Jul 31, 2016

Grandson details life in Ohio 'beard-cutting' sect

Canton Repository

By Charita M. Goshay
Repository


Jul. 30, 2016 



Johnny Mast's parents have not seen their first-born grandchild, nor do they ever intend to see her. They are devout acolytes of Bishop Sam Mullet, the ultra-conservative Amish church leader imprisoned for hate crimes against other Amish.

Mast's parents refuse to have any contact with him because he left their community and their faith.

Mast, 26, shares his life as a grandson of Mullet in his new book, "Break Away Amish: Growing Up With The Bergholz Beard Cutters."

"There were a lot of people who wanted to know what was going on," he said of the book. "I figured that I would I put my story out there, and they can read the truth."

In 2012, Mullet, his three sons, a daughter, and 11 of his followers were convicted in federal court of hate crime charges. Those involved the kidnapping, assault, and forcible shavings of beards of Amish men and the hair of Amish women whom he believed opposed him.

Bergholz, located in Jefferson County just east of Carroll County, is a village of about 600 residents, about 300 of whom are Amish.

In his book, Mast details how Mullet kept an iron grip on his followers and grew increasingly radical in his beliefs and in his treatment of those he determined were "sinners."

"It happened very slowly," Mast said. "Sam was a very, very persuasive person. He got people to start believing in him. He predicted what was going to happen, and some things actually did. After that, some people believed he was a prophet."

 

Beards: A sacred identifier

 

Mullet's punishments for sinners and doubters, Mast alleges, ranged from forced labor, beatings, bread-and-water diets, sleeping in barns and chicken coops, and finally cutting the beards and hair of those deemed by the bishop to be rebellious.

"I wouldn't have put up with that, but it never happened to me," Mast said. "It was no longer about serving God and doing right. It was all about control."

Mullet's followers took pictures of the attacks using disposable cameras, further infringing upon the victims' religious rights. Among Mullet's many victims was his own sister.

Mast, who was tasked with hiding the disposable cameras, testified against Mullet in court.

Beards are a sacred, central identifier for married Amish men. The tradition began when Jakob Ammann broke from the Anabaptist church in the Alsace region of Switzerland, in the 1790s, over his belief that it was becoming increasing secular. Followers of the new faith originally were called "Ammann-ish" and distinguished themselves from other men of the period by not growing a mustache, which they considered a vanity.

Amish women do not cut their hair but do keep it tucked under bonnets. To this day, the Amish eschew many modern conveniences including electricity, store-bought clothing, bright colors and motorized equipment. In addition to English, they speak Swiss-German or "Pennsylvania" Dutch, depending on the region in which they live.

 

Mast contends that his grandfather impregnated a niece by marriage, and seduced other women, including his own daughter-in-law, under the guise of counseling them.

As such incidents found their way to the outside, the Bergholz Amish found themselves isolated from their Amish neighbors, which made it easier for Mullett to exert control.

"In a normal Amish community, they have a means for removing a bishop," Mast explained. "(Other bishops) tried to step in and take control, but they couldn't."

Mast writes that when he was 17, Mullett ordered him to move into his home, which meant that any money Mast made from working in construction went to his grandfather, and not his parents, as is Amish tradition.

Mast said at one point, Mullet ordered his group to stop attending church and reading the Bible amid claims that Satan was twisting the Scriptures.

 

"Still in control"

 

Mullet, who could have received life in prison, is serving at least 10 years. Subsequent appeals for leniency have been rejected by the courts.

"He's still in control and has been the entire time," Mast said. "He makes at least 15 calls every day and writes letters" of instruction.

Several ministers under Mullet have been released from prison, including his nephew and niece-in-law.

"The last I heard from one of my cousins still living there is that both of them are in living in Sam's house," Mast said. "(Mullet's) instructed women he was sleeping with, to choose seven men to be in control."

Today, Mast lives with his girlfriend and baby in Middlefield, where he works as a full-time farrier.

He no longer attends church.

"For me, it's not about going to church," he said. "I still believe in God; I try to treat other people as I'd want to be treated."

Mast said he doesn't know if his parents are aware of his book.

"The biggest thing I want people to realize and learn is you have to be careful about listening to what someone tells you," he said. "You have to make up your own mind and live your own life."

Mast said that, in his opinion, Mullet's sect is a cult.

"At first, when it happened, I was still living there," Mast said. "I thought (the prison sentence) was pretty harsh. But after being away for three years and looking it from the other side, I think it fit. I think he got what he deserved.

"But as far as I know, he still doesn't think he did anything wrong."

The book is available from Amazon.com and Christian bookstores throughout the U.S.

 

 

http://www.cantonrep.com/news/20160730/grandson-details-life-in-ohio-beard-cutting-sect\

 

Polygamous towns gradually becoming conventional American community

NATE CARLISLE

The Salt Lake Tribune

July 30 2016

 

More businesses, students and private property have plural-marriage town looking more like mainstream USA.

 

Colorado City, Ariz. • The train is running again in Cottonwood Park — the small engine pulling kids in miniature cars on the thin tracks of steel that circle the park.

The park looks good, too. After years of atrophy, tables and benches were painted for the July Fourth community party. Broken windows have been replaced in the restrooms and outbuildings.

On Central Street, the new Dollar General store is open. In adjoining Hildale, Utah, a dentist plans to open a practice.

A music festival is set for October. More parents are enrolling their children in the public schools. And George Jessop would like to start a restaurant. TOP JOBS

It would be called "The Destination." Photos of the nearby national parks would hang on the walls. So would something else: long-sleeve shirts and prairie dresses — the traditional attire of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Jessop knows that the tradition of polygamy in Colorado City and Hildale, collectively known as Short Creek, would attract visitors, too.

"This is just a little oasis that's just been discovered," Jessop said.

Short Creek, once known as an isolated enclave for polygamists who didn't say hello to strangers, is threatening to become a conventional American community.

More and more people are leaving the FLDS and the rigid prohibitions imposed by its leaders. Dissenters are reunifying with people who split from the faith earlier, and they want contact and commerce with the rest of the world.

Short Creek's location and its residents' history offer opportunities — and challenges.

 

America keeps rolling past

Short Creek sits on Utah's State Road 59, which becomes Arizona 389. It is one hour from Zion National Park and two hours from the Grand Canyon.

Smithsonian Butte National Back Country Byway stops just outside Hildale. There are nearby national forests on both sides of the state line. According to the Utah Department of Transportation, an average of 3,695 vehicles rolled past Hildale daily in 2015.

"There's enough money driving by everyday," said Harvey Dockstader Jr., president of the new Uzona Chamber of Commerce, which was formed to promote businesses in Short Creek and nearby rural townships. "We can turn this into a thriving community."

At the moment, Short Creek is doing almost nothing to make tourists stop there. The towns — Colorado City, with an estimated population of 4,821, and Hildale, 2,927 — have one gas station between them. Next to that station is the Merry Wives Cafe, which offers a menu of sandwiches, french fries and salads, and a Subway restaurant.

The only lodging is America's Most Wanted Bed & Breakfast, which debuted in 2014 in a compound built for FLDS President Warren Jeffs, who is serving up to life in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting two underage girls he took as polygamous wives.

Jessop sees the omissions as openings. As he sat at a picnic table with his wife, Miriam Jessop, and Dockstader in Cottonwood Park during a Fourth of July celebration, Jessop described some of his vision for Short Creek.

In addition to opening The Destination, Jessop, 49, wants to start a tour company to take visitors to petroglyphs in the area. Jessop manages Most Wanted and already takes some of its guests on such a tour.

Miriam Jessop, 47, wants the Uzona Chamber to sponsor more festivals and community events in Short Creek, like it did for Independence Day, to attract visitors and locals.

"It's about our kids," the mother of 12 said. "If we can't create a good community for our children, what are we doing?"

Creating a service economy will be a change for Short Creek. The towns' primary industries have always been construction and manufacturing, though with some unique FLDS characteristics.

Those businesses traditionally have been loyal to the FLDS and its communal form of living. Men who worked in the businesses often have been paid below minimum wage or were expected to turn over their paychecks to the church in exchange for housing, an opportunity to marry, good standing in their faith and a chance at eternal salvation. FLDS women seldom worked outside the home.

Dockstader said entrepreneurs in Short Creek will be willing to follow labor laws, but they may need an education on how to do that. He wants the Uzona Chamber to hold trainings on topics such as wage and tax compliance.

"There's still a great workforce, and a really great work ethic," Dockstader said. But he sees a more pressing cultural obstacle: getting the locals to patronize Short Creek.

The FLDS still comprise at least half the population in the towns, and they seldom shop at businesses not in favor with church leaders. Dockstader in 2014 opened a store in Colorado City called Home Spun Health that sells nutritional and health products. The store has yet to make money, he said.

"The FLDS will drive for hours to buy gas, goods and services, but they won't go across the street," Dockstader said.

"I understand their positions, and why they don't want to participate," George Jessop said. "They've got their heads in a vice."

 

The disenfranchised return

Dockstader and the Jessops are examples of the new unities being formed in Short Creek.

In the mid-1980s, the FLDS underwent a split over its governance. Those who wanted both spiritual and political power in a prophet, known as "One Man Rule," stayed with the FLDS. Those who wanted to be governed by a council formed their own community immediately south of Colorado City in an unincorporated area that has become known as Centennial Park. Today Centennial Park has about 1,200 residents. The Centennial Park group continues to practice polygamy, but wears conventional clothing and has largely assimilated into modern American life. The group also has not had the history of child sex abuse and lawbreaking that has followed the FLDS.

Dockstader, 50, and his family have lived in Centennial Park since 1987. For almost three decades, he didn't see or speak to the friends and family he had in the FLDS. But in recent years, as people have left the FLDS, the kids who grew up together before the split have reunited. Dockstader said he recently moved back to Colorado City.

"This is home," he said.

George and Miriam Jessop were loyal FLDS followers, but they gradually saw other families split, either because Jeffs evicted the husbands from the faith or sent husbands and wives to different FLDS enclaves. One day in 2012, the Jessops said, they had a conversation. Did they want to stay married and stay together, or did they want to wait for Jeffs to separate them? They decided to leave the FLDS.

For those following the Jessops out of the FLDS, there are more resources than ever. Families and old friends often help those leaving the church. Social-service agencies offer food, clothing and temporary shelter to families leaving the FLDS.

Also, anyone who grew up in the FLDS can apply for a home through the United Effort Plan, the trust that owns most of the land in Short Creek and which Utah seized in 2005 over concerns that Jeffs was mismanaging it. Since, 2014 the UEP has been selling homes in Hildale to trust beneficiaries at low costs. Those sales have encouraged former FLDS members to move back to Hildale.

The movement back to Hildale spurred the Washington County School District to open Water Canyon School in Hildale in 2014. Some 160 students were enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade the first year. Principal Darin Thomas expects 400 students when classes resume in August.

Keith Leonard, a 67-year-old retired dentist from Arlington, Wash., recently bought an old dentist office that belonged to the UEP and is finishing remodeling it. Leonard will lease it to a dentist who plans to move his practice to Hildale — the first dentist in Short Creek in years.

"You don't need to go to a third-world country to see need," Leonard said. "Just drive down to Hildale."

Leonard was the mission president in St. George for the mainstream LDS Church in 2010, when people started telling him stories about life in Short Creek — evictions, separation from families, sex abuse, poverty. He said the FLDS is a "dying culture" and Short Creek is less marginalized than when he first started visiting.

"It's becoming more of a normalized community," Leonard said, adding: "It's got a ways to go."

 

The government's little role

While Hildale is gaining homeownership and the benefits that go with it, homes in Colorado City remain under UEP ownership. A dispute over subdividing has prevented home sales there. Entire city blocks remain as one parcel at the county recorder's office. The trust and the municipal government are litigating the issue in Arizona courts, with Colorado City refusing to approve subdivision plans because they do not include items such as curb and sidewalk improvements that the UEP argues are excessive and costly.

Representatives of Hildale and Colorado City government did not reply to interview requests.

Jeff Barlow, UEP's executive director, said Colorado City is slowing progress in the area. While residents are getting deeds to houses and spending money to improve them in Hildale, they are waiting in Colorado City.

Barlow points to his own experience. He left Short Creek after high school, joined the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, got married and moved back with his wife and three children in early 2015. At first, they had only an occupancy agreement, sort of a rental contract that the UEP created, to live in their home. Once Barlow and his wife were approved to buy their home, they began renovations and landscaping.

"For the most part," Barlow said, "construction had completely frozen under the Warren Jeffs regime."

Barlow, 38, said the sense of community in Short Creek is better than when he grew up there. Back then, everyone was FLDS and those out of favor with the leaders were ostracized. The community is more diverse and accepting now, he said.

"You can have a barbecue and anyone can come," Barlow said, "and it's fantastic."

Dockstader wants the reunification with Centennial Park codified. He would like Colorado City to annex Centennial Park to provide Centennial Park residents with representation in local government and more infrastructure and tax base to both sides.

To do that, and to make other political changes in the towns, including fixing problems highlighted earlier this year in a lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department won against Hildale, Colorado City and their police forces, will mean winning at the polls. FLDS followers still hold the elected and appointed positions in municipal government. Dockstader wants to get people registered to vote for the municipal elections in 2017.

None of the elected officials was seen among the thousands of people who were in Cottonwood Park on July Fourth. Dockstader contended residents in Short Creek do feel a love of country.

"It's time," he said, "for it to be nurtured and spread."

 

ncarlisle@sltrib.com Twitter: @natecarlisle

 

http://www.sltrib.com/home/4076223-155/polygamous-towns-gradually-becoming-conventional-american

 

Break Away Amish

Ohio 'beard-cutting' sect

Johnny Mast's book.

Charita M. Goshay
Repository
July 30, 2016

Johnny Mast's parents have not seen their first-born grandchild, nor do they ever intend to see her. They are devout acolytes of Bishop Sam Mullet, the ultra-conservative Amish church leader imprisoned for hate crimes against other Amish.

Mast's parents refuse to have any contact with him because he left their community and their faith.

Mast, 26, shares his life as a grandson of Mullet in his new book, "Break Away Amish: Growing Up With The Bergholz Beard Cutters."

"There were a lot of people who wanted to know what was going on," he said of the book. "I figured that I would I put my story out there, and they can read the truth."

In 2012, Mullet, his three sons, a daughter, and 11 of his followers were convicted in federal court of hate crime charges. Those involved the kidnapping, assault, and forcible shavings of beards of Amish men and the hair of Amish women whom he believed opposed him.

Bergholz, located in Jefferson County just east of Carroll County, is a village of about 600 residents, about 300 of whom are Amish.

In his book, Mast details how Mullet kept an iron grip on his followers and grew increasingly radical in his beliefs and in his treatment of those he determined were "sinners."

"It happened very slowly," Mast said. "Sam was a very, very persuasive person. He got people to start believing in him. He predicted what was going to happen, and some things actually did. After that, some people believed he was a prophet."

Beards: A sacred identifier

Mullet's punishments for sinners and doubters, Mast alleges, ranged from forced labor, beatings, bread-and-water diets, sleeping in barns and chicken coops, and finally cutting the beards and hair of those deemed by the bishop to be rebellious.

"I wouldn't have put up with that, but it never happened to me," Mast said. "It was no longer about serving God and doing right. It was all about control."

Mullet's followers took pictures of the attacks using disposable cameras, further infringing upon the victims' religious rights. Among Mullet's many victims was his own sister.

Mast, who was tasked with hiding the disposable cameras, testified against Mullet in court.

Beards are a sacred, central identifier for married Amish men. The tradition began when Jakob Ammann broke from the Anabaptist church in the Alsace region of Switzerland, in the 1790s, over his belief that it was becoming increasing secular. Followers of the new faith originally were called "Ammann-ish" and distinguished themselves from other men of the period by not growing a mustache, which they considered a vanity.

Amish women do not cut their hair but do keep it tucked under bonnets. To this day, the Amish eschew many modern conveniences including electricity, store-bought clothing, bright colors and motorized equipment. In addition to English, they speak Swiss-German or "Pennsylvania" Dutch, depending on the region in which they live.

Mast contends that his grandfather impregnated a niece by marriage, and seduced other women, including his own daughter-in-law, under the guise of counseling them.

As such incidents found their way to the outside, the Bergholz Amish found themselves isolated from their Amish neighbors, which made it easier for Mullett to exert control.

"In a normal Amish community, they have a means for removing a bishop," Mast explained. "(Other bishops) tried to step in and take control, but they couldn't."

Mast writes that when he was 17, Mullett ordered him to move into his home, which meant that any money Mast made from working in construction went to his grandfather, and not his parents, as is Amish tradition.

Mast said at one point, Mullet ordered his group to stop attending church and reading the Bible amid claims that Satan was twisting the Scriptures.

"Still in control"

Mullet, who could have received life in prison, is serving at least 10 years. Subsequent appeals for leniency have been rejected by the courts.

"He's still in control and has been the entire time," Mast said. "He makes at least 15 calls every day and writes letters" of instruction.

Several ministers under Mullet have been released from prison, including his nephew and niece-in-law.

"The last I heard from one of my cousins still living there is that both of them are in living in Sam's house," Mast said. "(Mullet's) instructed women he was sleeping with, to choose seven men to be in control."

Today, Mast lives with his girlfriend and baby in Middlefield, where he works as a full-time farrier.

He no longer attends church.

"For me, it's not about going to church," he said. "I still believe in God; I try to treat other people as I'd want to be treated."

Mast said he doesn't know if his parents are aware of his book.

"The biggest thing I want people to realize and learn is you have to be careful about listening to what someone tells you," he said. "You have to make up your own mind and live your own life."

Mast said that, in his opinion, Mullet's sect is a cult.

"At first, when it happened, I was still living there," Mast said. "I thought (the prison sentence) was pretty harsh. But after being away for three years and looking it from the other side, I think it fit. I think he got what he deserved.

"But as far as I know, he still doesn't think he did anything wrong."

The book is available from Amazon.com and Christian bookstores throughout the U.S.

Jul 30, 2016

Religious freedom or medical neglect? Idaho lawmakers take up faith-healing exemption

JULY 29, 2016

Idaho Statesman

BY BILL DENTZER

bdentzer@idahostatesman.com

 

The last person arrested in Idaho for putting religion ahead of medicine for a sick child might have been Lewis Anis of Kimberly, near Twin Falls, who was charged with refusing to provide medical attention when his 13-year-old daughter died.

The year was 1915.

“Girl dies from neglect” the Idaho Statesman reported at the time. The story said authorities called to the family’s two-room home found the child “in bed, fully dressed and dying.”

“No medical aid had been summoned and strenuous objections were made by the father and mother of the family to the removal of the child to the hospital or to any medical aid being given to her,” the paper reported.

The girl did go to the hospital, but died there. Her father was arrested after an autopsy. Her death certificate said Pearl Anis died of sepsis. The story ended by noting that her father was “a member of a religious cult known as the Followers of Christ, which disapproves of medical attention to the sick.” The paper reported another child death two years later under similar circumstances.

What happened after in the Anis case is likely lost to history. But bear the story in mind next week, more than a century later, when a committee of Idaho lawmakers takes up the question of whether First Amendment religious freedoms are a proper and permissible legal defense to withholding treatment in such cases, even if a child dies.

Now, as then, the practices and beliefs of the Followers of Christ group are central to the debate. The literalist Pentecostal sect has congregations in areas of Owyhee, Canyon, Ada and Twin Falls counties. Some say that more members have moved to Idaho from neighboring Oregon in the years since Idaho’s neighbor to the west eliminated faith-healing exemptions from its criminal statutes.

As with many debates involving faith, the issue gouges sharp societal battle lines here. Idaho, with a large population of Mormons whose beliefs were long held in contempt or ridicule by majority religions, is particularly sensitive to religious freedom concerns.

But child advocates, prosecutors, medical professionals and former members of faith-healing sects with stories to tell have been pressing the case for change. That’s what’s brought Idaho to the current moment.

How did this all start? And will this committee be able to sort it out?

“I’m looking for guidance on this,” said Sen. Dan Schmidt, D-Moscow, a committee member who is a family physician and former Latah County coroner. “I do think the state has a responsibility to protect children, but protect them from what? Can you look at how a parent is treating a child and know that it’s abuse or not?”

Followers of Christ members are media-shy and typically decline interviews. Sen. Dan Johnson, R-Lewiston, one of the legislative committee co-chairs, met with members July 6 “so we could both get comfortable with each other.” He said they had agreed to participate in the committee’s work.

Johnson declined to predict what the committee will end up doing.

“What I’m looking for is the needle in the haystack that is going to meet the state’s interests and at the same time protect the rights of individuals,” Johnson said. “I know that it’s going to be a tough issue, and that there are those who think we should just leave everything alone. I respect that. But this working group, we’ve been tasked with looking at this so I want to make sure we give it a hard look and do the job that we’ve been asked to do.”

State standard not new — or old

Idaho’s faith-healing exemption dates to 1972. The year before, the Legislature approved a top-to-bottom rewrite of state penal code, adopting changes recommended under a model advocated by a national legal group seeking to standardize and modernize American laws.

Among other changes, the new code that took effect in January 1972 decriminalized consensual gay sex. That produced an immediate citizen backlash. In the 1972 session, legislators quickly moved to amend parts of the new code. But so many amendments were proposed that lawmakers opted instead for full-scale repeal, driven mostly by the uproar over the gay sex issue. They dumped the new code and reinstated the old one, with immediate effect.

In that same session, after the old code was reinstated, an amendment to laws on family abandonment and nonsupport passed through the House and Senate without debate. The change removed penalties for withholding medical assistance in cases where a parent or guardian “chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.”

That specific language is boilerplate Christian Science terminology, as the advocacy group Idaho Children notes. In fact, the state Bar Association referred to it as the Christian Science amendment. Two years later, Christian Scientists were involved in creating similar exempting language in federal child abuse protection statute. The 1974 Child Abuse and Prevention and Treatment Act included a provision, reportedly added by Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, both Christian Scientists, requiring states to enact faith-healing or “spiritual treatment” exemptions to receive federal funds for anti-child abuse programs. Founded in 1879, the church has moderated from its onetime outright rejection of modern medicine and now is said to let members choose for themselves.

In response to the federal law, Idaho enacted three additional changes in 1976 and 1977. State code thus has four provisions involving the exemption: in civil code regarding neglect and emergency treatment in child protection cases; and in criminal code regarding family abandonment and injury to children.

After lobbying, the federal government eliminated the requirement in 1983. Several states have followed suit. Oregon did so in 2011. Idaho has not and remains one of six states with what amounts to a religious defense for child manslaughter, even capital murder, in its code.

Rep. John Gannon, a Boise Democrat, has twice sponsored bills that address one of the criminal code exemptions, in 2014 and again this year. Advocates say this year’s effort was slated for a Senate hearing, although the committee chairman, Lee Heider of Twin Falls, later disputed that. The facts are in question, and Heider came under fire for his handling of the issue and his defense of the exemption on First Amendment grounds.

So how and why was this interim committee formed?

Gov. Butch Otter wrote to legislative leaders in February asking that they study the issue. The request was based on work and findings by governor-appointed Task Force on Children at Risk, whose chairman outlined concerns in a July 2015 letter to the governor. Among the concerns: the number of Idaho children who apparently died after live-saving care was withheld. The task force’s Child Fatality Review Team, in its 2016 report, documents 10 such deaths between 2011 and 2013. Child advocates think there may be more that just haven’t been documented yet.

What is the legal issue and has any court ruled on it?

The Followers of Christ and their supporters, who include prominent Idaho legislators, argue that withholding medical care in favor of prayer is a religious belief protected by the First Amendment. Heider has expressed that view, and Rep. Christy Perry, R-Nampa, also has been outspoken, seeing it as an issue of religious freedom and parent rights.

But child safety advocates cite weaknesses with the religious freedom argument. For one, children of church members are not making their own decisions about their medical care. For another, numerous laws already regulate or outlaw religious practices.

“An adult’s religious freedom crosses the line when it causes death to a child,” says Linda Martin, a native Boisean who left the Followers of Christ church decades ago at 16 and now leads citizen efforts to change Idaho’s laws. She maintains connections within the church and is related to many members.

As for the courts, Prince v. Massachusetts is a 1944 U.S. Supreme Court case that dealt with a Jehovah’s Witness couple accused of violating that state’s child labor laws by making a nine-year-old girl proselytize in public. The 5-4 ruling said government has wide authority to regulate the treatment of children.

“Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves,” Justice Wiley Rutledge wrote for the majority. “But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, 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.”

That decision cited a 1903 New York court ruling in a case where a father had refused medical treatment for his daughter on religious grounds. The girl died. The earlier case said that freedom of religion did not include the freedom to expose a child “to ill health or death.”

In 2011, Oregon removed the last of its faith-healing legal protections. A county prosecutor lauded the move for making all parents subject to the same rules. One couple was convicted of withholding medical care the same month the new law went into effect, another couple three months later. Oregon’s last prosecution ended in November 2014 with manslaughter convictions for a couple in the death of their 12-year-old daughter from treatable diabetes.

So how will changing the law change things?

Beyond the obvious legal deterrent, proponents say changing the law would end what amounts to a special legal privilege now extended to people of certain religious faiths. It also would likely promote closer monitoring and better tracking of childhood deaths.

It might help anguished parents in faith-healing church navigate between obligations to faith and family, giving them legal cause to resist pressure, shunning and threats that ex-church members say they face.

Joshua Durham, a doctor in family medicine with Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, has spoken to former Followers of Christ members and has personal experience having left a similar Christian sect in Twin Falls in his 20s. When a child comes down with a life-threatening illness, members end up in a double-bind.

“They’ll tell them, ‘If your kid doesn’t get better, it’s because you don’t have enough faith.’ And if they take their kid to the doctor, they don’t have enough faith. ‘You’re going to get punished for that,’” Durham said. “It puts them in these bad situations where they can’t win.”

With a change in the law to remove the exemption, “They would be able to just tell their leader, ‘Well, I don’t want to go to jail.’ 

FOLLOWERS OF CHRIST

A small Pentecostal faith with about 1,200 members, founded in Kansas around 1880. The group adheres to a literal interpretation of scripture, including a belief in faith healing. In the 1920s, members began missions from Oklahoma west to Idaho and California, and an offshoot of the main group relocated to Oregon City, Ore., in the 1940s.

In Idaho, there are Followers of Christ churches or congregations in Caldwell, where the Peaceful Valley cemetery is located, as well as Meridian, Marsing, Cambridge, the Castleford-Buhl area and possibly elsewhere.

INTERIM COMMITTEE MEETS THIS WEEK

The Children at Risk-Faith Healing working group has its first meeting at 9 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 4, in Room EW42 of the Capitol.

Members are: Sens. Dan Johnson, R-Lewiston (co-chair); Jeff Siddoway, R-Terreton; Marv Hagedorn, R-Meridian; Mark Harris, R-Soda Springs; Dan Schmidt, D-Moscow; and Reps. Joe Palmer, R-Meridian (co-chair); Steven Harris, R-Meridian; Clark Kauffman, R-Filer; Janet Trujillo, R-Idaho Falls; John Gannon, D-Boise.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article92784987.html

Louis Theroux's My Scientology Movie: Taking On The World's Most Secretive 'Church'


What does the Church of Scientology have to hide?

July 29. 2016

Emily Verdouw Associate Video Editor, HuffPost Australia

Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie, a film investigating the mysterious 'religion' created by sci-fi writer L.Ron Hubbard, is over before it even begins.

And that's no surprise. Because every story ever attempted at better understanding this 'church' by any skeptical journalist in the past, has immediately been stone-walled by Scientologists.

Which is why Louis Theroux let go of the idea over 15 years ago. After his first attempts in 2002 were quickly squashed by the powers that be.

Theroux, a journalist that has mastered gaining access and sympathies of the strangest of stranger-than-fiction subcultures around the world (and mostly in the US) was denied entry into their world.

Despite this, over a decade later, Theroux, along with director John Dower and Academy Award winning producer Simon Chinn (Searching for Sugar Man, Man on Wire) persisted and have created a documentary that still manages to explore the enigma that is Scientology while leaving the viewer with a better understanding of the lengths the church will go to to protect its inner-world and their leader -- David Miscavige.

They do this by mimicking the very methods Miscavige and his 'church' use to recruit new members. By hiring actors to tell the story.

The documentary recreates alleged events taken place under Miscavige's leadership, rumours of beatings, of anger and vitriol at anyone who threatens the instability of their leaders ego -- a man accountable to no one, and seemingly, especially not to journalists.

They do this with the help of former Scientology second-in-command Mark 'Marty' Ruthburn, who left the church in 2004 and is now their primary whistleblower.

"I was the baddest ass dude in Scientology," he tells Theroux.

Instead of having Ruthburn regurgitate the same stories he has told in the past, Theroux has him direct actors in scenes that illustrate his experiences and those other ex-members claim to have gone through. All to better understand the 'religion'.

They film the entire process of hiring actors to play high-profile members like David Miscavige and Tom Cruise, from auditions through to the final scenes.

"I find that the most inexplicable behaviour is motivated by very relatable human impulses," Theroux comments in the film.

Theroux is persistent in his questioning of everyone in the film and remains the master of pursuing awkwardness, while reaming comfortable in the moment.

He remains unshakeable even when it appears the organisation has a car tailing him for hours on end. Even as random members pop up through the course of the film harassing Ruthburn for speaking out. And even as halfway through the film, the Church of Scientology reveal they're creating their own documentary on Louis Theroux.

It's the culmination of this bizarre behaviour by the church and Theroux's mastery of awkwardness that lead to many seriously laugh-out-loud moments in the film.

But it's the kind of humour that's funny because it all seems too strange to be true.

And by the end of the film one question remains: with all efforts to rebuff Theroux and his team, what is it that the Church of Scientology has to hide?

Ryan Bundy Says He's 'Idiot' Sovereign Citizen Not Subject To Federal Law

TPM

By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND

JULY 29, 2016

 

In a baffling series of court motions filed Thursday, one of the men who led a 41-day occupation earlier this year of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon declared himself a sovereign citizen free from the bounds of federal laws.

Ryan Bundy claimed that he was a “idiot of the ‘Legal Society’” in documents filed to U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown, as Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

“I, ryan c, man, am an idiot of the ‘Legal Society’; and; am an idiot (layman, outsider) of the ‘Bar Association’; and; i am incompetent; and; am not required by any law to be competent,” Bundy wrote.

Along with his brother Ammon and some two dozen others, Bundy faces felony conspiracy charges for illegally occupying the wildlife refuge in remote eastern Oregon to protest federal land ownership.

Ryan Bundy is representing himself in the case.

In another filing, he declared himself a sovereign citizen of the “bundy society” who was a creation of God, not a “person” as defined by “the unholy bible of the Legal Society.”

His brother, Ammon Bundy, signed the declaration of sovereign citizenship as a witness.

Ryan Bundy’s behavior has become increasingly erratic since he was jailed this spring. Earlier in July, he prepared for an escape attempt by braiding his bed sheets into a 12-15 foot rope and stockpiling food and other goods.

After authorities prevented the escape, he told Judge Robert Jones that he was “a rancher, trying to practice braiding rope,” according to OPB.

Read some of the filings below, courtesy of OPB:

 

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ryan-bundy-declares-self-idiot-sovereign-citizen

 

Jul 29, 2016

Study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances


BY STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER ON JULY 28, 2016 COGNITION

Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you’re floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your mind and body like this is all thanks to changes in a few specific areas of the brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.

The scientists scanned the brains of 57 people during guided hypnosis sessions similar to those that might be used clinically to treat anxiety, pain or trauma. Distinct sections of the brain have altered activity and connectivity while someone is hypnotized, they report in a study that will be published online July 28 in Cerebral Cortex.

“Now that we know which brain regions are involved, we may be able to use this knowledge to alter someone’s capacity to be hypnotized or the effectiveness of hypnosis for problems like pain control,” said the study’s senior author, David Spiegel, MD, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

A serious science

For some people, hypnosis is associated with loss of control or stage tricks. But doctors like Spiegel know it to be a serious science, revealing the brain’s ability to heal medical and psychiatric conditions.

“Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes,” said Spiegel, who holds the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professorship in Medicine. “In fact, it’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”

Despite a growing appreciation of the clinical potential of hypnosis, though, little is known about how it works at a physiological level. While researchers have previously scanned the brains of people undergoing hypnosis, those studies have been designed to pinpoint the effects of hypnosis on pain, vision and other forms of perception, and not the state of hypnosis itself.

“There had not been any studies in which the goal was to simply ask what’s going on in the brain when you’re hypnotized,” said Spiegel.

Finding the most susceptible

To study hypnosis itself, researchers first had to find people who could or couldn’t be hypnotized. Only about 10 percent of the population is generally categorized as “highly hypnotizable,” while others are less able to enter the trancelike state of hypnosis. Spiegel and his colleagues screened 545 healthy participants and found 36 people who consistently scored high on tests of hypnotizability, as well as 21 control subjects who scored on the extreme low end of the scales.

Then, they observed the brains of those 57 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Each person was scanned under four different conditions — while resting, while recalling a memory and during two different hypnosis sessions.

“It was important to have the people who aren’t able to be hypnotized as controls,” said Spiegel. “Otherwise, you might see things happening in the brains of those being hypnotized but you wouldn’t be sure whether it was associated with hypnosis or not.”

Brain activity and connectivity

Spiegel and his colleagues discovered three hallmarks of the brain under hypnosis. Each change was seen only in the highly hypnotizable group and only while they were undergoing hypnosis.

First, they saw a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network. “In hypnosis, you’re so absorbed that you’re not worrying about anything else,” Spiegel explained.

Secondly, they saw an increase in connections between two other areas of the brain — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. He described this as a brain-body connection that helps the brain process and control what’s going on in the body.

Finally, Spiegel’s team also observed reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network, which includes the medial prefrontal and the posterior cingulate cortex. This decrease in functional connectivity likely represents a disconnect between someone’s actions and their awareness of their actions, Spiegel said. “When you’re really engaged in something, you don’t really think about doing it — you just do it,” he said. During hypnosis, this kind of disassociation between action and reflection allows the person to engage in activities either suggested by a clinician or self-suggested without devoting mental resources to being self-conscious about the activity.

In patients who can be easily hypnotized, hypnosis sessions have been shown to be effective in lessening chronic pain, the pain of childbirth and other medical procedures; treating smoking addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder; and easing anxiety or phobias. The new findings about how hypnosis affects the brain might pave the way toward developing treatments for the rest of the population — those who aren’t naturally as susceptible to hypnosis.

“We’re certainly interested in the idea that you can change people’s ability to be hypnotized by stimulating specific areas of the brain,” said Spiegel.

A treatment that combines brain stimulation with hypnosis could improve the known analgesic effects of hypnosis and potentially replace addictive and side-effect-laden painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, he said. More research, however, is needed before such a therapy could be implemented.

The study’s lead author is Heidi Jiang, a former research assistant at Stanford who is currently a graduate student in neuroscience at Northwestern University.

http://www.psypost.org/2016/07/study-identifies-brain-areas-altered-hypnotic-trances-44074

The Curious Rise of Scientology in Taiwan


A church facing setbacks elsewhere finds an unlikely foothold.

 

The Atlantic

2016/07

·    BENJAMIN CARLSON

At the end of 2013, in the low-slung, industrial Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, a bevy of officials came to attend the ribbon cutting of a huge former hotel that had undergone a top-to-bottom, multimillion-dollar renovation. Speaking before the throngs of celebrants who blocked the flow of traffic, Taiwan's deputy director of the Ministry of the Interior praised the group that funded the renovation and presented them, for the 10th year straight, with the national "Excellent Religious Group" award.

"For years you have dedicated your time and lives to anti-drug work and human- rights dissemination," said the director, echoing praise offered by the mayor's office and the president's national-policy adviser.

The name on the award was the same as the one newly blazoned in steel letters across the building's façade, the same as the one that flanked the building in a gigantic vertical banner, a name that elsewhere might draw stares but in Taiwan has drawn government praise: SCIENTOLOGY.

Scientology around the world is in broad retreat, but to be in Taiwan you would never know that. In an area slightly smaller than the combined size of Delaware and Maryland, with a total population of 23.4 million—roughly the same as that of the New York metropolitan area—Taiwan has 15 Scientology missions and churches. Per capita, it's one of the most Scientology-friendly countries on earth. The island serves as a major source of donations and new members for the church, which has capitalized on L. Ron Hubbard's early suggestions that he was a new Buddha. In a sign of Taiwan's importance to the church, Scientology chief David Miscavige also attended the 2013 Kaohsiung reopening of the hotel as a Scientology megachurch.

Elsewhere, including its homeland the United States, Scientology has been facing setbacks. Some of Scientology's highest-ranking members have left the church in recent years and denounced its leaders for alleged abuses. Defectors have also leaked documents, exposing the church's secrets to unwanted scrutiny. Celebrity members have left its ranks, including the King of Queens actress Leah Remini and  the Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis.

And though the church claims millions of members, census figures say its numbers in the U.S. may have fallen to 25,000 or lower in 2008 from a peak of 55,000 in 2001. High-ranking defectors say that missions around the world have closed or consolidated and showcase properties stand empty.

By contrast, Scientology's biggest church in Taiwan—the 108,000 square-foot ex-hotel in Kaohsiung—is bustling. When I visited one evening last fall, I saw dozens of people coming and going in the course of a few hours. Taiwanese believers are also fundraising to build the island's second lavish megachurch in Taipei.

Asked about this growth, the Church of Scientology said: "It is true that the Church of Scientology is expanding in Taiwan, just as we are expanding everywhere."

And Scientology's reach in Taiwan extends beyond the churches themselves. According to Scientology's disaster-relief and community-service arm, the group sent Taiwanese volunteers last year to participate in earthquake-recovery efforts in Nepal, where members performed "contact assists," a form of touch-healing Scientologists believe relieves pain by hand. (Last summer, Scientologists trained dozens of Kaohsiung police officers in these "assist" techniques.) A Scientology affiliate runs anti-drug programs in elementary schools across the country, and claims to have already educated some 300,000 young Taiwanese.  

According to documents described as leaks from Scientology's main database of internal statistics and published by Mike Rinder, a high-ranking defector, Taiwanese Scientology missions were three of the top 10 cumulative fundraisers for the church in 2014. In June 2015, according to data published on the Scientology-watching blog Sec-Check, the Taipei mission tied for first among Scientology churches around the world for weekly "stats" reflecting sales of books, hours of counseling, and new recruits. (Asked about these materials, a Scientology spokesperson described them as "stolen documents." The church said Rinder was "dismissed from his position and expelled because of his dishonesty.")

Scientology has found a lifeline in Taiwan, which the church describes as a gateway to China, a target it calls "the abiding dream of all Scientologists."  

How did this happen?

* * *

Sitting at a café across the street from a downtown Taipei temple last fall, Verjanso Yang shook his head ruefully as he remembered the near decade he spent in the church. Once one of Taiwan's highest-ranking Scientologists, he now wants nothing to do with the group.

When Yang first encountered Scientology, he was a young man seeking spiritual answers. His mother had taught him how to read fortunes from star charts and the Chinese characters of a person's name, and new ideas intrigued him. Like many Taiwanese, he'd grown up with beliefs about reincarnation.

In 2003, while watching TV, he saw a popular guru hypnotize a Taiwanese entertainer. The guru claimed to take the entertainer into a past life, where he discovered that he had been a pig.

Yang was fascinated by the show. "Taiwanese are very curious about their future and past life," he said. He, too, wanted to find out what his past lives contained. The guru's theories didn't provide him with the answers he sought, but they led him to Scientology, which claims that people must free themselves from deep-seated traumas in past lives.

Taiwan's attitude toward religion differs notably from that of the People's Republic of China. While roughly 60 years of official atheism have repressed the mainland's traditional religions, in Taiwan they have prospered. For generations, Buddhist, Taoist, and folk beliefs have mingled on the island. In the 1980s, Taiwan's government lifted Chiang Kai-Shek's martial law, under which the country had been governed since 1949. Religious restrictions were relaxed, and new sects multiplied. Taiwan "became a different country" virtually overnight, recalled Chuen-Rong Yeh, an anthropologist of religion at Taiwan National University, in an interview. Moonies, New Age movements, and mystical martial-arts groups began proliferating. As the island modernized, religious movements blending indigenous practices with contemporary styles of worship attracted many Taiwanese, said Richard Madsen, an expert on Taiwanese religions at the University of California, San Diego.

For some, this seeking led to movements like Falun Gong, which merges physical practices with spiritual beliefs, or to kung fu organizations that claim to possess secret techniques for gaining supernatural powers. Taiwan is also home to groups like the Quan Yin Method, founded by a woman whose followers regard her as the reincarnation of Buddha and Jesus Christ; the True Buddha School, founded by a man who claims he fights demons and travels the world while asleep; and the Chen Tao cult, the members of which believe that flying saucers have rescued humans from five extinctions.

In this environment, Scientology, too, began to take hold. "Everything here is free, maybe even more than in the U.S.," Yeh said. "Because of this, these kinds of occult groups enjoy their freedom in Taiwan."

Hubbard liked to imply that he was Buddha and claim that the Buddha would reappear in the West with red hair—like Hubbard himself.

The first Scientology mission appeared in Taiwan in the late 1980s; by the mid-2000s, that single mission had blossomed into at least a dozen, with several in Taipei alone. The government recognized Scientology as a religion in 2003.

Yang's first encounter with Scientology was the year following, when he visited a mission located in a chic Taipei shopping district. After registering him, the staff sold him the first book in the Scientology sequence, Dianetics, a 1950 work that purports to contain the Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's scientific discoveries proving that the key to mental health lies in emptying the mind of traumatic memories. In auditing, a kind of therapy that uses a lie detector and repetitive questioning to take users into a quasi-hypnotic state of memory and imagination, Yang found it "easy to go to the past life," he recalled.

Like many believers, Yang turned to working long hours at the church as a way to pay for the Scientology courses that are required for believers wanting to move forward on their spiritual journeys. He says he worked 10- to 12-hour days for six months in 2004, for which he received two payments of $800. Much of that he paid back into Scientology courses. (The Church of Scientology declined to comment on this and other details of Yang's account, with a spokesperson writing in an email, "We do not debate anonymous gossip.")

"Because I hardly got paid, I had financial problems," Yang said.

After he completed a series of courses, Scientology staff advised him to go to Sydney, Australia, which at the time was one of the few places in the region offering certain high-level training. Those courses, he recalled being told, would allow him to do more specialized auditing and increase his income. He flew to Australia in the fall of 2004. "It's the nature of Taiwanese," said Yang. "Because Taiwanese are obedient, [Scientologists] use hard-sell techniques."

He rented an Australian Scientologist's apartment, sharing two bedrooms with eight other Taiwanese. "It was terrible," he remembered. "Much cheaper than a normal apartment, but it was illegal. I was on an old mattress, there was no air conditioning, the room had no window." (The Church of Scientology declined to comment.) Other defectors recalled to me one Taiwanese having to camp out on the 20th-story balcony of a building for months. Dozens of Taiwanese were studying Scientology in the city at the time, and they accounted for a quarter of the Sydney church staff, an Australian ex-Scientologist named Peter Smith told me.

Taiwan serves Scientology as a source of recruits, laborers, and donors. Another Taiwanese Scientology defector, Smith's wife Anita Hsu, told me recruiters from America and Australia have long targeted Taiwan. Hsu, who attended her first Scientology course in 1993, said she was recruited to go to Sydney in 1999 with promises of rapid spiritual advancement. Despite Taiwan's modest per capita income of roughly $22,000 a year, many Taiwanese were persuaded to spend $20,000 and up for Scientology courses, not counting rent and travel expenses, according to Hsu's account. (Scientology declined to comment.) Given the cost, it's not surprising that the first wave of Taiwanese converts came mostly from the middle to high-income professions: doctors, teachers, lawyers, nurses.

Missions in Taipei proudly display plaques and posters from America that commend them for "stellar sales."

To pay for the courses, defectors told me many Taiwanese sold their furniture and homes, maxed out credit cards, and were coached by church staff to ask relatives for loans. (The Church of Scientology declined to comment.) Taiwan is "very important for churches in Sydney," said Smith, who worked five years at the Sydney church in the early 2000s. "They made a lot of money there. Lots of kids can come because the culture is they can borrow a lot of money from their families, even if they don't have much money." (Critics of the church of Scientology, including Hubbard's great grandson, have compared the religion to a "pyramid scheme.")

* * *

When Yang arrived in Sydney, he was surprised to find there were very few Scientology materials in Chinese. (Official Chinese translations of Hubbard's works weren't published until 2012.) Armed with rudimentary high-school English, he had to teach himself the language by reading Hubbard's prose, which abounds with words such as "un-enturbulating" and "full color-visio, tone-sonic, tactile, olfactory, rhythmic, kinesthetic, thermal and organic imagination."

"It was just studying, reading all day," Yang said. "It was very painful." In the end, because of the language barrier, Yang spent four-and-a-half years finishing training that native English-speakers could complete in several months.

The coursework alone, not counting rent, cost $35,000 for those years, he said. That's 10 times the price of a full year of tuition at National Taiwan University.

In Sydney, Yang's life revolved entirely around Scientology, he recalled. His friends, his lodging, and his visa all came through connections with the church. As Yang's English improved he volunteered to help interview or audit fellow Chinese speakers. In 2007, he began dating an Australian Scientologist named Sarah Forster.

There were, however, moments of friction. Yang remembers being sternly punished for lending friends a DVD of The Secret, a New-Age film that advocates positive thinking. Senior church members called him and demanded the DVD, which they snapped in half and threw into the trash. They ordered him to write a confession of wrongdoing and show it to everyone in the church cafeteria to sign. (The Church of Scientology declined to comment.)

When Yang finally finished his training in 2008, he was eager to earn back some of his tuition money. He was also now the first Taiwanese certified to give high-level auditing, which can cost $300 an hour or more, he said. So when a unique opportunity came along, he took it: He flew to mainland China in 2009 to train a Chinese citizen to be "Clear"—an advanced state that Hubbard claimed would raise a person's IQ, liberate him from colds, and enable him to calculate in seconds equations that average people needed half an hour to do. At this point Yang himself was considered Clear, having finished his training. But his new mission had a catch: Unregulated and foreign-controlled religions like Scientology are forbidden in mainland China. Groups considered cults by the government often face crackdowns.

That hasn't stopped Scientologists from dreaming, however. China has loomed large in church mythology since Hubbard's visit to the Great Wall with his mother and father in 1929. At the opening ceremony of the Kaohsiung church, Scientology's leader David Miscavige said that "ever after [Hubbard] would speak of Scientology as 'first conceived in the East.'" (Because of this, the church tends not to highlight the passage in Hubbard's 1929 diary where he reportedly referred to the Chinese by a racial slur.) In later years, Hubbard liked to imply that he was Buddha, writing in his 1956 poem, "Hymn of Asia," "address me and you address Lord Buddha," and claiming that the Buddha would reappear in the West with red hair—like Hubbard himself. In Taiwan, church leaders frequently stress the Hubbard-Buddha connection to recruit members. In one of the Taipei missions I visited, staff showed a video in which a statue of Hubbard is briefly juxtaposed with a statue of Buddha; in the Kaohsiung church, the gym had a large mural of Buddhist symbols.

For six months, Yang lived in Hangzhou, a city in eastern China where he spent six hours a day auditing a businessman (whom Yang declined to identify) up the levels of Scientology. Compared to his cramped, restricted life in Sydney, Yang enjoyed relative freedom in Hangzhou, but kept a low profile and told authorities he had come to China as a student. He felt that the businessman studied mostly to please his wife, who had discovered Scientology on a trip to Europe; yet a year later he saw a video the businessman had made to promote his own spiritual group—a thinly veiled rip-off of the Scientology he had learned.

* * *

In 2010, Yang returned to Taiwan. Forster, by now his fiancée, joined him. In Taipei he started his own independent auditing and counseling practice, specializing in taking people from lower levels up to "Clear." Around the same time, a blog he started that was popular among Taiwanese Scientologists began to draw criticism from the church's intelligence organization and law-enforcement unit, the Office of Special Affairs, because Yang expressed opinions that were either unorthodox or seemed to be derived from Scientology, which fiercely protects its copyright.

Meanwhile, Scientology was embarking on a "global expansion," and fundraising in Taiwan intensified. High-level church figures from Scientology's spiritual headquarters in Florida, known as the Flag Service Organization or simply Flag, came to recruit Taiwanese. The International Association of Scientologists held fundraisers with lofty goals, and came to Taiwan multiple times a year, Yang recalled. Missions in Taipei proudly display plaques and posters from America that commend them for "stellar sales."

Yang remained active in the church—he was paying 10 percent of his salary to Scientology—but he and Forster began avoiding events because the doors would be blocked until they made a donation. But it didn't stop there. Yang and Forster were asked repeatedly to buy new, $3,000 versions of "The Basics," a collection of 18 books and 280 digitally enhanced Hubbard lectures. They saw friends donate houses, overcharge credit cards, and lose jobs for the church. (The Church of Scientology declined to comment.)

"Many people were rich and now are poor," said Yang.

When fellow Scientologists in Taipei poached two of his auditing clients, Yang began to distance himself from the church, quietly downplaying "Scientology" in his marketing materials. He continued to write his blog. Yet when church intelligence officers objected to him writing posts about Buddhism and romantic topics, he balked at the restrictions. "The church said, 'Don't write that, you should promote Scientology, otherwise people won't pay for courses,'" he said.

In 2012, the Office of Special Affairs emailed a list of articles and demanded he remove them. In one, he pointed out that the idea of karma did not originate in Scientology, but came from Buddhism. "They said, 'You can't talk about that. It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to us.'" (The Church of Scientology declined to comment.)

He took down the posts. Two years later, the blog was mysteriously hacked in a denial-of-service attack and has since remained down.

* * *

Taiwanese who want to understand outside perspectives on Scientology face a basic obstacle: Most critical articles on the church, and most forums where ex-Scientologists offer advice to people leaving the church, are in English.

Taiwan's own media, while boisterously independent compared to mainland China's, have shied from negative coverage of the church. While gossip-friendly newspapers have reported briefly on matters related to the divorce of celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise, I could find few that had written on the group's expansion on Taiwan's shores. One of the few Chinese-language blogs that publishes critical items on Scientology is run by Anita Hsu, the Taiwanese defector.

Yang and Forster left the Church of Scientology in 2012. In the midst of their disputes with the church over Yang's blog and his independent practice, a high-ranking church friend came to visit. She shared with them a letter written by Debbie Cook, a Scientologist beloved in the church who used to head Flag. The letter criticized the church's ceaseless focus on fundraising. Yang's friend also told them that Cook had testified in the church's lawsuit against her to being locked in a building for seven weeks and experiencing physical abuse. This was the first time he had heard such reports; he and Forster had been forbidden from reading anything online that the church deemed to be anti-Scientology.

A month later, full of anxiety and excitement, the couple sent out their own letter: "Dear Friends. … I am the first Taiwanese Senior Minister that was ever made. I was the first Taiwanese who co-audited to Clear. I was the first person to go to China and make the first Clear in China. And now I am the first highly trained Class V Taiwanese Auditor to publicly depart."

The next day, Yang lost 400 friends on Facebook—almost everyone he knew. A friend who had attended his wedding called contacts of Yang and Forster in Taiwan and Australia and told them to "disconnect," or permanently cut off contact with them. "We were prepared" to lose friends, Forster said, "but we didn't know they'd be totally gone."

Asked now what he would tell Scientologists in Taiwan, Yang shook his head in disgust. "I don't care. They won't listen, you can't deprogram them. If they come to me, I will help, but otherwise, what can you do?"

As subtitled versions of the documentary Going Clear appear online, Scientology may gradually lose momentum in Taiwan, but Yang is not optimistic. In Taiwan, at least, the group's affiliated organization—the anti-drug program Narconon, the Citizens Commission for Human Rights (an anti-psychiatry organization which claims to expose the field as "an industry of death"), and the Youth for Human Rights program, which promotes Hubbard writings alongside the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights—continue to reach students, receive positive media coverage, and hold events with the government's support, including meetings with the former president.

"I did feel I was brainwashed," Yang said, "Now that I am out I wonder, what was I thinking at that time? How come I was so controlled, people telling me what to do and not to do? What to read and not to read?"

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/scientology-in-taiwan/493493/