It is proving more difficult than I expected to make a space of time in this conference to write a blog post. The programme for this Annual Conference for the International Cultic Studies Association is packed tight. I am starting to write this at 3 in the morning at my lodgings (AIRBNB) which are situated some 15 minutes on foot from the conference centre.

This Conference is one occasion in the year when I find a live audience with which to discuss issues of power abuse, partly because most of the attendees have been its victims. The stories that individuals tell have more frequently involved stories about churches whether mainstream or fringe. When I started attending these conferences four years ago in Trieste, the majority of stories seemed to concern actual cults like Scientology, Moonies and Jehovah’s Witnesses. This year Christian groups of various kinds seem to dominate the scene including some that I have never heard of.

Within the world of cult studies there has always been a debate as to whether these groups cause actual harm to their members. Some would like to claim that the suffering of ex-members is exaggerated and that they are telling ‘atrocity tales’ to justify their messed up lives. The suffering they experience is only indirectly linked to what the cult has done to them. The position of the conference is to stand firm against this ‘cult-apologist’ claim. Cults and their leaders do cause considerable damage to many of their followers and the fact that the damage is truly apparent only after they leave does not mitigate the horror of what has happened in many cases. Few people walk away from high demand religious groups without experiencing extensive emotional and spiritual damage.

This year the particular area of damage that I have noticed in the conversations I have had, as well as in the talks is the damage to relationships. One of the legacies of successfully breaking away from a mind-controlling group is to discover that all or most of your blood relationships have been destroyed. This is not because the relative has necessarily stayed behind in the group. It may be a legacy, in the case of a parent, of a child realising that their nurture in the group has deprived them of a normal childhood. The only way they can express their anger is to turn their backs on the parent who has betrayed them. This is an horrific scenario. Healing a single individual whose mind, emotions and social skills have been damaged is one thing. It is quite another to carry all the relatives, parents and children along with you in the radical process of change. So I am meeting people all the time who have made the journey from ‘darkness to light’ but have had to suffer chronic abandonment along the way.

I expect I will have further reflections about Bordeaux but thought that in view of the strange time of night I am writing this to leave my piece at this point. My first presentation on healing was well received and I make my other presentation on the Cathars on Saturday. Meanwhile I am receiving encouragement for the tasks that I am engaged in which is to explore, analyse and interpret the use and abuse of power in the Church. The Cardinal Pell story will need unravelling at some point. I am hoping that one or two members of this Conference will be joining our small band of readers. To them I give a warm welcome

Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I feel compelled to comment on the recent Gibb Report on the crimes of Bishop Peter Ball and the way the church responded. It is less easy for me to write this post as I am en route between home and the ICSA Conference in Bordeaux. This event begins next Wednesday and no doubt I will be reporting on some of what will take place there.

On Thursday when the report by Dame Moira Gibb appeared via the Thinking Anglicans website, I quickly read the entire document. It showed me once again how relevant is our continuing discussion on the issue of power within the church. From my perspective, the facts around Ball’s crimes are now so well known that they need not be further rehearsed. For 20 plus years Ball used his authority as a priest and bishop alongside his personal charisma to take advantage of young men, sexually and emotionally. This personal and institutional power allowed him to indulge in one of the worst types of abuse – sexual abuse.

The shocking parts of the report have been already rehearsed by others. The blindness of the wider Church to the seriousness of, firstly, the rumours, and later the admissions of serious crimes by the Bishop is extraordinary. The former Archbishop, George Carey, has come in for particular censure. He withheld from the police six letters from victims which were received after the Ball’s Caution in 1993. These letters were written either by victims or their parents and were independent of each other. If the police had received them they might have been able to establish a clearer pattern of behaviour by the Bishop. The Archbishop’s response reflected, as we have seen in the Catholic Church, an obsessive defensiveness on behalf of the institution at the expense of affected individuals. There were in 1993 people around who would have been able to advise the Archbishop as to how serious the offences were which Ball had admitted. From the perspective of this blog, George Carey also was showing a complete blindness to the way the dynamics of power were at work in the church. Sexual abuse by a person in authority in the church is likely to have devastating consequences. The power given to church officials, bishops and clergy, is considerable and sensitivity to ways it can be abused should be part of the awareness of everyone. Clearly it was not. Although sex is at the heart of this episode, almost as important is the way that power has been used or misused in the subsequent blanking out of victims. This has been going on since Ball’s Caution in 1993 and reminds us of Joe’s story told last year. It would be possible to write an annotated version of the Report by Dame Gibbs to highlight the numerous examples of power mismanagement revealed in the Report. Each represented an attempt by the church to control bad news. Clearly almost no one from the top down seems to have had an understanding of the different power dynamics that were in play in this tragic episode.

The second shocking part of the story is the way that Ball, assisted it seems by his brother Michael, had no insight into the appalling nature of his actions. It is also hard to believe that the former Diocesan Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, had no knowledge of the rumours about Bishop Ball’s behaviour when Bishop of Lewes. The late Bishop Eric has been previously criticised in an Archbishop’s Visitation to his diocese for the lax moral culture in parts of the Chichester diocese. Under his watch a number of clergy were to practise child abuse, and several of them are serving prison sentences for their crimes. Any level of collusion in the crime of another person is a serious matter. It would appear, according to the Gibb Report that a number of senior clergy stand accused of this failure. Michael Ball, a Bishop of Truro and twin brother to Peter, lobbied for several years to allow Ball to regain a Permission to Officiate. This lobbying was effective and Archbishop Carey is criticised by the Report for giving into the pressure. Ball continued to take confirmations and visit schools right up till 2011. In short no one at the top of the Church of England was prepared to state categorically that, after his Caution and admission of criminal acts, Ball was unfit to be with young people. In subtle ways power was used against the Archbishop himself to overturn a clear case for inhibiting one of his senior clergy. Also, the apparent failure of Bishop Peter to express any remorse, according to the report, is a remarkable fact within the whole sorry saga.

What do I take from reading this report? Apart from being reminded how the church seems to care more about its institutional reputation than individual people, I realise how little insight there is about power operating within the church institution. Power exists in many forms in the church. A danger which is potentially acute arises when charismatic power is combined with institutional power. This was the situation for Ball and there was in him enormous scope for destructive behaviour. This blog has at its aim to be sensitive to all expressions of power in the church. We have identified the power of an infallible Bible. There is also the power of charisma, the power of institutional authority and the power assumed by the male of the species over the female. Within a church all the strands can come together. They are at best untidy but sometimes they form a potentially abusive combination. The people who are best able to tell us how power is operating are not the holders of this power. We need to listen to those who feel bullied, controlled and generally manipulated by the people who use power in the ways we have named above. When we have this fuller insight into the way that church and power coexist, then we may be able to begin to rebuild the institution. We want a church which is life-affirming, encouraging and empowering for all. That sort of church is sadly still a long way off. Reports like the Gibb Report show relatively little insight into the power dynamics in our church on the part of leaders even in the year 2017.

Sir, — The letter from Judith and David Paston (26 May) about St Thomas’s, Norwich, (an HTB plant) raises numerous issues for those of us who are concerned about the weakening of traditional Anglicanism. Clearly, Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), and its offshoots are here to stay as part of the Anglican scene. But there are various grounds for unease, and I want to look at one aspect.

We seem to be losing sight of the importance of ministry and pastoral effectiveness in favour of “mission”. People continue to need the help of the Church in the way in which they negotiate crisis, illness, and death. A preoccupation with financial and attendance statistics seems to shift attention away from the core Anglican business of pastoral care.
STEPHEN PARSONS

This letter appeared in the Church Times last Friday (16th June). I am reproducing the letter as it may interest my readers. They have hitherto been prepared to put up with my prejudices and rants on a variety of topics. One more will do no harm.

The issue that I raise is not whether Holy Trinity Brompton and its offshoots are a good thing. I feel that the jury are still assessing whether Alpha, the teaching course which is the tangible product of this significant church in London, is successfully helping people to find faith. My real grounds for questioning HTB are to do with the use of statistics to evaluate this church. Present methods of assessing church strength are to count how many people attend a church on a particular Sunday. A more important question that I feel should be asked is how many people stay the course as Christians over a significant length of time within an HTB environment. I am asking for a ‘longitudinal’ study. We should take a group of Christians and follow them through the years and see whether the enthusiasm of the twenties for HTB is carried into later adult life.

The book by Alan Jamieson, referred to in the letter, makes some interesting observations. Although he does not talk about the faithful who do remain in ‘high-octane’ churches into their thirties, the implication he makes is that these churches are in fact losing many of their more reflective and intelligent members. Among them are individuals who have served these church as leaders, group enablers and teachers. There is no question but that there was originally a high level of commitment in the first place among the people he studies. What seems to happen is that a highly gifted group of Christians mature beyond the charismatic/Pentecostal style in which they became Christian. Jamieson’s description of the process of maturing is taken largely from the writing of James Fowler. Fowler has written about six stages of faith that may occur in individuals between birth and old age. His model seems to have stood the test of time. At the beginning there is an innocent style of faith which then moves into a stage marked by literalism. This is followed by faith which is uncritical but tribal in nature. One writer compares this stage to the perspective of a fish in a tank. There is only the one perspective to be drawn on as the fish cannot leap out of the tank to view it from the outside.

The final three Fowler stages of faith represent a withdrawal from uncritical acceptance of what one has been taught. Many, if not most Christians, never reach these later stages. The ‘critic’ in the fourth stage is able to handle new perspectives and debates as well scrutinise leadership in their church for example. The later stages involve such things as the ability to cope with mystery and paradox in matters of faith. These sorts of insights will often make them highly disturbing to those who are holding on to a more child-type approach to their faith.

There is of course a lot more which could be said about Fowler and his ideas, but they are beyond this short comment. What can be said is that Fowler gives us a model through which to understand the longitudinal changes that will normally occur in our lives and in particular the way we appropriate the Christian faith. If some of us are exploring and travelling, who among the rest of us have the right to challenge the process or declare it invalid? I ask the reader to ask him or herself to look to see how attitudes of faith have changed over a lifetime. My question for HTB is whether they have built in to their system the ability to handle these later Fowler stages which may be adopted by the Christian members. Perhaps they secretly would prefer these searchers to jump overboard when the ship is perceived to be an uncomfortable or restrictive environment. Our blog is aware of one particular reason to jump overboard for many – namely the experience of abusive power!

In the early 50s the American public was greatly disturbed by film of their own soldiers in Chinese captivity speaking anti-American rhetoric. These individuals had been somehow psychologically manipulated so that they had lost touch with their old identity. They were apparently fully under control of their Chinese captors. Much ink has been spilt since those days about the process by which an individual could be coerced to change beliefs and personality. The popular expression was ‘brainwashing’. This expression, however, proved so hard to define that it ceased to be used in academic or legal circles. More common now is the notion of mind control or thought reform. The latter term is the one used by the author Robert Lifton. Lifton wrote an important book in 1961 called, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. This showed how it was possible to manipulate an individual so that he would think and speak in a way that was out of character and contrary to a previous personality.

I was reminded of Lifton’s work on thought reform techniques when I watched the adulation being handed out to President Trump by each member of his Cabinet in a recent newscast -Trump’s ‘lovefest’. A further historical memory took me back to the Soviet show trials in Russia in the 1930s. The condemned individuals who were about to be executed for counter-revolutionary activity, were shown to be publicly venerating Stalin. As Trump’s Cabinet members spoke their words of flattery and obsequiousness, one felt almost nauseous at this Soviet-type manipulation. One hopes that at least some of the humiliated Cabinet members were aware of the historical parallels. Trump himself with his weak grasp of current affairs or history would have been totally unaware of the way that he is leading his country to become in certain respects to be more and more like North Korea.

I have already written a piece on Trump as a cult leader who is apparently firmly in the grip of a narcissistic disorder. I want to return to this theme because once more we see in the behaviour of his government certain aspects of the functioning of an extremist religious group. Robert Lifton described eight characteristics of a ‘totalist’ group, whether political or religious. One of these eight which we have looked at in the last blog, was the manipulation of language. When language only connects you with people who are in your group, you find yourself effectively in a social prison because you are cut off from the wider world. I do not propose to go through the other eight characteristics of a Lifton’s totalist group, but to summarise, there are two main features. Totalist groups, which we would describe as cult-like, involve the subservience of each member, emotionally and psychologically, to a leader. The exact nature of this relationship for both parties is complex but we can say that each side has something to gain from the relationship. In the second place the group possesses an ambiance or culture which simultaneously draws members together while isolating them from the world beyond. Both physical and psychological barriers are erected to stop the flow of information from the rest of the world. It is not hard to observe this cult-like environment in the appalling spectacle of the current Trump Cabinet.

Each of the members of Trump’s Cabinet has obtained a level of influence, prestige and power by being given some responsibility for government. Most of them have been chosen for their ability to amass enormous sums of money in their working life. The Republican agenda is also offering them the opportunity to become even more wealthy. But the price they have paid for this elevation is to drink the Kool Aid of believing (or pretending to believe) the conspiracy theories, the fake news and the outright lies which have pushed their leader into his present position of power. Like cult followers they have become strangers to any real dialogue with the truth. They are certainly no longer thinking in a way that connects with wider reality. They do not (yet) realise that each of them has utterly humiliated themselves both professionally and personally by hitching their wagon to such a corrupt individual as President Trump. Like members of a cult they have been corrupted by the process which Lifton describes as thought reform. They probably for the moment really believed the nonsense that they uttered when the camera went round the cabinet room asking for their opinions about Trump’s presidency. The problem is that Trump also believes the false narrative that his government is putting out to the world.

A few years back we witnessed dramatic public scenes of grief when the North Korean leader died. We naturally asked ourselves whether this emotion was faked or not. I would suggest that the cult personality was so ingrained in the population that the weeping masses could be said genuinely feel their demonstrations of sorrow. The one main difference between North Korea and the United States today is that there are still many strong democratic institutions alive to challenge the narrative of alternative facts and fake news. These institutions particularly represent the educated and informed population. They will not disappear. Through newspapers and humour, the cult culture of Trump and his followers is constantly being challenged. While for the time being the Trump Cabinet members can offer their false and deluded perspective on what is going on to the world, in the longer term, truth must prevail.

There is a clear reason for this blog to be concerned about thought reform in political life. We see the devastating effect of such mind control within religious institutions. People are shown not only to be misled by such manipulation but they are often traumatised by it for a long time. Many of the influential people in America associated with Trump will take many years to recover from what is effectively cultic contamination. Others, including Trump himself, may never recover from the lies and falsifications that have absorbed into their personalities as the price of obtaining power. When power is obtained through a massive manipulation of truth, then that power becomes something corrupt and permanently damaging to the soul.

This post is not going to be about the recent general election in the UK. Although with my political interests I have been drawn into the recent saga of President Trump and James Comey, I find that I have little to say about the strange state of UK political life at present. No one can deny that UK politics have become intensely dramatic over the past two or three days. My blog theme today does however touch on politics. I want to talk about the way that words are sometimes manipulated by politicians and church leaders to trap people into distinct tramlines of thought. Words are here being used, not to describe something, but to draw people into a belief system through a technique we might describe as propaganda.

A week or two back I wrote about the way that English language does not always have a word to describe every idea or experience. Today I am speaking about words which have had their meanings subtly altered to suit a speaker’s agenda. This is part of a process through which an individual can be taught to think in a defined way, one that will play into the hands of an authoritarian or coercive group. This might be political or religious in nature.

To start with an example of what I am talking about. Christian groups sometimes want to describe their experience of being criticised. These criticisms may well be valid ones. But rather than address the fact of the criticism and what it might be telling them about the way that they appear to outsiders (or insiders), some Christians are quick to speak of ‘persecution’. Persecution is an emotive word and it can be used to push aside quite legitimate questioning directed at an authoritarian group or individual. The word in short may not describe what is in fact going on. The criticised group may then deploy another emotive word to describe the legitimate questioning; they may talk about the ‘enemy’. From what starts as a probing to find the truth relating to an organisation we move to something that is portrayed as the onslaught of a godless, even satanic enemy. The choice of words being used by the criticised group has ramped up the tension and completely transformed the way the members perceive what is going on. This deliberate misuse of English words and their normal meanings has changed the perceptions of those involved. It is very hard, if not impossible, to have normal communication with a group which distorts words in this way.

Another word that might be used against the enemies of a political party or closed religious group is the word ‘slander’. It is easy to use this word slander as a way of trying to fend off any sort of negative criticism. Slander is to tell information about an individual that is not true. What the defensive group is calling slander may simply be negative but true information about the group which the leaders do not want to face up to or examine.

Religious and political groups are very good at using words in a subtly different way from the rest of society. Once this in-house jargon has taken root, it is a short step from cutting members off from all communication with the wider society. A culture is developed where words have an in-house meaning which no one outside can share. Experiences that are local to the group also isolate group members. The way that words referring to Christian experience are given special local meanings also help this process of isolation from the rest of society.

Many churches and cults attract the young. The reason for this is not hard to find. Young people are entering the vulnerable and unknown experience of adulthood. This makes them open to the possibility of being sucked into family type relationships which help to heal the trauma of leaving home. At the same time the young person is probably also developing critical thinking which asks questions. These contrasting aspects of youth do not fit well together in cultic churches. Leaders have to do what it takes to dampen down any intellectual independence that is emerging. Questions and doubt are a recast as a form of resistance against God. The leader will quote Scripture where it speaks of insubordination and rebellion against God. The natural process of intellectual maturing will be presented in various ways as sinful or lacking in faith. This closed society of cultic churches has taken the process of growing up and made it through the manipulation of words something full of guilt and sin, requiring total obedience to a leader.

Another word which is often misused in closed Christian groups is the word ‘commitment’. The idea of commitment to God becomes subtly changed when used by a leader. It comes to mean abject obedience to the minister. The word ‘selfish’ is also altered so that it means doing anything that is not approved of by the rest of the group. Words in short can be used to control members by ensuring that all behaviour is tightly controlled. Any independent thinking is quietly quashed by an appeal to unity with a quote about being of the same mind and spirit.

The use of words through which to control church members is something that takes a long time to recover from. Even after an individual leaves a group, they will continue to translate words in their minds according to their old cultic meanings. ‘Humility’ means degradation. A word like ‘discipleship’ also may provoke a trigger effect, reminding the former member of a memory of subjection to a power-hungry leader. Whenever ‘submission’ or ‘submit’ are brought up, there may be an instant recollection of a cruel coercive control by another Christian.

Words are powerful things. When they are used as tools of subjection and control to suit an authoritarian culture, they can cause enormous damage. I have frequently written about the meanings of words. For myself I believe that words should be used to point to a variety of possible meanings. They should never over-define or limit themselves to a single interpretation. It will never be a pointless task to question how words are being used by ourselves and the people we talk to.

Shocked by the events around London Bridge on Saturday night, I have been reflecting on the nature of violence. More precisely I have been thinking about violence inspired by a religious creed. What is violence? The World Health Organisation speaks about the ‘intentional use of physical force or power which has the result of injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation’. Clearly violence involves malevolence towards an individual, a desire that they should be deprived of one of the marks of what we describe as human flourishing. There is no doubt that the jihadists were attempting to destroy through violence in the name of their religion. Do Christians ever use violence for their religious purposes?

Two issues have been concerning me in the past few weeks. One is the investigation of the Cathar sect in mediaeval France for the talk I am giving in Bordeaux at the end of the month. The other is a correspondence with two readers of this blog concerning their experience of shunning by church authorities. I have had therefore reason to look back to see what I had said about shunning and ostracism in a church context. I was in particular struck by something I said in my talk in Stockholm preserved by You-tube. I described shunning as a kind of soul murder. Thus, by implication, it involves non-physical violence. I also there expressed the opinion that in some ways it is better to be punched on the nose than to be shut out by an individual or a group. The person who is punched at least has established the fact that he exists in the mind of the person who is assaulting him. An individual who is shut out or shunned by another person, is not even accorded the right to exist.

Eric Bonetti, and I hope sometime in the near future, Helen from Australia, are giving us two perspectives on their personal experiences of church shunning. I would like here to indicate my belief that church shunning is in fact an example of religiously inspired violence. It does not of course involve taking someone’s life. But along a notional spectrum of violent acts against the individual it should be rated worse than an assault involving the fists. When we speculate about the motivation for shunning we find something deeply evil at work. The person who initiates the shunning is always in a position of power. Officially a shunning is initiated to preserve order and discipline in the church. At another level there is fear, cruelty and vindictiveness which are the shadow opposites of Christian love.

The religious inspired violence shown in London on Saturday night was of course quite different from the violence that we have suggested is taking place in religious shunning. The three individuals shot dead by the police have yet to be identified. No doubt we will discover, in all probability, that they were seduced into the violence of ISIS to compensate for feelings of inadequacy or failure. For them violence perpetrated against total strangers was an outlet to vent a deep frustration and anger. Those who directed them knew how to manipulate them by the careful use of religious texts and slogans. Extremists of all kinds will always claim that violent conflict is endemic in society and we must play our part in overthrowing the status quo.

Although I have suggested that the violence portrayed in London last Saturday was quite different from the violence of church leaders who advocate shunning, I have hinted at a common factor. It seems that any act of violence is made possible by a perverse human enjoyment of cruelty. The normal healthy human response to another person who is weaker that we are, is to have feelings of empathy and pity. When such empathy is absent, it is most likely the result of an environment, particularly during childhood, where it was not taught or practised. The individual brought up in such a setting may grow to be incapable of this human feeling. They may instead enjoy only the shadow opposite of empathy and love, which is to gratify a lust for cruelty and a desire to inflict pain on others. The bully, the terrorist and the one who shuts out other people through shunning all share this tendency to enjoy cruelty. When empathy fails, the capacity to enjoy cruelty is likely swiftly to take its place.

Violence in this sense of acting cruelly towards others is sadly endemic in the human condition. Tragically it is also found everywhere in the great religions. From Catholic Inquisitors burning Cathar heretics in the 13th century to Muslims shooting total strangers in the 21st century, we have many examples of religiously inspired violence which involve actual murder. We also find religiously inspired violence in the casual cruelty of church leaders who seek to control their members by the threats of exclusion and shunning. We need to identify within our religious institutions every example of violence towards others, even when it is disguised as godly discipline. Once again, we come back to the fundamental nature of power as it operates in our churches. Even though the existence of power in all these institutions is a necessary component for their proper functioning, we need to become ever more sensitised to the way it is being exercised. Is this power wielded with sensitivity and care, or do we find in its exercise the signs of its shadow, gratification and cruelty? In registering our legitimate sense of horror at the activities of Muslim terrorists, let us also take the trouble to be alert to the violence and cruelty that lurks within our own religious institutions.