King's College, Jesus Fellowship, UK, Lori Vallow Daybell, Legal
Religion Unplugged: The King's College Will Permanently Close After 'Unable To Secure' Funding
Religion Unplugged: The King's College Will Permanently Close After 'Unable To Secure' Funding
" ... Founded in 1938 by preacher Percy Crawford and established in Belmar, New Jersey, the college relocated to Delaware in 1941 and later to Briarcliff Manor, New York, in 1955. After losing its accreditation, the college closed in 1994.
After being taken over by Cru (formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ) and acquiring Northeastern Bible College, The King's College reopened in 1999 with space in the Empire State Building. The college became independent of Campus Crusade in 2012.
For nearly a decade, King largely relied on donations from wealthy and politically conservative donors such as Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway and father-in-law of former education secretary Betsy DeVos during President Donald Trump's first term."
Philippa Barnes was a child when her family joined the Jesus Fellowship. As an adult, she helped expose the shocking scale of abuse it had perpetrated.
" ... In 1979, John Everett, a student at Warwick University, began a sociological study of the Jesus Fellowship for his doctoral thesis. He had joined the group in the summer of 1977, experiencing it as a "pocket of utopian escape from a chaotic, frenetic, unsympathetic world", something "very close to a classless society" where people of all kinds were accepted. Now, he had been commissioned by Stanton himself to go and study its unique makeup. Yet as he conducted his research, examining the group's structure and practices through an academic lens, he began to reach a devastating conclusion: that the church was a cult.
As Everett writes in War and Defeat, a history of the organisation [Jesus Fellowship] that he self-published this year, he couldn't escape the fact that the authority structure and separation from the rest of the world were hallmarks of cultic groups. "It would have taken a huge amount of self-deceit to deny what I could plainly see: the key characteristics of a cult were in our DNA," he writes.
There is a school of sociology that rejects the term "cult", arguing that it has been used to dismiss unusual groups that challenge social norms, and preferring the category "new religious movements". Many other scholars and survivors disagree, arguing that the methods cults use to control their members are distinct. Alexandra Stein, a British psychologist and survivor of a political cult, says that whether religious or non-religious, cults are remarkably similar: "If you've seen one car, you know what machinery is in another car, even if it's a different colour."
In the popular imagination, cults are closed-off entities, physically removing their members from the outside world. The fellowship claimed to work differently: members were free to go to school, work, and live outside of community houses. But just as an abusive partner might exert influence over every aspect of a victim's life, Stanton [founder of Jesus Fellowship] had built a system of mental and emotional control that relied on a common cultic tactic: gradually severing members' attachments to the rest of society, to family members and even to one another. Those broken connections were replaced by a single reference point: the fellowship. With nowhere else to go, any feelings of fear and stress provoked by life in the organisation would only serve to drive members closer to it."
"Lori Vallow Daybell, the "Doomsday mom" who is already serving life sentences in Idaho in the deaths of her two youngest children and a romantic rival, received two more life sentences Friday in her murder conspiracy trials.
The sentences will run consecutively to each other and consecutively to the Idaho case, an Arizona judge said.
She was found guilty of conspiring to kill her fourth husband, Charles Vallow."
" ... Those who spend their childhoods in cults ... can find leaving particularly hard: "They struggle to know what is the self, and what is the cult." - Alexandra Stein
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