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

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 spankings—four 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.