Well, firstly I must say that Matt would 100% embrace being a god figure for a cult. Like he'd go ALL in - there's actually a miniseries where he does just that.
As for the cult itself, I feel like the depowering would work well to keep people there against their will, but if you embrace it maybe they let you have your 'godly' powers back. Which means of course some people could try to fake it but Matt is a telepath who would usually be able to tell so he'd work to keep other metas depowered. Because he's a dick. Like "hey, you guys are not messing this up for me!"
I feel like we'd need a reason to have the metas feel necessary to the cult so maybe something like, they had a chosen one years ago (probably a metahuman conman) who gave them a prophecy about a certain number of metahumans being needed to bring about a Cosmic Event where the cult can ascend to heaven/be gifted their own powers. So then you have a reason to kidnap metas against their will? I'm obviously just spitballing!
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As for the cult itself, I feel like the depowering would work well to keep people there against their will, but if you embrace it maybe they let you have your 'godly' powers back. Which means of course some people could try to fake it but Matt is a telepath who would usually be able to tell so he'd work to keep other metas depowered. Because he's a dick. Like "hey, you guys are not messing this up for me!"
I feel like we'd need a reason to have the metas feel necessary to the cult so maybe something like, they had a chosen one years ago (probably a metahuman conman) who gave them a prophecy about a certain number of metahumans being needed to bring about a Cosmic Event where the cult can ascend to heaven/be gifted their own powers. So then you have a reason to kidnap metas against their will? I'm obviously just spitballing!