The following article will be published in August 2000 (slightly edited) as Chapter Eight in the book Bad Pastors: Clergy Misconduct in Modern America (Anson Shupe, editor; New York University Press).   Is Abuse About Truth or Story...  or Both?   One Intentional Community's Painful Experience with False Accusations    by Jon Trott "... every person defines the world differently. In order to explain these definitions and relate them to social behavior, sociologists must understand what events mean to the people experiencing them."  Becoming an EX: the Process of Role Exit, Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh It is in an awkward position that I, neither a sociologist nor a disinterested observer in the issue of religious malfeasance, find myself. I am a member of a religious group accused of "abusing" its members by a sociologist, Ronald Enroth. I am also a journalist known in evangelical Christian circles as an exposer of malfeasance via my community's publication, Cornerstone magazine. So consider my re-telling of my community's story as rough-hewn timber; I offer it, splinters and all, in four sections: a historical sketch of our community; a confrontation of accusations made against us by sociologist Ronald Enroth; the story of our and others' response to those charges; an attempt at a philosophical overview. Living within a religious communal group, as I have done for the past 22 years, one can't escape the overpowering importance of stories. My "group" is Jesus People USA -- JPUSA -- an evangelical Christian commune in inner-city Chicago. How does our history relate to the biblical story we use as a guide? How does what God imparts to us through His Word and other churches, fellowships, and Christian teachers influence our collective direction? How do we of JPUSA (Ja-POO-zah) see our role in the world? And how do individuals within JPUSA encounter our group's story? How does each continue to perceive her story in relationship to the group she has chosen, even in how she re-conceptualizes the story if at some point she decides to leave JPUSA? When someone begins the exit process, his story must first be self-perceived as no longer having a part with our shared story. There is great complexity in that, since eventually the exiting individual makes it known he is leaving; at that time both he and we begin telling a story which seems to explain why the exit is occurring. Many people leave for reasons we wholeheartedly agree with: they are called to another mission field; a parent has cancer and needs a caregiver at home; their Christian growth here seems slow and they want to try another route. Others leave for reasons we find very painful, reasons that signify their rejection of our calling and even at times of Christ himself: a member leaves our interracial community and becomes a neo-nazi; a woman leaves her husband and JPUSA to embrace lesbianism; a former addict goes back to his heroin and three months later is found dead in a hotel room. These are, from a traditional Christian point of view, tragic stories.  Other stories of exiting members fall between these extremes. In many cases, our interpretation won't match the leaving member's interpretation. The trick then is to maintain some level of mutual respect, to agree not to dehumanize one another. Nobody said living together was easy!   A Brief History of JPUSA     Bellah, Madsen, et. al., note the importance of a community's history as the shared memory helping to define that community in the present. [1]We certainly find our own history a compelling example of that truth.  Jesus People USA is a twenty-seven-year-old intentional evangelical Christian commune of 450 to 500 members, located in Chicago's inner-city Uptown neighborhood. JPUSA is somewhat unique as intentional communities go, not only within its own evangelical subculture, but also within the historical stream (the Jesus movement groups of the 1960s and 1970s) serving as its source. Almost all the communal groups which emanated from the Jesus movement era faded away within a few years of their founding. A few others (notably, the Children of God / Family of Love) departed standard Christian categories for what evangelical and mainstream Christians have labeled heretical beliefs and practices. In contrast, JPUSA, which began in 1972 as a spin-off of Jesus People Milwaukee, not only aligned itself doctrinally with mainstream evangelical Christianity, but within a few months of its founding was already writing counter-cult materials (most published within the Cornerstone newspaper) explaining how the Children of God, Way International, Unification Church, and other such "new religions" strayed from historic Christian practices and beliefs. [2] That hard-nosed skepticism was not only reserved for non-believers in Christ, but also for others whose doctrine may have been standard, but whose personal lives and financial misdealings spoke of less than Christian values. There was a reason for our blunt honesty. JPUSA itself had gone through a stressful period in 1974 when the group's then-sole "elder," J. W. Herrin, attempted a sexual liason with a JPUSA woman. She did not give in to his demands, and eventually told others in leadership of his attempts to seduce her. They took up her cause and confronted Herrin. The result was a six-month mixture of daily confrontation, counseling, and strict observation, but to no avail. When J. W. Herrin refused to stop approaching the woman, he was removed from leadership and sent to a Christian counseling center in Florida. Instead, he chose to opt out of both JPUSA and ministry.  This event was a watershed moment for the community. It further cemented within JPUSA members the desire to be forthright, not only about the failings of others but about our own failings and sins. "Confess your faults to one another" was not just empty verbiage but instead a mainstay of our communal way of life. For instance, it is not uncommon to see two men, one asking for prayer and counsel, the other stopping and responding immediately, in a communal hallway. This twin approach--a fearless, questioning honesty paired with biblical standards of thought and life--seemed to work well for mature individuals as well as JPUSA's most needy members. [3] After J.W. Herrin's expulsion, JPUSA leaders met and discussed ways to best live out our "calling." The first century Christians, as do we, held all things in common and made provision according to individual need. Using a Book of Acts model [4], the leaders (deacons and deaconesses) concluded that plurality of leadership was the biblically-endorsed norm. Two of the deacons were appointed elders and a number of other deacons / deaconesses added to JPUSA's leadership council. Over the years the council grew to include eight "elders" (the latter term became interchangable with "pastors").  The 1974 turmoil also witnessed the introduction of  adult spankings, a practice introduced to JPUSA by Jack Winters of Daystar Ministries based in Minneapolis. These spankingsfour or five swats with a thin dowel rod--were voluntary, and were likely a carry-over from the then-faddish Regression Therapy. It soon became apparent that many members were using spankings more as a form of penance, and this, along with the fact that no-one in the evangelical community but Winters was promoting the practice, caused us to abandon adult spankings. Unadvised? Yes. Immature? Undoubtedly. These spankings played nearly no role, however, in the controversy we would eventually face with Ronald Enroth. As years passed and the young JPUSA members matured, Cornerstone (which had become a magazine) gained respect as a sensible and scholarly voice dealing with issues of the day and critiquing so-called "cults" from an evangelical (biblical theology and practice) perspective. Meanwhile, JPUSA's social involvement expanded from street ministry and feeding homeless individuals to political involvement which culminated in a bloc vote making the difference in electing a local activist, Helen Shiller, to Chicago's City Council. JPUSA's sheltering of the homeless began with offering space on our 47407 N. Malden lobby floor to a few individuals. It quickly escalated into providing space, mats, blankets, counsel, and food to 90 women and children, and 50 to 70 men, each winter night. As of the present JPUSA runs the Cornerstone Community Outreach shelter, a women's and children's transitional shelter, along with our Leland Project, a second-stage apartment building to help previously homeless women with children transition into the social mainstream. JPUSA's involvement in music and the arts expanded. From the original JPUSA rock'n'rollers, REZ Band, music groups within the community escalated to over a half dozen, covering the musical spectrum. In 1983, JPUSA began an annual four-day music and arts festival which, as of 1999, drew 23,000 attendees. Cornerstone magazine's art staff received various awards for artistic merit. Our magazine's expose of evangelical mega-star Mike Warnke's fraudulent story of satanic involvement was lauded by the Evangelical Press Association as the evangelical "story of the year." Our Warnke story was, of course, deemed a true story and not merely one magazine's opinion or perception. In both the article and the later book, Selling Satan: Mike Warnke and the Evangelical Media, we focused on historical facts, verified via an exhaustive investigation of Warnke's entire life, to prove that his best-selling testimony was untrue and his "ministry" a sham. And our series of articles on so-called "Satanic Ritual Abuse" and "Recovered Memories Therapy" led to the evangelical community re-assessing and largely rejecting these dubious (but for some financially lucrative) concepts. JPUSA technically functioned outside traditional evangelical structures, though often in cooperation with them. From our earliest years we rejected a sectarian "us vs. them" mentality in relating to surrounding churches and fellowships, and sought (though unsuccessfully) an official liason with various mainstream denominations. [5] Then, in 1989, the community cemented close ties with the Evangelical Covenant Church, a relatively small but very vital denomination with its international headquarters and flagship university and seminary, North Park, located within a mile of JPUSA's 920 Wilson address. The Covenant saw in JPUSA a unique expression of corporate faith, while JPUSA saw in the Covenant a larger family who could both spiritually and physically aid us in our growth and outreach while offering us another church body to whom we could be accountable. Again, we clung to the idea that we could truly be "in the world" even while not losing our distinctive communal and individual identity(s). [6]     Ronald Enroth Accuses   We in America live in the most individualistic country and the most autonomous century of the past two thousand years. As Robert Bellah, et. Al., observe in their Habits of the Heart, this therapeutic society of ours has made war upon the community, the shared life. The history of American religion, and intentional religious communities in particular, is one that underscores this tension between the corporate and individual. As a member of JPUSA, I do believe this theme of extreme individualism has led to abuse of not only communities such as ours, but also more mainstream church pastors and leaders. Dave Jackson, member of the intentional community Reba Place Fellowship (Evanston, Illinois) and author of Living Together In a World Falling Apart , wrote in Cornerstone about such anti-community sentiment. His 1978 article was a response to the Jonestown mass suicides, noting that the problem wasn't too much commitment; it was commitment to the wrong things. [7] We consistently objected to the brainwashing paradigm, even in articles aimed at groups we consider cultic due to their theological manipulation of Scripture. When Ted Patrick's Let Our Children Go! [8] first was published in 1976, Cornerstone objected strenuously to its premise. We repeatly challenged the secular anti-cultist interpretation of religious involvement, as in a 1979 article where we worried about the secular press attacking the cults on societal lines rather than theological ones, and cultivating fear and anger rather than love toward cultists. [9] Dr. Ronald Enroth was a fixture in the religious (mostly evangelical) counter-cult movement of which we were part, and what we didn't realize was how closely Enroth identified with the views of such individuals as Patrick, Steve Hassan, Margaret Singer, Conway and Siegelman, and others in the secular anti-cult movement. Even though I and other JPUSAs were personally present at the late 1970s counter-cult conference where Enroth received the Leo Ryan award from the Cult Awareness Network, we failed to grasp the award's significance. When Enroth wrote about cult members in his 1977 Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cults that "the will to be self-determining is absent," [10] he was talking about the same concepts promoted by Ted Patrick. But we missed it, focusing instead on Enroth's evangelical heritage. Though Enroth's eventual accusations against us did not explicitly use terms such as "brainwashing" or "mind control," and in fact even avoided the use of the word "cult," those ideas deeply affected his mode of thought regarding a religious group versus a lone individual: The individual is always abused, the "cult" or religious group always the abuser. In June of 1993, our denomination (the Evangelical Covenant Church, or ECC) informed us that they had received a letter from Ronald Enroth accusing us of abusing our members. The ECC faxed the letter to us. We were astonished and horrified, especially since Enroth had been well-acquainted with us through Cornerstone magazine and our annual Cornerstone Festival. It was suggested that, through the stories of former members, Enroth had ascertained that we were mistreating JPUSA children, that we'd psychologically damaged some adult members, and that many former members bore scars. We hunted in vain for any specifics from Enroth to back such charges. Instead, Enroth described our alleged abuse of former members in a maddening way, beginning by touting his own sociological credentials. From there, he noted that he was doing his sociological duty by hunting for patterns of behavior among our former members, who, he claimed, showed every sign of psychological and spiritual abuse. Some were, he asserted, confused, doubting, angry, disillusioned, mistrustful of authorities and religion in general, undergoing identity crisis, suffering from lack of self-esteem, lacking social and work skills, unable to deal with non-communal life, feeling abandoned, and unable to make choices. [11] Enroth initially noted that this abuse was no doubt "unconsciously" delivered, but by letter's end his tune seemed to have changed. He claimed that the Covenant Church was potentially being duped by a well-thought-out public relations facade put up by JPUSA. [12] In typical JPUSA fashion, news of Enroth's accusations circulated throughout our dorm-like living quarters and hallways. Some members were little affected by the news, not knowing of Enroth's status as a best-selling evangelical author (Youth, Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults and Churches That Abuse) and frankly wishing to have little to do with what to them seemed nothing more than a minor controversy. Others, particularly older members as well as the eight JPUSA pastors serving as Enroth's main targets, felt the sting of such accusations in a very personal way. Then there came the tremendous struggle to maintain objectivity, to push the hurt far enough away from oneself to try and respond rationally, with gentleness, candor, and common sense. In addition, we had to try and go beyond the heat to find any legitimacy in what Enroth was alleging. All of this in the context of having to continue on with the business of ministry, raising families, and dealing with the various "normal" stresses of community life. We were stunned. The charges seemed so broad, so overwhelming in scope. Yet they were also mysteriously undefined, other than containing all sorts of "scare" words. How did the phrase "doubts, anger, disillusionment" apply regarding abuse? Couldn't someone feel all those things, and even more, without having been abused in the least? We questioned ourselves, knowing that community life certainly can be stressful. We knew we were a community made of many people from dysfunctional backgrounds including drug usage, sexual promiscuity, and radically broken families. Not all those wounds had been healed, nor rough edges rubbed off. But it didn't add up. All of us, whether a JPUSA pastor or a member of one week's standing, had at times erred in tone of voice or words presented. Was this abuse? We long-time JPUSA members had hurtful memories of our own regarding some former members, including documentation that took such stories beyond "you said / we said." But we were determined not to target former members.  More frustration. We came up with alternative titles for Enroth's upcoming book: "Church Members Who Abuse" or "Sociologists Who Abuse." Gallows humor.  This writer, as a twenty-plus year member deeply loving JPUSA and the Jesus movement from which it came, involved himself in trying to sort through Enroth's allegations. I admit my initial response was one of anger and a deep sense of unfairness; how dare a man calling himself a scholar do what Ron Enroth was doing? I wrote an initial response to Enroth, tore it up after realizing it was too filled with emotional rants. I asked others to read my second and third drafts and help me remove phrases that sounded haughty or offensive. We had to stay focused in our responses, remembering the Christian's call to love both our neighbor and our enemy, even though we felt bitterly torn by this man. There was also hurt as we pondered the motives of former members, most of whom we had some contact with of a seemingly friendly nature. That isn't to say they wholly agreed with our leadership structure or communal identity; but there was a sense of mutual respect that, though fragile, seemed real to us. A small number of former members we perceived as having what amounted to a destructive dislike for us; in at least a few of those cases, we had attempted to resolve outstanding issues with them, both on our own and using the ECC as intermediary, but without success. They believed they had wasted years of their lives living in a "cult," and such a radical reinterpretation of their past left us little room to attempt reconciliation. One doesn't reconcile with brainwashed zombies, which we seemingly were perceived as. We reminded one another not to demonize them as they were demonizing us.  In light of the Enroth letter, ECC leadership sat down with our eight pastors and went over Enroth's charges. The meetings lasted for hours as we reviewed our own history as well as the portions of history we knew regarding some of the former members whose names Enroth mentioned. The ECC's International President, Paul Larsen, then responded to Enroth's letter with a letter of his own, chiding Enroth for neglecting to visit either JPUSA or the ECC international headquarters despite the fact Enroth was in Chicago for a week doing interviews with former members of JPUSA. Larsen perceived Enroth's bias as a middle-class one, aimed squarely at a group of people living as a countercultural community; Larsen's analysis seemed far more sociologically penetrating than Enroth's. [13] Not only letters, but copies of letters, began circulating. This "communication by fax" became a multi-voiced but ultimately futile dialogue involving JPUSA, the ECC, Enroth, and various interested others (including other evangelical counter-cultists). There is no way to represent the sheer volume of the correspondence, nor the painful task of continuing to respond to Enroth's volumnous but vague paper trail. Each new Enroth letter invariably answered our questions with questions and further vague accusations.  Enroth's methodology became the central issue, to us and many interested observers (including psychologist William Backus, counter-cult expert Ruth Tucker, CRI Journal editor Eliot Miller, UNLV philosophy professor Francis Beckwith, evangelical theologian Norman Geisler, veteran counter-cultists Bob and Gretchen Passantino, and sociologist Anson Shupe, all of whom this author mailed much of the Enroth vs. JPUSA correspondence). Enroth's methodology was most clearly articulated in his response to  ECC's Paul Larsen, when Larsen had contended Enroth's methodology was flawed because he'd failed to take into account our version of the facts. Enroth boasted that he would focus exclusively on those he claimed were recovering from spiritual and psychological abuse, and not the views or feelings of current leaders or members of the groups he was accusing. He asserted that his was a completely valid sociological method. [14] We were astonished. Then Enroth quoted sociologist of religion James Beckford, and the quote seemed to contradict what Enroth had just said. The key sentence of Beckford's cited by Enroth was this:  "I therefore dissociate myself from those who, on principle, discount the stories that defectors tell.... the testimony of ex-members should be taken just as seriously as that of practicing members .... I reject the idea that ex-members' accounts can all be subsumed under the heading of 'atrocity tales.'" [Ellipses in Enroth's original letter- italics added]. As we understood Beckford, he seemed willing to listen to both current and former members' stories. That was all we wanted. Or, if Enroth wanted only former members' perspectives, why not quote them but without naming the churches they claimed had abused them? The latter seemed both methodologically sound and ethically appropriate. Regarding Enroth's appeals to other experts, we noted that Enroth's Churches that Abuse cites Harvard social psychiatrist Robert Coles as his mentor in terms of methodology. [15] Coles is best known for his moving "Children in Crisis" books and an excellent biography of Catholic novelist Walker Percy. Enroth citing Coles' research methods made no sense. The gentle depth of Coles also seemed absent from Enroth's approach. More of Enroth's letters followed and it became painfully apparent that he was not only listening solely to ex-members' worst stories, he was also unwilling to entertain the possibility of our being anything but a "church that abused." He had apparently found the story that was the most compelling to him. Preliminary advertisements for Enroth's book including us appeared in Zondervan's catalogue, linking the groups in the book with Jonestown and Waco. How much wider could this very wide brush get? A meeting was finally forced when the ECC confronted Zondervan. We found ourselves sitting across the table from Enroth and his Zondervan contact, Stan Gundry. Paul Larsen lectured Enroth and Gundry about proper methods of research regarding ascertaining abuse; the ECC, Larsen contended, dealt with local church difficulties between pastors and membership continually. Larsen indicated that his understanding of our role vs. the role of some former members did not qualify as the role of an abuser. Rather, there were hurt feelings-real feelings, but feelings nonetheless. Additionally, it was obvious that the current members of JPUSA had been hurt to varying degrees by what some former members, especially via Enroth's correspondence, had been saying regarding us. We believed it was one thing to disagree about callings and lifestyles; it was another thing to assault each other's motives and character.  Herb Freedholm, as Central Conference head for the Covenant, attended the meeting, and addressed an issue that to us underscored the witch-hunt nature of Enroth's accusations. Enroth had at one point floated the theory that JPUSA was in fact being run by Dawn Herrin (currently Dawn Mortimer), who is JPUSA's only female pastor. Freedholm, a quiet and gentle person normally, grew angry as he confronted Enroth and Gundry over the targeting of Herrin. His point was simple: she was the most vulnerable, and one of the least public, of all JPUSA's pastors. To target her as some sort of spiritual power-monger was more than unfair; it was, in the male-dominated evangelical subculture, highly sexist. Enroth presented the ECC and JPUSA spokespersons with four documents alleged to support his own methodology, none of which seemed to actually do so. One was a xeroxed excerpt from Helen Ebaugh's Becoming an EX: The Process of Role Exit, and contained the quote beginning this chapter. Ebaugh's point was that subjective perspectives don't seem subjective to the persons espousing them. The other documents also seemed to us non-applicable, especially one having to do with researchers' guarantees of anonymity for members of Native American tribes. [16] An anthropological article further highlighted the confusion in Enroth's model. Point one of its Principles of Professional Responsibility was responsibility to those studied . [17] Enroth claimed to be studying former members, but he was actually publishing an alleged study of JPUSA's alleged abuse. The final document explored sociological ethics, and was yet another apples and oranges example. [18] Despite the meeting which lasted for somewhere between four and six hours, no resolution was reached. But Zondervan's Stan Gundry was shocked to discover that this writer, who attended the meeting, had been sending nearly all the correspondence between Enroth, Zondervan, the ECC, and JPUSA to various Christian spokespersons. Gundry seemed most shocked when I mentioned having sent the entire correspondence (over one inch thick even at that point) to professional acquaintances at Christianity Today, evangelicalism's flagship magazine. My response (as I recall it): "Did you think we wouldn't take this public? We're not afraid of scrutiny from the outside; we want it!" And in fact, along with fellow journalists and members of the counter-cult community, I had called various sociologists, both evangelicals and their secular brethren, to see if I could get them involved in examining Enroth's methodology. One sociologist from an evangelical mid-west college advised me to seek out Anson Shupe, a name I already knew about and had planned to call. Shupe agreed to visit us after reading the correspondence I'd sent him, and stayed two days and a night at JPUSA. Shupe got a sore back from sleeping in one of our rustic "loft beds," but despite that found us to be "an egalitarian and open community." Two days might not have been much time to make such a conclusion; it was more than we ever received from Enroth, who despite repeated invitations never darkened our door. Evangelical theologian Norm Geisler, who first visited JPUSA in the late 1970s, wrote Enroth regarding the correspondence I'd forwarded and blunty warned Enroth that the evangelical counter-cult community would not accept Enroth's methodology. [19] Former members began dialoguing with us, and from our point of view it appeared Enroth was leading them into a pre-fabricated understanding of their experiences with us. Former members, for instance, received copies of "Coming Out of the Cults," a 1979 Psychology Today article by secular anti-cultist Margaret Singer. (Enroth claimed later that this was after he had interviewed them.) The article contained various notations in longhand, presumably Enroth's, suggesting that while some parts of Singer's [20] article might not apply to JPUSA, others certainly would. Which parts supposedly applied to us were, we supposed, up to the imagination of each former member. Reading Singer's article, one is confronted by the same vague therapeutic definition of abuse running throughout Enroth's letters and eventual book section on JPUSA. Singer uses terms such as "total obedience to cult commands," "guilt," "fear," "behavior conditioning practices." At least she has the decency not to (in this article anyway) mention the alleged "cults" by name. But like Enroth's accusations, hers are the stuff of a narrative, not of historical truth. How would any group so accused defend itself? The ugly truth regarding such vagueness is that the flamboyance of the accuser's vocabulary itself is enough to cause many folks to believe the charges are valid. It is the equivalent of being accused of child molestation. One might be completely innocent, but the charge itself is so horrific as to leave a permanent mark upon one's reputation. (Enroth did one interview with a former JPUSA member, who taped the phone call and later sent a copy to me. In that interview, despite the fact that not a single former member had or has made such accusations, Enroth bluntly asked if any JPUSA pastors had sexually abused children.)  Perhaps the clearest exposition of Enroth's procrustean bed we were being stretched upon appeared, ironically enough, in a chapter edited by Cornerstone magazine's own counter-cult expert, Eric Pement. As Executive Director of Evangelical Ministries to New Religions, Pement was responsible to collate a number of papers presented at EMNR's 1989 Conference. "Churches on the Fringe" was Enroth's contribution. Though Enroth lists ten ways to define a "fringe" church, the most telling may be the last, "Painful Exit Process." [21]This passage reflects Enroth's reliance upon emotive, nearly indefinable, terms. "Just as is often the case with an abused spouse, the victim of spiritual abuse has mixed feelings about cutting ties," he wrote. How was the spouse abused? How was the church member abused? Such things are simply not defined, or are defined with terms equally vague but just as ominous.   Our Further Response to the Accusations After a time, we despaired of Enroth hearing our concerns. It was then we considered our ultimate options. We did ponder legal action after others close to us recommended it. But the idea of suing a fellow Christian -- though to us he didn't seem to be behaving like one -- seemed Scripturally dubious.  We also considered doing what some of the other groups who were to be included in the book were doing. Duck and cover. Wait for the book's release, then lay low and after a time all the publicity would die down. This option held very little attraction for us. We have always been forthright regarding our faults, whether real or alleged.  There was an option we rejected out of hand, but which bears mention. Due to our lives together, a level of transparency occurs that often bares a member's darkest, most problematic areas of life struggle. We categorically refused to use that knowledge against former members in a public venue. Our research of various sects and New Religions had made us familiar with cases in which high-commitment groups had indeed abused that pastoral priviledge. [22] While such a use of another's sins and weaknesses would undoubtedly have served us well in the court of public opinion, it would be unethical from a Christian point of view. We did at times share honestly about some former members with those we are accountable to in the ECC in order to give them context, especially since some of those ex-members had themselves gone to the ECC to discuss their perspectives. [23] The option we decided on for a public response to Enroth was to use Cornerstone magazine, the very vehicle we had used to expose Christian frauds and subject New Religions to examination. We would attempt to subject our own history and our own story to the methodology Enroth seemed to be ignoring. And we would study what the truly guilty subjects of our own research had done in response to avoid doing likewise ourselves. We would take all of this before the watching world. To prepare, we examined our own methodology as "investigators" via Cornerstone magazine (investigator the role Enroth seemed to be playing) and the role of a few of our more celebrated "subjects" as the accused (the role we involuntarily had assumed). There have been at least five avenues through which Cornerstone verifies information regarding any religious group. (I list them in no particular order.) First, ex-members and / or other "whistle blowers." We don't discount ex-member testimony, but do hunt for secondary verification of it. Second, books, tapes, and magazines from the group itself. Third, additional documentation from court proceedings or other legal channels such as tax returns. Fourth, testimony from members and leadership within the group. Fifth, writings about the group from both popular and scholarly sources, with emphasis on the latter. This of course is the researcher's basic laundry list; any good journalist knows that his sources need cross-verification from as many other sources as possible.  We determined that all accusations from Enroth should be subjected to the same rules of evidence we subject our own research to, data on "New Religions" such as the Children of God and Unification Church, evangelical fakes such as Mike Warnke, Lauren Stratford, Troy Lawrence, Alberto Rivera, John Todd, and others.  We decided not to wait for Enroth's book. We had nothing to hide, and believed Enroth's correspondence showed the entire nature of what he would eventually publish. By this time, dozens of packets of the entire correspondence (some forty letters, most multiple-paged) had been mailed to various evangelical and secular spokespersons. Any or all of those spokespersons could take us to task if we misrepresented or quoted -- out of context -- Enroth's claims. The magazine, which normally we had tried not to use as a promotional tool for the community, now became our courtroom. We chose to construct the "Enroth issue" with various pieces of the very complex set of issues raised by Enroth's accusations. First, we introduced the problem with an editorial, " The Acid Test of Accountability," which outlined the entire controversy in miniature. We began our first published history of JPUSA, " Life's Lessons," [24] which told the story of Jesus People Milwaukee and the eventual beginnings of Jesus People USA itself. The lengthy, heavily-footnoted article established our identity through historical documents and eye-witness testimony. Our history was a rich mine indeed, yielding up among other things a number of sociological studies done on the community. One such study, a 1974-1975 doctoral thesis, noted that we majored on the theme of balance, both in doctrine and practice. This was in contrast, the sociological student noted, to the Children of God. [25] The doctoral student mentioned Enroth in a footnote, disagreeing strongly with Enroth et al's The Jesus People: Old Time Religion in the Age of Aquarius. There, Enroth had indicated that Jesus People were simplistic proof-texters; Not the Jesus People I've researched for over a year, the student responded. In recounting our history, we told both the J.W. Herrin story and the "adult spanking" story involving Jack Winters. We explained what a day in the community had been like back in those early times. We told of a homeless fifteen-year-old runaway whom one of our street-witnessing members found and brought to our house, and who was safely returned to her grateful parents. We wanted people to know us, our goods and bads, our life and growth. We also included the entire " JPUSA Covenant," a document each JPUSA member is asked to sign. This covenant covers rights and responsibilities of the individual and JPUSA toward one another. [26] Again, the purpose was historical and evidential context. But the covenant also did provide that unseen, existential, "feel" a group has. We hoped people would see us as flawed but healthy human beings joined together in a flawed but healthy community of believers. Long-time Cornerstone contributing editors, Bob and Gretchen Passantino, run their own California-based counter-cult ministry, Answers in Action. With this writer, they had researched and exposed Lauren Stratford's story of ritual satanic abuse as false, forcing her publisher to drop her best-selling book. Our association with the Passantinos was long, and well before the Enroth controversy we had discussed with them the concepts behind "Mind Control." The Passantinos were incensed over the Enroth letters, and researched an article on the Mind Control paradigm's falsity. " Overcoming the Bondage of Victimization" dealt in-depth with concepts Enroth's worldview was rooted in, and is still quoted in literature dealing with the debate over mind control. "Who's Abusing Who?" was a thoughtful reflection from psychologist and author William Backus, who targeted the term "spiritual abuse" as one having no real content. [27] He had visited our community numerous times, and assured us that both ourselves and our children seemed quite healthy from his professional perspective. "JPUSA is Family" came from Dr. Ruth Tucker, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. As someone who also had visited us and known us for years, and who had researched cult groups for her book, Another Gospel, she was offended by Enroth's lack of scholarship. She had in fact refused to author an introduction to his previous book, Churches that Abuse, because of what she saw as unfair treatment of one group she was familiar with in that book. [28] Tucker noted how ironic it was that JPUSA and Cornerstone were being attacked with methodologies we had strictly avoided in our own counter-cult research. [29] Anson Shupe, who as mentioned had visited JPUSA upon finding out about the Enroth controversy, was interviewed by Cornerstone. He explained how sociological data is normally gathered in regard to religious groups with unhappy former members. Shupe did not discount ex-member testimony, but reminded the reader that Enroth's "scholarly sin" was to have treated narrative accounts as literal history. [30] As we thought how to close out our "Enroth" issue, as we called it, we decided upon a lengthy open letter to Enroth from our counter-cult expert, Eric Pement. Eric, as mentioned, had edited Enroth's ten-point paper, "Churches on the Fringe." Responding to an Enroth letter to ECC's Paul Larsen, Eric dealt with nine areas where Enroth claimed we'd abused people. Then various others, both on the Cornerstone staff and pastoral board, gave input and co-signed the " Open Letter to Dr. Ronald Enroth." It was a respectfully worded, but rigorous, examination of the vague accusations against us made in the correspondence. Insensitivity re pastoral care; fostering dependency on control-oriented leadership; spiritual elitism; dissent discouraged; manipulation of members; double standards; legalism/rigidity; painful exit process; shunning/ostracism-these were explored and forthrightly responded to as best we were able. Trying to defend ourselves from Enroth's accusations still felt like pushing against a giant marshmellow; squishy but sticky.     Reaction to Enroth's Book     Enroth's book, Recovery from Churches that Abuse, was published by Zondervan in the late spring of 1994, nearly a year after his first letter had come to our attention. The book's chapter on JPUSA was, as we suspected, the linking together of unverifiable stories from mostly anonymous sources. In addition, Enroth noted he had at times melded more than one of the stories together to make a more compelling narrative. The result? Now we were being accused by ex-members who didn't even exist! A final irony; some groups included by Enroth had indeed sexually and physically abused members. This abuse was verifiable, and Enroth made sure to include hard evidence in that regard. Yet there we were, accused with no such evidence, unfairly grouped with other churches who were documentably abusive. Enroth repeated his only "evidence" for the world to see:  "There is a side to the JPUSA story... that is largely unknown. I became aware of problems in the group after receiving letters and phone calls from former members who had read Churches that Abuse and saw parallels with their own experiences." [31] Various leaders at JPUSA are mentioned by name, accused of abusive behavior, and always in quoted stories that, we noted, left Zondervan and Enroth less culpable. Two former members are named; the rest are fictitious in name. In a rambling closing chapter, Enroth complains that the [JPUSA] leaders view problems of leaving largely in terms of transition from a communal setting to a noncommunal one. By limiting their concern to practical and utilitarian matters such as securing housing and opening a bank account, the leadership overlooks the painful interpersonal and psychological hurts that often accompany departure. [32] This admission on Enroth's part that we did (and do) help leaving members with the various logistics of exiting JPUSA also revealed how Enroth placed us in a Catch-22 situation. Enroth charged that we over-directed members' lives, yet also criticized us for not further directing those leaving our community. Which was it, over-directing or under-directing? And of course we know the pain of leaving; some pain, both for JPUSA and for those leaving us, is unavoidable. Ending a relationship hurts. Enroth's seeming ignorance of this simple psychological truth glares from his book's pages.  The fact that Enroth's end product was somewhat anti-climactic in comparison with some of the far-out allegations included in the correspondence did little to soothe the pain of being publicly vilified in a supposedly evangelical publisher's book. We decided that our approach to publicize Enroth's scholarly folly was the best defense we could muster. Other than that, Spurgeon's truism that "Falsehood strides around the world before truth gets its boots on" was likely going to be true in our case as well. It was time to move on with life. But in one last parting salute, Cornerstone did run a review of Recovering from Churches that Abuse, written upon our request by sociologist James T. Richardson.  "Enroth reminds the reader several times that he is a sociologist, thus implying that he is doing sociology in the book, but this slim volume is not sociological. There is no attempt to sample properly, or to limit generalizations in any explicit way. There is no effort to discuss the issue of self-serving accounts that plague all such books of this 'anticult' bent, and there is a glossing over of the writer's own particular religious persuasion. Furthermore, there is virtually no recognition of the considerable scholarly research that might be used to counter the apparent thesis of Enroth, who seems to believe that religious groups that require heavy discipline and commitment should be avoided in favor of less demanding mainstream groups. There is no reference to scholarly work by other sociologists such as Stuart Wright, Normon Skonovd, Trudy Solomon, Jim Lewis, and David Bromley, or psychologists such as Carol Latkin who have done more scientifically defensible work on ex-members. Helen Rose Ebaugh's fine book, Becoming an Ex, is referenced, but the larger amount of work by other social scientists is ignored." [33] A specific facet of the concept of story I've adopted here was touched upon by Richardson. "Enroth's book can be viewed as another in a long line of popular books that teach people how to become good victims by reinterpreting their past. Ironically, this thoroughtly non-sociological book makes use of a sociological truth--that people are constantly reinterpreting their past to make their view of that past more functional for their present--as he delivers the message that people's problems are not really their fault. Someone else is always to blame. This line of thought is controversial from several perspectives, of course, including the theological and the therapeutic. [34] Further scholarly fallout against Enroth began almost immediately. UNLV philosophy professor Francis Beckwith delivered a stunning blow to Enroth with his harshly negative review in evangelicalism's most prestigious counter-cult publication, CRI Journal, versions of which appeared elsewhere. Beckwith also delivered a paper taking Enroth to task at the 1994 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. Alan Gomes, theology professor at Biola University, published a book in 1995 (ironically with Enroth's publisher, Zondervan) entitled Unmasking the Cults. In that small book, he devoted a chapter to a discussion of the brainwashing paradigm and to Enroth's methodology. Gomes was highly critical of such a methodology, and like Beckwith, found it neither scholarly nor Christian. [35] Mind Control and Other Stories     In understanding the background of what befell JPUSA, there is a story, or set of stories, which ought to be taken into account. Such stories involve the victimization of individuals by religious groups and, more particularly, religious leaders. Make no mistake that I believe abuse within religious groups occurs; it does, and we have written about and investigated such tragic events, as well as publishing stories (duly fact-checked) from former members of new religious groups.  But the victimization stories regarding some religious groups, particularly smaller groups involved in "high commitment" lifestyles, take on a mythic quality of their own. These stories are, as was Enroth's concerning JPUSA, rooted in the brainwashing / mind control paradigm. The Cult Awareness Network (before going bankrupt then being taken over by agents of the Church of Scientology) was the most vociferous promoter of this concept. Currently the American Family Foundation (AFF), headed by Michael Langone, offers the most public support for the mind-control story through its Cultic Studies Journal.  In considering the mind-control debate as it relates to so-called "new religions," psychiatrist and well-known author Robert Lifton is a key figure. Lifton has been adopted as the poet/philosopher of the anti-cult movement, speaking at various anti-cult functions over the years and having his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, cited in nearly every major work supporting the concept of mind control. AFF's Michael Langone, for instance, defers to Lifton when it comes to defining the word "cult." [36] Dr. Enroth also cites Lifton in his 1977 Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cults. And during his interview phase of former JPUSAs, Enroth sent them copies of Lifton's Eight Criteria of Mind Control. [37] A handwritten notation explained, Dr. Lifton, psychiatrist (M.D.), has had a major impact on the scholarly writing on cult mind control. An interesting exercise would be for you to apply these 8 to JPUSA! Enroth's public protestations to the contrary, this mailing certainly did cultivate the standard "thought reform/mind control" story line among his ex-JPUSA interviewees. Lifton's take on mind control is a well-told story, a narrative used to negatively dismiss high-commitment forms of religious commitment as "totalism." In that light, I am interested in Lifton's self-described bias toward post-modernism and his own variant he calls "proteanism." [38] Without an in-depth judgment on the right or wrong of Lifton's worldview, I would note that it is not value-free in orientation. Traditional religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would not (unless held in an ironical, "I don't really mean it, but these man-made symbols are comfortable for me" sense) be very tenable from the post-modern/protean viewpoint. And Lifton makes this clear by opposing his protean ideal with the "fundamentalist" man, loosely based upon protestant evangelicals but including even Nazis. Such is Lifton's story. What Lifton, in all his articulate (one might say romantic) longing seems to be saying is that the human self is not a reality grounded in any absolute truth, but rather a self-defined entity. The problem (among others) with this is that one ends up with the self defining the self. Further, as a self defines itself, it inescapably begins defining all selves. Lifton does not escape this tendency. And in spite of discussing his protean model for an entire book, he is unable to formulate how a human being does find self-definition. [39] This view is profoundly individualistic, and nowhere in Protean Man does Lifton explain just how such men build a family, church, or society together. For further articulation of this, I turn to the team of five sociologists who authored Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life:  "Separated from family, religion, and calling as sources of authority, duty, and moral example, the self  first seeks to work out its own form of action by autonomously pursuing happiness and satisfying its wants. But what are the wants of the self? By what measure or faculty does it identify its happiness? In the face of these questions, the predominant ethos of American individualism seems more than ever determined to press ahead with the task of letting go of all criteria other than radical private validation." [40] This is the problem, from a philosophical viewpoint, with the anti-cult movement. Their worldview is radically therapeutic, radically centered on the lonely individual. And this worldview, as best exemplified by Lifton's disciples, is one which in and of itself can and often does lead to tyranny. Mass murderer John Wayne Gacy was, it could be argued, one successful example of a protean, self-defined individual. De Sade was another. In a less sensational vein more directly applicable to this discussion, the disciples of Lifton are eager to have us embrace their individualistic values, to the point that they would "reprogram," sometimes after kidnapping, members of groups unwilling to conform to the Liftonian meta-narrative. If that isn't an inflexible, totalist worldview masquerading as freedom, what is? What they fear most is, in the end, what they themselves have become.  Christian sociologist Milton Riemer warns that worldview assumptions greatly influence the way sociologists perceive other human beings. [41] Riemer perhaps paints with a broad brush in saying that all "secular" sociologists are guilty of reductionism. But he does make one point clear, namely, that both the Christian and non-christian sociologists carry assumptions which are scientifically unproveable yet lead to inevitable conclusions.  This sociological given is a crucial point as regards charges of abuse. My idea of the word "abuse" may bear no resemblance to your idea of abuse, depending on whether or not we hold the same or different basic assumptions about reality. Who says what is and what is not abuse? How does the sociologist define abuse: from the viewpoint of the alleged victim, from the viewpoint of the alleged victimizer, or from a third allegedly neutral "scientific" viewpoint? None of the three views listed, nor perhaps any other, is in fact value-free. [42] I am a journalist, not a sociologist, but I believe both disciplines must progress while gingerly embracing the apparent contradiction between non-biased research and strongly held beliefs. Ronald Enroth, on the other hand, seems to think that his Christian bias makes thorough research unnecessary. An ancestor of mine, Rebecca Nurse, was hanged in Salem, Massachusetts for witchcraft by good Christians who believed the unverifiable testimony of her alleged victims. In closing, I note the obvious: It does hurt to be falsely accused. The pain is subjective, but real enough, and what transpired between JPUSA and Enroth is a matter of historical record. We choose not to call his behavior abusive toward us, though using a more substantive measuring stick than his own, we certainly could. From this layman's point of view, he abused the discipline of sociology. We look upon his version of science as akin to the bogus science of phrenology – measuring skulls – by which African Americans were alleged to be less intelligent than the white scientists using such methods.  There is the issue of Ronald Enroth's own story, of which we cannot presume to fully know. But just as all men and women want to be the hero of their own stories, [43] certainly Dr. Enroth wishes to be the hero in his. He sees himself, stated over and over in the JPUSA / Enroth correspondence, as the defender of disenfranchised victims of religious groups. In this book I seek to be the voice of the voiceless, he wrote in Recovery from Churches that Abuse. [44] While a properly balanced advocacy is not wrong either in journalism or sociology, we believe that this intense sense, one might almost say a felt need, to be a victim advocate has harmed Enroth's ability to do good social science. The final area in which we believe Ronald Enroth failed was in doing what a sociologist who is evangelical ought to do best. That is, he failed to synthesize sociological and biblical tools to grapple deeply with the meaning of our life together, a life affecting both former and current JPUSA members. Sociology, despite some sociologists' relativistic worldviews, is not intrinsically an anti-religious venture (as Peter Berger, among others, exemplifies). A growing number of evangelical sociologists have made and are making contributions to the science. [45] In light of this, Enroth's failure is painful not only for JPUSA but also for the Church, the sociological discipline itself, and the watching world. What now for JPUSA? Despite the pain Ron and other well-meaning "experts" may choose to inflict upon us, we are determined to remain and live as we believe we are called by Christ to live. We also will continue to grapple with the experiences of leaving members and ex-members, neither of whom we pretend to completely understand. We cannot completely understand them, any more than they can completely understand us. But we can work together toward a resolution which says, "Your story belongs to you. I may not be a part of your story any more. I may even have to grieve over leaving your story... or being left out of your story. But I affirm your individual right to tell your story."  On the other hand, we cannot deny who we are and what we believe. There are borders beyond which we cannot go. We will not affirm the moral legitimacy of a person's choices if those choices appear to contradict God's truth as revealed in Scripture and through his Holy Spirit, no matter what those choices are. We will, of course, affirm each individual'sright to make those choices. And we will affirm a person's humanity as well as the value of their time with us, even if their present choices are, to us, unscriptural and/or unsound. We hope that those former members feeling alienated from us will affirm our humanity as well. And we hope one day that perhaps they will look back upon our shared time together as a chapter in their own story worth remembering. (See footnotes following next section) Jon Trott is the editor-in-chief of Cornerstone magazine, a 26-year-old publication of the Jesus People USA community in Chicago. Trott has co-authored articles on the Unification Church with sociologist Anson Shupe, and is currently working on a book regarding human sexuality. Related Links: NEW: Ronald Enroth's looooong response to this article's final, published form. I didn't bother responding to this, as it in my opinion merely underscores my original contention: Enroth is not a scholar, and relies upon bullying and misdirection to avoid the central points I was trying to make. There's really nothing more to say. +In-house JPUSA documents: JPUSA Covenant Transitions Committee document (guidelines for leaving JPUSA) Membership Commitment to Serve document +Sociologists' JPUSA research: Sociologist of Religion Jeffrey Haddon's page on JPUSA Sociologist John Bozeman's research paper on JPUSA The Ronald Enroth controversy: + JPUSA's response via Cornerstone magazine + Ronald Enroth's response to Cornerstone's response. We did not find his arguments either new or compelling; since we had already dealt with the central issue from our perspective, that is, his methodology or lack thereof, we did not respond to this article or reprint it in Cornerstone as he had hoped we would do. Critics of JPUSA + Rick Ross' JPUSA page (Ross, who has in the past forcibly deprogrammed members of various religious groups, including members of Jews for Jesus, did not target JPUSA until his deprogramming activities were covered in Cornerstone magazine. Ross apparently considers Youth with a Mission, Campus Crusade for Christ, and other evangelical Christian groups to be abusive sects.) + Scientology (the "new" Cult Awareness Network, [CAN]) on Rick Ross. [Those confused by Scientology's name being linked to CAN's should note that CAN was recently taken over by the former after going bankrupt due to a deprogramming lawsuit.] Some of this is over the top, esp. the portion regarding Ross being a "jewel thief." Ross admitted to me (Jon Trott) that he did indeed do wrongful things as a young man, but like many others has rearranged his life since that time. What is of signficance, however, is Ross' complaints regarding this posting (which, after all, does seem to be historically accurate), when compared to Ross' postings about JPUSA, which he conveniently avoids responsibility for simply by posting a "disclaimer." + Response to Rick Ross' charges against JPUSA from a JPUSA married couple. These responses represent that couple's own viewpoints, and have not been "edited" (to my knowledge) by any other JPUSA member or pastor. +More on brainwashing, pro and con Footnotes: [1]"Communities.... have a history-in an important sense they are constituted by their past-and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a 'community of memory,' one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget that past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative, and in so doing, it offers examples of the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community. These stories of collective history and exemplary individuals are an important part of the tradition that is so central to a community of memory....  "But the stories are not all exemplary, not all about successes and achievements. A genunine community of memory will also tell painful stories of shared suffering that sometimes creates deeper identities than success.... And if the community is completely honest, it will remember stories not only of suffering recieved but of suffering inflicted-dangerous memories, for they call the community to alter ancient evils. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life , Bellah et al., Harper & Row, 1986, p. 153. [2]The Children of God, for instance, hold that sex between consenting adults who are not married to one another, and who may in fact be married to someone else, is permissible providing the spouse agrees to the liason. I suggest that the most objective sociologist could, with little fear of contradiction, note that such an idea is outside the framework of orthodox Christian belief and practice.   [3]"So many things are absorbed in our large family, when one person hurts, everybody comes to the rescue with comfort and prayer.... We handle our own emotional, spiritual, and even marital problems. Yes, Christians, despite popular fantasies, are not immune to problems"; "United We Stand," Cornerstone, vol. 3, issue 14 (1974), p. 6,7.   [4]Acts of the Apostles, 6:1-6; This passage not only expounds on the genesis of deacons and deaconnesses, but by inference (see also 1:21-26) shows the apostles working as a sort of board, with Peter often acting as spokesperson but not as sole or primary authority.  [5]For instance, Cornerstone, in Vol. 12, Issue 69, 1984, published "Denominations: Variety and Variance Within the Christian Church." The article defended both denominations and the concept of denomiationalism: "Denominations have historically been the vessels used by Jesus Christ to preserve and maintain the Christian faith, each serving a different function. Luther and his Lutherans lifted up the then-neglected banners of justification by faith and the priesthood of the believer. Calvin held high the sovereignty of God. Another generation, led by John Wesley's Methodists, emphasized holiness.... In the end it is apparent that we need each other." Another example was how closely JPUSA worked with other churches and denominations, both Protestant and Catholic; JPUSA joined various umbrella groups of churches, including the Lakeview Evangelical Fellowship, a large group of churches representing Chicago's North Side.   [6]For a lengthy treatment of JPUSA's history, see our web site: http://www.jpusa.org/jpusa/lessons.htm [7]"As the secular press has tried to help the public comprehend the recent horror in Guyana, there has been the frequent inference that the problem was too much commitment. They suggest that any time people give themselves totally to a cause, the product is likely to be as heinous. Is that true? And if it is, how should that affect our commitment to Jesus Christ and His Church? Is our safety a retrenchment into individualistic Christianity? ....Commitment is not the problem, but the object of our commitment is critical"; "Guyana: Was the Problem Too Much Commitment?", Dave Jackson, Cornerstone, Vol. 7, Issue 45, p. 2.    [8] Kidnapped: Let Our Children Go, Cornerstone , Vol. 5, Issue 33, p. 8. The review points out that Patrick ignores the often real problem of some groups being monetary rip-offs, focusing instead on the commitment level of individual members. It seems his major objection to the cults is their level of dedication. Patrick, we noted, encouraged kidnapped NRM members in the midst of a deprogramming to open sin, taking that as the sign that the victim is successfully deprogrammed; Although we strongly oppose the cults and speak out against them, we feel that the Holy Spirit has more ethical loving ways of dealing with people than kidnapping and forced repentance. Even though there were many false religious teachings in His day, we cannot imagine Jesus kidnapping people and harassing them for days to change their mind. The Lord is a truthful persuader, not a gangster.   [9]"The urge to scream 'fire!' has replaced that earlier silence that had greeted the eastern pseudo-religions of the sixties. Jim Jones made one contribution to American society: people have become aware of the cults as they never have been before.... The secular press was at first incredulous, then furious.... The attack has not basically been theological, but societal. Herein lies a great danger. While we too have a great concern for the subversive power of the cults (enough that we have carried a 'Cult of the Month' column for five years) we have as a primary goal love. We cannot ignore the cults; neither can we allow fear and anger to dictate our actions.... Let us expose false teachings and warn the cults, but in love"; "Cults: What to Say When the Tacks Are Brass," Eric Pement, Cornerstone, Vol. 8, Issue 47, p. 36.  [10]Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cults, Ronald Enroth, Zondervan, 193, 197?, quoted in Understanding the Cults , Alan W. Gomes, Zondervan Publishing House, 53, 1995.  [11]letter, dated June 16, 1993, from Ronald Enroth to ECC Central Conference head Herb Freedholm. [12]Ibid. [13] "They were challenged by [African-American evangelical] John Perkins to live among the poor as poor. And so they moved to communal life in the slums of Uptown many years before they joined the Covenant. I am no disciple of Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida or of Liberation Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez. But any critical reader of culture will have to agree that America's underclass is often abused and victimized by its cultural establishment. You and I are both prospering beneficiaries of that establishment.... "In many ways Jesus People do not and should not meet the 'stereotype' of the middle-class Protestant establishment. But they are in dialogue with us and are trying to be responsive. We are, like many, a predominantly 'WASP' denomination seeking to overcome our own 'addictions' of insensitivity to the poor and the alienated. The Jesus people, clearly seeing our lack of wholeness as well as their own, humbly asked for help. We took the risk and will now accept the pain you apparently intend to inflict upon us both." [Letter dated July 13, 1993] [14]letter from Ronald Enroth to Paul Larsen, dated July 19, 1993. [15] Ronald M. Enroth, Churches that Abuse, Zondervan (Grand Rapids), 1992, p. 30. [16] NEH Develops Code of Ethics for Native American Research, American Anthropological Association [rest of title obliterated], Vol. 22, No. 8., p. 1, 13.    [17] Ethics and Anthropology, from [this written on xerox copy] Cultural Anthropology – Kottak; p. 295. [18] Policy Research and Ethical Issues, Caroline Purcell, Understanding Sociology, 3rd Edition, Harper & Row (1990), p. 42. We did not disagree with Purcell, of course, merely with Enroth's attempted use of her writings to justify his methodology. Should researchers always reveal their identities, especially when doing participant observation? she had written. Why Enroth had underscored this sentence was baffling. He'd never visited JPUSA's headquarters incognito or otherwise. The next sentence seemed to explain his thought processes. There are certain groups that may not want researchers in their midst, such as reclusive religious cults, corporate boards, and certain criminal groups (Italics added). His selection of this section seem to revealed his hostility toward us, in that we are neither reclusive nor a cult by any standard definition. We'd allowed all sorts of researchers, including sociologists and journalists, into our midst. [19]"Ron, do we really have to write books attacking other Christians on such highly volatile and debatable topics such as 'abuse'? Frankly, I am tired of the word. It has become one of the most abused terms in our vocabulary. So far as I can see, the most abusive thing in this whole situation is your desire to publish this and Zondervan's willingness to do it. Is making money at the expense of the character of other Christians really ethical? I would urge you again as a brother in Christ to cease publication. You are not only going to hurt another group of sincere, dedicated Christians, but you are going to hurt yourself. I do not know of anyone in the counter- cult ministry who agrees with you. You have already alienated the major groups and leaders that I know." Letter from Geisler to Enroth, March 14, 1994. [20] Singer, in a 13 October 1993 letter to Philip B. Heymann, U.S. Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice, and Ronald K. Noble, Assistant Secretary (Enforcement), of the Department of the Treasury, recommends eleven individuals as experts on thought reform and cults. She includes Ronald Enroth's name. The letter concerned training regarding groups such as the Branch Davidians.   [21]"It is not easy to leave fringe churches. This fact is difficult for nonmembers to comprehend. Just as is often the case with an abused spouse, the victim of spiritual abuse has mixed feelings about cutting ties. The group, for all its weaknesses, represents security. For some, it becomes a surrogate family. Not all experiences are viewed as negative or harmful. Furthermore, the participant (especially the long-term member) has been programmed against ever leaving. The repeated invoking of fear, guilt, and intimidation can be extremely effective with regard to any consideration of bailing out."; "Churches on the Fringe," Ronald Enroth, Contend for the Faith: Collected Papers of the Rockford Conference on Discernment and Evangelism, Edited by Eric Pement, Evangelical Ministries to New Religions, Chicago, p. 196, 1992. [22] See, for instance, Shepherd Without Compassion: Stewart Traill and the Church of Bible Understanding, Eric Pement, Cornerstone, Vol. 11, Issue 60, p. 32. We went as far as to note that we had somewhat re-evaluated our position on ‘mind control' due to the findings of our research on the COBU group, who's members were publically verbally abused for personal sin, but summarized this way: [The ex-members' alleged] ‘failures' were (and are) not either the result of carnal backsliding or hypnotic states induced by a bizarre cult. After hours of dialogue and research, the members of the Church of Bible Understanding appear as young Christians, zealous to do God's will, who were twisted and savaged by one man's ego. It's easy to point to [COBU leader] Stewart Traill's extreme, yet how many Christian leaders both large and small manipulate others to achieve pseudo-spiritual ends? The list unfortunately is not small.   [23] In the JPUSA/ECC meeting with Enroth, we had discussed two or three of the more outlandish former members' stories, in order to show both Enroth and Zondervan's Gundry how easily disprovable those stories were. Enroth later wrote that we had, by bringing up those stories, failed to acknowledge the pain of these former members.    [24]"Life's Lessons: A History of Jesus People USA Covenant Church," Jon Trott, Cornerstone magazine, 16, 17, Vol. 22, Issue 102/103, 1994; for an on-line version of this article, see http://www.jpusa.org/jpusa/lessons.htm   [25]"Balances which are often referred to include balancing structure and spontaneity, submission and love, criticism and praise, teaching and worship, and recreation and work. In an additional usage, balance refers to qualification, as when someone provides a balance to what another has said.... One young man in [JPUSA] told me, 'Balance is like, when the children of God take the verse in the New Testament that says to forsake your parents, and then they go off and reject their parents. There's no balance to that. They don't look at all the other verses in the Bible that say that you should obey your parents. So they're right that you should put Jesus first but the balance to that is that you have to respect and obey your parents, too.... Cults are unbalanced. They just take one little statement or line and build a whole cult on that."; "Two Jesus People Groups," David Gordon, 40-41, 1975; quoted in "Life's Lessons: A History of Jesus People USA Covenant Church," Jon Trott, Cornerstone magazine, 16, 17, Vol. 22, Issue 102/103, 1994, 11.   [26]" A covenant with JPUSA does not equal salvation, nor does it bring a person into a special 'elect within the elect,' a higher order of Christians. It is the agreement of an informed individual, the member, and one small expression of the Christian Church, JPUSA, that we see God leading us in service to him."; "JPUSA Covenant," Cornerstone magazine, 19, Vol. 22, Issue 102/103, 1994, 19.   [27]"The new definition of abuse has shifted. It does not include an objective description of abusive behavior. Rather, it tends to describe, as the major element in the definition, the subjective reaction of the [alleged] victim. In current parlance, abuse is any behavior which another person experiences as painful, regardless of the objective characteristics of that behavior."; "Who's Abusing Who?", Dr. William Backus, Cornerstone magazine, 19, Vol. 22, Issue 102/103, 1994, 35. [28]Ironically, the group Tucker defended against Enroth, University Bible Fellowship, turned out to be located within a mile of our Chicago address. We discovered that a member of UBF had been kidnapped and subjected to an attempted "deprogramming," and contacted her. The results of our research, which included visiting UBF's facility as well as attending their worship services, focused on Annie Kang's testimony as a victim of abuse at the hands of "anti-cult" forces. We also included interviews with the professional deprogrammers involved: "Enemies of the Heart: The Story of a Christian Woman's Deprogramming," Annie Kang with Jon Trott, Cornerstone, Vol. 25, Issue 110.   [29]"Whatever the setting or subject, the [invalid] research method is to treat the victim stories as truth without investigating counterclaims. The alleged victimizer is presumed guilty of the victim's charges without being given an opportunity to prove innocence or even challenge the assumption of guilt... My serious concerns about Ron [Enroth's] work arose in 1991, when I was asked by his editor at Zondervan to write an endorsement for his book, Churches that Abuse. After I read over the manuscript I wrote back to the editor (and sent a copy of the letter to Ron) stating that I could not endorse the book. Of the churches featured in the book, I had personal knowledge of only one, and in that instance I felt that Ron had made some very unfair allegations. The one-sided testimonies on which he based his conclusions were old (primarily 1980 to 1984) and he seemed entirely oblivious to the cultural factors that gave the group its distinct non-western flavor." Regarding JPUSA, Tucker wrote: "What is so ironic about this latest attack is that Cornerstone magazine is widely recognized for its solid investigative reporting and for its persistent efforts to interview people on both sides of the story. Never has it offered up articles based solely on victim stories, claiming they were valid research. Yet the organization is being attacked by the very methods it strictly avoids." Cornerstone magazine, 19, Vol. 22, Issue 102/103, 1994. 41.   [30]"If Enroth has committed a scholarly sin, it's that he has treated narrative accounts as literal... as history. But it seems to me he fails to take into account the individual perspective of each observer of any event. Reality is complex. The average reader wants to be presented with something that either happened or it didn't. I mean, how would a book do if it were titled Churches that Might or Might Not Be Abusing?";  Cornerstone magazine, 19, Vol. 22, Issue 102/103, 1994, 44.   [31]Recovering from Churches that Abuse, Ronald Enroth, Zondervan Publishing House, 121-122, 1994. [32] Ibid., p. 152. [33]"Book Reviews: Recovering from Churches That Abuse," James T. Richardson, Cornerstone, vol. 23, Issue 105, p. 20. [34]Ibid. [35]Unmasking the Cults, Alan W. Gomes, 72, Zondervan, 1995. [36]"Although the term cult is vague and controversial, it has firmly implanted itself in popular discourse. The term is often associated with 'thought reform' (popularly called 'mind control'), which, according to Lifton (1961), describes certain processes of behavior change used on civilians in mainland China and on Korean POWs":  "Introduction," Michael Langone, Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse, Michael D. Langone, ed., W. W. Norton (New York), p. 2,3. Various other writers in this volume also cite Lifton, some at great length, in support of their brainwashing paradigm.   [37] The mailing Enroth sent was copied from self-described exit counselor Steven Hassan's book, Combatting Cult Mind Control, (Park Street Press, 1988, p. 201); Hassan includes a startling excerpt from Lifton on cults, taken from the latter's 1987 book, The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age. That excerpt abundantly underscores Lifton's confusion regarding fundamentalism, totalism, and evils such as the People's Temple suicides and even Nazi Germany: if one has an absolute or totalistic vision of truth, then those who have not seen the light – have not embraced that truth, are in some way in the shadows – are bound up with evil, tainted, and do not have the right to exist. Once again, note the difficulty for Lifton and his followers here, namely, that they too end up being totalists by deciding who else is a totalist, and (to use his term) does not have the right to exist. The whole concept of deprogramming (exit counseling) is rooted in an attempt to destroy the personality which believes, replacing it with a personality which disbelieves. Lifton himself claims that there is a second self created within some cults; it is this second self that must, according to the anti-cultists, die. Self-responsibility for joining or leaving a religious group is thus removed from the individual and assigned elsewhere, namely, to the totalistic anti-cultists bent on undermining that individual's commitment.    [38] See Lifton's The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, Robert Jay Lifton, Basic Books (New York); 1993. I am only somewhat familiar with the "post-modernist" approach to truth and story, namely, that story is basically man's subjective attempt to make sense of an unknowable objective truth. But at the heart of the post-modern worldview is the same horror Lifton feels toward the monolithic, whether philosophical, religious, political, or historical. Thus the Po-Mo rejection of "meta-narratives," any story which claims to be the sole and only truth. (A wag might suggest that their own story appears to be a meta-narrative.) Lifton sees an invariable connection between monolithic, or totalist worldviews, and societal evil. While fearing fundamentalism, Lifton welcomes pluralism, both societal and in the individual's inner life, as the antidote to totalism. Lifton's understanding of both Chinese Communism and Germany's Nazism as evil is especially problematic when applied to small, relatively powerless religious groups and individuals, despite how Langone and others attempt to rationalize away this glaring problem.  On a deeper level, Lifton could be accused of making a philosophical error, generalizing from evil examples of monolithic worldviews to conclude that all  monolithic worldviews are evil. Are not pluralistic worldviews, at least those taken to their logical extreme, also problematic from a moral standpoint? The word "abuse," for instance, implies that there is a commonly-held and thus monolithic consensus on the moral and/or ethical norms being violated by the abuser. If there is no moral norm, then by definition, there can be no abuse, which at the least relies upon a societally-defined moral norm for its own definition. The child abuser, for instance, is only an abuser if a moral norm (societal, religious, or both) is being violated. In a completely pluralistic society, how does one define such a norm? [39]Consider, for instance, this attempt by Lifton to distance himself from the obvious weakness of his position: I must separate myself, however, from those observers, postmodern or otherwise, who equate multiplicity and fluidity with disappearance of the self, with a complete absence of coherence among its various elements. I would claim the opposite: proteanism involves a quest for authenticity and meaning, a form-seeking assertion of self." The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation , Robert Jay Lifton, Basic Books (New York); 1993, p. 8,9. That last sentence is in danger of amounting to poetic-sounding nonsense.   [40]Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Bellah et al., Harper & Row, 1986, p. 79. [41] "The secular sociologist is almost always comitted to a random/chance-evolutionary view of humanity. From this view it follows that a person becomes human as a result of socialization (Horton and Hunt, 1976:88). Also, through socialization a person becomes either a man or a woman; a person becomes oriented either toward the opposite sex or to his own sex. The Christian, however, is compelled to begin with a biblical view of human nature. God created humans in His own image, and the reflection of God's image continues in all people regardless of age, sex, skin color, or moral condition. The child does not become human when he or she begins to assimilate the cultural patterns of environment. Rather, the child is human by virture of God's creative act (Gen. 1:26-27): Christian Perspectives on Sociology, Stephen A. Grunlan and Milton Reimer (eds.), Zondervan, p. 21.   [42]In this business of "values" as applied to studying religion, I obviously disagree with the relativist; a community's shared beliefs, as well as the beliefs of individuals within those communities, could be a socially constructed (to use Peter Berger's term) conspiracy of meaning involving not only men but also involving an all-powerful, loving God Who actually exists! We understand the difference between our finite understanding and God's infinite one, and keep that in mind when interpreting our history and our vision. We won't get it exactly right. But we also have a sturdy sense of self-identity, an understanding of who we are and why we have chosen to live together.  We realize that our story is (to again borrow from Peter Berger) a story we have built together.  Because that story is humanly constructed does not mean it is untrue in an ultimate, even eternal sense; we believe it to have been co-authored by the Holy Spirit. Any  sociologist could, without invalidating her or his objectivity, acceed to that possibility.   [43] Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, Free Press, 1973, offers a thoughtful exposition on this human tendency. [44] Recovering from Churches that Abuse, Ronald Enroth, Zondervan Publishing House (1994), p. 11. [45]See, for instance, Christian Perspectives on Sociology, Stephen A Grunlan and Milton Reimer, Editors, Zondervan, 1982. --end of footnotes Copyright © 2000 Jon Trott. All rights reserved.