The other night there was a story about the Exclusive Brethren on Four Corners which we watched all the way through.
This was mostly a story about people who had left this very conservative relgious group, and there was much discussion of the Brethren’s equivalent to ‘shunnning’, where ‘excommunicated’ members were excluded from the community. This meant that they weren’t allowed to talk to, touch or interact with their families or any other Brethren after they’d been excommunicated. When you take into account the fact that this group do not allow their members to eat or drink with non-members – effectively ‘separating’ them from the rest of society, being ‘excommunicated’ is a devastating practice.
One of the things that I noticed was how passive and unaggressive all the former Brethren members were. They spoke of experiences which made us cry, but their manner remained largely ‘flat’ – definitely unaggressive. And while there was reference made at one point to one man’s ‘aggressive’ response to being excommunicated, it wasn’t really in the range of ‘normal’ aggression, as I’d put it.
It was frightening stuff: to see people who’s lives had been devastated responding calmly. It made me wonder if perhaps they were all seriously depressed (though they probably were – suicide rates for excommunicate Brethren are frighteningly high), but it also made me think about how such controlling religions encourage passivity. It also made me think about what it would be like to teach students who’d been trained so thoroughly not to think critically, or to question.
Scary stuff.
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Submitting to the will of God is a big deal for Christians. It’s all over the Bible.
2 Chronicles 30:8
“Do not be stiff-necked, as your fathers were; submit to the LORD.”
Job 22:21
“Submit to God and be at peace with him;”
James 4:7
“Submit yourselves, then, to God.”
So having that drummed into you will make a person very passive indeed. It becomes all about how you abide by God’s Plan.
With regards to things like refusing medical attention, I would disagree that it’s about the luxury of choice afforded to the middle class.
Somehow interventionist medical attention became against God’s will. Whoever made that up has blood on his hands.
A lot of Christians though scoff at the idea of life rules.
I watched that 4 Corners too.
I’ve been a net stalker of the EB for a while . They used to have a meeting hall in the next street to us for years and a few businesses around the neighbourhood mainly related to car smash repairs and spare parts, they were polite and honest enough to deal with but firm if you crossed them.
I always reckoned they were one of the “protect believers of our sort” and “the unbelievers or others are fair game” perhaps not to the extent of the $cientologists or jihadists, but there none-the-less.
We called them the “scarfia” for obvious reasons. from memory they preached at lunch time on the street corners.
Scary stuff. Especially because I think I’d actually be quite a compliant cult member … soothing to follow the will of the herd. All the way up to the edge of the cliff, of course.