Based on pseudo-scientific theories of brainwashing, anti-cultists supported the criminal but lucrative business of deprogramming.
by Anson D. Shupe (†) and Susan E. Darnell
Article 2 of 10. Read article 1.
Note: A description of the cases of deprogramming mentioned in this article, including the names of the victims, has been available on CESNUR’s website since the year 2000. Since many years have passed, we indicate only their initials, except for Jason Scott, whose case is well-known.
Elsewhere one of us has presented a detailed historical/organizational analysis of the anti-cult movement (ACM) up to the end of the 1970s (see Anson D. Shupe, Jr. and David G. Bromley, The New Vigilantes: Deprogrammers. Anti-Cultists and the New Religions, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980). The chronicle is basically one of regional grassroots “mom-and-pop” groups’ struggles to (1) acquire sufficient financial stability to allow them to spread their message of “destructive cults” subverting American society, (2) maintain a shifting membership base together long enough to lobby, publicize, and mobilize opposition to NRMs, and (3) establish a national unified organizational prominence with political clout. There were a number of false (i.e., unsuccessful) starts, but by the mid-1980s there were two prominent national-level groups—the Cult Awareness Network and the American Family Foundation. (The symbiotic relationship between AFF and CAN is not dealt with in this series). In the beginning (i.e., the early 1970s) most ACM groups’ membership consisted of senior family members distraught at their offsprings’/junior relatives’ deviant religious choices. Over time, however, the mantle of ACM activism and leadership passed to degreed behavioral science moral entrepreneurs who made ACM involvement an important, and sometimes lucrative, part of their careers.
The extent to which either CAN or its “sister” social movement organization, the American Family Foundation, have been “hate groups” as defined either by Washington state law or by the racial/ethnic criteria in sociology is open to debate. (AFF began in the late 1970s as a local chapter of the Citizens Freedom Foundation.) Certainly both ACM groups have presented slanted, stereotypical images and language that has inflamed persons to perform extreme actions. Certainly also both CAN and AFF have at least promoted a professional veneer that, at the popular level, appears more scientific than hateful. This apparent “normalization” of their ire against NRMs is a modern trend for hate groups, according to one author: “The hate movement in the United States has taken on a new, modern face. The strength of the contemporary hate movement is grounded in its ability to repackage its message in ways that make it more palatable, and in its ability to exploit the points of intersection between itself and prevailing ideological canons. In short, the hate movement is attempting to move itself into the mainstream of United States culture and politics (Barbara Perry, “‘Button-Down Terror’: The Metamorphosis of the Hate Movement,” “Sociological Focus” 33 (2, May 2000):113).
So it was for CAN until its bankruptcy in 1996. CAN was a literal offshoot of the earlier tax-exempt Citizens Freedom Foundation – Information Services (CFF-IS), itself another development from the even earlier Citizens Freedom Foundation (CFF) which was at one time the nation’s largest ACM group. CAN proclaimed itself to be an informational clearinghouse for facts about NRMs. At the same time it was aggressive in promoting a “mind control” model of NRM membership though its representatives (at least publicly) righteously denied any involvement in coercive deprogramming. In the remainder of this series we turn to evidence (in admittedly abbreviated form) suggesting a rather different evaluation of CAN’s operations and purposes.
Deprogramming (referring to the pseudo-therapy in which the member of an unpopular or controversial religion is abducted, involuntarily detained, and repeatedly demeaned/harangued/harassed/threatened by individuals, usually paid by that person’s family, until that person recants the faith system) has become a term in popular culture. Recently [note: the article was written in 2000], given the unsavory reputations of many deprogrammers (e.g. Ted Patrick’s criminal convictions, and the repeated misadventures of Rick Ross), they have adopted new euphemisms for their roles, such as “interventionists” and “exit counselors.” Unfortunately these terms muddy the water. Such terms may legitimately apply to voluntary discussions among NRM members and their families guided by a trained counselor or simply become a linguistic dodge used by coercive deprogrammers. But the presupposition is still there in the new terminology: the purpose of the activity is to “exit” members from their associations in non-approved religions and which affiliations call for intervention, exit, or deprogramming, not tolerance or acceptance.
Examples of deprogramming, some given national attention and others more local, are legion. We certainly do not have the space here to provide legal, media, and anecdotal-narrative data on even a modest fraction of such cases. However, to give readers a flavor of several well-known cases, we provide a sample of five deprogrammings. A sixth, crucial case is discussed in a further instalment of the series.
1. J.B. was raised a Roman Catholic. In 1982, he switched to become a Baptist, then eventually to Pentecostalism, a charismatic form of Protestantism. His unhappy parents sent him first to talk to a Catholic priest, then to a psychiatrist. According to J.B.’s notarized testimony: “My father thought that I must have been being controlled by someone to have turned against the Catholic Church.” J.B.’s parents then sent him to Anne Greek of the Positive Action Center in Portland, Oregon, a group with ties to deprogrammers and both CFF and CAN. Greek met with J.B. and (again) also a Catholic priest. J.B. was adamant about remaining Protestant.
Then things turned coercive. J.B. was abducted by deprogrammers and Greek, accompanied by violent restraint and a bloody nose. Then came the typical ACM mind control harangue. J.B. frequently told her and the others that he felt they were using against him the very tactics they accused the “cults” of using. Greek and others all replied that this confinement was different because they were the “good guys.” Eventually the deprogrammers were at a loss as to how to undermine J.B.’s refusal to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church and decided he was not in fact a victim of mind control. Rather, they concluded that he had rejected the church because he once had been sexually molested by a priest. J.B. denied this fallback excuse for having been physically traumatized and imprisoned.
2. In the early 1980s, deprogrammer Ted Patrick was almost hired by a Cincinnati couple, M. and W.R., to deprogram their 20-year-old daughter S.R. whom they feared was being influenced into becoming a lesbian by a female apartment roommate. Patrick turned the parents down because he was already on probation for a kidnapping conviction in Arizona. S.R.’s eventual deprogrammers kidnapped her and then raped her over several days. One, J.R., was charged with five counts of sexual assault. One of us at the time contacted a Cincinnati journalist about details concerning the alleged rapes. He replied that the proceedings were bizarre: that the judge had sealed the court transcripts but that there were known semen samples from the deprogrammer.
3. K.L., aged 33 years, self-supporting for six years and president of a computer consulting company in Redmond, Washington was returning to Seattle from Southern California where she had been holding business meetings in late May 1990. (She had had appointments with a data processing manager at Paramount Studios and a bank vice-president.) At the Seattle airport’s parking lot, as she was loading her luggage into her car, three men grabbed her and shoved her into a van. She recalled: “One man sat on me and clamped his hand over my mouth to prevent me from screaming as we passed through the airport parking pay booth. I could hardly breathe. My face was cut in several places.” Her parents had hired the deprogrammers, afraid she was in danger of falling under the influence of the Rama Seminars held periodically by Dr. Frederick Lenz.
The head deprogrammer was the same one who had led the abduction/assault on 39-year-old L.C.M. (the subject of case #4). K.L. was guarded 24 hours a day, with no privacy in a remote location. Even the bathroom door was nailed open. She was constantly confronted with a barrage of the ACM mind control message and (however illogical on the deprogrammers’ part) repeatedly shown tapes of Charles Manson’s group. She spent eight days of captivity with no fresh air or exercise. She refused to take a shower because she was not allowed privacy. When she stated her concerns about missing her business meetings and being unable to check her messages and return any business calls, her captors told her that deprogramming was far more important than success in her business. Altogether over seven deprogrammers monitored her. One of them told her that each participant in the deprogramming carried enough cash to escape by airplane in the event police were notified. Things in the deprogramming eventually went sour, however. Finally the frustrated deprogrammers returned her to her car at the Seattle airport. She called the Seattle police and was told she had grounds to press charges for kidnapping and false imprisonment. (A parenthetical note: K.L. later saw a newsletter from the AFF with an article about the group honoring one of her female deprogrammers.)
4. L.C.M., 39 years-old, belonged to the Church Universal and Triumphant, a Montana-based New Age mystic communal group. The Church Universal & Triumphant is several decades old and numbers several thousand members worldwide. It preaches a spiritual message put together from world religions as allegedly revealed by various spirit guides, or “ascended masters,” including Jesus Christ. During the 1980s the church’s critics feared that it was obsessed with a last-days’ nuclear war, that it was stockpiling weapons, and that it might imitate Jonestown in a murder-suicide feast.
On November 20, 1991, at 8:30 P.M., L.C.M. was violently abducted from her Boise, Idaho house. She had just put her four young boys to bed and changed into her nightgown. Then the doorbell rang. Peering through the front door peephole she saw a person who appeared to be a pizza delivery man. Earlier that evening, she had ordered a pizza for dinner, but now she assumed the store had made a mistake by delivering a duplicate. She opened the door, she debated with the apparent delivery man that she had not ordered a second pizza, he showed her a forged receipt, then he abruptly grabbed her arm and pulled her towards a van at the curb. According to court documents, “L.C.M. yelled to her children to call the police. L.C.M.’s son R. tried to call the police but was unable to because the deprogrammers had disconnected L.C.M.’s phone service.” In front of her terrified children, L.C.M. was dragged out into the street and forced into a van by two men she did not know. She was thrown face-down on the floor, both men on top of her, with their hands over her mouth. Later court records showed she had bruises on her mouth, an arm, and a leg from her abductors’ rough treatment.
The deprogrammers drove L.C.M. to a remote cabin, dragged her inside, and informed her that her mother had hired them to prevent her from taking her children to a Church Universal and Triumphant shelter in Montana. (It turned out that L.C.M. had no such intention; however, she had been contemplating a family move to Bozeman, Montana, almost ninety miles from the Church Universal & Triumphant headquarters).
At the cabin they were joined by a woman and another man. Then, the next day (with continued rough restraint) they took her to a motel. Here a second woman appeared, ostensibly to counsel her about her dangerous religious affiliation. Then it was another night drive to another motel, always with her face pinned down on the floor of the van so that she had no sense of where in Boise she was. Each day she was grilled about her religious beliefs in mocking terms, with only brief chances for meals or restroom breaks. Harangued, nervous for her safety and for her children, worn thin, and embittered that a middle-aged woman in the contemporary United States was being imprisoned for her religious beliefs by vigilantes, she still resisted. Then, on November 26, she was moved to yet another motel, continually resisting.
By November 27 the pseudo-therapists let her go. L.C.M. went to the police, several of the deprogrammers fled the state and only returned after government agents tracked them down in New Mexico, the kidnapping defendants tried to claim in court a “necessity” to abduct her for her own good, and they won an acquittal in a lower court. The prosecution appealed. Eventually the deprogrammers agreed to plead guilty to the felony of second-degree kidnapping after the Idaho Supreme Court overturned the acquittal. That was five years after L.C.M. had been kidnapped in front of her children.
5. Ted Patrick, a poorly educated and often unemployed but self-styled “community worker” in San Diego, California coined the term “deprogramming” in 1971. Over the next three decades he was lionized by families and ACM groups dedicated to opposing NRMs as a hero and humanitarian seeking only “to liberate minds” from authoritarian cultic control. In 1990 a Mennonite couple, B. and S.M., put Patrick in contact with an Amish husband in rural LaGrange County, Indiana. (The two of us live in the region and followed the ensuing folly.) The husband was E.M., aged 36, and he was concerned that his wife, El.M., was straying from the Old Order Amish faith. She had begun attending meetings of a “splinter” discussion group of Amish that took up, among other scandalous matters, whether there was a biblical basis for not operating gas-combustion-driven machinery. Shortly before Thanksgiving 1990, the husband paid Patrick between $10,000 and $15,000 (one estimate was $25,000) in cash to abduct El.M. and deprogram her back into the Old Order Amish worldview opposing modern entanglements such as automobiles and electric generators. So in late November 1990, Patrick, along with the couple and E.M.’s brother, abducted both El.M. and her 9-year-old daughter A. and transported them variously through Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois.
Patrick, the original deprogrammer, was at this time in his sixties and showing that such abduction was a younger man’s game. A. was put screaming in a farmhouse basement, distracting El.M. upstairs, who was not in the perfect mood to be argued with about her religious beliefs. Moreover, Patrick let El.M. go to the toilet by herself —a colossal mistake for a seasoned deprogrammer—and she crawled out a bathroom window, hiked cross-country across two fields, and jumped a fence before using a farmer’s phone to call police. Realizing the deprogramming had turned into a fiasco, Patrick fled the scene back to California.
There were several unusual outcomes. First, Amish husband and wife reconciled. E.M. was apparently sensitized to the sincerity of his wife’s beliefs, she was touched by his devotion to her, and Patrick—who returned to his home in San Diego as soon as El.M. had escaped—declared to Fort Wayne newspaper journalists that he was keeping the money. Deprogrammers don’t give receipts, and E.M. may have been out as much as $25,000. And Indiana Amish stay out of courts. Second, prosecutors in LaGrange County dropped the case since the abductees declined to press charges. Third, the case was the first in the history of the modern ACM where a deprogrammer actually attempted to force someone, or reprogram her, back into a minority religion.
