Question 12 Tribes » Mattatall

US cult expert+sociologist warns of child abuse in the 12 Tribes+2 other cults

Charlie — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:25:21 +0000

Source: International Journal of Cultic Studies Volume 1, 2010, 27-48

Original title of essay (The Northeast Kingdom Community is short for Northeast Kingdom Community Church, name the 12 Tribes had previously):

House of Judah, the Northeast Kingdom Community, and ‘the Jonestown Problem’

Downplaying Child Physical Abuses and Ignoring Serious Evidence

Stephen A. Kent

Department of Sociology

University of AlbertaThis article offers a critique of the discussions concerning physical child abuse that occur in the standard academic sources on Peoples Temple and Jonestown—most especially John Hall’s Gone From the Promised Land, which he published in 1987. Using accounts about children in Peoples Temple and Jonestown from personal accounts and respected journalistic sources, the article shows that sociological and religious-studies scholarship has downplayed the extent of the physical and emotional abuse that the children suffered prior to their murders. Moreover, some of this scholarship even has minimized the children’s deaths themselves. Hall’s discussion of corporal child punishment comes under special scrutiny, because he attempted to contextualize it by analogizing Jonestown’s child punishment regimes to practices within both conservative Protestantism and two groups operating in the same period as Peoples Temple and Jonestown—the House of Judah and the Northeast Kingdom Community.The Jonestown[3] deaths of November 1978 remain the most dramatic and tragic American ‘cult event’[4] to have occurred after the Second World War, and a generation of people still remember the nightly news broadcasts of increasingly dire information as reporters and government officials struggled to make sense out of the bodies bloating in the sun. The generation of people who hold those memories, however, is aging (and, alas, dying—see R. Moore, 2000: 7–8), and at some point future generations will have to acquire information about the tragedy through media and Internet sources. Thanks to the Internet, audio of Jim Jones’s directives to his followers will survive electronically, as will many documentaries produced since the murder-suicides. Very little information from these sources, however, winds up in scholarship, since academics tend to rely upon the written word—especially the written word of earlier academics. Undoubtedly in the future, some academics will return to archives and mine information afresh, but until new research emerges, scholars and others will have to rely upon earlier publications in their efforts to understand the violent deaths of 918 people.[5]Those of us who see Jonestown as the epitome of cultic control, manipulation, and abuse may find aspects of scholarship on that fateful community startling. The scholarship that I paid particular attention to appears in the book-length monographs that academics (people with appointments in colleges or universities) have produced on Jonestown, especially monographs published by university presses. For years I have been collecting these monographs, as well as journalistic, religious, and conspiratorial accounts about Jonestown and its demise. For this article, I supplemented my own collection with additional volumes that I obtained through my university’s library (including from the Kent Collection on Alternative Religions), and I spent hours searching new- and used-book Internet sites for more titles (which I either purchased or ordered through interlibrary loan). I also checked bibliographies within the academic monographs.Because in this article I am concerned about what subsequent generations will learn about Jonestown based upon existing scholarship, I wanted to identify which monographs are likely to have impact in the future. To determine books’ likely impact, I checked (in mid-November 2009) the titles on the OCLC Online Union Catalog (WorldCat) database, which gives the names and total numbers of libraries around the world that own particular volumes. I assumed that the greater a book’s availability, the more likely that future generations will have access to it. Presented chronologically (according to date of publication), the sociology studies are: Ken Levi (ed.), Violence and Religious Commitment: Implications of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple Movement (1982; with a WorldCat count of 634);[6] and John Hall’s Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (1987; with a WorldCat count at 842).[7] Other academics wrote and edited additional sociological books about Jonestown but published them with Edwin Mellen Press—a publisher that received very bad media coverage in 1993 for the poor review and production standards that it applied to its products (St. John, 1993).[8] Again in chronological order, the books are Judith Mary Weightman, Making Sense of the Jonestown Suicides: A Sociological History of Peoples Temple (1983; with a WorldCat count at 363);[9] Rebecca Moore, In Defense of Peoples Temple—and Other Essays (1988; with a WorldCat count at 146); and two books edited by Rebecca Moore and her husband, Fielding M. McGehee III—The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown (1989; with a WorldCat count at 152); and New Religious Movements, Mass Suicide, and Peoples Temple: Scholarly Perspectives on a Tragedy (1989; with a WorldCat count at 202). A number of religious studies and interdisciplinary books also have appeared concerning Jonestown, and I will mention them later in this study.

Based upon the number of libraries worldwide that own copies of these sociological books, Hall’s study of Jonestown appears destined to be the most influential in the coming years. Moreover, soon after its publication, several book reviews sang praise to its scholarship. “Hall’s achievement is noteworthy…. [H]e presents the most comprehensive and sociological assessment of Peoples Temple available,” said the review in Contemporary Sociology (Rigney, 1988: 469). Another proclaimed, “Hall’s book is a triumph of scholarly craft and a skillful demonstration of the sociological viewpoint” (Christiano, 1989: 222). According to a third review, this study provided “the most compelling sociohistorical account to date of one of the more chilling horrors of modern times” (Snow, 1990: 1103); and a fourth reviewed concluded, “I have no doubt this work will be a standard in the field for years to come” (Wright, 1989: 94). More recently, three religious-studies scholars praised Hall’s monograph as “the most complete and compassionate history of Peoples Temple to date” [Moore, Pinn, and Sawyer (eds.), 2004: xvii]. Certainly, Hall’s study of Jonestown is a likely source to examine in an attempt to see what future generations of scholars will learn about and how they will interpret child-abuse issues within Jones’s group. I begin, therefore, my analysis of scholarly representations about child abuse within Peoples Temple by examining his book.
The Discussion of Child Physical Abuse in John Hall’s Gone from the Promised Land

Hall discussed child abuse issues far more than did other scholarly books, yet he (and for that matter, other scholars, too) diminished important issues of the physical (and psychological) abuse that the children at Jonestown endured prior to their murders. He minimized the deviance of the children’s abuse by spuriously analogizing it to other punishment regimes in two contemporaneous groups (the House of Judah and the Northeast Kingdom Community), even though the regimes in those two groups actually were themselves widely criticized (and in at least one case, fatal). Other scholarship on Jonestown attempts to humanize the people who died while placing considerable blame upon the group’s countercult opponents (called the Concerned Relatives) for Jones’s murderous response (see R. Moore, 1988: 3–26), but these attempts minimize the significance of the large number of infants, children, teens, and elderly who simply were murdered.

Hall’s study was the product of extensive research, with his having gained information from the Guyanian government; the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of State; the California Historical Society; and the attorney for the Peoples Temple (Hall, 1987: x). Although the study has much to commend, it completely rejected any validity to what Hall called the anticult movement and its alleged reliance on atrocity tales (Hall, 1987: xiv–xviii). The anticult movement, he decided, “was ideological, no matter what its claims to scientific legitimation,” partly because it targeted “culturally deviant and unpopular religions” but ignored “the more subtle (and perhaps more effective) coercion in mainstream religion” (Hall, 1987: 107).

Clearly, Hall was disinclined to provide any legitimation to the anticult movement. Moreover, his insistence that the movement relied upon atrocity tales to make its claims about coercion blinded him to the fact that people in the particular anticult movement against Jim Jones, called the Concerned Relatives, often were deadly accurate in their fearful predictions about the direction of his group (cf. Hall, 1995: 308 for mention of the group’s credibility problem). In, for example, his complaint against Peoples Temple, former member James Cobb, Jr. accurately predicted the mass murder of children that would occur five months after he filed his papers in court. Cobb indicated that ‘revolutionary suicide’ was what Jones and Temple leadership were calling the action that the group would take if “Jones felt he was being persecuted or unduly harassed,” but the action really “was a megalomaniacal threat of ‘mass murder’ which would result in the death of minor children not old enough to make voluntary and informed decisions about serious matters of any nature, much less insane proposals of collective suicide” (Cobb v. Peoples Temple… 1978: 14). Despite this kind of accurate prediction, Hall’s discussion of the group’s punishment of children did not locate Peoples Temple’s obvious abuses within a framework of anticult concerns, but rather attempted to place them within a context of conservative Protestantism. In doing so, however, Hall juxtaposed Peoples Temple with two other groups whose abusive practices had attracted considerable anticult attention and concern.

The forms of child abuse that Hall identified in Jonestown were numerous, but his accounts of the physical and psychological abuse of children and teens understated the severity of their group-inflicted punishments. Hall reported that, on one occasion, a Temple defector indicated that Jones’s pathological cruelty manifested in “forcing a child to eat his own vomit” (Hall, 1987: 121). Child-beatings also took place by 1975, in which “children sometimes were subjected to extensive paddlings” in the context of public meetings in which the entire congregation agreed to them (of course, with Jones’s approval [Hall, 1987: 122]). After parents signed release forms that supposedly absolved Peoples Temple from any liability for administering the paddlings, children received a wide range of what Hall called “whacks.” “For example, “several small boys received ‘twenty-five whacks’ for ‘stealing cookies’ in a supermarket” (Hall, 1987: 124). Another boy of indeterminate age “took 70 whacks” for calling a member “a crippled bitch” (Hall, 1987: 124). One teenager even asked Jones to “administer seventy-five whacks” for an offense that she believed she had committed, but Hall was not clear whether she ever received them (Hall, 1987: 123–124).

Beyond these paddlings, beatings, or whackings, Hall was imprecise about exactly what happened to children who faced punishment, saying only that they could expect to receive it

for stealing, for lying, acting ‘irresponsibly,’ making fun of people for their handicaps, physically threatening or attacking others, especially adults, associating too intimately with outsiders, and breaking the laws of the larger society, especially in ways that reflected on Peoples Temple. (Hall, 1987: 123)

He mentioned boxing or wrestling matches as forms of punishment, but was not clear whether children (rather than just adults) had to endure them (Hall, 1987: 123, 124). Hall, for example, did not provide an age of “one ‘cocky delinquent type’” who successfully fought several opponents before one beat him (Hall, 1987: 124).
Critiques of Hall’s Accounts of Child Corporal Punishment

Two fundamental problems exist with Hall’s account of the child abuse that occurred in Jonestown prior to the murders of the children. First, it seems highly likely that he dramatically under-presented what the children actually suffered. One of Hall’s sources, cited in his bibliography, is Jeannie Mills’s 1979 book, Six Years with God: Life Inside Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. Her accounts of beatings are explicit and numerous. Although Hall was vague about whether the teenager who supposedly requested “seventy-five whacks” got them (Hall, 1987: 123–124), Mills recounts in painful detail how Jones ordered and oversaw her daughter’s beating with a board, seventy-five times, for hugging “a girlfriend whom Jim [Jones] considered to be a traitor” (Mills, 1979: 267).[10] Mills’s account of this public beating was only one of many. She indicated that large men beat children as young as four and five years old, sometimes as much as 150 times (Mills, 1979: 13). (As did Hall, she indicated that parents signed release forms prior to the public beatings, which reputedly gave Jones permission to carry them out [Mills, 1979: 260, 296].) During various periods in the group’s history, children received beatings with boards (Mills, 1979: 53, 71, 289), belts (Mills, 1979: 254, 259), elm switches, and electric cables (Mills, 1979: 260). She also indicated clearly that, as punishment, Jones forced young children (as well as adults) into boxing matches (Mills, 1979: 53, 279). In one case, the group forced a young boy, whom an adult man had molested, to watch as punishers stripped the molester and beat him with a board “all over his body” (Mills, 1979: 48; see 71)—an account substantially confirmed by a later source (Layton, 1998: 61).[11] In addition, Mills also told the story, in far more detail than Hall, about the youngster whom Jones forced to eat his own vomit (Mills, 1979: 162). Another tale that she recounted, from a family who escaped the group and came to her, was about “young people [who] were forced to eat hot peppers or even have hot peppers put up their rectums as disciplines” (Mills, 1979: 79).

Finally, Mills recounted a punishment that a defector from Jonestown told her about, in which adults put children down a well (Mills, 1979: 81), which a later account about life in Jonestown confirmed (Layton, 1998: 177).[12] Reiterman with Jacobs contextualized the story about the well by placing it among other abuses that adults inflicted upon children and teens:

For younger children, punishment could be especially terrifying. At first Jones would threaten to turn disobedient children loose in the bush to see how long they would survive there by themselves. Those who continued to act up were blindfolded then lowered by rope into a well. Adults, on Jones’s orders, would hide in nearby bushes or even in the bottom of the well, making noises and pretending to be monsters. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 394)

The authors further recounted the punishments Tommy Bogue, a teenager around sixteen years old, and another boy who tried to escape Jonestown suffered:

Once when Tommy Bogue and another boy ran off, a Temple search squad caught them near the railroad tracks to Matthews Ridge, then put the boys in leg irons. Back in Jonestown, their heads were shaved and they were forced under armed guard to cut logs into small pieces until Stephan Jones got his mother to intervene. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 294; see 551)

Subsequently, Bogue was among the people who tried to leave Jonestown with Congressman Leo Ryan, and he was shot in the leg (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 551). Hall failed to mention that one of the wounded defectors was a teenager (see Hall 1987: 279).

Another one of Hall’s sources also wrote about

a trench, roughly nine feet deep by nine feet square, where the slackers were dumped…. A few children who maintained they were sick and unable to work were lowered into that excavation and made to dig in the mud, first light till last light. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 357)

As far as I can determine, however, Hall also omitted these punishments in his rendition of physical abuses.
Child Corporal Punishment in Protestantism

If Hall had believed that the accounts of either Mills or Reiterman with Jacobs were inaccurate, then he could have criticized or qualified their statements, as he did on other issues (see Hall, 1987: 167 [criticizing Reiterman with Jacobs], 338 n. 13 [qualifying Mills]). Instead, when he discussed the physical child-abuse incidents that they had reported, Hall dramatically downplayed their extensiveness, their severity, and their variability. As I have indicated, therefore, his downplaying and under-representation of various abuses is my first criticism of his use of Peoples Temple and Jonestown’s child-abuse incidents. By using them, however, he could putatively locate the abuses within the context of historical and contemporary Protestantism. Locating them in this manner was crucial for his argument, which was that most of the evils of Jones and Jonestown “were widespread and sometimes institutionalized practices in the wider society” (Hall, 1987: 309; see xviii; also see Hall, 1982: 49; 2000: 42; B. Moore, 1989: 551; Rigney 1988: 468). The anticult movement focused on “Temple methods, healings, money-making schemes, glorification of a prophet, intimidation and punishment, public relations, and political manipulations” (Hall, 1987: 309); but (Hall asserted) these issues were similar to what went on within society at large, and in that broad societal context did not receive scrutiny from the anticult movement.

Herein lies the second major problem with Hall’s account: He minimized the extreme and damaging punishments against children by trying to equate them with the punishments that various historic and contemporary Protestants and modern Christian-related sects inflicted upon their own children. The section in which he attempted the comparison between Jonestown and Protestantism is worth quoting at length:

Physical punishment in the [Peoples] Temple certainly exceeded normative standards of the modern middle class, but Temple members were not predominantly middle class. Disciplinary practices of Peoples Temple more resembled those of stern Protestants, from the Puritans of seventeenth century New England to some modern fundamentalist sects. The extremes of Protestant discipline are marked by a Michigan sect whose members accidentally beat a child to death for his sins in 1984. More representative of the sensibility is [the] Northeast Kingdom Community, a contemporaneous Christian religious community in Island Pond, Vermont, whose members had no apologies for using rods and switches for ‘loving correction’ of children, even if it left marks on their bodies.

By a Puritan standard like that of Island Pond, Temple discipline was not excessive. (Hall, 1987: 125)

Worth noting, however, about Hall’s analogy between Peoples Temple and Puritan and fundamentalist Protestant punishments is that, by minimizing their severity, he replicated a criticism that he had made of the anticult movement. He had criticized that movement for ignoring issues of coercion in mainstream religion, but he downplayed the severity of the physical and emotional child abuse that brutal corporal punishment entailed in the Peoples Temple by analogizing it with Protestant child-rearing practices.

Hall was at least correct in pointing out that the beatings Jones oversaw on children bore some resemblance to ones that children suffered in various forms of fundamentalist and sectarian Protestantism (see, for example, Ellison, 1996; Ellison, Bartkowski, and Segal, 1996). For example, the groundbreaking book on Protestant punishment techniques was Philip Greven’s Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, and it appeared in 1991, which was two years after Hall’s Jonestown study. On the issue of beating children, Greven was unequivocal in identifying “the pervasiveness of such views about physical punishment among fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal Protestants, as well as many Americans of other persuasions, both religious and secular” (Greven 1991: 40). Among those groups, “Puritan parents were among the most abusive in using the rod upon their children’s bodies and wills” (Greven, 1991: 133). Jones’s religious background included Pentecostal and Holiness theologies along with ordination in the Disciples of Christ (see Hall, 1987: 19–28), so this historical context was useful. The two contemporary (supposedly) Protestant sects, however, to which Hall drew analogies, were ones whose practices the anticult movement had specifically been concerned about for a long time and that many critics called ‘cults’ (see Langone and Eisenberg, 1993: 332–334). One sect turned out not even to have been Protestant, and the other was by no means representative of American Protestantism.
Child Corporal Punishment in the House of Judah

The unnamed Michigan group that Hall mentioned was the House of Judah (also known as Black Hebrew Israelite Jews)—a group whose violent activities had attracted the attention of cult-monitoring organizations of the period.[13] Contrary, however, to Hall’s claim, it was not a Protestant group, since its members read only the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (Helfer, 1983: 3). Moreover, the beating death of a twelve-year old child (John Yarbough) took place in July 1983 (not 1984, as Hall indicated), with his mother (Ethel Yarborough) being convicted of involuntary manslaughter in February 1984 (Detroit Free Press, 1984). At the cult’s religious camp, the adolescent “repeatedly refused to do his chores,” which included chopping and hauling wood, digging dirt used to repair a road inside the camp and hauling pails of water” (Ray, 1983: 1A). For this refusal, adults put him in stocks and beat him “30 times on the butt” with a broomstick-sized wooden pole. One or more blows hit his spine, which killed him (Ray, 1983: 1A). In what cult apologists likely would call an atrocity tale, John’s brother, Daniel, eventually would testify under oath that his brother had been “beaten on at least 40 occasions by sect members, one of whom once tried to lift the youngster by the ears with a pair of pliers” (Detroit News, 1986). In response to the death, authorities removed sixty-six children from the camp, and eventually secured the conviction of the cult’s leader, William Lewis, and five others to between two- and three-year federal prison terms “for conspiring to enslave sect children and causing a boy’s death” (Mitzelfeld, 1986).

A pediatrics professor and medical doctor, Ray E. Helfer, assessed the children, and he observed:

…these nutritionally healthy bodies have been moderately to severely injured by repetitive beatings and other physical insults. Of the first 50 to 55 children examined by a physician after John [Yarbough]’s death a full 20% had signs of severe physical abuse. For the children greater than five years of age this percentage increases to approximately 40% and for the boys in this age range, the figure is 70% to 75%. Thus, the likelihood of a male child reaching adolescence without showing physical signs of severe abuse to his body is less than 25%, possibly even less. (Helfer, 1983: 2; see Langone and Eisenberg, 1993: 333)

The physician wrote in conclusion:

The children of the House of Judah have been reared in a manner unacceptable to any and all standards. Their bodies [are] seriously and permanently injured, their intellectual capacities underdeveloped, minimal decision making and problem solving abilities have been taught, the basic concepts of delayed gratification underdeveloped, feelings and their expressions denied, trust misguided and nongeneralizable with fear serving as the foundation of the way of lives….

Being reared in the House of Judah is physically unsafe and developmentally destructive. (Helfer, 1983: 10)

In essence, Hall’s attempt to analogize the beating of children in Peoples Temple to the beating in the House of Judah works far better than he ever imagined, even though the group was not Protestant and the boy’s deadly beating was not “for his sins” (Hall, 1987: 125). Adults beat him to death because he refused to perform slave labour, and one wonders if ‘slavery’ would also have been an appropriate term for the conditions in which the Peoples Temple children lived and died.

By attempting to contextualize, therefore, Peoples Temple’s corporal punishment of children within fundamentalist Protestantism, Hall inadvertently showed that such behaviours occurred outside of a Christian context, and were criminal in nature. Moreover, true “atrocity tales” assisted a United States District Court judge to reach his decision that six key adults in leadership positions deserved federal prison time. Alas, future generations are unlikely to be able to draw these alternative conclusions about Hall’s use of the House of Judah in an attempt to normalize the physical violence that occurred at Jonestown. They are unlikely to be able to do so because none of the book reviews written about Gone from the Promised Land (Bainbridge, 1989; Baptiste, 1988; Christiano, 1989; B. Moore, 1989; Rigney, 1988; Snow 1990; Wright 1989), nor any of the subsequent academic discussions about Jonestown that I have seen (for example, Chryssides, 1999; Dawson, 2006; Gallagher, 2004) have critiqued Hall on his child-abuse discussion. Moreover, only a few paragraphs exist on the House of Judah in two academic publications aside from this one (Landa, 1990–1991: 592 n.1; 610; Langone and Eisenberg, 1993: 333).
Child Corporal Punishment in the Northeast Kingdom Community

Although Hall had alluded to the House of Judah only when attempting to contextualize Peoples Temple’s corporal punishment of children, he specifically identified by name the Northeast Kingdom Community as a better example of a group demonstrating “[t]he extremes of Protestant discipline.” To reiterate his statement about it, he described it as “a contemporaneous Christian religious community in Island Pond, Vermont, whose members had no apologies for using rods and switches for ‘loving correction’ of children, even if it left marks on their bodies” (Hall, 1987: 125). On this much Hall was correct, and a significant body of academic literature does exist about this group that academics in the future will be able to read about its practices. Unfortunately, key elements of that scholarship misrepresent crucial issues in the sect’s stormy relationship with authorities over corporal punishment and child-protection issues.

The basic facts about a 1984 raid against the Northeast Kingdom Community are well known, and Hall cited two New York Times articles and one Christian magazine article about it.[14] On June 22, 1984, police officers, accompanied by social workers and nurses, raided the community, removing 112 children. The next day, however, a judge overturned the raid on grounds that the search warrant was too general and did not mention specific alleged crimes against specific children who were living in specific buildings (Mahady, 1984a, 1984b). At least nine academic and academically related articles have appeared about this group and the raid against it (Bozeman and Palmer, 1997; Malcarne and Burchard, 1992; Palmer, 1998, 1999; 2001; Swantko, 2000 [then revised, updated, and reprinted in 2004], 2005–2006; Swantko and Wiseman, 1995)[15]; and the author/co-author of four of these is the Northeast Kingdom Community’s lawyer, Jean Swantko.

In various publications, Swantko blamed the raid on the anticult movement, specifically on Priscilla Coates, who was active in the Citizens Freedom Foundation, and deprogrammer Galen Kelly, who had deprogrammed at least one member. According to Swantko, Coates and Kelly “prevailed on the Attorney General’s Office and the Governor himself to adopt as true” a collection of unreliable evidence that a state team of investigators had gathered from a dozen former members from around the country (Swantko, 2004: 184). Indeed, “these two antireligious zealots” (as Swantko called them [Swantko, 2004: 184]), “provided the fodder for local law enforcement to compile a 32-page affidavit used to secure the warrant, which was replete with unfounded stories of abuse strewn with erroneous and sensational interpretations of doctrine” (Swantko, 2004: 184). Nothing in Swantko’s articles, nor in any of the articles in which Susan Palmer was the author or contributor, gave any credence to the possibility that authorities acted on compelling evidence, or that Coates and Kelly were speaking in the community and talking to authorities because they had genuine, well-founded concerns about children’s welfare. Indeed, a review of media accounts[16] about the Island Pond community before the raid paints a very different picture than what Swantko presented—one of serious, documented physical abuse against children, and a religious group that was uncooperative with authorities who were acting on behalf of children’s welfare.
Pre-Raid Media Accounts of Child Abuse in Island Pond’s Northeast Kingdom Community

An article that appeared in the Hartford Courant (and was reprinted in Florida’s St. Petersburg Times) at the end of 1982 provided a litany of problems that local residents were having with the Island Pond community, all the result of actions and policies of the Northeast Kingdom Community itself. These actions and policies were not things that residents learned about from anticultists; they learned about them simply from living in the same community with members of the group (Cockerham, 1982).

Within about three years of Northeast Kingdom members moving to Island Pond in 1979 (Palmer, 2001: 213), tensions with local residents festered over a number of issues. Specifically regarding the group’s care of children, residents had figured out that the group illegally exempted its members from normal registry procedures involving births and deaths. As locals realized, “the group refuses to record births or deaths. They [sic] have a registered graveyard on church-owned land, although no one knows of any mortalities” (Cockerham, 1982: 6; see Harrison, 1984: 61). This refusal was particularly troublesome regarding children, since officials had no way of identifying or tracking their health and safety.

Also regarding children, townspeople saw and heard firsthand how the adults in the group punished their children. In essence, townspeople such as Bernard Henault observed them “‘disciplining their own children on the street’” (quoted in Cockerham, 1982: 6). Almost certainly, “disciplining” often meant hitting their children. For example, former members Charles and Tommye Brown

decided to leave [the group] because they objected to the way the group treated its children. ‘The kids are punished for almost everything, asking for more food or not speaking to adults they pass on the street.’ Brown and his wife, who are childless, said the punishment ranges from whippings to being locked in their rooms for as long as a week. He also said the food is barely enough to survive on. (quoted in Cockerham, 1982: 6)

Apparently, Tommye Brown had testified about the beatings during a previous, high-profile custody case, since, in late November 1982, Newsweek reported that, during the trial,

witnesses testified that all of the Kingdom’s children, from tots to teens, received frequent and lengthy bare-bottom thrashings with wooden rods—during which they were supposed to smile and thank their elders…. ‘I couldn’t stand what they were doing to their children,’ said Tommye. ‘I couldn’t stand listening to them cry.’ (Zabarsky, 1982)[17]

Again, these tensions between the local community and the Northeast Kingdom came from interactions that members from each group had with one another while living and working in proximity. Coates and Kelly from the Citizens Freedom Foundation did not have to generate allegations of physical abuse against Northeast Kingdom Community children—Island Pond residents apparently saw instances with their own eyes, heard the beatings going on in a Northeast Kingdom community house (Sexton 1983: 25), and read about other instances in the local press.

In addition to information about children allegedly being beaten within the Northeast Community, local citizens also learned from the press that Lydia Mattatall, one of a defector’s children, essentially had been kidnapped. Ex-members relayed that the defector’s former wife “‘gave’ her to [leader Elbert Eugene] Spriggs as a faith gesture” (Nickerson, 1983: 81), and Spriggs took her to Europe. In her scholarship, Susan Palmer mentioned Lydia was with Spriggs; Swantko did not. Palmer indicated that “members claim that [mother] Cindy Mattatall gained her husband’s consent prior to this arrangement [involving Lydia living with Spriggs], but when he was disciplined by the community in Boston, he decided to claim his daughter was ‘kidnapped’” (Palmer, 1999: 170). Even if this were true, however, when the father, Juan, demanded custody of his daughter, “the church has ignored a court order to return her,” and (on December 28, 1982) members “were told to pray for his death. One elder of the sect rose during a ‘body meeting’ of baptized members and described a dream in which Juan’s throat was slit and his head lopped off” (Nickerson, 1983: 81; see Braithwaite, 1983: 1). Moreover, no reasonable explanation comes to mind about why the group leader would want to raise someone else’s young daughter in the first place, especially thousands of miles from the parents themselves. No indication exists, for example, in anything that I have read, that the mother gave her daughter to Spriggs out of fear that her husband was a child molester, as might be inferred from Swantko’s comments and subsequent evidence about the father himself.

Lydia’s disappearance was not the first time that a young girl had gone missing from the Northeast Kingdom Community at Island Pond. In 1980, a Northeast Kingdom member kidnapped his daughter, Gabrielle Spring Howell, from her grandmother’s house in Tennessee and brought her to Island Pond. Gabrielle Spring’s mother found her and was trying to flee with her when Northeast Kingdom members (or her husband himself—accounts vary) “ran her off the road and snatched the child again.” Her father took her to Europe; but three years later (when she was seven years old), her uncle tracked her down in Spain and returned her to her mother in Alabama, in March 1983. Spring (which was the name she went by) “told her family on her return that she was beaten, forced to do physical labor, milk goats and scavenge for nuts and berries to feed the cult” (Ottawa Citizen, 1983; see Daley, 1985: 154–155). Moreover, upon her return, she bore

scars on her legs and buttocks that her mother, once a member of the church, claims are the result of whippings administered by sect members. ‘These are sick and dangerous people who would do this to a child in the name of Jesus,’ the mother, Deborah Heflin 26, said in a telephone interview…. (Nickerson, 1983: 87)

A medical doctor in Alabama examined Spring, and he reported that “she had ‘multiple, long, narrow, discolored scar tissue areas over the … buttocks and posterior thighs—the result of severe blows to this area with a rod-like instrument’” (quoted in Daley, 1985: 155).

It turned out, too, that Spring had babysat Juan Mattatall’s daughter, Lydia, in Europe. The information that she brought back, however, was deeply disturbing. Detective Corporal Peter M. Johnson filed a report about his interview with Spring, indicating that she told him,

During the time in Spain, Spring was severely disciplined by Kirsten Nelson and Gene and Marsha Spriggs. Spring Howell advised that she was hit all over with a stick with her clothes off. During the interview, Spring showed concern for children that [sic] were still with the group; Spring named Lydia (Lydia Mattatall), Semony Daniel and Benjamin Sayer that [sic] they were still getting beaten; Spring advised that during breakfast, if she asked for more food, she would get a beating. Spring was suppose[d] to take care of Lydia Mattatall and advised that Lydia was still in diapers; Spring got a spanking for lying about Lydia wetting the bed. (Johnson 1983a: 1)

Shifting to information that the police officer received from Spring’s mother, his report continued:

Deborah Heflin advised that at one point, approximately 3½ years ago, she was forced to watch as Gene Spriggs and James Brooks hit Spring with a stick until she bled; Deborah advised that Spring was scarred up when she came home from Spain and that a few weeks after she returned, photographs were taken; Deborah gave this officer written permission to obtain the photographs…. (Johnson, 1983a: 2)

It appeared, therefore, that the founder and leader of the Northeast Kingdom Community was practicing corporal punishment against children, not to mention requiring a child to care for an infant. About a month after officer Johnson filed this report, and in a surprise twist of fortune, Mattatall recovered his daughter, in October 1983, when Canadians living on Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia who had seen a television show about the group recognized Spriggs and phoned both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television (Gorham, 1983).[18]

Information provided by defector Arthur Fritog (apparently in January 1983)[19] established the connection between the alleged beating behavior by the leader and his wife in Spain and the probable beating practices in Island Pond, Vermont. Fritog departed the group after having attended the meeting where two elders asked baptized community members to pray for Juan Mattatall’s death. As a Vietnam War veteran told a friend at the time, however, “‘I’ve watched a lot of men die, and I’ve been party to a lot of men dying…. I assured him that nobody knew what death was. I could not ask for a man to die,’” so he left the meeting and departed from the group (quoted in Braithwaite, 1983: 1). In Fritog’s accounts about what life was in the Northeast Kingdom Community, he revealed:

Methods of child discipline at the Island Pond community have been dictated in a series of messages from Mr. Spriggs and his wife, based on their experiences with three-year-old Lydia.

One method, called scourging, involved tying a nude child face down on a bed and striking the entire body with a thin wooden balloon stick. Mr. Fritog said he had seen the technique used on a two-year-old girl. (Braithwaite, 1983: 23)

If true, then Fritog’s information established a clear link between the beatings that Spring received in Spain—the results of which police had summarized in a police report and had seen in photographs—and messages received and followed by Northeast Kingdom residents from the leader and his wife in Europe, both of whom had been involved with beating the young girl.

What at the time appeared to be unfortunate confirmation that Northeast Community elders were following the Spriggs’s instructions about scouring came when Constance and Roland Church reported that elder Charles “Eddie” Wiseman had scourged their thirteen-year-old daughter, Darlynn, over a period of seven hours. Detective Johnson’s report indicated that he and a person from Social and Rehabilitation Services taped a statement from Darlynn in which she

Advised that she was sent from the room and the adults stayed and had a meeting. Darlynn was called back into the room and told she was going to be disciplined for lying. Darlynn was stripped to her underpants and told to put her hands on a window sill. The accused then hit the victim with a long, thin piece of wood (balloon stick). According to Darlynn she was hit and then questioned…. The victim advised that this lasted from approximately 0930 until 1630 hours. (Johnson, 1983b: 2)

Along with the police report, Detective Johnson also submitted a copy of a medical report written by a physician at a local hospital, which “indicated that linear scars were present on legs and would be consistent with the victim’s statement” (Johnson, 1983b: 2).

Darlynn’s father, Roland Church, who was present in the room during the beating, confirmed his daughter’s story. He indicated that the men who beat her “suggested that the rod be an extra long one and that they should strip her down to her waist, down to her panties” (R. Church, 1983: 3). He also indicated that the men talked to her for about “an hour before the discipline started,” and it lasted “until 4:30 in the afternoon.” The men overseeing her beating would stop scouring her for “ten to fifteen minutes until they pried information out of her,” then start the whipping again (R. Church, 1983: 3). Likewise, Darlynn’s mother, Constance Church, confirmed her daughter’s story, since she, too, witnessed it. The man beating her daughter, she said, used long balloon sticks as the whips (C. Church, 1983: 5). Although crucial aspects of this family’s accounts would change in the future, before the raid there was strong evidence that adults were scourging children, as the Spriggs couple had instructed.[20]

More dramatic evidence of physical abuse came forward in late August 1983, when Brenda Hebert, who was the wife of a Northeast Kingdom Community member, produced for the police seven photographs she had taken of children whom she said had been injured, sometimes bleeding, from beatings. One picture was of a baby’s bottom—the child was still in diapers; Hebert claimed the child had been beaten for a week (Hebert, 1983: 4–5). Still another allegation of a nine-month-old being physically abused came to light in March 1984, when defector Jeff Jenke indicated that, in the community, a baby with broken bones had been hit with “sticks,” and the people in the church said that the breaks were from rickets (Jenke, 1984: 5–6; see Hebert, 1983: 3).

Clearly, Social and Rehabilitative Services knew that a serious problem existed regarding the physical abuse of children in Island Pond’s Northeast Kingdom Community. Authorities had similar accounts of beatings coming from multiple sources over a period of years. They also had medical reports that corroborated people’s statements, and they even had photographs showing the damage caused by children having been beaten with balloon sticks. Moreover, police and social services had no way of knowing whether any children had been sufficiently injured to have required medical attention, since one member of the Northeast Kingdom Community already had been convicted of practicing medicine without a license (Lium, 1982; O’Dea, 1984). Likewise, officials could not even be sure that no children had died from the physical abuse, since the Community operated its own graveyard, refused to register births and deaths, and at every juncture refused to cooperate with them. The lack of cooperation had gone so far as a Community member hiding a stillborn baby’s body from authorities in 1980 (Kenney, 1980).

With these facts in mind, a raid against the Northeast Kingdom Community was inevitable. Any efforts by subsequent authors such as Jean Swantko to blame it on “anticultists who try to use the legal system” (Swantko, 2000: 342), or Susan Palmer, who saw the raid as a consequences of anticultists who “created a portrait of a nefarious cult habitually cruel to children” (Palmer, 1998: 201) clearly are attempts to scapegoat responsibility away from the group itself. After Judge Mahady threw out the warrant and any possible evidence that authorities acquired, the Commissioner of Social and Rehabilitation Services for the Vermont Agency of Human Services, John D. Burchard, Ph.D., wrote a clear (and to my mind, compelling) justification for the raid and the continued need to provide protection to Northeast Kingdom Community’s children. Swantko called this statement a “self-serving justification” (Swantko, 2000: 353), but it actually seems to have been an accurate account of the decision-making processes that led up to the raid itself.

With considerable understatement, Burchard let readers see how surprising it was that Judge Mahady would have squashed the state’s intervention into the Community on behalf of its children, since he himself had commented strongly on the group’s corporal punishment in a previous case. In that case, Mahady stated:

‘At all material times, while the children have been residing at the religious community, they have been subjected to frequent and methodical physical abuse by adult members of the community in the form of hours-long whippings with balloon sticks. These beatings result from minor disciplinary infractions.’ (quoted in Burchard, 1984: 6)

Although Burchard said little else directly about Mahady’s decision, the clear implication was that, in ruling to dismiss the raid, the judge allowed a social environment to continue that even he realized fostered physical abuse.

Swantko claimed that “antireligious zealots, Kelly and Coates, prevailed on the Attorney General’s Office and the Governor himself to adopt as true the unreliable information collected by two state employees sent to investigate” former members around the United States (Swantko, 2000: 347). Burchard, however, pointed out that many of the incidents that contributed to officials believing in the necessity of the raid had appeared in the media,[21] and much of the evidence also included “sworn statements from witnesses and victims and there are photographs corroborating several of these incidents” (Burchard, 1984: 5). Religiously bigoted information from “anticult zealots” played no role in the officials’ decision, especially since many of the incidents, and much of the supporting evidence were local to the Island Pond area.

Without specifically naming the cases involved, Burchard presented “some of the specific allegations” that gave police and social-service workers great alarm about the safety of the Community’s children:

1. A named four-year-old child who was hit fifteen to twenty times with a rod for imagining that a block of wood was a truck.

2. A named seven-year-old girl who was stripped naked by several persons besides her father and spanked for asking for some food. The spanking continued until her bottom bled.

3. A named thirteen-month-old female child spanked for not taking food from someone other than her parents. The spanking led to bruises on both legs and her buttocks.

4. A named three-and-one-half-year-old boy disciplined until his back was bleeding.

5. A named thirteen-year-old girl who was stripped to her underpants by several men and hit with a rod for being deceitful. The discipline lasted over a period of several hours and produced more than eighty welts on her body.

6. A named eleven-year-old boy who was hit with a 2 x 4 eight times for laughing at a church member. A large blister and bruise resulted from the discipline. (Burchard, 1984: 5)

Burchard certainly captured the feelings of many Island Pond citizens when he offered, “any person who reads the published accounts of the disciplinary practices of the church must believe there is reasonable evidence that child abuse may have occurred” (Burchard, 1984: 5; see Malcarne and Burchard, 1992). He also was aware of how severe (if not deadly) child beatings in closed communities can be, because he had consulted with Michigan officials concerning what had transpired within the House of Judah (News Tribune, 1984).

Judge Mahady’s objections to the raid, of course, were not because he doubted the probability that adults were inflicting child physical abuse upon children; rather, they were largely because the warrant was not specific in naming alleged victims and their exact locations. Burchard, therefore, both examined whether the state had any alternative to initiating a raid on an entire community, and discussed whether such a raid was legal from the standpoint of an action designed for juvenile protection. On the question of possible alternatives, Burchard was very clear that the behavior of Northeast Kingdom Community members toward authorities left his department with no other choice than to issue a general warrant. Said succinctly, time and again, Community members refused to cooperate with far less intrusive social-service interventions:

The problem that State has faced from the beginning is that the church community appears to be purposefully organized to shield the identity of the parents and children in question, and to allow them to thwart the ordinary steps of due process which many critics seem convinced should have worked successfully. (Burchard, 1984: 7)

Amidst discussing eleven instances (dating back only to 1982) when the Northeast Kingdom Community had refused to cooperate with a variety of state agencies, Burchard concluded “that the church does not recognize the state as having any authority to examine any of their children under any circumstances” (Burchard, 1984: 10; see 8–10; see Palmer, 1998: 194). Later he added, “the active, unlawful resistance of the church was also extraordinary” (Burchard, 1984: 13). The noncooperation and actual resistance of the Community members, individually and collectively, made it impossible for the Attorney General’s office or Social and Rehabilitation Services to specify the names or specific locations of people or possible evidence. The group members “file [tax] returns as if they were one family” (Harrison, 1984: 61), and they acted as a unified front against all of the state’s authorities and institutions designed to protect children.

Comparing the detailed media and professional accounts of child physical abuse within the Northeast Kingdom Community with the scholarship on the group, it is clear that most scholars have buried or dismissed the former Commissioner’s thoughtful statement about his perspective on the raid that his office had conducted. If researchers, therefore, try to contextualize the child punishment in Peoples Temple and Jonestown by following Hall’s suggestion and looking at the Northeast Kingdom, then they likely will find articles by Swantko, Palmer, and a few others that conveniently neglect to portray the severity with which that group apparently disciplined children and teens. Hall greatly understated the severity of the group’s abuse when he stated that members’ use of “rods and switches” sometimes “left marks on [children’s] bodies” (Hall, 1987: 125), since in reality the beatings apparently also left bloodied and bruised children with scars.

This level of corporal punishment clearly exceeded community standards outside the narrow confines of some Protestant (mostly fundamentalist and evangelical) circles, which Hall overlooked when he used the group’s corporal punishment actions as indicative of a “Puritan standard” that was not excessive (Hall, 1987: 125). These actions were excessive and potentially harmful to the children themselves, as historian Philip Greven realized. In Spare the Child (1991), Greven highlighted many of the beating allegations, and mentioned the raid as “the result of several years of intense but frustrating investigation by the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services” (Greven 1991: 35). When discussing the harms caused by such beatings, Greven identified the causal connection between corporal punishment techniques involving “spankings, whippings and beatings” of children and the development of sadomasochism in adults (Greven, 1991: 174–186). “For many adults,” Greven observed,

…sadomasochism in both erotic and nonerotic forms is a direct consequence of the confusions generated by the combination of love and pain in childhood, the long-tem outcome of the normal assaults and abuse associated with physical punishment from infancy to adolescence. (Greven, 1991: 174)

Illustrating this point, Greven concluded,

…the association of love, fear, and pain begin early and remain embedded in the unconscious mind for life. Children from Island Pond, Vermont, who have been beaten for disobedience, have sometimes insisted that painful punishment is the proof of love. (Greven, 1991: 175)

He quoted a disaffected member who told a reporter, “’I have an eight-year-old girl who is a masochist. She equates love with beatings’” (Greven, 1991: 175, quoting Juan Mattatall in Sexton, 1983: 36). The ex-member had audio-taped that daughter insisting to him:

‘I know, the Lord wants you to spank us [herself and her younger sister] if we’re disobedient. If you love us … then you’ll spank us. If you spank us, then you love us. If you don’t spank us, then you don’t love us…. That’s what it says in the Bible.’ (Greven, 1991:175, quoting daughter of Juan Mattatall in Sexton, 1983: 36)[22]

Greven concluded his section on the implications of Northeast Kingdom Community disciplinary procedures by observing that “the association of love and pain is inescapable when corporal punishments are used” (Greven 1991, 176). It seems wholly inappropriate, therefore, to continue Hall’s use of fundamentalist and evangelical Protestantism to normalize the corporal punishment at Jonestown. Such intense beatings are physically and emotionally harmful to children regardless of the religious or secular context in which they occur.

Moving beyond Hall’s analogy involving corporal punishment in Jonestown and conservative Protestantism, other forms of extraordinary discipline took place under Jones’s supervision that have no Protestant parallels. Hall had to downplay or ignore these other forms in order for his analogy to Protestantism to appear superficially credible. I am not aware of Protestant children being lowered into wells and terrified by adults hiding within them or within surrounding bushes, and I am not aware of Protestant children being forced to eat their own vomit. I have not seen any reports of Protestant children being punished by ingesting hot peppers or having those peppers rubbed on their rectums. Nor have I encountered examples of Protestant children being placed in leg shackles and having their heads shaved. Hall’s effort, therefore, simply failed when he attempted to ‘normalize’ the child physical abuse inflicted by Jones and his followers by equating it to practices in conservative Protestantism. Rather, the attempted analogy heightened awareness of how uniquely brutal the Jonestown environment was on children. The brutality reached its apex, of course, with the child murders.
The Child Murders

To his credit, Hall included information about the child murders that took place as adults administered the poison to infants and children (Hall, 1987: 283–287). He reproduced some of the debate between member Christine Miller and Jones in the minutes before the final act, in which she told Jones, “’I look at all the babies and I think they deserve to live’” (Christine Miller in Hall, 1987: 283; see Hall, 2000: 37; and for a transcription of these final exchanges between Miller, Jones, and others, see Maaga, 1998: 147–164). Concerning a retort that Jones gave soon afterward to another member’s question about how Jones could allow his precious little boy (John Victor, who was the subject of an ongoing paternity battle [see Hall, 1982: 48–49]) to die, Hall reported Jones as saying that he could not put the child’s life above the lives of the others. Hall surmised that, “for the children, Jones held, life was worse than death: ‘we give them [i.e., the governmental authorities] our children, then our children will suffer forever’” (Jones in Hall, 1987: 284; see also Jones quoted in Smith, 1982: 117). He described the actions of the first two adults to pour poison down the throats of their children, and he reproduced the comments of a Jonestown member who instructed, “‘the older children help love the little children and reassure them. They’re not crying from any pain; it’s just a little bitter tasting’” (Judy James, quoted in Hall, 1987: 285; see Hall, 2000: 37). When yet another man tried to speak to the crowd, “the shrieks of the children yelling ‘Noooo!’ swallowed up his words” (Hall, 1987: 285). As Hall concluded in an early book chapter on Jonestown, “many Jonestown residents did not willingly commit the suicide” (Hall, 1982: 54).

Despite Jones’s pronouncement that the cyanide would not cause convulsions, Hall mentioned the action of Odell Rhoades, who “helped carry a young boy out to the yard and gently laid down the life jerking with convulsions” (Hall, 1987: 286; see a longer account in Feinsod, 1981: 198). Curiously, however, Hall did not provide the exact number of children—around 276—who fell victim to the poisonings at Jonestown, even though one of his sources was Kenneth Wooden’s The Children of Jonestown, which provided this number in the first sentence of its prologue (Wooden, 1981: 1; cf. Smith, 1982: 108, and Chidester, 2003: 154, both of whom gave the number of infants and children at 260). Most of the 234 unidentified bodies were the murdered children (R. Moore, 1988: 107, 109). Not always included in the body count were Sharon Amos and her three children, who were away from Jonestown at the time of the murder/suicides. After receiving instructions over the short-wave radio to follow the lead provided by her comrades, she slit the throats of her children, and then cut her own wrists (Feinsod, 1981: 210; see B. Moore, 1989: 183).

The most detailed examination of the dead people’s ages appeared in a 2004 study by Rebecca Moore, who lost two sisters and a nephew (i.e., a sister’s child) among the 918 or so people who died because of Jonestown (R. Moore, 2004: 61). She determined that “one hundred thirty-one (131) were children under the age of 10; 234 were between the ages of 10 and 19…,” which means that “more than one-third were under 20” (R. Moore, 2004: 64–65). (Presumably, Moore included nineteen-year-olds so that her findings would encompass all teenagers, but the exclusion of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds would have allowed her to speak more clearly about the number of children who died.)[23] In addition, “two hundred eleven (211) people were 60 and older, with three-fourths of this segment being black females” (R. Moore, 2004: 65). From these figures, “twenty percent of the members were over 60 years of age…. Over a third of the population—36 percent—were infants, children, and teenagers” (Sawyer, 2004: 169–170). (Moore’s bar graph that presents ages makes it difficult to be precise, but apparently around ninety people who died at Jonestown were in their seventies and around twenty-five were in their eighties. One or two people appear to have been in their nineties [R. Moore, 2004: 66). In sum, half or more of the people who died at or related to Jonestown were of ages (young and old) at which responsible adults should have been giving them varying degrees of care. Instead, the presumed caregivers killed them.

The inescapable reality that adults (often parents) murdered hundreds of children in the final moments of Jonestown has caused problems for scholars who wish to give interpretations of Jonestown that challenge anticult images of Jones as the brainwasher who destroyed the critical minds of his followers. Respected religious-studies professor Catherine Wessinger, for example, wrote the introduction to Mary McCormick Maaga’s study that attempted “to restore the humanity of the individuals who were a part of People’s Temple” (Maaga, 1998: xx). (The book’s front cover contains four pictures, each with a child or children and an adult in normal, almost always happy, poses.) Toward this goal, Wessinger offered:

Most Jonestown residents agreed that their ultimate concern was worth killing and dying for. The transcript of the last Jonestown meeting [reproduced as an appendix in Maaga’s book] provides evidence of peer pressure, persuasion, psychological coercion—by the whole group, not solely by Jim Jones—but there is no evidence that physical force was used to make people commit suicide. (Wessinger in Maaga, 1998: xi–xii)

Immediately, however, Wessinger seemingly contradicts herself in a qualifying footnote:

I am saying that, contrary to the media myth, we have no evidence that there was any physical coercion to join the mass suicide. The witnesses are dead. There is testimony of surviving witnesses of people willingly going to participate in the mass suicide. Certainly the children did not choose to die. Probably a number of elderly people did not have a choice. Dissidents in Jonestown were drugged and kept confined. These people do not choose to die. Able-bodied people could have escaped the suicide easily and some chose to do so. My primary point here is that mass suicide could not have been carried out without the agency of the able-bodied adults. (Wessinger in Maaga, 1998: xii n. [italics in original])

In other words (and not even challenging her claim that able-bodied members easily could have escaped rifle-carrying guards [see Chidester, 2003: 154]), at the very least the group used physical coercion probably to kill dissidents and the elderly and certainly to murder the children.

In essence, the children of Jonestown suffered what surely has to be the cruelest and most severe form of child abuse—murder, committed by their poisoning parents. A surviving letter from Jonestown member Annie Moore (deceased sister of Jonestown scholar Rebecca Moore) likely captured the attitudes that many of the able-bodied killers felt about murdering the children. Annie Moore indicated,

‘I don’t relish the idea of participating in killing the children and I don’t think anyone else does but I will do it because I think I could be as compassionate as the next person about it and I don’t hate children.’ (letter reproduced in Maaga, 1998: 123)

Efforts to restore the humanity of the individuals who were at Jonestown, therefore, cannot gloss over the fact that roughly half of those people had their humanity—their very lives—taken from them by other members acting under Jones’s directives.

Somewhat similar qualifications about the fate of the children appeared in David Chidester’s 1988 study (revised 2003), Salvation and Suicide, which attempted to give a religious-studies perspective to the tragic events. “For those who willingly embraced death through revolutionary suicide, Jones described the conditions under which this could be regarded as a meaningful act within the categories of symbolic orientation and classification that operated in their shared worldview” (Chidester, 2003: 155; see Smith, 1982: 119–120). But in the previous paragraph he had to acknowledge:

Finally, it would be difficult to suppose that the 260 children[24] of Jonestown all committed suicide. Babies were sacrificed first, perhaps to signify to the adults that this was not a rehearsal, not another loyalty test, but an act from which there could be no turning back once it had begun. (Chidester, 2003: 154–155)

However much scholars within religious studies want to find meaning for the suicides within the group’s own theological system, for the children the final event was infanticide. As even Hall admitted, “the organizational effectiveness of People’s [sic] Temple for more than fifteen years and the actual carrying out of the mass murder/suicide show that Jones and his staff knew what they were doing” (Hall 1982: 36; Hall, 1990: 270).
Conclusion

The so-called ‘cult wars’ continue to rage, as a few scholars persist in publishing ideologically tainted studies designed to minimize or ignore real instances of harm. In such studies, of course, these scholars have to neutralize or deemphasize the child abuse that the adults far too frequently perpetrate upon children. Sociologically, therefore, important social processes involving the socialization of adults into abusers (not to mention, murderers) are crucial to identify; and studies that ignore, sidestep, or downplay the range of child abuses that adults perpetrated against children in Jonestown are overlooking an important issue. It seems likely that they are doing so because close analysis of groups’ deviant socialization processes will fuel anticultist criticism of numerous groups. As a sociologist realized back in 1983,

The children of Jonestown were very thoroughly socialized. For them, the [Peoples] Temple was not an alternative reality, a subuniverse, but the ground of their primary socialization…. The primary socialization that the children of the Temple was receiving, however, was taking place within a milieu designed more for the secondary socialization of their parents—a milieu oriented toward those who might be tempted to deny its reality. (Weightman, 1983: 152–153)

Surely these questions about socialization are vital (see R. Moore, 1988: 130–131), especially concerning how adults came to individual and collective positions that allowed them to abuse and ultimately murder children.

Far too much of the existing scholarship on Jonestown has avoided detailed examinations of the child abuse in Peoples Temple facilities, probably for fear that such an examination would feed the fires of the anticult movement with atrocity tales (Maaga, 1998: 39; see Hall, 1987: 107; R. Moore, 2009: 5, 116–118; Shupe and Bromley, 1982: 128–129; Swantko, 2004: 180–181; Weightman, 1983: 177–178). If, however, members of the anticult movement are in fact looking at issues related to child abuse in Jonestown and other ideological organizations, then they are pursuing an important, and often neglected, research and social agenda. At this moment, however, no comprehensive academic study of the child abuse within Peoples Temple and Jonestown exists for future generations to read. In a discussion a decade ago about why scholars were not ready to ‘close the canon’ concerning Jonestown, nowhere in lists of issues and data still needing study were the plights of children (and for that matter, the elderly) mentioned (R. Moore, 2000: 17, 22). Surely their lives and their deaths demand careful and thoughtful attention.

As I conclude this article, I return a final time to one of the groups, the Northeast Kingdom Community, that Hall used when he attempted to normalize the physical beatings that Peoples Temple and Jonestown children suffered. An important glimpse into the “subuniverse” of that group—one that casts additional doubt upon its validity in providing normative child-rearing practices, comes from a surprising source—a child-turned-young-adult who had intimate knowledge of the world in which spokesperson, lawyer, and scholar Jean Swantko lived.

Swantko not only is the group’s lawyer, but also is a convert who (in 1991) married a leader, Charles “Eddie” Wiseman. She had met Wiseman when she was a Vermont public defender assigned to defend him on charges of simple assault, after he allegedly was involved in the beating of a 13-year-old girl (a case that I mentioned earlier [Johnson, 1995: 24]). This beating/
whipping allegedly took place over a seven-hour interval, and the girl and her father “told state officials [that] she had 89 welts” from it (Clendinen, 1984).[25] A court dropped the charges, however, in 1985 because the defendant had not received a “speedy trial” (Swantko, 2004: 185), but the state’s case had been damaged badly when the father of the girl retracted his initial statements about the beating (Donnelly, 1984).

Years later, Swantko went so far as to indicate that “Members do use corporal punishment, but abusive punishment is not taught or condoned” (Swantko, 2004: 185). Certainly she was in a position within the group to know about this corporal punishment, since she became a stepmother to Wiseman’s children, one of whom was Zebulun (or simply Zeb) Wiseman. In 2001, Zeb fled the group and spoke to a reporter. “‘Growing up in there, I saw the inside scoop. There’s [sic] a lot of things there that weren’t right…. Spanking kids, locking them up’” (quoted in Wedge, 2001). Academics are likely to believe Swantko, who dismissed allegations of abuse, but her own stepson, and others of his generation, have a different tale to tell. Academics who ignore their voices run the risk of producing scholarship that, in the future, will prove to be simply, demonstrably, wrong.

Jonestown was a dramatic reminder for people worldwide that demagogic, emotionally and psychologically imbalanced (see Lys, 2005), but charismatic individuals can both attract followers and do tremendous harm to them and their children. Their deaths were the clearest possible warning that unaccountable leaders can spiral downward with their flocks into destructive, even murderous behavior. The clarity of this warning to future generations must include accurate accounts of what the youth experienced, and it is highly regrettable that people in generations to come will receive information that downplays the Jonestown children’s suffering. It is equally regrettable that similar diminishments of child abuse appear in accounts about young lives in other groups. Academics who write apologetic or misleading accounts of life in sectarian or ideological groups do an injustice to the lives of the people about whom they write and a disservice to their readers in the years and decades to come. Victimized children deserve more; and so, too, do the persons who were (and are) active in anticult groups and who try to sound the alarm about children’s plights.

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———. 1984b. “Opinion and Order: Petition.” State of Vermont Orleans County, ss. In Re: Certain Children. District of Vermont Unit 3, Orleans Circuit. Docket No. 22-6-840sj, August 7, date-stamped August 8, 14pp.

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———. 2000. “Is the Canon on Jonestown Closed?” Nova Religio 4 No. 1: 7–27.

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———. (2009). Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

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———. 1989b. New Religious Movements, Mass Suicide, and Peoples Temple: Scholarly Perspectives on a Tragedy. Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press.

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———. 1999. “Frontiers and Families: The Children of Island Pond.” In. Children in New Religions, edited by Susan J. Palmer and Charlotte E. Hardman. London: Rutgers University Press, 153–171.

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About the AuthorStephen A. Kent, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, University of Alberta, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the sociology of religion and the sociology of sectarian groups. He has published articles in numerous sociology and religious study journals. His 2001 book, From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era, was selected by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries as an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2002.”International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010 [1] This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the International Cultic Studies Association conference on June 27, 2008, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[2] Thanks go to Terra Manca and Ashley Samaha for their editorial suggestions.

[3] The technical name of the group that followed Jim Jones (1931–1978) was Peoples Temple, and the community that Jones and more than a thousand of his followers established in Guyana was Jonestown. Often, however, people use Jonestown to refer to the entire movement, and at times I may be guilty of doing so myself.

[4] I use the ‘cult’ term in a manner that is in line with standard dictionary (in this case, Webster’s) definitions as both a religion that most people consider unorthodox and spurious, and a small circle of persons devoted to an intellectual figure. In simple terms, Jones’s self-deification, harsh punishments, and fake healings made his movement unorthodox if not spurious in the eyes of many, and his combination of Christianity and Marxism made him something of an intellectual leader (at least in the eyes of his followers). I am also aware of the early attempt by an opponent of the so-called anticult movement, James T. Richardson, to isolate Peoples Temple and Jonestown from the debate around new religions and cults. According to Richardson, most new religions developed in America during the 1960s or early 1970s; Peoples Temple began in the 1950s (Richardson, 1980: 241-242). Most new religions comprise Caucasians/whites; many of the Peoples Temple members were African Americans/black (Richardson, 1980: 242). Jones’s organization was more authoritarian than most new religions (Richardson, 1980: 243-244). Peoples Temple grew more wary toward outside society over time, while most new religions become less wary of the dominant society over time (Richardson, 1980: 245-246). In a remarkable admission, Richardson acknowledged that some of the resocialization techniques that Peoples Temple used seemed to share “at least some important facets with the thought reform model developed by R. J. Lifton…,” while most new religions used resocialization techniques closer to effective persuasion (Richardson, 1980: 247). Jones was a socialist, whereas the new religions “reflect Western culture’s emphasis on individualism” (Richardson, 1980: 248). Jonestown’s members were not crazy or brainwashed in committing suicide; they committed what Durkheimian sociologists call ‘altruistic suicide’ (Richardson, 1980: 249). In addition, new religions tended to be introversionist, whereas Peoples Temple attempted to involve itself in the political process (Richardson, 1980: 251). Finally, participants in most new religions engage in their groups’ rituals sincerely and see symbolic meaning to their actions, while Jones probably “manipulated ritual behavior to accomplish his own ends” (Richardson 1980: 251). According to Richardson, even though Peoples Temple/Jonestown bore little relation to the new religions, those groups were under increasing pressure from deprogrammers, anticult groups, and even the Internal Revenue Service because of the inaccurate analogies between the two (Richardson, 1980: 252). Suffice it to say that no anticultist identifies a cult according to the ages of its members or the racial composition of the group. Nor does the time period in which a group emerges or flourishes influence a cultic designation. Moreover, authoritarian leadership is more pervasive than Richardson implied, which certainly can contribute to outsiders seeing a group as spurious and cultic. In fact, many groups do engage in politics in varying degrees, and now several of them also have committed murder/suicide. For anticultists, a major factor for labeling a group to be a cult is a determination of harm caused by group actions, and this very determination of harm often is what makes a group spurious in the eyes of many societal members.

[5] As indicated by Rebecca Moore, “[t]his number includes four of Congressman Leo Ryan’s party—including Ryan himself—and one [Peoples] Temple member who were killed at the Port Kaituma airstrip outside Jonestown, and four Temple members who died in Georgetown [Guyana]” (Moore, 2004: 61).

[6] According to the book’s cover, Ken Levi (PhD) taught sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio at the time of the book’s publication.

[7] According to the back of the book, John R. Hall was an associate professor of sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

[8] St. John (1993: 22) referred to the Edwin Mellen Press as “a quasi-vanity press cunningly disguised as an academic publishing house…,” and manuscripts did not go through a review process (St. John 1993: 24). Its owner, Herbert Richardson, used the press’s proofreaders as a money-making enterprise and also “threatened to take a quarter out of the proofreaders’ paychecks for every mistake they corrected past a certain number” (St. John, 1993: 23). Richardson sued St. John and Lingua Franca over the article but lost; and about a year after St. John’s article appeared, St. Michael’s College (which is part of the University of Toronto system) dismissed Richardson for “gross misconduct” (Lingua Franca, 2000). For a short analysis of the libel case between Edwin Mellen Press and Lingua Franca (albeit one published by Edwin Mellen Press), see Reid, 2006.

[9] This book is a version of Weightman’s 1983 Ph.D. dissertation from Drew University in Religion and Sociology entitled, Breakdown in the Creation of a New Reality: A Sociological Analysis of the Peoples Temple. A 1989 source suggests that she may not have remained in academia (Moore and McGehee [eds.] 1989: 249–250.

[10] Other differences exist between Hall’s and Mills’s accounts. Hall stated that the teenager Linda Mertle (who was Mills’s daughter) “wrote a letter requesting seventy-five whacks for greeting a lesbian adult friend of the family who had left People’s [sic] Temple several years earlier” (Hall, 1987: 123). Mills, however, made no mention of a letter requesting punishment, but instead said, “Our sixteen-year-old daughter Linda was called up for confrontation. She had hugged a girlfriend whom Jim considered to be a traitor. Linda stood before Jim and admitted that she was guilty.

“Jim looked at her sternly. ‘You have been unwise, in the past, in your choice of friends, and it is important that we teach you a lesson you won’t forget…. In order to help you learn this lesson, you will get seventy-five whacks with the board’” (Jones, quoted in Mills, 1979: 267).

Even if Hall is accurate in stating that Mertle wrote Jones and requested the beating, it still is outrageous that Jones had it carried out. Likewise, the sexual orientation of the person she hugged should have been of no consequence to anybody, and neither should the fact that she had left the group.

[11] Layton did not mention the victim having to watch the beating, but she did recount that “There was the secret rubber hose beating of a member who had molested a Temple child. Father [i.e., Jones] made me watch the beating and had my photo taken holding the rubber hose, which paralyzed my questioning inner voice” (Layton, 1998: 61). Note that Mills said that the beating instrument was a board, while Layton indicated that it was a rubber hose.

[12] Layton wrote,

There was also the Well, a punishment used especially for children. They would be taken to the Well in the dark of night, hung upside down by a rope around their ankles, and dunked into the water again and again while someone hidden inside the Well grabbed at them to scare them. The sins deserving such punishment included stealing food from the kitchen, expressing homesickness, failing a socialism exam, or even ‘natural’ childish rebelliousness. Their screams were chilling but we had learned from the consequences of previous people’s objections not to complain. (Layton, 1998: 176)

[13] Among the early accounts about the House of Judah was a news summary about the group that appeared in the newsletter of the anticult organization the Citizens Freedom Foundation (Citizens Freedom Foundation, 1983: [3]). Later, an organization that concerned itself with harm caused by cultic groups, the American Family Foundation, published an article about the House of Judah in its May/June 1988 newsletter, The Cult Observer, reproducing it from the newsletter of an organization (Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty, or CHILD) dedicated to children’s medical rights (American Family Foundation, 1988). In July of that year, the largest cult-monitoring organization in the United States at that time, the Cult Awareness Network, published an article about the group in its Cult Awareness Network News (1988).

[14] Hall’s citation system was minimalist, citing only “NYT, 6/23, 29/84; Charisma 1984: 68–79. Charisma is a Christian magazine from the period (Nori, 1984), and a New York Times article did appear on June 23, 1984 (The New York Times, 1984). I an unable to find, however, an article from June 29; but perhaps it is a typographical error for the date of the article that appeared on June 24, 1984 (Butterfield, 1984).

[15] In an editorial note in Swantko 2004: 179, she said that this article is revised, updated, and reprinted from Social Justice Research 12(4), 1999. My copy of the earlier article, however, is from 2000, which is the date that I use here in the bibliography.

[16] In one of her articles about the Northeast Kingdom Community, Susan Palmer referred to “negative and inaccurate media reports” that likely contributed to the “violent reactions” against the group (Palmer, 2001: 211). Presumably, she had in mind the very media accounts to which I am about to refer. What suggests to me, however, that these media accounts likely were accurate is that multiple reporters using different sources (interviews with former members, police reports, medical reports, photographs, etc.) identified similar accounts of severe child beatings allegedly perpetrated by different people

[17] Alluding to this trial, Swantko and Wiseman said that, in 1982, a member of their community, “whose wife accused him of pedophilia,” defected and tried to gain custody of the family’s five children. Vowing to “‘destroy’ the community, [he] sought advice from anticult activists, who apparently suggested that he spread lies in the media and among local government officials” (Swantko and Wiseman, 1995: 88). What they failed to state is that, during the hearing,

…several former members of the Vermont church community testified that toddlers were beaten with rods or belts. David Anderson, 24, said he comforted one mother as a church member whipped her 3-year-old son on his legs, chest and arms for about 40 minutes. He said he also saw two other youngsters the same age beaten until blood flowed down their legs. (United Press International, 1982)

Simply from reading the account by Swantko and Wiseman, one cannot know that several people testified under oath about intense corporal punishment in the group. Bozeman and Palmer 1997: 184) indicate that, in the early 1980s,

[r]umors, gossip and mis-information about the community—particularly about possible child abuse—grew, a situation unintentionally aggravated by the Church’s unwillingness to indulge the curiosity of journalists or state officials. This was particularly true after 1982, when church members lost a series of child custody battles due to their unconventional lifestyle….

Note that both reporters’ and state officials’ interest in the group was only “curiosity,” and that “possible child abuse” was only “mis-information.”

[18] Palmer, (1999: 162) mistakenly gives the year as 1982 when Mattatall retrieved his daughter, but it was 1983.

[19] As sometimes happens when one tries to piece together events by using documents, I have encountered some problems around events and dates concerning Arthur Fritog that I cannot resolve. The newspaper article indicating that Fritog had left the Northeast Kingdom Community has a handwritten date on it of “January 12, 1983” (Braithwaite, 1983). I also have, however, an affidavit by Detective Corporal Peter M. Johnson, dated July 18, 1983, alleging that that a person named Timothy Pendergrass had committed “simple assault” against Fritog’s son by “hitting hit with a piece of 2 x 4 on the buttocks” as a punishment for laughing with two other boys (Johnson, 1983c). Does this report mean that Fritog remained in Island Pond after he left the group? Did he rejoin it after issuing his harsh criticisms against the media? Is the handwritten date incorrect on the newspaper photocopy that I have? The fact that detective Johnson reached Arthur Fritog by telephone suggests that he no longer was a part of the Northeast Kingdom Community; but if that is so, then why did Pendergrass allegedly beat his son? I cannot resolve these issues.

[20] Worth noting are Susan Palmer’s comments on the child beating issue:

I have been asked on many occasions to express an opinion concerning the severity of these disciplines. I always state that, since I have never personally witnessed the chastisement of children, I cannot judge. Certainly, the people I have spent time with strike me as kind and loving parents, and their children are high-spirited and trusting, so it is difficult to believe some of the affidavits I have read for the courts. (Palmer, 1999: 161)

[21] Swantko also had an issue with Burchard’s use of media accounts:

While Vermont’s Commissioner of Social Services claimed evidence of abuse of children, he relied on newspaper reports unlawfully published as a source. Despite the fact that he knew, or should have known, the confidentiality laws for juvenile cases, he violated them. He then used the fact that newspaper reporters printed unlawful disclosures to justify his own use of them, clearly prohibited by the juvenile statutes. (Swantko 2005-2006: 45)

While I do not know what these laws were in the early 1980s, perhaps they had to do with not using the names of children who allegedly had been abused. If this interpretation were in fact accurate, then I note that both Swantko herself and Palmer named thirteen-year-old Dealynn Church as having alleged that a group leader had spanked her (Palmer, 1998: 199; Swantko 2000: 349). Perhaps reporters were able to use children’s names because their alleged beatings became public knowledge outside of court proceedings.

[22] In one of many ironies involving the people and incidents surrounding the Island Pond raid, the ex-member father Juan Mattatall, who taped his daughter making these statements, would be murdered several years later by his own mother (who then killed herself), apparently because she feared that her son would have ongoing problems around his pedophilia (Palmer, 1998: 196).

[23] Here I follow Article 1 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defines “a child” as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the laws applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier” (United Nations, 1989: Article 1).

[24] See above, where I give Kenneth Wooden’s (1981: 1) number for dead children as 276.

[25] Palmer (1998: 207 n.2) claimed, “the testimony of ‘eight or nine’ welts on her skin, read out by the judge with a heavy Maine accent, was transcribed as ‘eighty-nine’ welts.” I cannot verify or disconfirm the claim.

Women, Elderly, and Children In Religious Cults (incl.12 Tribes)

Charlie — Tue, 01 Aug 2000 12:33:35 +0000

Source: Icsa article
Marcia Rudin

Abstract

Although most reports concerning cults suggest that the majority of converts are young adults, there is growing documentation attesting to the negative impact of cults on elderly and children. In addition, special abuses of women in cults have become a cause of concern. This paper discusses reports on the cult-related experiences of these three neglected groups and makes recommendations regarding appropriate remedial actions.
Introduction

Two hundred seventy-six of the 913 who died at Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978 at the command of Reverend Jim Jones were young teenagers and small children (1). Another third were elderly, including several people in their nineties (2). The Jonestown settlement is gone, but the nightmare of cult life lingers on for many small children, young teens, and elderly caught up in other religious cults.

We tend to think of cultists as being single young adults between the ages of approximately eighteen to twenty-six. But this is no longer the whole story. Some groups have existed now for fifteen and twenty years. But, as time passes, cult life, like everything else, undergoes change. One of these major changes is that cults are becoming a family matter. Now, more and more cultists are married, if not before joining, then afterwards, often paired off by the leaders. They are having children. And families are joining groups such as The Way International, Church Universal and Triumphant, The Walk, and the proliferating Bible movements which appear on the surface to be family-oriented, conventional churches (3). The existence of family ties within the group complicates the scene and makes it more difficult to break away, for often the defecting cultist must leave behind a spouse, child, or even a parent, perhaps never to be seen again.

Before discussing in detail women, elderly, and children in cults, a word about methodology. I gather most of my information from former cult members and families and friends of former or present members, which is, as critics of the counter-cult movement assert, a bit like asking only divorced people their views on marriage. Well, I believe these sources to be the real “experts” on the cult scene. Perhaps there are happy women, elderly, and children in these groups. But we cannot ignore the by now thousands of first-hand accounts of abuses in cult life, especially the growing number of horrifying tales of child abuse.
Women

Women in cults share more than equally in the general exploitation and abuse of adult cult members with which we are so familiar, perhaps because their extra burden of guilt and dependency conditions them more easily for total submission to God (4). As Una McManus says of her marriage in The Children of God, “I was being signed away, given into slavery. From now on I would belong to my husband. He controlled me, his leaders controlled him, and Moses (Berg) controlled all of us” (5).

Women suffer particularly from the lack of life choices in cults, especially regarding marriage, sex, and childbearing. They are often paired off to men in the group according to the man’s or the leader’s dictates, perhaps when as young as thirteen or fourteen (6). In July, 1982 over 2,000 couples matched by the Unification Church were married by Reverend Sun Myung Moon in a mass ceremony in Madison Square Garden. Many of the brides and grooms had never met before (7). The Unification Church also prevents couples from marrying: former members testify they had to wait as long as three years before getting engaged and another two years before marriage (8). Moon claims to follow “the divine revelation of God” in determining if and when his married followers can have sexual intercourse. Newlyweds in the Unification Church must wait at least forty days to consummate their marriage (9).

Cult heads often dictate when to – or not to – have a baby. A former disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh reports he has heard first-hand accounts of forced abortions and sterilizations of women in the Rajneesh group and that Rajneesh’s three-hundred top women disciples are sterilized (10). Pregnant women in cults may receive inadequate pre-natal care and diet and deliver under unsanitary conditions with poor, if any, medical attention. Some women in cults have died during childbirth (11). Some mothers are not allowed to raise their own children or to see them alone or often (12). Some mothers have had to leave their children behind when they break away from a cult (13).

Former members of Hare Krishna speak of poor treatment of women. Girls’ education is geared to preparation for homemaking in their early, often arranged marriages (14).

Ex-member, Susan Murphy claims she wasn’t allowed to attend public school because “Hare Krishna teaches that women are not intelligent enough for schooling” (15). Founder Prabhupada explains that women can never be equal to men because of their childbearing functions and their lower mentality (16). A leader of the Boston temple preaches that women’s brains weight only half of men’s (17). The men organize and direct the temple administration and supervise religious ritual because they “are better suited to spiritual development (than are women) because they are less tied to the material world” (18). Susan Murphy relates that in her Boston temple the women were fed “like dogs” with scraps from the table after the men had finished eating (19).

Women in some groups suffer considerable physical abuse (2) and are often subject to sexual abuse. Young girls in the Rajneesh Foundation and Children of God report rapes (21). Children of God leaders order and orchestrate sexual orgies for everyone in the group (22) and order, some observers say, carefully trained women disciples to use their sexuality to recruit new members and solicit property and large donations, a technique leader David (Moses) Berg calls “Happy Hooking” or “Flirty Fishing” (23). Jim Jones forced Jonestown women into public homosexual and heterosexual couplings, sometimes in front of their children (24). Often male leaders have sexual access to the women in the group, as Jones did. A former high official in Swami Muhktanada’s Siddha Yoga Dham of America asserts he left that organization because he heard “scores of stories” of “numerous” seductions of young women, some only teenagers, “in the name of Tantra initiation” (25). Other former members confirm the Guru had sexual relations with young women in his group (26).
Elderly

We do not know the exact numbers or percentages of elderly involved in cults, as statistics in this as in all other areas of cult life, are sparse. Older people are particularly embarrassed about and reluctant to admit cult membership, and may fear harassment if the “go public.”

Cultists who joined when young are now, like the rest of us, growing into middle or old-age. Moses Durst claims the average age of Unification Church members is now thirty-one years (27). A few parents of young people in cults have joined their children’s groups because they perceive that is the only way they can continue to have relationships with them (28). And some cults are actively seeking elderly members, particularly in California and Florida where there are many retirees (29).

In 1977 the California-based Church Universal and Triumphant sent out a letter urging senior citizens to join and “set the example for youth” (30). Former member Gregory Mull, sixty-one years old, estimates that about fifteen percent of CUT members are over fifty years of age (31). The Church views its recent purchase of a seven-million-dollar, 12,000 acre ranch in Montana as an opportunity “to get personally involved in the definite expansion of a golden-age community” (32). A few years ago a Unification church missionary in Florida publicly announced the Church’s desire to expand its membership to include the elderly. Now, UC members present program s for seniors in condominiums there and “witness” to them from door to door (33). Workers in a Unification Church sponsored organization called The Bay Ridge (New York City) Home Church Association slip material under doors of elderly offering help with “chores such as baby-sitting, house cleaning, garden work,” etc. (34). One of the Unification Church members in charge of this operation testified at the New Castle Zoning Board of Appeal hearings that such offers of service are only ways of getting into peoples’ homes to solicit for members and donations (35). Elderly in Birmingham, England have been approached through a free magazine entitled “Our Family” (36). A woman who works with senior citizens centers in Brooklyn recently told me that Unification Church members came to her centers and invited the elderly there to attend the mass wedding ceremony at Madison Square Garden last July (37).

Full-time elderly members of The Way International live in the group’s “Sumnset Corps” in Rome City, Indiana (38). In an October, 1981 communication to Way adherents leader Victor Paul Wierwille urges senior citizens to live together in “Way Homes” throughout America (39). Many elderly contribute money to the Divine Light Mission or follow leader Maharaj Ji all over the world (41). The group recruits heavily among elderly Jews in Miami Beach (42). Former Walk member David Clark estimates about twenty percent of Walk followers are over fifty (43).

How do elderly fare in these groups? The senior citizens in The People’s Temple (one third of the group) went hungry, lived in squalid, crowded conditions, and received no medical care (44). They roiled in the jungle settlement’s workshops and fields. Visiting U.S. officials, however, were told the elderly were only pursuing hobbies and not working (45). Thus, they could continue to receive their social security checks, which Jones took from them as his major source of income (46). Cult observers in southern Florida have heard many stories of groups in the area bilking seniors out of food stamps and social security payments (47). More affluent elderly all over the world are urged to turn over homes and property or to sell them and donate the profits to the group (48). David Clark asserts that The Walk forces elderly to donate money and sign deeds for the church’s “visionary projects” (49). Gregory Mull relates that older CUT members “work part-time for the organization and also hold outside jobs in order to pay room and board to the church and to donate additional money to it. They told me I would die if I didn’t give them money,” Mull says. “When you go on ‘permanent staff’ at Camelot (the church’s headquarters) you have to sign over your property. They control your money and don’t allow you to give any to your children (50). Mull relates at Camelot “some older people sleep in goat barns and boiler rooms, sometimes forty to fifty people in one room in triple-decker beds. It looks like a concentration camp. Yet older people live in constant fear of getting ill or becoming too old to work because if you can’t work, you’re out” (51).
Children

There are now thousands of small children in religious cults. There are 5,000 small children in the European-based Children of God alone (52). They are born into cults or brought in when one or both parents join. Some counter-cult activists believe cults all over the country are seeking foster children to raise in their groups (53). (Jim Jones built up his multi-million dollar fortune largely from payments to the Peoples’ Temple from the state of California for the many foster children and wards of the state in his group (54).” The Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation is advertising all over the country asking expectant mothers to give the children to them to raise instead of seeking abortions (55).

Some cults are actively recruiting young teens and small children. The Way International’s rock bands perform at shopping malls and school assemblies often without telling school officials of their Way connection (56). Several public and parochial school teachers have invited young children to their homes for bible Study or “Christian Fellowship” meetings without telling parents they are affiliated with The Way (57). A Des Moines, Iowa woman reports that her twelve-year-old son is the third paperboy in the city to be approached by The Way recently. The boys have been picked up while delivering newspapers, taken to a “religious gathering,” and then returned to their paper routes. Her son has since disappeared, and she believes his disappearance is connected to The Way (58). In August, 1979, former Unification Church member Christopher Edwards and others told the New York State Assembly Public Hearings on Treatment of Children by Cults that the Moon organization has social, community, and patriotic activities and front groups such as the High School Association for the Research of Principles to interest younger teens, even though it claims it does not recruit anyone under the age of eighteen (59). Edwards also told the committee that several years ago when he was in the church he attempted to set up an “elementary school in San Francisco under a false name with false papers” (69). Neither parents of prospective students nor area principals he solicited for support knew of the school’s connection with the Unification Church or that its purpose would be “to convert their children and make extra income for the church” (61). Former Children of God member Una McManus relates how disciples witnessed to young children in front of schools in England, saturating them “from the youngest to the oldest, with Mo letters. Mo instructed us to aim specifically for the younger kids who were more impressionable and willing to believe than their elders” (63).

Many children in cults are subjects of bitter custody suits when one parent leaves the group and the child is left behind with the other, or when grandparents seek to remove grandchildren from a cult. Many parents and grandparents claim the groups do not let them see the children, do not honor their legal visitation rights, or do not turn the children over when they gain custody. Some assert cults hide children by transferring them to other headquarters throughout the world. (See documentation for specific cases (64).

How are children treated in these authoritarian groups that are often physically isolated from the outside world? There are mushrooming reports that children are separated from parents and siblings, receive inadequate medical care, sometimes even from the moment of birth, may not have their births recorded or receive inoculations, get inadequate or no schooling at all, live in crowded and unsanitary conditions, suffer from improper diets which can damage their physical and mental growth, and are subject to sexual abuse, and undergo harsh discipline and physical abuse so severe it has in many cases led to death (65).

Small children in the Unification Church are often separated from their parents (66). Offspring of marriages that took place before parents joined the church are considered to be “claim by Satan” (67). Observers believe Neil Salonen resigned as president of the American branch of the Unification church because he was unhappy about the poor quality of education in Unification church schools (68). Dr. Lowell Streiker reports former Unification church members and even present members express unhappiness to him over the poor treatment accorded pre-school children in the church communal nursery in upstate new York (69). “Mothers are sent off to ‘do their own thing’ for the church. Members who are between permanent assignments are given the job of caring for those children,” Streiker explains. “They are exhausted and this is considered to be a ‘bottom of the barrel’ assignment.” The children are often badly neglected and have a “high incidence of emotional disturbance” (70).

The many small children in the Hare Krishna communes and farms throughout the world sleep on floors in sleeping bags, eat a strict vegetarian diet excluding meat, eggs, and fish, and awaken at 3 a.m. for the daily 4 a.m. worship service (71). Babies and toddlers are cared for in a nursery. At age five – and some say even at two or three (72) children go away to a Krishna boarding school, where they study Sanskrit Hindu scriptures and chanting (73). The group separates girls from boys at about age ten (74), when the girls then study primarily cooking, sewing and household management in preparation for an early marriage, while boys go on to higher academic studies or train for skills such as farming or carpentry (75). Former high Krishna official Cheryl Wheeler asserts that her son was endangered physically because he wasn’t properly supervised, did not have adequate dental care or clothing, was possibly being used sexually (76), and underwent “educational indoctrination that will render him incapable of functioning in society,” that the group alienated him from her, and that it subjected him to “extreme and brutal disciplinary methods” (77). Susan Murphy, who joined Hare Krishna when she was only thirteen years old, claims she became a slave and was subjected to years of “ill health, bad diet, vermin-infested living conditions, brainwashing, and being forced to beg on the streets” (78).

A former member of CUT testified that while she was at Camelot her children didn’t live with her “due to lack of facilities” and she was allowed to see them only twice a month for three to four hours. “Guru Ma teaches that your real father is God and your real mother is the World Mother…your brothers and sisters are those in the teachings, not those born of the same parents.” She says children at the church-run Montessori schools must “decree repeatedly to the masters (79). Gregory Mull reports CUT has an official child spanker (80).

Critics accuse The Body of Christ of forcing families apart, severely disciplining and abusing children, and keeping them out of public schools (81). TV executive Skip Webster, whose three grandchildren were in the River of Life Ministry in California, claims his eight-month old grandson was “severely beaten with a belt by his mother” in order to “drive Satan from him,” that babies in the group were fed only water for up to three days, that a nine-year-old boy was left alone for several nights in the Arizona desert, and than none of the children was properly educated (82). Garbage Eaters subsist on garbage and are neglected and beaten to insure obedience (83). Oregon officials removed twelve children from the Christ Brotherhood commune there when they discovered the children were not attending school (84). Children in the Church of God and True Holiness in North Carolina performed hard labor at a poultry company, were beaten, nearly starved, and forced into arranged marriages (85) before leader Robert Carr was sent to prison for violating United States slavery laws (86).

Children in some groups are subject to sexual abuse. Young girls in the European-based Children of God report rapes (897) and engage in “Happy Hooking” (88). In August 1979, Children of God published a pornographically illustrated booklet entitles, “My Little Fish,” which encourages child sexuality and sexual use of children, even by parents (89). Recent reports indicate that sexual activities of children with other children and with adults in the group is now “commonplace and accepted” and that children as well as adults are suffering from the venereal disease now rampant in the group (90).

In 1982 in Oregon, the leader of the Christ Brotherhood was convicted of rape and sodomy of girls in his group as young as six or seven (91). Disillusioned followers of Swami Muktananda say the Guru had sexual relations with girls in their early teens (92). Children in the Vashon Island, Washington, Wesleyan Community church are subject to therapy sessions which include simulated breast-feeding of adults (93).

The children at Jonestown were also subject to severe sexual abuse. Jones forced girls as young as fifteen to sexually serve influential Californians whose favors he courted (94). Jones and other adult supervisors sexually assaulted some youngsters (95). If parents were caught talking privately, their daughters were, according to author Kenneth Wooden, “forced to masturbate in public or to have sex with someone they didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults” (96).

Many children have died in destructive religious cults due to medical neglect. The Fort Wayne, Indiana News-Sentinel has documented sixty-one deaths to date from medical neglect (97), thirty-nine of them infants or children (98), in the Indiana-based Faith Assembly, whose members believe in faith healing and are forbidden to seek medical help. Other observers say there have been at least seventy-three deaths, most of them women or children, in The Faith Assembly in five Midwestern states alone (99). This figure most certainly does not reflect the total number of deaths in this group since it has branches in twenty states in the United States and in Switzerland and Australia (100).

According to statistics provided by the Children of God, between March 1978 and March 1982 alone fifty-seven people, thirty-five of them children, died in that group from lack of medical care (101). One former member who witnessed the deaths of five children asserts that they died from treatable diseases such as pneumonia or died because the mother did not receive adequate pre-natal care (102).

There have been at least three infant deaths in the Northeast Kingdom Community church in Island Pond, Vermont, whose 123 children do not receive medical care (103). Newborn babies have died in The Overcomers in Montana (104), church of the First Born, and The Glory Barn Faith Assembly.

Children in some groups are subject to harsh physical abuse. Children in The Northeast Kingdom Community Church (also known as The Yello Deli) are subject to frequent and lengthy bare-bottom beatings with wooden rods (106). In the Wesleyan Community church on Bashon Island, Washington, children are beaten with coat hangers and a long stick (107). Five members of the Church of Bible Understanding were charged with severely beating the twelve-year-old son of their leader, who ordered the beatings (108). The former wife of the leader of the Church of the Risen Christ in Ohio testified that even children less than a year old were severely beaten to make them obey God (109). Before they died at Jonestown, the children in the People’s Temple were, as punishment, forced to dig holes and then refill them, imprisoned in a small cellar, and kept in a small plywood box for weeks at a time (110). Security guards beat children and stripped and forced young girls into a cold shower or a swimming pool (111). The few youngsters who tried to escape from the jungle settlement had electrodes wired on their arms and were given electric shocks or had chains and balls welded to their ankles (112).

There have been some deaths as a result of extreme physical abuse. Twenty-three month old Joey Green was paddled to death in the Stonegate Commune in Charles Town, West Virginia, where children were routinely paddled to insure absolute obedience (113). Twelve-year-old John Yarbough was beaten to death in the House of Judah in Allegan, Michigan, in July, 1983 (114). The group’s leader, “Prophet” William Lewis, was acquitted but the boy’s mother, Ethyl, was recently convicted of manslaughter (115). In April 1981, four members of The River of Life Tabernacle in Montana, including the boy’s parents, were convicted of beating five-year-old James Gill to death with electrical cords and a fiberglass stick (116). A five-year-old in the Black Hebrews of the Children of Israel in Ohio died after he was beaten and forced to eat red peppers because he had violated the group’s food laws (117).
Conclusion

What can be done to improve the lives of women, elderly, and children in destructive religious cults?

By pointing out the exploitation and abuse of children, elderly and women in cults we can reach a wider range of interest groups. We should alert pediatricians, nutritionists, and other child advocates. We must inform PTA’s and legislative committees charged with the legal protection of minors, such as Assemblyman Hoard lasher’s Child Care Committee in New York, which sponsored hearings into child abuse in cults in New York in August of 1979. Gerontologists, special commissions and committees on the aging, and other professionals concerned with the physical and mental welfare of the elderly must be alerted. Surely women’s rights and feminist organizations, such as NOW, can be mobilized into action.

Such special-interest groups can assist general cult research and educational organizations, such as the Citizens Freedom Foundation and the American Family Foundation, in providing extensive preventive education programs aimed specifically at women, elderly, and young children.

Networks must be set up so that lawyers involved in the rapidly growing numbers of child-in-cult custody cases (as well as with general cult-related issues) can exchange information and assist each other in this new and hitherto untested legal area.

All present legislation should be enforced and new laws passed where necessary to ensure that religious cults do not break civil and criminal laws with regard to women, elderly, and children, as well as all other cult members. There are many areas where the legal system can be used to ensure that cult members lead better lives.

State education officials can make sure the children go outside to a public school if the group’s educational facilities fail to meet state standards. Inspectors can check for violations of sanitary and health codes, can make sure that births are recorded, and can check to see that infants and children receive immunizations and medical care. Officials can ascertain if minors are being transported across state lines and should apply kidnapping or abduction laws if they suspect children are being hidden from relatives. Authorities should monitor violations of child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and interstate commerce code violations. Authorities should watch for violations of Thirteenth Amendment federal anti-slavery statutes which outlaw involuntary servitude (being compelled to keep a job one doesn’t want) and peonage (being prevented from leaving a job because a debt – imaginary or real – has not been paid (118).

Child abuse laws should be enforced so that children who are physically or sexually abused are permanently removed from the group. Laws concerning physical and sexual abuse of children should be placed under felony codes in states where they are presently under juvenile codes, in order that perpetrators may receive harsher sentencing. For example, the judge presiding in the Joey Green fatal beating case could give the boy’s parents a maximum sentence of one year in prison and fines of $1000 each, because at that time child abuse was not under the felony code in West Virginia. (It has since been transferred to the felony code because of public outrage over the Joey Green case (119).

Those who neglect children’s health should be held legally accountable. It is now very difficult to prosecute parents for deaths from medical neglect if they have acted out of religious conviction, because when Congress passed the Child Abuse prevention and Treatment Act in 1974, it allowed states to obtain federal money for child protection services only if they exempted from child neglect laws religious groups practicing faith healing (120). In other words, those who let a child die out of religious conviction cannot be prosecuted. While this rule has been revoked on a federal level, it is still operative in forty states. These state laws should be changed, something that will have to be done on an individual state-by-state basis (121).

Involved in this discussion are complex issues of parents’ rights to raise a child according to their chosen religious faith vs. the government’s right and duty to protect the welfare of the child. However, in a 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Prince vs. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Justice Rudledge declared “Parents may be free to become (religious) martyrs themselves. But it does not follow that they are free to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion, when they can make that choice for themselves” (122).

God knows the cults do not have a monopoly on child abuse, exploitation of elderly, and unequal treatment of women. And, of course, we should act to correct these abuses wherever they are found. But some religious groups are perpetrating such acts in the name of religion and are hiding from criticism and prosecution behind First Amendment guarantees of freedom of religion.

One must distinguish between freedom of religious belief and freedom of action as a result of these beliefs. We do have freedom of religious belief in the United States, but in a civilized society one cannot have complete freedom to act out one’s beliefs. The First Amendment does not provide immunity when religious groups violate civil or criminal laws.
Footnotes
Wooden, Kenneth, The Children of Jonestown, (1981), The McGraw-Hill Book Co, New York, New York, p.1.
Ibid, pp. 65-66.
Telephone conversation between the writer and David Clark, November, 1980. the Unification church has formed a new organization called the International Family Association to accommodate the entire families it claims have joined the group. (“Moon Family Group: ‘God-Centered Unity’”, The Advisor, August/September, 1982, p.3.
Telephone conversation between the writer & Dr. Lowell Streiker, September 29, 1982.
McManus, Una and Cooper, John Charles, Not for a Million Dollars, (1980),Impact Books, the Benson Co., Nashville, TN, P. 74.
Conversation between writer and former member of the Children of God who prefers to remain anonymous, January 30, 1984.
Van Horne, Harriet, “Obscenity Draped in White,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 7, 1982.
Smilon, Marvin and Johnson, Richard, “Moon Tells Disciples When to Have Sex,”, New York Post, May 27, 1982, p. 13.
LOC. CIT.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Eckhart Floater, January 22, 1983.
Thomas, Jo and Sheppard, Nathaniel, Jr., “Growing Concern Surrounds Cults After Jonestown,” The New York Times, January 21, 1979.
In Jonestown (Wooden, OP.CIT., pp.41-44); The church of Armageddon (Stoner, Carol and Parke, Jo Anne, All Gods Children: The Cult Experience-Salvation or Slavery?. Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1979, p.79); Volume I, p.11); Hare Krishna (Johnson, Hillary, “Children of a Harsh Bliss,” Life, April, 1980, p. 44); Church Universal and Triumphant (Letter from Kathleen E. Mueller to Mrs. Jean Gordon, Child Custody Investigator, Santa Monica, California, January 5, 1982.
Cheryl Wheeler claims she was forced to leave her son, Devin, behind with her husband when she left a Hare Krishna commune (“Hare Krishna Group Sued in Child Custody Fight,” Religious News Service release of April 11, 1979, p. 22); Candy Pickens, Children of God (Charity Frauds Bureau, Final Report on the Activities of the Children of God to Honorable Louis J. Lefkowitz Attorney General of the State of New York, September 30, 1974, p. 53.
Forkash, Rose, Newsletter of Friends of Krishna, September-October, 1979, pp. 4-6.
“Ktishnas Called Antihuman,” Denver Post, April 7, 1977.
“Srila Prabhupada Speaks Out – Women’s Liberation,” Back to Godhead, Volume 14, no. 2/3, 1979, p. 14.
“Krishnas Called Antihuman,” Op.Cit.
Flynn, Kevin, F., “The Subordinate Role of Krishna Women,” Rocky Mountain News, April 10, 1979, p.42.
“Krishnas Called,”, Op. Cit.
Church of Armageddon (Enroth, Ronald, Youth, Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults, The Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1977, p.89); Body of Christ (Harris, Beverly and Moore, Louise, “Girl’s Mom Saw Big Changes After Deprogramming Days,” Houston Chronicle, March 21, 1977, p. 4; and Thomas and Sheppard, “Growing Concern Surrounds Cults After Jonestown,” The New York Times, January 21, 1979. Jonestown (Wooden, Op.Cit., p. 12); The Garbage Eaters (“For Brother Evangelist’, Child Abuse is God’s Way of Ensuring Obedience,” Chicago Tribune, p. 18); The Children of God (Charity Frauds Bureau, Op. Cit., pp. 48 & 53).
Children of God (Charity Frauds Bureau, Op. Cit., pp. 48, 52.); Rajneesh Foundation (Phone conversation between the writer and Ekhard Floater, Op. Cit.; Ross, Joan C. “Panel Investigates Raj Neesh,” The Advisor, October/November 1982, p. 11).
Hopkins, Joseph M., “The Children of God: Disciples of Deception,” Christianity Today, February 13, 1977, p. 20 and “Children of God – Family of Love: Update,” The Advisor, August/September, 1981, p. 5.
Wallis, Roy, “Recruiting Christian Manpower,” Society, May/June 1978, p. 72; “The Children of God,” Anti-Defamation League Research Report, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, March, 1979, p. 4; Sheppard, Nathaniel, Jr., and Thomas, Jo, “Many Find Coercion in Cults’’ Holds on members,” The New York Times, January 23, 1979; and Conversation between the writer and former Children of God member who prefers to remain anonymous, January 30, 1984.
Wooden, Op. Cit., pp. 44-45
“An Open letter of Resignation” by Stan Trout, aka Swami Abhayananda.
Rodamor, William, “The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda,” The Coevolutionary Quarterly, Winter, 1983, p. 105.
“Unification Church. ‘Maturing’ – Durst” The Advisor, June/July, 1981, p. 6.
Askins, John, “Moonies: Their Four Children Joined the Unification Church. The Morrisons don’t want to lose them,” The Detroit Free Press, June 10, 1979, p. 31.
See Rudin, Marcia R., “New Target of the Cults: You,” Fifty Plus, October, 1981, p. 21.
Letter from Church Universal and Triumphant addressed to “Beloved Esther,” March 22, 1977.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Gregory Mull of November, 1980.
“Cult Purchases Montana Ranch,” Billings Montana Sunday Gazette, September 20, 1981, p. 10-A.
Ward, Phillip, “Moonies Open Mission in Plantation with High Hopes for Older Converts, The Miami Herald, pp. 1BR and 4BR.
Handout entitled “Public Service,” from Bay Ridge Home Church Association,” May, 1981.
Letter to Robert Abrahams, Charitable Frauds Division of new York State, Rabbi A. James Rudin, Rev. James J. LeBar, and Malcolm Hoenlein from Herbert L. Rosedale, July 14, 1981.
“F.A.I.R. Report on Cult Activities,” The Advisor, April/May, 1981, p.13.
Conversation of September 19, 1982.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Wendy Ford of March 8, 1981.
“By The Way,” Victor Paul Wierwille, October 8, 1981.
Telephone conversation between writer and Rabbi Dov Tidnick, November, 1980.
Telephone conversation between writer and person who prefers to remain anonymous, November, 1980.
Telephone conversation between writer and Bidnick, Op. Cit.
Telephone conversation between writer and Clark, Op. Cit.
Wooden, Op. Cit., pp. 19 and 177.
ibid, p. 89.
Ibid, p. 81.
Telephone conversation between writer and person who prefers to remain anonymous, November, 1980.
Henry Masters gave his farms and 600 acres of land in Wiltshire, England to the Unification Church when he and his family joined. (“Highlights of Moon Libel Trial vs. Daily Mail,” The Advisor, February/March, 1981, p. 13); Older people in Birmingham, England were persuaded to house Unification Church members and claim they “sold their houses below market value to the church.” (“Fair Report,” Op. Cit.); The Church of Armageddon has received gifts of several large homes in Seattle, Washington (Telephone conversation between the writer and persons who wish to remain anonymous, October, 1979); The Children of God has received large estates in Europe (“Tracking the Children of God,” Time, August 22, 1977, p. 48).
Telephone conversation between the writer and Clark, Op. Cit.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Mull, Op. Cit.
Loc. Cit.
Conversation between the writer and former COG member, Op. Cit.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Rabbi Rubin Dobin, March 20, 1981.
Wooden, Op. Cit.
Flipps, Chet, “Siege of The Alamos,” People, June 13, 1983, p. 30; poster distributed by Alamo Foundation.
newsletter of Positive Action Center, Portland, Oregon and Steer, Brian, “Rock Group Suspected of Being Cult Front,” The Times Herald, Norristown, PA., October 28, 1980, p. 1.
Letter of October 18, 1977 from Glenn Webser to parents as included in “Word in Education Newsletter,” The Way International, January, 1978; Luptak, Gene, “Perils in the Way,” The Arizona Republic, February 28, 1981; Petrie, Laurie, “Private School vs. Private Religious Beliefs,” Cincinnati Post, February 10, 1981; “Math Teacher Fired for Cultish Activities,” The Advisor, April/May, 1981, p. 11.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Herbert L. Rosedale, October 6, 1982.
Testimony of Christopher Edwards at The Assembly of the State of New York, Op. Cit., Vol. I, pp. 20, 22 and Testimony of Bernard Livingston, The Assembly of the State of New York, Op. Cit., Vol. II, p. 73.
Testimony of Christopher Edwards, The Assembly, Op. Cit., Vol. I, p. 13.
Ibid, p. 14.
“Recruiters at Jr. High,” The Advisor, June/July, 1982, p. 11, reprinted from San Francisco Chronicle of May 7, 1982.
McManus and Cooper, Op. Cit., p. 65.
Jim Jones illegally spirited many children out of California to Guyana without their or their families’ knowledge or consent. (Wooden, Op. Cit., pp. 20-22). Morris Yanoff has grippingly documented his desperate search for his grandson in Hare Krishna (Yanoff, Morris, Where is Joey? Lost Among the Hare Krishnas, Ohio University Press, 1981). Una McManus’ husband abducted her children back into the children of God after pretending he had come out of the group (McManus and Cooper, Op. Cit., pp. 153-155). Cheryl Wheeler charged the Hare Krishnas hid her son from her after she was awarded custody and that her estranged husband threatened to take him to another country if she tried to get him. (Tarowsky, Judi, “Devin Krishna hearing called ‘Farce’” The Intelligencer, (Wheeling, West Va.), May 15, 1979, p.1). Candy Pickens is searching for her husband and two small children in the Children of God, (Memminger, Charles, “Mother Accuses, Op. Cit.). Juan Mattatall has finally been reunited with his five children after the Northeast kingdom Community Church hid them when he was granted temporary custody, and Deborah Heflin found her daughter after a three-year search living in Spain with members of the Northeast Kingdom Community church (“Church Defectors Seek children Abroad,” The Advisor, June/July, 1983, p. 5). These are only a few of the many cases.
Scales, Harold, Dr. “Malnutrition in Cults- II,” The Advisor, April/May, 1981, p. 4.
Testimony of Christopher Edwards, The Assembly, Op. Cit., Vol. I, p. 11; Conversation of writer with Lowell Streiker, Op. Cit.; and “Cults Abuse Children, VP I Survey Shoes,” The Fairfax (Virginia) Journal, June 13, 1983, p. A9.
Testimony of Edwards, The Assembly, Op. Cit., vol. I, p. 10: “Cults Abuse Children,” Op. Cit.
Schecter, R.E., “Durst Replaces Salonen as Moon’s American Leader,” The Advisor, June/July, 1980, p. 2 and telephone conversation of writer with Streiker, Op. Cit.
Telephone conversation of writer with Streiker, Op. Cit.
Loc. Cit., and “Cult Counselor Interviews Ex-Moonies – Cites New Wrinkles,” The Advisor, October/November, 1981, p. 5.
Johnson, Hillary, Op. Cit., p. 44.
Conversation between writer and Lorna Goldberg on April 5, 1981.
Johnson, Hillary, Op. Cit., p. 48.
Forkash, Rose, Op. Cit., p. 5.
Ibid, pp. 4-6.
Tarowsky, Judi, Op. Cit.
Hodiak, Bohdan, “Hare Krishnas Ask Dismissal of Suit on Missing Boy, 8,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 6, 1979, p. 3.
“Krishnas Called,” Op. Cit.
Letter from Kathleen E. Mueller, Op. Cit.
Letter to the writer from Gregory Mull of March 14, 1981.
“’The Body’ Loses Its Earthly head,” Christianity Today, June 29, 1979, p. 43.
Hoover, Ken, “Cult Accused of Child Abuse,” Las Virgenes/Conjo Daily News, March 5, 1981, p. 1.
“For ‘Brother Evangelist,’ Child Abuse is God’s Way of Ensuring obedience,” Chicago Tribune, p. 17.
“Twelve Children Taken From ‘Christ Brotherhood,’” The Advisor, December, 1981/January, 1982, p. 12.
Douglas, David, “New Jonestown Horror in U.S.,” National Enquirer, April 1, 1980, p. 28.
“Slave Labor,” The New York Times, “Follow Up on the News” section, September 14, 1980.
Charity Frauds Bureau, Op. Cit., pp. 48, 52.
Wallis, Roy, Op. Cit, p. 72; “The Children of God,” ADL Research Report, Op. Cit., p. 3.
“My Little Fish,” Adult DO S56, August, 1979, World Services, PF 241, 8021 Zurich, Switzerland.
“Children of God Update,” Op. Cit.
Reporter’s Transcript on Appeal, proceedings on Sentencing, Circuit Court of the State of Oregon, State of Oregon vs. Thomas patterson Brown, no. 10-81-09853, Hon. Edwin E. Allen Presiding, p. 17.
Rodarmor, William, Op. Cit.
Ostrom, Carol M., “Families Destroyed, say Critics,” Seattle Times, May 20, 1983, p. 1.
Wooden, Op. Cit., p. 15.
Loc. Cit.
Ibid, p. 16.
Quinn, Jim, “Authorities Probed Death of Sect Baby,” Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, February 18, 1984, p. 5A.
Quinn, Jim, “Member of Faith Assembly succumbs to Untreated Cancer,” Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, November 16, 1983, p. 14A.
Telephone conversation between the writer and Priscilla Coates, January, 1984.
Loc. Cit.
Telephone conversation between the writer and former Children of God member, Op. Cit.
Loc. Cit.
Starr, mark and Zabarsky, Marsha, “The Kingdom at Island Pond,” Newsweek, November 29, 1982, p. 53.
Pechter, Kerry, “Five Criminally Negligent in Baby’s Death,” Billings Gazette, February 23, 1979, p. 1.
Thomas, Jo and Sheppard, Nathaniel, Op. Cit.
Starr, Mark and Zabarsky, Marsha, Op. Cit.
Hessburg, John, “Vashon Group’s Children Risk Abuse, Guardian Says,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, May 30, 1983.
“Cultists Accused of Child-Beating,” Philadelphia Daily News, February 9, 1982, p. 3.
“Cult Cruelty Probed – Ex-Wife of Leader Bares Tortures,” The News Herald, (Ashtabula, Ohio), October 1, 1978.
Wooden, Op. Cit., p. 8.
Ibid, p. 11.
Testimony of Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo at The Assembly of the State of New York, Op. Cit, Vol. III, pp. 10-11.
Zito, Tom, “Stonegate: Discipline and a Boy’s Death,” The Washington Post, November 26, 1982, p. D1.
Crawley, Janet, “He was a Bad Boy…,” Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1983, p. 1.
“Judge Calls Evidence Weak in Acquitting Sect Leader of Child Cruelty,” Religious News Service, January 17, 1984, p. 5.
“Smiling Girl tells of Sect Beatings,” the Billings Montana Gazette, June 10, 1981, pp. 1A & 8A.
“Pair Charged in Child’s Death Waive Right to Jury Trial,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 16, 1978.
See Delgado, Richard, “Religious Totalism as Slavery,” Colloquium, Alternative Religions: Government Control and the First Amendment, New York University Review of Law and Social Change, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1979-1980, pp. 56-57.
Conversation between the writer and Priscilla Coates, Op. Cit.
Green, Charles, “Sects’ Immunity to Child-Abuse Laws Eroding,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 10, 1983, p. 1A; Swan, Rita, “Faith Healing, Christian Science and the Medical Care of Children,” The New England Journal of Medicine, December 19, 1983, reprint.
Loc. Cit.
Pearson, Linley, “Parental neglect Can’t be Excused,” USA Today, August 17, 1983, Opinion Section.

Marcia Rudin, co-author of Prison or Paradise? The New Religious Cults, writes and lectures frequently about cults. She formerly taught philosophy and religion at William Paterson College. She serves on the Advisory Board of the American Family Foundation, the Steering Committee of the Interfaith Coalition of Concern about Cults, the Board of Directors of the Citizens Freedom Foundation/New York-New Jersey, and is an Honorary Member of the Board of Directors of Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty, Inc

Cult defector helps bring another’s child back home

Charlie — Tue, 23 Mar 1993 08:44:01 +0000

The Chronicle

March 23, 1983

Juan Mattatall, a defector from the Northeast Kingdom Community Church of Island Pond [now known as “Twelve Tribes] who is trying to get his own three year old daughter back from Europe in the custody of cult leader Eugene Spriggs, has reportedly helped bring another defector’s child home from Spain.

Six year old Spring Howell was brought back to the U.S. last week, according to Suzanne Cloutier of Orleans, an active opponent of the Island Pond cult. She was located by long distance telephone, living with 23 adults and five children in Grenada, Spain. Her family obtained the assistance of Spanish police, Mrs. Cloutier said, and an uncle flew to Spain to bring her home. She is now with her mother, Debra Howell, at the home of her grandparents in Alabama.

But according to Mrs. Cloutier, the child’s buttocks bears about 15 permanent scars, the apparent result of adult cult members administering beatings.

Mrs. Cloutier said Tuesday that Spring Howell’s long distance discovery and rescue was the result of joint efforts of her mother and Mr. Mattatall. Mrs. Howell left the cult several years ago to live in California, leaving behind her husband, still a resident of Island Pond, and their young daughter.

With the assistance of a telephone operator, Debra Howell was able to obtain a Spanish phone number from which collect calls had been made to the Island Pond community. Mattatall, a Spanish speaking native of South America, called the number, which turned out to be a bar and grill in Granada, Mrs. Cloutier said.

From there he obtained the number of a Catholic priest, who said a group of American and German adults were living in the city with several children. Mrs. Howell contacted U.S. officials in Spain, and police picked the child up and held her until her uncle could arrive.

FBI files report on founder of sect

Charlie — Tue, 25 Jun 1985 08:38:06 +0000

The Associated Press

John Donnelly

June 25, 1985

Montpelier, Vt – The FBI has turned over to federal prosecutors a case involving allegations that the founder of a religious sect in Island Pond sexually abused a young girl in 1982 or 1983, FBI officials have confirmed.

FBI Special Agent Joseph Skrzat of the Albany, N.Y. office, which oversees federal investigations in Vermont, said his office completed a report on the case earlier this year and turned it over to U.S. Attorney George Cook in Rutland. No charges have been filed.

FBI Agent Jo Yakshe, based in Orlando, Fla. , who helped investigate the report, said it involved sexual abuse allegations against Twelve Tribes founder Elbert Eugene Spriggs.

Both agents said the girl allegedly abused was Lydia Mattatall, now 6. The girl, the daughter of a couple in the sect who had separated, was involved in a lengthy child custody battle from 1982 to late 1983.

The 450-member reclusive sect has been under investigation for alleged instances of child abuse for more than four years. Vermont officials raided the commune one year ago Saturday in an attempt to check the abuse reports, but a judge foiled the roundup of 112 sect children and called the raid a “grossly unlawful scheme.”

Community members strongly deny the allegations of abuse, saying they discipline babies from the age of 6 months to save them from becoming a “lost generation.”

Cook and Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Hall declined to confirm or deny the report. “We don’t comment on any case that has not been publicly filed,” Hall said.

John O’Donnell, a former state Human Services secretary, said Vermont turned over a case “that may have involved sexual abuse” to the FBI during the fall of 1983 because it involved people who moved out of the state.

O’Donnell said it was the only child abuse case concerning the community that Vermont turned to federal authorities. He declined further comment, citing juvenile statutes that prohibit the release of details in criminal proceedings involving minors.

Juan Mattatall, the father of the girl, now lives in Florida with his five children. He could not be reached for comment.

Spriggs also could not be reached for comment Monday. He is rarely seen in Island Pond, often traveling between the Twelve Tribes’ satellite bases in France and Nova Scotia.

Spriggs, a former carnival barker, founded the sect in 1972 in Chattanooga, Tenn., concentrating efforts on picking up drug addicts and converting them to a form of Christianity as practiced in his sect. The group moved to the Northeast Kingdom community of Island Pond in 1978.

Mattatall was involved in the sect’s publicized child custody case. In November 1983 he won custody of his five children from his wife, Cynthia, a member of the group who lived in France and Nova Scotia.

Mattatall won temporary custody of his children in 1982, but he was unable to locate his youngest daughter, Lydia. The girl was then traveling in Europe and Canada with Spriggs, Spriggs’ wife Marsha, Cynthia Mattatall, and several other sect members. The girl has said in interviews that Spriggs told her he was her father.

During the summer of 1983 Nova Scotia officials took the girl from her mother and other communal group members after a pre-dawn car chase.

Juan Mattatall first joined the sect in 1974, but left the group in 1982 because, he said, he disagreed with the group’s child disciplining practices. The group uses Old Testament verse to explain why it disciplines children with a slim, wooden rod.

Yakshe said she interviewed Lydia Mattatall about the case, but the FBI agent declined further comment except to say the sexual abuse allegations were against Spriggs.

Children and the Cult

Charlie — Fri, 14 Dec 1984 08:58:22 +0000

Source: New England Monthly/December 1984

By Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

NOTES: Barbara Harrison went to Island Pond and saw this bizarre cult in its daily life, interviewing various members, and learning what it is like to face fiercely judgmental hatred. She was especially concerned for the welfare of viciously treated children.

In 1971 a carnival barker in Chattanooga founded a church. Elbert Eugene Spriggs, who had studied psychology at the University of Chanattooga, first called the group of troubled young people he gathered to himself the Light Brigade; later — when they removed themselves from the mainline churches — Spriggs’s commune became known as the Vine Christian Community. In 1978 the church — which has small branches in the Dorchester section of Boston and in Clark’s Harbour, Nova Scotia — moved, having found Chattanooga inhospitable, to that remote part of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom. It now calls itself the Church in Island Pond or the Northeast Kingdom Community Church. Today Spriggs lives in France with a handful of followers.

I AM IN a sunny, sweet-smelling meadow,” Jan Mon- fort (a pseudonym. The names of all other people in this article are real) says, “vibrant with yellow wildflowers. The children and I play Roll-about. We roll down the slope, and at the bottom there are two huge iron doors. The doors swing open and women in babush- kas grab us by the throat, and on the other side of the doors it is all darkness and smoke and the air tastes of sulphur. When my eyes grow accustomed to the dark I see a lake with tongues of fire playing on its surface. I crawl back to the iron doors and now there are peepholes in it, and I can see, all over the sunny meadow, women in long dresses and babushkas, tearing at the throats of children . . . .”

“What does the dream mean?” I ask, knowing what it means but wishing to break the frightened silence that surrounds her words, and thinking how eloquent Jan’s unconscious is, how simple and urgent and elegant the nightmare is, how nicely fact and symbol dovetail.

“My husband says the dream means I shouldn’t talk to you,” Jan says.

“Is that what you think?”

“I’m tired of thinking, “Jan says. “I’m afraid.”

We are sitting, late at night, at the Common Sense deli, an all-night restaurant owned and operated by the North- east Kingdom church. Jan is drinking Red Zinger tea. She likes it here: An “ex-hippie brought up by hippies,” she is reminded of Woodstock (macrame and candles and rough- hewn wood benches and apothecary jars full of spices — a stylized simplicity). She likes it here and she doesn’t like it here; sometimes, without seeming to notice it, she lapses into local slang and calls the Common Sense “the Yellow Dell. “Jan smokes furiously in the deli she calls “so peaceful” — so peaceful compared to the bar at the Osborne Hotel, at the other end of Cross Street, the bar that is known even to its habitues as “the Zoo,” and to which we now walk.

“Find out what ‘the training’ is,” Jan tells me. “They send their children to ‘the training.’ When the children come back, they’re terrified. Find out what it is.”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

No longer eloquent, suddenly listless, Jan shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says, her voice drained of feeling.

It does not require genius to interpret Jan’s dream: The women of the Northeast Kingdom church in Island Pond wear babushkas. Their children are beaten with rods; the children are also forbidden to entertain fantasies. Members of the cult believe that we are living in the “end-times” and that only those living a sacrificial Christian life — which is to say, them — will survive; the rest of us will be consigned to the Lake of Fire. Jan has seen terrified children. The cult has sworn to “get” her husband (which is to say, enlist him), and although he plays hard to get he frequently goes to their “Celebrations.” He defends the cult’s “disciplining” of their children and sees something admirable and pretty in the submission of their women. Jan says she deplores the discipline and the submission, but she often goes to the deli because she has good friends among the cult members, and also because, she says (not altogether convincingly), she wants “to see what’s going on and to set an example to them of how you’re supposed to raise children.” Her own words sound slightly mad to her. “Dammit,” she says, “how many contradictions can one person stand?”

It is Jan’s very ordinariness that makes her convulsed and convoluted response to the cult so distressing. What Jan knows is that the people of the Northeast Kingdom church are robbing the children of their childhood.

IT WOULD NOT be a gross exaggeration to say that the en- tire town of lsland Pond has gone haywire. Paranoia, anger, hopelessness, apathy, hysteria, bitterness, and fear are everywhere in evidence. And yet haywire seems almost too thin a word to describe what I truly believe (and in this belief I am not alone) to be the contagion of evil.

Fancy religions have become almost as American as apple pie. Millennialists and doom-proclaimers and Uto- pian communities come and go, and unless they directly impinge upon our lives, we tend to regard them with little more than distaste or bemused curiosity. Anybody, after all, can wear saffron or sacrifice to Baal, and provided that it isn’t our children who are the sacrificed or the sacrificers, we take refuge in the First Amendment (which after all protects our right to worship as we please); we either dismiss all such groups as aberrant but not dangerous or view them as emblematic of our freedom and diversity.

We are right in thinking that most fringe groups either disappear or are, ultimately, absorbed into the mainstream. We do not spend our lives anticipating Jonestowns. A sanguine people, we mind our own business and allow others to mind theirs. We call this innocence.

The people of Island Pond have lost whatever claim they may once have had to innocence. They’ve lost what no- body can afford to lose — a sense of the fundamental decency and rightness of things. Being neither rich nor foolish, they have always known that injustice exists. But experience of injustice is not the same as apprehension of evil. When EIbert Eugene Spriggs’s commune moved into Island Pond, two hundred or so strong, the town’s fifteen hundrcd residents had no way to anticipate the traumatic events of June 22, 1984. Now they have no way to recover from them.

Before six-thirty on the morning of June 22, some ninety state troopers and fifty state social workers, empowered by a warrant from a Vermont district judge, removed 112 children, all under the age of eighteen, from twenty com- munal homes of members of the Northeast Kingdom church. The children, together with 110 adults, were taken in chartered buses and police vans to Orleans District Court in Newport. State officials armed with affidavits quoting a dozen former members of the cult, charged that some children allegedly of the Northeast Kingdom church had been brutalized –stripped, lashed, whipped — and sought to gain temporary custody of the children to examine them for signs of abuse.

District Judge Frank G. Mahady, who in an earlier cus- tody hearing had identified several instances of abuse, nonetheless found the indiscriminate police action “grossly illegal” and refused to detain the children, who were re- turned to their homes.

THE MAIN (and only, by urban definition) street of Island Pond is ugly. It takes ten minutes to walk up and down the road, a thoroughfare so bleak, so devoid of charm and lacking in New England grace, that even the surrounding mountains and the pond from which the town derives its name — a pond with a twenty-two-acre island in its center — do not erase the impression of blight.

Island Pond is poor: Three hundred and forty-four Island Ponders live below the official poverty level; 235 people receive food stamps; 123 households receive Aid to Needy Families with Children. Even these statistics don’t accu- rately reflect the town’s poverty. People hunt and fish and gather blueberries and pick apples and cultivate gardens in order to survive, and in the hills, high above the steeples of the Roman Catholic and the Congregational churches, marijuana is a cash crop, grown and harvested by people whose uuderground economy escapes statistical analysis.

Island Pond is also remote: two hours from tile Bur- lington airport, sixteen miles from the Canadian border. Townspeople will tell you that the Northeast Kingdom church established itself here — after they left Chattanooga with eight million dollars derived from sales of property, according to Galen Kelly, a private investigator — precisely because of this combination of circumstances.

The Common Sense deli is located at the north end of Cross Street; the hundred-and-fifty-five-year-old Osborne Hotel is at the south end. An anthropologist might tell you that there are four forces operating in lslaud Pond, forces represented by the Common Sense; the Osborne, where the drinking and the living are hard and where rooms rent for forty-five dollars a week; the conmunes — Mad Brook Farm, Frog Run, Earth People’s Park — that anachronisti- cally thrive in the hills of Orleans and Essex counties; and the folks who go to Congregational picnics and to Grace Brethren fundamentalist and the Roman Catholic and Epis- copal churches. Most Island Ponders will tell you there are only two forces: them (the Northeast Kingdom church) and us.

In this town, the church and its members have purchased seventeen houses . . . no, eighteen. When I arrived in Is- land Pond, there was a For Sale sign on a ramshackle building that lay between the Osborne and the Common Sense; a week later I saw five children staring out a second- floor window of this house. They were cult children. Cult children are not like other children. It’s more than a matter of their not being allowed toys or coloring books. Their expressions are both vacant and watchful; they are preter- naturally grave. The old house, the silent children, re- minded me — though I am not given to hysteria — of a scene from Village of the Damned.

WHEN I WALK INTO the Common Sense deli, I am greeted pleasantly and served by a young woman called Donna. Donna wears a babushka over long blond hair, and a loose, peasantlike dress; she has the pasty look of someone whose diet consists only of starch. She does not wear a watch. None of the church women I observed wore a watch, which seems to me more signifi- cant than wearing a babushka as an outward Sign of submis- sion to men. If your time is not your own, your life is not your own; you have given both your time and your life over to someone else. The elders of the cult — all male- have watches and timepieces; their time does belong to them, as does every decision and every initiative. I say that I have come to Vermont by bus from New York. When l express a weary traveler’s displeasure with New York’s seedy Port Authority bus depot, Donna tells me that “the angels of the Lord” gathered around her when she was at Port Authority: “Nobody had any intention of doing me harm.” It is characteristic of religious fringe groups to see the hand of God in every temporal event, to lay special claim to understanding the ways in which He works. All believers have the conviction that God is present in the world, brooding gently and mysteriously over us all, but members of the cults so particularize God’s activities you’d think the Almighty had nothing better to do than to see them safely across the street.

Donna does not chat with me long. Cult members have no small talk — a casual remark about the weather will invoke a sermon on the bounties of the Lord and the saving goodness of their commune. When I tell Donna that I am a writer, she sends a man called Isaac over to talk to me. I extend an unsmiling Isaac my hand. He places his own hands firmly on the table that divides us: “I’ll wait,” he says. “I like to see where you’re coming from . . . . Of what benefit is it to you to write?” he asks. I have trouble focusing on his eyes, which seem to want to bore into me rather than to see me, to make a statement rather than to observe. Although I try to answer his question thoughtfully and honestly, my answers sound foolish to me.

“Why are you on earth?” Isaac asks. I give him the catechism answer — “To know God and to love Him.” I say, which is in fact what I believe. As this response elicits nothing but an unblinking stare, I add, feeling as foolish as he intends me to feel, “and to try to be good, and to work, and to suffer — that’s the easy part — and to raise children who are better and happier than I am.”

“Your children can’t be happier than you are — they live in the world. You’re not happy. Why do you paint your fingernails that passionate red?”

“How do you know I’m not happy?” I ask.

“Because I’m looking at you,” Isaac says. “I don’t want to shred you, you’re a human being . . . . WORTHLESS,” he mutters. “You don’t know God.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“If you loved Him, you’d serve Him. You would leave the world. You would die. You would be living with us. You are not my sister. If you were, you’d serve God.”

“Tell me how you know I don’t?”

“If you served God, you’d know the truth. If you knew the truth, you’d serve God. Are your fingernails part of your fantasy? Your fantasy is that you are Lois Lane. You come here in the guise of a writer. You’re looking for Superman . . . . WORTHLESS.”

This cloud-cuckoo-land conversation is tiresome, and discouraging, too. One wishes to believe that there is some- thing in every man and woman that words and goodwill can reach. Nothing can touch or disturb the certainty of Isaac and Donna, their sense of me as worthless, which reinforces their own sense of salvific worth. (The conversa- tion accomplishes its aim, though; it makes me feel frivo- lous.)

So: “Do you abuse your kids?” I ask.

Isaac: “We do and we don’t.”

“You do?”

Isaac: “We don’t. We spank them.”

“Why?”

“And we don’t send them to school. Why should they salute a piece of cloth, a rag?” ‘

I have been told — by an eyewitness — that a boy of three has recently been consigned to a dark, airless closet for half an hour because he pretended that a block of wood was a car. Seen in this light — as a monitor of fantasies — Isaac is dangerous as well as silly. “Fantasies,” he says, “steal the person you are.” It is a surprisingly sophisticated and ornate thought. But how can he know when the children are fantasizing? “If you get down on all fours and bark like a dog, you’re fantasizing,” he says.

Thinking of the children’s impoverished separateness from the world of other children, remembering how my own childish fantasies nourished me when adults and the real world hurt me, thinking of the castles (the refuges) in the air I built when I was growing up desperate in a religious sect, I ask: “What about sand castles? Would they be permit- ted to build sand castles?” Isaac is stumped (as he is when I ask him to tell me the difference between wish, hope, imagination, and fantasy): “I don’t interpret the heart,” he says, but he makes a quick recovery, taking refuge in instantly concocted certainty. “We don’t build sand castles. We live in reality. God is the only reality.”

Children circle around Isaac as we speak — as Isaac speaks, now compulsively, of homosexuality — “a form of global birth control. Sex isn’t love,” he says (once again regarding my fingernails with inordinate interest). “I used to be a pervert, due to reading pornography.” He asks me to define perversion, an invitation I decline. “My knowl- edge of perversity is deeper than yours,” Isaac says. “Roman Catholics are perversions. Garbage and corrup- tion and baloney. You are a pervert.” He veers off into his own testimony: “I left the church for two years. I was not in the Spirit. I was sleeping around, stealing. An outlaw.” The Butch Cassidy of the Northeast Kingdom church. Isaac has long greasy blond hair and bitten fingernails.

The children standing nearby express no curiosity. They are without animation. They do not speak. A beautiful young girl — ten? twelve? — approaches Isaac in a storm of controlled apprehension. He turns an icy countenance toward her. “I was supposed to retun the Spannel bottles,” she says (her name is Phoebe), commencing a conversation I cannot at first decode. Isaac’s silence is stony. “And I failed,” Phoebe says. Poor Phoebe; there is a question implicit in her confession. Isaac allows her to stand there, humiliated for reasons I don’t understand. Then he rewards her, when it seems no longer possible for her to withstand the severity of his gaze. “I have seventeen cents,” he says softly. “You can buy popcorn.” Phoebe, I now understand, wants seventeen cents, but none of the childrcn may ask a direct question or make a choice: if they are offered an apple or an orange, their response must be “I’ll have what you know it is good for me to have.” She wants to buy a bag of the deli’s popcorn. She kisses Isaac’s hand.

Another child, Madeleine, sits next to Isaac. Her enor- mous eyes swivel in her head, attaching their regard to no one and nothing. “Are you afraid of this woman?” Isaac asks, turning her palpable terror to his advantage. (“Of me?”) “She doesn’t live with you,” Isaac says. “You are not part of the body of the Messiah.” Madeleine says not a word. He dismisses her with a glance.

Donna, the waitress who had God shepherd her through the Port Authority, speaks. She is the Good Cop. “You can’t be comfortable at the Osborne,” she says. “We want you to be comfortable. Will you stay with us? Stay with us for three days. Will you have dinner with us on Thursday? At Pleasant House?”

Three days is the standard period of time for what is variously called brainwashing, persuasive coercion, or mind control. I do not believe that I am susceptible to their bullying, or their blandishments, nor do I have complex yearnings for a simple life. I won’t spend three days with

[A small picture of a police car is shown, with the caption: The early morning raid brought 90 state policemen to town; they took custody of 112 children.]

[The picture continues on the next page, showning another police car and an uniformed officer at its door.]

them, but I do consent to have dinner at Pleasant House.

TEN A.M. The drinking starts early at the Osborne. And all the talk is of the cult, Yankee reticence having yielded to obsession. Teresa, the pretty young bar- tender, says: “If we didn’t send our kids to school, we’d get our . . . in jail. Somebody in that church” — this is the majority view at the Osborne — “bought the state officials off.” Jackie, who works at Ted’s Market down the street, says: “One of the church women came in yesterday with a dollar and asked me how much chicken she could buy with it. She wanted to know if a dollar’s worth of chicken would serve twenty people. She bought a can of mackerel and said she’d stretch it with potatoes. The other day a kid came in to return a bottle. Then an elder came in to ask the kid what he had to confess. The kid said: ‘I stole a grape.’ I’d want my kids to be that honest, too. But, oh my . . ., I was scared for that kid. I worried about him all night. The next day I wanted to lift his shirt to see if he’d been hit.”

Lise Grimaldi, who shares a small room without bath at the Osborne with her cat and the man she expects to marry, and who calls this old railroad hotel “a cross between Tennessee Williams and Mayberry, RFD,” is one of two women in town whom I have seen wearing makeup. Twenty-five-year-old Lise is a New Yorker, and in this town she is sui generis; proud to be a misfit. Down on her young luck, an actress out of a job, a waitress without money for a Manhattan apartment, she came here — “as a stopgap” because her sister lived at Mad Brook Farm. Then she fell in love with Lenny, whose sister owns the Osborne, and now she’s here, defiantly wearing New York designer clothes and high heels in a town where women wear jeans — but not because Calvin Klein told them to. Lise feels a kind of vexed sympathy for the women of the cult, a feeling she shares with almost every woman in Island Pond. “What’s better — unwed mothers on welfare whose kids crawl on the barroom floor or those nuts down the street? I’ve seen women in this bar beat up and kicked in the stomach, and you, can’t call the cops because they’ll go fight back to the . . .[one] who beat them.” she says. “So who’s worse? I saw those state troopers the morning of the raid. I was waiting tables at Jennifer’s Restaurant down the street, and they came in — big fat barbarians — eating ten-pound breakfasts and ]aughing, like southern vig- ilantes. You think those guys were protectors of children? And how do you ask a kid of five to believe his parents are bad? On the other hand, their mothers, if they were their mothers — you, can’t figure out who belongs to who in that church, they all change their names whenever they feel like it — they stood around, the mornlug of the raid, grins on their faces like they’d just found glory. I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong.”

Vicki Guthrie, a woman in her late forties who owns the Osborne, has no doubt as to who’s right and who’s wrong. Vicki parades through her bar and her hotel barefoot in a blue flannel nightgown. She lives here in a room of ruffles and lampshades and geegaws. Her morality is conven- tional, her life is not. Her ex-husband, a diabetic given to bouts of what Vicki calls “insulin temper,” lives down the hall; they seldom converse. Vicki, like some maternal hyena, dispenses money and advice in a barbed roar, offer- ing her opinions and her largesse, solicited or not. And it is her opinion that cult members, who offered her thirty thousand dollars for the Osborne, are “Communists.” When they were courting her, she says, they gave her a copy of what they called “the Love Bible” — nothing but hellfire and hate in it.” Vicki has been told that cult members pray for the death of former members. She says, “The way they’re taking over tht town — it’s killing me . . . . How dare they tell me I’m not a Christian?”

The Northeast Kingdom church pays property taxes and sewer and water rates. Organized as an apostolic order for IRS purposes, they file returns as if they were one family, a family vowed to poverty. They do not send their children to school, nor do they register births or deaths. It is a measure of the induced apathy of the townspeople that Island Ponders feed off the persistent rumor that the cult has its owu graveyard, in which bones of children were found. In fact — a single call to the town clerk provides this information, which church, elders will not provide, prefer- ring to keep their captive audience on the ropes — the Northeast Kingdom church does have a registered private graveyard. Bodies of children were found; one baby was stillborn, another died, apparently, of spinal meningitis. Children of the cult are assigned names “when the Lord reveals their true nature to the elders.” Kathy Cunningham, a state trooper, told a Newsweek reporter, “They’ve taken away all our normal ways to detect child abuse. There are no teachers to report scars, no doctors to report anything funny.” The children are moved from communal house to communal house, which defeats social workers’ efforts to act on allegations that they are beaten. Baptized members of the cult are assigned new names. (Andy Masse, to whose house the Chattanooga group first moved, is now known as Cephas.) What this amounts to is that nobody knows who is who, and it is this facelessness and anonynmity that led to the raid of June 22, state officials having exhausted other remedies.

The Northeast Kingdom church has managed to slip through the net of Vermont’s civil and criminal laws — which drives the townspeople crazy.

IN A DOCUMENT dated July 17, 1984, John D. Burchard, Ph.D., commissioner of social and rehabilitation ser- vices for the Vermont Agency of Human Services, defends the June 22 raid: “Child abuse law provides for authorities to intervene to see if there is a problem while criminal law allows authorities to intervene only if they can demonstrate that a problem (a crime) has occurred. . . . The Island Pond action was . . . a preventive action taken under the standards, mandates and responsibilities of child abuse law . . . and taken under the authority of the Court.” The action was not without precedent: “In the past three years there have been over 200 instances [in Vermont] where SRS, because of a lack of cooperation on the part of the parents, had to obtain the assistance of law enforcement officials to gain access to a child who was alleged to have been abused or neglected.”

Before June 22, the state had exhausted “all less intrusive ways to ensure protection of children.” In October of 1982, social workers attempting to investigate were refused entry to homes — church members would not give their names and said either that they’d never heard of the individuals being sought or that those individuals had moved. When state’s attorney filed petitions in November of 1982 to get temporary custody of four named children, law enforce- ment officers were unable to locate the children or to notify the parents; church officials said they had no knowledge of them. Again in January of 1983, state’s attorney was unable to locate children or parents — even though registered notices of the hearing date Were sent to named parents. The state continued to receive reports of abuse from former church members visited by SRS in four other states. In the summer of 1983, two elders were charged with simple assault of two children, both of whom had left the church after alleged beatings. On every occasion on which the secretary and deputy secretary of the Agency of Human Services visited elders in an attempt to arrange for the cooperative examination of children, they were unsuccess- ful. In February 1984, the church was unwilling to allow any Vermont physician to look at the children. The action of June 22 was therefore, Burchard maintains, “the culmi- nation of a long, complex, and thoughtful process to pro- tect the children.” The state, he said, acted on these specific allegations, obtained during child custody hearings and from affidavits from former church members:

A named four-year-old was hit fifteen to twenty times for imagining that a block of wood was a truck.

A named seven-year-old was stripped naked by several persons besides her father for asking for more food. The spanking went on until her bottom bled.

A named three-and-a-half-year-old boy was “disciplined” until his neck bled.

A named thirteen-year-old girl was stripped to her underpants and hit with a rod for being deceitful. She had as a result more than eighty welts.

A named eleven-year-old was hit with a two-by-four for laughing at a church member, receiving a large blister and bruise.

According to Burchard’s document, sworn statements by witnesses and victims attest to these acts of brutality; in several instances, photographic evidence exists.

At one custody hearing before the raid, Judge Mahady, who would later declare the action of June 22 unconstitu- tional, said, “At all material times while the children have been residing at that religious community, they have been subjected to frequent and methodical physical abuse by adult members of the community in the form of hours-long whippings with balloon sticks. These beatings result from minor disciplialary infractions.”

ON MAY 21, 1983, Roland Church, a farricr and a cult member, called Suzanne Cloutier, a former practical nurse at the North Country Hospital in nearby Newport. Church told Cloutier, who lives in Or- leans, that his thirteen-year-old daughter Darlynn had been stripped to her underpants and beaten for seven hours by elder Charles (Eddie) Wiseman, Elbert Spriggs’s apparent surrogate in Island Pond (Spriggs himself lives in France). After meeting with Cloutier, Roland Church issued a state- ment to the press to that effect. Three days after the beating, Cloutier saw “twenty-four marks — linear scars — on Dartynn’s legs.” SRS in Newport has pictures of Darlynn’s scars, and emergency-room records at the North Country Hospital confirm Church’s story and those of Darlynn Church and Suzanne Cloutier. According to Cloutier, Ro- land Church and his wife, Connie, drew diagrams of the bedrooms in communal houses in which children were beaten — information that Cloutier turned over to the state. Both Darlynn and Church’s older daughter Rolanda told Cloutier of many other beatings they had-witnessed. Both Darlynn and Rolanda, Suzanne Cloutier says, were “no more physically developed than a ten-year-old,” pre- sumably as the result of malntutrition. Another former cult member, Carol Fritog, told Cloutier of five teenage girls going into a bedroom and being told, by an unmarried church elder, “Take off your clothes, take off everything.” Children have been beaten, according to former members, for asking for one more strawberry, for refusing to take a nap, for wetting the bed.

Suzanne Cloutier’s involvement with the Northeast Kingdom church began when Juan Mattatall came to her for help in 1982. Mattatall, a member of the cult for seven years, sued for custody of his five children, who had disap- peared into the maws of the church. He did eventually gain custody of the children — one of whom, one-year-old Lydia Mattatall, was found living at the time in Nova Scotia with Spriggs. Before Mattatall gained permanent custody of his children, he recorded two of his daughters, eight-year-oldJelmifcr and six-year-old Anna, on tape: “We want to feel decent,” the voices say. “Do something like spanking us, or hit us . . . . Spank us or put us in the corner . . . . Do you rather put us in the corner, Papa? . . . If you love us . . . then you’ll spank us. If you spank us, then you love us. If you don’t spank us, then you don’t love us . . . . That’s what it says in the Bible.”

On August 5, 1984, Roland Church recanted. In a state- ment issued “at the request of Roland Church” by “the church in Island Pond,” Mr. Church said: I’ve had a change of heart. I’d like to make that public so that I could have a free conscience and that Charles, or Eddie, Wiseman wouldn’t be convicted ofbeating a child for 7 hours . . . the ordeal went for 7 hours, not the discipline. Now if I had it to do over again it would never have happened that way. I would learn to discipline my own child . . . . I didn’t quite agree to discipline myself, and I was weak in that area. So I asked Eddie Wiseman if he would do it. And he did.

“I have nothing against the way they discipline. It is according to scripture — it’s the church. I’m weak in that area.” He claimed to have been pressured by the “news media” and by Suzanne Cloutier: “She . . . called everyone in Vermont. I guess . . . . She’s the instigator of it all.”

After Roland Church recanted, Suzanne Cloutier- who has four children of her own, and who says she spent five thousand dollars of her own meony in her fight to protect the children of the cult — announced her intention to stop fighting. “I’ll help individual members,” she says, “but I can’t go on beating my head against a wall. I feel betrayed by Roland Church. He stayed in my house on and off for eleven months after Darlynn was beaten. It bugs me out. . . . God forgive me, I almost pray a child dies. Nothing will happen until then — and they’re all dying a slow death.”

The state of Vermont has decided not to appeal Judge Mahady’s decision on the June 22 raid.

“These roles, they are interchangeable: pharisee, journalist, witch hunter, . . . reporter, murderer of the innocent, are all interchangeable in their spirit and likewise in their reward.” — “Open Letter To the Editor of a Local Paper From the Church in Island Pond.” , …..

“We do not pray for the death of ex-members . . . . We only pray for mercy . . . . For some, the mercy of the Lord is that they would not incur greater judgement from the Lord by remaining on earth.” — “Open Letter To a Reader of the Newspaper From the Church in Island Pond.”

ALTHOUGH I REGARD IT as an unnecessary precaution, I have told three peoople outside the church that I am going to Pleasant House for dinner, towns- people having warned me that cult mcmbers are capable, in the space of less than an hour, of “debasing” people with whom they choose to play mind games, and — this from Jeff Hare, a first-grade teacher and a member of the St. James’ Roman Catholic parish — “making you doubt ev- erything you’ve ever held dear, all your beliefs and values.” Even Suzanne Cloutier, whose informed opposition to the cult has never been in question, says, “I wouldn’t have believed their charisma — I found myself doubting my own perceptions. I snapped back when I saw the marks on the children and when I kept hearing the terrifyingly consis- tent stories of ex-members.”

Vicki Guthrie does not want me to go to dinner at Pleasant House. “Don’t think they can’t hurt you,” she says to me. She will call the state troopers if l do not check in with her by ten P.M. I am not alarmed; I am warmed by people’s concern, although it seems to me excessive.

In the event, Donna, whom I have arranged to meet at the Common Sense, tells me that dinner will be at Belle- view House. No reason is given for this change of plans. There are two playpens in the large kitchen of Belleview, a rambling Victorian house with an unloved yard and garden. I am introduced, by Donna, to a score of people — all the men sport beards, all the women wear babushkas. The effect is of a small army in uniform. Donna disappears into her bedroom with my briefcase. The children — I count thirteen, including three babies — are objects of intense fastnation to me, and I reproach myself for this: I do not want to regard any child as a specimen, yet it seems impossible not to. None of the children touches me or expresses any curiosity about me. A beautiful little girl comes in with a shoebox in which, she says, there is a bird. “I won’t kill this one, though,” she says. I hear a hissing — a sharp intake of breath — as all the adults in the kitchen freeze. After a silence in which the child trembles and looks beseechingly around her, Sandy, one of the women I’ve met at the Common Sense, says, “They had a baby bird once and they touched its wing. The bird died. Now she knows not to touch its wings.” The shoebox is taken from the child; the child is removed from the room. I do not see the child or the man who took her away again.

At dinner, served at long tables, the seating is choreo- graphed. If I wish to see the children, who are seated behind me, I have to swivel, which I don’t like to do (I feel like the Englishman in the jungle — good manners seem, at this moment, almost crucially important). As we are served dinner — thin soup made of flour and water with bits of broccoli floating in it, plates heaped with good whole wheat bread (no napkins) — a young girl falls off her chair and hits her head sharply (there is an audible crack!) on the wall molding. One strangled cry, then she turns bright red and reseats herself. No adult comments. A baby in diapers makes the gurgling noises appropriate to a baby in diapers; the baby is hit on the hand and wails. After a second slap, the baby is taken upstairs. I hear no sound from upstairs. I have been given a baby spoon with which to eat my soup. When I dribble soup on my dress, I apologize, and three people tell me that it’s “normal”; when I ask if may have another piece of bread — “I’m greedy,” I say — I am told that this is “normal.”

Donna hands me an embroidered handkerchief to use as a napkin. A man called Asher says he wants to “share” with us evidence of the Lord’s miraculous intervention in his life that day; there follows a long story about a tractor that almost, but didn’t, run him over. This is greeted with beaming applause. A woman called Ruhama “shares” that when the children were being taught that day, they learned how Catholics persecuted heretics in the Middle Ages and how the Pilgrims persecuted those who did not share their religious beliefs. “And I never knew that!” she says, her face ablaze. “I never knew that, and I went to college! I was leveled in college, I was leveled! I wasn’t cognitive!” Asher says, “Our children will inherit the earth. They will be called upon to speak before kings and judges. It is appro- priate for them to know these things. They must be cogni- tive.” During this time — the “sharing,” punctuated by glad cries, has occupied thirty minutes — no child asks for more food or declines food. No child talks. An elder says, “Donna, is there any reality to Phoebe’s having to help Joseph? She says there is.” “There is no reality,” Donna says, and Phoebe is led away.

At seven-thirty the children are led, in a group, to bed. Donna and Sandy talk with me about the raid — about their terror, and the children’s. I ask them to hit my hand with a balloon stick — a thin reed — with as much strength as they would use to hit a child. Donna immediately obliges with a sharp rap. “That’s for disobeying,” she says. “For lying it would be harder. Do you want me to hit you again? You understand why the children can’t fantasize? Because when the Lord calls our children, they have to be sure it’s His voice, not the voice of another. They have to live in reality.”

A black man called Theton, who is afflicted with a dreadful stutter, tells me that he comes from Manhattan and that he was a seminarian, but he wasn’t “cognitive” then. Soon the men drift away to prepare for a meeting at the Common Sense. I am left at the table with Donna and Sandy and Ruhama. Theton reappears, his face disfigured and clotted with rage. He screams: “Doesn’t anybody know there’s a body in this house?” His explosive rage unsnarls his speech: no stutter. “He means there’s a meeting tonight,” Donna says calmly. Ten minutes later, Theton appears on the lawn, where I am having a cigarette in the company of Donna and one of the men. “I want to repent,” he says. His stutter has returned. “I want to repent for my anger and for giving a bad testimony.” He is embraced. Donna says, “It’s normal, Theton; that’s reality. We all have different ways of expressing our anger. We’re cognizant.” Theton stands there, shuffling his feet, looking chastened, fearful — and somehow also pleased, as if a necessary cycle has been completed.

WHY DO THEY throw dirt in my yogurt?: Hope asks. Hope Bowen is eight years old. She lives near one of the church’s communal houses. She would like the children of the church to play with her, but they will not. “And in my chocolate pudding, too? One girl came to my house to watch television — her name was Spring — and the next day I saw marks all over her. That’s when she threw dirt in my yqgurt. They don’t know how to please so much. They just grab. And sometimes they go around in rags. I know one girl — her name is Know-It-All — and sometimes she plays with me. She’s pretty and she has such nice hair. But they hurt little birds. Robins. All kinds of birds, I don’t know why.”

IT WAS BECAUSE of the dogs that Frank Forbes didn’t join the church. The beatings, which he has not witnessed, do not trouble him. His mother beat him with a buggy strap, Frank says, and he grew up okay. Forbes, a former Teamster, is fifty-seven, hearty, and sad. In the space of one year his wife died of cancer and he was focibly retired and his own church, he says, let him down: “Methodists,” he says. “That’s one hour a week.”

The people of the Northeast Kingdom church, Frank says, “give it their life.” And he — after his wife died and time lay heavy on his hands — was “ready to give them my home. This fells called Dante . . . he said they could use my cellar for growing marijuana in. See, they needed money. A lot of it is misery and marijuana at that church. But they’re nice people. They talk to you when nobody else cares. They do chores for you. But they wouldn’t let me live with my dogs if joined. They said I’d have to get rid of them. And the children — very well behaved, but they teased my dogs. They threw stones at them.

“Misery and marijuana,” Frank says. “But whaddya do when your life is empty?”

ELBERT EUGENE SPRIGGS, according to published sources, was married three times. According to Isaac at the Common Sense, Spriggs was married “oh, about ten times” — the former wickedness of their leader is presumably proof of his present goodness. Isaac says the church had to leave Tennessee because “Chat- tanooga was inhospitable to the people of God. They got us on entrapment. Marijuana.”

Sixty-five-year-old Al Bresciani has had complicated real estate (and complicated human and emotional) dealings with the church. He says he has sold four houses to the Northeast Kingdom church and given them one. The church thrift shop is located in a large, partially boarded-up building once called Kathy’s Kozy Crnmer, ‘which Bresciani gave them, he says, for “the remaining mortgage and back taxes.” According to Island Ponders, Bresciani is a “hus- tler.” According to Bresciani, church members are “ex- tremely giving people.” Bresciani’s wife, Jean, is a church member, as are three of his children, Edward, Josephine, and Angela. Like_ Dante, who flies regularly to France to see Spriggs, who lives outside the commune with a non- member to whom he is not married, and whose bullying sexual libertinism is widely excoriated, Jean Bresciani ap- pears to be exempt from many church regulations. She owns a watch and carries a purse and lives with Al. Jean and Josephine are now living with Spriggs’s group in France.

“When I came to Island Pond,” Al says “I was the only Italian in town, and I was hated for it. I bought a lot of property here, and they hated me for that — they said I belonged to the Mafia. Nobody else invites me to their house but the church people. My own church — Catholic — is good for nothing. When my first wife left me with three kids, the priest came in asking for a donation for a new roof. I said, “I’m all alone with three kids — how about giving me twenty dollars?” And he said, “Courage, my son, courage.” I got courage — courage to get out.

“So what if the church people wanted my property? If you needed ten thousand dollars for an operation, they’d give it to you.

“I whacked my own kids. I’d brain them before I’d let them hang out on the street. The church people’s kids have respect. I tell these punks in town, ‘If you say one bad word about my daughter, I’ll kill you. I’ll cut your hands off. I’ll murder you.’ My wife had to stop me from smashing a guy’s Adam’s apple . . . . They’re not violent people. They’re the kindest people you ever saw.

“The only reason I don’t join the church myself is, I’m not ready to give them my whole heart and soul. I’m an easy guy. I like to go fishing.”

WHAT SCARES ME most is the silence,” says Marinn Barnes, who lives alone on Birch Street, across from a communal house. Sometimes at night she hears a cry from one of the children, then an adult voice saying “Don’t you cry!,” then nothing. Her summer nights have been punctuated by noises she has learned to dread- a deep-throated, gurgling wail that fades into a moan. Several years ago, thirteen-year-old Randy Langmaid, grandnephew of a one-time boarder of Marina’s, made his third escape attempt, coming to her from a communal house on the hill three-quarters of a mile away. He was wearing layers of clothes — all that he had — and he said, “Close the curtains, Marian, they’ll see me and give me a licking. I’ll kill myself iT I have to go back.” Marian Barnes is seventy-one; she says of the church greet her with smiles: “You’re old, Marian” they say. “Aren’t you afraid of living alone in that big house? Aren’t you afraid something will happen to you?” Then they call her Satan.

ON SUNDAY the Northeast Kingdom church has its Celebration in a barnlike room above the Com- mon Sense that smells of spices and human sweat. I enter to the sound of tambourines. The women are danc- ing heavily on the wooden floor, but their bodies are stiff, out of sync with the tambourines and with their own feet.

Kirsten, a young woman in her mid-twenties who has twice been deprogrammed, has now returned to the church, delivered by a man called Gladheart, who stands over her while she testifies, her head bowed. Kirsten had been taken by her brothers, her sister, and a deprogrammer from Spriggs’s chateau to Paris and then to a deprogram- ring “safe house” in Iowa, from which she had managed to escape, having called the Vermont church to say she’d wait for a rescuer at an appointed time in the town library. “I just played along with the deprogrammers?” Kitsten says with the lilting inflection used by all the female mem- bers of the church. “I just really wanted to serve the Lord? So I told them, ‘Oh yes, I just really wanted to get out, I’m so glad you kidnapped me.’ And a miracle happened? The two things I said in my heart I wouldn’t do would be to appear on videotape to show other kidnapped members my deprogramming? And I wouldn’t eat pork? And the video machine broke down? I just really want to praise the Lord? And even some of the deprogrammers know we have the truth? Because when I told them the church teaches us that women are equal in grace but not equal in authority, one guy said, ‘Where is that place? Take me to it.’ And I just love Gladheart so much? He shaved his beard off for me, he’d do anything for the Lord. And I’m just so glad to be home? Back in the land of the living? And I was so grateful when I drunk the wine of the new covenant? And all I want to do is be with my husband in France?”

No one asks why, if Kirsten wants so much to be with her husband in France, she has been obliged to make this detour from Iowa to Island Pond. The obvious reason is that she is giving the church in Island Pond a buzz. Persecu- tion always acts as a jell for members of cults. It proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God’s chosen.

After her first deprogramming, Kirsten and her twin sister lectured on the college circuit for two years, talking about the dangers of the cults. I learn this later, from Suzanne Cloutier. Church members do not allow me to talk with Kirsten. After Kirsten’s testimony, I see a young girl describe an arc in the air with a large sweeping gesture: “Whack!” she says. “Whack!”

On Cross Street, Al Bresciani is cruising in his van. He stops me. “I’m riding around with a gun,” he says, “in case there’s a deprogrammer in town.”

THE CHURCH is sure enough that we are living in the “end-times” to be building an ark in Nova Scotia — in any case, a ship. “I’m just a child,” the chtldren sing. “How will it feel to be on a boat in Nova Scotia?” The church is sure that God has “a shadow government, a resistance government, a kingdom forming, an under- ground.” The church defmes itself largely in relation to what it is not and what it does not: Is it not “Christian — as you understand Christianity”; and “You can’t trust America” (for which reason church members do not regis- ter for the draft, so that the government, “the FBI and the CIA, can’t keep track of us”).

Every member of the church talks of his or her previous misery: They had been drunks, they had had traumatic abortions, they had been “so depressed I couldn’t even wash a dish,” they’d been on drugs, they’d been suicidal, they’d killed. All had been full of self-hatred, a condition they describe as “emptiness.” No one, apparently, came to the church relatively whole or happy. (And yet the sad parents of lost children — the parents who stand at the windows of the Osborne with binoculars looking for youngsters who have drifted into the cult — say that their children were like any other children. Some say the young people who are lost to the cults are the brightest and the best.) Perhaps, as townspeople say, all the church members’ talk of past horrors is a result of malnutrition and brain- washing and an inhuman workload placed by the leaders upon the led. Perhaps their present acquiescent state obliges the young people of the cult to redefine their blurred past. The fact that they do not yet know exactly how to flesh out their simple apocalyptic beliefs does not prevent them from knowing exactly what it is their children do not need to know: Bill Smith, who says he is a former seminarion and who is the older in charge of the children’s education, says he sees no reason for the children ever to have to read Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Dickens, Chekhov, Tolstoy — no need, in fact, for them to read anything but material written for them by their elders. “For example,” Smith says, “we might make up a story about a child who was persecuted or a child who needed to be disciplined for taking a cookie out of cookie jar.”

Could the children sing “Here We Go Round the Mul- berry Bush”? “Never heard of it,” Smith says. “Humpty Dumpty”? “That was by Lewis Carroll, wasn’t it? A verse disguising an attack on a scholar? No. Why should we teach our children about a cracked egg?”

I AM SITTING in the house of Diana Marckwardt, in East Charleston, a ten-minute drive from the center of Island Pond. With us are Cheryl (“I won’t give you my last name because I’m scared of those ‘Christians’ and I don’t want my head manipulated any more”) and a handsome thirty-two-year-old man called D.T., whose wife and two children are living with the mysterious Dante. D.T. is “waiting to get it together” before he tries to get custody of his kids — “I’m just a poor [he uses a coase noun] sitting in a corner,” he says. “How am I supposed to fight them? I don’t have any money for a lawyer.”

Although Isaac has told me that Dante is “in rebellion,” a church member not in good standing, Diana and Cheryl and D.T. are convinced — as is almost everyone else in Island Pond — that Dante is a member of the church hierarchy who enjoys special status and privileges. Dante’s ambiguous status bolsters their belief that the church has “runners” who pose as civilians in order to infiltrate the community and gather information. I have a hard time convincing them that I am not a runner. Diana’s eagerness to talk, to discharge herself of the poisonous feelings she has been harboring, overwhelms her suspicion.

Diana is a person who needs to believe that her motives are good and that she is fair. Two years ago people she identifies as runners — “undercover agents” — insinuated themselves into her life and assaulted her where she can least afford to be assaulted: They defeated her idea of herself as a good, sane person, a member of an extended, nonbiological “family,” of which Cheryl and D.T. are a part.

Her story is a complicated one. She is the first to ac- knowledge that nothing she has to say about the runners, or about one named Debbie, in particular, is susceptible of proof: “She started coming over and canning with me. And she asked me a whole lot of questions about a whole lot of different people that I know. I’ve been up here for seven -years and I have been a part of the Family for that long, and I know a lot of people. I gave her a lot of general information — nobody’s secrets.” (The “family” is a scattered network of people in these hills.)

The runners, Diana says, moved in on her because they thought she was vulnerable. “I got straight-out, flat-out conned. I also noticed that they were starting to move into all of these groups that I had told Debbie about during the course of our canning,” In fact, Diana — who reproaches herself for sounding incoherent — has not discussed the runners with an outsider before. “I feel like a jerk,” she says. Juan Mattatall, the former church member who was trying to win custody of his five church-bound children, stayed with her. He was considered a good person until he started trying to regain his children and the church turned on him. Suddenly there were rumors that he had raped a young girl in the church community.

“Debbie played me on every single emotional point that I had. They had been through every single low-income, hard-pressed organization up here. I’m a patsy, you know. They started feeding back to me the fact that I am a patsy. They pushed me all the way down to the bottom of my basic morality, and I discovered I was all right. So in a way they did me a favor. But it also took me six months to pick up the pieces . . . . I believe they had designs on my son.

“I’m good at growing gardens,” Diana says. “Debbie told me my expertise was gardens. Juan Mattatall’s exper- tise is that he knows all the wild herbs and edible plants. Knows enough that they can survive up here all year round on what can be found in the woods, and that was his expertise. When I began to see how they were using us, I panicked and I kicked them out. Then I started getting phone calls — southern voices — threatening my life.” DECEMBER 1984 ú 67 Diana’s friend Cheryl has been told by Isaac (“their sex symbol, their bait”) that if she were to join the cult, she would be “treated like a queen.” D.T. says he thinks the church was after his kids and his wife. “After I met them they played nice-nice to me, asking me to teach them things. And I was finding books in their library — books on growing things, you know what I mean?” His books disap- peared, he says; so did his wife and kids.

This sounds like crazy talk and Diana knows it: “Either I am crazy or I am not, and I don’t think I’m crazy,” she says. Diana is so trusting one is afraid for her, she wishes to be of use. She locks her door now. She has a watchdog. She tries never to let her child out of her sight. She is moving away from Island Pond because three-year-old Isaac will be going to day school next year. Perfectly composed when she speaks of anything else, when she talks about the cult she shakes. The cult robbed her of her goodwill, her easy faith in the goodness of others. She will never forgive them.

I never did get to speak to the people Diana and Cheryl and D.T. refer to as runners; they sent word out that they would not talk to me. Al Bresciani says they are “friends of the church — like me.” ‘ ”

DIANA AND HER SON and I are sitting at the edge of the pond: “I will catch you a fish, Barbara,” the three-year-old Isaac says. He is pretending a twig is a fishing rod. “I will catch you a chocolate-chip fish.” He deposits the “chocolate-chip fish” in my lap — sweet little boy, I’ve just told him chocolate-chocolate-chip is my favorite ice cream — and then he catches a “fierce red fish” and then a “strawberry fish” (strawberry is his favorite flavor), and then we eat the fish, which has been cooked, he says, by “water magic.” He hugs me. For this enchanting piece of business, this child, whose brown eyes gaze into mine with perfect trust, would be beaten if he were a child of the cult.

NOT ONE of the cult children has called me by name. The cult children are empty vessels with nothing to fill them but the insistent words of their elders — not even music: They may not listen to music with “worldly” lyric or “demonic” themes. At the thrift shop, a church member named Barbara told me she vomited when she heard The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And that Beetho- ven’s Ninth Symphony was just as bad. “How about Mi- chael Jackson?” I asked. “Who’s Michael Jackson?” she said. Adult cult members do not read newspapers or magazines or watch television; those elders who are permit- ted to read edit and verbally present the news to their followers.

The Northeast Kingdom church does not believe the evidence of Jonestown was consistent with Jim Jones’s followers having killed themselves. They believe it is much more likely that Jones and his followers, with whom they identify, were killed by helicopters using “chemical war- fare” for “political reasons.”

I AM SCRIBBLING at the Common Sense, and Isaac says: “Are you taking notes? We don’t want you to. We don’t speak to reporters, only to compassionate, caring human beings with good hearts: I don’t want you to take notes. When was the last time you examined your con- science? I’m not talking about that hokey stuff in that black box, that corruption, that evil, the confessional, that gar- bage,” Isaac says. “Does your conscience tell you you are worthless and needy? Needy.”

I am saved from more lunatic conversation with Isaac by the entrance of a young Vietnamese. Church “walkers” — proselytizers — in Boston have given him literature that inveighs against homosexulaity, the military, cold and un- caring hospitals, capitalism, Communism, liberation movements, Walt Disney, and all the woes and com- plexities attendant upon the industrial and technological revolutions. The literature invites people with a deep sense of injury to separate themselves from the world and to leave “fear, death, loneliness and isolation” behind.

“Give him anything, anything he wants, everything,” Isaac says expansively. What the Vietnamese is given is a bowl of popcorn and a glass of water.

“Isaac doesn’t like me,” I remark to the elder called Asher. Five minutes later, Isaac, who I think cannot possi- bly have heard me, reappears: “I don’t want you to think I don’t love you, Barbara,” he says. “I do. I love you very much. I want you to live our life.”

When I leave the Common Sense that afternoon, Isaac sneaks behind me: “BOO!” He is stroking a jackknife. “I just like to play,” he says. “Did I scare you?”

From this time on, whenever I make a phone call from the Osborne, someone from the cult stares in at me through the plate-glass window. Whenever I have coffee with a townsman at Jennifer’s Restaurant, a cult elder honks the horn of a vehicle that follows me everywhere. He is letting me know that I am under surveillance.

This behavior strikes me as more silly than diabolical, although some townspeople are telling me that I am press- ing my luck.

ON AUGUST 28, members of the press were invited to hear Roland Church publicly repent. He shared a platform with Charles (Eddie) Wiseman, the elder who, according to Roland’s previous allegation, had beaten his daughter Darlynn until “she looked like a zebra.” Church, who had also said that the church’s troubles with Darlynn stemmed from unspecified sex games, repeated what he’d said in his pubLished, recantation: Darlynn had lied. She was beaten because she lied — neither he nor Wiseman would say in what way she lied — and she had lied when she signed a deposition to the court saying that she had been beaten. The “ordeal,” Wiseman and Roland said, had made Darlynn “freer and lighter”; the “scourging” and the “controlled sever- ity” had produced “the fruits of the spirit.” Why it had also produced a signed statement in which Darlyrm claimed to have been beaten for seven hours was a problem that Roland — who, not to put too fine a point on it, looked and sounded like a zombie — could not resolve for the press. Wiseman showed us pictures of Darlynn’s neck and back, on which there were no marks. He declined, with a great display of delicacy of feeling, to show us photographs of Darlynn’s buttocks and legs. It was motive that counted, Elder Wiseman insisted. While most people who beat kids did so when they were drunk or angry, Darlynn was chastised by a loving elder with love, and Darlynn therefore knew love. When someone remarked that abused flesh was incapable of interpreting motive, Roland said, “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

For the first time since I arrived in Island Pond, I allowed myself to express anger to members of the cult. I think it was Darlynn, so present in her absence, who provoked it

The next day I was driven to the Common Sense by Father Francis Connors, the pastor of St. James’ Roman Catholic Church. I thought, arrogantly, that I could tough it out. An elder I’d not met before stared at me, unblinking (how do they do this?) for half an hour and told me (many variations on a single theme) all about the Lake of Fire, in which, if I did not change my evil ways, I would soon find myself. I don’t remember his words. They were silly words. I remember what I felt — virulent hatred focused on me, the kind of hatred that is like an invasion of the body: I felt my heart being attacked. Nobody — pity the children — can stand being the object of such intense hatred. The women, their voices sweet, chanted about the Lake of Fire. The children watched.

Three hours later I was admitted to the North Country Hospital for chest pains. Hutch Jenness, the Quaker doctor who examined me, must at first have thought — I am perfectly healthy — that I was crazy: “Do you often feel your body is flying apart? Have you had any suicidal thoughts in the last six months?” When I told him that I’d been in Island Pond, talking to members of the church, he said, “Well, why didn’t you say so? You’re not crazy. You’re respond- ing to craziness. You’re lucky that it was your body that went haywire. It could have been your mind. I know those people. They’re evil. You can’t go back there.”

WHAT TO DO? Bernie Henault, Essex County co- ordinator of the Northeast Kingdom Commu- nity Action Agency, says, “If they disciplined a child to death with love we’d never know about it. The laws of this country stop at the borders of Island Pond and have for sLx years . . . . I’ve heard them say [to Spriggs]: ‘Did I do all right, Lord?’ When I hear them say the Lord says this and the Lord says that, are they talking about our God up there, or are they talking about Elbert Spriggs?

“I never go and solicit anybody to leave. Because Jim Jones left San Francisco and went to French Guyana, didn’t he? And look what happened there.” Henault says the Northeast Kingdom church is missing two entire genera- tions: Where are the older people? he asks. Where are the teenagers? “I get burnt out,” he continues. “I had seven people in my office in one day that were leaving. I was up a wall.” One afternoon a church member told him that he would “wake up some day and find out that the wrath of the Lord has fallen upon your head.” The church even approached his daughter. “We adopted a young girl last year — twelve. And Donna had some spedal needs. She’d been in special education all her life. And these suckers are inviting her down to their Celebration and telling her how evil we are and that she should come and join. This is how they operate.”

“They watch,” he says later. “It’s good, smart leadership, that group that plays with the system, that mocks the system and says, ‘Here we are. We’re a religious group. We’re doing what we want and we’re only responsible to the Lord.’ The Lord, everybody says, is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Except maybe,” Henault says, “it’s Elbert Spriggs.”

Selectman Bud Wade is “so . . . mad I can . . . hardly talk about it. It’s hard to keep getting beat. We’ve tried everything, but the state won’t even act on its own zoning ordinances to get those people. And those civil liberty lawyers are paid by the state to defend people who are just laughing at the state.” .

One might expect that the mainline churches would act to remedy the misery in lsland Pond, and to an extent they do. Father Connors has put up young people who wish to leave the cult at the Osborne and has seen them safely out of Island Pond. But by and large the mainline churches keep a low profile — to avert bloodshed,” according to church sources (or, more cynical voices say, because the churches are afraid to act lest they be acted upon). In many quarters the silence of the churches is interpreted as a perverse form of “do unto others”: If the churches leave the cult alone, they too will be free from state intervention.

Reverend Dale Jenks of the fundamentalist Grace Breth- ren Church says, “There is no organized effort to help. Part of that is because when people leave the cult, they’re still sufficiently indoctrinated to believe that we’re evil. I don’t- know what the answer would be,” he says, “unless it’s less publicity, less press. They rejoice in negative publicity.” Jenks is conservative; he believes that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. His quarrel with the cult is that “there’s nothing more dangerous than to believe you are the only one in possession of the truth.” He places some of the blame for the existence of the cult on the the mainline churches: “We offer people a building. They offer people a life.”

GOD WORKS in mysterious ways; the wheels of justice grind slowly; there are no simple solutions. (lt’s easy to become fatalistically axiomatic in Island Pond.) As long as there are people who require the absolute simplicity of absolute authoritarianism, as long as the wounded, the defeated, the hopeless, the idealists-gone- awry exist, and as long as spiritual con artists hungry for power are around to authenticate them and to give them a life empty of choice and full of the busyness and spiritual double talk that passes for meaning, the cults will thrive. As long as there are people willing to sacrifice their lives — and those of their children — for the promise of transcen- dency, the cults will thrive. As long as the bludgeoned and the bewildered and the brainwashed are willing to endure a drab present for the hope of an exalted future, the cults will thrive.

But what of the children? Island Pond may learn to deal with its problem, and to deal — though this is far from certain — with the scars left by fear, paranoia, and loathing. But it is not Island Pond’s problem alone. They are all our children. If the Northeast Kingdom church is forced to leave Island Pond, where will it go? Where will the children go, and what will become of them?

Cult polarizes Clark’s Harbor

Charlie — Sun, 05 Aug 1984 09:34:03 +0000

The Globe and Mail (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

Deborah Jones

August 1984

Clark’s Harbor, N.S. –Since last fall, when a child reported missing in the United States by her father was found living here under a false name with a Bible-based cult, a storm has been brewing in this small, tightly knit fishing community.

Local residents have split into two camps, defending or opposing the group known as the Northeast Kingdom Church. Twelve Tribes members have been refused service in local stores, boycotted for jobs and denied permission to rent space for a public meeting. A brick has been thrown through a window of one of their homes.

The community is currently waiting for a judge’s decision on a charge of truancy for keeping its children out of public schools. Recently, the Concerned Citizens Group, made up of long-time local residents, purchased a newspaper ad to announce that the names of people who hire church members or sell anything to them would be published.

Most people in the surrounding area have sided with the citizens’ group, which is trying to force the sect out of town. A small minority criticizes the group, saying group members have a right to be here.

Community members say they just want to live in peace and adhere to their strict interpretation of the New Testament.

“I hope to hell this is all settled as soon as possible,” says Michael Nickerson, the worried mayor of Clark’s Harbor, who figures he may lose the next election for not opposing theTwelve Tribes, but who thinks church members have a right to live in the community.

Tension in Clark’s Harbor is simmering now, he said, but he is afraid of what will happen if the sect and the townspeople refuse to compromise. So far, the citizens’ group has refused to talk to community leaders.

Town council is trying to set up a forum where the two groups can meet, Mr. Nickerson said. “There are those of us who would like to go down the middle and hopefully try to see this thing through in a way that both sides can be appeased. It could become violent, and I don’t think we want to see that happen.”

On the surface, Clark’s Harbor, Nova Scotia, appears peaceful. White Baptist churches and clapboard houses overlook fishing boats moored in rows off sturdy docks. Satellite-receiving dishes squat in yards along the barren shoreline, testifying to the marked form of diversion in the isolated area.

Most of the 3,500 island residents can name ancestors who settled here generations ago, from the Acadians who arrived in the 1700s to Loyalists and British immigrants. Residents describe themselves as people who usually get along well together, but one year ago a rift started to develop, centering on the new church.

Most of the 30-odd members of the Twelve Tribes, who have moved into two large wooden houses in Clark’s Harbor, are from Quebec. But church leaders travel back and forth from their base in Island Pond, Vt.

Last fall, television reports were aired about the search by American Juan Mattatall, a former member of the sect in Island Pond, for his 4-year old daughter, Lydia. Mr. Mattatall had legal custody of the girl, who disappeared with her mother Hannah and Elbert and Marsha Spriggs, founders of the church.

A Clark’s Harbor resident recognized the televised pictures of Lydia as the girl living here with a couple using a different name, who said they were her parents and were later revealed to be Mr. and Mrs. Spriggs. Townspeople called the royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment, and Lydia Mattatall was returned to her father after CBC’s The Journal filmed a dramatic midnight chase.

“The communal group had been here two or three months at that time and hadn’t caused a problem,” Mr. Nickerson said in an interview. “People thought they were ordinary hippies who had moved into a local house and set up housekeeping. But when we saw the story on the Journal about the girl and the Island Pond church group, (some local residents) thought ‘oh, my God, they’re sitting in my back yard.”

The people of Clark’s Harbor also learned that Eddie Wiseman, a Twelve Tribes leader in Island Pond, was charged with child assault in Vermont after 13-year old Darlynn Church was allegedly flagellated for seven hours as a disciplinary measure.

(Darlynn’s father, Roland Church, had left the Northeast Kingdom Church and said the girl had been cudgeled. This summer, he and his family rejoined the community and he denied on television that Darlynn was abused. The case is still pending in Vermont, although the state has lost Mr. Church as its prime witness).

James Beverley, assistant professor of contemporary religion, visited Clark’s Harbor in October, 1983. In a recent interview, he said he “told people not to react in a way that would bring shame to the community. There was a rumor of violence on Halloween night. I told them to obey the law. I also told them to be careful of the group; new religious movements are not always good, and it’s always wise to be cautious.”

During an interview in one of their homes, members of the Twelve Tribes said they simply want to live in peace. Sitting in a bare living room furnished with a wood stove and some second hand furniture, with light filtering through plastic stapled over the window that a brick smashed, Stephen Mavity blamed media reports for the church’s trouble in Clark’s Harbor. “The media is slanted – when they deal with us they’re biased.”

He said most stories about the church contain factual errors and rarely give the group’s side of the story. Over the past year, television crews have walked into their yards and filmed members without permission, he added.

“We think it’s equivalent to the witch trial and anti-Communism in the U.S. in the 1950s. I was here before the Journal program (about Lydia Mattatall) came out, and the friendliness really impressed us. Then, when the Journal came out, it was an amazing transition. One man ran a fruit market and said he couldn’t sell to us, it was hurting his business. Suddenly, the school authorities came around, asking if we were sending our kids to school.”

Church members are vague.

The goal of theTwelve Tribes, according to Mr. Mavity, is to build a kingdom of God on earth.

For the past year, Mr. Beverley has conducted research into the communal group in Canada and the United states and has written two reports on the sect. He says the rigid views of church members makes conflict with local residents inevitable.

“The Northeast Kingdom suffers from a persecution complex. They display an attitude of narrowness and anti-intellectualism, and they have a limited understanding of worldliness.

“They believe they are sort of like Noah’s Ark on a sea of evil, so you have to join the Northeast Kingdom, because outside the kingdom is evil. They don’t believe they’re the only Christians in the world, but they believe Christians have to be pretty much like them.”

Mr. Beverley said that despite his criticism of theTwelve Tribes, he does not consider them dangerous and believes “the group has a legal right to be there, although I understand residents’ concerns about them.”

Mr. Blades, June Smith and other members of the Concerned Citizens Group just want the church to leave. They say Mr. and Mrs. Spriggs deceived them when they moved here under false names and that they violate laws by not sending their children to school or registering births and deaths. And they are afraid that members are harming children in the sect, although they admit they have no proof.

One citizens group member, who didn’t want to be identified, said, “I don’t know if anyone has seen them discipline their children. But a friend of mine told me he saw a man tell one of the children he’d get a battering when he got home and the tone would freeze you.”

This summer, Vermont state authorities seized 112 children from Island Pond community members to examine them for signs of abuse and harm. But shortly after they were seize, Judge Frank Mahady ordered that the children be returned to their parents because of insufficient evidence.

Critics say the church does not contribute to the local economy.

“They’re an economic drain. All they buy is gas. Ordinarily more people build up an area. But they take work and put nothing back in.

Mr. Blades noted that a slump in the fishing industry has affected Clark’s Harbor and he is angered by the fact that church members work for lower wages than local residents.

Over the summer, the citizens group has intensified its efforts to make the sect leave. They are bringing opponents from Vermont here to make speeches, they have written to various government agencies criticizing the church and they have screened films about Jonestown.

The group refuses to meet church members. “We don’t want them here, there’s no purpose to be served by talking to them,” Miss Smith said. “This is a dangerous and destructive cult; they use brainwashing and mind control. Around here, people put up with things just so long – then look out.”

Asked about the reasons for their group’s opposition to the church, Mr. Blades cited “their claim to be the truth, their unyielding nature when it comes to our laws and the threat they pose to our young people.”

Elizabeth Townsend is one of the few residents if the island who does not criticize the communal group. “It’s different, and I just don’t think people know how to handle that.”

Dalhousie religion professor Tom Sinclair-Faulkner has been monitoring the fray from his Halifax office. “You can’t be even-handed in this circumstance without being condemned as an active supporter of the Twelve Tribes,” he says.

It will be difficult for the opposing groups to compromise, he warns. “Most people think of religion as private.

Small Vermont town embroiled in controversy over religious sect

Charlie — Fri, 18 Nov 1983 07:01:28 +0000

source: the Associated Press, 18 November 1983, page 4

Associated Press

Island Pond, Vt. —18 November 1983

When Juan Mattatall got his 4-year-old daughter back from the Northeast Kingdom Community Church, it was one of the happiest days of his life.

But for some people in this village it was an unpleasant reminder of the

tension between the town and the fundamentalist sect, which is the subject of a child abuse investiga tion. And it served as a reminder of

recent charges against two church elders accused of beating a 12-year-

old and a 13 year old.

“I’m just really disgusted that there’s always something boiling,

but never enough to blow the top off,” Lisa Hilliker said as she fastened

a seat belt around her one-year-old daughter. She said she resents the

fact that some of her closest friends joined the church — a group that

“totally baffles me. ” “I thought of petitioning . . .but there’s nobody around, including me, that has the backbone to do any

thing about it.”

Island Pond, part of the town of Brighton, which has a population of

1,557, has been embroiled in controversy off and on ever since.

The most dramatic episode occurred Oct. 10, when Mattatall, a

church defector, was reunited at a police roadblock in Nova Scotia

with his daughter, Lydia, who had allegedly been abducted.

Mattatall had been searching around the world for Lydia for two

years when a viewer tipped a Canadian television station to the

child’s whereabouts.

“It was the happiest moment I can remember, except for the time I was

reunited with the other four,” Mattatall said from his South Burlington

home. He had been granted temporary custody of his five children

after a bitter court battle in which he accused church members of beating

the children with rods to discipline them.

Canadian police detained Mattatall’s wife, Cynthia, church elder

Charles Wiseman and his wife, Mary, under suspicion of kidnapping.

However, officials decided not to prosecute the case as a kidnapping

and the three were released.

Mattatall said church members told Lydia that church founder Elbert Spriggs and his wife were her parents and that her real mother was her nursemaid.

Mattatall also said Lydia told him she had been beaten “a lot. “

“She’s been beaten with that rod daily,” he said. “Her bottom is really

hardened and calloused ”

Essex County State’s Attorney David Weinstein said the state is

conducting a “very extensive” investigation into reports of child

abuse.

Church members have refused to discuss their practices with repor

ters. But a few members agreed to answer questions if their names

were not used.

One father of three, who works in the church owned shoe repair shop,

said he sees nothing wrong with using a rod to discipline children.

“Were you ever spanked as a child?” he asked, leaning forward on

the counter. “And didn’t you feel grateful afterwards?”

He said the Bible commands parents to discipline their children,

citing the passage that says “Spare the rod and spoil the child. ”

Town Manager Robert Shepeluk said some church owned businesses

have refused to abide by zoning ordinances. “Sometimes they say they

don’t have to follow man’s laws —only God’s laws, ” he said.

“There is definitely tension in the community.”

WHERE IS LYDIA MATTATALL?

Charlie — Sun, 17 Apr 1983 06:47:39 +0000

 Father battles sect over custody of girl
Source: Boston Globe article archived by Factnet and Xenu directory

By Colin Nickerson
Globe STaff

ISLAND POND, Vt. - lt's been a year
now since Juan Mattatall last saw his
youngest daughter, Lydia, 3 years old.

He knows where she is: Europe. And
he knows who she's with: Gene Spriggs,
self-anointed "apostle" of a Vermont-
based fundamentalist Christian sect
called the Northeast Kingdom Communi-
ty Church, to which Mattatall belonged
for eight years.

What he does not know is whether he
will ever see Lydia again. Or, should he
find her, whether she would even recog-
nize him. Since last April, when, accord-
ing to former members, her mother
"gave" her to Spriggs as a faith gesture,
the child has been taught to consider
Spriggs and his wife Marsha her parents.

"She's been stolen from me. She's be-
ing taught to call another man 'Papa,'"
Mattatall said in an interview last week.

A Vermont judge awarded Mattatall
custody of his five children after an acri-
monious court battle last fall that pitted
the 41-year-old native of Chile against
not only his wife but the
entire membership of the church.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[A picture of a small girl has this title: LYDIA MATTATAL, Taken to
Europe a year ago.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mattatall was able to reclaim four of his children -- three girls
and a boy ranging in age from 8 years to 15 months -- last October,
just before they were to board a plane for Portugal with members of
the sect. But Lydia had been taken across the Atlantic months
earlier, and the church has ignored a court order to return her.

Custody battles are usually ugly, but the one between Mattatall
and a church that considers itself the only true expression of Christ
on earth has taken on ominous overtones.

Shortly after the court ruling, Mattatall's former brothers and
sisters in Christ were told to pray for his death. One elder of the
sect rose during a "body meeting" of baptized members and described a
dream in which Juan's throat was slit and his head lopped off. The
elder suggested the gruesome vision must surely represent the will of
the Lord, according to a sect member who was present at the meeting.

"Yes, I feel my life is in danger," said Mattatall, who spends
his days working and his nights trying to track Lydia's passage
through Europe. [But] this is my child, the flesh of my flesh. I
will not abandon her to them."

The child was reportedly spirited out of the country last April
by Spriggs, who is revered as a prophet by his followers. Since
1980, he has spent much of his time overseas seeking to establish a
European branch of the church.

In the last year, the only word of Lydia has come from another
little girl allegedly abducted by the sect in 1980 and found by her
family with help from the US State Department and the Roman Catholic
Church, last month in Spain.

That child, Gabrielle Spring Howell, 7, bears scars on her legs
and buttocks that her mother, once a member of the church, claims
are the result of whippings administered by sect members.

"These are sick and dangerous people who
would do this to a child in the name of Jesus,"
the mother, Deborah Heflin, 26, said in a tele-
phone interview from her home in Montgomery, Ala.

A sect member denied children are abused,
saying, "We are raising our children to be righ-
teous in the eyes of the Lord."

In Vermont since '78

Spriggs and his followers came to Vermont
from Tennessee in 1978. Since then, the sect
has grown to about 300 members who follow a
puritanical way of life, shunning contact with
outside society, except to preach the gospel, or
"good news" of Christ.

In recent months, however, only bad news
has trickled out of the insular kingdom of Gene
Spriggs.

Former members tell of child abuse and the
use of mind control techniques and of the harsh
disciplining of adults as well as children.

A believer accused of making advances to a
teenage girl, for instance, was told he must sac-
rifice his hand to atone. "The brother had his
arm laid out on the table and [an elder] had the
hatchet raised, all set to whack," but relented,
said a former follower who claimed to have wit-
nessed the incident. "The really disturbing
thing is, the [accused] brother was going to let
them do it. He didn't once protest."

Just as troublesome are accounts of severe
physical punishment meted out to children, in-
cluding infants, for even minor infractions,
such as wriggling at the supper table or talking
during prayers. Former members insist that the
beatings go far beyond normal spankings, re-
calling instances when children were scourged
for hours with wooden rods.

"Children are whipped harshly, bloodily and
often," said Arthur Fritog, a soft-spoken plumb-
er's apprentice who quit the sect in disgust
when instructed to pray for Mattatall's death.

"I'd seen enough death in Vietnam," said
Fritog. "I didn't want to do Satan's work in
Christ's name."

Frittog said he was also deeply disturbed that
members of the communal sect were encour-
aged to discipline each others' children. "The
idea, I think, is to break down the family and
make everyone subservient to Spriggs and the
elders."

Accused of "rebelliousness"

Mattatall left the church last year after the elders accused him
of "rebelliousness" and sent him to the sect's house in Boston as
punishment. He was told he could not live with his wife and children
in Vermont until he became more obedient.

His wife, Cynthia, who now calls herself Hannah Newsong --
continues to live with the sect and regards Juan as possessed by
Satan. Mattatall is caring for his other children.

Despite a court order awarding Mattatall custody, the religious
group refused to return Lydia just as it has refused to return other
children to parents who depart the sect.

And so Lydia remains in Europe, bouncing from country to
country with Spriggs. He and a band of 26 German and American
followers known as the "Little Flock" are on a proselytizing mission
in Europe.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[A picture shows a woman giving a girl a gift. The caption reads:
Deborah Heflin gives her daughter, Spring, a gift after being reunited
with her following a three-year separation. AP Photo] AP PHOTO
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The chlld's mother, Cynthia/Hannah, re-
cently told a Judge she did not know Lydia's ex-
act whereabouts and would not ask the church
elders to reveal it. Mattatall's lawyer earlier this
month filed a motion seeking a contempt cita-
tion against Mrs. Mattatall. A ruling is expected
this week. i

For another desperate parent, Deborah Hef-
lin, three years of uncertainty ended last ,
month when Spanish and US authorities de-,
scended on a tiny village in Granada province
and seized her 7-year old daughter, Gabrielle,
from the Little Flock.

Heflin said her estranged husband, James
Frank Howell, and members of the sect took the
girl from her grandmother's home in Alabama
three years ago. Gabrielle was taken to Island
Pond and from there to Europe -- her passport
shows she was in Portugal, Denmark, West Ger-
many and France.

"They were living In a filthy abandoned
schoolhouse," said Heflin, who joined the sect
while a student in Tennessee. "Her job was to
mind Lydia, cook, milk the goats and gather
nuts."

Gabrielle's rescuers were too
late to find Lydia: Spriggs had al-
ready departed with the younger child.

Heflin said she had called her
husband, who remains with the
church in lsland Pond, to demand
an explanation for Gabrielle's
scars. "All he said was, Deborah,
why can't you look through the
scars on her body and see what
God has done for her soul?"

(Randolph Ryan of The Globe staff
also contributed to this report.)

Judge Mahady gives Mrs Mattatall 2 weeks to locate daughter Lydia

Charlie — Mon, 07 Mar 1983 06:40:58 +0000

Source: Facnet archives via Xenu directory
7 March 1983
 A judge has ordered that a woman involved in a bitter custody battle be
allowed to have her children visit -- as long as she does not use any
instruments "such as rods or other weapons" to discipline them.

    District Court Judge Frank Mahady also gave Cynthia Mattatell
[sic], the mother, and officials of the controversial Island Pond Church 
to which she belongs, two weeks to locate the fifth Mattatall [sic] child
and turn the girl over to her father.

    Last fall, the Mattatall case focused public attention on the Northeast
Kingdom Community Church's practice of using rods and sticks to punish small
children.

    The Mattatall [sic] children had visited their mother once, but their father
refused to take let them go back when he learned they had been beaten again.

    A lawyer for the children's father said he doesn't think the church intends
to turn over the missing daughter, who is believed to be in Portugal with the
church leader, to her father. He said Mrs. Mattatall [sic] may face contempt of court
charges if she does not comply with the order.

The Kingdom at Island Pond

Charlie — Tue, 30 Nov 1982 05:46:40 +0000

Source:Factnet archives via xenu directory 
29 November 1982
MARK STARR with MARSHA ZABARSKY in Island Pond

 Folks in the tiny Vermont village of Island Pond (population: 1,542), nestled
in rugged mountains near the Canadian border, like to say they live in "God's
country." But lately residents have begun to fear that some of their neighbors
may be confusing God with Elbert Eugene Spriggs. A Chattanooga carnival barker
turned self-proclaimed Christian apostle, Spriggs has established a
fundamentalist Christian community -- the Northeast Kingdom Community Church --
in Island Pond and settled 300 devoted followers there. And although the town
originally welcomed the Kingdom, a bitter child-custody dispute between an
ex-Spriggs follower and his wife -- still a group member -- has unleashed
charges of widespread child abuse among members of the Kingdom and triggered a
boycott of half a dozen church-owned businesses by some locals.

    Outwardly, subjects of the Kingdom are a tranquil lot -- quiet young men and
modest women with kerchiefs on their heads. The charges against them became
public at a hearing in which former church member Juan Mattatall --
excommunicated for questioning the gospel according to Spriggs -- sought custody
of his five children, still living with his wife in one of the 13 Victorian
homes that serve as communes. Witnesses testified that all the Kingdom's
children, from tots to teens, received frequent and lengthy bare-bottom
thrashings with wooden rods -- during which they were supposed to smile and
thank their elders. The beatings so upset Charles and Tommye Brown, a couple
recruited personally by Spriggs in Wyoming, that they quit the Kingdom only a
few months after hitchhiking for two weeks to reach it. "I couldn't stand what
they were doing to their children," said Tommye. "I couldn't stand listening to
them cry."

    The Kingdom defends its "spare the rod, spoil the child" philosophy as Old
Testament discipline that drives out the Devil and renders the youngsters pure
of heart. "We're just trying to live a quiet, godly life," says Bill Hinchliffe,
a cheerful, young deacon. Local authorities have not been able to confirm
child-abuse charges because the Kingdom is virtually a closed society that shuns
contact with the outside world. Vermont state trooper Kathy Cunningham has
followed the case closely, but says the police cannot do much. "They've taken
away all our normal ways to detect child abuse," she says. "There are no
teachers to report scars, no doctors to report anything funny."

    Deaths: There are also no doctors to save lives. Local officials say that the
Kingdom's reliance on paramedics and a makeshift health facility may have led to
the deaths of three infants, including one whose spinal meningitis was
misdiagnosed as an ear infection. Cunningham says one of the dead babies weighed
only 13 pounds at eight months but had never been brought to a hospital.

    Elbert Spriggs could hardly have imagined such problems in 1972 when he
founded a shelter for runaways, drug abusers and other alienated youths in
Chattanooga. But when he discovered that his troubled flock was unwelcome in a
local church, he simply began one of his own -- and it soon became a potent
force. "Gene started feeling his oats, and we were working so hard toward the
Kingdom of God that we started to feel like a superior people," recalls Cliff
Daniels, who joined the church at 17 after a long talking session with Spriggs
and later became his right-hand man. Daniels, who quit the church in 1976 before
it left Tennessee, charges that Spriggs "is a father in the truest meaning of
the word . . . he has manipulated people's emotions, life-style and thoughts,
and used the Bible to do this."

    Yankee Thrift: If Spriggs is manipulating his flock in Island Pond, he is
doing it mostly from afar these days. Seldom seen in Vermont, he is reportedly
camping with his fourth wife and one of Mattatall's children in Portugal, where
followers say he contemplates establishing another Kingdom. Back in Vermont the
Kingdom appears to be thriving despite the boycott, thanks in part to two
traditional New England virtues: a reluctance to interfere in the affairs of
neighbors, and good, old-fashioned Yankee thrift. "They do fine work," says one
local, "and they charge a whole lot less than most folks around here." Others
believe that in any case, the controversy is overblown. "I think the whole
disadvantage for the group is that the Jonestown incident has sort of influenced
townsfolk," says Beverly Pepin, a local hairdresser. "The only comparison
between Jim Jones and Gene Spriggs is that when Jones started, he felt he was
the disciple of Christ too." Says one of the church's members: "We really trust
in the Lord to vindicate us."

GRAPHIC: Picture 1, Kingdom members: 'Trying to live a quiet, godly life',
Elaine Isaacson -- Burlington Free Press; Picture 2, The Browns with trooper
Cunningham: 'I couldn't stand listening to them cry', Ira Wyman; Picture 3,
Spriggs: Seldom seen, John W. Coniglio -- Chattanooga Times