This post will examine personal strategies which Christian individuals and groups can use to prevent being hijacked by religious dominators. Making sure that you are a healthy, well-informed person, and that your church is a healthy place is the best strategy for dealing with potential wolves.
The first and most personal strategy is simply this: to realize and believe that God loves you. There are many strategies used by abusive groups and leaders to ensnare recruits. But one thing that makes people quite vulnerable to exploitation by an abusive leader is the awareness that they are not whole or complete, combined with the leader's assertion that he has the answer for them. As such a leader encounters people with unmet needs and soul damage, he obtains great power over them by promising that he can meet their needs.
Often this promise is made through the practice of “love-bombing,” that is, when group members try to recruit a potential candidate by showering him or her with attention, care and affection in the initial stages of the candidate's involvement. This is done in order to form powerful, early bonds between the candidate and the group, in order to bring the candidate quickly into a state of dependency on the group. This strategy is very effective when used on people who have not experienced much kindness or love in their lives, people who instead have experienced a great deal of rejection. As the leader of such a group establishes himself as the ultimate source of the affection and attention being shown to the candidate, the candidate becomes more and more dependent on the leader. And if the leader and the group begin to withdraw that affection, or to attach strings to it, the recruit resorts to desperate measures to secure another love “fix.”
This is why in my old abusive church, members were always encouraged to pray with the elders and “leading brothers”; why members were subtly taught that in order for them to amount to anything, they needed the approval and attention of the “leading brothers” and elders; why people who prayed out loud in the meetings or men who preached in the meetings would often try to work themselves up into tears in order to obtain the sympathy of the leaders; and why so many of us zealously and unquestioningly enforced the things we were told by the leaders.
In short, these leaders inserted themselves into our lives as father figures, and their head honcho inserted himself into the lives of his deputies as their father figure. In many cases this strategy worked because many of us who joined this group came from homes in which the parenting we received was sadly lacking. But Christ Jesus said, “Call no man on the earth your father, for one is your Father, he who is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9) He also taught us to pray to our Father in heaven in the full expectation that our Heavenly Father is attentive to us and cares about our needs (Matthew 6:6-13). To believe this is to rely on it as truth, to rest the whole weight of your life on these words.
It is the stand which I have chosen to take, though I am no expert in this. I was taught a very wrong view of God by my old church, and I am still recovering from that. And I see great suffering in the world, and haven't yet figured out how it all fits into the grand scheme of things. But I have decided to believe that God loves me – tangibly, practically – and that I don't need to go running off to find some religious honcho to be my surrogate daddy. As 1 John 4:16 says, “We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” As I look over the last year and a half, I can see how He has met my material needs in merciful ways. One example: I am not rich (far from it), but I am now debt-free. And He is meeting my psychological needs, as I am drawn through blogging into meetings with fellow-travelers. God wants each Christian to rely fully on Him as a Heavenly Father, and to realize what it means that we are complete in Christ. This realization is a powerful antidote to those who would try to gain control over us by exploiting our natural incompleteness. The Bible says much about how God loves us in Christ. Study for yourself what it says and rely on it.
And this lesson – that we are loved – must be taught by Christian parents to Christian children. Children who know that their home is a safe place where they are welcome are far less vulnerable to manipulation by bad influences (such as gangs and cults) than those who feel as if they have no one to support them. But children don't begin to learn love through theology lessons and abstract reasoning, but rather by the modeling of concrete behavior. Christian parents, treat your children as if you love them. And don't let love be defined for you in the way some false teachers do, who talk much about “tough love,” severe discipline and authoritarian control as if that were the true sign of parents' love for their children. The Bible does teach that parents must discipline and correct their children when they go astray, yet it sets limits - “Fathers, don't provoke your children, so that they won't be discouraged (Colossians 3:21; read Ephesians 6:4 also).”
To those parents who are just escaping from a high-demand, authoritarian religious group, I say that you must realize that you may be carrying some baggage with you, baggage relating to your treatment of your children and the way in which the group may have tried subtly to redefine love into something that looks very much like cruelty. My suggestion: go rent an old video of episodes of Lassie – especially the episodes with Timmy and his adoptive parents. See how they treated him, then go and do likewise to your children.
Next, Christians should do all they can to educate themselves concerning the strategies of those who would try to enslave them. As 2 Corinthians 2:11 says, “...that no advantage may be gained over us by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his schemes.” Know what it means that you are free in Christ, in order that you may easily spot the theological attacks used by false teachers to move Christians away from true freedom in Christ into bondage. But don't stop with theology. Learn the psychological and sociological tricks used by abusive leaders in order to assert control over groups of people. As you learn, you will be able to spot these tricks as they are used in many other settings beside the church. (For instance, one thing you will learn is the large number of college graduates possessing advanced psychology degrees who go into the market research and advertising fields – and how much they get paid! And you didn't know why you keep buying things you don't need...)
I want to mention one particular trick that is popular with those seeking to enslave people or groups. I have just started reading The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a book by Naomi Klein. Her premise is that the rich masters of the present global economy have advanced free-market, corporation-friendly capitalism throughout the world by means of artificially-induced crises to a nation or culture which left the people of that nation in a temporary state of shock and disorientation. That shock state was then exploited by corporate masters and pro-business Western leaders to set up governments in the “shocked” regions which would be favorable to Western businesses in exploiting the poor and the natural resources of these nations and cultures. The aftermath of these shocks almost always resulted in a strong, domineering central government which gave great latitude to large private businesses while stripping rights away from its own citizens. She cites the September 11 tragedy and the mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as examples of the shock doctrine applied in the US (though I think she should also mention how President Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing to expand the reach of Federal government control over private citizens).
The shock doctrine can also be used to take over churches and Christian groups. The first step is to manufacture a crisis. Webster's Dictionary defines a crisis as “...an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending...” A crisis can be positive or negative. For instance, a would-be leader may send infiltrators to an established church to talk to the members about how “they have a great opportunity to hear deep teaching from a great man of God. But they mustn't let it slip or it will never come again!” Or the infiltrators might talk about how a particular church “...needs to grow, and it hasn't been growing like it should, and this is very, very bad, so we need to do something drastic!” Or, the crisis could be financial: “Gifts and tithes are diminishing, and this very ministry is in danger of ceasing! We must do something!”
The next step is of course to present the one man or group of people who have the answer to the crisis. And it is stated that in order to insure that this man or group has sufficient latitude and tools to address the crisis, the congregation or individual members must give unlimited authority and unquestioned submission to the person with the answer. Democratic processes, committees, member input and voting must be suspended so that the man with the answer can solve the crisis. The funny thing is that even after the “crisis” has been solved, the man with the “answer” is still in a position of absolute authority.
This strategy was used by George Geftakys to take over a number of house churches and para-church groups in the late 1960's and early 1970's when he was just starting his “Assemblies.” This strategy is also a hallmark of those who hijack churches to force them into a Warrenist “purpose-driven” agenda. Believe it or not, there are Lutherans who believe that this strategy is being used on the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, in order to transition it to a “purpose-driven” model, including the consolidation of financial and executive oversight in the hands of a chosen few. I don't consider myself to be Lutheran per se, but in the times I have visited Lutheran churches since leaving my old abusive church, I have always liked my visits, because the Lutherans seemed to be safe, conservative people not given to the excitement of intrigues. I guess maybe I was wrong!
Don't let yourselves be shocked by the shock doctrine into giving total control of your lives or your church to mere mortals.
Notes:
All Scripture quotations are taken from the World English Bible, a public domain translation. No royalties are owed to anyone for its use, and it may be freely quoted in all settings, public and private.
If you want another book that addresses the “shock doctrine,” read Leading Change by John P. Kotter (http://www.amazon.com/Leading-Change-John-P-Kotter/dp/0875847471/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209064439&sr=8-1).
If you want to look up news on the brewing Lutheran dust-up, here are some links: http://christianresearchnetwork.com/?p=4784; http://adelphoitouchristou.typepad.com/savethelcms/; and http://www.extremetheology.com/.
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