offered him a room.
In the first year of his leaving the cult, he got a job and his own apartment.
He'd always intended to pay child support, and still does.
He also admits that the values of hard work and industriousness ingrained into him by The Order definitely don't hurt when it comes to doing well at work.
Nephi also described his response to the threats of losing contact with his kids: 'I would tell them, "Nothing will ever relieve me of the duties that I have to them. And that's a lot more than just financial. And if I have to exercise the legal system to take care of those duties, then I will."'
After spending tens of thousands on legal fees, he won visitation rights with his kids, and still sees them regularly.
Host Shelise Ann Sola wrapped up the interview with Nephi by asking him how he's doing now.
'I'm doing pretty good,' Nephi answered.
'It feels like having a second chance at life. To spend 33 years of your life in that group, and then find a way out of it, and find a way to find your place in the world,' he said.
'I'm doing a whole lot to get to know myself. And I've had a chance to detox from that world. I had a boyfriend for a while. I'm currently single,' he added, admitting that, after leaving an organization like he was in, he had to recognize that he wasn't 'ready' for a serious relationship.
More broadly, he's just 'focusing on himself' and finding his place in the world, as well as making sure his kids continue to do well.
Of his ultimate life advice, Nephi offered: 'Trust in your creator, and to thine own self be true.'
