Ever since Paul described the Christian path as resembling a race, Christians have found the image of movement and journey to describe their lives a helpful one.  The Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the classic description of the nature of the Christian life, a journey with set-backs as well as periods of encouragement and grounds for hope.  The activity of pilgrimage itself is a metaphor for the whole of the Christian life.  Any pilgrim who has travelled on foot, whether to Canterbury or Compostela in Spain, will know the combination of pain and expectation and joy as the journey comes to an end.  Christian living itself combines the periods of doubt with moments of insight and breakthrough.   As with pilgrimage the Christian is given the grace to persevere through ‘cloud and sunshine’.

It is on reflection a puzzle to discover that large numbers of Christians appear to reject the notion of pilgrimage in favour of a faith that puts a stress on arriving at their destination on the day of their conversion.  For many evangelical Christians the decisive moment in their lives is the experience of giving their hearts and loyalty to Christ so that he is said to be the Lord and Master of their lives.  Simultaneously they are promised infallible access to his guiding word in the text of Scripture.  The task from then on is to hold themselves safe from falling away so that when the moment of death comes they may be transported to glory.  The entire Christian journey seems to have been accomplished in a moment of time and the only place that seems possible to travel to is backwards to perdition.   That would involve a loss of the salvation so preciously gained at the moment when the individual became a Christian.  Staying in this place of conversion is an activity not totally without tension or even fear.

This way of being a Christian contrasts starkly with the way of pilgrimage that we outlined at the beginning.  It will be clear which way I prefer from the tone of my writing.  But I want to make it clear that what I have said about the evangelical/conversionist path is not meant to imply that it is entirely wrong.  The experience of conversion may be totally self-authenticating and valid for the person concerned.  The problem for me is not the moment of conversion but what happens afterwards that is the issue.  The new Christian, because he/she has received everything on the first day of the journey seems to have nowhere else to go, nothing else to explore.  They are stuck in a place of supposed fulfilment and joy but which, in reality, seems to be a place of stagnation and what appears to be sterility.  Chris has often spoken to me about the loud music that accompanies the worship of evangelical Christians who want to tell the world about the joy of conversion.  Somehow I suspect the music is loud because it enables them to bypass the activity of having to think about what comes next in their Christian lives.  I have listened (painfully sometimes) to numerous testimonies given by Christians which record their moments of conversion.  Listening to these accounts critically, two things stand out.  The first thing is that the structure of conversion experiences is very similar wherever you hear it.  While the details of time and place will obviously be unique, the formula of words is almost identical in every case.  The second thing that is striking is that normally nothing to match the conversion experience has happened since.  It is as though the Christian has been up a mountain, seen a glimpse of glory but has never been able to evoke anything like it again.

The liberal or progressive Christian, were they to give a testimony, would give a very different story.   Not for them in all probability was there a bright light on the Damascus road.  Maybe they would happier with the language of a series of flashes along the road.  None of these experiences of light was on its own sufficient to convince totally but when seen together over a period of time, the progressive Christian had been able to discern a pattern, a pattern which speaks of God.  The word that describes this way of conversion is perhaps a pilgrim faith.  The pilgrim Christian is the one who travels, sometimes alone, sometimes with others along a path which he has decided is one he wants to follow.  It leads to a destination that he wants to call truth or reality but she/he knows that until he arrives the full shape and glory of the destination will not be known.  As I have said in previous posts, the pilgrim Christian travels with this combination of faith and hope in what is fully to be revealed.

Why do I commend to my reader the way of the pilgrim Christian?  It certainly describes my own path but that is not the main reason for commending it.  Look back over my life-time I can see that the path of the pilgrim Christian has given me the freedom and the excitement to explore and discover the transcendent in many manifestations.   It is this combination of freedom and the excitement of a constant possibility of discovery that I want to commend.   This is not the time for personal autobiography except to say that being a pilgrim has given me the permission to travel and discover aspects of truth within a variety of cultures and belief systems.  It has been and still is an exciting journey and I suspect that God is not far from most human beings who seek him whether or not they are Christian.  By travelling with others who may not even speak my language or engage with my culture I may nevertheless find God in that journey.  Each new discovery, each new insight shows me beyond all doubt that anything I do know already is incomplete.  The fullness of truth, the depth of reality is always beyond and further along the road but as a pilgrim I can continue to travel towards them.

One of the themes I have touched on in various blog posts is the way that we oscillate between knowing ourselves as individuals and as part of a group.  I want to reflect on this further, particularly from a historical and cultural point of view.  A heightened awareness of this contrast can help us to know ourselves better and resist the urge to become a part of an unthinking crowd when it is not in our interests to do so.

The Life of the Tribe

When we observe the life and patterns of traditional tribal communities we notice various things about them which are very different from our own culture.  In the first place a tribal society will know only one form of education, that of being initiated into the customs and traditions of the tribe.  This may include an acute sensitivity to the natural world and the ability to track animals, using clues that we would describe as subliminal.  The tribal society will normally have its own language but this language will be by our standards probably very restricted.  If you only have a 1000 words in your language it is going to severely restrict the ideas you can articulate.  Abstract words probably don’t exist.  This restricted vocabulary and the severe limitations on educational attainment are going to have the effect of meaning that every member of the tribe is going to find it difficult or impossible in our modern sense to become individuals.  They are going to be in a cultural and psychological sense very similar to one another.  They simply do not have the tools to enter what we would understand as a process of ‘individuation’.  That would require an exposure to life beyond the tribe.

The first individuals – 6^th Century BC

Living in such tribal groups is the way that human beings have existed for most of history.  It is only in recorded history that we begin to read about individuals as we would understand them.  Of the characters in the Old Testament, the first person who stands out as having a near modern self-consciousness is the prophet Jeremiah.  He can be said to ‘exist’, a word that literally means stand out.  We can read of his inner struggles that drove him away from the support and comfort of his fellow human beings in order to follow his call from Yahweh.  The world of the 6^th century BC also saw the simultaneous emergence in other parts of the world of personalities like the Buddha. Similar individuals are found in China in the same century with the emergence of Taoism and Confucianism, and we must not forget in Europe the early Greek philosophers.  I do not want to say anything further about the events of this particular century except to say that it can be seen as a golden age for religious and cultural history.   There was nothing universal and inevitable about this dawning of individual consciousness.  For most of the next 2000 years the tribal pattern continued to exist and indeed it could be argued that it still affects a large swathe of humanity.

The rediscovery of the Individual in modern times

Tribal awareness, in contrast to individual awareness, could be said to have largely dominated the West after the collapse of the Roman empire right up to the Renaissance.  This movement was when the values of the ancient world were rediscovered in the countries of Europe.   This new education and learning only touched a relatively small elite of wealthy people but it is generally agreed that the years between 1450 – 1550 mark the beginning of the ‘modern’ period.  ‘Renaissance man’ came to be a shorthand for describing a character having a fairly modern kind of awareness.  Such a person was further refined into ‘Enlightenment man’, the 18^th century manifestation of humanity.   The shorthand motto of the Enlightenment was, as we have mentioned before, ‘dare to doubt’.  Doubting was a mark of emancipation from the past and present traditions, so that new ideas could be thought and new discoveries made.

Western education for individuality

The values of western education have for some time encouraged the emergence of individuals who can think for themselves and take part in a democratic society, itself an Enlightenment idea.  Whether our education system is successful in creating these values through education can be debated but there is a belief that the thoughts, conscience and awareness of the individual takes a prominent place in our Western societies.  People who are arrested for criminal offences are assumed to be capable of making moral choices for themselves.  As adults our choices in numerous areas of activity are honoured by the rest of society.  The latest one to be so honoured is the biological sex of our partner.

Reflecting on individuality and group identity

This post has been written in order to provoke reflection by the reader as to whether the assumption we normally operate as separate individuals is always accurate.  The patterns of consumption and the dedication to fashion would seem to be tribal behaviour.  Also as I have suggested in an earlier blog, the gang culture of the inner city may simply be a living out of tribal behaviour.  Tribal behaviour is also an evocation of the merger experience known to a small child.  A baby or a toddler has little sense of being a separate being from the mother and in situations of stress even a normally differentiated adult may long for a similar merger to take place to alleviate the pain of isolation.  It would seem, to repeat the point at the beginning, that all of us appear to oscillate between separateness and identification with others according to the situation.  Perhaps what this blog post has helped to make clear that this swinging between the two extremes is built into our genes, our human history as well having been lived out in our experience of emerging from infancy into adulthood.

The ability to say ‘I am’ is something we have been given by our education, our place in human history  and our experience of relationships.  Perhaps we need to think about this awareness and at the same time ponder our share in a common history with countless others of being part of a tribal-type of existence when our thinking, feeling and experiencing was merged with that of countless others.  That experience is not totally negative, indeed the Christian experience of worship often activates it in us.  What is perhaps most important is not whether we have one or other of these experiences at a particular moment, but to see them as both part of our human condition.  The self-awareness is the important thing so that, as in the subtle manipulation of ‘merger-needs’ by abusive churches, we have insight into what is going within our consciousness.

Conclusion and Summary

As a summary, and to draw this reflection into our main theme of abusive churches,  I need to make my point clear.  Everyone in the 21^st century exists within a continuum between a desire for total merger with others and a strong sense of separateness.  Churches understand this oscillation and can sometimes manipulate it to our disadvantage by convincing us that it is in our interest to remain at the dependent end of this continuum.  While it is not wrong to enjoy this experience of dependency on others from time to time, it is also important to have a proper understanding and insight into the process so we are not so easily exploited.  Let us rejoice in both ends of this spectrum that exist inside ourselves and not allow them to be a means to be taken advantage of by others.

After writing a blog post twice or three times a week for the past three months, I realised that there was a limit to the material that I could pull out of my memory to place in front of those who follow the blog.  So from this point on my blogs will change direction somewhat.  The material that I will be sharing will more likely refer directly to material on my book-shelves and especially to ideas that I have found helpful at some point in the past.  Thus the reader of the blog will be travelling with me on a journey as I look back to books and ideas that I have found useful over the years.  I hope my readers will want to travel on this journey that will help all of us to understand better the phenomenon that we call abusive religion.

One of the problems of trying to write a book on abusive fundamentalism as I did some 15 years ago, was getting a handle on the subject matter.  There were of course lots of books on fundamentalism but they took a whole variety of approaches that varied from the biblical to the theological ,  from the psychological to the political.  It was with some relief that I found a particular book which for the first time gave me a place on which to stand and find an overall perspective from which to look at the whole topic.  The book was entitled Righteous Religion:  Unmasking the illusions of Fundamentalism and Authoritarian Catholicism by Kathleen Ritter and Craig O’Neill.  Part of the attraction of the book was that it spoke about psychological themes without becoming too technical.  This tendency of books about psychology to be extremely technical has been something which has constantly plagued my attempts to understand the dynamics of cultic churches.  This book on the other hand had the ability to say something quite profound with no danger that the reader, new to psychology, would be overwhelmed by the jargon.

The thesis of the book is a deceptively simple one which can be outlined in the space of a single blog post.  The first principle of the book is that attendance at a church of whatever kind has the attraction of reactivating in the individual the experience of belonging to a family.  Everyone has such a desire for the safety and security of a human family built into the genes.  A church can or should provide for its members the various positive aspects of the birth family, including safety, acceptance, support and meaning.  The parallels between the needs of a young child in a family and that those of an adult belonging to a church are obviously far from exact but the same basic needs are there in both stages of human growth.

Righteous Religion then distinguishes between the healthy family and the toxic one.  At the risk of over-simplification, the normal family is seen as one where the love offered is unconditional.  However good or bad the child is, the parent never ceases to love the child without limit.  The child grows up with that security built into their awareness.  Even though misbehaviour has to be dealt with the child is never allowed to doubt that the parents’ love is solid and dependable.  In contrast to such a family there are other families where the message given is different.  We call the love in these families conditional love.  Any affection offered comes with subtle strings attached.  The message is given ‘I will show you care  and affection if….’  The conditions that are laid down normally concern the parents’ status and well-being.  ‘I will love you if you bring credit to this family by your achievements and your efforts’.  This most damaging form of conditional love is one which places on the child the need to succeed, to make the parents proud.  If for any reason success is not achieved the child is made to feel worthless as a human being both for his/her failure at the task but also for failing to receive adequate affection and love from the people he is dependent on.  The child is doubly betrayed by this toxic environment.

Ritter and O’Neill present the authoritarian church as being the equivalent to the toxic family that only cares when its expectations are met.  Acceptance and approval are only handed out to those who believe the right things, give sufficiently of their means and generally conform to the norms of the group.  Because the church has often succeeded in activating quite powerful mechanisms of need, these toxic churches are able to continue to exercise a powerful controlling and ultimately harmful hold over individuals.  Dissent is not tolerated. The member of an abusive church or cult will be reluctant to leave the group in the same way that the abused child will find it hard to let go of the toxic family.  Belonging is a stronger instinct even than the desire to avoid harm and abuse.

I have spoken in a previous blog post about the power of induced fear.  In the toxic family the child lives with the threat of being cast out into a nothingness, losing any familiarity that he has known, the sheer terror of being alone.  The toxic church has a similar trump card.  It deals in the currency not only of belonging but also claims to have the power to threaten its members with the terrors of being lost for all eternity, in a place apart from God, a place of eternal torment.  No doubt thinking about the possibility of hell evokes childhood memories of separation and terror in the adult.  This will always be a powerful tool of control.

Using the model of the church as a family is useful up to a point.   In the last resort it is a useful metaphor and the limitations of linking the two will become apparent quite quickly if the metaphor is worked too hard.  But Righteous Religion did help me at an early stage in my reading grasp one aspect of the way that one can assess the healthy and the unhealthy in church life.  It also helped me to understand how the vulnerabilities of people are taken advantage of and made the tools of control.  Frightening people into the Kingdom may make for ‘successful’ and full churches but ultimately such churches cannot necessarily be said to be healthy.  The important question that has to be asked of any church congregation is whether it is healthy.  By healthy we mean that the people have the opportunity to grow, feel affirmed, love and be loved as well as be free from fear.  The same questions can also be asked of a human family.  Most of us know what makes for a healthy environment for children to grow up in.  The least we can ask for members of our church families that they are allowed to exist with the same underlying values of acceptance, tolerance, freedom to think and be heard.  Part of the glory of a human family is that children are normally allowed to grow up different in character and ability.  Why on earth should we expect the members of the church acquire a monotonous similarity of character and belief with one another?  Long may difference and even disagreement flourish in the church just as it does in the human family!

On this blog my readers will have noted that I have put forward some outspoken, even uncomfortable statements about the Bible.  I have talked about a selective reading of passages from Scripture, finding a point of teaching from a single quotation while ignoring other passages that say something different.  The other technique, to which I strongly object, is to suggest that the only valid truth statements are those that are factual and scientific in some way.  If the Bible says, to take a random example, that God is going to make the Nile dry up (Isaiah 19.5) then presumably this is something that will have to happen one day because it is in the Bible.  For most of us truth statements come in a variety of forms – poetry, drama, story, symbol as well as factual statements.  Does it matter that people in America and across the world claim to believe that when the bible makes an apparently factual statement then that is how we have to understand it?  Yes I believe it does because in some situations this belief system causes some individuals very real harm.

In the news, as I write, is the report of the Anglican bishops in England who write that they ‘agree to disagree’ on the issue of gay relationships following the Pilling report.  Elsewhere in the world the Anglican bishops see this as a total betrayal of Anglican standards.  The Archbishops in Nigeria and Uganda, while quoting Scripture, have loudly supported moves to outlaw gay relationships by their respective governments.  While the Ugandan authorities seem to be hesitating before signing new measures into law, no such reticence is to be found in Nigeria.  Those suspected of homosexual activities are already being rounded up and put in prison.  It would not be a total exaggeration to say that ‘the Bible put them there’, even though there are many other factors, cultural, historical and social.

When we examine the rhetoric of these fervent Anglican African leaders on this topic, we frequently find the expression ‘the Bible clearly teaches’.  No doubt this is a turn of phrase that is heard in conservative pulpits across the world.  When I started to think about this expression I began to realise that this personalisation of the Bible is a nonsense statement.  Let me explain what I mean.  The Bible is a compilation of writing across many centuries and is enormously varied in the approach it takes to almost any subject you can name.  A book cannot anyway teach anything unless it is written by one person over a fairly  short period.  For me one of the fascinating discoveries of being a Bible student was to discover that Paul changed his teaching over time.   If we do not get consistency in this single writer we can name, how can we, or should we, expect consistency within the writings of other anonymous authors over centuries?  I would like to see the liberal Anglican bishops argue forcefully against this claim that the Bible has a single view on the gay issue or any other one for that matter.

I could go on to talk about all the things that are in the Bible and we like to avoid noticing, like God commanding the slaughter of women and children but that is not the point I want to end on.  I want to come back to the issue of rhetoric and the way that conservative Christians use rhetorical devices to confuse their opponents as well as their followers.  When writing about the thinking of George Lakoff in an earlier post, (December 20^th) I mentioned that he saw many of the debates between progressive and conservative in American politics being bedevilled by the manipulation and loading of language to suit the conservative point of view.  The expression ‘the Bible teaches’ or ‘the Bible clearly states’ is another rhetorical device which needs to be challenged every time it is said.  We cannot easily talk or dialogue meaningfully with such crude and unhelpful expressions which are, in the last resort, virtually meaningless statements.  We must challenge the person repeating  these slogans and suggest  that he restate his position to say, ‘in a certain period in Biblical times people believed that the following was the will of God.’  ‘The Bible clearly states’ has to be translated to say, ‘there is a passage which appears to have this understanding of God’s will.’  Having stated it thus we can then go on to have a sensible discussion about whether these ancient insights apply to us or not.  I can find numerous ideas from the Old Testament that clearly do not apply to us and each and every moral injunction from those days needs to be tested thoroughly through the prism of Christ’s revelation and the insights of modern understandings.

The Anglican bishops have been under a lot of flak for not coming on one side or the other over the gay question.  Perhaps this failure to agree is more helpful than it looks.  By agreeing not to agree they are saying loud and clearly that the church as a whole has to live with disagreements.  In other words if you want to claim the name Anglican then it is part of the course to recognise that you have to live with people who do not agree with you, without telling them that they are inspired by satanic thinking.  Anglicanism needs to exorcise intemperate intolerance.  If the conservative churches in Africa and elsewhere continue to condemn those who disagree with them, then they may need to be a parting of the ways.  There is only so long that anyone can live with another person who is unable to see any goodness or light within you.

As part of a varied ministry over 40+ years, I have for a period of around 15 years accepted the responsibility for the ministry of ‘spiritual deliverance’ in two Anglican dioceses.  The Press would no doubt describe the role as that of Exorcist but the reality was far more prosaic.  Perhaps the main qualification for doing the job was a readiness to take seriously strange phenomena that occur from time to time in people’s lives.  Typically and most commonly there could be a manifestation of physical energy with no obvious cause.  This might be described as poltergeist activity.  There might be a disturbance of things flying around or lights flashing on and off.  Normally I would be talking to a clergyman over the phone advising him how to approach the problem, the attitude to take and the things to say.  I have to say that when I went into such a situation myself the phenomena always stopped but I have absolutely no doubt that these frightening episodes were real.  Listening carefully, taking the fears seriously and offering prayers would normally calm the situation down.  Mostly I was also able to identify a particular individual who was the focus of the strange phenomena.   There was thus a duty on my part to ensure that the unconscious energy at work in that individual was somehow ‘earthed’ through careful listening and other forms of pastoral care.

The second typical event was encountering directly, or through advising a clergyman seeking advice, an individual who believed themselves ‘possessed’.  The question that I wanted to determine before anything else was where the person had learnt the language of possession.  In almost every case they had picked up the vocabulary from attendance at a Christian fellowship which had dealt in the currency of demonic activity and constant attack.  Although the language of demonic attack had been normally linked to Anglo-Catholic circles until around 40 years ago, the idea of possession has since around 1980 been normally linked to charismatic and evangelical groups.  There was a particular upsurge of interest, even paranoia, about satanic and demonic activity in the late 80s and early 90s.  As I described in an earlier blog post, aspects of this paranoia around this were, for once, taken seriously by the UK Government and a report published in 1995.  This particular paranoia, even affecting some in the wider society, has largely subsided.  (See blog post for December 4^th)

In this post I don’t want to repeat what I said in the previous one about devils, but to revisit the horror and cruelty of telling a vulnerable person that they are in thrall to a negative spiritual power of some description.  I was always open to the possibility that this was indeed the explanation for their distress but it never, as far as I could tell, turned out to be the case in practice.  In the discussions on this blog we have touched on the experience of utter powerlessness whether through poverty, social exclusion or mental illness.  When you are at the bottom of the pile, you feel unworthy of anyone’s attention and therefore expect to be ignored and humiliated by everyone.  It seems to me that the language of demonic possession is one more weapon in the tool box through which someone can make an individual feel utterly powerless.  How can you argue with a person who tells you such a thing?

The task of someone who is entrusted with the ministry of spiritual deliverance when encountering someone who believes they are ‘possessed’ is to recognise that you are dealing with someone who may have been doubly or triply burdened.  They first of all carry the stigma of the original problem whether mental or social that has allowed them to be burdened with the possession label.  Secondly they have assumed the identity of someone who is powerless to defend themselves against spiritual/demonic incursion.  Thirdly they have allowed themselves to trust in a Christian leader who, for reasons of their own, has put them in this state of utter dependency.  The relationship with such a person is little short of toxic and one wonders how they can escape it even if they run away physically from the influence of that individual.

This second kind of care entrusted to an Officer for spiritual deliverance might be described as a kind of exorcism but in practice it was an attempt to give people back some of their power after they had been doubly betrayed by the church and one of its leaders.  Once was through a doubtful dualistic teaching and secondly by a continuing toxic dependence on a church leader who wanted total dominance over vulnerable members of his (normally his) flock.  It will be apparent that I met relatively few devils doing my ‘spiritual deliverance’ work.  More frequently I met the casualties of hopelessly inept teaching and examples of ruthless exploitation of the vulnerable.

Shepherding – a story.

Among the books on my shelves is a small green volume written by one Juan Ortiz, a pastor from Buenos Aires in Argentina and published in 1975.  This small book, called Disciple, was a reflection on his ministry over the previous ten or more years.  It was to help cause a small revolution in certain parts of the evangelical churches of his time.  The history of shepherding is something I discussed in my book Ungodly Fear but I did not have then access to this key foundation document by Ortiz.

I want to list some of the key Biblical ideas that Ortiz picks up in explaining the ideas that led to the so-called Shepherding Movement.  Reading them one can see how innocent ideas can be turned, as indeed happened, into something monstrous and abusive.

According to Ortiz we are slaves of Jesus Christ and he bases this teaching on Luke 17.10.  In other words Jesus owns every part of our lives.  The idea of being the slaves of Christ is one worthy of exploration but when it becomes combined with Ortiz’s other key ideas about discipleship, it becomes subtly much more oppressive.

Ortiz in chapter 14 of the book Disciple sets out two ‘laws’ of discipleship.  The first is that ‘there is no formation without submission’.  Formation is for him a key factor in the way that Jesus discipled his followers.  In accepting his call to discipleship, the disciples submitted to his authority.  In short undergoing formation for discipleship through submission is to be a key task for every member of the church.  Most members would also have others ‘below’ them who needed to be discipled.  This process of discipling is not dissimilar to the role of parents ‘forming’ or bringing up their children.  But Ortiz quickly recognises that submission has to be something that everyone has to agree to, including the pastor.  So Ortiz sets out the second law ‘there is no submission without submission’.  Everyone was thus tied into an interlocking hierarchical structure that placed everyone in a situation of submitting to someone else but also having others submitting to them.  The church then dropped the word member in favour of the word disciple to describe an individual who formed part of this pyramid structure.  Thus everyone except the very newest members was both discipling and being discipled.  As can be imagined this networking idea proved fairly successful in the context of Argentina where the ravages of poverty, high inflation and political oppression meant that individual lives were fairly fragile.  The vision of the church that Ortiz wanted to share was one which gave nourishment, both spiritual and practical to its members up and down the network of the church.  The cell structure in his church helped to bind people closer together in the context of oppression and persecution.  Also because the way that all disciples are interlocked with others above and below them, it provided for rapid communication within the whole.

Cell structures and mutual submission might sum up the insights of Juan Ortiz who inspired the Shepherding Movement in the States and across the world.  The historical details of how shepherding spread do not concern us here but suffice to say that however well it had succeeded in Argentina, the shepherding idea was a disaster when it hit the wider church beyond South America.  When you take the words ‘submission’ and ‘discipleship’ together and draw everyone in the congregation into this structure, you give those with a penchant for enjoying power a field day.  The churches where shepherding ideas were put into practice gave to naive young Christians the power to enforce their will in every area of life over others ‘below’ them.  Thus one Christian could tell another how to live their lives – how to spend their money, the relationships they were to have and who they were to invite into their homes.  Being in submission to another did not, as it turned out, prevent excesses of immature and irresponsible behaviour.  Far from it.  The situation in numerous churches became so dire that the leaders who had welcomed the ideas into America recanted on their approval by 1975.  Needless to say, and Chris will confirm this, these ideas continued to hold sway for many years after this.  Most of the House Churches which flourished in the 80s were deeply influenced by these ideas and ideals.  As with the cults, the idea of living a communal life, sharing and submitting to a community ideal seems very attractive.  No doubt some succeeded in sustaining the ideal for a period but the snake of power abuse at work in the Garden of Eden appeared very quickly and destroyed what seemed so good at the start.

Somewhere in the writing of Ortiz are some interesting and profound insights and perhaps they should be revisited at some point.  This can, however, only be done when the sad history of the Shepherding Movement has been revisited, the countless lives wrecked and destroyed are mourned and we acknowledge in repentance what happens when scriptural ideas are taken and misapplied.

At the end of this month an American charismatic superstar is to visit Britain and is to lead a big event in the South West in connection with the God Channel.  There are some who will be able to guess who I am talking about but I find it easier to discuss my thoughts on the man and his visit without mentioning an actual name.  That way I am able to discuss the phenomenon of charismatic superstars generally without limiting myself to a single individual.  There may also be search machines on the look-out for mentions of this particular name so that legal action can be taken against any disparaging remarks.  The world of charismatic superstars is full of such involvement with the law.

Our charismatic superstar, henceforth to be called HB, is notorious on both sides of the Atlantic.  He is known for so-called Miracle Crusades which have taken place in every part of the world.  HB emerges out of the so-called Word of Faith tradition which declares that it is God’s will for us to have material abundance.  He himself is a vivid example of this belief system, dressing extravagantly and flamboyantly at all his meetings.  His hair is always immaculate and he exudes a style and over-confidence that is culturally alien in this country.  Nevertheless the over the top style does appear to have an attraction for some people in the same way as the excesses of the God Channel.  For our particular individual the most notorious and chilling example of excess was the appeal via a mass mailing to supporters to send in money for a Gulfstream jet.  Apparently this money was raised in less than a year.

The evidence for miracles at the hands of HB has been examined by various researchers, journalists and students.  The evidence for actual miracles turns out to be extremely thin.  Not only have few miracles been verified but there have well-attested examples of fraud uncovered.  Individuals going into meetings have been questioned at the door and then their symptoms are ‘miraculously’ described by HB during the course of the meeting through ‘words of knowledge’.   Also the very obviously sick, the brain damaged and those with severe physical complaints are prevented from coming anywhere near the stage by the ushers.

I have probably said enough to indicate my own position over HB which is that it is highly regrettable that he has been given a visa to visit this country.  What is worse is that there are people in this country who feel moved to sponsor him and take care of his considerable entourage not to mention his extravagant requirements for hotel accommodation.  Such people seem blind to the appalling suffering that is caused by extravagant claims to be able to heal the sick.  This issue is not that it is impossible for such healings to take place but the crass exploitation of a very, very few instances to make a lot of money at the expense of the hopes of countless others is obscene.  We are back to the familiar theme of this blog which is that it is the most vulnerable that suffer the most at the hands of spiritual abusers.  The refusal of HB even to touch the most severely afflicted on the grounds that they will harm the PR of the organisation makes one wince.  What are the adjectives to describe such behaviour – callous, cruel, cynical, exploitative?  I am sure there are other adjectives but they all involve the denial of Christian love.  This behaviour all suggests an individual who is totally addicted to wealth and self-importance.

I will be returning to the psychological profile of people like HB because it is a subject on which I have done a fair amount of reading.  Meanwhile I just want to make one or two observations.  The apparent cynical exploitation of huge numbers of sick people to make a lot of money for HB is indicative of a complete absence of empathy and imaginative identification with other people.  This lack of empathy and excessive cultivation of image is a pointer to a full blown personality disorder, particularly that known at the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  This affliction of NPD is fed and encouraged by all the razzmatazz of big crusades which convinces the leading speaker that he or she is above ordinary people.  They believe ‘we are special, anointed by God himself’.  This grandiosity or messiah complex is precisely something that our abusive Christian cultures seem to encourage.  In short, areas of Christian life are creating monsters with severe personality disorders who are able to wreak havoc on other people’s lives, particularly the most vulnerable.

My final comment is to question the whole crusade enterprise and to ask who benefits.  It is not God who is hardly presented amid all the loud music and appeals for money.  It is not the sick who come normally to be cruelly disappointed.  The person who benefits is the speaker whose massive need of money, adulation and attention is being gratified.  In short charismatic events, not to mention charismatic organisations are all designed ultimately to benefit a single person, the one at the top.  HB is no exception and it may be that the large numbers of people supporting him will eventually come to this same depressing insight.  But the nature of Christian abuse is that it hides this insight from us as long as possible.  It is up to us in different ways to open our eyes and those of other people to see what is really going at these events.  This blog will continue to provide material to help the reader to have clearer vision.

The idea that the earth is 6000 years old and that humans lived alongside dinosaurs in times past is not something that I ever heard about in my younger days.  Indeed the vast majority of Christians in this country, even the most conservative, would not subscribe to such notions.  But it does appear from recent press stories that the so called ‘young creation’ theory is alive and well in certain churches and some Christian schools which operate outside the State system.

For most people in our society and indeed among Christians, the calculations of Archbishop Ussher in the 17^th century that date the moment of Creation to October 4004 BC are fanciful nonsense.   And yet such nonsense never entirely goes away.  The existence of Creationist schools in Britain has been once again brought to our attention by Professor Alice Roberts, the television presenter and president of the Association for Science Education.  She would claim that the teaching of a theory that the science of creation is set out the first chapters of Genesis is ‘indoctrination’ and has absolutely nothing to do with scientific education.

Chris reminds me that there are many individuals in the churches who have been exposed to such theories.  For them the idea that God created the world in six days is all part of the package they have bought into when they became Christians.  They are either people of relatively poor education or else they have succeeded in sealing off their Christian beliefs from everything else they have learnt at school and elsewhere.  In a recent conversation Chris also mentioned how difficult it is to debate with individuals who have bought into this body of ideas.  They follow such speakers as the Australian Ken Hamm, an individual linked to Creationist groups in the States.  Because these ideas are so counter-cultural, the defences that are erected to defend them are massive and hard to dislodge.

As part of my scrutiny of some Internet material on this topic last night, I found mention of an encounter between the eminent sceptic Richard Dawkins and a group of Australian Creationists in his Oxford home.  They filmed an interview which was then edited to suggest that the Creationists had outwitted Dawkins in a particular question about evolution.  This, what can only be called manipulation of the debate, is perhaps a clue to the way we should respond to the Creationists.  The detail of whether Professor Dawkins did or did not answer the technical  question put to him can be laid aside for the moment.  The important thing is that we name and challenge illegitimate forms of argument in the so-called debate between Creationists and those who oppose their ideas from whatever perspective.

The essence of any productive discussion is that two people agree to share their different views on a given topic. There also has to be an implicit agreement about the rules of discussion and these are going to vary according to the subject.  To discuss politics we must be agreed that we are talking about the same thing, whether it is theoretical politics or the political arrangements that apply to a particular country.  We would not think an argument of much value if for example one side was talking about politics in China and the other side was disagreeing with them by giving examples of  politics in the NHS for example.  Over the years certain conventions have grown to determine how political and historical debates take place, what counts as evidence and how rumour or propaganda, for example, are not valid tools of argument.  Both sides will know these rules and any deviation from them will be quickly challenged.  Within science as well there is a long tradition of agreement as to how we establish what is true and what is false.  Truth obviously is not only to be sought in science but science can rightly claim to make truth statements within its areas of competence.  The competence of science is found in the area of detailed measurement and in experiments that can be repeated over and over again.  Occasionally science discovers that it needs new theories to account for new phenomena.  The old mechanical physics outlined by Newton was inadequate to describe new phenomena thrown up by quantum physics.  The old theories were not shown to be wrong, merely incomplete.

The trick used by Creationists to claim a certain plausibility for their arguments is very clever but it remains a deceitful ruse.  When the creationists invaded the home of Richard Dawkins to ask him certain questions, they were able to give the impression in their video that two rival scientific theories of truth were being articulated and expressed alongside one another. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether there is anything of value in the Creationist arguments, it has to be said that the two sides are starting from such different places that there is no possibility of real contact or communication.  Creationism is not a scientific theory, whatever else it might be.  It fails to follow contemporary scientific convention on any score.  It is not based on evidence, experiment or rigorous observation.  To say that it is based on faith also does not make it a scientific claim.  It is as though we are describing a debate between a child who believes in Father Christmas and an astronaut.  The points of contact simply do exist.  No one would argue that the child’s understanding of reality should be placed alongside the training of the astronaut as though somehow they have equal status in the debate.  Nor do we want to crush the child’s beliefs as of no value.  They do have value within certain limited parameters.  The so-called debate between Dawkins and the Creationists was in fact a non debate because it simply did not fulfil any of the unwritten rules governing proper debate or discussion.

To summarise, the issue over Creationism is to recognise that it is not grounded in a theory of knowledge or fact that is part of conventional modern understanding.  It thus logically has to be placed in a category of unproveable statements because it does not touch any other area of knowledge or discourse.   Few would even describe it as theology.   Thus it cannot form part of a modern education which has as its aims the disciplined understanding and interpretation of various recognised bodies of knowledge, including art, science and history.  If a group of individuals choose to believe in the ideas of Creationism, we may want to allow them to do so but a modern society should resist allowing these ideas to be part of a normal education.  Normal education is to expose a child to the canon of agreed knowledge.  Alice Roberts is right.  The teaching of Creationism in any school is ‘indoctrination’.  It may also seriously harm the child in his or her intellectual formation and their ability to absorb the values and understandings needed to make normal citizens who participate in their society.  Absorbing totally extraordinary ideas may also drive individuals into despair when they discover how little currency these ideas actually possess beyond the small group  that holds on to them.  The Creationist is thus destined for ever to be cut off from various aspects of ordinary public discourse and culture, unable to understand or fully participate in wider society.  Is this really what we expect from Christians?  Does this resonate with the kind of life that Jesus wanted for his followers?

The blog post about hierarchy and the responses to it have made me realise that this is an important topic to which we need to return.  As always I am drawn to thinking about the groups for whom Chris is an advocate, the poorly paid, the mentally ill and those working in low status and demeaning jobs.  In any hierarchy, in any society there are always going to be people who for various reasons are at the bottom of the pile.  However we describe such people who do not succeed, we need to be aware of them, the large number of people who occupy a place of disempowerment.  These disadvantaged may suffer in various ways, poor education, indifferent health and an upbringing that may have been inadequate in some way.

It is the issue of poor health and low life expectancy that I want to focus on today.  In some reading I did in the past year or two, I came across some fascinating research by one Sir Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist (one who researches issues of public health).  He had a commission from the Government to study ill-health and life expectancy among civil servants.  A Google search will provide further details of this research so I will limit my comments to the broad outlines.  Marmot had the health histories of some eighty thousand civil servants to study, what illnesses they contracted and the age at which they died.  None of the subjects for study was poor in a material sense and their medical histories were carefully screened to take out of the calculation any genetic factors leading to ill-health.  His conclusions were startling and alarming.  The lower down the civil service hierarchy an individual worked, the more they were susceptible to ill health and relatively early death.  The ones who lived the longest and who enjoyed the highest standards of health were those who had reached the top levels of the Civil Service.  The ones below the top did not achieve the same levels of health and this pattern was repeated right down the pay grades to the least paid and those with the lowest status.   Marmot and his fellow researchers tried to test this observation again and again but it seemed every time that high rank in the Civil Service predicted good health.  It was far more important than diet, exercise and other healthy life-styles.  Only smoking seemed to be a greater hazard than low rank.

The reader is invited to look at the research for themselves to check that I have represented the findings accurately.  But it is the speculation about the reasons for this imbalance in health between those of high and low status that is the intriguing part of the research.  Marmot surmised that the one factor that could account for the mismatch of health between the different levels within the Civil Service was stress.  It would appear that he identified a particular type of stress associated with looking over your shoulder at your boss.  In short having your work priorities determined by someone else and also having to work following other people’s orders is deemed to be stressful in a way that is different from simply working hard.  It is only when you are the boss that you escape this particular threat to your health.

Giving and receiving orders is no doubt  a normal working out of the dynamics of a hierarchical organisation.     Marmot’s research in a nutshell suggested that the stress caused by a constant need to obey orders and to please those set over you is not only unpleasant but is also a physical threat to your health.  We can surmise that when the ordinary giving of orders has added to it actual abusing of power, we have a very stressful and toxic mix.

The word ‘stress’ is a slippery word but we all have experience of it.  It is one of the privileges of retirement that for the first time in my life I can control the external stressors on my life as I have the power to use the word ‘no’ if something comes up and I do not want to do it.  Speaking personally I also find that opportunities for taking extra exercise also help to counter any residual stress in my life.

But to return to Marmot’s research.  It confirms how serious is a situation when power manipulation and even the simple giving of orders can be experienced by the vulnerable, those at or near the bottom of the hierarchy, whether in a church, the workplace or as a member of a despised social group.  The conclusion of the research indicates that those at the bottom do not just suffer indignity, they also suffer severe threats to their long-term physical health.  That observation should compound our concern for any group that lies at the bottom of a social hierarchy.

One of the ‘good news’ stories of 2013 was Pope Francis’ decision to speak up for the poor.  By the poor, no doubt, he meant not only those who have little money, but also all those who come at the bottom of the hierarchies in societies across the world.  His example may help in identifying those who suffer, emotionally and physically, from the experience of disempowerment and bring them properly to the attention of the ‘powerful’.  Those of us who follow this blog, although we are only a tiny number of people, can play our part in firstly becoming aware of the powerless people around us but also by helping in small ways to help lift them up.  The words of the Magnificat come to mind.  ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek’.  Would that the church became a place where exalting the humble and meek was a reality.

‘aloof complacency’

In today’s Times there is an intriguing story about the efforts of Mr Xi, the Chinese President, to curb extravagance on the part of those who work for the State and occupy important posts within it.  A decree has gone out that this elite is no longer going to be allowed to drive foreign imported cars, particularly those from Germany, such as Audis and Mercedes.  They will be required to drive Chinese made models instead.  The problem for the Chinese officials is that Chinese cars are not known for their reliability.  But there is also a problem for their perceived status in the eyes of their fellow citizens.  ‘How,’ remarked one tweeter, ‘can a senior PLA officer possibly maintain his usual expression of aloof complacency at the wheel of a Geely? (local car)’  It is these two words ‘aloof complacency’ that seems to capture aspects of hierarchical behaviour the world over.  My younger daughter, who spent a year in China, tells me that for a country who is wedded to Communism, the Chinese have developed a remarkable variety of marks of status, including the size and shape of their spectacles!

What do these two words, ‘aloof complacency’ imply?  They imply that people who occupy a high position within a hierarchical structure often develop a body language and pose that proclaims their position at all times.  Aloof is a word that describes a self-important pose, an expression around the mouth accompanied by a straight back.  It says two things.  Look at me and be impressed and simultaneously keep out of my way because I am too important to be bothered with the likes of you.  It is not difficult to convey that message from the driving seat of a large imported foreign car.

The other word, complacency, picks the part of the attitude that wants nothing to do with lower forms of life.  In any hierarchy one way of asserting your position and keeping your status is by disregarding or dominating those below you.  They are simply not worth your attention.  People below you in the hierarchy do not just get ignored, they do not engage your compassion or what Christians would call love.  Complacency thus involves detachment and such detachment seems part of the pose adopted by many who occupy high places within hierarchies the world over.

Another story parallel to the Chinese report leapt at me from the pages of this week’s Tablet, the Catholic weekly.  This is the news that Catholic clergy, with a few exceptions, may no longer expect to achieve the honorary title of monsignor.  This title was given to clergy by the bishops for such things as long service or loyalty to the bishop.  Pope Francis has spotted no doubt a kind of careerism and ambition for titles among the clergy which involved a certain preening themselves as somehow more important than their fellows who were doing identical jobs.  The Church of England has a similar system which rewards clergy who have stayed loyal to the system for a long time in one place, by awarding them the honorary title of Canon.  The title has virtually no duties or extra responsibilities but allows some of these clergy concerned to make minor alterations to their robes as well as inviting his parishioners to alter their term of address to him from ‘Vicar’ to ‘Canon’.

These examples from China and from the Catholic and Anglican churches can probably be paralleled by the reader through countless other examples from a variety of walks of life.  In my school days I can remember the way that promotion to becoming a prefect meant that one instantly stopped speaking to boys who were not prefects.  In short, hierarchy, whether political or religious, has a horrible capacity to corrupt people and make them less human, compassionate and loving.  There are some telling words in the gospels when Jesus comes in on a conversation among his disciples about who was the most important.  He said and I paraphrase, ‘Kings and Lords exercise authority and lord it over others, but it shall not be so among you.  Whoever wants to be great must be the servant of all’.  There is a long sermon that could be preached on these few words.   We may comment that the undergirding message of this passage seems to have been completely lost over the centuries.  Few people criticise constructively the malign effect of hierarchy on some individuals.  They do not see that although it is necessary to have different levels of responsibility in government and church as well as in every other form of human organisation, it does not necessitate the ‘aloof complacency’ that quite often accompanies it.  Christians follow a master who saw right through power games in society and so should we.  Jesus spoke some memorable words in Matthew 23. 5 when talking about the teachers of the law and the Pharisees.  ‘Everything they do is done for men to see.  They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honour at banquets …..’  How little things have changed!

To return to the theme of this blog overall and the relevance of these news stories, we can finish by simply noting that ‘aloof complacency’ is a temptation always inherent in hierarchical organisations and this will increase the likelihood that power over others will be abused.  An increase of responsibility within a hierarchical structure is not sufficient reward for some.  They have to gild the lily by behaving in self-important ways that ultimately seem to be pointless and self-defeating.  It is particularly disappointing to find church organisations sometimes drawn into the same vanity power games as others.  The abuse of power wherever it is found is also often going to be rooted in this kind of vanity and superior attitude.  That is a good reason for us to be alert to notice it and resist it.  Although ‘aloof complacency’ is not easy to withstand when we are pushed down by it, we can at least recognise its ultimate futility and even see in this futility aspects of humour.    Perhaps ultimately pomposity and vanity are best defeated by humour and ridicule.  No doubt the Chinese tweeter raised a few wry smiles when describing the behaviour of the Government officials in his country!