New DocuseriesDevotion: Obedience or Betrayal (2026)
This brand-new three-part docuseries premiered in June 2026 on Paramount+ (also broadcast as Devotion: The Gloriavale Story on New Zealand television).
The Focus: It examines the daily life inside the sect—where men maintain total authority and women are expected to live in absolute submission—while investigating decades of alleged sexual abuse, coercive control, and leadership cover-ups.
The Approach: Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer, it uses archival footage and presents dueling interviews with ex-members who call it an abusive prison, alongside current members who fiercely defend their faith.
Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal is a three-part Paramount+ original docuseries released on June 2, 2026. Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer, the series provides an unprecedented, ground-level look inside the Gloriavale Christian Community in New Zealand, contrasting decades of archival footage with dueling present-day interviews from both current members and survivors.
The series serves as a visceral case study in coercive control. It meticulously documents how vertical authoritarianism—established by the sect's founder, Neville Cooper—relied heavily on horizontal community enforcement to sustain itself. The documentary highlights how members were conditioned to view the outside world as inherently evil, creating a closed milieu where peer surveillance and rigid patriarchal rules normalized decades of alleged sexual abuse and systemic cover-ups.
The visual markers of this totalizing environment are so stark that The Handmaid’s Tale costume designer, Ane Crabtree, has cited Gloriavale's uniform blue dresses and bonnets as a direct inspiration for the acclaimed television series.
Episode Breakdown
The docuseries unfolds in three distinct chapters, charting the rise, exposure, and fracturing of the community:
1. In Search of Truth: Traces the origins of the group under Neville Cooper, exploring how a movement initially founded on religious devotion hardened into a high-demand system built on absolute obedience, sacrifice, and total control of information.
2. Sins of the Father: Captures the pivotal moment the closed world is torn open. This episode details the mounting allegations of sexual assault, the subsequent police raids on the compound, and Cooper's stunning public fall from power.
3. The Choices We Make: Examines the succession and leadership crisis following the founder's death. It focuses on the ongoing struggle over the community's future as external legal scrutiny and internal fractures threaten its survival.
Sources for the details provided about Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal:
• Paramount Press Express: The official media and press release platform for Paramount Global, which provided the June 2, 2026, premiere date, official episode summaries, and production details.
• Paramount+: The official streaming service hosting the docuseries, which confirms the three-part structure and its release as a Paramount+ original.
• Apple TV & Prime Video Directories: Streaming databases that catalog the series, listing Nicole Rittenmeyer as the director, Susan Zirinsky and Terence Wrong as executive producers, and confirming the episode titles ("In Search of Truth," "Sins of the Father," and "The Choices We Make").
Research & AcademicEcstatic Integration: The US military just ended a 16-year, $500mn experiment in 'resilience training'
"Last year, the US military quietly ended one of the biggest-ever experiments in psychological training. Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) was a resilience training program that launched in 2009, cost somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, was designed by Professor Martin Seligman of Penn University (the inventor of Positive Psychology) and aimed to train every soldier in the Army, and their families, in Positive Psychology and CBT-style coping techniques, in order to improve resilience, and reduce PTSD and suicides.
Did it fail? By one important measure, yes. Veteran suicides kept on rising in the years after the program was rolled out. But by other measures, the truth is, we don’t have a clear answer. One of the biggest-ever psychological training programs in history launched without a pilot and was never independently and rigorously evaluated.
The rise and fall of CSF illustrates the power of the hype cycle in psychological theories. Psychology is an incredibly faddish discipline, arguably more so than other social sciences, because it overlaps with self-help and life-coaching, and because the media and celebrities love to amplify the incredible new way to fix yourself. Fashions rise then disappear - anyone remember the self-esteem movement? Or ‘hysteria’? Or ‘lovesickness’?
The end of CSF is further evidence that well-meaning attempts at mandatory training in wisdom / emotional intelligence / mindfulness / resilience, or other psychospiritual goals consistently fail, based on extensive evidence over the last 25 years. Does that mean Positive Psychology was a pointless waste of time, effort, and money? No. Some findings from the field appear to replicate, and it could intersect with psychedelic science
in interesting ways. It’s the grander ambitions of the movement - resilience classes in every school, resilience training for every US soldier, well-being targets for entire nations - that didn’t stand up."
The SafeHouse website serves as a survivor-led platform for former students, teachers, and associates of Rishikesh’s Sattva Yoga Academy. It provides resources, support, and a collective space to share information regarding severe allegations of sexual and emotional abuse by the founder, Anand Mehrotra.
The selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not imply that Patrick Ryan, Joseph Kelly, or Ashlen Hilliard endorse the content. We provide information from multiple perspectives to foster dialogue.
Please forward articles you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment