Ditto Boys: Jesus Without Christ
This very long but excellent essay begins with an exclusive school named Westmont College, described by an alumnus as a “feeder school” for the (political) Christian conservative movement. (FWIW, I dislike referring to the current religious far-right as Christian “conservatives” because they are anything but—they’re radicals, extremists.)
The article was written by Jeff Sharlet, author of the book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, a must-read if you want to try to grasp the mindset of the religious far-right Tea Party types (or any extremists really). It’s so… twisted.
After describing the school, Mr. Sharlet proceeds to tell the story of Ben Daniel, a man who attended Westmont and contacted him after reading an essay he wrote about his time spent living with the Christian conservative movement called the Fellowship, or the Family (the same one that’s the subject of the book mentioned above).
Ben’s questions didn’t drive him away from his faith, they propelled him deeper into it. He began writing columns for the student newspaper about faith in the world. Standard social gospel fare, working with the poor, the hypocrisy of affluent Christians, American involvement in the late 1980s dirty wars of Central America. Radical by Westmont standards. And yet nobody could deny Ben’s sincerity, his intensity. He became a student-chaplain, and then, with the encouragement of the head chaplain, a man named Bart Tarman, Ben joined what Tarman called a “cell group,” a group of young men devoted to their faith through their devotion to one another.
Ben remembers Tarman telling them they should seal the deal: commit to being a cell group forever. Brothers for life. Such a brotherhood would be stronger than “Christianity,” a term, Ben recalls, that Tarman considered nothing more than a label. They could leave names like that behind. They could leave everything behind. Ben, in fact, should ease off writing for the paper. The brothers should live together. They would be special. The dean of students, Jonathan H. Hess, became one of their mentors. “Every guy confessed to one another,” Ben remembers. “Mostly, we talked about masturbation.” It was a sin, but not as great a sin as women. “It was supposed to be just men and Jesus. […]
This was not the social gospel. This was not what Ben believed. There was a man there Ben had only read about: a man said to run death squads in El Salvador.Ben didn’t want to own his girlfriend. He didn’t want to submit to his mentors. But the Fellowship wanted Ben. The older men invited him to Washington. By now Ben knew his cell was just one of many, that the main work of the organization was not with students in need of grooming but with “followers of Christ” in politics, business, overseas. In Washington he attended the Fellowship’s only public event (the Fellowship “works best when it’s clandestine,” another member told him), the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Public and not-public; the President of the United States is the star speaker and much of Congress attends, but the Breakfast belongs to the Fellowship. They decide who’s invited and where they sit and who attends the week of hotel suite meetings, the dinners, the receptions for generals and contractors and defense ministers around the globe.
This was not the social gospel. This was not what Ben believed. There was a man there Ben had only read about: a man said to run death squads in El Salvador. That made Ben’s decision easier. He chose the girl. He left the Fellowship behind. […]
Next we meet Dr. Ronald Enroth, a sociologist who has been teaching at Westmont for 39 years and specializes in the study of “spiritually abusive” religious movements that he sees as dangerous to his evangelical faith. He provides some fascinating insight into how these cultish, secretive, authoritarian groups operate. It’s incredibly creepy.
Spiritually abusive movements, Enroth explained, lack the most explicit warning signs by which we know fanaticism and charlatanism. They don’t usually believe in flying saucers, like the 39 suicides of Heaven’s Gate, or homegrown Christs with a taste for classic rock, like the Branch Davidians of Waco. They rarely retreat into compounds, they don’t stockpile weapons. But common to cults, “new religious movements” gone sour, and old church communities turned abusive, is an emphasis on submission and obedience, what one informant called “learned helplessness,” stumbling upon a common psychological term for a condition of perceived powerlessness that can lead to depression and mental illness.
Enroth ran down a list of characteristics of spiritual abuse: “disrupted families,” “surveillance,” “spiritual elitism,” ostracism of those who leave. I found myself nodding in recognition. It sounded like what I’d witnessed in the Fellowship. Later, I’d read in Enroth’s work about other aspects that were just as instantly recognizable:
—an emphasis on amorphous “attitudinal sins,” especially “rebelliousness”;
—suppression of dissent ;
—no institutional checks and balances;
—an aversion to publicity ;
—a perception of persecution, the notion that outsiders can never understand;
—a recruitment strategy that, in the beginning at least, denies that there’s anything to which to belong.
[…]
After Enroth departs we meet Dr. Shirley Mullen, the provost of Westmont College.
The first thing Mullen said when we met was, “anything associated with the Christian faith does not need more bad press.” But it soon became clear that the Fellowship, for her, was not exactly associated with the Christian faith. “Two things,” she told me, “cover my comments on the Fellowship. The first is that there is a wide range of people in the Fellowship.” She paused and stared at my notebook as if to be certain that I was writing that down; I assured her I understood that many—most!—of those involved with the Fellowship had the best of intentions, that I knew this to be true from my own experience. It was the leadership that puzzled me. As a woman who grew up in a faith context, it never would have occurred to me to ask how I could be a woman for God. I wanted to be a person for God.“The second,” Mullen continued, apparently satisfied, “which is a source of unease, is the very fact that the organization purports not to be.” That is, that if an outsider asks a member of the Fellowship about the Fellowship, he’ll likely say there is no Fellowship. “When I try to ask questions,” Mullen said, “I’m told there is nothing on paper. My uneasiness is brought about by two things. First of all, there was a time in this institution when a significant number of speakers in chapel seemed to have come through the Fellowship.” Chapel at Westmont is weekly and mandatory, though most students would attend regardless. Ambitious students take it seriously, not just as moral guidance but also as instruction for ascending in the world. Among all the worthy evangelical ministries and churches, why should the Fellowship have such a hold on this elite pulpit? “‘Why are there so many Fellowship speakers?’” she asked her colleagues. Nobody would provide an answer.
“Secondly,” she continued, “the Fellowship seems to have very distinct roles for men and women. I would say it this way. As a woman who grew up in a faith context, it never would have occurred to me to ask how I could be a woman for God. I wanted to be a person for God. The Fellowship emphasizes brotherhood. It emphasizes discipleship. It seems to leave women out. Its reading of scripture is selective; it leaves women in a supportive role. Not as actors, but as people who nurture the actors.”
The last person Mr. Sharlet interviewed at Westmont was Ben Patterson, the chaplain.
Patterson had no real brief to deliver for or against the Fellowship, just “gut feelings. The Fellowship has a lot of access to students here, but they’re sort of friendly-vague, we’re-not-saying-anything.” What bothered him, he said, was the paucity of faith he’d witnessed among the people involved. “It’s as if everything about the church gets shrunken down to ditto boys, to your buds, to the guys you hang out with. That’s all the church is for them. I believe the church is a lot bigger than that.” […]
There’s quite a bit more of interest from the chaplain, however out of respect for fair use of Mr. Sharlet’s work I don’t want to copy & paste more of the original than is needed to provide a feel for things.
The article ends with Mr. Sharlet making a 6-hour long nighttime drive from Santa Barbara to San Jose, contemplating the things he’s heard. It’s an engrossing piece—even the footnotes are good—so do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing over at Killing the Buddah.
Update - A little more info on the article:
@curtisbronzan @KtBuddha yes, as I say at beginning of the essay. This is material I didn’t have place for. But I thought it interesting.
— JeffSharlet (@JeffSharlet) September 13, 2013