How a TikTok dance craze turned into a brainwashing cult

Because you don’t – I hope – use TikTok you will never have heard of the Wilking sisters. But back in the day (2020) they were huge, their homemade videos of dance routines performed at their suburban Michigan home attracting 127 million views. A year later, it all turned sour.

Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult opens with one half of the sibling duo, Melanie, talking tearfully about her terrible loss. You think at first that Miranda has died. But no, it’s almost worse, for Miranda has become a living ghost – still present on social media, but dead to her family and friends, and unrecognisable from the girl-next-door she used to be. She has been sucked into a religious cult called the Shekinah Church.

This particular cult embodies and capitalises on the peculiar madness of our age. It specialises in recruiting kids who perform viral internet dance routines. The church’s LA-based founder Robert Shinn first tried his hand at film and pop production but his business only really took off when he started exploiting this new, niche sector. His business, 7M, has all but cornered the market in smiling, gyrating, terpsichorean brain-death.

Another phenomenon that has proved invaluable to Shinn’s business model is the current Christian revival. All manner of unlikely public figures are claiming to have found God – former seedy comedian Russell Brand, for example, who was recently baptised in the Thames by Bear Grylls – and the youth are renouncing drugs and rock’n’roll for Jesus. Part of Shekinah’s lure are its late-night Bible studies classes, four-hour invitation-only church services and uncompromising messages, e.g. ‘You’re not Jesus’s family till you’re dead to your loved ones.’