Exclusive Brethren: Brutality in the name of Christ.

Most people’s knowledge of the Exclusive Brethren comes from reports of them meeting John Howard, providing funds to the Liberal Party or campaigning against Bob Brown and the Greens.

Michael Bachelard’s new book* is a penetrating, and detailed analysis of another,darker and more brutal side of the Exclusive Brethren. His description of the tactics and practices,for example, towards children involved in custody issues,makes for sad and disturbing reading.

During a long and exhausting custody case in the Family Court, Justice Robert Benjamin accepted evidence that the actions by the Brethren,”amounted to psychologically cruel,unacceptable and abusive behavior that was at ‘the highest end of psychological abuse of them”. Justice Strauss in another case found that attempts by members of the church,”to deprive the children of their mother’s love and affection and care…..approaches the connotations of the terms wicked and evil”. The relentless battles fought in the Family Court by the Brethren,the way children are turned against the parent who decides to leave the sect, according to former Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson, “is abusive of them,and it’s psychologically very damaging to the child”.

Bachelard, a Melbourne Age reporter, has spent a number of years researching,reporting and commenting on the Brethren. The early chapters of his book provide a helpful overview of their origins,and the authoritarian power of the “Elect Vessel”,the head of the church. In the 1970s some 390 directives controlled,and in many cases still control the everyday lives of Brethren. At one stage members were banned from sharing “sewer lines with their ‘worldly neighbours’,lest they suffer contamination”.Young people are still banned from going to university, and married women are forbidden to work. But computers and mobile phones once dubbed ‘evil’,'worldly’ and ‘conduits for filth’ are now permitted,but only those sold and distributed by Brethren companies.

There is remarkably little known about fundamentalist Christian sects in Australia.Despite a number of Christian research centres and institutes, and a couple of Catholic universities, it has been left to others to help the church understand something of the travesties committed in the name of Christianity. The church is indebted to the likes of reporters such as Bachelard, academics such as Marion Maddox(1),disenchanted believers and authors like Tanya Levin,(2) and Morag Zwartz.(3)

Perhaps a clue to this hesitancy on the part of mainline church research, lies in the chapter on how the Brethren first accessed, and then significantly increased their share of Government funding for their schools.This is a cult with some 15000 members in Australia, which prevents their members from voting,ensures their children do not go on to university,orders their female married members not to work,ensures children “are sequestered in their sect”,yet with ” just 838 secondary students,alone, their schools will receive almost $50 million in taxpayer funding over the next four years”.

Church schools are coming under closer scrutiny by both the broader community and governments. Moves to demand greater transparency particularly with regards to how church schools mange and organise their finances,is being strongly resisted.Bachelard details the lobbying tactics as well as the complex company arrangements, the Brethren use to fund their schools. There would be,I suspect, a great deal of sympathy and support from the elite private school principals and councils, for the Brethren, with regard to their school financial arrangements.

Bachelard believes that governments should scrutinise more closely what is happening within the Exclusive Brethren. In Family Law,for example,he believes that ways should be found to prevent “a cashed up, vexatious litigant’, like the Brethren, from misusing the goodwill of the court and ignoring court decisions.Further he suggests that a school funding system “that allows one of the richest,most employed,and least disadvantaged groups to receive the highest level of government subsidy, which sequester children from the world, is a system in desperate need of review”.

For any who assert that such a book vilifies a religious group,Bachelard responds, saying that scrutiny is not vilification. Readers, concerned with how sects and cults misuse and distort the Bible, and who are concerned with the political activities of minority religious groups,then this book is essential reading.

Alan Matheson

October 2008

* Behind the Exclusive Brethren,Scribe,2008

1.God under Howard,The rise of the religious right in Australian politics,Allen &Unwin 2005

2.People in Glass Houses,An insider’s story of a life in & out of Hillsong,Black Inc.2007

3.Fractured Families-the story of a Melbourne church cult,(The Fellowship).Open Book 2005

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