When I began my interest in the world of cultic studies some twelve years ago, I had all the misconceptions about cults that most people in our society possess.  The main failure of understanding on the part of ordinary people, when looking at cults, is the difficulty of appreciating how deeply these harmful groups may have burrowed inside their acolytes, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually.   The task of escaping from a cult ideology or world view is, in fact, very hard.  Surely, we naively think, exiting a cultic group is just a matter of sitting down with a well-informed and sensible person and having the errors of our thinking pointed out in a conversation of an hour or two.  The reality is of course very different.  Most cultic groups are skilled in the task of taking the identity of an ordinary person and utterly transforming it.  The individual member has effectively become, in a negative sense, a new person.  Although the idea of becoming a new person has biblical echoes, the cultic version has little to do with anything set out in the New Testament. The cultic new person possesses a created identity which imitates the model designed by an exploitative leader.  Such a leader is typically motivated with a malign desire to exercise power.  The cultic identity of the acolyte is one ripe for exploitation, financially, sexually or emotionally.

The field of cultic studies is not without its contested areas and arenas of deep division.  One group of academics study and describe what we have outlined above – the profound personality changes wrought by various controlling groups.  Another group of academics want to sit lightly on the idea that belonging to a religious or political group can ever be of lasting significance to the individual concerned.  They seem unwilling to consider seriously the risk of massive harm that exists in such groups.  They also seem not to have noticed the hollowed-out identities that belong to many of these dedicated cult members.  The assumption of our legal system is also, not unreasonably, that any political or religious decision made by an adult has to be respected.  Moral choice is assumed to belong to everyone and a functioning conscience and intellect exists for all unless compromised by mental incapacity,  Everybody can make the choice to surrender property and self-determination to a small coercive group.   That is a sacred right even if, in the process, it takes that individual to a place of extreme harm.

During my time as a member of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) I have got to know a distinguished British therapist, Dr Gillie Jenkinson, who is active in the field of helping cult survivors.  She has recently published a book Walking Free from the Trauma of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse.  It is a workbook for individuals who are seeking to recover from cult membership and any abuse encountered through such an involvement.  My motive for buying the book was not personally to undo the effect of a malign group, but to understand better the way cults are understood by therapists who take the whole topic seriously.  Gillie’s approach to the impact of cults can be summed up in the expression, the pseudo-identity. This is the identity given to the acolyte by the cult and it overlays the core identity with which one was born.  The traditional way of speaking about cults was to describe some kind of indoctrination as is implied by the word brainwashing.  The new model is to conceive of an identity which is being built up layer by layer with emotional and intellectual material from a cult leader.  This way of describing the process is to think of an onion.  At the heart of each individual is a core identity which pre-exists cult membership.  Over time, the membership of a cult has built up an accretion of layers like an onion, to cover and bury that original authentic identity or self.  What is presented to the outside world and internally experienced is the cult self, or cult identity.  This notion of a cult member having a core/authentic identity overlaid by one created by a group leader for the members, seems to be a illuminating way of speaking. It is also the one that it has largely superseded the old brainwashing language of the past.

Gillie’s book shows us clearly the way that this model is helpful for thinking about and mentally grasping the complex phenomenon of cult membership.  The book Walking Free, is to a considerable extent a description of these onion layers and the way each has to be in turn stripped away in order to reach the core pre-cult identity.  Here is found freedom and the ability to choose and make decisions for oneself.  I have not yet finished the book, but I want to speak about two of the onion layers of cult membership which must be dealt with along the journey of recovery.  I choose them in part because we may see, in considering them, how it is not just hard-core Scientologists or Moonies who have external things wrapped round and obstructing the authentic identity.  These restricting layers may be encountered in places where so-called ‘orthodox’ church life is practised in Britain today.

One of the sure signs of an unhealthy political or religious group is the way that doubt is handled.  We find that a coercive group will typically refuse to allow members to question leaders or challenge their decrees or their teaching.  Members of closed groups are, at the same time, restrained by the need to remain in good standing with this leadership.  A rebellious confrontation risks expulsion.  When such action is taken against a member, that individual may believe that his/her assurance of salvation is instantly taken away.  The dynamic of cultic groups is well versed in such tactics of inducing fear.  Needless to say, when ordinary questioning is supressed, the human intellect can hardly be described as functioning well. Can it ever be described as healthy to encourage the notion that there is only a single answer to a problem?  We have spoken about the limitations of binary thinking before.  Whenever doubt is discouraged in any area of human thought, we find what we can only describe as a vacuity in the human soul.

Gillie describes in detail how other facets of the cultic identity have to be dismantled one by one in the journey to release the authentic version long buried by cult membership.   Some, like doubt, are to do with the thinking intellectual side of the individual and others are to do with emotional and personal functioning.  One fascinating notion, which introduces for me a brand-new word, is contained in the section where Gillie speaks about ‘confluence’.  Confluence is a word to describe the way that we all have the capacity to flow or merge into other people and they into us.  This of course is appropriate when we speak of mother and child, but it is less welcome when a similar process happens as part of the functioning of a coercive group.  Too much confluence can involve the partial or complete dissolution of the individual human personality.   Although Christian love might seem to some to require a partial merging into another person, any excessive loss of boundaries or personal space would appear to be too high a price to pay.  Even the marriage partnership does not demand we relinquish our separateness in the name of unity.   From the outside it is not difficult to see that confluence in a cultic setting is potentially toxic, benefitting only those who have power and control over the group.

Forbidding doubt and encouraging confluence and fuzzy edges in a cultic context are just a sample of the onion layers described in Gillie’s book which have to be peeled away in the journey towards wholeness.   Gillie’s other metaphor is to describe the journey to wholeness as a pilgrimage with a heavy bag. Cultic membership may have required the acquisition of ideologies and burdensome ideas which have be let go as we seek to make our way through life.  To assist this process of unpacking and abandoning the things that are not required for the task of abundant living, the book introduces us to some valuable and up-to-date psychological insights.  These help us to understand how human beings can learn to function better and thus to find healing and true human flourishing in a world beyond coercion and control.

Walking Free is not overtly a Christian book. But, as the author spent twenty-five years in a Christian cult, she does understand and describe implicitly how the Church itself can become involved in cultic dynamics. My final comment is to hope that this wise book will reach the hands of many Christian leaders, especially those who minister to those fleeing from abusive and coercive situations.  We need such a clear guide to protect us from the ravages of cultic dynamics that seem in some places even to plague our churches.

by Martin Sewell & Richard Scorer

This week, the Lucy Letby case has brutally exposed the lack of regulation and accountability of NHS managers (link to Lucy Letby: NHS managers must be held to account, doctor says – BBC News). Whereas clinicians are subject to professional scrutiny and accountability by independent regulators, NHS managers are not, even when (as in the Letby case) they may have prioritised the reputation of a hospital over patient safety.  This is a feature they share with those in leadership and managerial roles in religious organisations. Both NHS managers and Bishops are amongst the dwindling band of professionals still not subject to independent regulation. This urgently needs to change, and as far as religious bodies are concerned, Professor Jay’s taskforce on independent regulation of safeguarding in the Church of England has an opportunity to set this change in motion.    

A brief recap of where we are. In response to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), the Archbishops Council of the Church of England set up what purported to be an “Independent Safeguarding Board” (ISB) to provide independent oversight of CofE safeguarding. In June its two remaining members, Steve Reeves and Jasvinder Sanghera, were summarily dismissed. Meg Munn, whom the Archbishops Council had tried to impose as chair, also resigned. The ISB project in its existing form thereby effectively collapsed.   

There are some in the CofE safeguarding who seem relatively relaxed about this. Colin Perkins, a leading figure in CofE safeguarding whose work in Chichester one of us commended at IICSA, tweeted in response to the ISB fiasco that “there is some crisis in the centre, yes, but please don’t confuse what happens there with what happens on the ground, where, on the whole, good people quietly get on with it and do a very good job”.  Our experience is that safeguarding responses across the Church of England vary: there are some good people and responses, but some poor ones too, and far too much staff churn.  But events in Soul Survivor, where it seems likely that safeguarding concerns were deliberately brushed under the carpet for years, even as the CofE was telling IICSA that everything had changed, should strike down any complacency. If a cover up can still happen during IICSA, how effective is the CofE’s safeguarding system in reality?

Professor Alexis Jay, the former chair of IICSA, has now been effectively tasked with completing what was designated as “ Phase Two” of the old ISB, by which we mean the conceptualization of “shape” of the replacement iteration of the body to oversee the Safeguarding of the CofE. That work seems to have stopped with the suspension of the first Chair Maggie Atkinson; bluntly, it was the responsibility of the Archbishops’ Council to fill that gap and they signally failed to do so; worse still, the Council sought to frame the independent ISB members, gaming them for that stalling when they were never tasked with that remit.

No member of the Council has taken the honorable path of resignation over this or the lack of any proper planning for survivors in terms of securing data protection, pastoral support, suitable future advocacy recommendation, or delivering on the only completed review to date – that of Peter Spindler in the case of Survivor Mr X.  

At the point at which “Phase Two” stalled, there had been a winnowing of options which were presented to Synod members for feedback. The options were fourfold: a regulator, an Ombudsman an “ACAS” or a hybrid.  Realistically, it should take less than four and a half minutes to see that the idea of the Regulator is “the only show in town”.

The ISB as created by the Secretariat and endorsed by the Archbishops’ Council was a largely secret hybrid in that it was both named and sold as “independent” but it was never intended to function independently. As Steve Reeves told Synod, when the Church says “ independent” it means “semi-detached”. It was closed down as soon as it demonstrated worrying signs of non-compliance. When it attempted to advocate the safeguarding of its only review subject Mr X, by following the recommendations of the Spindler Report, the ISB members were ignored and ultimately sacked.

Add to this toxic history the way in which the original attempts at  examination of the ISB project was cynically shut down by a shabby procedural motion at Synod to move “next business”, and readers will understand that trusting the Church of England again with devising a novel structure would be like trusting teenagers with the whiskey and the car keys the day after they have written off the Volvo.

That issue of trust effectively removes the other two options from the table. Both Ombudsman and ACAS models are predicated upon that one simple and necessary commodity. If you are going to sit down with another party within either structure, there has to be a presumption of mutual respect and good faith, and there has to be an agreed sense of direction of travel. This has no chance of existing in the current circumstances. None of the Church leadership is trusted by the survivor community or their supporters. The responsibility for this tragic state of affairs is so obvious that you have to be a member of Archbishops’ Council or the Secretariat to even consider contesting it.

Like the failed managers of the NHS trusts, the buck stops plainly with the CofE leadership;  although it has constructed a confusing historical structure so that Archbishops Diocesan Bishops. Secretary General, Lead Bishops for Safeguarding, NST Directors and Archbishops Council Members all claim “plausible deniablity”, surely no secular investigator such as Prof Jay need spend too much time excluding these two options.

The CofE has had too many chances to rectify the situation and IICSA was its last chance saloon. Worse, it has consistently shown that it is not even willing to afford its supposedly legislative/ oversight body, The General Synod, time to comprehensively consider and debate these complex matters. A recent 75 page proposal drawn before all these latest crises arose to complicate matters was debated at York. The “debate” was afforded only 10 minutes of time with speech limits of 2 mins. This is what passes for scrutiny in the Church of England.

Of course the House of Bishops had separately considered it so all was well from their point of view, and therein lies another can of worms. As things stand, secular activity such as safeguarding is having to be recast within the mindset of medieval Ecclesiastical Law. The role and authority of the Prince Bishop within his/her Diocese is not to be interfered with. Secular Safeguarding law and culture has no problem with Human Rights Act compliance, there is a strong move towards greater transparency in explaining decision making, Freedom of Information principles and data protection  laws are upheld, there is a culture of collaborative problem solving and most important of all, secular lawyers know what a conflict of interest looks like, they are required to have clear and transparent policies and are held accountable for failure. Bishops are not.

The only credible option left on the table is that of Regulator.  Everyone knows what a regulator is; we trust them in many areas of life especially within the professions. A Regulator is not there to make the rules but to impartially administer and enforce them. Their bona fides and competence is overseen by a Trustee Board and it is important that the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, the General Medical Council and the Nursing & Midwifery Council, all have majority lay Trustees overseeing the development and enforcement of professional standards.

The first question for Prof Jay to ask the CofE is surely this. “What precisely is the reason for the Church of England resisting the establishing of an independent Regulator overseen by competent and professional Trustees in the area of safeguarding?” 

We doubt any resistance will long withstand scrutiny by Parliament which may become necessary given the inadequacies of Synodical processes which are controlled by the forces of conservatism both within House of Bishops and Secretariat alike.

The Regulator would need to liaise with the Church to ensure that its decisions will be directly enforced via the Clergy Discipline measure. A substantial breach of Episcopal or Clergy Standards would need to be actionable by the Regulator as of right and provision duly made within the new Clergy Disciplinary Measure currently being drafted. This will of course offend and upset some sectors of the Church not least those who have been missing in action whilst Bishops have covered up abuse on multiple occasions. There may be a small amount of room for negotiation. It may be that just as the constitutional monarch formally assents to legislation, so a similar nod to Episcopal amour propre could be permitted – but only if there is wholesale surrender of power.

It is not actually much of an ask. No Diocesan Bishop wanted the job of lead Bishop for Safeguarding. None has shown much aptitude or inclination for the task. The newly appointed incumbent has declared a heart for the work but with appropriate modesty acknowledged she has no background. It will take three years to get up to speed by which time she will, on past form, be burnt out and moved on. It is time to stop this absurd merry go round of serial incompetence and appoint a proper Regulator for the CofE with proper skills and resources to do the job properly.

So this is what Jay needs to do: recommend a truly independent Regulator, and recommend that parliament intervenes to create it. And that in respect of safeguarding at least, the CofE becomes subject to the Human Rights Act, freedom of information laws and the Nolan principles– the mechanisms which underpin accountability and transparency in other public bodies, The authors of this article disagree on whether we should have an established church, but as long as we have one, so far as safeguarding is concerned the Church of England surely cannot continue to evade the legal protections which govern the rest of the public sector. The Archbishop of Canterbury, so keen to criticize human rights violations elsewhere, must surely agree that the church ought to be subject to codified human rights standards too?     

Although the above relates directly to the CofE, there is, of course no reason why the costs and activity of such a Regulator should not be spread beyond the CofE. A successful piloting of the scheme could in due course be applied to other Churches and faiths. It is not the task of the Regulator to do other than ensure that the vulnerable are kept safe and that people can gather in worship contexts confident that any issues of concerns will be addressed with professionalism, competence and impartiality. 

The Office of the Faith Safeguarding Regulator is surely something all people of goodwill can surely welcome.

Richard Scorer is Head of Abuse Law and Public Inquiries at Slater & Gordon Lawyers. Martin Sewell is a retired child protection lawyer and General Synod member

I think I was twelve or thirteen when another boy countered what I thought to be a factual statement I had made with the riposte – it is a matter of opinion.  I was faced at that moment with the notion that what I believed to be a true fact could be understood in more than one way.  Truth and falsehood were thus not always the neat categories I had always thought they were.  As life went on, I discovered that debate might be a good way of moving towards what is true and bringing clarity to whatever was being talked about.  But even lengthy discussions did not always uncover an authoritative truth which all could agree on.  Inside one’s own head they were beliefs and personal opinions, but I understood that other people could hold very different notions, even when using the same words. Thinking and feeling alike, to paraphrase Philippians 2.2, was never a simple straightforward matter.  Finding out what one really believes and thinks in areas like religion and politics is, for most of us, a work in progress   Thanks to the slippery, even provisional nature of language, many of us are somewhat reticent in the way we communicate our deeper beliefs and convictions.

As small children, most of us were alert to the expressed opinions of parents and respected teachers.  The opinions that were expressed on the things we could understand, had enormous influence on us as we negotiated our way to learn about the world in all its complexity.  Eventually we had to decide for ourselves which ideas and convictions truly belonged to us and were not just the pale reflection of a parental opinion.  The teenage years are a traditional time of questioning and creating personal value systems.   For those of us who attended university, there was an additional allocated space for questioning life and discovering personal identity and conviction.  The majority embrace these new arenas of thinking and working things out with excitement and relish.  Others shrink from the pain which comes as the result of having the safe patterns of childhood thinking undermined.  Some find their way into membership of ideologies or groups where thinking and coming to an opinion is done for them by a figure with charismatic authority.   I am always struck how cultic groups have much appeal for those confused and disoriented by the difficult task of growing up.

 For Christians and others involved in a spiritual quest, the task of finding a place of spiritual and intellectual coherence is an issue always being worked upon.  If we have, in fact, a position of faith able to be put into words, it is likely to be a combination of what we have experienced, what we have been taught and the use of our reasoning and linguistic abilities.  However enthusiastic we are for speaking about this personal spiritual journey, we are probably aware of limitations in what we say and how we communicate it.  One limitation is the fact that language, as we have suggested, is a slippery construct.  What I mean when I use a particular word is not necessarily how another person hears and understands it. This flakiness of everyday language, if we may describe it as such, results in some Christians taking refuge in the belief that the words and text of the Bible have a supreme privileged status.  A quote from the Bible is thought to be a clinching argument against which there can be no counterstatement. This propositional way of understanding Scripture is one I personally find hard to deal with.  This approach side-steps so many difficult issues in discovering the best way of understanding Scripture, that I avoid this kind of discussion.  The Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep or the fundamentalist preacher expects me to agree with their approach and their dogmatic understanding of the text.  When I do not, there is little purpose in debate or even attempts at communication on the issue.  Consensus or anything resembling agreement is a long way away.

The parading of texts of Scripture in our current debates about sexuality and the place of women in the church seems to be, from my perspective, an unrewarding, even futile task.  There is a chasm which exists between those who argue with a defensive use of bible quotes against others who seek to apply other insights from human thinking and reflection over the centuries. The issue is not primarily about one side being right and the other wrong.  It is that the starting places of the two sides makes logical coherent debate impossible.  Any attempt, for example, to pit a believer against a non-believer in the ‘young earth’ theory is clearly an unhelpful exercise. To have any kind of debate on a topic, there have to be a number of agreed ground rules.  Both sides have to be ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ as the expression goes. In many contemporary debates this is not the case.  The classic notion of debate, typified by those which take place at the Oxford Union, has as its aim the presentation of arguments that can change minds and beliefs.  In church debates we often seem to encounter the parties concerned behaving like two deaf individuals shouting at one another.  The supporters of the complementarian point of view cannot really expect to change minds by endlessly repeating the same overworked texts from Paul’s epistles.  As a student of the Bible, I found, for example, the scholarly hypotheses about the structure of the book of Genesis to be far more convincing than a theory of a single author.  I have no intention of expending energy arguing for the existence of these source documents, respectively known as J, E and P.  For me, the settled convictions of much biblical scholarship, the non-Pauline authorship of the so-called Pastoral Epistles and the primacy of Mark’s gospel make sense and have stood the test of time.  There will of course be refinements and revisions to such theories, but the fundamental claims have held sway for a long time.  No attempt by conservative evangelical Christians to persuade me or one of my college contemporaries, to turn our backs on the broad outlines of these positions, is likely to succeed. 

In our crazy contemporary world of political and religious differences, we sometimes arrive a place where it is clear to see that two opposing positions are never going to be reconciled.  No amount of discussion is going to make chalk into cheese or a lie into truth.  If one party in a dispute persists on maintaining a totally implausible theory, (as in Trump-world), then the other side may choose simply to withdraw from the field.  This is not because they have been defeated, though it may look like that.  It is because the truth speaker recognises the futility of pretending that the dispute merits the description of being called a debate.  A proper debate is, to repeat, an honourable and worthwhile activity and it has the possible outcome of changing minds.  In contrast, the endless repetition of propaganda or ideology does not deserve such a description. 

There is one interesting current example of what seem to be two opposing opinions or minds being unable to meet.  This is in the sanctioning of Lord Sentamu by the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley.  The removal of the PTO from a former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, has been applauded by many as an example of firm management.  While my strong sympathies and support are with Bishop Hartley in this case, the question of who is right and who wrong, is not the most striking feature of this event.  What is important is to note to the way that Bishop Hartley, in issuing this sanction, clearly saw that the time for dialogue or debate was over.  The strongly held beliefs about a past safeguarding case held by Sentamu had to be overruled and declared to be completely out of order.  A peer of the realm and, for a couple of decades, a bishop of the Church of England was being told decisively by another bishop, you are wrong, and I cannot allow this discussion to continue.

 The sanctioning of a senior retired archbishop and a member of the House of Lords sends a chill through the entire Church.  We fear for the institution, not because the decision was wrong, but because the clash of such opposing irreconcilable positions should never theoretically have been allowed to happen in public.  Our belief in leadership always depends on our trust that those in charge will always make the correct decisions.  Even if we do not agree with them, we trust that senior figures in the Church (like Lord Sentamu) will have the experience and the advisors to protect them from serious errors of judgement.  If they do make mistakes, we trust that these mistakes are never serious in nature.  If a senior church figure is declared officially to have made a serious mistaken judgement, something in the structure of the institution is weakened.  We desperately want our leaders, political and religious, to make sound decisions and for those decisions to stand the test of time.  In this case that assumption no longer holds.  For the rest of us it is disturbing and deeply uncomfortable to witness the failure of debate together with non-communication among our leaders.

Non-communication and a complete failure to agree, has always been a feature of political life. We may always have wanted to believe that Christians were somehow always eventually able to reconcile their differences and come to a common mind.  The situation of General Synod at its recent session is perhaps demonstrating to us that there are situations where two or more parties in a dispute can never agree, because objectively their arguments and perspectives are rooted in places where communication does not take place.  American politics has given us another dramatic example of human non-communication.  The gulf that has opened up between the parties can no longer be resolved by an appeal to truth.  For some reason, which is deeper than psychology, personality or education, individuals take a stand on issues which are, to the opposing party, incomprehensible. Understanding the inner workings of a MAGA mind, or a believer in the young earth theory, involves penetrating a level of irrationality which is impossible to do without some risk to our own sanity.  Some current differences in the Church also are going way beyond the apparent rules of useful debate.  The two positions are starting from such different places that we cannot reasonably even speak about ‘gracious disagreement’.  Some discussion about this current crisis of non-communication is urgently needed.  Admitting that we sometimes start from places at total variance to another may be necessary.  Only then can a process be set up to explore where the bonds of a common humanity can perhaps be rediscovered.  Human communication in some situations is something that needs to be learnt all over again.