The Satanic Temple plans a Black Mass next month at PhilaMOCA, and protesters are seeking aid from the mayor's office to stop it
ROBERT SKVARLA
PhillyVoice Contributor
SEPTEMBER 28, 2018
The Philly Satanists are gathering at PhilaMOCA for An Evening with the Satanic Temple on Friday, Oct. 12. A live Black Mass ritual will take place, as well as a screening of the 1922 silent documentary horror film, "Haxan."
It’s a sweltering afternoon in late May. A group of mostly 30-somethings are relaxing in the air conditioning at Devil’s Den discussing movies and politics. To the untrained eye, this might look like a normal meet-up, but these 11 strangers aren’t getting together to bond over foreign films or to try speed dating. They’re Satanists.
One month later, they're gathered at a bar in Germantown. A chocolate cake covered in black icing topped with a blood red pentagram sits on the table before them. It's the group's first anniversary. They open the meeting with an invocation calling to Satan for power and wisdom. It ends with members intoning, “FIAT, IN NOMINE SATANAS.”
Who are these people? What evils do they have in mind for Philadelphia?
“I don't harm animals or other people,” writes Moira Corvid, one of the organizers of Satanic Philadelphia, via email.
“I don't want churches to be burned down, and I do not view other religions (or the human beings who participate in them) as a disease or otherwise something to be eradicated. And I don't eat babies.
“We are Satanists. Full stop. Many of us are also atheists, and we relate well to the platforms put forth by secular groups.”
Atheistic…Satanists? How can someone who believes in the absence of God also identify as a Satanist?
“In a word, autonomy,” she continues.
“I belong to no one. I am mine. The mythological dynamic of Lucifer taking up a sword against the God who owned him speaks to me on such an intimate and existential level.”
If you haven’t been paying attention, Satan has been experiencing a bit of a moment. Bands like Ghost promote Satan with their music. Movies like “The Witch” celebrate Satan at the box office. And, led by Salem-based activist organization The Satanic Temple, new Satanic groups are popping up in major cities. Contrary to the beliefs of millions of frustrated parents, it wasn’t a phase -- adults are embracing Satanism in growing numbers. As recently as 2014, the Pew Research Center found that 1.5 percent of Americans now identify with “other” religions, including Paganism, Wicca and, yes, Satanism.
Where are these Satanists coming from, and why now? In his book Satanism: A Social History, Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne distinguishes between two types of practitioners: occultists and rationalists. Rationalist groups significantly outnumber occult groups and dominate media coverage in the U.S. because, as he explained during an interview, “[they] want to criticize society, particularly American society, which they believe is still dominated by evangelicals or conservative Christians, so they need to go public.”
Today, these rationalists -- a loose coalition of atheists and humanists -- are claiming the mantle of Satanism to make political statements. They’re creating and joining these groups as a form of protest, to defend reproductive rights and religious freedom. But what separates them from organizations like the ACLU is their flair for theatrics. It's not uncommon to see The Satanic Temple carting a nine-foot idol of the horned deity Baphomet to state capitols to protest attempts by state legislatures at erecting statues of the Ten Commandments.
“Perhaps the institutions of secular humanists are a little bit boring and somebody like Lucien Greaves is much more fun,” said Introvigne, referring to one of the founders of The Satanic Temple.
“If you are young, in particular, and you feel Christianity is very oppressive, you probably find the activities of The Satanic Temple much more fun than some of the American atheist associations.”
Not everyone finds these antics amusing. In response to a Black Mass planned by The Satanic Temple and Satanic Philadelphia for this October at PhilaMOCA, the York-based American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property created an online petition asking the venue (and Mayor Jim Kenney) to cancel the event. Jack Burnham, a member of the Catholic organization, created the petition because the group, in his words, “opposes the mainstreaming of Satanism.” While he won’t protest the event in person, Burnham said he intends to contact the mayor’s office once the petition reaches its goal of 40,000 signatures.
But Satanic Philadelphia refuses to back down to those who might demonize their beliefs. In an email, another of the group’s founders, Braden Rhys, states, “As has been clearly evident in contemporary times (especially with the ‘fake news’ propaganda), people will believe what they want to believe, even in the face of overwhelming logic or empirical evidence that points to contrary facts. It’s a battle that we can’t realistically expect to ‘win’ in terms of our group, so public perception of Satanic Philadelphia will largely fall on what we do and how we conduct ourselves while doing it rather than direct or concentrated efforts to debunk the persistent mythologies about Satanism today.”
ROBERT SKVARLA
PhillyVoice Contributor
https://www.phillyvoice.com/who-are-the-philly-satanists-what-do-they-do-a-look-into-the-underground-world-of-satan-worship-in-philadelphia/
At St. Matthias Church in Trinity-Bellwoods, they spoke in tongues, went into trances and performed exorcisms. When a teenage follower complained of an earache, they tried to drive the devil out of her. Within days, she was dead.
NATHANIEL G. MOORE
Toronto Life
OCTOBER 1, 2018
My grandfather, George Moore Smith, was born in Toronto in 1911. While his brother, Brigadier Morgan Smith, became a Canadian war hero—he fought at Dieppe and landed at Normandy—my grandfather chose religion. From a young age, he was captivated by the story of Jesus and his teachings, and as an adult, he devoted his life to serving God with the Anglican Church of Canada. In 1939, he was appointed rector in Dunnville, Ontario, on the shores of Lake Erie, where he oversaw three parishes. He and my grandmother, Violet, had five children in quick succession: David, my father, was the eldest, followed by Rebecca, Ann, Patrick and Suzie.
In demeanour, my grandparents always reminded me of Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey, the genteel castaways on Gilligan’s Island. They were proper, with an air of sophistication and intelligence. In appearance, Violet was mousy and petite, and always subservient to her husband. My grandfather, who went by Moore, was large and imposing, just under six feet with broad shoulders and a square jaw. He had a soft voice that could accelerate to a furious boom when he delivered sermons, and when he sang, he sounded like a cross between Kermit the Frog and Leonard Cohen. Some people found him to be a charismatic leader, while others thought he was prone to histrionics. Growing up, my father rarely saw his dad. Moore was always doing God’s work.
For most of the 1940s, my grandfather and his family lived in a square cinder-block house in Dunnville. It was ill-heated—the furnace seldom worked—and there was no indoor toilet or running water. It was a difficult life and so, in 1948, when Moore was offered the job of rector at St. Matthias Church on Bellwoods Avenue in Toronto, he leapt at the chance. The family packed up and moved into the rectory next door.
In the coming decades, the major Christian institutions in Canada—the Church of England, United Church and Roman Catholic Church—found themselves in crisis. By the 1960s, as the Beatles meditated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as the Vietnam War eroded trust in authority, as young people leaned toward cultural revolution, the oligarchies of the past lost their power. Church memberships plummeted. Between 1961 and 1981, the number of Canadian Anglicans dropped by almost a third, from around 1.3 million to less than one million. The church had tried to modernize, changing its name from the Church of England to the Anglican Church and permitting divorcees to remarry, but it was still perceived as aloof and stodgy.
The new ideologies of the era were libertarian, anti-elitist, often radical, spurring some parishes toward new, ecstatic forms of prayer. The Pentecostal movement preached that worship had to be experiential, not just ritual or intellectual. Its cousin, the charismatic movement, espoused the notion that Christ conferred gifts upon his followers, like the ability to speak in tongues or the power to heal with one’s hands. In 1952, my grandfather discovered these new religious practices when he attended a sermon by Canon Bryan Green, a British evangelical preacher known as the “Anglican Billy Graham,” who preached at the CNE Coliseum before 5,000 people. “Man is not a pathological case, as psychiatrists would have us believe,” Green pontificated. “He is a guilty sinner.” Moore went through a conversion that day. He considered himself born again. “He became addicted to intense religious experience,” my aunt Ann later said. “We—his children and family—had to buy into it. We had no choice.”
After Green’s sermon, my grandfather embraced rituals that were wildly different from the Anglicanism he’d practised before. He spoke in tongues. He performed the laying of the hands. Sometimes, he’d whip himself into a frenzy, flailing and rolling around on the floor. During sermons, he’d shake and howl unintelligibly. This kind of preaching extended to the home, where his children were exposed to odd spiritual behaviour. His ministry was a patchwork of influences, some of them self-contradictory. He described it as “Catholic in faith, liturgy and worship, evangelical in Christian experience, biblical in teaching and witness, Pentecostal in ministry, proclaiming Christ in the inner city.”
Moore’s radical new dogma created a divide within the congregation. Around half of the members left the parish. But some were captivated. In 1963, he was invited to deliver a sermon at Grace Church-on-the-Hill in Forest Hill. In the audience that day were Professor William Rogers, the chair of the French department at U of T’s Trinity College, and his wife, Marjorie, who was particularly entranced by my grandfather’s faith-healing practices. The couple were fairly well off, with a large house in Moore Park. After that first sermon, they joined St. Matthias and became my grandfather’s most devoted parishioners. In turn, he confided in them about the difficulties he faced, describing in letters how busy he was with his ministry, how he often felt “off” and “on”—possessed by malignant energy—and how that resulted in cruel outbursts with his family.
As my grandfather’s ministry evolved, the leaders of the Anglican Church remained hands-off, and occasionally even seemed to indulge some of his beliefs. In 1958, he received permission to bring a British faith healer—who claimed to have cured his own son’s meningitis—to the parish, largely at the expense of the church. At one point, he was also allowed to form his own healing committee. But behind closed doors, the diocese was trying to transfer Moore away from St. Matthias. They approached seven Ontario parishes between 1959 and 1964. All of them refused to take my grandfather as their minister.
In 1964, tragedy struck. My uncle Patrick, the favoured son, was killed. He was 14 at the time, on his way home from his job at a stationery store. As he cycled past the corner of Dundas and Shaw, a car collided with him and threw him from his bike, bashing his head on the concrete. He was rushed to Sick Kids but died the next day.
Everyone in the family fell into a depression after Patrick died. “He was always in song, and carried his guitar with him, always cheerful,” my grandfather once told me. “He would say the most remarkable things about Jesus.” After he lost Patrick, my grandfather relied increasingly on faith healing to help himself and his family get through the tragedy. At hospital visits and home visits, he insisted on healing the sick, praying and laying his hands on their wounds, whipping himself into hysteria. Within a couple of years, he had become obsessed with the idea of the devil and exorcisms. He often claimed to hear voices, to which he’d turn for guidance.
By 1966, he had formed a close-knit group of followers who subscribed to his form of faith-healing Christianity. He called it the Ministry of Healing. He was assisted by Doug Tisdall, a young Anglican priest whose father, Frederick Tisdall, was one of the inventors of Pablum. Doug had been involved in charismatic Christianity from a young age, praying in tongues and practising faith healing before he was ordained as a priest in 1965. The diocese bishop had encouraged him to pursue his PhD, but my grandfather urged the church to ordain the young man. Marjorie Rogers, her brown hair in a tall bouffant, provided counsel for members and claimed to possess the ability to discern when someone was “off,” or not listening to their holy guidance.
According to some members, she would perform what the group called potting out—going into a kind of trance, howling like a dog and chanting. That behaviour indicated there was demonic energy in the room and helped her sniff out who in the group was possessed. She was reportedly only able to come out of it when other members laid their hands on her and prayed loudly until she was herself again. Once, she even suggested that my grandfather and Doug were off, and sent them to a motel for the night until they were back to normal. (I reached out to Marjorie, now in her 80s, for comment on this story. She confirmed that she possessed the gift of discernment, but denied that she ever entered trances.)
Many members claimed to be able to perceive evil: some described a “head,” which was a kind of headache that would manifest when there was a demonic presence in the room; others could sense a “bad atmosphere” when an evil spirit supposedly infringed on the Holy Spirit. They believed in bad omens—a cut on the hand or a dropped dish might indicate the presence of evil.
My grandfather had a standard recruiting process. First he’d identify a troubled parishioner and counsel him or her late into the night. After a few sessions, he’d invite the parishioner to join his group. It seemed like a credible operation: it was associated with a real church, and there were two Anglican priests at the helm. Many members moved into the rectory, next door to the church. Others moved in with Marjorie and her husband, William, in Moore Park. William, however, was starting to have his doubts. He was disturbed by his wife’s fierce devotion and especially by the constant presence of my grandfather and Doug. In October 1966, he moved out, telling a friend their activities had driven him away. A few months later, Marjorie moved into Doug’s house on Gloucester Street, which became a second headquarters for the group. They later married and had a daughter.
In its first months, Canon Moore Smith’s ministry attracted around 50 vulnerable young men and women. Several of them were theology students Doug had met at the University of Toronto. My grandfather never called his group a cult, but that’s what it was. He would insist that new members commit themselves fully to God’s will, as he and his cohorts interpreted it, in exchange for the group’s protection and support. They’d often have to cut off contact with their families—their fellow cult members would be their new family—and reveal all their secrets and sins to foster a sense of trust. They were encouraged to maintain a sense of serenity and good will to all their fellow members, but urged to be wary of outsiders. Many members suffered from depression or came from troubled homes. The more disturbed they were, the more opportunity they had to be healed.
One woman, a 19-year-old mother of two, brought her kids to live with Marjorie and Doug after my grandfather convinced her that living with her parents was evil. “He prayed all of the hell and atmosphere out of my clothes and belongings,” she later said. During her first night at the house, she woke up convinced the devil was in her bedroom, which Marjorie confirmed. Right then and there, at 4 a.m., Doug baptized her with holy oils.
Another young woman had been married at 14 and later separated from her husband and two children. She’d attempted suicide by shooting herself, and the bullet had lodged in her spine, causing her to limp. Her ex-neighbour, a cult member, told her the residual pain indicated that there was evil in her body and introduced her to Doug. When he touched her leg, she claimed, the pain went away. While living at the rectory, she coughed up blood one night. “That’s hell coming through you,” Doug told her.
At a vestry meeting, my grandfather spoke openly about his new venture. He had become irrational after Patrick’s death, and the members of his group had saved him. “I keep telling you that God rescues us when we are in trouble. You should believe me because I certainly needed help myself,” he said. “The group came because they needed help, and the help was there…they saw the trouble I was in and they stayed to help me.”
The Anglican Diocese of Toronto was aware of the strange and mystical activities at St. Matthias, yet they seemed unwilling or unable to stop them. In March 1966, an archdeacon was assigned to investigate the ministry. He spoke candidly to the bishop about the “dangers” he perceived under my grandfather’s leadership. But without concrete evidence of wrongdoing, the diocese was at a loss about what action to take. So they took none.
My aunt Ann, then 17, had been away from home for two years, teaching at a residential school near James Bay. While she was gone, she’d received strange letters from her father, proselytizing about the wonders taking place at St. Matthias. When she came home to Toronto, she found the doors bolted at the rectory. The church secretary passed on a message from her father: if she wanted to see her family again, she’d have to give herself over with complete dedication to the group and report to Marjorie Rogers. She had no choice but to acquiesce. Living at the rectory, she was often told she was off, and no one would speak to her for two or three weeks at a time. One time, during an off period, she ran to the basement, where her father and Doug stopped her. “You’re filled with the devil!” they kept shouting until she went limp.
My grandfather often arranged romantic partnerships between members of his cult. He paired Ann with a young man at the rectory who was struggling with his homosexuality. One day, her father accused her of being cold to her new boyfriend. She was ordered to go to her room and take off her clothes. Moments later, Moore walked in. He was also naked, carrying a chalice and some bread and wine. He anointed her body with oils and celebrated the Eucharist. Later that evening, her assigned boyfriend came to her room and she was urged to have sex with him.
In the summer of 1966, Katherine Globe, a high school student from Burlington, joined my grandfather’s cult. Her older brother Alex was already a member of the ministry; he credited it with curing his epilepsy. Their father, an engineer, had recently suffered a heart attack, and her mother had a history of mental illness. Alex worried his parents wouldn’t be able to take care of Kathy, so he suggested she join Canon Moore Smith’s group and finish high school in Toronto. My grandfather visited her father in the hospital, where he signed over Kathy’s legal guardianship. (He later claimed Moore blackmailed him, threatening to ruin him in court if he protested.) The next day, Kathy moved to the rectory on Bellwoods Avenue, where she roomed with my aunt Ann. At 17, she was one of the cult’s youngest members.
Kathy had short brown hair, dark eyes and a ski-slope nose. She was a typical teenager of the 1960s: she loved the Beatles, and according to her high school yearbook, she dreamed of running her own household. Like other cult members, she was forbidden to speak with her parents, and my grandfather continuously reminded the Globes of the papers they had signed.
Soon after she joined the group, Moore set her up with my father, David, then 25. My dad had always been a proud and dutiful son, loyally supporting my grandfather’s teachings. He was tall and thin and clean cut, with bushy eyebrows that threatened to join in the middle. His eyes were hazel and deeply set in his head. Within a few months of meeting, my father and Kathy were engaged.
At the end of May 1967, a year after joining the group, Kathy developed an earache. At first, it seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. She had chronic ear infections and had been seen by doctors at Toronto Western Hospital several times. On her last visit, they’d found hearing loss in her left ear, a thick discharge from her ear canal and a bloody post-nasal discharge. She was prescribed antibiotics. When she started complaining of new pain, her friends at the rectory thought she was exaggerating—many believed she was prone to melodrama—and her brother figured she was responding to tension from her high school finals. But the earache wouldn’t go away.
Over the next week, her pain got worse. By mid-June, Kathy was mostly bedridden, moaning in agony. On Monday, June 19, Moore visited her room. Kathy told him how much she wanted to beat the illness, and he agreed to pray for her. As her complaints persisted, the other cult members assumed she was off and, as was the custom, they ignored her, intending to give her the silent treatment until she returned to normal. By the next morning, her moans had intensified. That day, according to several cult members, Doug and my father went into her room and spanked her across the behind. “It is our belief that illness is caused by Satan,” my grandfather later said by way of explanation.
Her cries continued all night, and by morning, they’d turned into one prolonged shriek. It was so excruciating that my grandmother, Violet, ran upstairs, where a cult member heard her slapping Kathy across the face. (Violet later claimed that the sound must have been Kathy slapping her own face.) Then my grandmother calmly walked downstairs and prepared lunch. She never took Kathy’s temperature or found out when she’d last eaten. When my grandfather went up to Kathy’s room later, she was in hysterics. “God help me,” she screamed out the window. He threatened her, saying that if she didn’t calm down and get out of bed, he’d have to cancel an appointment he’d made with the ear specialist for that day. The noise continued, so my grandmother called Marjorie, who sent over Doug and Alex. No ambulances were called. No doctors consulted. No painkillers administered. On the way from the Rogers home on Gloucester to the rectory on Bellwoods, the men stopped to pick up dry cleaning and at the church to pray. By the time they’d finished running their errands, Katherine Globe was dead.
Alex discovered his sister’s body at the rectory. She was lying in bed, dressed only in her underwear. After a failed attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he called the police, and Detective-Sergeant Patrick Donovan arrived at the scene. When he entered the church, he saw members of the cult lying in the chapel’s aisles. In Kathy’s bedroom, the wall and floors were streaked with vomit. Her discarded clothing and bed linens were also soaked in vomit, tossed in a heap on the floor. In her hysterical pain, she had removed the contents of her drawers and thrown them on the ground. There was a broken water glass on the floor and a second glass under the bed containing a greenish liquid, likely vomit or bile.
Kathy’s body arrived at the morgue that evening. Standing around her corpse, my father, my grandfather, Alex and Doug formed a tight circle. Moore anointed her with oils. Then, as the detective looked on in astonishment, the four of them clasped each other’s shoulders. My grandfather incanted a prayer, asking if it was God’s will that Kathy be brought back to life. They were trying to revive her. Later, Alex admitted he didn’t think the ritual would work. “But I do believe the power of prayer is strong enough to bring a person back to life,” he said. “It’s recorded in the New Testament.”
When police interviewed members of the cult, many of them said Kathy’s illness had been an emotional one, the result of demonic possession. According to the post-mortem report, it was something much more prosaic. Frederick Jaffe, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, determined Kathy had acute meningitis and an abscess near her left inner ear, which had ruptured hours before she died. Ontario’s chief coroner, Beatty Cotnam, later asked my grandfather if anyone had considered calling a doctor. “I realize it should have been done,” Moore said. “Our judgment was clouded.” An inquest was ordered to look into Kathy’s death. The cult spent days trying to pray it away, to no avail. It began on September 28, 1967.
At the time, Kathy’s death was the biggest story in Toronto. Front-page newspaper headlines described the downtown cult, the girl who’d died and the exorcism attempts that had killed her. People were shocked that such a thing could happen in Toronto, where the best hospitals in the country were just a few blocks away. Originally, the inquest was to be held at the city morgue on Lombard Street, but due to the massive amount of attention from media and the public, it was moved to the city council chambers at Old City Hall, where hundreds of spectators sat in the gallery. They heard testimony from the doctors who had treated Kathy’s ear infections and the pathologists who performed the autopsy, then from members of the cult. My father testified that he believed Kathy was trying to get his attention, and that she only seemed to scream when someone walked past her door. He had spanked her across the behind several times the day before she died, claiming that if she was going to act like a child, he was going to treat her like one. During his testimony, my grandparents looked on with doting affection, proud of his loyalty to the family. He had stuck to the script.
I can’t help but sympathize with him. All the attention was on the cult leaders and the Globe family. I never read so much as a single keystroke of sympathy directed at my grieving father. And yet he had lost his fiancée, and was himself a victim of the cult. In a piece for Saturday Night magazine, the journalist Barbara Frum took an ill view of my dad. “He is dour, rigid, straight-laced, with an icy, glowering intensity,” she wrote.
Toward the end of the inquest, Moore took the stand. He denied ever hitting Kathy and claimed he loved her very much. By way of defence, my grandfather presented himself as a deeply troubled and weak man, susceptible to the influences of others. He also confessed that he’d believed he could bring Kathy back to life at the morgue, and had hoped to just take her home with them as if nothing had happened. Doug, for his part, called the whole inquest a witch hunt.
After a few hours of deliberation, the inquest jury delivered their findings. They concluded my grandfather and his wife had been negligent to not seek medical care or hospitalization for Kathy. “We find their judgments were so clouded by the religious beliefs of the healing group within the parish of St. Matthias that they failed to give her adequate personal attention and similarly failed to recognize the obvious symptoms that she was suffering severe physical pain.” They recommended an inquiry into the presence of this and other faith-healing groups in Toronto. A few hours later, the Anglican Church released a statement. “The Anglican hierarchy must decisively dissociate itself from the unusual faith-healing practices which border on exorcism.” My grandfather was asked to resign from the church, but was permitted to remain in the rectory until the end of the year. No criminal charges were ever laid.
The bishop, an ultra-conservative Anglican called George Snell, selected a commission of seven men to investigate Canon Moore Smith’s ministry. It included an Anglican priest, a canon and a rector, as well as the head of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Hospital, a U of T medical professor and a lawyer from the Bay Street law firm Strathy, Archibald, Seagram and Cole, which would later merge with Gowlings. In May 1968, the commission published the results of its inquiry. They noted that Marjorie had held the reins of power and was regarded as an “all-wise matriarch,” the person everyone—including the two priests—would consult before any action was taken. My grandfather, who was then living with his family in a rented house in the east end, was deemed a “mere straw figure.” He was to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, and was placed under close supervision for two years before he could run his own congregation again. “What began as a bold experiment in Christian outreach gradually degenerated into a mystic cult,” the report stated. “Satanic influence was believed to be incorporated into objects as well as persons. Given this premise, the need for exorcism followed as a logical consequence.” My grandfather’s only statement that day: “I have never left the church.”
By January 1969, my grandfather was a visiting pastor to the Church of St. Michael and All Angels on St. Clair West, and regularly administered Eucharist at St. John’s House, a community centre on Portland Street. He was in dire financial straits, and dealing with the lingering trauma of Kathy’s death. He decided his only solution was to leave the country. That year, he and my grandmother settled in the mountains in Jamaica. For seven years, he ran three thriving congregations. He never practised faith healing again.
After Kathy died, my father enrolled in the history program at the University of Toronto and later entered the insurance business. He renounced Anglicanism but couldn’t shed religion altogether, and he eventually became a member of the United Church of Canada. In 1969, the same year his parents fled to Jamaica, he met my mother, Diane, who was 27 and working as an administrative assistant at U of T. As they got to know each other, she perceived the lasting scars the cult and Kathy’s death had left. Soon after their marriage, he and my mom saw a psychiatrist several times to assess the damage. My father was haunted by guilt and shame, by the brutal shock of someone he loved dying because of his father, a man he worshipped. For years, he had recurring nightmares, and he’d often burst into uncontrollable sobs.
I was born in 1974, and my younger brother followed four years later. In 1981, the four of us settled in a modest detached house near Laird and Eglinton. Leaside will always be my Tatooine, minus the sand and droids. It’s where I played out the years of my childhood with bike rides and toboggan runs in Serena Gundy Park, where I once put my Han Solo action figure in a cup of water in my freezer to re-enact his carbonite freeze moment on Cloud City. To outsiders, we appeared to be the perfect nuclear family. But my relationship with my dad was always strained. Sometimes he could be kind, teaching me basic carpentry and electric skills for my Cub Scout badges. Other times, he could be unpredictably hostile. Once, when I was eight, he broke my hockey stick in half to teach me a lesson about cleaning up after myself. To get back at him, on the way to church one morning I shouted at the top of my lungs, “DAVID GEORGE MOORE SMITH IS AN ASSHOLE!” He was so humiliated that he skipped the service and went home. I hated him.
I first met my grandparents in the early 1980s. They were stern but never cruel. They’d shout at my brother and me about tracking mud on the floors or about shutting up our noisy electric toys. Whenever they pulled up to our house, my mom would do her best Poltergeist impression: “They’re heeeeere.” Occasionally, they stayed the night, but mostly they preferred to live in rural hideaways outside the city. “Grandfather doesn’t like to spend too much time in Toronto,” my mom would say, cryptically.
By this point, they had left Jamaica and moved to Wilberforce, Ontario, where my grandfather ran a ministry at St. Margaret’s church. Whenever we visited our grandparents, we would participate as guests at their Anglican parish. I can still remember my anxiety of taking communion and walking up in a line with my mother. She told me I didn’t have to drink the wine, that she’d told my grandfather I was just to take the wafer. I looked back to see my mom sipping Christ’s blood with a mixture of fear and curiosity. No one ever mentioned the cult. “You aren’t to speak about that in front of my children,” my mom told all our relatives.
Once, I attended a family reunion in Wilberforce. My grandfather was already going deaf at this point, and most sentences would either begin or end with a slightly elevated “Hmmmmmmmmm?” I was about eight years old, and the Star Wars craze was in full force. He presented my brother and me with matching Yoda action figures, and explained how being a good Christian and believing in God were similar to the Jedi and the Force.
We went to Northlea United Church in Leaside every Sunday. We wore itchy sweaters, and my brother and I were never allowed to sit beside each other because we’d start fighting or making jokes. I was involved in the social aspects of church: the choir, the Christmas pageant where I played one of the wise men. If my father was home, we prayed before every meal, blessing our fish sticks and meatloaf with the Lord’s Prayer. But as I grew older, church and God became annoying chores I had to endure. I had no interest in the prehistoric ramblings of religious characters who were terrified of damnation and crops turning to dust. Deep down, religion also unsettled me. I was convinced that God wasn’t really looking over us. Once I was so mad about something that I ripped a cross—given to me by my grandfather—off my neck and threw it out the car window. Another time, I took a gaudy wooden crucifix my father had given me and drove a nail into Jesus’ stomach, then tossed it at my father’s feet. “You’re not hurting me when you do that,” was his only reply.
I only knew snippets of my father’s past. I knew that as a child he’d walked miles to go to school. I knew he’d had a dog and that he’d lived in a farmhouse with his parents and sisters before moving to Toronto when he was seven. He loved to sing and was in the church choir, but no one seemed to like his voice. He would sing off-key, which he seemed to do as a way of being heard. Most people try to stand out so they can reveal themselves to others. When my father did it, he was just alienating himself. He had few friends—the only people he knew were his family and the odd neighbour—and he never told us what he was thinking or feeling. He was always preoccupied and distant.
By 1995, my parents had split up and my dad was living in a one-bedroom apartment above the funeral home where he was working. That February, I got a phone call from my brother, telling me to read page A1 of the Toronto Star. My aunt Ann, who’d become a minister in the Anglican Church, had given an extensive interview to the paper about her father’s cult. My grandparents commented for the story, too. “I take responsibility for the mistakes that were made,” my grandfather said, adding that exorcisms should be avoided. On the subject of cults, he described “the separation, the isolationism, the pride and arrogance that goes with it. It happened to me. It was a dreadful time.” My grandmother’s take was eerier. “It happened in a gradual way; going into it, you feel God is guiding you, but you have to be very careful—it may be the other party.” She meant Satan, of course. It was the first I’d ever heard of my father’s ordeal, my grandfather’s sins and the death of Katherine Globe. It sounded like some twisted made-for-TV movie. At first, I was horrified, both by the story and at my aunt for airing it to the paper. The family figured she just wanted to drum up publicity for her new congregation. My father refused to talk about it.
And yet the Star piece was ultimately a blessing. I finally understood my grandfather. I thought about his fear of evil and endless regrets at being so weak. I recognized a genuine sadness at what had happened, the incredible remorse he must have felt. As for my father, everything made sense: his obsession with religion, his need to belt out a solo in the choir to impress his father and his simultaneous fear of him. A whole universe of tragedy seemed to predate my arrival in my father’s life. How did he sweep it all under the table and start a family? After the article came out, my father and I never had any more confrontations. I saw him as a man burdened by his past. Our war was over.
These days, I live in Fredericton with my wife, Amber, and our daughter. My grandfather died in 2003, and my dad lives in Elgin, Ontario. We don’t speak often. The last time I visited, earlier this year, my brother and I replaced his floors. I could sense that my father felt vulnerable—the process seemed invasive, and my brother wouldn’t let him help. He was 76, suffering from emphysema, with a rake-thin Woody Allen physique. As he smoked in his lair, I found it hard to believe that this was the same man who’d seemed so overpowering when I was a kid.
In my father’s bedroom, I saw the dresser he had bought in 1981 from the Art Shoppe, originally part of a set that included the bunk beds my brother and I slept on. Resting on the dresser was a tiny brass picture frame containing a black-and-white school photo of a pretty young girl with dark hair and a friendly smile. It was Kathy Globe.
This story originally appeared in the October 2018 issue of Toronto Life magazine.
https://torontolife.com/city/my-grandfathers-cult/
He changed the course of civil rights in this country and you never heard his name.
Director & Producer Lenny Feinberg.
Producer Nancy Cutler.
Co-Producer Claire Chandler.
94 Minutes. Includes Captions.
This is the untold story of the remarkable civil rights pioneer Father Divine – who had over a million followers worldwide and is considered the link between Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King – but is neglected by historians because he claimed that he was God incarnate.
Father Divine was born in poverty, the son of emancipated slaves, and went on to become one of America's most controversial religious leaders. Father Divine's movement was dedicated to integration and communal living, and was an innovator in desegregating neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and the ballot box in the 1930's and 40's, through his radical program of empowerment. He commanded hundreds of properties and businesses, all funded by the work of his thousands of followers. At the same time, he preached that he himself was an incarnation of God, and that by following his rules of purity and celibacy, his followers could live forever in "heaven on earth." But scandal, suspicion, and racism lead to clashes with the law for him and his movement. Though he was once a celebrity, and was decades ahead of his time fighting for civil rights, he has largely been written out of history because of the audacity of his religious claims, and doubt about his motives.
Today, Father's few remaining followers live as a communal family on a magnificent estate outside Philadelphia. As time and mortality confront the followers, they struggle to preserve Father's legacy. Through unprecedented access to this unique and reclusive community, the film explores the line between faith and fanaticism, between a religion and a cult. Father's revolutionary ideas on race and identity still resonate today.
Watch the Trailer
https://www.gooddocs.net/fathers-kingdom
Larry Getlen
New York Post
October 2, 2018
Renee Linnell stood with a friend on the beach near her Los Angeles home, built a fire, and burned everything she owned. Her brand-new Armani leather jacket, her parents' wedding album, even her bed — everything went into the fire.
She did this because a woman named Lakshmi, whom Linnell paid $500 a month for such guidance, had told her to do so. She did whatever Lakshmi instructed, however it might destroy her life.
"The Burn Zone" (She Writes Press) is Linnell's wrenching tale of falling under the sway of two "gurus" named Lakshmi and Vishnu (referred to in the book by their first names only), taking much of Linnell's money and years of her life in the process.
Linnell was a 33-year-old ballroom and tango dancer when she attended a meditation seminar called University of Mysticism in June 2006.
Describing herself as someone who'd been searching for purpose all her life, Linnell found what she was looking for in Lakshmi, the seminar leader, a "young woman" in "an expensive black business suit" who "oozed confidence" and "radiated power."
As soon as Linnell began to meditate with Lakshmi, her world changed.
"Instantly, I felt energy uncoil at the base of my spine and shoot up through the top of my head," Linnell writes. "Then everything went white and I disappeared; the room disappeared; and I was being held in the hands of God. I was Home. My search was over."
Linnell became a Lakshmi regular. The philosophy was basically the cult version of the prosperity gospel, the idea that meditating and clearing out the things that disturb your life will help clear your mind, paving the way for success and money.
After volunteering to help with an event, Linnell received a phone call from Lakshmi's partner, Vishnu, a muscular man in his 40s who was Lakshmi's head of security.
"He explained that Lakshmi was an Enlightened Being," Linnell writes, "and that she did not need anything from anybody. He said that my volunteering to help her would really be her helping me."
Linnell, who had read about performing service in the quest for enlightenment, "immediately accepted this as Truth."
While students couldn't talk with Lakshmi one-on-one in class, volunteers were allowed to ask one question by letter. Linnell, feeling ready for a professional change, asked for advice.
Lakshmi told her to retire from dancing and become a computer programmer.
"In ancient times, she explained, monks would stare at mandalas, memorizing the intricate patterns in order to sharpen their minds," Linnell writes. "Computer programming, she told me, was the modern-day version of this."
Linnell took a programming course and found it frustrating, but got an A.
Three months into her classes, Lakshmi announced a "Power Trip" to Egypt that would cost $15,000 — $5,000 for the trip and $10,000 for an "empowerment fee" for Lakshmi. "Money is energy," Vishnu said.
They took such trips all over the world, each with their own supposed spiritual significance: The jaunt to Egypt was meant to pass through a spiritual portal that could be reached only through the Great Pyramids.
In time, Lakshmi's instructions for living became stricter. In addition to burning all their things, Lakshmi told her students to delete all photos from their lives and to never be photographed, never reveal their birthdays to anyone and never have visitors in their homes — or, if they do, to rearrange the furniture immediately after so that "visitors could not access our homes in their minds." All of this, Lakshmi said, was because if people were inaccessible, then others could not "pull on us with their minds."
Soon, Lakshmi gave Linnell the honor of helping her plan and run her events — basically, enlisting her to work for free whenever Lakshmi needed anything, to the point where Linnell quit the computer classes Lakshmi had implored her to take so she could always be available.
Linnell loved Lakshmi's classes so much that she introduced three of her longtime friends to them, and all three moved to California to get more involved. But Vishnu told Linnell she needed to remove them from her life.
Vishnu's concerns in this area, though, weren't just for Linnell's sake.
"Now that you are so close to Lakshmi and me," he said, "your energy affects us. You don't want to harm us with old energy, do you?"
Vishnu began calling Linnell more often and sometimes flirted, which made Linnell nervous. Aside from her holding the pair in high esteem, it was assumed among the students that Lakshmi and Vishnu were a couple.
One day at class, Lakshmi pulled Linnell aside and asked that she help run the group. Linnell, honored, accepted, but then Vishnu told her this would mean her time would no longer be her own.
She was to be on call for him 24/7 to do "anything and everything that needs to be done," and she could no longer spend time with other group members.
With Lakshmi and Vishnu's encouragement, 16 months into being their "student," Linnell cut her friends out of her life, wiped herself off the Internet and dedicated her life to working, for free, for Lakshmi and Vishnu.
Her every waking moment was now spent with Vishnu, who soon deepened the relationship when he grabbed her, "opened his mouth wide, and jammed his tongue as far down my throat as it would go."
Linnell assumed this had been approved by Lakshmi.
These horrible make-out sessions went on for months. Linnell was torn, flipping between finding him and his kisses repulsive, and almost falling in love, as the lines between Lakshmi — who she now believed was "an incarnation of God" — Vishnu and Linnell, and between spirituality and love, broke down for her.
Soon after this, Vishnu told her to get blood work done, including a full array of STD tests, and to fax him the results, and also to get on birth control. She did all this and they slept together soon after. While this became a regular thing, she found she couldn't sleep with him without crying.
"I wanted to love him," she writes. "I wanted to be insanely attracted to him, but I simply wasn't."
In the months to come, as their relationship and her virtual enslavement deepened, she cycled constantly between love and disgust.
Lakshmi, who had not known about Vishnu and Linnell after all, found out soon after, and was devastated. But she told Linnell it was her "Divine task" to be Vishnu's consort, and proclaimed the three of them "a family." Lakshmi would cry every day over Vishnu's betrayal, yet encouraged Linnell to continue sleeping with him.
Linnell was now the personal servant for both of them. She cooked and cleaned for them, ran their business and had sex with Vishnu whenever he wanted. And not only wasn't she being paid, but she was still paying them tuition for classes, which was now up to $1,200 per month.
When they invited her over for Thanksgiving, a request she couldn't refuse, she had to do all the shopping and cooking. But when Linnell, already pressed, didn't have time to track down extra items for Lakshmi, the guru went off on her, screaming, "Renee, it's not all about you!"
Linnell began feeling bitter and angry toward Lakshmi, especially after visiting her home, which was packed with things from throughout Lakshmi's life. Linnell had burned everything she owned, destroyed cherished possessions and memories, only to discover that Lakshmi didn't practice what she preached.
Before long, Lakshmi was insulting her in front of the class, calling her out for being too seductive and proclaiming her a witch and a sorceress.
On the rare occasions Linnell stood up for herself, they made her regret it. Once, after telling Vishnu she couldn't sleep with him anymore, he ignored her for days, then ordered her to write out the three-page "Code of the Samurai" 1,080 times, or 3,420 pages.
"It took weeks, writing every day until my hand cramped," she writes, "but I f–king did it."
Linnell made excuses for the abusive behavior, telling herself that her teacher was so pure, she simply couldn't take the pressure of being in the world.
After Lakshmi refused to speak to her for more than a year, she called Linnell out of the blue one day in August 2010 and said she had a new task for her. She ordered her to quit a job she had previously asked her to find, say goodbye for good to everyone in the class, earn an MBA from a prestigious program she was to start by January and then form a company that earned $10 million a year in pretax profit.
Linnell complied as best she could. She abandoned her life within 48 hours, moved east and began visiting schools, landing in New York.
It took her three more years, therapy and a certified letter from the couple asking her not to come to any more of their events before she finally realized she had been in a cult. She has had no encounters or contact with them since receiving their letter, although she has heard rumors the cult disbanded. She has no interest in learning more or ever having any contact with them again.
Linnell subsequently earned an MBA from NYU, and moved to Colorado five years ago. She reconnected with her old friends and has worked to balance her anger at the couple with the positive elements of their teachings.
From the outside, Linnell's predicament seems ludicrous. Why would an otherwise smart person fall for this?
"It happens so slowly. So insidiously," she writes. "At first, it's like winning the lottery. You think you've finally found someone who understands you . . . the you that was meant for greatness."
Being seen like this, writes Linnell, felt like a religious experience. Energized by all the attention, she went on to meet like-minded people, feeling a new sense of belonging. When she tried to tell people "on the outside" about her new life, they would react with judgment and concern — only sharpening her sense of isolation.
Even today, Linnell can't completely reject her cult experience.
"I am still trying to figure out how to undo the lingering paranoia left in my mind by their incessant teachings on the occult," she writes. "But I do know that Lakshmi did push me toward freedom. She did teach me to grow up. She did help me to expand my life in magnificent ways."
https://nypost.com/2018/10/02/why-i-gave-up-everything-and-joined-a-new-age-cult/
Crispin Hull
The Sydney Morning Herald
October 6, 2018
It seems that the government is going to hang on to Philip Ruddock’s report on religious freedom until after this month’s by-election and then, according to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, take some legislative action on it.
First we have the obvious questions about open and accountable government. Who paid for this report? Why do freedom-of-information laws give such broad exemptions to Cabinet documents on topics which have absolutely no national-security or national-finance questions?
That aside, this is a minefield.
Any legislation or constitutional provision on religious freedom gives rise to two fundamental legal questions: what is religion and what is freedom?
Former attorney-general Philip Ruddock has been appointed to ensure religious freedoms are protected as the government pushes ahead with legalising same-sex marriage.
The leading case in Australia is the 1983 High Court case of Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Payroll Tax.
Scientologists claimed that as the Church of the New Faith they were a religion, and should not have to pay Victorian payroll tax.
All five High Court judges held that Scientology was a religion.
Justices Mason and Brennan responded to claims that Scientology’s founder L Ron Hubbard was in it for the money by saying: “Charlatanism is a necessary price of religious freedom, and if a self-proclaimed teacher persuades others to believe in a religion which he propounds, lack of sincerity or integrity on his part is not incompatible with the religious character of the beliefs, practices and observances accepted by his followers.”
Justice Murphy said: “Most organised religions have been riddled with commercialism, this being an integral part of the drive by their leaders for social authority and power... The amassing of wealth by organised religions often means that the leaders live richly (sometimes in palaces) even though many of the believers live in poverty. Many religions have been notorious for corrupt trafficking in relics, other sacred objects, and religious offices, as well as for condoning "sin" even in advance, for money. The great organised religions are big business.”
So the legal test in Australia for “religion” is not the motives of the founders and leaders of it, but the gullibility or faith of the followers.
This case was about tax exemption. Morrison’s new law, in the name of religious freedom, presumably is to give “religions” exemptions not only from tax, but also from other laws such as discrimination in employment on grounds of sexuality because homosexuality offends their “religion”.
This presents the legislature with a problem. The legislation could be cast widely to give “religions” exemptions against almost any law that is contrary to their religion. Then the door is open for charlatans to gather genuinely believing followers to say their “religion” demands they engage in what would otherwise be unlawful conduct (smoking dope, having bonfires on beaches, marrying while you are already married, discriminating against homosexuals) or that their religion demands that they do not engage in conduct which the law otherwise demands (sending your children to school, having them vaccinated, paying taxes which might be spent on the military etc).
On the other hand, the legislation could be cast narrowly so as only to apply to specified (mainstream) religions and not others. This would ironically discriminate against some religions in the name of religious freedom.
The germ of the Scientology case is “one in, all in”.
The other difficulty for the Coalition (aside from the Senate) is that the Commonwealth Parliament has limited constitutional powers. Making laws specifically with respect to “religion” or “religious freedom” is not among them.
So the legislation would have to rely on the foreign affairs power and the fact that Australia has signed various human rights treaties.
In the past the Coalition has railed against Labor for extending Commonwealth power this way.
Moreover, the legislation may not past muster unless it is consistent with the whole treaty, not just the religion bit.
The other way to go would be not to legislate, but to have a broad bill of rights including freedom of religion in the Constitution. Courts are better at dealing with competing rights and duties than legislatures.
At present, Section 116 of the Constitution says: “The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office.”
But it is a set of negative rights, not a positive individual right to freedom of religion.
Its shortcomings were made clear in the 1944 Jehovah’s Witnesses case. The High Court validated a Commonwealth law expropriating the property of the Jehovah’s Witnesses despite the constitutional prohibition against laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion.
Justice Latham said that the word "free" is vague and ambiguous and would not prohibit the Commonwealth using the defence power to confiscate Jehovah Witnesses’ property on the grounds that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were subversive – believing in one Kingdom, and not the one that was running the war effort.
See what a minefield this is? Morrison will not be able to legislate for the freedom of white, mainstream religious values without ensnaring himself in the questions of what other religious values should be upheld, exactly how free their exercise should be and how a court would interpret this.
Besides, these days there is no real threat to religious freedom in Australia. The real threats are to freedom of speech and information, as the withholding of the Ruddock report attests.
So if Morrison insists, let’s put freedom of religion to the test. One in, all in. Bring on the religion. Bring on the Dope Smoking Religion; the Multitude of Wives Religion; the Passport Photos with a Veil Religion; the Noise Law-Ignoring, Happy Clapping and Singing from Turrets in the Middle of Night Religion; and the I Want to Run a Tax-Free Grow Some Turf and Second-Hand Clothing Business Religion.
If, as Mason and Brennan said, charlatanism is the price of religious freedom, the price is too high. Give me constitutional freedom of speech and allow them to spout whatever nonsense they want, but beyond that they should comply the ordinary law of the land and pay tax like anyone else.
crispinhull.com.au
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/legislating-religious-freedom-will-be-a-minefield-for-morrison-20181002-p50798.html
While there have been dozens of sex abuse claims in the past decade, experts say the religion's self-enclosed nature makes it hard for victims to speak up.
Elizabeth Chuck
NBC News
September 28, 2018
A jury ruling this week that the Jehovah's Witnesses must pay $35 million to a woman who says the church covered up her childhood sexual abuse puts a rare public spotlight on the normally insular religious organization, experts say.
The penalty, handed down by a Montana jury on Wednesday, will go to a 21-year-old woman who accused the Jehovah's Witnesses' national organization of telling local clergy members not to report her abuser, a relative who she and another woman say molested them and a third family member. The church plans to appeal.
The case was just one of dozens filed nationwide over the past decade alleging Jehovah's Witness officials have mishandled sexual abuse of children, including a $13.5 million award by a San Diego judge in 2014 to a man who was abused by a church leader when he was seven years old.
Many of the allegations have surfaced as other religious groups, such as the Catholic church, have wrestled with similar abuse claims. But bringing up such accusations in the Jehovah's Witness community comes with an extra set of challenges, religious scholars say.
"In terms of reporting complaints or misbehavior or abuse, there's what they call the 'two-witness rule,' which means that, for example, if I were abused, I would need another witness to come forward to corroborate that," said Mathew Schmalz, an associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. "Because of this, it's very difficult to get corroborating evidence of any kind of abuse complaint."
The two-witness rule is only for internal modes of discipline and does not prevent a victim from going to the police, Schmalz added.
But the fear of being ostracized from the tight-knit community also prevents members from speaking out.
"There are very strict internal modes of discipline within Jehovah's Witnesses and I know Jehovah's Witnesses who have been shunned or what they call disfellowshipped, and that’s an incredibly painful experience," he said.
Experts say Jehovah's Witnesses are a misunderstood and very self-enclosed group, despite counting some celebrities among its ranks — including Venus and Serena Williams.
Perhaps best known for going door-to-door to preach their beliefs, the New York-based religion has nearly 8.5 members worldwide — far fewer than the more than 1.2 billion Catholics in the world — and unlike in Catholicism, where bishops are often well-known, prominent figures, Jehovah's Witness leaders are not typically known to the public.
"They are an eccentric group in the sense that they separate themselves from public life," said Mark Silk, a professor and the director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "They don't vote. They don't celebrate birthdays and holidays. They don't say the pledge [of allegiance]. They are not just another Christian denomination."
All of these tenets, plus their other beliefs, stem from a strict, often literal interpretation of the Bible and the belief that the Jehovah's Witnesses organization is "God's organization on Earth," according to Schmalz.
"Whatever belief they have or mode of internal discipline they have, they have a biblical justification for it," he said.
In keeping with their penchant for privacy, the church issued only a brief, unsigned statement after Wednesday's verdict, according to the Associated Press.
"Jehovah's Witnesses abhor child abuse and strive to protect children from such acts. Watchtower is pursuing appellate review," the Office of Public Information at the World Headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses said in a statement.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/35-million-verdict-puts-spotlight-insular-jehovah-s-witness-community-n914841
How Hillsong Church transformed Justin Bieber from a bad boy into a Christian family man.
Tara Isabella
VOX
October 1, 2018
Justin Bieber may now be a family man.
The pop star and his fiancée, model Hailey Baldwin, are rumored to have gotten married in a secret civil ceremony at a New York City courthouse, People reported in September. Other sources, including TMZ, report that Bieber and Baldwin were just at City Hall to pick up a marriage license. Either way, wedding bells are in Bieber and Baldwin’s future, as they are now planning a bigger religious service and celebration, according to Vanity Fair.
Bieber’s nuptials mark yet another tentpole for the pop star’s transformation from drug-addled, womanizing bad boy to squeaky-clean, presumably monogamous husband. Central to that narrative is Bieber’s well-documented embrace of evangelical Christianity.
Since 2014, when Bieber was baptized in an NBA player’s bathtub by Pastor Carl Lentz, his relationship with the evangelical megachurch Hillsong has been an essential part of his personal brand. And with his marriage — impending or otherwise — to fellow Hillsong member Baldwin, Bieber enters a new stage of his narrative: faithful, honorable Christian husband.
Bieber and Hillsong’s relationship has been, since its inception, a symbiotic one. The wildly popular Hillsong, which boasts 100,000 weekly attendees in churches in 21 countries, came to international prominence the same way plenty of celebrities do: by creating an easily marketable persona, curating a brand custom-made for social media, and advertising an identity both accessible and aspirational.
Hillsong is the “chill” church where pastors wear skinny jeans. Showing up hungover to Sunday service is not considered the worst thing. Hillsong’s sermons, influenced by the self-help-style theology of the “prosperity gospel,” promise adherents a life full of material as well as spiritual blessings.
Bieber’s presence in the pews has ensured Hillsong and its media-friendly pastors a place in the tabloids. And in return, Hillsong has granted Bieber a rebirth both religious and reputational.
There is nothing new about Christianity providing certain pop stars a veneer of respectability, especially when they’re trying to rehabilitate a “bad boy” or “bad girl” image. As Ellis Cashmore, author of Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption and a sociologist of celebrity culture, pointed out to Vox, ’70s singer Donna Summer famously transformed her public persona from that of a “slithery sexual” siren to a “slightly too pious symbol of purity” after she was born again in the 1980s. UK pop star Cliff Richard, likewise, came to prominence as an Elvis-esque rock-and-roller in the 1950s, only to pivot to Christian music and a softer image in the mid-1960s.
“Today’s culture has a few spots open for holier-than-thou celebs,” Cashmore said. “They’re almost reassuringly pure in the midst of unbridled debauchery, degeneracy, and all-round immorality.”
But in Bieber’s case, the relationship with Hillsong is a two-way street. Each bolsters the other’s personal brand.
Hillsong has been central to Bieber’s redemption narrative
Back in 2014, Justin Bieber was a mess: drinking too much, doing too many drugs. He was a reliable tabloid train wreck, making headlines for trying to illegally import a pet monkey and spending a night in jail for underage drag racing. He’d been raised an evangelical Christian by his mother back in Canada, but lost connection with his faith.
Enter Carl Lentz, pastor of the New York City branch of the international Hillsong megachurch. Bieber had known the young pastor since they’d met at one of his concerts in 2008, according to the New York Post. Lentz and Bieber had another pastor friend in common: Judah Smith, known for befriending celebrities. But they’d only started to get closer recently, around the time Bieber’s life started falling apart. Lentz declined to comment for this story; Bieber has not responded to requests for comment through a representative.
By 2014, Bieber was hitting rock bottom. According to celebrity lore, best recounted in this GQ story by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Bieber was desperate for a way out of his downward spiral. Lentz convinced him Jesus might be the way. And so, one night at 3 in the morning, a despondent Bieber begged Lentz to baptize him immediately. Unable to find a place safe from the prying eyes of paparazzi, Lentz ultimately baptized the pop star in the bathtub of Lentz’s friend NBA player Tyson Chandler.
And just like that, Bieber was transformed. He became, as in Psalm 51, “washed clean ... whiter than snow.” Now, Bieber’s Instagram feed is full of Bible verses and devotional texts, not selfies with monkeys. His personal brand and his conversion comeback are inextricable from one another.
Since then, Bieber has been both a vocal Christian and a vocal Hillsong supporter, appearing at Hillsong events and conferences, as well as frequently appearing alongside Lentz on social media.
For example, a video from April 12, posted to Bieber’s Instagram Live and later reposted to YouTube, perfectly captures the new, “purer” Bieber. At first, it seems just like any other social media post, designed to foster a celebrity’s sense of intimacy with his fans: hands tinkling piano keys; a breathy, even erotic, melancholy croon.
The lyrics, too, sound at first like a conventional love song: I breathe You in / I lean into Your love / Oh, Your love. Then Bieber gets to the point. His voice all but breaks. Drawing close / Stirred by grace / And all my heart is yours.
It’s a Hillsong United song — written by the church’s flagship band. It’s not about Baldwin, but about Jesus.
The video captures the essence of Bieber’s current celebrity persona. The boy who once sang, “Coffee table, girl, get ready, I’mma put you down / All the way down,” with disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly is now embracing a gentler, even teenybopper romantic rhetoric.
He’s safely, endearingly Christian, but he’s also not too Christian. (Tellingly, Bieber leaves out some of the song’s most explicitly Christian lyrics — You are my everything / Jesus Christ / You are my one desire.) His song is a song of religious praise, but it also doubles in its secularized reworking as an accessible, tame melody for fans who would rather imagine themselves as objects of Bieber’s love than lust. His Christianity and his reformed, “safer” public image are inseparable.
O. Alan Noble, editor-in-chief of the website Christ and Pop Culture, told me that Bieber’s approach to that song ties into a wider divide within evangelical culture over the extent to which Christians should engage with the tools of secular media, such as pop music.
“That’s the joke among evangelicals who are very critical of [pop-style] worship music,” Noble said, “that it just sounds like a love song, and that if you took out Jesus, it would just sound like any other love song.”
However, Cashmore warns that when it comes to our celebrities, at least, our culture tends to easily get bored of Bieber’s redemption narrative. Hillsong may have solidified its prominence due to its affiliation with celebrities we love, like Nick Jonas, Selena Gomez, and Hailee Steinfeld, but Cashmore argues that ultimately, we as a culture gravitate toward celebrities who titillate, not preach.
“We stay interested in celebrities because they’re mostly the opposite of pure,” he noted, “the more sullied, the better. I think celeb culture tolerates a limited number of evangelical types, but not too many or they become tiresome. We like our celebs dirty, flawed, contaminated, disgraced, tainted, and, yes, impure.”
Nonetheless, Bieber is reflective of a bigger trend, Noble says. Churches like Hillsong, and “crossover” celebrities like Bieber, are the new normal. “There’s a lot less siloing going on than there was in the early ’90s and 2000s,” Noble said, referring to the separation of Christian and secular media. Evangelical college kids these days will “listen to an artist talk about loving God, and [also] talk about going clubbing.” In general, he says, the evangelical world has moved away from a suspicion of the corrupting influence of media and pop culture, and toward a desire to engage with it.
Hillsong, and Bieber’s role within it, is perfectly representative of that trend.
Hillsong is a fitting vehicle for Bieber’s success
Given its extraordinary spread, with branches as far afield as Kiev and Buenos Aires, and its pop culture-savvy vibe, it makes sense that Hillsong would be the church of choice for a young, evangelically minded pop star like Bieber.
The church’s wholesale adoption of what has come to be known in church circles as a “seeker-sensitive” model — maximizing outreach through feel-good rhetoric and the veneer of accessibility — combined with its “the Lord will provide” prosperity gospel, has allowed it to spread across more than 80 cities, 21 countries, and five continents, resulting in an estimated 50 million people a week singing Hillsong-branded music across the globe.
Hillsong’s ethos, while distinctive, is not unique or unprecedented. It involves an approach to worship shared by many other churches: an aesthetic characterized by intense emotional outbursts and a firm faith in the sanctity of everyday experience. Its theology is relatively, though not extremely, conservative from an evangelical perspective. And its near purpose-built appeal to younger audiences is also shared by a number of other megachurches across the world.
Hillsong is rooted in an Australian church called the Sydney Christian Life Centre, created in 1977 by Rev. Frank Houston. The church was Pentecostal, which is an umbrella term for any one of a number of evangelical movements that emphasize the direct action of the Holy Spirit in a worshipper’s life (often through acts like miracles of healing, or believers speaking in tongues). Pentecostal churches tend to stress members’ displays of extreme emotion, as well as a highly charged atmosphere — including music, dancing, and clapping — designed to foster the worshipper’s connection to God.
When Frank Houston left the church in 1999 under undisclosed circumstances (more on that later), his son Brian Houston and daughter-in-law Bobbi Houston, both pastors, folded Sydney Christian Life Centre into their own emerging church, called Hillsong.
From the beginning, Hillsong was characterized by its focus on Christian pop music as a means of attracting a younger, pop culture-savvy audience. Under the younger Houston, Hillsong had been releasing Christian music since 1992, annually producing what would come to be millions of dollars’ worth of albums and singles.
Hillsong added a healthy dose of prosperity gospel theology, adhering to the belief that spiritual purity, “positive thinking,” and expressions of unswerving faith will yield immediate material benefits for true believers.
As Brian Houston proclaimed in one sermon: “The only people who ever talk about a prosperity gospel are people who are threatened by God’s blessing in people’s lives.”
Hillsong’s services are both high-tech and minimalist, equal parts rock concert and TED talk. In services and sermons available for streaming on Hillsong’s website, with motivational titles like “Your Dream Is Your Destiny” and “Relevance: Hole-y Jeans or Holy Life?”
In one sermon, which was filmed in Hillsong’s headquarters outside Sydney, Houston appears in front of an LED-lit screen, dressed in a blue button-down shirt and jeans. “I encourage everyone here to dream a dream,” he tells listeners, “so much God-given potential perishes because of a lack of a dream!”
Later, he becomes more animated. “Never, ever discourage people and their dreams, because you know what God can do with dreams,” he exclaims, clutching the microphone. “Dreamers understand other dreamers! That’s why it’s good to come along with a church that’s filled with vision!”
Hillsong both holds to, and generally underplays, a conservative evangelical theology, although its leaders have in recent years generally been reluctant to speak out on hot-button issues. The church appears to have a quiet “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on LGBTQ issues, and hot-button issues like abortion and homosexuality are rarely, if ever, weighed in on from the pulpit.
Its celebrity adherents, such as Bieber and his ex, performer Selena Gomez, tend not to focus on these elements of Hillsong’s ethos when prompted. Instead, Bieber, for example, encouraged a queer fan to come to Hillsong, promising she’d be welcome at the church.
What’s striking about Hillsong, however, is less the fact that it holds conservative views — plenty of evangelical churches do — and more that it’s successfully refocused its look, feel, and rhetoric to cater specifically to the #blessed. It’s managed to market a feel-good Christianity, using the branding of progressivism to do so. And, insofar as Bieber’s Christianity has given him a solid tabloid redemption arc, he has benefited from that marketing — even if the church’s leaders haven’t been as fortunate.
The church and its leaders have seen their share of scandal
Despite (or because of) its popularity, Hillsong has not been immune to scandal. As early as 1999, according to Australia’s Daily Telegraph, rumors had spread that Frank Houston had molested boys in his community. These rumors, of which Brian Houston was reportedly aware, may have contributed to the elder Houston’s abrupt retirement. A year later, Frank Houston confessed to his son that he abused a young boy 30 years prior. The matter was never formally reported to police. The elder Houston died in 2004, after having drawn a consistent pension from Hillsong since his retirement.
In 2014, an Australian police commission found that Frank Houston had molested up to nine boys. The British newspaper the Guardian reported that he offered $10,000 to one victim, saying, “I don’t want this on my head before God.” Brian Houston also failed to inform police of his discovery. He has maintained that he has always acted in the best interest of his father’s victims.
While there is no documented link whatsoever between pedophilia and homosexuality, Houston maintained this as a potential reason for his father’s acts. “I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual,” he later told an interviewer. “I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children.”
Hillsong’s views on homosexuality, which mirror those of typical evangelical churches, clash with its vibe that is seemingly youthful and therefore overtly welcoming to LGBTQ people. Like many, if not most, evangelical churches, Hillsong formally holds that the only legitimate and godly sexual relationships are between married heterosexual couples.
Outside of same-sex marriage, though, the manner in which Hillsong treats its LGBTQ members is less clear.
On the one hand, Frank Houston started Exit Ministries, a so-called ex-gay ministry, which was devoted to using therapeutic methods to essentially try to make LGBTQ people straight. After that shuttered, Hillsong outsourced its conversion therapies to outside companies throughout the 2000s.
But around 2011, that changed. Brian Houston decided that a church at which young LGBTQ people did not feel they could pray was a church that could not grow, and he started distancing himself and Hillsong from conversion ministries altogether. He also started adopting more LGBTQ-sympathetic rhetoric, talking more and more about the difficulty of being LGBTQ in the church and advocating compassion for LGBTQ teens. (As an example of how LGBTQ attitudes among evangelicals are changing, 53 percent of white evangelicals ages 18 to 30 support same-sex marriage.)
Lentz has, in interviews, stressed that Hillsong does not treat homosexuality as markedly different from what evangelicals might consider other sins, including premarital sex between a man and a woman. LGBTQ issues rarely come up explicitly in the pulpit at Hillsong, though some former members report the church’s tone having “mixed messages.”
Ben Fenlon, an ex-member, described his experience at the church’s London branch for the Huffington Post: “When I first started attending I questioned those around me about how the church felt about homosexuality having read conflicting reports. The answers were always vague, telling me that God loves everyone and that everyone is welcome to come and worship. There was never a clear answer on the gay issue.”
In practice, this has created a tension within Hillsong’s pews. Often, LGBTQ members are welcomed as parishioners, but, according to ex-members, those in same-sex relationships are discouraged from seeking leadership positions. When it came out that a male church leader in the New York choir was in a same-sex relationship (something the couple says was an open secret with the church), Houston and Lentz quickly clarified the formal position of the church: that being gay is, indeed, a sin. They wrote in a 2015 blog post
Hillsong Church welcomes ALL people but does not affirm all lifestyles. Put clearly, we do not affirm a gay lifestyle and because of this we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid.
Celebrities affiliated with the church, including Bieber, have often tried to walk back the more politically controversial statements of Hillsong. He’s told queer fans, who’ve expressed sorrow over homophobia in other churches, that they’d be more than welcome at Hillsong: “That’s not okay. If you ever want to come to any of the [Hillsong] services, we’d love to have you in there. You’re more than welcome to come any time.”
Bieber has never commented specifically on Hillsong’s stance toward LGBTQ people. While his words to his fan were approvingly quoted in the secular press, other Christians, including former Christian rocker Trey Pearson, who is openly gay, pointed out that Hillsong is not an LGBTQ-affirming church.
Still, despite criticism, Hillsong has made itself into an astounding financial and social media success.
Hillsong was nearly tailor-made for celebrities and social media appeal
Central to Hillsong’s success, of course, are its high-profile ambassadors, such as Bieber.
It makes sense that Hillsong would appeal to celebrities. It demands neither vows of poverty nor renouncing the glitz-and-glamour lifestyle that characterizes the celebrity experience, even as it offers a kind of structure and meaning inherently absent from, say, a drug-fueled life on a tour bus.
It’s social media-friendly, its leaders’ impeccably curated Instagram aesthetic of self-care and self-acceptance perfectly dovetailing with the #inspirational messages of its most famous member.
Lentz has appeared, for example, on Oprah Winfrey’s show Super Soul Sunday. His highly appealing, easily marketable narrative of Christianity — though it differs in content from Oprah’s more vaguely spiritual mantras of self-care — is, like hers, accessible, consumer-friendly, and social media-savvy. The blessings it provides are a mixture of spiritual, communal, and aspirational. Who wouldn’t want to look like Carl Lentz, or have the happy marriage he seems to have?
It would be easy to be cynical about Hillsong, and the degree to which Lentz’s Instagram content informs the church’s aesthetic as a whole. But for Kelly Bollmann, 31, the aspirational nature of Hillsong’s leadership, and the way the leaders represent Hillsong’s branding, is part of its appeal. Bollmann has been involved on the volunteer creative team of Hillsong New York since the beginning, when Lentz, the pastor at Bollmann’s old nondenominational church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, left to start the New York branch of Hillsong in 2009.
“I wouldn’t be part of the church if I didn’t know the leadership was that much more of a beautiful representation of the church off-platform than just preaching it,” Bollmann told me. Hillsong’s “platform” may be its services, but its “off-platform” identity — as curated on social media and in the personas of its pastors — creates a holistic sense of Hillsong as a Christian identity that transcends Sunday morning. For Bollmann, that “off-platform” identity was enough to lead him to follow Lentz to New York and help plant Hillsong as a member of the initial creative team.
In this way, Hillsong is the apotheosis of both the prosperity gospel movements and the seeker-sensitive church movement. It’s a place where the language of #blessed is re-sanctified and renewed. It’s certainly possible to ask whether a church that relies as much on Instagram branding and photogenic pastors as Hillsong is a good thing. But that might be missing the point.
Hillsong, with its talk of “off-platform” pastor behavior and its curated Instagram feed, is successful precisely because it ties into an existing cultural need. It embraces a spiritual life that infuses our social media as much as our souls. It uses the language and rhetoric of the millennial experience to win millennial souls.
For Bollmann, Hillsong’s message of welcome is one that transcends the specifics of its theology. Jesus, he says, “made everybody feel welcome” — especially the sinners.
Sure, he sees plenty of Beliebers, as Bieber’s fans are known, show up at Hillsong in the hopes of catching a glimpse of their icon. But he doesn’t mind. Even if people come to church for the wrong reasons, he says, it’s still an opportunity for them to see the love that Hillsong has to offer. “You’re going to find that you love what our relationship with Jesus is all about ... they’re quickly just reminded, hey, there’s people that have a certain status, but they want to just come here and praise Jesus just like you.”
For Bollmann, who grew up in a multiracial family of 11, Hillsong’s image as a diverse, young, and welcoming church is a vital part of its Christian ethos. “You see more cultures in one subway car in New York City than you do in whole cities,” he says. And Hillsong — youth-focused, informal, multiracial — reflected that diversity. “What it enabled a lot of people to do when they saw such a beautiful community come around so many people, and it’s all welcoming of any gender, color, sex, everything. And they saw there’s absolutely no judgment.”
Hillsong speaks to personal aspiration. It’s the ethos of our age.
It makes sense that Bieber and Hillsong would engage in a spiritual and — in effect, if not in intent — commercial partnership. Hillsong provides Bieber not only with spiritual fulfillment but with a tabloid-perfect redemption narrative. Bieber provides Hillsong with publicity.
But, viewed another way, the partnership is as natural as it is seemingly transactional. In an age in which our “on-platform” and “off-platform” selves converge, Hillsong offers something, well, holistic. The Christian identity and sense of fellowship it provides its largely young, smartphone-savvy parishioners is designed to transcend Sunday morning services. It’s designed to go on Instagram, or Snapchat, precisely because that’s where its worshippers are exploring their own identities.
While it’s certainly possible to critique the perhaps packaged nature of Hillsong’s theology — its reliance on motivational speech and prosperity gospel narratives of success, for instance — it’s also worth asking the bigger question: Why do these narratives work?
For a church to be as successful, as much of a phenomenon, as Hillsong is, does its theology have to lend itself to the rhetoric and imagery of social media? Does Christian identity have to root itself in personal identity?
After all, the most enduring Christian movements in America have allied themselves most prominently with other, more insidious, kinds of identity politics and identity formation. All across America, we’ve seen the rise of a white evangelical Christian nationalism that equates Christianity with a particular notion of whiteness, as well as with GOP party politics.
If religion and faith are as much about how we see ourselves — our identities, our personal brand — as they are about what we believe, then Hillsong has cornered the market on a particular kind of self-identification for young Christians.
It’s fair to ask whether a church as social media-engineered as Hillsong represents the “real” Christianity. But it’s also fair to ask the reverse. If it didn’t use its mass-market appeal to spread the gospel, would anybody listen?
https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/10/1/17596502/justin-bieber-hillsong-carl-lentz-married
Rahul Bhattarai
Asia Pacific Report
October 4, 2018
The Chinese government is accused of illegally harvesting the organs of Falun Gong members. However, a leading academic says that China isn’t the real threat – Western countries are themselves, reports Rahul Bhattarai of Asia Pacific Journalism.
Leading academics warn that the “problem” with China is not the Chinese Communist Party but that Western self-censorship is “killing” its liberal democracy.
“China is not the real threat there, we are, we are the biggest threat to liberal democracy in New Zealand,” says Dr Stephen Noakes, senior lecturer in politics and international relations and Asian studies at the University of Auckland.
“Every time we self-censor, when we choose not to speak out, when we chose to keep quiet for fear of not getting a visa, or not getting a trade deal … But since we, through our obsequiousness towards China are a potential threat, we can also be the cure,” he told a public seminar last week.
Lawyers and political scientists gathered at University of Auckland (UOA) last week to discuss the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies about fundamental human rights and freedoms, civil liberties and the rule of law.
Organ harvesting
China has been under fire globally for its alleged unauthorised organ transplants from members of the Falun Gong community.
Though the initial position of the Chinese government was that all the organs were donated, “this was at a time when they [China] didn’t even have donation systems… and they did not have an organs distribution system,” said Professor David Matas, lawyer, author and professor of immigration and refugee law at the University of Manitoba.
While all organs were being found locally and the transplant volume was small, after the prosecution of Falun Gong began, the transplant volume “shot way up,” he said.
China became the leading producer of transplantation in the world, second only to the United States.
Research conducted in 2006 by Professor Matas and his colleagues concluded that “the organs were coming from the practitioners of Falun Gong”, he said.
As a result of his report, the Chinese government quickly shifted its stance and said that “everything that was coming from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed, before their execution they decided to donate their organ as an atonement for their crimes,” said Professor Matas.
Foreign lobbying
In New Zealand strong lobbying from the Chinese Embassy prevented an exhibition of the Chinese spiritual organisation Falun Gong to be set up in Auckland City.
Lawyer Barry Wilson, president of Auckland Council for Civil Liberties, said he had spent an enormous amount of time at the Auckland City Council trying to persuade them to allow the Falun Gong stand and the demonstrations for the protection of Falun Gong to remain.
“We were up against very strong lobbying from a Chinese Consulate and the Chinese Embassy which did not want that exhibition there,” he said.
The Chinese constitution of 1982 contained the civil liberties that are observed in democratic countries – “freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom from arbitrary arrest,” he said.
When Xi Jinping became president, he also brought his “clearly expressed opposition for liberal values”.
“In his speeches he has spoken of the dangers of the liberal ideas like civil liberties, constitution rights, the dangers they pose for Communist Party rule,” he said.
In China, there is no separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature – “courts and judges are subject to political direction,” he said.
Ruling by law
“What China needs is lawyers as cogs in its economic development machine, but it needs lawyers to rule by law, not keep the rulers in check through the rule of law,” he said.
Wilson said: “They [Falun Gong] are always interesting… its organisation and its events well deserve support.”
China has also been using various means to infiltrate foreign countries to exercise its soft power on them – the Confucius Institute (CI) is one such organisation, says director Doris Lui in her documentary movie, In The Name of Confucius.
The documentary claimed CI was an “infiltration organisation”.
The Chinese government founded the institute in 2004 to teach foreigners the language and culture of China.
The documentary has been a strong critic of the CCP over its alleged violations of human rights, particularly against the Falun Gong community.
In August, the free screening of the movie was set to air in University of Auckland, but the airing was withdrawn at the last minute.
The University of Auckland, University of Canterbury and University of Wellington in New Zealand have ties with CI.
The CI, which is controlled by the Office of Chinese Language Council Internationl (Hanban) prevents its teachers from teaching Cantonese or Hokkien.
https://asiapacificreport.nz/2018/10/04/china-isnt-the-real-threat-to-liberal-democracy-we-are-say-academics/
