by Perry Bulwer
This past February there was a brief report in the Michigan newspaper, Huron Daily Tribune, on the sentencing of a Christian minister for the sex assault of an 11 year-old boy. It's the kind of story that is all too common these days, as my fast-growing archive of news articles related to religion-related child abuse demonstrates. The details in the article are similar to other cases of child sexual abuse in a religious context, except for one thing. The report makes no mention of the name of the organization to which the minister belonged, simply referring to “a non-denominational Christian organization” and “the ministry”. But have you ever heard of an organization with no name? When people organize themselves into groups, even for trivial purposes, one of the first things they usually do is decide on a name. So, who is this Christian organization and why do they claim to have no name?
One clue as to who this group is comes not from that news article, but from one of the comments posted at the end of it by a person named Sal who writes: "This ministry, known as the Two by Two's needs to be exposed.” Well, Sal, here's my little effort. After an easy web search, that clue leads to the revelation that this secretive group that claims to have no name does have a name after all; in fact, it has many names. It is referred to both by members and outsiders by many different names, including “The Truth”, “The Way”, “Two-by-Twos” and several others, and it is officially registered in the U.S. as “Christian Conventions” and in Canada as "Assemblies of Christians", and various other names in other countries. This particular religious ruse is used to perpetuate the conceit that this group has no modern founder, but can trace its origins back to the first Christians, and therefore it is the true church, not a sect or cult. However, as a survivor of a Christian fundamentalist cult I've heard that story before, so when I now hear people claiming to have "the only truth" and living "the only way" cult alarm bells sound off to warn me of the dangerous deceit.
When a reader of my blog recently alerted me to that news article mentioned above, she referred to some of those names for the group, but it was “The Truth” that most sounded familiar to me. I checked and, sure enough, just over two months ago I posted in my news archive an article from the student newspaper of the University of Illinois. It tells the story of a student, Jennifer Hanson, who escaped from the fundamentalist Christian sect she was born into so she could attend university and live her own life. Her's is a familiar story of religious repression, suppression, indoctrination, spiritual abuse and denial of human rights, but familiar only because of media reports of similar religion-related abuses in other more well known groups.
Having no name, or actually, many different names, helps this group fly under the radar by causing confusion as to who they really are and making it difficult for outsiders to 'connect the dots'. It is a common cult tactic, changing names or using many alternative names in different countries or for different aspects of their ministries. It appears to have worked for this no-name cult because “... none of the University professors of religion contacted had heard of Hanson's former group.” Get that? Professors (plural) of religion had never heard of this Christian organization that numbers at least in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions worldwide.
So, is this no-name group a cult? According to the Apologetics Index, [see Update Note below] which keeps track of such groups, “... from an orthodox, evangelical Christian perspective, the movement is considered to be a cult of Christianity.” And according to a Canadian lawyer representing the father in a child custody case the group is a cult:
"We compiled a list of 47 different cult characteristics," says lawyer Arends. "The Two-by-twos meet all the points. They are extremely secretive, have no written doctrine or records, you can't get a straight answer from them, and yet they claim to be the only path to salvation. Their 'friends' must give unconditional obedience to the workers, or they're guilty of backsliding. And if they backslide, they're damned." Mr. Arends says his case is bolstered by California academic Ronald Enroth's work Churches That Abuse, Port Coquitlam author Lloyd Fortt's In Search of 'the Truth', and the testimony of a dozen former members in Alberta.
But it is the next paragraph in that magazine report that convinced me that the cult designation is an appropriate one. That paragraph cites J. Gordon Melton, a notorious cult apologist who thinks there is no such things as cults, only 'new religious movements':
However, Gordon Melton, the California-based editor of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, argues the Two-by-twos are simply an "old-line, 19th-century Christadelphian sect," an isolated subculture of non-Trinitarian Christians. They are not a cult because "there's no real threats or violence," he says.
Alberta Report, "Doubts About a Mystery Church", September 15, 1997
Of course, the absence of real threats or violence are not enough to determine whether or not a group is a cult. Furthermore, what does he mean by “real threats”? Melton seems to imply that spiritual threats, common in such fundamentalist groups, are not real threats, therefore they don't count. As the Canadian lawyer pointed out, he compiled a list of 47 cult characteristics and of those he mentioned none involved violence or real threats, as opposed to spiritual threats. There are many sociological and theological characteristics used to determine whether a group is a cult or not, which Melton, a supposed expert on religion, is well aware of, yet he simplistically dismisses the evidence. It's not the first time he's done that. Here's part of what I wrote about his working regarding the cult, the Children of God, now known as The Family International:
In both the 1986 edition and the revised 1992 edition of the Encyclopaedic Handbook of Cults in America, Melton wrote critically about The Family for five pages, concluding that “The sexual manipulation in the Children of God has now been so thoroughly documented that it is doubtful whether the organization can ever, in spite of whatever future reforms it might initiate, regain any respectable place in the larger religious community.” 20 Yet just two years later, in 1994, he co-edited a collection of essays favourable to The Family entitled Sex, Slander and Salvation; Investigating The Family/Children of God. 21 Kent and Krebs describe 22 how that book was a result of Family representatives seeking advice from certain scholars, including Melton, on how to create a positive public image in the face of negative publicity revolving mostly around allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation. They also describe the substantial efforts The Family took to make sure any potentially discrediting information, such as sexual material involving children, was not available to researchers, and that researchers had access only to special, sanitized ‘media homes’ that were not at all representative of regular Family homes. Unsurprisingly, The Family touts that book, which they offer for sale on their Website, as “…proof of its legitimacy and the group has distributed copies to media in an attempt to gain favourable press.” 23 The Family considers Melton, as well as Chancellor, experts on the group, 24 and in 2000 Melton received USD $10,065.83 from The Family. 25By the way, I used the term “researchers” lightly as the book of essays is merely propaganda that was entirely financed by The Family cult. In other words, they payed apologists like Melton to write favourable essays for public relations purposes in the wake of child sex scandals. So, if J. Gordon Melton says “The Truth” or the “Two-by-Twos” or the church with no name is not a cult, it probably is. From what I've read about it so far, and comparing it to other well-documented cults, there is no question in my mind it is. Jennifer Hanson's story provides enough details and warning signs for me to come to that conclusion, but there are also other stories out there that corroborate her's, many at the websites listed below. It turns out that a cult by any other name, or no name at all, is still a cult.
A Response to James D. Chancellor's "Life in The Family: An oral history of the Children of God"
REFERENCES & WEBSITES:
University of Illinois student shunned by 'cult' for sake of education
Veterans of Truth - information about abuses in "The Truth" ministry.
WINGS For Truth - created by victims/survivors who have suffered sexual abuse within the "Truth" Fellowship along with individuals who have been both directly and indirectly impacted by CSA.
Christian Conventions - wikipedia entry
Apologetics Index - Two-by-twos [see Update Note below]
Apologetics Index - J. Gordon Melton [see Update Note below]
Rick A. Ross Institute on the Apologetics Index [see Update Note below]
Alberta Report, "Doubts About a Mystery Church", September 15, 1997
A Response to James D. Chancellor's "Life in The Family: An oral history of the Children of God"
xFamily.org - a collaboratively edited encyclopedia about The Family/Children of God cult.
exFamily.org - a source of truthful information about The Family
Cult survivor reveals deceptive recruiting tactics used by Scientology and similar cults
Update on Friday, May 7, 2010
Note on the Apologetics Index, a source cited in the post above
After asking the question, "So, is this no-name group a cult?", in the post above, I provided two sources to illustrate two different perspectives on that question. One source is a lawyer who provides an answer from a sociological point of view. The other source, the Apologetics Index, provides an answer from a particular Christian perspective. My purpose was to show that regardless of their position, many people would view this group as a cult.
However, it has now come to my attention that the person behind the Apologetics Index, Anton Hein, is a fugitive from U.S. law and is a registered sex offender in California for committing "lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years.” That child is his niece, who was 13 at the time. There is an outstanding warrant for his arrest should he ever attempt to enter the U.S. again.
Hein is not a credible source of information, and I should have been more careful to check into his website before citing it. I was in a hurry, but that's no excuse, because a quick search of cult expert Rick Ross's website would have alerted me to the problem with Hein. He has a page on Hein that would have been enough for me to omit any reference to or quotation from him. Lesson learned.
Friends and enemies, truth and lies
ReplyDeleteBy Chris Johnston, The Border Mail Sept. 23, 2013
Elizabeth Coleman grew up in Canberra in the furtive religious sect known as either the Friends and Workers, the Two by Twos, or The Truth. Most people have never heard of them - and this is how the sect likes it.
They have no churches or headquarters and no written policies or doctrines. They are highly secretive and paranoid about scrutiny: when questioned about new allegations of child sexual abuse within the sect's ranks, the ''overseer'' for Victoria and Tasmania, David Leitch, 56, of Heidelberg, says: ''We are not an organisation.''
Members are told to either deny the existence of the sect or, next best, deny it has a name. Yet the ''non-denominational'' Friends and Workers has 2000 members in Victoria, making it a global stronghold; internationally there are about 200,000 members. Core beliefs come from a very literal reading of certain sections of the Bible. But they don't call themselves Christians because they consider themselves the only true religion.
The sect is sometimes called the Cooneyites, and while the two have much in common, the Friends and Workers are strictly speaking an offshoot. The Irish founder of the Cooneyites was the Protestant evangelist Edward Cooney, who moved to Mildura and died there in 1960 - hence Victoria's strong membership.
In Canberra in the 1970s and '80s, Elizabeth Coleman's father was a sect elder, which meant Sunday morning worship was held at their home. There were always the same 20 or so people there, she says, no outsiders allowed, very formal and dour. ''No one greeted each other as they walked in. No one talked.''
Women wore long hair pinned up on their heads; short hair is still forbidden on sect women. Long hair is forbidden on men. Television, radio, movies, dancing and jewellery were banned back then, and in most sect families still are. If they do have a TV, it is often hidden in a cupboard.
These Sunday mornings at the Coleman house were about singing hymns and saying prayers and there was also a series of confessions called ''testimonies''. Coleman remembers these mornings as being very closeted and unwelcoming.
Then on Sunday afternoons were the more open ''mission meetings'', still held throughout Australia today as they were then, in public halls, organised by the religion's itinerant ''workers'' - the highly ranked ministers who, in pairs (hence the sect's Two by Two name), go into communities, country towns or regions and stay for up to a year in the homes of lesser-ranked ''friends'' such as the Colemans to do ''the Work''.
None of this is in any way wrong. Unusual, but not wrong. However, when Elizabeth Coleman turned 19 she wanted out because while she remained under the sect's control she was not allowed to believe anything other than what they preached.
Children in the sect are told that if they stray, bad things will happen - a lightning strike, for example, being hit by a runaway bus, or an illness.
''They believe that all other religions in the world are the work of the Devil,'' Coleman says. ''Going to worship at another church or finding another set of beliefs is considered worse than leaving the religion.''
When she did leave - because she wanted to explore other more open kinds of Christianity - she says she was called ''the Antichrist'' by sect members, was sent offensive mail referring to her ''coldness'' and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder on account of the ''fear'' she carried into her decision.
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But what worried her most were the persistent rumours of male ''workers'' and elders sexually abusing young - some very young - sect girls and getting away with it. There was, she says, a culture of secrecy, cover-ups and denial, and a dismissal of outside authority, which meant sex crimes stayed hidden.
ReplyDelete''If something happened between a minister and a young girl, or a young boy, it would be swept under the carpet,'' she says. ''The minister would be moved away and nothing would be said. The families would be outraged - but they would also be scared of being kicked out of the tribe. I have reason to believe this is still going on.''
The sect's method of sending itinerant, celibate ministers into family homes for extended periods of time, she says, was, and still is, dangerous.
The Victorian and Tasmanian leader of Friends and Workers, David Leitch, is known to be close to Chris Chandler, the former senior sect member who Fairfax Media today reveals will face 12 child sex charges in a Morwell court next month.
Chandler grew up in Dromana. He lives now on French Island in Western Port and describes himself as a ''self-employed ecologist''. Last year he came back from 14 years as a ''Christian teacher and counsellor'' in Uruguay and Brazil, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Last June, Chandler and Leitch wrote a letter to all Victorian sect members announcing Chandler would step down ''from the Work'' because police in Gippsland had begun questioning him about the allegations that have now led to charges involving several alleged victims.
The charges all relate to alleged indecent acts on young girls in the 1970s when Chandler was aged about 20. Some alleged victims were under 12. Chandler claims in the letter he was not a sect member at the time - but he joined only three years later.
Sources say senior members of the sect knew of the allegations that had already been made about him within sect circles at that time, but did nothing. In fact, in 1991 they promoted him to the senior position of ''worker'' - meaning he was travelling throughout Victoria and Tasmania and staying in family homes.
''He was around lots of children from that point on,'' a former sect member says. From 1991 until 2004, Chandler was in Wodonga, Shepparton, Launceston and rural Tasmania.
Sect sources have confirmed that later in his time as a ''worker'', he positioned himself within the sect as a counsellor and a point of contact for victims of child sexual abuse.
''People were drawn to him as an advocate,'' the source says.
Fairfax Media understands that after he announced he was standing down last year because of the police investigation, Chandler attended an overnight sect convention where children were present at Speed, near Mildura, and continues to attend sect meetings at Crib Point near Hastings, the closest town on the mainland to French Island.
The convention at Speed is the biggest in the state; the others are on a farm belonging to the Lowe family - sect stalwarts for several generations - at Thoona near Benalla, in Drouin and also in Colac. In New South Wales the strongholds are at Glencoe, Mudgee and Silverdale.
David Leitch denies sect leaders knew of Chandler's alleged past.
''If that had been the case he wouldn't have been involved in the way that he was.''
Leitch says he does not know if Chandler has continued to attend sect meetings since resigning.
''We would not tolerate any matters that were not upright and in accordance with the teachings of the Scripture,'' he says. ''You might have seen it in the Catholic Church and so on, but we would not tolerate any such stupidity.''
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In 2011 another senior Victorian ''worker'', Ernest Barry, was convicted in a Gippsland court on five indecent assault charges over four years on a girl, a sect member, in the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteHe pleaded guilty and was sentenced to jail, but was given a suspended sentence on appeal after Melbourne forensic psychologist Wendy Northey - who has also profiled gangland drug trafficker Tony Mokbel for an assessment used by his defence lawyers - gave a psychological profile of Barry to the court.
Police say they knew of another 12 alleged victims, but could not lay further charges against Barry, who now lives in Warrnambool, because the additional alleged victims would not come forward or press charges. Police also say David Leitch wore a wire to help convict Barry.
Leitch says he ''greatly assisted'' police in their investigation - to improve the sect's image, sect sources say - but he declined to confirm whether he recorded conversations with Barry for the police. ''I don't think that's a proper question to be putting to me,'' he said.
When Chris Chandler was a ''worker'' in Wodonga in 1995, the co-''worker'' with him in family homes was Ernest Barry.
Then last year - this time in South Australia - the issue of child sexual abuse emerged in the secret sect again. A South Australian ''worker'', who has now moved to Victoria, alleged to David Leitch that another fellow ''worker'' had been allegedly sexually abusing children.
Leitch sacked the worker who raised the allegations because he says the allegations were not true and he knew they were not true because he investigated them himself.
''I investigated with the actual people involved, with the people who were supposed to be the victims. They said nothing happened. [The worker] brought forward false child sexual abuse allegations and he was removed from his posting.''
Leitch says if further allegations against sect members were raised he may or he may not tell the police.
''First I would assess how genuine the allegations are. I wasn't going to involve police in that other case because I know it was totally wrong. That would be a waste of resources and it's not common sense, it's stupidity.''
In the Bible, Matthew 10 sets out much of what the sect believes. In it, Jesus sends out his disciples to cleanse the world of ''impure spirits''. Jesus ordered them to go with few belongings and seek out the homes of worthy persons to ''let your peace rest on it''.
But ''be on your guard'', Matthew 10 says, and ''when they arrest you do not worry about what to say or how to say it … for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.''
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A former Victorian sect member now living in NSW says that during her time in the sect as a child and teenager it was ''95 per cent wonderful'', but the older she got and the more aware she became she realised the clandestine culture she was born into was ''misguided''.
ReplyDelete''The culture fosters generational abuse,'' she says. ''There's little knowledge of legal matters, there's a real naivety about the wider world. Workers were highly trusted and held in the highest esteem. They had absolute authority. Worship was and still is highly conservative.''
As young sect members got older, she says, they could feel trapped and silenced. In 1994 at Pheasant Creek near Kinglake, a 14-year-old girl, Narelle Henderson, and her 12-year-old brother Stephen, shot themselves with a rifle to avoid attending a four-day sect convention.
Narelle's suicide note read: ''We committed suicide because all our life we were made to go to meetings. They try to brainwash us so much and have ruined our lives.''
That year the then leader of the sect in Victoria, John ''Evan'' Jones, then 84 years old, made a statement to police at Surrey Hills in Melbourne confirming he knew the children, but adding: ''I cannot for the life of me think of any reason why they would do such a thing.''
His statement said the sect was ''financially well-off'', with donated money controlled by a trust fund of three elders. Jones died in 2001 and is buried at Narracan East cemetery in Gippsland.
David Leitch declined to elaborate on the sect's financial affairs now, but sources said it is still well-off, with money held in private bank accounts rather than a trust, to pay for senior members' overseas missions.
In New Zealand and the United States the sect has registered companies called either United Christian Assemblies or Christian Conventions, but no such companies exist in Australia.
A heavily redacted submission to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious groups by an organisation called Wings - an online group of former members - says the sect is ''haphazard'' in dealing with allegations from within its ranks and ''the main focus has been on protecting the reputation of the Workers and not on helping victims''.
(The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse began in Sydney last week.)
According to the submission, contact by sect leaders with victims has been minimal and ''threatening, unwelcome and intimidating'', according to Wings' submission. Victims are discouraged from making contact with police or lawyers.
One recent victim, the submission says, was asked if she ''really wanted to open that can of worms'' when seeking advice about what to do; another victim was told by sect leaders to ''heal herself in silence''.
Elizabeth Coleman, who now works at a Christian school in Canberra, says speaking out was considered the gravest of betrayals in the sect. ''You would be widely seen as selling the group out.''
But like all whistleblowers, she knew about the secrets within and knew they needed to be revealed.
http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/1793857/friends-and-enemies-truth-and-lies/
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE DISCUSSES "THE CULT WITH NO NAME" THAT IS THE SUBJECT OF THE BLOG POST AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE.
ReplyDeleteCriteria for Recognizing a Religious Sect as a Cult
by Roger E. Olson, Patheos May 21, 2015
Note: If you are pressed for time and cannot read the whole essay below, feel free to skip to the end where I list 10 criteria. The essay describes my own history of interest in and research about “cults” and new/alternative religious groups.
Developing Criteria for Recognizing a Religious Sect as a “Cult”
Many religious scholars eschew the word “cult” or, if they use it at all, relegate it to extreme cases of religious groups that practice or threaten to practice violence. “Extreme tension with the surrounding culture” is one way sociologists of religion identify a religious group as a cult. By that definition there are few cults in America. No doubt they still exist, but when one narrows the category “cult” so severely it tends to empty the category.
In the past, “cult” was used by theologians (professional or otherwise) to describe groups that considered themselves either Christian or compatible with Christianity but held as central tenets beliefs radically contrary to Christian orthodoxy as defined by the early Christian creeds (and for some the Reformation statements of faith). Given the diversity of Protestantism, of course, that was problematic because it opened the Pandora’s Box of deciding what is “orthodoxy.”
A Supreme Court justice once said that he couldn’t define “pornography” but he knew it when he saw it. Many evangelical Christian writers of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, couldn’t quite define a “cult” but clearly thought they knew one when they saw (or read about) one. One evangelical radio preacher published a book on the “marks of a cult.” He was not the only one, however, to attempt to help people, in his case evangelical Christians, identify groups that deserve the label “cult.” Many have made the attempt. In the 1950s and 1960s (and no doubt for a long time afterwards) “cult” tended to mean any heretical sect—judged so by some standard of orthodoxy. That standard often seemed to be little more than a perceived “evangelical tradition.” Some anti-cult writers called the Roman Catholic Church a “cult.” Many labeled the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints a cult. One controversy erupted among fundamentalists and evangelicals when a noted evangelical anti-cult writer published an article arguing that Seventh Day Adventists are not a cult. Most Protestants had long considered Adventism a cult—theologically. (Just to be clear: I do not.)
Still today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a difference exists about the word “cult.” It is used in many different ways. Following the trend among sociologists of religion most journalists tend to use the label only of groups they consider potentially dangerous to the peace of community. Theology rarely enters that discussion. Still today, many fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals use the label “cult” to warn fellow believers away from religious (and some non-religious) groups that espouse doctrines they consider heretical—even if the groups pose no danger to the peace of the communities in which they exist.
Psychologists often regard any group as a cult insofar as it uses so-called “mind control techniques” to recruit and keep members. Sociologists of religion quickly point out that most religious groups could be accused of that depending on how thin one wishes to stretch the category of “mind control.” Would any religious group that claims members who leave are automatically destined for hell using “mind control?” Some psychologists have said yes to that question. Sociologists of religion point out that would make many peace-loving groups cults.
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The debate over the meaning of “cult” has gone on in scholarly societies for a long time. Now it has settled into an uneasy acknowledgement that there is no universally applicable, standard definition. But there is a general agreement among scholars, anyway, that “cult” is a problematic word to be used with great caution. Calling a religious group a “cult” can mean putting a target on it and inviting discrimination if not violence against it. For that reason many religious scholars prefer the label “alternative religion” for all non-mainstream religious groups. My own opinion is that has its merits, especially where there is no agreed upon prescriptive standards or criteria for determining religious validity, where no idea of normal or orthodox is workable—as in a diverse context such as a scholarly society. Even that label, however, assumes a kind of norm—“mainstream.” If postmodernity means anything it means there is no “mainstream” anymore. But religion scholars cannot seem to abandon that concept.
ReplyDeleteI have more than a scholarly interest in the concept “cult.” For me it is personal as well as professional. It’s professional because, over the thirty-plus years of my career as a theologian and religion scholar I have taught numerous classes on “cults and new religions” in universities and churches. I’ve spoken on the subject to radio interviewers—especially back when “cults” were all the rage in the media (after the “Jonestown” and “Branch Davidian” and similar events happened). I’ve published articles about certain “alternative religious movements” in scholarly magazines and books. While rejecting so-called “deprogramming” practices, I have engaged in sustained discussions with members of groups about their participation, even membership, in groups their families and friends considered cults—to help them discern whether their participation was helpful to them as Christians and as persons.
It’s personal because I grew up in a religious form of life many others considered a cult. And I had close relatives who belonged to religious groups my own family considered cults.
The professional and the personal came together recently—again. I became acquainted with a man who grew up in (but has left) a religious group to which one of my uncle’s belonged. My uncle’s religious affiliation was always a bit of a sore spot in my large and mostly evangelical family. (I say large because when they were all alive I had sixty-five first cousins. That’s a large family by most standards. I remember family reunions where over a hundred people attended and they were all fairly closely related. And that was only one side of my family!) Among my close relatives (aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins) were members and ministers of many relatively non-mainstream religious groups. But my uncle stood out as especially curious to me and to my parents (and, no doubt, many of his siblings). At family reunions, when prayer was said over the meal, he would get up and walk away and turn his back on us. My father explained that his brother believed praying with unbelievers was wrong. So I set out to discover more about my uncle’s and cousins’ religion. My uncle would not talk about his religious affiliation with anyone in our family, so he was not a source of information about it. (My father knew some about it because he was “there” when his brother converted to the group.) Over a period of years I discovered some fairly reliable information about the group even though it is somewhat secretive. The group exists “off the radar” of most people including many religion scholars, but researchers have labeled it the largest house church movement in America and possibly the world.
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Some have called it the church without a name because its adherents and leaders give it no name but only call themselves “Christians,” “the Truth,” and “the Brethren.” (It has some similarities and possible historical connections with the Plymouth Brethren but is not part of that movement.) They have no buildings, no schools, no publisher, no headquarters. They believe they are the only true Christians, but they live peacefully among us and pose no physical threat to anyone. They do not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ or the Trinity, but they use the King James Version of the Bible only.
ReplyDeleteMy acquaintance who grew up in the group asked me if he grew up in a cult. (His parents still belong to it.) I found that difficult to answer because of the many definitions of “cult.” Which definition should I pull out of my religion scholar’s/theologian’s grab bag of labels? I couldn’t give him a clear answer. “It depends on how one defines ‘cult’” is pretty much all I could say. I don’t think that satisfied him. It doesn’t satisfy me.
Certainly my family thought my uncle belonged to a cult, but that started me thinking, even as a teenager, what “cult” meant. At school I had been told by friends who were fundamentalist Baptists that my church was a cult. I began to conduct what research I could into the concept of “cult” and found two radically different but contemporary treatments of the concept. One was Marcus Bach, a well-known and highly respected scholar of religion who taught religious studies for many years at the University of Iowa. (I think he founded the university’s School of Religion.) I read every book by him I could get my hands on and they were many. Eventually I had the privilege of meeting him in person and having a brief conversation with him. Bach grew up Reformed, became Pentecostal, and eventually ended up in the Unity movement. His book The Inner Ecstasy tells about his religious pilgrimage in vivid detail. He wrote many books especially about what scholars now call “alternative religions” in America and it was from him that I first learned about most of them—everything from New Mexico “Penitentes” to The Church of Christ, Scientist. I was especially fascinated by his descriptions of Spiritualism—the religion focused on séances as the central sacrament. He claimed that at one séance he did actually have a conversation with his deceased sister and asked the medium questions that only his sister would be able to answer—from their childhood. The apparition answered his questions correctly. He drew no metaphysical conclusions about that, which was typical of Bach. He was interested in, fascinated by, alternative religious movements and groups but held back from prescriptive judgments of any kind.
The opposite book was by a Lutheran pastor named Casper Nervig and the title tells much about his approach to this subject: Christian Truth and Religious Delusions. In it I discovered that the Evangelical Lutheran Church was the “church of truth” and that both my uncle’s religion and my family’s were “religious delusions”—tantamount to “cults.”
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This launched me on a lifelong search to understand so-called “cults” and “alternative religious movements.” Had I grown up in a cult? Was the faith of my childhood and youth an alternative to some mainstream religion of America? We considered ourselves evangelical Protestants, but I discovered many religion scholars (including Bach) considered us “alternative” and even some evangelicals (to say nothing of mainline Protestants and Catholics) considered us a cult.
ReplyDeleteAs a passionate Pentecostal Christian in junior high school and high school I was relentless teased, even sometimes bullied, by schoolmates who belonged to many different religious traditions. I was called a “holy roller” and “fanatic.”
So my acquaintance’s question has often been my own: Did I grow up in a cult? Apparently it depends on what “cult” means.
When I taught courses on cults and new religions in universities and churches I often began by telling my students and listeners that “nobody thinks they belong to a cult.” I also pointed out that if the concept “cult” (in our modern sense) had existed in the second century Roman Empire Christians would have been called “cultists.” (Of course the word “cultus” did exist but simply meant “worship.”) We should be very careful not to label a group a “cult” just because it’s different from what we consider “normal.”
My preference has become to not speak of “cults” but of “cultic characteristics.” In other words, religious groups are, in my taxonomy, “more or less cultic.” I reserve the word “cult” as a label (especially in public) for those few groups that are clearly a threat to their adherents’ and/or public physical safety. In other words, given the evolution of the term “cult” in public discourse, I only label a religious group a cult publicly insofar as I am convinced it poses a danger to people—beyond their spiritual well-being from my own religious-spiritual-theological perspective. To label a religious group (or any group) a “cult” is to put a target on its back; many anti-cult apologists still do not get that.
On the other hand, at least privately and in classroom settings (whether in the university or the church) I still use the label “cult” for religious groups that display a critical mass of “cultic characteristics.” Of many non-traditional groups, however, I prefer simply to say they have certain “cultic characteristics” rather than label them cults. And, in any case, I make abundantly clear to my listeners that if I call a group a cult, I am not advocating discrimination, let alone violence, against them. In the case of those groups I label cults publicly I am advocating vigilance toward them.
So what are my “cultic characteristics”—beyond the obvious ones almost everyone would agree about (viz., stockpiling weapons with intent to use them against members or outsiders in some kind of eschatological conflict, physically preventing members from leaving, harassing or threatening critics or members who leave the group, etc.)? Based on my own long-term study of “alternative religious groups,” here are some of the key characteristics which, when known, point toward the “cultic character” (more or less) of some of them:
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1 Belief that only members of the group are true Christians to the exclusion of all others, or (in the case of non-Christian religious groups) that their spiritual technology (whatever that may be) is the singular path to spiritual fulfillment to the exclusion of all others.
ReplyDelete2. Aggressive proselytizing of people from other religious traditions and groups implying that those other traditions and groups are totally false if not evil.
3. Teaching as core “truths” necessary for salvation (however defined) doctrines radically contrary to their host religion’s (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) orthodoxy broadly defined.
4. Use of conscious, intentional deception toward adherents and/or outsiders about the group’s history, doctrines, leadership, etc.
5. Authoritarian, controlling leadership above question or challenge to the degree that adherents who question or challenge are subjected to harsh discipline if not expulsion.
6. Esoteric beliefs known only to core members; levels of initiation and membership with new members required to go through initiations in order to know the higher-order beliefs.
7. Extreme boundaries between the group and the “outside world” to the extent that adherents are required to sever ties with non-adherent family members and stay within the group most of the time.
8. Teaching that adherents who leave the group automatically thereby become outcasts with all fraternal ties with members of the group severed and enter a state of spiritual destruction.
9. High demand on adherents’ time and resources such that they have little or no “free time” for self-enrichment (to say nothing of entertainment), relaxation or amusement.
10. Details of life controlled by the group’s leaders in order to demonstrate the leaders’ authority.
By these criteria I suspect that I have been involved in religious organizations with cultic characteristics in the past. The college I attended displayed some of them some of the time (depending on who was president which changed often). The first university where I taught displayed some of the characteristics. I remember a faculty meeting where the founder-president (after whom the school was named) called on individual faculty members by name to come forward to the microphone and confess “disloyalty” to him. I would not say, however, that the religious form of life of my childhood and youth was or is a cult or overall has cultic characteristics. There are specific organizations within it that do. My recommendation to people caught in such abusive religious environments is to leave as quickly as possible.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/05/criteria-for-recognizing-a-religious-sect-as-a-cult/
A Nameless, Insular Religious Sect Is Being Rocked by a Massive Sexual Abuse Scandal
ReplyDeleteKnown to outsiders as the “Two by Twos,” a little-known community is reckoning with a far-reaching scandal over sexual abuse, accountability, and power.
By Anna Merlan VICE October 12, 2023
The dead man was found in his hotel room, slumped over in a chair. It took six months more before the letter began circulating, accusing him of harboring a deeply disturbing secret when he died.
Dean Bruer died in Government Camp, Oregon on June 21, 2022, in a Best Western motel, embedded in a copse of towering pine trees just off the highway. Several websites covering Bruer’s death have attributed his death to a heart attack; his family did not publicly specify his cause of death in his obituary.
“We have come to the tragic conclusion that Dean Bruer had another side to his life that none of us, except victims, ever witnessed or suspected,” the letter, dated March 20, 2023, read. It was written, according to several people with intimate knowledge of the community, by Doyle Smith, who’d taken over Bruer’s role.
“It has come to the surface in recent months, and more so in recent weeks, that Dean was a sexual predator,” Smith’s letter continued. “We never respect or defend such totally inappropriate behavior among us. There is a very united consensus among us that the only thing to do is to be transparent with all of you for obvious reasons, though this is very difficult. We are very sorry for the hurt this will bring to the hearts of many. Thankfully, he is no longer in a position to hurt anyone.” (Italics his.)
Smith added, “His actions include rape and abuse of underage victims. He totally abused his authority as an overseer in order to control, manipulate and threaten his victims. We are strongly recommending our staff look at the Ministry Safe Program and possibly other venues that help understand, recognize, and prevent such problems.”
Smith is, as Bruer was, a member of an insular and nameless Christian sect often known to outsiders as the Two by Twos. (Smith did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News. His letter has been reprinted on at least four different websites set up for current and ex-members of the sect.)
The name is drawn from the practice that its homeless, itinerant preachers—known as “workers”—follow, traveling in pairs and sleeping in the houses of congregants. The church has existed for over 100 years, although many of its members believe its lineage stretches back directly to Jesus Christ; members of the community often say they follow “the Truth” or “the Word,” or simply refer to themselves or one another as “professing.” Cherie Kropp, an expert on the church’s history, estimates that in 2022 membership was about 75,000 worldwide, a decline of about 50 percent from its peak in the early 1980s. There are members all over the world, mostly concentrated in English-speaking countries, including the U.S., Canada and Australia. Some former believers describe themselves as having been in “a cult,” while others do not.
Workers and overseers are meant to be celibate, and are viewed as profound spiritual authorities, seen as intermediaries between ordinary believers and God. Members of the church believe in what’s called “exclusivity:” the idea that the church is the only true one, and that workers and overseers, who direct them, are the only way to salvation. Prayer meetings happen in people’s homes and, occasionally, at large conventions. Overseers manage swaths of territory that, in the United States, often comprise multiple states. There are no good records on the number of overseers worldwide, but former members say there are fewer than 10 senior overseers in the U.S. When he died, Bruer was the overseer for Oregon, controlling the finances for workers in that state and where they were sent to preach.
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For an overseer to be accused of sexual misconduct—or even sexual activity, given that workers are meant to be celibate—was already a serious scandal. As Smith’s letter began circulating through the community, though, the accusations spread too, rippling outward as in a pond that has been suddenly and violently disturbed. People began coming forward to say that Bruer was not the only one, and that they, too, had been subject to sexual abuse by workers, overseers, and elders in the community. Many said that they had been sexually abused as children, talking for the first time of being subjected to misconduct in their own homes by workers who’d been allowed to stay with their families, or at conventions where they were surrounded by people who were supposed to protect them.
ReplyDeleteThe Bruer letter, as it is known in the church, spurred a massive sexual abuse scandal and an equally profound reckoning, driven largely by women, many of whom are survivors themselves.
The Bruer letter, as it is known in the church, spurred a massive sexual abuse scandal and an equally profound reckoning, driven largely by women, many of whom are survivors themselves. Dozens more workers and overseers have been accused of past sexual abuse towards adults or children, with some of the accusations going back decades. Calls for the alleged abusers—as well as those who failed to stop them—to step down have grown louder and louder. In some territories, the accused workers have “left the work,” as the terminology goes; in others, leadership has ignored the scandal, or outright declared that nothing will change. In one instance, an overseer told his territory in a letter that he would only step aside when called to do so by God.
The power held by workers and overseers has led some advocates to say that addressing the deep-rooted sexual abuse problem in the church will require nothing less than changing the doctrine of the church itself. They argue that workers and overseers must be removed from their central roles in the faith, stripping them of the intense spiritual and social power that seems to have contributed to the culture of fear and silence around their abuses.
Both current members and people who have left the church have played a role in advocating for the rights of survivors and for transparency about what’s going on, and are said to be seeking justice through both criminal and civil court processes, according to people familiar with the situation. They’ve also helped believers literally find the words for what happened to them, in a faith where many things go unsaid.
But survivors also face a simple logistical issue in seeking justice: The religion isn’t registered as an official entity, has no formal structure, and—on paper, anyway—no leadership to speak of. Lawyers are said to have declined to take on survivors’ civil lawsuits, and it remains exceedingly rare for the alleged abusers, or those who protected them, to be criminally charged, though there are exceptions.
As it stands, some survivors and advocates are working on a far more basic task: creating a paper trail to try to figure out where abusers worked, when, and who might have known about their misconduct. And those still in the faith are examining the prospect of radically reimagining what the religion could look like, to make it safer for children growing up within it.
“It’s about time that all of this comes out in the open,” one survivor of childhood sexual abuse, T.S., told VICE News. (She asked that we refer to her by her initials.)
“There are so many secrets in this religion,” she added. “Too many.”
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Selkie Hope grew up in the church, in a very literal sense. Their father was the fourth or fifth generation of believers in the family, and when Hope was a teenager, their overseer asked the family to move from Oklahoma to Missouri and take over what’s known as a “convention grounds”—a large property, often farmland, where the faithful periodically gather for days-long meetings to listen to workers preach, something known as “having fellowship.” Hope remembers a flock of people descending on the grounds just before their annual convention to meticulously prep and clean.
ReplyDeleteAt around age three, Hope says, they were sexually abused by the son of their parents’ closest friends. “I didn’t have the words to understand what had happened,” they have written, “and when I told my parent, they told me it was just a disgusting dream and not to talk about it again.” (For years, in fact, they thought they’d been closer to age 5 when they were abused, until quite recently, when piecing together a timeline with their parents.) At age 12, they have written, after being forced to stay with the same man for an evening while their parents were at an event, the abuse happened again.
Hope left the church in their early 20s after getting married; they reasoned that it would be more acceptable for them to stop attending church if their spouse wouldn’t let them go. Otherwise, they say, “I was afraid that I would get excommunicated by my family.”
In the aftermath of the Dean Bruer letter, Hope became involved in advocating for the rights of sexual abuse survivors in the church; with several other people, they founded Voices for the Truth, a non-profit offering advocacy, education, and resources for former and current members of the church. After years of a somewhat distant relationship with their family, that’s all changed recently, they said.
“Since this news broke, I have probably spent 10 hours a week on the phone with my parents, talking to them about how to talk to their overseer and how to press for changes.”
Thus far, prominent workers and overseers within the sect have not responded to media reports about the widening abuse scandal. A journalist for the Daily Dot, whose family belongs to the church, wrote a deeply reported piece about the situation; several overseers within the church did not respond to her request for comment.
Similarly, several workers and overseers named as abusers in internal letters circulating within the religion did not respond to requests for comment from VICE News. Nor did people who have admitted to knowing about widespread child sexual abuse within the church, and who put what they knew in writing in messages they sent out to their congregations.
Those letters have ranged from apologetic to defiant. Merlin Affleck, an overseer in Canada, wrote an unusually frank and raw letter to his flock in May of this year, apologizing for not knowing how to talk about sexual abuse.
“In hindsight I realize more than ever that I was in over my head and floundering as I was trying to understand and get up to speed with CSA,” Affleck wrote, using an acronym for child sexual abuse. “I do want to apologize to victims amongst us for my lack of understanding and the additional pain that this has caused them. I truly am sorry.”
In the letter, Affleck also announced the rollout of an updated “Child Safe Policy,” purportedly designed to keep children safer from sexual abuse within the church and help survivors. It pledged “better communication” and a commitment to keep conventions safe from child abuse, but notably did not lay out a legal framework for how child sexual abuse might be reported to law enforcement. Sources within the church say that going to the police has often been tacitly or overtly discouraged.
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“I hope we all can work together to find a way through these issues in a more united way,” Affleck added. “We are aware that our enemy’s most effective tool is wedge-creating divisiveness.”
ReplyDeleteDespite the nominal lack of structure in the church, there are three men who insiders say have a special degree of power: Ray Hoffman, Dale Shultz, and Barry Barkley. Hoffman is the informal leader of the eastern half of the United States, having taken over for Barkley, according to people well-informed about the church’s structure, while Shultz controls the Western half of the U.S. and Canada. (All did not respond to repeated requests for comment from VICE News.)
“We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as we have been in the past.”
A victim advocate group published a timeline in July, laying out what they allege were the decisions made by all three men over the years in response to various allegations of abuse within the territories they control. In a town hall meeting in June, though, Hoffman specifically denied having downplayed abuse or moved alleged perpetrators, telling the room, “If people can prove that I knowingly moved a perpetrator to another field I will happily step down, I will happily step down, I will go to jail, I’m not afraid of jail. I don’t think it would be wise to step down off the suggestion of one person.”
Letters the men have sent to their congregants have also been posted online, typically soon after they’re sent.
“The Master is purging His family and we know He wants us to care for the victims,” Hoffman wrote in a June letter, which was posted on one of several websites for current and ex-members of the church. “We want to be willing for this purging and remain on the Vine so the fruit of His efforts could come forth to make us more ready for our Bridegroom’s return. We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as we have been in the past.”
Despite pleas for unity from some overseers, divisiveness certainly exists, in spades; the situation within the church right now can best be summarized as “chaos,” said Abbi Prussack.
Prussack and her husband Mike grew up in the church, the children of families who’d belonged for generations. At 21 and 19, respectively, they married. It didn’t take long before they realized that neither of them truly felt connected to the church’s teachings, or faith in general.
“We don’t remember who even said it,” Abbi told VICE News—only that one day, one person turned to the other and said, in essence, ‘When you pray, do you actually get a response, for real?’”
Now 35 and 34, with three children, the Prussacks and another couple, Kyle and Kari Hanks, run a Facebook group for former members to connect. It’s one of several such groups. The group was lighthearted until the scandal broke; then it became a space for information and disclosure, with even current members joining to get the information they felt church leadership was not giving to them. Abbi eventually helped to co-found Voices for the Truth, the non-profit advocacy group.
Other groups have also been very active in pushing for alleged perpetrators to be removed from positions of power, if they are workers or overseers, or asked not to attend meetings, if they’re ordinary members of the religion accused of abuse. One major voice is Advocates for the Truth, founded by three women. One is Cynthia Liles, a private investigator and a former member of the religion who has investigated alleged abuse within major institutions including the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church. Her cofounders are Sheri Autrey and Lauren Rohs, both survivors of sexual abuse within the religion who’ve written publicly about their stories. (Members of Advocates for the Truth declined to comment on the record about their work when reached by VICE News.)
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In emails from Liles that have been posted on the ex-member message boards, she excoriated church leadership for failing to take action against alleged abusers, reminding them they had both a legal and moral obligation to do so.
ReplyDelete“Society expects institutions to keep their communities safe—especially the children,” she wrote in one such letter. “You may say, ‘Oh, he's an old man and he's in a wheelchair,’ or ‘he's not in meetings with children.’ To the victims, that shows you are standing with the alleged perpetrator and not with them. In addition, I have worked on cases where perpetrators were still abusing children well into their 80's. Pedophilia is not something that goes away with old age.”
A church with such widespread sexual abuse echoes for generations, survivors say. “People don’t know what boundaries are,” said T.S., the childhood-abuse survivor. “They don’t know how to have a relationship where they aren’t minimized or negated. They’re just prey. They have it written all over them.”
“A lot of us felt for a long time that something was wrong,” says Selkie Hope, the Voice for the Truth co-founder and member. “And maybe we even experienced that ourselves. But there’s such a focus on if something bad happens it’s your fault because you don’t have the right spirit. All of us internalized it.”
But even with an enormous and multifaceted outcry, the issues in forcing structural change in the church are obvious.
“Every overseers’ area is dealing with this differently,” Abbi Prussack said. “They actually had an overseer meeting, which is unusual, and had a child sexual abuse advocate speak to them, who was from outside the church. That was a new concept.”
“There are a lot of overseers right now who are being asked to step down, and nobody can make them.”
But as people connected to the church understand it, Prussack said, the result of the overseers’ meeting was that they agreed “there wasn’t going to be a unified policy” in how they responded to the abuse allegations.
“There are a lot of overseers right now who are being asked to step down,” she added, “and nobody can make them.”
It’s also difficult to track any history, including things as basic as where workers have been and when, making abusive ones hard to trace. Lists are released periodically that say who a worker’s “companion,” or the other worker they’ll be traveling with, is. These are always of the same gender, with one person usually being younger and the other older.
Historically, members have been advised to burn the lists after receiving an updated one, Abbi Prussack says. “So there’s no centralized information anywhere. I’ve been trying to compile lists of where people have been, pictures so people can put faces to names and it’s so hard to fill in those gaps because those lists are gone. There’s no accountability. We can’t prove that so-and-so was in Alabama this year. And we don’t know who stayed where night by night.”
The Prussacks say they now have a decent number of lists, and have developed an understanding of troubling patterns—for instance, when someone works in one state, and then pops up soon after in another, or even in another country entirely.
“Someone who’s been moved several times, that’s a red flag,” Abbi said. When she and her husband watched Spotlight, the film about the Boston Globe uncovering the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal in part by tracking where pedophile priests were sent, they both recognized that they were tracking similar alleged patterns.
In the United States, there have also been a handful of criminal cases against workers and overseers. A website, Workers Sect, has a list of criminal charges brought against people it claims were workers and overseers between 1997 and 2016.
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While some survivors are grappling with how to move forward, other people who grew up in the church are trying to answer even more basic questions about their own histories—ones that, to date, they say the church authority figures have not helped with.
ReplyDeleteOne such person is T.S., the survivor who spoke to VICE News. When she arrived in the United States as a young child, she was in a state of terror. She was born and raised in the 1970s on Pohnpei, part of the island nation of Micronesia. As was common in the region at the time, her mother had gone abroad to work, and she was left with her grandparents. A white family from the United States arrived; they were part of the church, there on a sort of missionary-cum-sightseeing trip. Their guide was a man named John Mastin, a worker based in Pohnpei for many years.
The family decided that they wanted to adopt a boy and a girl from the area, T.S. told VICE News. When she was just three years old, she was sent to the United States to live with them, with Mastin and at “his suggestion and facilitation,” she says. It’s a situation she doesn’t feel her mother was fully informed about, as she wasn’t residing on Pohnpei at the time; an aunt and uncle signed her adoption papers. Some of her cousins were also eventually sent to the U.S., a situation which she thinks was sold to their parents as a way to allow their children to get the benefit of an American education, rather than a permanent placement; some of the cousins, she said, were “bounced around from family to family.”
When T.S. arrived at her new family’s doorstep, after weeks of being in Mastin’s care, “I just remember being completely terrified of men and my new dad,” she said. “The story my family always tells is that I would run and hide and cry. I was terrified of men.” She remembers hiding underneath a ping pong table, cowering in fear, and of her new adoptive father holding her forcibly in his lap to try to cure her fear of men, which only made it worse.
Today, T.S. is clear that while she has no memory of it, she believes she was sexually abused by Mastin when she was left in his care, and that some of her cousins were abused by him as well. (When reached by phone, Mastin hung up as soon as I identified myself as a journalist. Over the course of a week, he did not respond to a detailed phone message or to text messages my editor and I sent seeking comment on the allegations outlined in this story.)
“Although my little toddler brain protected me from actually remembering what has happened to me,” she said, “with my body’s visceral reactions and the way that sexual abuse presents as you grow older, I have no doubt in my mind that I was abused sexually as well.”
This year, T.S.’s suspicions given more weight by a letter sent to church members by a group of three overseers, informing them that Mastin had admitted to sexually abusing a child during his time on Pohnpei.
“We have recently received other similar allegations from victims and their families which indicates a troubling pattern,” the letter added.
For T.S, it was a new outrage: The letter also said that the overseers were “in touch with some who have connections on Pohnpei and offering our support to those involved.” That did not include her, or her family, T.S. said: “Never once have I or any of my family on the island side been contacted.”
The situation strengthened her belief that the church is fundamentally sick, she said, that people need to “amputate themselves from this rotten core.”
“I feel as if people will need to walk away from this structure completely and cut all ties with it in order for it to die,” she said. “Create your own.”
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Nothing happening in the church is exactly new. Accusations of abuse have been surfacing for years. For just as long, there’s been a deep logistical and spiritual struggle over how to respond. One of the earliest people in the United States to speak out was a woman named Rebecca Ginestar, who in 1996 released a self-published book detailing what she alleged was a history of spiritual abuse and incest during her childhood in the church.
ReplyDeleteGinestar alleged that her primary abuser was her father, and that she’d tried many times throughout her childhood to disclose his abuse, first by going to a worker who her family knew best. The worker, she alleged in her book, responded, “This could destroy ‘the truth’ as you know it. So, we have to be careful that this information does not get into the wrong hands.’” (Ginestar died in 2013; a surviving family member acknowledged an initial request for comment from VICE News but did not respond to subsequent messages.)
Years before the Bruer letter, believers in Australia were also rocked by a similar sexual abuse scandal. In 2019, 60 Minutes Australia ran an aggressive expose which claimed that senior members of the religion in the country were ignoring child sexual abuse, shunning those who spoke out about being victimized, and accused the religion of exercising “cult-like control” over its members. Members of the church in Australia have found one another through TikTok, where they frequently give updates on the latest overseers to step down, or refuse to do so.
Other cases hint at how long these abuses have been going on. In 2016, a former worker in Ireland was convicted of sexually abusing a boy whose parents’ home he’d stayed at in the 1970s. In 2013, a longtime Michigan overseer named Jerome Frandle was convicted of failing to report abuse and sentenced to several days in jail and a $733 fine.
In a neat bit of foreshadowing, during a court hearing in 2012, Frandle’s defense attorney Thomas Lessing argued that Frandle wasn’t in a position of power, given the sect’s namelessness and decentralization.
“There is no unified structure,” Lessing said. “There is no unified chain of command. There, in fact, is nothing.” The prosecution, he added, “wanted to show [Frandle] had some level of authority or some level of supervisory ability in this ‘organization,’ but they can’t even identify the name of the organization that he somehow has authority for.”
Another worker, Bruce Waddell, was convicted in 2010 of molesting a seven-year-old girl while staying with her family; outside the courthouse, he told a reporter from the Saskatoon StarPhoenix that he’d previously offended against other children, and that the matter had been handled without the involvement of police.
“There’s been other victims but that’s been looked after,” Waddell said, according to a report by journalist Betty Ann Adam. “We looked after the others before,” he said, adding, “Everybody forgave me. The ones that I did, the parents forgave me. We believe in repentance and forgiveness.”
Adam also reported that Waddell specifically told him parents of the other children didn’t want to go to the police:
“They didn’t want to go to the law of the land,” he told her. “They wanted to leave it in God’s hands.”
Workers traveling in pairs and other rules and conventions of the church are the process of years of evolution, according to Cherie Kropp. Some of them have a clear scriptural basis, while others do not.
“In the beginning,” she told VICE News, “their only goal was to make converts to Christ.”
Kropp is an author and the foremost living historian of the history of the church; she grew up in it herself as a third-generation believer, and left in 1990. Her leaving was the end of a long and extraordinary process, in which she set out to learn as much as she could about the tradition in which she was raised.
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At the time, Kropp was the mother of two young children, living in Oklahoma, where her then-husband was working. She had plenty of time and curiosity, and she’d started to have questions about the church, specifically its roles for women; like others who grew up within it, she’d been taught that she needed to have long hair and forego makeup. She’d also begun to be bothered by the idea that her friends outside the church wouldn’t go to heaven.
ReplyDelete“They were just so godly,” she told VICE News. “It wasn’t right to me.” (Kropp is still a devout Christian, and carefully refers to the church as a “church,” not as a religion, which delineates clearly that she departed a specific organizational structure, not her belief in Jesus. She spoke to VICE News solely about church history, not about the current abuse allegations.)
Kropp had heard third-hand about a 1982 book, now long out of print, titled The Secret Sect by Doug and Helen Parker. It was, at the time, the only book about the history of the religion, and Kropp was desperate to get her hands on it. But in those days, that was far from an easy task, and it took a turn of fate for her to access it: Her in-laws got a mailer from a ministry in Spokane, which contained an ad for the book. They wadded it up and threw it away, but her then-husband fished it out of the trash and handed it to Kropp.
“He was the first historian,” Kropp says of Doug Parker. “I am the second one. They don’t believe in putting their beliefs in writing. They’re proud they don’t have literature. They only have a hymn book and then various little lists here and there, workers and speakers and convention days, that kind of thing. They don’t publish literature about their beliefs or anything, and they’re proud of it.”
What Kropp read in the book astonished her. The religion wasn’t part of a lineage stretching back to Jesus, but had been founded at the turn of the 20th century by a man named William Irvine, who’d previously been part of an evangelical movement called Faith Mission.
“I was just dumbfounded,” Kropp said.
She decided that she had to fact-check the book. “I was going to prove or disprove what he said before I decided what I was going to do with my life,” she said. She contacted the Faith Mission and got a history of Irvine’s time there. She placed long-distance calls, at a time when they cost 25 cents a minute. She contacted newspapers to get certified copies of articles from their archives. What she found, with the exception of a handful of typos and minor details like dates, is that “everything was true and accurate.”
For Kropp, this had far-reaching implications. She stopped attending meetings, and so did her-then husband; her current husband is also a former member of the church. As part of that, she rejected the doctrine of “exclusivity”—the idea that the church was the only true one, and that workers and overseers were the only way to salvation.
In 2022, Kropp published a book, Preserving the Truth, about her scholarship; with the Dean Bruer scandal, she said, she’s been selling multiple copies every day. Relatives and friends who’d seen her as an enemy of the church have begun reaching out again, something she’s found astonishing.
“I never dreamed it would happen,” she said. “My prayer is that people would have a closer walk with God, that this book would enable them to find a closer relationship with God. I don't try to tell them how to do that. They have to work through it on their own and they’re doing that right and left.”
“There’s a core of people that will not talk about it or think about it,” said Bruce Murdoch, “and still pretend that everything’s okay.”
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Murdoch, 70, is a current and lifelong member of the church. He’s also the only publicly-named member of a group of people who run Wings for Truth, a long-running website which publishes educational materials as well as information about the sect’s issues with child sexual assault, including leaked emails from workers and overseers.
ReplyDelete“It’s not a sea change yet, but that’s what we’re hoping for.”
“I would call it a seismic event,” Murdoch said, referring to the Bruer letter. “It’s not a sea change yet, but that’s what we’re hoping for.”
Murdoch has been active in denouncing abuse in the church for the past 15 years; he first recalls hearing someone disclose a story about child abuse online in the 1990s, which affected him deeply, and brought other people “out of the woodwork,” he said, to share their own stories. By the mid 2000s, he said, it became clear “there’s a serious problem here.”
Yet Murdoch has also remained a member of the church. “I haven’t remained in spite of the problems,” he said recently. “I’ve remained because of the problems. I know the church. If anybody is going to be of any help it would be someone inside, someone who understands.”
The scandal in the religion has been so massive that it’s spurred a bit of a tech boom. Earlier this year, Shane Garner and Devon Wijesinghe created Connected and Concerned Friends, a private social network for current and former members to talk about both the current scandal and larger questions about scripture and belief. Meanwhile, other websites, Wings for Truth, are seeing a flood of new traffic.
For many abuse survivors, the events surrounding the Bruer letter have led to a profound sense of betrayal, and a spiritual crisis. This, too, is not precisely new.
“I feel I have been deceived all my life by my parents and the workers,” wrote Rebecca Ginestar, the woman who disclosed her alleged abuse in 1996.
“I am not sure if all the friends know or not, but I refuse to live a lie or be in a system that continues to let the lie continue to thrive,” Ginestar wrote in her book, describing her decision to leave the religion entirely. “One must believe in Him—not in a way or system. It is God’s approval I desire and not the approval of the workers or the friends. God is the one I will stand before on Judgment Day—those in the Truth will not be judging me.”
Former workers have also felt betrayed by the abuse scandal. Jeanie McElroy is a former worker who’s now involved with Voices for the Truth; she says she believes she experienced child sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and struggles to recall significant portions of her childhood. At 20, she says, she was assaulted again, this time by someone she’d been on a date with.
“I brought him back to my house and I was consenting to have sex,” she says. “But I did not consent to what happened. I was raped in my own bed, in my own house.”
At the time, McElroy says, “I was waiting to go into the work, and had no business dating anybody, let alone having sex with anybody. So I was never able to name it as rape.” (In one medical appointment, she disclosed the assault, when asked about it on a checklist of screening questions. The practitioner “didn’t know what do with me,” she says. She didn’t speak about it again for 20 years.)
McEloy was a worker for 11 years, beginning just before she turned 21. For her entire 20s, she lived a homeless and itinerant lifestyle expected of her, her only real stability a spare room at a sibling’s house where she could store keepsakes and spare clothes. When her father died during her sixth year in the work, she received an inheritance. Because workers aren’t supposed to have bank accounts, she bought herself a few essentials—a laptop, a cell phone, and a camera—and then put significant portions back into the work, putting $10,000 towards a hymn book project in Japan.
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Like other workers, McElroy forewent romantic and sexual relationships during her time in the work; the fact that overseers did not —even when not accused of outright abuse—strikes her as rank hypocrisy.
ReplyDelete“To hear about the overseers having decades-long affairs and having babies they didn’t take responsibility for, that pisses us off,” she said, speaking for herself and other former workers. “They’re having their cake and eating it too. Sex is so shamed unless you’re married.”
McElroy also absorbed messages within the church about the role of overseers and workers, especially men, who have inherently more power than women workers, she says. “The workers and ministry are so revered and put on a pedestal,” she says. “You don’t say no to them. You do what they want. They’re the voice of God.” For the most part, she says, “you do what they want and you don’t question it and you don’t tell anybody about it.”
Many other young female workers that McElroy befriended yearned for true connection, she says: love, sex, relationships. That desire for intimacy—both physical and emotional—eventually drove McElroy out of the work. She had fallen in love, an experience that was difficult and confusing, due to the teachings she’d grown up in.
“I think that, with the touch hunger and lack of closeness or intimacy in the ministry, when we have feelings for someone, we feel even more isolated and alone than ever before,” McElroy said. “And when things aren't going well in general in the ministry—misogyny, patriarchy, powerlessness, not having a voice—the pros of leaving outweigh the pros of staying, even considering the stigma and shunning that happens after leaving.”
McElroy began working through her own experiences—both the sexual abuse she believes she experienced as a child, the rape as an adult, and the religious trauma—with the use of alternative healing modalities like quantum healing and “energy work,” which she now also offers to others. Her involvement in Voices for the Truth, she says, has provided another way to help survivors. But she struggles to visualize what change within the church would actually look like. Concrete, structural change, she says, would mean “changing the entire doctrine.”
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While many like McElroy have left, others have, of course, stayed, and are fighting for their vision of the faith. Some families who own convention grounds refused to hold their conventions this year, people familiar with the church say, after being told they would have to invite alleged sexual abusers to participate.
ReplyDelete“There are a lot of people in the church who are talking now,” says Abbi Prussack, questioning things like exclusivity or “talking about losing faith in the institution. There are big topics being talked about, which is massive.”
At the conventions this past August, where groups of several hundreds of the faithful gathered together, there were moments of clear pain and grief, references to the tumult going on just out of view. One man, speaking at a convention in Washington, appeared to grow deeply emotional while speaking to the assembled crowd.
“The last few months,” he told the room, haltingly, “I have been returning to the same few meditations.” He’d been thinking, as he put it, “about the malignancy that we have found in the body, and how I’m part of the body.”
His voice broke slightly as he spoke. “I need to examine myself,” he added, after a pause. “To know what I can do better.”
Other leadership seemed to strike a note of defiance, and a warning about the profound struggle still ahead.
“We have just finished a most wonderful convention season,” an overseer in Alberta wrote to his faithful, after it had concluded. “Our Lord has been so good to us. Perhaps some would have felt there was a ‘crisis’ in the kingdom but that is not happening. This is God’s kingdom and everything is very much under His control.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7zpvm/an-nameless-insular-religious-sect-is-being-rocked-by-a-massive-sexual-abuse-scandal