Joseph
Joseph L.11 was born in London in the 1950s as a third-generation member of the Exclusive Brethren. The Exclusive Brethren movement was founded in Dublin in 1825 as a fundamentalist evangelical Christian denomination with no officially appointed clergy. The original Brethren focused instead on the inerrancy of the Bible, on the literal existence of heaven and hell, on close studies of scripture, and on isolating themselves from the outside world. Any male Brethren can contribute to religious services (called assemblies) and biblical discussions; however, women are not permitted to do so. Women and girls are not allowed to pray out loud in Brethren assemblies; and once they are married, women’s lives and bodies are under the control of the cult. Married women are not permitted to use birth control, and until recently, they were not permitted to work outside the home. Today, many Brethren women are allowed to work, but only in positions where they do not have any power or influence over men.
The Exclusive Brethren (and their many offshoot branches) promote powerful internal unity with required nightly assemblies, weekly communal meals called The Lord’s Supper, two Saturday morning assemblies, and three assemblies on Sundays. The Brethren firmly separate themselves from worldly outside influences (the official doctrine is called “Separation from Evil”), and frequently distance themselves from anyone who disagrees with them. Joseph reports that, as a result, the Brethren have undergone more than a dozen schisms since 1848, such that there are now over twenty different Brethren branches12 in fourteen countries existing in what Joseph calls “a state of mutual excommunication.” Joseph’s branch, called the Raven/Taylor/Hales group, is headquartered in London and is considered the most strongly separatist of the Brethren’s many competing branches. It is estimated that there are now more than 45,000 members in Exclusive Brethren branches and offshoots worldwide.
Children in Joseph’s Exclusive Brethren branch were raised in their own family units and attended public schools, but they were not allowed to take classes in music, art, literature, Bible studies (Brethren have their own interpretations of scripture that don’t agree with mainstream Christianity), drama, dance, computer studies, evolution, paleontology, geology, sex education, or physical education where revealing clothing was worn.
Joseph recalls that when he was young, he and his family were able to interact with outsiders and neighborhood children. However, a change of leadership in 1959 led to a series of decrees that required members to donate large sums of money to the Brethren, actively shun any dissenters, and end all contact with outsiders. This new leadership enacted many authoritarian and exclusionary changes, so that by 1960, no one in Joseph’s group was allowed to live in a house or apartment that shared walls with non-members, or to share meals or socialize with outsiders. One consequence of these changes was that Joseph lost touch with all of his aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who weren’t in the Brethren.
By the age of nine, Joseph was expected to attend assemblies every evening, plus two meetings every Saturday morning, and three daytime services every Sunday. This made finding time for school or homework very difficult for him.
He dreamed of escaping and living wild in the trees of a nearby forest, and he has fond memories of a teacher who would secretly let him read novels at school (novel reading was strictly forbidden in his group). Joseph was fortunate to be in the last generation of Brethren children who were allowed to go to college, because the relative freedom he found there allowed him to quietly set himself up in the outside world with a small rented apartment and a job. As he met people from other churches and discovered that the Brethren’s ideas weren’t supported by the Bible, he began to question all parts of his cult’s ideology—but only to himself, as questioning and debate weren’t allowed.
Joseph secretly planned his escape by applying for non-Brethren jobs and connecting with outsiders he met at college. He escaped from the group at the age of nineteen and was excommunicated completely, meaning that no one in any Brethren branch was allowed to communicate openly with him for the rest of his life.
Joseph built a life on his own and reconnected with his non-Brethren family, but he didn’t really know them or have much in common with them. When he was twenty, he met a young woman who was also trying to leave the Brethren, and they developed a close and supportive friendship that turned into love, and soon into marriage. Joseph and his fiancée invited both of their families to their wedding, but no one attended. However, a few family members broke their enforced silence and wrote terse notes to let Joseph and his wife-to-be know that their marriage was immoral, worldly, and evil.
After an uncomfortable period of learning to adjust to the outside world, Joseph has lived a good life away from the Brethren. He found an online group of exBrethren, and has been able to share his story with people who truly understand what he went through. However, even though he’s been out for more than forty years, he reports that his feelings of anger, grief, and loneliness have increased rather than decreased over time. As the only immediate family member to have left the Brethren, Joseph has missed all the important life events of his siblings, parents, and grandparents—and sadly, he wasn’t even notified about the deaths of his parents or his grandparents. When he misses them the most, he sometimes imagines talking to them and hearing their voices. Today, Joseph counsels other cult escapees online and in person, and has created a history and genealogy of the Exclusive Brethren and its many combative offshoots.
The Exclusive Brethren and all its competing branches are still active today, but many have finally relaxed their extreme prohibitions against contact with outsiders and non-Brethren family members. The Brethren are considered a New Religious Movement by some religious scholars; however, there is ample evidence of each of the four dimensions of bounded choice in Brethren groups: a strongly transcendent belief system; a severe and demanding authority structure; and powerful systems of influence and control that isolate followers, bind them to the group, and regulate every aspect of their lives.
Lily E.
The Highly Disciplined Martial Artist in the Inner Circle
I wasn’t able to have a normal childhood because I didn’t live in a normal household with normal parents. After I was ten years old, I was out of my parents’ picture. My mom lived in house with other women and didn’t raise me anymore. And my dad lived in a house for the men. And then I lived with another family. It wasn’t normal. I couldn’t do normal things, couldn’t have normal friends, couldn’t go over to anybody’s house, couldn’t even do a normal school project.
Lily
Lily E. was born in Vermont in the 1980s. Her parents were earnest seekers who had converted to Mormonism before Lily was born, but only truly found what they were looking for when they started martial arts training under the direction of a Korean-born woman named Tae Yun Kim. Kim had created her own form of martial arts, called Jung SuWon, which incorporates Korean tae kwon do, spiritual teachings about marshalling and purifying your ki (or chi: your life energy, power, and healing ability), Bible-based studies, and self-help teachings on discipline and success. Kim claimed to have achieved the status of Grandmaster of martial arts in her native Korea (which is disputed); thus, she required her followers to address her as Grandmaster and bow to the many large color portraits of herself that adorned the walls of her martial arts studio.
Lily’s parents became members of Grandmaster Kim’s inner circle (of about forty or fifty people) called the College of Learning when Lily was three years old. When Kim left Vermont to start a larger martial arts training school in Fremont, California, Lily’s parents left everything behind and moved to California to study with Kim and help her build her new school. In Fremont, Grandmaster Kim created very strict living arrangements for her College of Learning followers, segregating men and women into separate household compounds. Lily was one of the few children in the inner circle. While she was allowed to live in the same communal women’s home as her mother until she was ten, Lily was urged not to attach too
strongly to either of her parents. For instance, if Lily wanted to go shopping alone with her mother, Grandmaster Kim had to be asked for permission first.
Grandmaster Kim felt that parental attachments were weakening, and would only get in the way of the acquisition of spiritual purity and martial arts excellence. Lily’s parents were not expected to provide for Lily in any way, so she received care, food, clothing, and even toiletries from other women in the communal home (most of whom had no dedicated time or energy to spend on Lily). Lily remembers feeling very nervous and guilty about using shampoo or eating something from the sparsely stocked refrigerator because nothing truly belonged to her. Lily’s mother soon became Kim’s personal assistant and primary caretaker, and Lily was left on her own most of the time.
Lily began intensive martial arts training at the age of six, and she attended lengthy Jung SuWon classes every weeknight. Grandmaster Kim also personally taught Bible study classes where she subtly suggested a connection between herself and Jesus and took personal credit for bringing her followers to Christ. Daily life for Kim’s followers was strictly controlled: children slept on the floor; constant dietary restrictions were enforced for members of the inner circle; total obedience to Grandmaster was required; and military-style discipline such as doing pushups, running laps, and being berated in public for laziness or alleged wrongdoing were ways that Kim kept members of her inner circle in line.
Lily went to public Christian schools, but she lived a double life. While she wasn’t strictly forbidden to play with other children, Grandmaster Kim continually warned that outsiders were untrustworthy or might even be Satanists. Lily also didn’t know how to explain her home life or training schedule to other kids, or why she had to bow to an enormous portrait of Grandmaster every time Lily came in the door. Her intense nighttime Jung SuWon training also meant that visiting other kids’ homes after school wasn’t feasible. Lily did well in school, but she didn’t form any lasting friendships.
Lily’s parents divorced when Lily was nine (most of the marriages in Grandmaster’s inner circle ended in divorce), and her father left the group a few years later. As was customary in this group, Lily’s father was portrayed very negatively by Grandmaster Kim and other members of the inner circle. (The group habitually portrayed people who left as abusive, evil, or even as child molesters.) Although Lily knew that her father was not an evil man, these attacks made maintaining a relationship with him nearly impossible.
In 1998, when Lily was seventeen, Grandmaster Kim’s group was exposed as a cult on a television program called Inside Edition. After that scandal, child protection agencies investigated the communal houses, and Kim quickly bought the children beds and stocked the refrigerators. For a little while after this exposé, Kim allowed Lily and the other children more freedom, and even allowed friends to come to their homes—but that freedom didn’t last. Grandmaster Kim and members of the College of Learning became even more suspicious of outsiders, and the cult became more isolated, secretive, and paranoid.
Grandmaster Kim encouraged her followers’ children to go to college, but no money was made available for any of them to do so. Lily put herself through state college and lived on campus, where she found some freedom from the group. Nevertheless, she wasn’t able to make her escape until she was twenty-five years old. After Lily left, Grandmaster Kim denounced her as an embezzler and a person with “dark energy,” and even called Lily late one night to tell her that she had a vision of Lily dying in a horrifying automobile accident as a direct result of her disloyalty. Lily knew rationally that this vision was a manipulative tactic meant to punish her, yet she felt frightened and unsettled about driving for years afterward.
Lily’s mother is still the primary caretaker for Kim. Lily’s mother now allows Lily to contact her, but she remains deeply disappointed that Lily left and is uninterested in maintaining a close relationship with her daughter. Lily’s father is now involved in a New Age community, and while he is somewhat more available than her mother is, Lily and her father aren’t close.
Lily found post-cult support in an online group of defectors from the College of Learning (and other similar martial arts cults), and she has been able to make some sense of her early life. She paid off her student loans, and put herself through graduate school to become a legal paraprofessional. Lily now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and no longer practices martial arts.
* * *
In the next four chapters, you will learn about how these cults attracted and then retained our narrators’ families, and how each of the four dimensions of bounded choice combine to create the closed and isolated world of these (and other) cults. We will begin by exploring the dimension that was most alluring for our narrators’ parents or grandparents: the transcendent belief system.
Notes
1.
For more accounts of children raised in the FLDS, see Andrea Moore-Emmett, God’s Brothel (San Francisco: Pince-Nez Press, 2004).
2.
Miles Park Romney (1843–1904), the great-grandfather of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, was the son of one of the founding members of the Mormon Church. Miles was also one of the founders of the splinter Mormon Church colonies in Colonia Juárez and Colonia Dublán, Mexico. Miles and other American Mormons founded the Mexican faction in1885 to continue the practice of plural marriage after it had been outlawed in the United States. Miles Romney had five wives; however, his son Gaskell Romney (Mitt’s grandfather) and his grandson George Romney (Mitt’s father) were not polygamists.
3.
This form of welfare fraud pales in comparison to a multimillion-dollar case pending against imprisoned FLDS leader Warren Jeffs and his brother Lyle Jeffs. According to Federal prosecutors, the Jeffs’s followers in Utah and Arizona were instructed to use their food stamps to buy specific items that were then turned over to the Jeffs to distribute. Followers also spent their food stamp money at cult-run stores without receiving any merchandise. The prosecutors estimate that over twelve million dollars of Federal benefits were diverted and money-laundered by the Jeffs.
4.
See M. Oswaks, “Tiny Tombstones: Inside the FLDS Graveyard for Babies Born from Incest,” Broadly (March 9, 2006). Accessed December 23, 2016, https://broad.ly.vice.com/en_us/article/tiny-tombstones-inside-the-flds-graveyard-for-babies-born-from-incest.
5.
Iris D.’s story is a combination of the life stories of two people who grew up in the TM movement.
6.
Conflicts between the Beatles and Mahesh have been reported over the years, but have not been confirmed.
7.
A review of seventy-five published studies on meditation found that prolonged meditation could provoke “relaxation-induced anxiety and panic; paradoxical increases in tension; less motivation in life; boredom; pain; impaired reality testing; confusion and disorientation; feeling ‘spaced out’; depression; increased negativity; being more judgmental; feeling addicted to meditation; uncomfortable kinaesthetic sensations; mild dissociation; feelings of guilt; psychosis-like symptoms; grandiosity; elation; destructive behavior; suicidal feelings; defenselessness; fear; anger; apprehension; and despair.” See A. Perez-De-Albeniz and J. Holmes, “Meditation: Concepts, Effects and Uses in Therapy,” International Journal of Psychotherapy 5, no. 1 (2000): 49–58.
8.
Maharishi International University, which is now Maharishi University of Management.
9.
Matthew O.’s story is a combination of the life stories of two people who grew up in the Twelve Tribes.
10.
Actors Rose McGowan and River Phoenix (and his siblings) grew up in The Children of God/The Family cult.
11.
Joseph L.’s story is a combination of the life stories of two people who grew up in the Exclusive Brethren.
12.
Garrison Keillor grew up in an American offshoot of the Exclusive Brethren called the Sanctified Brethren. In his autobiography Lake Wobegon
Days (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), Keillor wrote, “We were Sanctified Brethren, a sect so tiny that nobody but us and God knew about it, so when kids asked what I was, I just said Protestant. It was too much to explain, like having six toes. You would rather keep your shoes on” (101). “We were the ‘exclusive’ Brethren, a branch that believed in keeping itself pure by avoiding association with the impure… . Once having tasted the pleasure of being Correct and defending True Doctrine, they kept right on and broke up at every opportunity, until, by the time I came along, there were dozens of tiny Brethren groups, none of which were speaking to any others” (105–6).
2
THE TRANSCENDENT BELIEF SYSTEM
Purity, Perfection, and the Eradication of Individuality
I was told to believe that I was evil, because the Exclusive Brethren believe in the Calvinistic doctrine of original sin, and in a literal heaven and hell. Throughout my childhood I experienced, and still sometimes experience, a strong sense of shame even in situations where I now logically “know” that I have done nothing wrong.
Joseph
Someone who left TM and became ill—we were told that he was meditating with the wrong mantra and how fortunate we were to know the right mantra, to protect ourselves from spiritual injury. There were also people who died or became extremely sick—including my father—because they believed to the core of their being that the true answer was long-term meditation and to use the Maharishi products. Or to pay thousands of dollars for ritual prayer services to be performed in India while the cancer or arthritis, or whatever it was, ate away their body and their money went to Maharishi’s coffers. They were so indoctrinated.
Escaping Utopia Page 5