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’s right 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.

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.