When I began this blog in 2013, it was an attempt to assist people who were grappling with the task of escaping from fundamentalist/extremist groups.  The target audience were people who had bought into authoritarian styles of church governance, at the same time coming to believe an ideology which, from the outside at any rate, made little sense.  Those who have followed this blog for any length of time will know that I have little time for the arguments of Creationism or many of the strange, even weird, propositions that are required of those who believe that the Bible is ‘true’ in every detail.  I have said more than once that the ‘cure’ for fundamentalist belief systems is to read the Bible text in an environment well away from an authoritarian preacher.  Once the Bible is read for what it actually says, rather than what the preacher says it says, then new possibilities emerge.  Unfortunately, the Bible is far from being an easy read.  Many people who attempt to go it alone find themselves quickly returning to the security of having someone in authority doing the reading the text on their behalf.  The comfort blanket of authoritarian teaching and strong directive church leadership is hard for many to escape.   When faced with a choice between uncertainty, ambiguity and even doubt and the reassurances of ‘bible teaching’, many Christians will always opt for the latter.

Today’s blog wants to explore whether the reason for the attraction of bible churches extends beyond simply being a way of resolving the intellectual challenges posed by the uncertainties of life.  Is the offer of answers to life’s deep questions really sufficient to explain why many people are attracted to authoritarian Christian groups?  Intellectual uncertainty and the need to know ‘truth’ do of course inform the decision of many people to join the more authoritarian churches/groups.  This would apply as much to the school-girls from Bethnal Green joining ISIS as it accounts for the young students finding their way into a Christian Union at University.  As my readers know, I approach this question of authoritarian recruitment from the perspective of those who study cults, whether political or religious.  Some in the academic world see joining a cult as a neutral act; others regard the dynamics of cult membership as posing a potential serious threat to psychological health.  This is not the time to enter this particular debate but merely acknowledge that such disagreements exist.  My perspective is that many religious/political groups are sometimes a source of great harm.  The harm is partly intellectual and partly psychological in nature.  The issue that I want to explore today is the way that some religious activity leads to damage in our capacity to form healthy relationships.

Back in the 1950s the American public was intrigued by the issue of ‘brainwashing’.  Soldiers who had been captured by the Chinese Communists in the Korean War appeared to have fallen under the spell of a kind of mind-control.  Another way of explaining this process was to call it thought-reform.  The writer, Robert Jay Lifton, wrote a highly influential book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, to explore this phenomenon.  His work was deemed to offer also a good explanation of what happened to the victims of cults.  The problem for those who use the brain-washing model to explain what happens to cult-members is that it has proved impossible to define exactly what brain-washing is.  Thus, it has never been an acceptable term in a court of law.  In recent years the law has to some extent caught up with a new term, ‘coercion and control’.   Since 2015, men (and some women) in the UK have been prosecuted for holding their partners in a form of psychological bondage which has not involved physical violence.   Coercion and control remain a good description of what goes on in many authoritarian religious groups.  It may only be a matter of time before a case is brought against such a group for harming a member through such methods. 

The old model of ‘brain-washing’ had one further limitation.  It focused on the individual and his/her mental state.  In other words, religious groups were supposedly harming people by manipulating their imembers’ inner mental processes.  Such arguments have their value and no doubt the cult academic world will continue to debate the problem using this model.  But there is another model which is currently on offer, one which I much prefer.  This model takes the individual cult member and examines the relational context in which they find themselves.  In other words, every individual lives in a context which has been formed by their relationships, both past and present.  The author of a book which explores this relational approach, Daniel Shaw, is a New York psychoanalyst.  In his book, Traumatic Narcissism, he explores the dynamics of cults through examining the narcissism that pervades the inner lives of both leaders and led.  From the perspective of his psychoanalyst practice, he was able to see that the leaders of so-called cults were ‘invariably traumatizing narcissists’.  By this he was describing the way that leader and led were caught up in a destructive cycle of harm.  The leader, the traumatising narcissist, was engaged in a process of ‘feeding’ off the followers in a variety of ways.  He/she might be exploiting them sexually, emotionally or financially.  The followers had, by a process of identification, obtained access to a place of self-esteem which was embodied and articulated by the leader.  His narcissistic messianic pretensions, grandiosity and delusions of power were all shared with the followers as long as they stood close to him.  In the original act of surrender to the leader and his claims, the followers had shed themselves of much, if not all, of their self-determination and core-selves.  The narcissistic dynamic had regressed them to the situation of a needy dependent child.  Escaping from such a situation is no easy matter.  The follower has to reclaim back the personality that had been surrendered to the charismatic/narcissistic leader at the helm of the organisation we describe as a a cult. 

What I have written about recent thinking among cult experts comes close to being a critique of some Christian groups.  Do we recognise the pattern of surrender to a powerful charismatic leader who has all the answers to life’s problems?  When individual Christians cease to think for themselves and let a leader do their thinking for them, are they not entering the dangerous dynamic of narcissistic dependency, a dependency that is so hard to escape?  Shaw’s book is full of wisdom and helpful insight about the way that groups and individuals sometimes behave when bound together in a situation of mutual need.  It has encouraged me to believe that a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a key to unlocking some of the appalling problems in our churches as they struggle to uncover unhealthy dynamics which sometimes afflict leaders and congregations.