International Cultic Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award - Patrick L. Ryan

July 2011
Barcelona, Spain
Michael Langone, Ph.D.

Patrick Ryan has many talents. He won a writing award for contributions to his high school newspaper.

He ran a million dollar business. He has a passion for computers, and his skills in this area are impressive. He is a born entrepreneur.

He should be rich. But he isn’t. Why?

When he was in high school, he took an introductory course on Transcendental Meditation. That led to a degree in business from the Maharishi University and years of TM practice. Like many others, he had dedicated himself to saving the world.

But something happened on the road to utopia. He lost faith in Maharishi. Patrick realized that the movement to which he had dedicated himself was an alluring dead-end, an intellectual and emotional cul-de-sac that had stolen years of his life. He successfully sued the movement in the 1980s.

In the process of seeking justice for himself, he came into the network of people who constitute ICSA.

He learned that there are countless groups that deceive and harm people. And he decided to do something about it.

He became an exit counselor, a profession that he has practiced for more than 20 years. He worked with others to develop ethical alternatives to the abduction deprogrammings that the press loved to report on in the 1970s and 1980s. The approach he helped to develop focuses on relationship building and conflict resolution, not merely on “exit,” although “exit” frequently results.
In 1997, when few of us in this field understood anything about the Internet, Patrick saw the future.

He realized that the future of ICSA’s network would depend upon the Web. So he dedicated himself, initially as a volunteer, to creating and developing a Website for ICSA (then known as American Family Foundation). The site he developed, www.csj.org, won more than a half-dozen awards.

Not content to rest on his laurels Pat has continued to keep up with the technical changes that keep the Web in a constant state of developmental turmoil, and he has completely recreated the ICSA site three times. A few years ago he redesigned the site so that its 25,000+ documents could be organized and displayed with a database. And now he is dragging us into the “cloud,” whatever that is. We don’t really understand, but we have come to trust that Patrick does understand. So we follow our Web scout into the cyberjungle.

Besides his many talents, Patrick is also a lot of fun to be with. Given his intellectual and social attributes, he really ought to be a rich businessman. But, fortunately for ICSA, he isn’t. Instead, he is a dedicated worker in a field that depends almost completely upon dedication.

We salute him for the many years during which he has donated his talents and time to ICSA and to helping others. May many others follow in his footsteps.

Acceptance

I first heard about ICSA (then called American Family Foundation) in 1984. I had recently exited Transcendental Meditation and had sued the leader, Maharishi. I was in a "cult fighter" mode. As I learned about ICSA's work, I was at first a bit troubled because the leaders of the organization seemed to me at the time to be too academic and not activist enough. However, as I learned more and became more active in this field, I realized that ICSA's emphasis on respect, dialogue, and exploration of diverse perspectives so as to HELP people was essential to the long-term survival of this broad and varied movement to counter the harm caused by cultic groups. That spirit of tolerance enables ICSA to bring into its broad tent people of very different religious, political, and philosophical perspectives. Our common concern is how to help those abused by groups using exploitatively manipulative methods and to forewarn those who are vulnerable to manipulation. To emphasize dialogue and respect is not the only approach one can take in this field. It is a vital one, however, and one that I follow in my own work as an exit counselor.

I am honored to accept this award and to contribute to ICSA's important work.

Inside 'The Order,' One Mormon Cult's Secret Empire

America's most twisted crime family – and the boys who dared to defy it

JESSE HYDE
Rolling Stone
June 15, 2011

The two boys pulled into the driveway and shifted the green Honda into park. It was February in Salt Lake, cold and gray, and in the foothills above the city, a low fog hung over the mountains. They sat there for a moment, warming their hands against the sputtering heater. Then one of them exhaled slowly, his breath shuddering in the cold air. It was time. They were finally getting even.

The well-kept yellow house sat on the corner of a tidy cul-de-sac called South Bonner Circle surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. From the outside it seemed like a typical suburban home, offering few clues of the secrets that were contained inside. A passerby might catch a glimpse of children in the windows, but for the most part, the Young family kept to themselves. Their neighbors had no idea that the family were prominent members of the Kingston clan, the most powerful polygamist cult in America — and one of the most dangerous.

This article appears in the June 23, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the digital archive.

The clan, known privately as the Order, runs what prosecutors believe is one of the largest organized-crime operations in Utah, overseeing its far-flung empire from a string of secret locations and backrooms. On the surface, the operation is legit: From Salt Lake, the Order controls some 100 businesses spread out over the Western states, from a casino in California to a cattle ranch in Nevada to a factory that makes lifelike dolls in Utah. Over 75 years, the Kingstons have amassed a fortune worth an estimated $300 million, but the operation skirts the edges of the law. According to people who have left the Order, the cult exploits its 2,000 members as virtual slave labor and hides profits from tax collectors. Children born into the clan make up much of the labor force. Girls, many of them teen brides, answer phones at the Order's law office, bag groceries at its supermarket or tend to the clan's many children. Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. They are paid not in cash but in scrip, an arcane form of credit used by the Mormon pioneers that can only be redeemed at company stores. "If the Order doesn't have it," the clan teaches, "we don't need it."

The teenagers sitting in the driveway on South Bonner Circle that afternoon in 2009 knew the operation well. They belonged to the Order and had toiled in the cult for years. They also knew that much of the clan's wealth was stashed inside the unassuming suburban house on the corner. One of them approached the front door while the other kept a lookout. Then, moving quickly, the boy at the door let himself in and got to work.

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In the kitchen, he opened a closet and popped a hatch in the floor that led down to a dark, musty basement. There, stacked on the concrete floor, were crates filled with bars of silver. He snapped the padlock on the first crate and began stuffing the silver ingots into duffel bags, lugging them back out to the waiting Honda. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver.

Later that afternoon, in another house across town belonging to the Order, a woman named Patty Kingston opened her closet to discover that a chest of gold coins worth as much as $5 million had vanished. In its place, someone had left a note. "Thanks," it read. "This didn't belong to you anyway."

As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. The Kingstons operate in a self-contained universe, completely cut off from the outside world. "When you're three years old, they start training you what to say if people talk to you," recalls Jeremy Tucker, a 32-year-old former member of the cult, who now works in construction. "We were taught to be polite, but to never make friends with outsiders." The clan avoids hospitals, believing government-backed doctors might inject them with a mysterious disease or demand birth records exposing the Order's lifestyle. They steer clear of banks, fearing they'll steal their money. And they avoid the police, opting to handle any disputes in their own brutal manner. One of the Order's leaders did jail time for severely beating his own daughter after she fled an arranged marriage to his brother. Boys are taught that the prophet demands absolute loyalty and that they should be prepared to defend the clan. Over the years, the Order has armed itself to ward off rivals, and once stalked and intimidated a judge who was meddling in the clan's affairs. (Paul Kingston and other leaders of the family ignored repeated requests for comment for this story.)

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"I could boil down what they're about in three words," says a member who broke with the Order. "Money, sex and power. They'll do what they need to do to defend what's theirs."

After the chest of gold was stolen, suspicion among the clan's leadership immediately fell on a group of rebellious teenagers who had left the cult a few years before. One of them, Stephen Knight, made for the most unlikely of suspects. The son of the clan's prophet, Knight, then 18, had once seemed destined for a leadership role within the Order. Instead, he had walked away from the family three years earlier to make a life of his own. No evidence directly linked him to the missing gold or silver, but his father was convinced he had played a part in the thefts.

One day, not long after the gold disappeared, Knight got an anonymous phone call. His life was in danger, the voice on the other end warned. The clan believed he had their treasure, and they were sending someone to kill him. Knight was born in Salt Lake City, the sixth child of third-generation polygamists. The Mormon Church officially banned polygamy in 1890, and some of the defiant bands of fundamentalists who refuse to give up the practice have been pushed out of the city and into the desert, where they eke out an existence in rusted-out trailers and sprawling compounds. But the Kingstons have remained in Salt Lake, operating virtually undetected in a city of more than 1 million people.

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A lawyer and an accountant by trade, Stephen's father hardly looked like the sort of man who could command the unquestioned loyalty of thousands of followers. Paul Kingston wore secondhand suits that hung off his slender shoulders, and he spoke in a flat, emotionless monotone. He kept his office on a side street in central Salt Lake. It was a grimy, derelict-looking place. The roof sagged, the carpet was worn, and the place reeked of cheap cologne. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. He was usually off visiting one of his 30 or so wives, or checking on one of the clan's many businesses, or in a backroom getting his muscles rubbed in preparation for one of his painful, 40-day fasts, a purification ritual that he endured in order to get closer to God.

Kingston taught his followers that they are the literal descendants of Jesus and one of his wives, who had come down to Earth to found a race of chosen people. He also preached a bizarre extrapolation of the Book of Mormon called the White Horse Prophecy, a dreaded prediction of a cataclysmic time when the "black race" will rise up and attempt to destroy the white man, only to be thwarted by Native Americans riding to the rescue. Those in the Order, Kingston preached, are responsible for building a master race, which is why all marriages are arranged within the original four families that started the cult.


When Stephen was a boy, the clan would gather for the New Year in a warehouse in the city for its annual ritual: the numbering of the men. His father stood on the stage and called out the names of the men who were to receive one of the clan's highest honors. "Brother Ron Tucker," he would intone, "come and get your number." According to the Order's interpretation of the Book of Revelations, only 144,000 numbered men will be allowed to rule in heaven under God. Many of these men are also given "stewardship" of the Order's business holdings — sent out to run the clan's coal mine or ranches, or to oversee one of its many storefronts.

That Stephen's father sat atop a mafialike organization was a secret kept from him for most of his childhood. When he was three, his mother led him into a building controlled by the clan and pointed out an intense man lifting weights in the gym. "That's your Uncle Paul," she said. (Like most kids in the clan, Stephen wasn't told who his father was until he was old enough to be trusted to lie to protect the Order.) Back then, Paul Kingston stood around five feet ten and weighed close to 200 pounds. He had yet to lose his hair, and thanks to his fanatical devotion to healthy food and alternative medicine, he had the ropy build of a well-toned athlete. He also had dozens of children — a brood that would eventually grow to around 300 — and he had a hard time telling them apart.

But it is likely that Kingston could recognize some of himself in Stephen. They both have the same high cheekbones, the same pale skin, the same wide-set eyes. Noticing Stephen, he put the barbells down and came over to the boy. He asked him if he was being obedient, then excused himself to talk to Stephen's mother. "He seemed like the most amazing guy," Stephen recalls.

It would be several more years before Stephen learned that Paul Kingston was his father, and that his mother was just one of his dad's many wives. And it would be several years after that before he stole from his father for the first time.

While his dad was running the order from Salt Lake City, Stephen grew up on a cattle ranch called Washakie, near the Idaho border. Situated at the base of a rugged mountain range, the Order's spread sat in a pristine valley of glistening hayfields and open pasture. The land had once been home to the Washakie Indians, and as children, Stephen and his 15 full brothers and sisters played among the wind-swept ruins of a Native American cemetery. Their father rarely came by, and because the nearest town was 18 miles away, the kids forged a fierce bond among themselves. "We were off on our own out there and really close," Stephen says. "It felt like it was us against the world." His older brother Richard, a burly diesel mechanic, taught him how to fix cars. Another brother, Ben, showed him how to mend fences. In summer, the kids swam in the reservoir as their mother, Richaun, watched, the boys doing back flips off the rope swing into the water; at night, as the sun set behind the mountains, they all sat together to watch the clan's buffalo herd grazing in the pastures. "It was all fun," Stephen recalls. "We'd sleep on the chicken coop in the summer and shoot raccoons. Or we'd set traps and raise them as pets."

In many ways it was an idyllic childhood, except for the fact that the ranch also doubled as a work camp for disobedient clan wives and rebellious kids. The family believed that discipline would rein in the boys and that hard labor would make the girls more supplicant to their husbands back in the city. "It was a wild place," says Scott Cosgrove, a former detective with the Box Elder County Sheriff's Office, who remembers the ranch as a broken-down spread, guarded by a feral pack of boys who patrolled the fence line from the back of a pickup armed with shotguns. "The clan kids from there would come to school not properly dressed for the cold, and they were always getting in fights. You'd show up for a welfare call, or a domestic-abuse call, and it was just real run-down."

For Stephen and the other kids on the ranch, the highlight of each week came on Sundays, when they traveled the hour and a half south to Salt Lake for church. Sometimes his father read the Book of Mormon from the pulpit and talked about things regular Christians would recognize, like tithing or repentance. But mostly he talked about the history of the Order and his ancestors, the men who had started the clan.

The Order was founded by Elden Kingston, Stephen's grand-uncle, at the height of the Great Depression. As lore has it, Elden was the "one mighty and strong" predicted by Scripture, who "holding the scepter of power in his hand" would "set in order the House of God." With thick white hair, a lantern jaw and a commanding presence, he had no problem attracting followers. Like other fundamentalists of that era, he believed the Mormon Church had lost its divine authority when it renounced polygamy in 1890, so he persuaded three other families to join him in establishing their own sect. They threw away their possessions, donned matching blue overalls, and pitched canvas tents on a patch of land north of Salt Lake that would come to be known as the "Home Place."


As time passed, his dogma became even stranger. He went days at a time without eating, convinced it helped provoke visions, and believed that by "the laying on of hands" he could heal his followers from sickness and disease. He became obsessed with homeopathic treatments and herbal remedies, teaching followers that through proper diet they could "live to the age of a tree." When lightning struck a tree at the Home Place, he taught his followers that the tree had divine powers and was a gateway to heaven. His followers erected a crude stone cross nearby in his honor, covered with inscriptions of the letter "K" (for Kingdom or Kingston). His most bizarre beliefs, though, concerned the occult. When one of his favorite wives died, he missed her so much that he dug her up from her grave. He then severed her index finger, cleaned off the three bones, and carried them with him the rest of his life, believing that the totem kept her spirit with him.

When Elden died in 1948, leadership of the Order fell to Stephen's grandfather, J.O., a short, miserly man with bony shoulders and thinning hair. J.O. was just as frugal as his brother — he lived in a dilapidated shack with planks missing from the porch — but he had a better head for business. He trained the women how to rip off the government, a scheme the Order called Bleeding the Beast. They would trek into state welfare offices, their kids in tow, claiming that they had no idea who the father of their children was, or that he was a truck driver who had left them destitute. The grift was exposed decades later, in the 1980s, when the clan paid a $350,000 settlement for swindling the government through welfare fraud. Later the Order reportedly bought slot machines from mob-controlled companies. To hide the scope of his organization, J.O. took great pains to never show his wealth and taught his followers to do the same. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. He also shared his brother's fascination with herbs and natural medicine. He became particularly obsessed with a plant called comfrey, which he believed would protect his clan from the nuclear war that would usher in the apocalypse. He mandated that children should drink tea brewed from the herb every morning, and that Order members should feed it to their cows.

J.O. had some 80 children by 13 wives, but his favorite was Paul, an excellent student who made friends easily. As a favored son of the prophet, Paul had the freedom to disregard the strict discipline his father imposed on other members of the Order. One day, for laughs, he and his half brother Ron Tucker stole some napalm from an Order army-supply store, drew lines of it in the street and lit it on fire as cars drove by. The boys also bought cigarettes wholesale through a small clan-owned market run by their older brother and sold them at school. "It was all just innocent teenage stuff," recalls Ron, who has since left the clan. "But within the Order, where drinking soda pop was against the rules, it was a pretty big deal."

When Paul turned 21, he married Richaun Dye. Unlike other girls in the Order, Richaun was refined — she didn't wear hand-me-downs, and at clan dances, a long line of boys waited to dance with her. "She was definitely the pick of the litter, and that's why Paul got her," Ron recalls. Paul already had two wives, but he and Richaun were married in a secret ceremony at her parents' house. J.O. presided, while Richaun's father officiated the wedding, promising the bride that if she obeyed her husband, she would be guaranteed a spot in the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of heaven. After the wedding, Richaun chose the name Knight randomly — a practice designed to prevent prosecutors from proving that men in the Order have multiple wives.

"They seemed happy," Ron says. "I could tell she loved him, and it seemed like he loved her too." Within a year, Paul Kingston would take a fourth wife. By the time he was 30, he would have more than 10.

As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. The Knight brothers weren't afraid to fight, or to stand up to authority. "They were the type of kids you didn't mess with," says Robert Owen, a former member of the clan. "If you messed with one of them, you were messing with them all."

When Stephen was nine, an accident at Washakie set in motion a chain of events that would eventually prompt him to leave the cult. It was Mother's Day in 2000, and Stephen and two of his brothers were speeding up a dirt road for dinner at an aunt's house. Suddenly, Stephen's brother David lost control of the truck and it rolled over, killing David instantly. "His face was crushed," Stephen says now, matter-of-factly, his eyes going blank for a moment. "I felt for his pulse, but he was already gone."

That night, Paul Kingston arrived at the ranch. The family gathered in the living room. Still stunned at the sudden loss of their brother, Stephen and his siblings were numb with grief. Then their father said something they never expected. "This is your fault," he thundered, glaring at them. "If you were more obedient, this wouldn't have happened."

"After that, everything changed," Stephen says. "My mom was never the same. She didn't want to be in that house anymore; it reminded her of my brother." To test her devotion, Stephen's father began calling her in the middle of the night and telling her to move the family to a new location. Over the next several years, Stephen bounced from the suburbs of Salt Lake to the clan's ranch in Nevada. Consumed with guilt over his brother's death, Stephen lashed out. He picked fights at school, shot a teacher in the face with a water gun and refused to do homework or answer questions. "He was angry and confused," says a former member of the cult. "He didn't have anyone to help him process what had just happened."

Taking advantage of his status as a son of the prophet, Stephen began bending the rules even further. Because of the clan's distrust of banks, the Order had cash hidden all over the place, a poorly kept secret within the family. "They'd keep it in basements, in filing cabinets, in a big safe in one of Paul's offices," says Levi Kingston, a former clan member. "If you knew where to look — and the Knight boys did — it was easy to find." In his teens, Stephen and five of his half brothers stole $4,000 from their father. "We figured it was ours anyway," says Stephen, explaining that the clan hadn't paid the boys for bagging coal. "But we paid it all back."


Eventually, Stephen was sent back to Washakie and was placed under the supervision of his uncle, one of the family's most feared enforcers. A short, blustery man with a hair-trigger temper, Daniel Kingston had reportedly once kidnapped two boys at gunpoint and led them out to the Great Salt Lake (the charges were later dropped). At Washakie, he forced clan children to decapitate cows with chain saws to toughen them up, and sometimes beat the children for some infraction of the Order's rules like forgetting to face the Home Place three times a day and pray.

One afternoon, as Stephen and his cousin were taking a break from fixing a tractor that had broken down in a hayfield, Daniel Kingston pulled up. When he noticed that the boys had stopped working, he became enraged. He charged across the field and started brutally beating Stephen's cousin. When he had finished, he walked toward Stephen, who was sitting on the tractor. Stephen calmly waited until his uncle got close, and then he reached behind the seat and pulled out a shotgun, leveling it at his uncle. "If you ever do that again," he said, "I'll blow your head off."

It was an astonishing moment in the history of the clan. "It empowered Stephen — before that, no one had ever stood up to Daniel Kingston or any of them," says a former member. "I think it scared them."

It was also around then that Stephen, at the age of 14, began to see the clan for what it really was. On weekends, he was sent out to work at the Order's coal mine with other teenagers. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. Older teenagers were crammed five and six to a room, sleeping on the floors of trailers. According to former Order members, they worked long shifts sorting coal and operating heavy machinery in unsafe conditions. At clan gatherings, girls who were still in their teens danced with men old enough to be their uncles, whom they were sometimes forced to marry.

With the Order's leaders taking so many wives for themselves, the clan's younger men were often unable to find anyone to marry. Stephen's father seemed to marry a new girl every year, each one younger and prettier than the last. He slept with a different one each night, in accordance with their ovulation cycles, and sometimes disappeared during lunch to have sex with a favorite. While the Order preached strict abstinence to its children, forbidding even incidental contact between the sexes, there seemed to be no rules after marriage — especially for the clan's leaders. Incest is endemic in the clan, with uncles marrying much younger female relatives; in 2003, police showed up at an Order barbecue and arrested a clan member for marrying his underage cousin.

According to former members of the Order, decades of inbreeding have resulted in rampant birth defects throughout the family. Some children are born blind, others with missing fingernails or undersize heads. One baby deemed to have too many deformities was allegedly put in a shoe box and left to die. Mark Shurtleff, the Utah attorney general, has spent years investigating the clan, gathering birth certificates and genealogical data, and has come to believe that the cult is guilty of a long list of crimes, including child labor, tax evasion, welfare fraud, polygamy and the sanctioning of underage marriages to blood relatives. So far, however, despite Shurtleff's efforts, the insular and highly secretive nature of the Order has prevented him from finding sufficient evidence to bring a case strong enough to dismantle the clan.

"I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family," Shurtleff says. "When people hear 'organized crime,' they think of mobsters. I don't think they're organized crime in that regard, but the racketeering statute defines it as any conspiracy or pattern of illegal activity done in concert with others. If they are money-laundering or making money in support of polygamy and incest, then they probably meet the statute."

Stephen didn't know what the law said — he only knew that the people he loved were being abused and exploited by his own father. He no longer believed in the Order, but he knew that leaving would mean being shunned by his own family, and because he had been forbidden from making friends outside the clan, there would be few people in the world he could turn to. "It's hard to leave when that's all you've known," says one former member, who was forced to marry her cousin when she was 15. "I was scared to death when I left." From a clan ranch in Nevada, Stephen called his brother Ben, who had left the Order a few years before. While some despised Ben for his apostasy and refused to speak with him, Stephen had remained in touch with his brother.

"Come and get me," Stephen said. "I'm done with this shit."

"What took you so long?" Ben said.

Like other teenagers who leave fundamentalist Mormon communities, Stephen was not prepared to enter the world at large. To cope with the disorientation and loneliness of leaving one world for another, many turn to drugs. Another group of kids called the Lost Boys, who were kicked out of the polygamist cult the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ended up on the streets of Las Vegas and Phoenix, some turning tricks for drugs like meth and heroin.

Stephen moved in with his brother. To deaden his feelings of isolation, he started smoking a lot of pot and sitting around the house all day listening to country music. "All I like to do is work on cars and hang out with friends and ride my ponies," he wrote one night on his MySpace page. "I am in love with old cars and horses. I don't really have too many friends, but the ones I do, I wouldn't trade for anything."

Among Stephen's friends were two of his cousins, Luke and Scott Brown. Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. Like Stephen, the boys were considered troublemakers by the Order — and like Stephen, they knew a lot about how the clan handled its money. Luke and Scott often visited the home of one of their aunts, Rachel Young. Everyone in the Order knew that she controlled the purse strings for the operation — but few were aware that she was sitting on a hidden stash of silver. "Only the inner circle knew the hoard even existed," says Christian Kingston, a former Order member. "You had to be, like, a son of the prophet to know where it was."

On February 26th, 2009, the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office got a call of suspicious activity in the foothills above the city. Two teenage boys had been spotted entering Rachel Young's home. They had sped off in a Honda sedan. When Rachel Young, a stern and humorless woman, got home, she discovered that several crates of silver in her basement had been pried open — whoever had robbed the place had clearly been in a hurry and had left with only a small fraction of her silver. She called her sister-in-law Patty Kingston, who lived across town. "You better check on your gold," Young told her.

As the first of Paul Kingston's many wives, Patty enjoyed a privileged role in the Order — including access to vast wealth. Hanging up the phone, she rushed to her closet. To her horror, all that remained was a ring of dust, marking the place where a chest of gold coins had once stood.


In the meantime, the police were closing in on the missing silver. A sheriff's deputy traced the license plate of the Honda to a run-down house in a working-class suburb south of the city. Pulling up, he noticed the getaway car parked in front of the house. As he talked to the woman who lived there, Luke Brown came out of the house, and his brother Scott soon joined him.

At first, the two boys denied any involvement in the break-in at Young's house. But the more the deputy pressed, the more their stories didn't add up. It didn't take long for them to break down and confess that they had robbed their aunt. The deputy opened the trunk of the Honda, where he found two duffel bags stuffed with silver. After the boys were taken into custody, one of their first calls was to Stephen. "We're fucked," they told their cousin.

One crime had been solved — but the chest of gold stolen from Patty Kingston's closet remained a mystery. The deputy heard the Brown boys knew who stole the gold — but suddenly, without explanation, they and everyone in the clan clammed up. "Paul was upset any of this had been reported at all," says a former member close to the boys. "The Order stays as far away as possible from police, and this was like inviting them in your front door."

With its vast wealth suddenly exposed to public view, the clan moved quickly to hush up the scandal. The Brown boys, charged with felony counts of burglary, wrote a letter to their aunt apologizing for stealing the silver in her house. She, in turn, wrote a letter to the judge on their behalf, and the case was settled without a trial. The boys were sentenced to two years of probation and taken back into the Order. Luke Brown now insists that he and his brother simply borrowed the silver, and planned to return it to their aunt later. "It wasn't like we thought about it a lot. It was a total spur of the moment thing," Brown says. "I love the Order. It's who I am."

To keep the police from prying into the matter any further, the clan also hired a private investigator to track down the missing gold. Within the clan, the pieces started to add up. The theft of the silver bars from Rachel Young's basement, they concluded, had been a copycat crime. In all likelihood, Stephen and his brothers had stolen the gold from Patty Kingston first — and then the Brown boys, in an effort to emulate their cousin's rebellious acts, had robbed their aunt weeks or even months later. Former Order members remain convinced the Knights stole the gold. "They did it," says Christian Kingston. "Everyone knows it."

After the gold disappeared, the Knight brothers suddenly seemed to have a lot of money — especially for young men on their own in the world for the first time. Unable to visit his mother, Stephen would leave a $100 bill in her mailbox or, with his brothers, buy her new furniture. "The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends," says Levi Kingston. "Some people say they funneled the money through Mexico. Others say they buried it out in the desert and are slowly cashing it out. If I had done it, the Order probably would have killed me. But because they were the sons of the prophet, they got away with it."

Stephen vehemently denies that he or his brothers had anything to do with the heist. "I honestly didn't even know there was any gold until they accused me of taking it," he says. These days Stephen works on a cattle ranch near the Idaho border, just down the road from where he grew up. It's a quiet, haunting place, with massive hayfields that stretch to the horizon. His arms are sunburned and his hands calloused from long days moving the irrigation pipes that water the fields. "Look around," Stephen says. "Do you think if I took $5 million in gold, I'd be working out here?"

In the months after the robbery, Stephen couldn't shake the feeling he was being watched. Mysterious cars followed his girlfriend, and he once came home to find that someone had rifled through his drawers. Then one night, a clan member called and told him that the Order planned to kill him. Terrified, he went out and bought a stash of guns to arm himself, just in case his family tried to gun him down.

Now, two years later, Stephen still sleeps with a gun near his bed. But the constant fear has subsided. "If they kill me, they kill me," he says. "I've lived a good life." Sometimes, lying in bed at night, he thinks of his brother who died not far from here, and the rest of his siblings who remain in the Order. He thinks about his mom, and wonders if she misses him. Every now and then, as he's driving around the ranch, his phone will ring. Fishing it out of his jeans, he'll recognize the number. It's his father, the prophet, calling to coax his wayward son back into the fold.

"Come back," his dad will say. "You could be such an asset to the Order."

Stephen hangs up and drives home in silence. He is not ready to forgive his father. But he hopes that one day his family will be able to forgive him for leaving them behind.


From The Archives Issue 1133: June 23, 2011

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/inside-the-order-one-mormon-cults-secret-empire-20110615?page=3

The Five Richest Pastors In Nigeria

Mfonobong Nsehe Former Contributor
Forbes
June 7, 2011

God is good, especially if you’re a Nigerian pastor with some business savvy. These days, millions of souls, desperate for financial breakthroughs, miracles and healing, all rush to the church for redemption. And while the bible expressly states that salvation is free, at times it comes with a cost: offerings, tithes, gifts to spiritual leaders, and a directive to buy literature and other products created by men of God.

Pastors are no longer solely interested in getting people to Heaven; they’ve devised intelligent ways to make good money while reaching out to souls.

Take Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, for example. He is the founder and lead pastor of the Christ Embassy, a thriving congregation with branches in Nigeria, South Africa, London, Canada and the United States. His publishing company, Loveworld Publications, publishes ‘Rhapsody of Realities,’ a monthly devotional he co-authors with his wife. It sells over 2 million copies every month at $1 apiece. He also owns television stations, newspapers, magazines, a hotel, a fast-food chain, and more.

Many other Nigerian pastors are similarly building multi-million dollar empires from their churches. Today, pastors fly around in private jets, drive fancy cars like Daimlers, Porsches and BMWs, don Rolexes and Patek Phillipes, and own breathtaking mansions all over the world.

After the blog post I wrote in May about Nigerian pastors owning private jets, I was bombarded with emails from readers requesting to know the richest pastors in Nigeria. So I set out to investigate the assets of some of Nigeria’s most prominent pastors, and I came up with conservative estimates of their fortunes. I contacted representatives for all of the pastors and all except Matthew Ashimolowo's representative confirmed ownership of the assets I list. Representatives for Pastor Ashimolowo did not respond to my emails.

Bishop David Oyedepo

Affiliation: Living Faith World Outreach Ministry, aka Winners Chapel

Estimated net worth: $150 million

David Oyedepo is Nigeria’s wealthiest preacher. Ever since he founded the Living Faith World Outreach Ministry in 1981, it has grown to become one of Africa’s largest congregations. The Faith Tabernacle, where he hosts three services every Sunday, is Africa’s largest worship center, with a seating capacity of 50,000. Oyedepo owns four private jets and homes in London and the United States. He also owns Dominion Publishing House, a thriving publishing company that publishes all his books. He founded and owns Covenant University, one of Nigeria’s leading tertiary institutions, and Faith Academy, an elite high school.

Chris Oyakhilome

Church: Believers’ Loveworld Ministries, a.k.a Christ Embassy
Estimated net worth: $30 million - $50 million

Last year, the charismatic preacher was at the center of a $35 million money laundering case in which he was accused of siphoning funds from his church to foreign banks. Pastor Chris pleaded no wrongdoing and the case was eventually dismissed. His church, Christ Embassy, boasts more than 40,000 members, several of whom are successful business executives and politicians. Oyakhilome's diversified interests include newspapers, magazines, a local television station, a record label, satellite TV, hotels and extensive real estate. His Loveworld TV Network is the first Christian network to broadcast from Africa to the rest of the world on a 24 hour basis.

Temitope Joshua (T.B Joshua)

Church: Synagogue Church Of All Nations (SCOAN)
Estimated net worth: $10 million - $15 million

Nigeria’s most controversial clergyman is also one of its richest and most philanthropic. T.B Joshua heads the Synagogue Church of all Nations (SCOAN), a congregation he founded in 1987, which accommodates over 15,000 worshippers on Sundays. The Pastor has remained controversial for several years for his inexplicable powers to heal all sorts of incurable diseases, including HIV/AIDS, cancer and paralysis. For miracle-craving worshippers, it’s the perfect seduction. The church currently has branches in Ghana, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Greece. In the past three years, he has given over $20 million to causes in education, healthcare and rehabilitation programs for former Niger Delta militants. He owns Emmanuel TV, a Christian television network, and is close friends with Ghanaian President Atta Mills.

Matthew Ashimolowo

Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC)
Estimated net worth: $6 million - $10 million

In 1992, Foursquare Gospel Church, a Nigerian church, sent Ashimolowo to open a satellite branch in London. But Pastor Matthew had other ideas and decided to set up his own church instead. Today, his Kingsway International Christian Center is reportedly the largest Pentecostal church in the United Kingdom. In 2009, the church posted profits of close to $10 million and assets worth $40 million. Ashimolowo earns an annual salary of $200,000, but his real wealth comes from varied business interests including his media company, Matthew Ashimolowo media, which churns out Christian literature and documentaries. Ashimolowo's representatives did not respond to a request confirming his net worth and ownership of all these assets.

*UPDATE: A spokesman for Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo disputes the net worth estimate and says the home in London is owned by the church, not by the pastor.

Chris Okotie

Church: Household of God Church
Net worth: $3 million -$10 million

Pastor Okotie made his first success as a popular pop musician in the 80s. He found the light, embraced the bible and set up the Household of God Church, one of Nigeria’s most flamboyant congregations. His 5,000 member church consists predominantly of Nollywood celebrities, musicians, and society people. He contested and lost Nigerian presidential elections for the third time this year under the Fresh Party, a political party he founded and funds. An automobile lover, he owns a Mercedes S600, Hummer and Porsche among several others.

Kabbalah Centre to close U.S. branch of children's charity

Harriet Ryan
Los Angeles Times
May 21, 2011

Success for Kids, in which Madonna was a board member and donor, will close at school year's end due to cost of translating lessons into nondenominational curriculum. Foreign branches will continue.

The Kabbalah Centre, a Westside spiritual organization that is the focus of a tax evasion investigation, is shutting down the U.S. operations of a global children's charity that has raised millions from celebrity followers and more recently drawn the scrutiny of IRS investigators.

SFK or Success for Kids, a 10-year-old nonprofit based at the center, will close its programs in American public schools at the end of the academic year, the charity's president, Michal Berg, announced in a letter Wednesday to supporters. Berg wrote that the decision was prompted by larger than expected overhead costs associated with translating the religious organization's lessons into a nondenominational curriculum.http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif

"The reality is that the current public school expansion strategy is not cost-effective and it is difficult to scale the program to impact more children," she wrote.

The letter made no mention of a federal grand jury in New York that has issued subpoenas seeking information about the center, the charity and the Berg family, which controls the center. A spokesman for the center said there was no connection.

"It was completely unrelated," the spokesman, Mark Fabiani, said.

SFK, formerly known as Spirituality for Kids, ran classes in about 40 schools in the U.S., including several in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The programs had been criticized by some officials and parents, who said they were quasi-religious. In her letter, Berg, the daughter-in-law of Kabbalah Centre founder Philip Berg, said that as an alternative to the classes, SFK was planning to present its curriculum on a free website.

The charity, which listed assets of $7.5 million in its 2008 tax filings, the most recent available, will continue running programs in Brazil, Costa Rica, England, Panama and Malawi, but about 20 staffers have been laid off.

The nonprofit began as a kabbalah-focused private grade school next to the center's Robertson Boulevard headquarters, but soon grew to include other programs, including an initiative for African children that became a separate charity led by Madonna, the center's most famous adherent. The finances of that charity, Raising Malawi, are also being examined by agents of the IRS' criminal division.

Madonna headed SFK's board and has been a major donor, as have several other celebrities, including Barbra Streisand and fashion designer Donna Karan, who gave $2 million in recent years.

Kabbalah, the study of mystical Jewish texts said to hold the secrets of the universe, was little known outside of Orthodox Jewish circles until about 15 years ago, when Madonna began studying at the center. Other high-profile entertainers, including Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, followed and the center experienced enormous growth.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/21/local/la-me-0521-kabbalah-charity-20110521

IRS Stirs The Kabbalah Pot

Robert W. Wood
Forbes
MAY 12, 2011

I focus on taxes and litigation.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Kabbalah is not a new way to make risotto, a new Gordon Ramsey restaurant, or a gourd-like vessel for carrying water across the desert. It is a new-old religion, popularized by Madonna and other A-list celebs who include Ashton Kutcher and the now singing Gwyneth Paltrow. I can't claim to be religious and don't emulate celebrities.

Yet as a tax lawyer for 30 years, I've seen IRS scrutiny on churches wax and wane, especially with Scientology. For years the IRS denied it was a church, but after multiple years of litigation and administrative harangues, the IRS abruptly ruled Scientology was a church after all in 1993. The New York Times claimed the IRS reversed 30 years of precedent to grant Scientology Section 501(c)(3) status when Scientology dropped numerous lawsuits against the IRS.

Now the IRS has leveled its sights on Los Angeles' Kabbalah Centre. Significantly, though, the current query is apparently not whether Kabbalah is a legitimate church entitled to that IRS tax status. Rather, this is a criminal investigation into tax evasion. So says the LA Times.

Kabbalah is a Jewish movement tracing its roots to the Zohar, a holy book allegedly 2,000 years old. Evidently begun in Jerusalem in 1922, Kabbalah claims 4,000 regular participants around the world. Many criticize it for not requiring followers to leave other faiths.

Private Inurement? Although the scope of the IRS questions is not yet clear, the LA Times suggests the IRS is querying whether funds inured to the Berg family, which has controlled the Kabbalah Centre for over 40 years. Tax lawyers know this issue as "private inurement," something that can spell disqualification of church tax benefits. In fact, private inurement can disqualify any charitable organization.

Questions are being asked on both coasts, since the Kabbalah Centre has holdings in New York too. A federal grand jury in Manhattan is gathering evidence, while in Los Angeles, IRS agents are interviewing people connected to the organization. One of Madonna's charities, Raising Malawi, is cooperating with the IRS.

Former Kabbalah Centre Chief Financial Officer Nicholas Vakkur has raised accusations about tax fraud. Vakkur implicates the Centre's Chief Executive Karen Berg, whose husband was appointed head rabbi in 1969. Since his 2004 stroke, Mrs. Berg runs the Kabbalah Centre with two sons, Michael and Yehuda.

Another former CFO, Nicholas Boord Jr., has suggested the Centre had annual revenue of $60 million, a $200-million real estate portfolio and a $60-million investment fund. But as a tax qualified church, the Kabbalah Centre doesn't make public tax filings. Churches and nonprofits usually don't have complex corporate structures.

Yet here the IRS confronts over a dozen nonprofit and business entities leading to the Bergs. A 1993 filing seeking tax-exempt status for the Centre claimed the Bergs don't receive salaries, although they apparently live in Beverly Hills in homes owned by the Kabbalah Centre.

Lawsuits have plagued the Kabbalah Centre and the Berg family. Some of the filings flatly accuse the Bergs of running the organization primarily for their own benefit, something that in the tax-exempt-church world is clearly a no-no.


Robert W. Wood practices law with Wood & Porter, in San Francisco. The author of more than 30 books, including Taxation of Damage Awards & Settlement Payments (4th Ed. 2009, Tax Institute), he can be reached at wood@woodporter.com. This discussion is not intended as legal advice, and cannot be relied upon for any purpose without the services of a qualified professional.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2011/05/12/irs-stirs-the-kabbalah-pot/

Spiritual girl: Madonna's shifting beliefs

Michael De Groote
Deseret News
May 10, 2011

Madonna's love/hate relationship with the Roman Catholic Church took a new twist in April when she spent more than an hour at an Opus Dei center  a Catholic organization cast as the villain in "The DaVinci Code."

This recent flirting with her childhood faith is somewhat ironic, considering how the "Material Girl" has never been shy to criticize or intentionally shock Catholic sensibilities. For example, the Daily Mail reported in 2006 that her concert tour that put her in a mock crucifixion complete with a crown of thorns had upset the Vatican. "Cardinal Ersilio Tonino, speaking with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI said: 'This time the limits have really been pushed too far. This concert is a blasphemous challenge to the faith and a profanation of the cross. She should be excommunicated.'"

That same Daily Mail article recounted how Madonna was also called blasphemous for her 1989 video "Like a Prayer," which included statues crying tears of blood.

Back in 1991, the Deseret News' own Chris Hicks reviewed her "Truth or Dare" video as "an amazing example of self-worship."

Her worship habits, however, took another turn when, as Newsweek reports , "she turned to Kabbalah in 1996 when she was pregnant, exhausted from Evita, and looking for an anchor. Since then she has reportedly donated at least $18 million of her personal fortune to the Kabbalah Centre."

The Los Angeles Times explains that the Kabbalah Centre is a "Los Angeles-based spiritual organization that mingles ancient Jewish mysticism with the glamour of its celebrity devotees." The Times said the center "is far and away the most well-known proponent of kabbalah, an esoteric Jewish movement that traces its roots to the Zohar, a holy book followers believe was written by a rabbi 2,000 years ago to explain the mysteries of the universe."

A Deseret News story in June 2004 covered an ABC "20/20" interview in which Madonna bristled at suggestions that her interest in Kabbalah was just a trend: "I'm a little bit irritated that people think that it's like some celebrity band wagon that I've jumped on, or that, say, somebody like Demi (Moore) has jumped on," she said on "20/20." "We don't take it lightly."

But even in her newfound faith  or expanded faith, Madonna still clung on to Christianity to some extent. New York magazine noted that while celebrating Jewish High Holidays and the Shabbat with her Kabbalah friends, "she presents a confusing tableau: Still a Catholic, she often appears with a gigantic cross hanging from her neck, the size of the one in her Desperately Seeking Susan days, and carries her adopted -Malawian son, on whom she's usually placed a yarmulke."

Madonna's connections to Malawi, one of the poorest nations in Africa, set the stage for her alleged disaffection with Kabbalah.

In April 2010, Madonna laid the first brick for a girl's school in Malawi. The $15 million Raising Malawi Academy for Girls was to help approximately 500 orphans and was supposed to open this year.

It won't.

As The Guardian reports "it has turned into a legal quagmire." Construction never began and eight workers are "suing her for unfair dismissal and non-payment of benefits."

But this is just one of the many problems Madonna's charity Raising Malawi is having according to the Newsweek article . Newsweek recounted a multiplicity of alleged unaccounted funds, possible mismanagement and more related to the charity's partner, the Kabbalah Centre.

The Daily Mirror reported most of the money meant to fund the charity "was allegedly spent on the Kabbalah Centre's offices in LA. Madonna has now removed directors of Raising Malawi. Among the axed board members is Michael Berg, a co-director of the Kabbalah Centre. Two other ditched board members, John Larkin and Rachel Almog, also had links to Kabbalah. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing from any board members."

The Daily Mirror quotes an unnamed source as saying, "She has invested so much into Kabbalah so she was devastated by these damning accusations."

As FoxNews said , "So what's a former pop queen to do? Flirt with another religion, of course."

In April, Madonna spent about 90 minutes at the Opus Dei center in Orme Court in Britain, according the Daily Mail. Her spokesman had nothing to say, but the Mail's unnamed source said she "has always been intrigued by Opus Dei."

Opus Dei is not, however, a different religion from Catholicism. According to its own website, it is a Catholic institution that teaches that people can grow closer to God through everyday life. Its profile has been raised again recently by another movie, this one featuring its founder, Saint Josemar�a Escriv�. The film, "There Be Dragons," unlike " The Da Vinci Code," is a more positive about the organization that Dan Brown's conspiratorial fantasy.

Madonna also seems to be positive about the Catholic organization. But it isn't that clear that meeting with Opus Dei means that she has indeed abandoned Kabbalah. She has, however, abandoned or been abandoned by her most recent boyfriend over matters of faith.

The Daily Mail reported May 9 that 24-year-old Brahim Zaibat, a Muslim, has split with the 52-year-old Madonna, supposedly over her devotion to Kabbalah. "Brahim's family had told him they did not want him going to Kabbalah meetings and wanted him to stick to his Muslim beliefs, which caused some rows," a source told the Daily Mail.

EMAIL: mdegroote@desnews.com TWITTER: degroote 

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700134135/Spiritual-girl-Madonnas-shifting-beliefs.html?pg=2

Munson: Fairfield an unlikely spot for a hate crime

Des Moines Register
Kyle Munson
March 12, 2011

Fairfield, Ia. - Of all the spots on the map in Iowa, this is the setting for an alleged hate crime in 2011?

Shocking headlines out of Fairfield last week centered on an incident in which Usama Alshaibi, an Arab-American filmmaker, alleges he was repeatedly kicked and beaten and called racial slurs by a group of men at a house party in his neighborhood in the wee hours of Sunday, March 6.

Not to imply that racism respects geography. Hatred and violence can crop up anywhere.

It's just that Fairfield makes a strong case for its status as an enlightened, multicultural oasis on the Midwest prairie. A hate crime seems particularly out of tune with the serene vibe in this town of 9,464. We're talking at least 34 nationalities represented among the work force at large, according to the mayor. And 240 international students are among the 583 that live on campus at Maharishi University of Management, where transcendental meditation (TM) and sustainable living degrees are big draws.

So this is the sort of place where the woman behind the counter at the coffee shop was born in Taiwan, the young professional lunching with his co-workers at the next table is from South America, and you overhear a grandfather talking about moving back west after 13 years in Fairfield.

And that's on a slow day.

The town is rife with vegetarian and ethnic restaurants as well as "the first and only solar-powered radio station in the Midwest."

Fairfield sort of acts like the much larger Iowa City but with meditation domes instead of Kinnick Stadium.

Even Alshaibi, 41, still lauds the town where he and his wife, Kristie, settled in July so she could enroll in Maharishi University.

"I don't believe that my incident is representative of Fairfield," Alshaibi said Friday. "I adore the town, and people have been very generous and open and kind to us, and they still are."

But he wasn't all that eager to talk considering the firestorm that erupted in the wake of initial reports. Alshaibi is in the midst of producing a documentary film, "American Arab," and has refuted claims that he orchestrated some sort of publicity stunt.

"I'm having a hard time kind of functioning right now," he said. "It's a hindrance to the film."

Alshaibi even regrets speaking to the media in the first place: "I wish I would've waited a little bit at least to let the investigation be over."

Jefferson County Attorney Tim Dille is unsure when the police investigation will be complete to reveal more crucial details.

Alshaibi repeatedly has stated that after a night of dining and drinking, he entered the home in question after what he took to be an invitation by a woman standing out front. He alleges that the beatings began immediately after he said, "I'm Usama."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is representing the filmmaker and if necessary will employ attorneys from Chicago or Washington, D.C., said Miriam Amer, the council's executive director in Iowa. The organization also is requesting hate crime charges if a bias motive is found.

"Nobody deserves what happened to (Alshaibi)," Amer said. "If he was a threat, they should've called the police."

The county attorney said that the investigation includes Alshaibi's visit with a friend to the nearby Vivo Restaurant and Bar prior to the alleged beating. Paul Strubell also was at the restaurant that night and said that Alshaibi was intoxicated when he began "verbally assaulting" two of his friends - "started to mouth off to them right as they walked in the door." Police arrived at Vivo later that night after Alshaibi already was gone.

"I don't recall anything like that," Alshaibi said of his visit to Vivo, adding that he "wasn't accosting anyone."

The ultimate answers will have to come from a full account of what occurred that night at the house, regardless of what led up to it.

"I don't normally go out, I don't normally indulge in this way," Alshaibi said. "But, again, I have to emphasize that I don't feel I deserved what I got."

Alshaibi was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and grew up both in the Middle East (where his family fled the Iran-Iraq war) and Iowa City (where his father studied at the University of Iowa). He most recently lived and worked for 16 years in Chicago. Studs Terkel became a friend and was a supporter of Alshaibi's highest-profile documentary to date, 2006's "Nice Bombs," which chronicled the filmmaker's return trip to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 American invasion.

Alshaibi's family is Muslim, but he describes his own religious beliefs today as "somewhere between agnostic and atheist."

It was Fairfield's influx of TM converts - often disparagingly nicknamed " 'rus" (gurus) or "floaters" - that once defined the cultural divide here, after Maharishi University took over the former Parsons College campus in 1974. But that has long since been hashed out.

Current Maharishi University graduate student and former student council president Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, 46, said that there has been a bridging of the cultural gap in Fairfield, from his generation on down. He meditates twice daily, but he's also a member of the local Masonic Lodge.

Fairfield's mayor for the past decade, Ed Malloy, from suburban Long Island, moved here 30 years ago based on TM and also runs Danaher Oil Co. He touted his city's "management class of people that you are only going to find in urban areas."

It's true that the children of the first TM generation to settle in Fairfield already have grown up, moved away and boomeranged back to launch their own entrepreneurial ventures. The story of Meghan Dowd, 31, is familiar: She grew up in Fairfield after her family relocated from the Chicago suburbs. She left for school at Dartmouth and then work as a TV screenwriter in Los Angeles before returning to found Open Space Studio in 2009, where she teaches spin and yoga classes.

Culturally, Fairfield residents "have had to stretch themselves a little bit more," Dowd said - and that's a good thing.

Last weekend's incident seems to have strained, rather than stretched, the Fairfield community.

Alshaibi added that his wife is pregnant and has dropped out of classes at the university as the couple decides what to do next.

"I wasn't interested in being a victim," he said. "I don't have a victim mentality."

Neither Alshaibi nor Fairfield sought a starring role in this real-life drama. But maybe the unlikely multicultural setting can work in favor of a more constructive outcome.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110313/NEWS03/103130334/Munson-Fairfield-an-unlikely-spot-hate-crime

When Does a Religion Become a Cult?

Wall Street Journal

Mitch Horowitz,  

America has long been a safe harbor for experimental faiths. But the unorthodox can descend into something darker.

America has probably supplied the world with more new religions than any other nation. Since the first half of the 19th century, the country's atmosphere of religious experimentation has produced dozens of movements, from Mormonism to a wide range of nature-based practices grouped under the name Wicca.

By 1970 the religious scholar Jacob Needleman popularized the term "New Religious Movements" (NRM) to classify the new faiths, or variants of old ones, that were being embraced by the Woodstock generation. But how do we tell when a religious movement ceases to be novel or unusual and becomes a cult?

It's a question with a long history in this country. The controversy involving Hollywood writer-director Paul Haggis is only its most recent occurrence. Mr. Haggis left the Church of Scientology and has accused it of abusive practices, including demands that members disconnect from their families, which the church vigorously denies.

To use the term cult too casually risks tarring the merely unconventional, for which America has long been a safe harbor. In the early 19th century, the "Burned-over District" of central New York state—so named for the religious passions of those who settled there following the Revolutionary War—gave rise to a wave of new movements, including Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism and Spiritualism (or talking to the dead). It was an era, as historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom wrote, when "Farmers became theologians, offbeat village youths became bishops, odd girls became prophets."

When the California Gold Rush of 1849 enticed settlers westward, the nation's passion for religious novelty moved with them. By the early 20th century, sunny California had replaced New York as America's laboratory for avant-garde spirituality. Without the weight of tradition and the ecclesiastical structures that bring some predictability to congregational life, some movements were characterized by a make-it-up-as-you-go approach that ultimately came to redefine people, money and propriety as movable parts intended to benefit the organization.

Many academics and observers of cult phenomena, such as psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford, agree on four criteria to define a cult. The first is behavior control, i.e., monitoring of where you go and what you do. The second is information control, such as discouraging members from reading criticism of the group. The third is thought control, placing sharp limits on doctrinal questioning. The fourth is emotional control—using humiliation or guilt. Yet at times these traits can also be detected within mainstream faiths. So I would add two more categories: financial control and extreme leadership.

Financial control translates into levying ruinous dues or fees, or effectively hiring members and placing them on stipends or sales quotas. Consider the once-familiar image of Hare Krishna devotees selling books in airports. Or a friend of mine—today a respected officer with a nonprofit organization—who recalls how his departure from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church was complicated by the problem of a massive hole in his résumé, reflecting the years he had financially committed himself to the church.

Problems with extremist leadership can be more difficult to spot. The most tragic cult of the last century was the Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple, which ended with mass murder and suicide in the jungles of Guyana in 1978. Only a few early observers understood Jones as dangerously erratic. Known for his racially diverse San Francisco congregation, Jones was widely feted on the local political scene in the 1970s. He was not some West Coast New Ager gone bad. He emerged instead from the mainstream Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) pulpit, which sometimes lent a reassuringly Middle-American tone to his sermons.

Yet every coercive religious group harbors one telltale trait: untoward secrecy. As opposed to a cult, a religious culture ought to be as simple to enter or exit, for members or observers, as any free nation. Members should experience no impediment to relationships, ideas or travel, and the group's finances should be reasonably transparent. Its doctrine need not be conventional—but it should be knowable to outsiders. Absent those qualities, an unorthodox religion can descend into something darker.

Mr. Horowitz, the editor in chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York and the author of "Occult America" (Bantam), is writing a history of the positive-thinking movement.

How Meditation May Change the Brain

Sindya N. Bhanoo
New York Times
January 28, 2011


Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours daily, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.

But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.


M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.


But how exactly did these study volunteers, all seeking stress reduction in their lives but new to the practice, meditate? So many people talk about meditating these days. Within four miles of our Bay Area home, there are at least six centers that offer some type of meditation class, and I often hear phrases like, “So how was your sit today?”


Britta Hölzel, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said the participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s. It traces its roots to the same ancient Buddhist techniques that my husband follows.


“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”


Generally the meditators are seated upright on a chair or the floor and in silence, although sometimes there might be a guide leading a session, Dr. Hölzel said.


Of course, it’s important to remember that the human brain is complicated. Understanding what the increased density of gray matter really means is still, well, a gray area.


“The field is very, very young, and we don’t really know enough about it yet,” Dr. Hölzel said. “I would say these are still quite preliminary findings. We see that there is something there, but we have to replicate these findings and find out what they really mean.”


It has been hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation, but a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans.


Previous studies have also shown that there are structural differences between the brains of meditators and those who don’t meditate, although this new study is the first to document changes in gray matter over time through meditation.


Ultimately, Dr. Hölzel said she and her colleagues would like to demonstrate how meditation results in definitive improvements in people’s lives.


“A lot of studies find that it increases well-being, improves quality of life, but it’s always hard to determine how you can objectively test that,” she said. “Relatively little is known about the brain and the psychological mechanisms about how this is being done.”


In a 2008 study published in the journal PloS One, researchers found that when meditators heard the sounds of people suffering, they had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures, a part of the brain tied to empathy, than people who did not meditate.


“They may be more willing to help when someone suffers, and act more compassionately,” Dr. Hölzel said.


Further study is needed, but that bodes well for me.


For now, I’m more than happy to support my husband’s little experiment, despite the fact that he now rises at 5 a.m. and is exhausted by 10 at night.


An empathetic husband who takes out the trash and puts gas in the car because he knows I don’t like to — I’ll take that.


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/how-meditation-may-change-the-brain/?src=me&ref=general