Last month the BBC released the two-part documentary Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army. This Christian community appeared as the Jesus Fellowship during the charismatic heyday of the 1960s, offering a sort of crossover with the hippy movement. It emphasised those elements from the New Testament which seemed to fulfil the cultural zeitgeist: love, peace, joy, and communal living. Taking seriously those passages which talk of the disciples owning nothing in common, it grew into various shared houses and communes originally in the village of Bugbrooke in Northamptonshire, then spreading across the country in the following years.
Eventually numbering 1000s of members, the Fellowship relaunched in the late 1980s as the Jesus Army — actively seeking recruits among the homeless and vulnerable in urban settings, and later rebranded itself to match the early 1990s zeitgeist with “Jesus raves” playing Christian house and techno as a form of worship intended to appeal to a new generation.
The focus of the programme is the grim fact that Jesus Army communes featured dreadful physical and sexual abuse. All this has come to light in recent years, leading to its demise in 2019. Survivors of the abuse relay the fellowship’s horrors in the documentary — being individuals who either entered the group as young adults, or were raised as children within its confines.
The scale and the severity of the abuse is appalling. A redress scheme saw compensation payouts reach £7.7 million, after 890 applications were received from 601 survivors. The final report of the scheme identified 539 alleged abusers, including many former leaders of the group — with allegations against the founder, Noel Stanton, around whom a pseudo-messianic personality cult had developed.
The documentary is particularly interesting when it moves from describing the group’s problems, to diagnosing where and why things went so wrong. Much of the analysis seems sound enough. Personality cults always have dehumanising effects on their recruits. Nascent religious groups often have intense impacts on their members which spill over into volatile and unpredictable behaviour. A community living outside society’s norms is perhaps bound to attract some predatory individuals who sense opportunities to prey on the vulnerable with impunity.
Other aspects of the documentary’s diagnoses are less clear cut. Mentions of the group’s increasing “conservative” tendencies during the 1980s are connected with its descent into moral depravity. Stanton’s developing interest and mandating of celibacy, for example, must imply repression of (probably homosexual) desire. Believing there is a spiritual battle with evil forces underway must imply a psychotic denigration of secular sanity. A prescient comment from a 1970s documentary about the group is replayed with haunting music in the background: “There’s a natural suspicion of any such highly committed and insular group of people”.
In the case of the Jesus Army, these things clearly did become gravely problematic. The problem is, however, that the history of the Christian religion has plentiful examples of times when such things were powerful and motive forces for renewal, for growth in sanctity, and even for bequeathing to us the same religion we recognise as Christian today. Nearly all the great saints and mystics of the Faith were celibates. In the immediate post-War period, mainstream variants of Christianity revisited the existence of evil forces with which the forces of good are waged in battle because recent history had made it difficult to deny. If being “highly committed” is problematic, then so were the first apostles, the monastic orders, and numerous reformist movements since.
Over on Amazon Prime, there’s two series of documentaries with similar themes, called Shiny Happy People. The first is an exposé of the Duggar family who were the subject of a TLC reality TV show in the noughties which ran for multiple series and accrued millions of viewers. This family had 19 children, and were followers of a movement within US conservative evangelicalism called the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP). One tenet of this movement was a commitment to having lots of kids, the so-called Quiverfull position, which forgoes contraception. Another is the commitment to homeschooling, in order to protect all those offspring from the manifold evils of contemporary US culture and education.
The Duggar family went from superstardom to collapsing in ignominy when their eldest boy, Josh Duggar, was jailed for 12 years for possessing category A images of child sexual abuse. After his arrest, it transpired that the parents had been less-than honest about an earlier arrest for multiple child molestation in which four of the victims were the perpetrator’s own younger sisters, i.e. daughters of those same parents who minimised and misrepresented the crimes. There’d been other allegations in between these two cases as well, of Josh’s having been registered with the extra-marital hook-up site Ashley Madison, and a porn star accusing him of sexual assault.
This is only series 1 of Shiny Happy People. Series 2 charts the rise and fall of another conservative evangelical movement, Teen Mania, the details of which are just as disturbing. As with the Jesus Army documentary, both these series move from description to diagnosis in such a way that conservative Christianity per se is presented as intrinsically abusive. Again, I don’t doubt for a moment that the examples given did indeed become gravely problematic in the cases of the Duggar Family and Teen Mania. Homeschooling can present safeguarding concerns. The rejection of an overly sexualised culture can lead to a dehumanising repression of natural instincts. A focus on discipline and authority can give way to demoralising forms of control.
The problem is, again, that there are many historical instances where this was not the case, and indeed anecdotal examples as well. I know a great many well-adjusted and well-balanced people who were homeschooled themselves, and/or are currently homeschooling. I know a great many families where the offspring have been able to thrive and flourish so well at least partly because of their parents’ sensitivity to the dangers of contemporary approaches to sexual expression. It is commonly suggested that one of the reasons young people are returning to Christianity is because that’s where they encounter an awareness that benign, wise, and compassionate authority and discipline are necessary goods for meaningful human society.
Added to all this — there is the awkward fact that it seems highly unlikely that conservative Christian positions are more likely to lead to situations of physical and sexual abuse than other ways of living. There are countless examples where such dreadful crimes have occurred in completely different circumstances. These counter-examples are so plentiful that they hardly need mentioning. In recent weeks there was the jailing of the founder of Pride in Surrey, Stephen Ireland, for example, for raping a child and possessing images of child sexual abuse. A few months before this, a “picture-perfect” gay couple who’d posed in Pride-flag t-shirts were jailed for 100 years for the rape and abuse of two young brothers adopted into their care.
Then there’s the grooming gang scandal which, again, shows something has gone horrifically awry in the culture and values shared by some Pakistani, Muslim men who’ve settled in England. Making things even more complex and difficult, there’s the incomprehensible fact that Josephine Bartosch describes by saying that, if “every man who sought out” images of child sexual abuse “were prosecuted, Britain’s prison system would buckle”. What are the cultures and values of all these perpetrators? There are thousands of identities involved, and we’ll probably never know – but statistically it is most likely that common-or-garden secular normies make up the largest contingent.
Surely the time is nigh to engage in exactly this sort of examination of the conditions which have nurtured systemic predatory abuse elsewhere
Living in a time of culture war, the question is how someone should respond to all this. Simply reacting to the media’s focus on examples like the Jesus Army or the Duggar Family by playing top-trumps with equally appalling examples of abuse from libertine wokeism or the kashmiri diaspora is ultimately a dead-end which generates the endless back-and-forth which today so often dominates the discourse.
A better alternative is to enter into and indeed critique the media’s attempts to understand how particular values and cultural tendencies can, in gravely unfortunate circumstances, foster such terrible scenarios. If this analysis applies to examples from conservative evangelicalism — then surely the time is nigh to engage in exactly this sort of examination of the conditions which have nurtured systemic predatory abuse elsewhere.
This means the onus is on organisations like the BBC and Amazon Prime to do a similar deep-dive into the culture and values of other communities like those just mentioned. Until the mainstream media have the courage to do more of this sort of fearless analysis — we’re condemned to compete in trying to shout the loudest, ad infinitum.
