A story which leapt out at me this morning in the Times concerns a GP who is facing a hearing at the General Medical Council in Manchester. Dr Thomas O’Brien allegedly told a patient that he could heal her pain without medication and that she was to submit to an exorcism. It was only after Dr O’Brien was reported to the GMC by the patient’s psychiatrist that the case came to light. The present hearing that is ongoing brings to the fore a number of issues relevant to this blog.

During the course of the hearing which began yesterday (Tuesday) the expression ‘religious grooming’ was used. This expression, as far as I know, has no place in law but the fact of its use in a quasi-legal setting may be of importance for the future. The pre-exorcism religious grooming included taking the patient to a local Pentecostal church, meeting the minister over lunch and giving her a copy of a book Doctor O’Brien and his wife had written, an Occult Checklist. This type of checklist, in favour among a certain genre of Christian, has been around since the 80s and it lists all the forms of behaviour that have the potential for allowing an individual to be demonically possessed. The lists are comprehensive and indeed anyone reading such a checklist will find at least one experience or situation that has made them susceptible to ‘Satanic influence’. I cannot imagine that many people have never once read their horoscope while sitting in a dentist’s waiting room and that activity open up the individual to demonic infestation. I encountered the influence of these types of checklists in the 90s when researching my book, Ungodly Fear. One vulnerable woman was told to destroy all her possessions after a group of Christians had persuaded her that she was possessed through having worked as a nurse at a Masonic Hospital in London. Fortunately she did not oblige. The checklist will mention the demonic power of elephants (pictures or models) because elephants are sacred to Hinduism. All adopted children are likely to be possessed because the act of their conception was performed out of wedlock. Needless to say, gay sex and any sexual activity outside marriage is taking the perpetrator straight to Hell. I used to have such a checklist but its contents were so disturbing and unsettling that the book was destroyed. The purpose of the book seems to have been to terrify the reader into cutting themselves off from any influences that might challenge the power of the religious leader under whose authority they have placed themselves.

The occult checklist culture in the UK reached a peak in the early 90s with the scares connected with satanic ritual abuse. I have discussed this issue in a previous blog post. I can say in summary that the demonic paranoia that was rampant among Pentecostal and other evangelical groups has mercifully subsided. One hoped that enough people had seen the horrendous harm caused to vulnerable individuals by such teaching. Clearly, as the present hearing shows, this is not universally the case. For one highly educated person, such as Dr O’Brien to hold on to such medieval and harmful beliefs, there needs to be a supporting culture of books, theological teaching and convinced individuals. People do not wake up one morning with all these beliefs in their head fully formed. They have to learn them in a church and the church has a minister who has learnt these ideas from an institution of some kind. As I have said on a previous blog post, there is a time for appropriate ministry to deal with paranormal and occult issues. But the exorcism as practised by Dr and Mrs O’Brien seems to have been laced with bad pastoral practice, weak theology and abusive assumptions. This kind of practice needs to be named and shamed.

Out of this sad episode, which is as yet unresolved, may come two positive results. One is that the expression ‘religious grooming’ may slip from its use in the General Medical Council to become a category understood by lawyers and courts generally. It would be a tremendous boost to the cause of helping vulnerable and damaged people who have been further abused by religious leaders if their plight could be understood by the courts. The second thing that gives me hope is the need for churches generally to have to consider where they stand in responding to this particular case. Some, no doubt, will claim that Dr O’Brien is a poor persecuted Christian who is suffering for his beliefs. Others, and I hope the majority, will declare that Christians of any kind have no business in making the suffering of an individual worse by the application of a type of Christianity which is clearly abusive. Any discussion in Christian circles, and I hope there is a lot, will help Christian people to see that certain beliefs can and do harm people. The unravelling of all the moral issues in this case may well help the cause of a greater self-awareness among Christians who sincerely want to apply biblical truths to the issues of people’s lives but need to be taught to do it with tact, intelligence and sensitivity. The battle against abuse by Christians of Christians has to go on. This is the task of this blog and your interest and support will help and encourage my very small role in this struggle.

“From a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.”

This is a quotation that I came across in my perusal of various web-sites that want to support the ideas of a movement called ‘Emergent Christianity’. No doubt my new interest in this US based movement will be reflected in future blog posts, but I was also fascinated by some of the arguments against the ideas of this movement. But when you read a statement, like the one above, that is supporting a set of ideas and you feel you want to cheer, then you feel an automatic attachment to the rest of the ideas that are contained in the movement’s teaching. I do not however propose to conduct a full-scale defence of Emergent Christianity, but to take one single thread of the argument among its ideas, and show that, as far I am concerned, the grounds on which its opponents attack it is fallacious and wrong.

Emergent Christianity contains many strands in its thinking and I do not propose to deal with most of them. However a broad summary would say that it is a movement within evangelical Christianity which seeks to present the ideas and insights of Christianity in a way that allows it to speak to contemporary life, not least the culture and thinking of younger people. The issue our quotation speaks to is the issue of language as a tool for communicating and containing truth. Emergent Christianity has attached itself to the ideas of postmodernism. Once again, risking the dangers of over-simplification, we can say that postmodernism strongly resists the idea that there is a single over-arching version of truth, a meta-narrative to explain or interpret the universe. Truth thus cannot be contained in a single philosophy or theory. To some extent truth is found within the experience of every single individual. This is not the place to defend or attack post-modernism but to note that it has received much negative comment from evangelical writers. They, being attached to the idea that God has revealed himself in the words of Scripture, cannot allow truth to break out from its confinement within these words. The traditional conservative Christian perspective is that faith, truth and doctrine are all expressible through the medium of the God-given words of the Bible. Such an idea can be described as propositionalism, the notion that everything, spiritual or material, can be articulated or defined through words. It is worth commenting, in passing, that propositionalism no longer holds sway in modern physics since there are observed phenomena which sometimes go beyond the scope of ordinary language to explain them. In summary, the conservative Christian wants to claim that truth can always be contained in the medium of words while postmodern ideas of Christianity will want to allow that truth on occasion, breaks out of the straight-jacket of words and is allowed to be discovered in such things as symbols, or visual and musical experiences. The infinite God, to quote our extract above, ‘is beyond all our linguistic grasping’.

It is several months now since I wrote a piece on the contribution of traditional Eastern Orthodoxy to the Christian tradition of today. I have not looked up my precise words on the topic but the kind of thing that I would have written would have been to emphasise the place of ‘mystery’ in Christian belief. The word is based on a root meaning of being silent or struck dumb. Mystery is thus a word that emphasises that words in themselves do not deliver very successfully a sense of the ‘beyond’ in Christian experience. Paul himself speaks of experiences that go beyond words and the mystical writers speak tantalisingly of the unknown in expressions such as ‘divine darkness’. A fourteenth century English writer, who wrote a book called the Cloud of Unknowing, spoke of the fact that God cannot be grasped by the mind but only by love. The Eastern Orthodox to this day fill their worship and their traditions of prayer with a strong sense of the way that God cannot be known, described or even spoken of, except by inference. The so-called ‘apophatic’ tradition, widely discussed in Eastern Christian traditions, declares that God can only be described by saying what he is not, rather than attempting the impossible task of comparing him to created realities in our world.

I leave further consideration of Emergent Christianity for another day. I suspect from the tone of the arguments against it, that I shall find myself, if not siding with it, approving of many of the arguments that writers such as Brian Maclaren put forward with great energy. When I hear the argument that truth is only to be expressed in verbal forms, I automatically feel a strong support for whoever is being condemned through the use of such spurious arguments. I am extremely grateful for my education which taught me from the earliest age that truth is to be found in many places beyond words – in beauty, love, longing and silence. I leave the reader with two short quotations from the Psalms where God is approached and known without the use of lots of, or even any, words.
‘Be still and know that I am God.’
‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.’

When I was an undergraduate I remember a rather unprofitable discussion with a fellow student about what Jesus knew or did not know. The student, being linked to conservative Christian circles, took the line that Jesus, being God, knew everything, even if he did not choose to talk about it. So I asked whether Jesus knew all about nuclear weapons. ‘Of course’ was the reply. It was important for the belief system of this young man that Jesus knew everything. That knowledge would of course include insight into information about the Old Testament and Jesus’ opinions were held to be decisive. When Jesus declared Moses to be the originator of the laws on divorce, for example, that was a clear indication that the whole Law was penned by his hand. The conversation stuttered to a halt as I realised that, although there was something profoundly wrong with this line of argument, I did not know how to respond or take it any further.

Recently I came across a similar argument in a book discussing the so-called Chicago Statement about biblical authority published in 1978. One of the authors of the Statement, Norman Geisler, claims that Jesus confirms the ‘divine authority of Old Testament Scripture .. on numerous occasions’. Having brought forward passages like Matthew 5.17-18 and Luke 24.44, Geisler is able to say ‘the authority of Christ and Scripture are one.’ The claim is that the authority of Christ can be appealed to and it confirms the claims made by conservative Christians for the inerrancy of Scripture. As James Barr put it: ‘This endlessly repeated argument seeks to use the personal loyalty of Christians towards Jesus as a lever to force them into fundamentalist positions on historical and literary matters’. In short the argument of Geisler appears to carry weight behind it at least as far as generations of conservative Christians are concerned.

The assumptions of Geisler do however need to be challenged and for this we need to examine the passage from Matthew 5 more closely. The text declares that ‘not one letter or stroke will disappear from the Law’. For this passage to have authority, one has to presuppose first that these words were actually spoken by Jesus and secondly we know the context in which it was spoken. Any student of the New Testament is aware of the dispute within the pages of Acts and Paul’s letters over whether Christian converts should be subject to the dictates of the Jewish law or not. Paul himself represented one side of the argument and the author of Matthew the other. The expression ‘until heaven and earth disappear’ is an idiom in Hebrew that basically means ‘until forever’. So Matthew has Jesus come down firmly on the need for Christian converts to keep the Jewish law after conversion. Luke on the other hand sides with Paul when he inserts this saying of Jesus in chapter 16.16. He has almost the same words as Matthew but the passage immediately before it allows Luke to understand these words in a quite different way from Matthew. In the previous verse Luke writes that ‘until John (the Baptist), it was the Law and the prophets: since then, there is the good news of the kingdom of God, and everyone forces their way in.’ In short Luke is claiming the total opposite to Matthew, that the Law has been set aside to let the Gentiles enter the kingdom. The same saying of Jesus has for these Gospel writers a quite different meaning, reflecting their distinctive theological backgrounds.

The second observation to be made about Matthew’s saying about the Law is that conservative Protestant theology does not agree with it. The classic Protestant position is that is that the laws of Moses were nullified after Christ’s death on the cross. In other words, Matthew’s Jesus is teaching something now universally rejected by most Christians. A final observation to be made is that even if the statement in Matthew 5. 17-18 was true to what Jesus said and thought, it is not an argument for the inerrancy of the whole Old Testament. The Law and the Prophets refers to only two sections of the Old Testament, while leaving out the third section, the Writings (Psalms, history books and the wisdom literature).

We could of course, go on to look at other ‘proof texts’ for Jesus apparently giving his support for conservative position on the Bible, but there is a deeper question to be asked about the nature of Jesus’ humanity and whether we should even expect his understanding of the Jewish scriptures to be decisive for the way we think about them and study them today. One writer puts it succinctly when he says ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to be its Saviour, not an authority on biblical criticism.’ While Jesus may have assumed that David wrote Psalm 110, Daniel the book of Daniel and took for granted the historicity of Jonah, these were notions that he shared with his contemporaries. The Chicago statement on inerrancy will not allow the possibility that there was any ‘natural limitation of His humanity’ . He is not allowed to adopt the understandings of scripture and the traditions into which he was born unless these are perfectly correct. This position, like that of my fellow student at the beginning, does not allow Jesus to be properly human and experience the limitations of his humanity, including a lack of complete historical understanding. Are we to suppose that Jesus grew up without having to learn anything, the gift of speech, the ability to read etc? If Jesus thought the world was flat, does that neutralise his whole ministry because he was mistaken in this? If we do believe that Jesus was omniscient, at what point did this happen? There are clearly many impossible problems to be solved, if we follow the conservative line that Jesus in some way ‘proves’ the modern ideas concerning biblical inerrancy. The Christian tradition wrestled with all these problems in the early years of the Church’s life. One part of the Church wanted to over-emphasise the divine nature, so that Jesus could not be said to be fully human. The final verdict on this debate was delivered at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD and stated categorically that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This has become Christian orthodoxy to this day. The notion of full humanity would appear to directly contradict Chicago statement about the omniscience of Jesus. To be fully human means that, whatever else we want to say about Jesus, he was at one with the limitations of his age over scientific and historical understanding. No one has ever suggested that limitations in these areas have been able to limit Jesus’ apprehension and knowledge of the mind and will of God. The belief that Jesus ‘incarnates’ the full reality of God in a human life is a paradox and mystery which we struggle to understand and always will. But whatever it means it does not necessitate his being able to offer an infallible opinion on the questions about the authorship of the book of Daniel and the Psalms.

My readers will forgive me for returning to the topic of the notorious church, Trinity, Brentwood as a jumping-off point for the understanding of a particular aspect in the life of churches that cause harm. Trinity Church in many respects is an archetypical church of its type, theologically and in terms of its internal dynamics. Some of what I have written here is a recounting of actual events in the tortured history of this institution. Other pieces are using the well documented descriptions of its life and times to illustrate general points which may apply to many churches of this type. All the information about the Brentwood church comes from victimsofmichaelreid.blog

The news at Trinity suggests that little is, in fact, going on at present. A Commission for investigating past wrongs is to be appointed with an external Chair recommended by the Evangelical Alliance. The church is soon to publish terms of reference for this Commission and it is hoped that the whole process of meeting, investigating and producing a report will be completed by the summer. All this sounds very civilised and the information was relayed through a news item on the official website last night (Monday). But in the middle of the anodyne and formal language, there was this startling statement. The church mentioned that there were nine allegations to be investigated, six of which that were anonymous. No details of what was contained in these ‘allegations’ but Nigel Davies’ blog has given us a good indication of their nature and seriousness. Some probably relate to bullying and the humiliating of children by staff at the school and the Bible School. Others may be about gross interference by leaders in the family lives of members, with wives or husbands pressured to leave their partners for the sake of their ‘salvation’. Maybe others touch on financial matters. The details of these allegations are not available or indeed important for the moment. Probably, apart from the rape allegation, none involved actual criminality though they were, no doubt, extremely unpleasant and traumatic for those concerned. The significant thing that the church is telling us is that serious allegations exist from the past which the church did nothing to address at the time they occurred. It is only the pressure from Nigel’s blog and possibility of police investigations that has forced the church to acknowledge that these complaints even exist.

Nine serious allegations of misconduct from the past is quite something for any organisation, let alone a church, to admit. It is freely confessing that things happened in the past of some seriousness which the leadership either did not know about or, if they did, were unwilling to pursue. Why would anyone in leadership not want to face up to such allegations at the time they happened? If they claim not to have known, what does that say about the power structures in place? These questions led me to reflect about the dynamics of power that would appear to exist in any organisation where serious abuse issues happen and are not dealt with.

One model that might be applied to the apparent power dynamics at Trinity/Peniel is the pyramid where all power is concentrated at the top. The power is surrendered to the leaders and control and coercion flow in one direction only – downwards. The leader in this case, Michael Reid, is a one man ruler who concentrates all the power in himself. One part of this power dynamic is that he will not listen to anyone who challenges him. His narcissistic world view has convinced him that he has messianic qualities. He has also internalised a battery of bible quotations which reinforce his position. The Holy Spirit speaks to him direct as leader and anyone who dares to suggest that he is a money-grubbing tyrant will have the quote ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ thrown at them, before being told to leave. It is in fact unlikely that full insight as to the tyrannical nature of charismatic leadership is ever given to members. They will just become aware that their continuing survival in the church has become impossible. They feel an immense dissonance between what they think about God and the experience of being constantly bullied, humiliated and shouted at by the church leadership.

The reason that the nine allegations could never be investigated at the time they occurred is simply because the organisation that investigates itself, has to have a sense of its own potential fallibility. It has to admit that things can go wrong at times. Fallibility in an institution does not sit well with the sense of infallibility that seems to attaches to the norms of charismatic leadership which we have looked at above. If, as I claim, the power in this kind of institution goes from the top downwards, it will also be apparent that ordinary people in the structure will not be heard. ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ can be translated into a command not to bother the big important man with petty complaints. The complaints will not be necessarily be petty but any challenge of the leader who has all the power and influence in the church, is not tolerated.

Nine allegations of power abuse from the past represents probably only a small selection of gross acts of misconduct that have actually occurred in this church. It is also suggestive of a grotesquely dysfunctional church. This church had organised itself in such a way that all the power was invested in one man and a small number of his hangers-on. Small people, ordinary people within the structure, experienced power flowing in one direction, downwards, overwhelming and extinguishing whatever voice that they might have had. To admit even one complaint and investigate it properly would have meant accepting in principle the possibility of fallibility in the leadership. At Trinity/Peniel this possibility could not even be entertained. The inability of leaders ever to be wrong or mistaken is part of the culture of such institutions and this infallibility makes them very dangerous places indeed.

It is worthy of note that today (Friday) the Church Times has a leader entitled Fundamentalism. I have noticed over the years that the word is one that is normally avoided in articles and comments in the paper. I suspect that this reluctance to use the F-word is based on two fears. One is the fear of being misunderstood and the other a fear of giving offence. There are of course some precise definitions linking the word fundamentalism to Christian groups in the USA in the 1920s which stood firmly against the ‘evils’ of modernist tendencies in the church and in society. Also in a looser context the word is sometimes used to describe people of a religious conservative bent you do not like. Many Christians of an evangelical background hate the word and bristle at the thought of being identified with Creationists or with people who work tirelessly to keep women in church under strict control. The Church Times leader, no doubt aware of all the problems of using the word, helpfully provides a definition from a 1992 article. It goes as follows: ‘(fundamentalism is) the belief that there is one set of religious teachings that clearly contains the fundamental, basic, intrinsic, essential, inerrant truth about humanity and deity; that this essential truth is fundamentally opposed by the forces of evil which must be vigorously fought; that this truth must be followed today according to the fundamental, unchangeable practices of the past; and that those who believe and follow these fundamental teachings have a special relationship with the deity.’ The leader comments in its conclusion that such a system of belief for Christians fails in one important way – namely in its attitude to outsiders. Jesus himself gave special attention to those who were unclean, those who could be argued to have the least claim to a ‘special relationship with the deity’.

It is unsurprising that the press both secular and religious is now using the word and giving particular attention to extremism in religion in the context of the terrible events in France. Philip Collins, the Times columnist, today writes that ‘when people lay claim to certainty about ultimate questions, sooner or later there is going to be trouble. If the truth has been in some way vouchsafed to you by the divinity then dissent is not reasoned disagreement, it is blasphemy. I am no longer an interlocutor, I am an infidel.’ This Times opinion piece can be summed up by some words that I wrote on the topic fifteen years ago. ‘Fundamentalism cannot and will not listen’.

I want to unpack my own pithy definition of fundamentalism, acknowledging that the other quotes I mention with approval provide a background of explanation about this slippery word. My own definition tries to preserve two aspects of the phenomenon of fundamentalism, one to do with the thinking intellect and the other to do with psychology. The extent to which the non-communication is intellectual or emotional will vary in every case. To say that someone cannot listen to another person in a situation of potential dialogue or communication is on some occasions, I believe, to do with a failure at an intellectual level. Here the conservative Christian (or Muslim) cannot deal with more than one explanation of truth. As the CT leader said, ‘there is one set of religious teachings’ for the fundamentalist. If that is true, then logically there will be, as my definition states, an inability to hear or listen to anything else from another person. For someone to be in this place of intellectual deafness is a sad plight. How they end up in this place is not clear but one cause would be a failure to be exposed to the norms of educational process as we understand it in the West. ‘I cannot hear you’ may be statement about a weak education. It may also be the result of a long term conditioning which we recognise as having created a closed mind.

The second part of my definition picks up the emotional and psychological aspect of being a fundamentalist believer. In this second case, the reason for the deafness is that the believer chooses not to listen. Listening or hearing something that would disturb a settled point of view and belief is uncomfortable and to be resisted. According to this way of thinking, discomfort of this kind is interpreted as the forces of evil mounting an attack and these must be vigorously fought. There is of course a desperate need to remain in a place of stability and certainty. Space forbids me going further in my description of the fundamentalist stance beyond the basic observation that there seem to be these two aspects or components, the intellectual and the emotional.

For the final part of this post, I need to say why I believe, as my title suggests, that religious fundamentalism is a place of danger. Most of what I intend to say on this has already been suggested in what has been already written. First, would any of us want to place a child in charge of those who cannot allow the cut and thrust of discussion and debate? Would any of us leave another person with a view on life that denied the possibility of anything new being discovered? Would we ever be happy for ourselves to have our lives controlled by a existing fixed set of rules? Can we imagine that every conversation with another person would have to be checked by an internal censor for fear that it might lead us into areas of unsoundness? The world that I am describing is indeed a place of danger, and the danger arises from the fact that important aspects of a wider humanity are suppressed or denied. When we think about the fundamentalist universe, it is hard to distinguish who is being harmed the most, the abuser (teacher) or the pupil-victim. Simply living in this paranoid universe is opening oneself up to the infection and danger of having one’s full humanity damaged and partly destroyed. How far we are here from a master who said ‘I have come that they may have life, life in all its abundance.’

When I reflect on some of the stories of Christians abused by Christians, one of the common themes, that often seems to come into the accounts, is the word ‘fear’. A lot more could be said on the topic as to the way that fear is such a mind-numbing and dispiriting experience for the one experiencing it. I want here to reflect not on the experience itself but why this emotion appears so often in the process we describe as Christian abuse. Abuse, in whatever context it occurs, normally takes place because certain individuals enjoy power. One thing that sets up an appetite for power is that the individual seeking power has at some point in their lives felt insignificant and less than appreciated. Exercising domination over others, through the exercise of authority and power, seems to relieve a void of powerlessness because there is another person who looks up to you in some way. To have someone frightened of you seems to satisfy this longing for domination.

The desire to dominate other people has always seemingly been a part of human nature. Sometimes entire nations are encouraged to feel superior over other groups or nations. The Germans as a nation were taught by their Nazi rulers to despise Jews, Slavs and other non-Aryan races and this was seen to be an aspect of their vocation to be the master race in the world. Indian society is riddled with the imbedded caste system which is a socially sanctioned system of power abuse over despised groups on the part of the privileged. We see the effect of power hierarchies and the bullying they create everywhere, whether in the family, the school, the company or the church.

For domination to work there has to be the possibility of sanctions. The master has to be able to punish the slave for disobedience. The soldier in an army of occupation has to be to able threaten the civilian with punishment and the child in a bullying relationship with another threatens to make life a misery for his victim. These implied threats cast a miasma of fear over a dominating relationship. Even if a stability is achieved so that actual violence rarely happens, this possibility, the threat of violence and the fear that it produces, can pervade the atmosphere of an institution or relationship like a fog.

The miasma of fear arising from bullying and an authoritarian structure is something that exists in certain churches. The members of these churches of fear have, paradoxically, often become so acclimatised to the atmosphere that they have forgotten that coercion and domination are built into the system. They have avoided encountering the sanctions built into the authoritarian system by keeping their heads down. The attitude that places all responsibility for thinking out problems on to the leaders has been adopted. Pastor So and So has been to college so he understands the difficult parts of the bible. I can rely on my Pastor because that is what Bible says I have to do. The no-questioning and no-challenging of the leaders seems to work and an un-eerie peace is allowed to prevail as a result. But in that peace there is a recognition that, were it to be challenged, the Pastor could make life very uncomfortable indeed for the questioner. Peace is ultimately preserved through fear, just as the Soviet system appeared to ‘work’ for countless numbers of its citizens.

The Brentwood situation to which I often refer in this blog is one where the miasma of fear allowed a situation of cruelty, deceit and power games to prevail for 30 + years. The habits of fear are still around even as the constant challenge of Nigel Davies through his blog undermines the pretentions and hypocrisy of the leaders. While the leadership can suppress questioning within the group, it is less successful when an ex-member, who has cast off the fear-laden attitudes of the past, questions and challenges. I am one of those who offers support from the outside. A battle against past and present fear is a battle well worth fighting.

What are the weapons that can induce fear in the victims of church abuse? The first is the one we have already mentioned, the right of a Christian leader to demand absolute obedience from members of his flock. This demand, backed up by select number of bible quotes, still seems to work in more churches than we would expect. The second fear-inducing tactic by some Christian leaders is one which claims to have the right to decide whether or not the church member is going to enter heaven or not. There was a story in the press in the past week where a Baptist church in the States refused to take a funeral service for a 90 year old member of 50 years standing on the ground that she had stopped coming because of illness, thus not paying her dues. The effect of this kind of decree on the other elderly members in the congregation could be massive, as the funeral service would be seen as crucial to eternal salvation. This power to hold and withhold the keys to heaven is a serious matter. Third the authoritarian church holds all the cards in the matter of interpreting Scripture. One simply cannot challenge or discuss if the minister comes down heavily, for example, on matters of sexual conduct. One has to listen as the minister condemns, divorce, gay relationships or whatever is fashionably ‘un-Christian’ at the moment, This might mean hearing that members of one’s own family are beyond the pale. Fourthly, we have to face the possibility that the Church leader may be given to angry outbursts, sexual misconduct or generally dominating conduct which makes life unpleasant for everyone, not least himself.

In a piece of 1000 words, I now need to come to my conclusion quickly, though no doubt I shall return to this topic again. Jesus would have had absolutely no time for any of the antics in churches that produce fear or the threat of fear. He never threatened anyone with hell; he never blackmailed people into behaving in a particular way. The words ‘Perfect love casts out fear’, are the words of someone who wanted to repudiate creating fear in others as a weapon of control. Jesus saw all the power games that were played by inadequate people, the pomposity and hypocrisy that went with them. Jesus saw right through all that took place among the religious leaders of his day. A great deal of what he thought about power can be summed up in those words from Mark 10. ‘..in the world the recognised rulers lord it over their subjects …..That is not the way with you.’ Service is to be the hallmark of their mutual relating to one another.

Since starting this blog, I have become more aware of the power of the internet to do many of the tasks with which we are concerned. In the first place information about churches and individuals that abuse is freely discoverable. I am mindful, of course, of the laws of libel that should protect individuals from malicious gossip, but there is nothing to stop an observant resident of Plymouth, UK walking around a huge derelict cinema complex, making a short video, and asking this question of God TV. How is this building going to be ready to be an international Prayer Centre in 2015 when the builders have abandoned the site for six months or more? When are you going to tell the thousands of viewers of God TV the plans you have for the money which has been given for this huge £3 million project? It is thanks to the Internet that such questions can be asked, and one hopes that accountability among Christian enterprises can be in this way sharpened up. Also when an individual in a church setting acquires a bad reputation, either as a power abuser or is guilty of financial malpractice, these facts come to show up through an internet search. More and more people are running such searches to find out something about Church leaders as well the most ordinary people. Few of us have left no trace at all on the internet.

The second thing that makes the internet helpful for our cause is to discover that there are other people on line who have interests similar to one’s own. Thanks to Twitter, which I have recently joined, I have encountered a man in America, Benjamin Corey, who writes some very good thoughtful material on the topic of this blog. Today I unashamedly intend to plagiarise some of his material. His background is that of a typical American evangelical but, through the passage of life, he has come to question many of the old certainties with which he grew up. The reason I do not just give a reference to his material straight out is that I myself also want to comment on two of his insights. The particular post I have in front of me is one with the intriguing title: ‘5 reasons why American Evangelicalism completely lost me’. (I will give a link at the end of my post.) The first two reasons apply more to the American scene and its deep involvement with the politics of the country. That is of course of interest but I need to leave these points to one side for now. The third comment is one that is dear to my heart and it is an accusation that this blog has made from time to time. He states: ‘Today’s Evangelicalism seems generally unteachable and unwilling to wrestle with theology’. He makes the point that there is, in certain churches and church cultures, a willingness to learn, but only if that learning reinforces what is already believed. To quote his words direct, ‘There’s little room for growth, reinterpretation, or the constant need for contextualisation of the scriptures. For a movement that prides itself on following the scriptures , I’m repeatedly shocked at the unwillingness to see what the scriptures actually say, and a willingness to malign those who attempt to point the movement back to the source.’ To interpret his words, he is pointing out to us, once again, that the leader/interpreter has the dominant voice in the way that scripture is encountered by Christians in the pew. The invisible ‘system’ has already decided what is written there, how to interpret it and how to iron out ‘problems’. There is thus no freedom to discover anything new or indeed make fresh discoveries beyond the received interpretations. That is a form of bondage in the Christian life, never to be able to read the Bible as though for the first time and let it speak afresh to the reader.

The other ‘reason’ out of the five in Benjamin’s piece on which I want to comment is his final one. He notes that ‘today’s Evangelicalism punishes people by withholding of relationships’. As visitors to this blog may remember, this is a theme which I resonate with very readily. Indeed it is to be the topic of my presentation to the International Cultic Studies Association meeting in Stockholm next June. Benjamin speaks of his own ostracism by his former church family and the pain that this caused. It is an isolation that affects not only him, but also his family and he speaks movingly of the incomprehension and pain of his own daughter at the loss of old friends. As I have pointed in previous blogs, conservative churches frequently offer a total environment, where all social and emotional needs are met. The price of this is that when the individual questions the system, the emotional ties are swiftly cut. In Benjamin’s words: ‘Today’s Evangelicalism does this to folks who think outside Evangelical lines – it strips them of relationships, cuts them off, and severs ties.’

I hope that some of my readers will go to Benjamin’s blog and read the full piece and other things that he has written. For myself I have noted a piece by him on Calvinism where he succinctly describes why he is unable to worship the God that is presented by Calvin. It is outspoken stuff but my long-term readers will recognise that it closely resonates with the tone of my own writings on scripture and church tradition. I am indeed fortunate to be able utter fairly stringent points of view without losing my livelihood and my place in the church. There has been, by all accounts, a high price that Benjamin has had to pay for uttering ideas, that are by the standards of this blog, fairly mild and uncontroversial. I shall continue to search out other heroic bloggers who are writing on both sides of the Atlantic. Their work will be acknowledged in this blog. Meanwhile it is good to find someone who is doing something comparable to surviving church, even though we have started in different places.

But Here’s 5 Reasons Why American Evangelicalism Completely Lost Me

A further discussion on God TV can be found on this blog written in May 2015 survivingchurch.org/2015/05/05/god-tv-blessing-or-scam/

For some time Chris has been urging me to watch the God TV, a British television station run by Christian Communications. My excuse for not watching has been that my television (Freesat) does not have it. Needless to say it is not difficult to find these broadcasts online, so it is probably laziness that I have not followed up Chris’ invitation, together with a visceral dislike of ‘Christian’ broadcasting. I finally got round to watching a little when Chris alerted me to a scandal that has broken in the past few months, the departure of one of the founders of God TV following a ‘moral failure’ during the past 12 months. Apparently the founder, Rory Alec is now living with a woman, not his wife, in South Africa. His name no longer appears with that of his wife, Wendy, as one of the directors of the enterprise.

Having finally gritted my teeth to watch a little of this broadcasting which apparently goes all over the world, I found it to follow a fairly predictable pattern in many ways. Being rooted in the theology, known as Health and Wealth Gospel, it is all about persuading the viewer that God wants them to possess the blessings of plenty, wholeness and success. The presentation is slick and the presenters are well dressed and superficially attractive. For me, this whole way of selling the Christian faith arouses considerable distaste. I find that the type of showmanship that is combined with this broadcast preaching makes me feel somewhat nauseous. There is little attractive about the make-believe sugary world that the viewer is offered. People are being encouraged to think that the sending of money to the television station will enable them to sort out all the problems in their lives. They will then have the same ‘miracles’ which are being enacted by the likes of Benny Hinn in America. An internet search on this particular man will show considerable interest by mainstream evangelicals in America questioning both his theology and ministry claims. Any study online of individuals who conduct television ‘ministries’ leads one to conclude that the ‘Gospel’ is being regularly milked to provide the maximum financial benefit for the organisers. I do not, in fact, know of any reputable church leader who has used the medium of television for honourable ends. Perhaps one of my readers can tell me if there is in fact a place where one can view wholesome material.

To return to Rory Alec and his ‘moral failure’. Chris believes that this failure will discourage thousands of vulnerable people who have come to depend on God TV as their spiritual home. Their faith in the founder, and through him in God, will waver when they see him disappear from their screens and their lives. My own reaction is more sanguine. Other television ministries in America have survived scandals, such as those affecting Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Their television channels have continued, albeit somewhat reduced for a time. Already I have looked at the comments columns connected with the ‘scandal’ and already earnest Christians are telling Rory that God will forgive him and is willing to restore him. Returning to his wife is, in fact, apparently not an option so the tidy solution of repentance and restoration that they would like to see, is not going to happen. In other words the typical supporter of Rory Alec is unable and unwilling to process what has actually happened to their hero.

What is it about tele-evangelists that open them up to moral failure that causes their down-fall? But before attempting to answer this question, I would comment that, from my perspective, the twenty years of preaching the Health and Wealth Gospel to tens of thousands of vulnerable people is by far the greatest moral failure in Rory Alec’s life. Enriching himself at their expense and offering promises that cannot be met, is just as intolerable as abandoning his wife for another woman. It is strange how sexual sin is always portrayed in some Christian circles as the worst possible kind of sin. It is of course serious but there is something equally bad in betraying people, cheating them by taking their money and cynically creating in them a dependence on a version of Christianity that at best is corrupt and at worst a cynical perversion of anything that Jesus stood for. The viewers of God TV have been thoroughly let down long before Rory Alec decided to leave his marriage.

I have already indicated in a previous piece on my blog the reasons why I believe that the sexual exploitation of women is a constant theme in some churches with a charismatic flavour. The reason for this, in summary, is because the leaders of these church become addicted to the exhilarating sense of being at the centre of the power generated by the worship sessions. It is but a small step to becoming addicted to power for its own sake. This blog has before explored how power addiction generally expresses itself in three ways, sex, money and being the constant centre of attention. Some leaders stray into all these areas. It seems appropriate to these leaders, in their power-obsessed consciousness, to feel entitled to all the trappings of power – wealth, adulation and constant access to sex. The psychological drama that is being worked out in this scenario is one that I have written about before, and it concerns both addiction and a diagnosis of the personality disorder involving narcissism.

The ‘scandal’ of the God Channel is then, in my perspective, not just the moral failure of the founder going to live with another woman. I would indeed be surprised if such episodes had not occurred before and the gossip mill does suggest this to be the case. Sexual misbehaviour in this type of charismatic environment goes with the territory. The greater immorality, and indeed evil, is the drip, drip undermining and exploitation of the naivety and idealism of countless would-be Christians. They have been and continue to be betrayed by such men and women of God. Their desperation and longing for help of various kinds is being ruthlessly taken advantage of. Chris tells me that he knows personally some of these people and their situation is tragic and sad in the extreme. This blog would love to do something to help them.

I was pleased to see that an important lecture which was given at the ICSA Washington conference last July on cults and the law by Alan Scheflin has been put on You-Tube. My readers may not want to spend 37 minutes watching it in its entirety but it is worth-while, I feel, giving some account of its content, in that it affects the concerns of this blog.

The issue that has bothered all those who seek to help those affected negatively by religious groups is whether they have any recourse in law. It is in fact not easy to persuade a judge that an individual has been emotionally, sexually or financially exploited by a religious leader because the individual concerned can be said, arguably, to have made an adult choice to join the group. The law apparently will always assume, unless it can be argued strongly to the contrary, that we always preserve our adult reasoning and thus are free to make irrational or foolish decisions if we so wish. There is no such thing in law as brain washing or mind-control, concepts that have been popular in the popular imagination when talking about extreme religious groups for some decades.

The one area of law that has proved to be relevant to judgements connected with religious groups is the notion of ‘undue influence.’ The law in most countries recognises the potential power of a religious leader to coerce an individual to change a will in favour of the group, particularly when in the last stage of life. This state of vulnerability when dying, is seen to be potentially a situation when a person’s free choice is compromised. Thus any pressure exercised in this context by a religious leader, can make the testator’s decision inadmissable if it is challenged by other parties. Cases connected with this issue of the disposal of an individual’s assets after death have been heard for the past 300 years. But the definition of ‘undue influence’ still remains elusive, especially when attempts are made to suggest that this idea could be applied to another area, that of an individual in full health submitting to the unequal power relationship which we associate with high demand religious groups.

The California Supreme court defined ‘undue influence’ as ‘pressure directly brought to bear on the testamentary act sufficient to frustrate the testator’s free will, amounting to coercion destroying the testator’s free energy.’ The writer on cults, Margaret Singer, wrote that virtually anyone can be ‘unduly influenced if the influences and techniques used against them are powerful enough’. Another American court ruling of 80 years ago in a will case agreed with this, by saying that ‘soundness of mind and body does not imply immunity from undue influence’. These statements appear to recognise that undue influence arguments could be applied not just to financial cases concerning wills, but could apply in other areas, such as financial or emotional exploitation .

There is clearly a line to be drawn between an adult making a free decision and someone who is coerced into an action that would go against their better judgement. The problem is where that line should be drawn. The law will always find it difficult to judge in this area because it has to deal with opinions about a situation and not definite facts. But the law needs to find that point where a reasonable person is able to say to him or herself, you can’t treat people like that. Legal protection should be able to operate in places where abusive treatment of individuals is proved to have taken place as the result of coercive behaviour.

In America one area of protection afforded to religion, good and bad, is the First Amendment which gives freedom of religious expression to all. This has made it extremely difficult to challenge anything that happens in religious institutions, even when, from a common-sense perspective, it is abusive. To take an extreme example which few would argue against, would anyone claim to bring forward the First Amendment in favour of the Boko-Haram kidnappers of the Nigerian schoolgirls. Should no one attempt to rescue the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, who were shown reciting the Koran, on the grounds that they had changed their religion? Their rescue would surely be considered an act of liberation, whatever the words of faith uttered by those girls in the bush. Common sense would suggest that coercion is being applied. Although most of them are children and presumably have some protection in law, no one would seriously argue that those over 18 had had any real choice in the religion that was being forced on them.

The lecture by Professor Scheflin then went to review some the new theories and categories in social psychology and in the study of social influence. This material may make it possible for the courts soon to be able to admit new forms of expert testimony in cases connected with cults etc. One powerful argument that suggests that this development may not be far away is that there are some new social evils in society that need dealing with definitively from a legal perspective. For example we have the horrifying fanatical events in the so-called Islamic State and the growing recognition that the so called ‘grooming’ of children by adults is a phenomenon that happens in situations which sometimes involve adults. This was exemplified in the recent case of the Marxist cult in London and also in the widespread incidence of human trafficking. In each of these examples we have the grotesque abuse of power which involves ‘undue influence’ of a kind which does not involve money. We may soon see the term ‘brain washing’ re-enter the courts and legal arguments as a valid category. This time it will be a concept backed up by a new academic and expert rigour which make it robust enough and able to stand up to the scrutiny of legal dissection.

The lecture is important because it shows how the legal world is slowly moving towards the possibility of protecting some of the abused individuals who are the concern of this blog. The common sense arguments that readily identify certain places as being dangerous for the mental and emotional well-being of individuals have not hitherto been backed by the law of any country in the world. That may soon change as the research of social psychologists and researchers on the concept of social influence refine their methods and show, beyond all reasonable doubt, the mechanisms by which the strong can manipulate for malign purposes those who are weaker. The time when those abused by religious organisations can easily have their day in the courts of our land will be a day of great rejoicing. May it come soon.

There was an interesting comment today (Friday) from one of the Times’ columnists, Janice Turner. She was talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury and saying that generally this has been a good year for the Church of England under his leadership. But then she commented that he was given to a ‘simple-minded sloganising’ when he frequently comes out with the expression ‘the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ’. She likens the slogan to something that you hear in a supermarket, an ‘inelegant formulation …..that isn’t very English.’

The columnist has a point; we do hear many clichés uttered in the course of sermons that, when they are left unexplained, are, no doubt, a source of confusion for those not initiated into this sort of language. In this particular case there is some unpacking to be done. I would however begin by saying that the expression the ‘good news of our Lord Jesus Christ’ is not one that I personally would ever use. But let me begin by giving an explanation of what I believe the ‘good news’ of the New Testament is in fact all about, taking, first, the perspective of the Synoptic gospels. Right at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, we have that memorable sentence (chapter 1. 14-15) when it is said of Jesus that he ‘came into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel (good news) of God’. The Greek word for Gospel here is often translated as good news, so we can regard the English words as identical in meaning. What is the good news or gospel as Jesus understands it? The passage goes on to explain what this good news is all about. Jesus is reported to say, ‘The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you; repent, and believe the Gospel’. We would be correct in taking the natural meaning of these words and see that the good news is closely identified with whatever Jesus means by the ‘kingdom of God’.

I can still remember the moment in my theological studies when it became clear to me that the understanding of this term ‘kingdom of God’ was the key to understanding much of what the synoptic gospels were about. In particular it was a term that was the key to unlock the meaning of the parables and thus much of the teaching of Jesus as a whole. Recalling a lot of reading from almost fifty years ago, I can remember how the writers like Norman Perrin and Joachim Jeremias opened up the meaning of both ‘Good News’ and Kingdom of God for me. The overriding idea of these terms was that Jesus believed that in his words and actions, God’s rule or activity was becoming visible. Those who attached themselves to his ministry could encounter God reaching out to them through the acts of healing and forgiveness that Jesus performed. Among the most vivid announcements and outworkings of this Kingdom were the meals with the ‘tax gatherers and sinners’. Here both forgiveness and outreach to the outsider were being powerfully enacted. The Lord’s Prayer itself was a prayer for the kingdom of God to come into the here and now. The ministry of Jesus was summed up in the words that were sent to John the Baptist when he asked if Jesus was indeed the one that was to come. The answer that was given (Luke 7.22-23) ‘The blind recover their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are being raised to life, the poor are hearing the good news…’ Here the good news (gospel) is about a new vivid encounter with God brought about through Jesus.

I suspect that the Archbishop’s summary of ‘good news of Jesus’ owes very little to the words of Jesus and far more to the use of these words by Paul. We get the flavour of what Paul understands by good news or gospel in the very first words of Romans. Here we see clearly that the good news has nothing to do with the teaching and ministry of Jesus but everything to with what Paul believed about the act of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus, now called Christ. The gospel has, in thirty or so years, changed its meaning from being something that was experienced to something that is an interpretation and understanding of an event in the past. The Gospel, to quote again from chapter 1 of Romans, is the ‘saving power of God for everyone who has faith’. It is beyond this blog post to go much further into Pauline theology to expound this beyond emphasising a second time that there is a marked contrast in understanding what the Good News (gospel) actually means according to Jesus (as understood by the Synoptic writers) and Paul. But what exactly does the Archbishop understand by these words?

This blog here makes a stab at an interpretation that seems to explain the Archbishop’s use of the words. I have in previous blog posts indicated that modern evangelical theology has a great loyalty to the particular theology of Christ’s death known as ‘substitutionary atonement’. This is a preference for certain ideas that can, no doubt, be read out of various passages in the gospels and epistles. This theology states that Christ’s death in some way ‘satisfies’ God so that he can free humankind from their sin. Once again I am skating over huge areas of biblical and dogmatic theology to make a point in summary. But I want to say that this particular reading of the significance of Christ’s death is one among several in the New Testament. It’s popularity, if that is the right word, among many Protestant and Evangelical theologians, is that it dovetails neatly with another central feature of conservative theology -the theology of conversion. Evangelical theology has always placed a great emphasis on human depravity and sin and the need to escape the ‘wrath’ of God. This preaching emerging from this theology always seems to lead into the creation of a ‘crisis’ where the individual discovers that Christ has taken his/her sins on to the Cross. He offers now a new life, a redeemed life where one can escape everlasting damnation and the threat of hell. The new life always takes place within the setting of a authoritarian institution where the leaders always have the last word as to how this life is to be lived in practice.

In summary the ‘good news of Jesus’ according to the Archbishop seems to be the promise of conversion from sin to salvation by an act of faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Perhaps the one who uses the expression, the ‘good news of Jesus’ with this meaning, needs to explain two further things. The first of these that this ‘good news’ is not what Jesus actually taught or understood by this word. Secondly it needs to be explained to those outside the Evangelical circles, the agnostics and intelligent journalists among others, that the good news of Jesus is far more varied (and exciting) than simply escaping the wrath of God. It is in fact about entering a new life of unimagined richness and depth of experience – the human life shown to us by Jesus.