Latest news with #cults
Irish Times
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
How a controlling cult and a strangling Catholicism ruined lives in Britain and in Navan
It's an unavoidable fact of human nature that people are attracted to cults. It's a similarly unavoidable fact of human nature that people are very, very, very attracted to TV programmes about cults. Such shows have certainly been in vogue in recent years, with about two dozen available on Netflix and Prime Video alone. Even the most well-executed of these – HBO's The Vow or Netflix's Wild Wild Country, for example – can't help occasionally falling into the trap of portraying their victims as feckless freaks and gullible goons. By contrast, Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army (BBC Two, Sunday) is a more sober and sensitive take on one such sect, the Jesus Fellowship, and it's all the more fascinating for it. The show opens with ITV footage from the small village of Bugbrooke, in Northamptonshire in England. It's the sort of place that, if it did not exist, drama executives would have been forced to invent it. An unspoilt vista of postcard-pretty homes and shops, all cricket matches and church fetes, suddenly interrupted by the abrupt growth of a radical new church – of the shouting, chanting, speaking-in-tongues variety – formed around a charismatic pastor, Noel Stanton. READ MORE Stanton cuts a rather imposing figure. Looking, ironically enough, like an evangelical Richard Dawkins, his manner is stern and austere, his rhetoric full of vehemence and passion. His demands for a militant form of Christianity take purchase, and soon 60 of his most committed congregants surrender their homes and personal wealth to live in one big farmland commune, overseen by a leadership structure with Stanton at its top. Members cut themselves off from their wider families, withdraw children from school and sell their toys. Adults relinquish jewellery, cosmetics, TV, radio – even reading, hobbies and pets. Still, the influence of Satan is discerned everywhere, exorcisms are routinely performed, and radical prescriptions are placed on adult congregants' sex lives – namely, a strict culture of celibacy underpinned by Stanton's confused and angry relationship with his own sexuality; one which gives way to rampant child abuse as the movement picks up members around Britain. This two-part series, which concludes on Sunday, is feathered through with sessions given by a psychotherapist, Gillie Jenkinson, to former members of Stanton's congregation. Jenkinson, once a member of a religious cult herself, conducts these sessions with empathy and tact. She gives survivors space to describe their experiences and how, decades later, they still worry that their spirits are unclean, and to explain what led them to stay within a community that exercised extreme social control, communal punishment, and abuse. It's a striking, sobering watch, which nimbly conveys how quickly talk of radical love can give way to nightmarish brutality. And it reminds us that those who find themselves in thrall to such cults are not gullible freaks but ordinary, vulnerable individuals, susceptible to the wiles and persuasions of those adept at wielding power and control. Their stories attain particular resonance when viewed alongside Pray for Our Sinners (RTÉ One, Wednesday), a survey of the stranglehold that Catholic-run institutions had on Ireland for the better part of our recent history. Irish girls on their First Communion Day in a still from Sinéad O'Shea's film Pray for Our Sinners It, too, begins with a procession of imagery culled from the archives: RTÉ footage showcasing the role the church held in daily life in every part of the country, when Mass attendance topped 90 per cent and mass incarceration was given a variety of other names. 'For much of the 20th century in Ireland,' Sinéad O'Shea, the film's director, tells us in her narration, 'there were more people incarcerated, per capita, than any other place in the world. A person could be institutionalised if they were poor, if they were considered to be living with a mental illness, if they were pregnant and unmarried, if the authorities saw fit.' To illustrate this, she focuses on her hometown of Navan, and a handful of people who experienced abuses first-hand. We meet Norman, beaten as a boy by the brothers at a local De La Salle school; Betty, who was sent to a mother-and-baby home when she became pregnant as a teen; and Ethna, who resisted entering such a home but still had her child taken from her by religious orders straight after she was born. All speak, with deeply affecting eloquence, of the unutterable things they suffered but also of the general culture of fear, obedience and silence that pervaded society. 'Only crazy people complained,' we are told. 'Or Americans.' Just as importantly, we meet Mary Randles. She, alongside her husband, Paddy, blazed a trail against the power and control of religious orders in Navan, and nationwide, campaigning against corporal punishment, and providing refuge for young mothers seeking to escape the demeaning institutions designed to incarcerate them. [ 'It was always the woman, she was the one, she was the sinner' Opens in new window ] Although the film's focus is on a few stories within a single town, the true horror might be that a similar survey would likely be possible in any corner of Ireland; the thousands of confirmed sexual-abuse victims uncovered in hundreds of churches and educational institutions; the innumerable everyday examples of physical abuse meted out to children in church-run schools; the tens of thousands of girls imprisoned, beaten and forced to do unpaid work in the Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes. Within my extended family alone, I'm fairly sure I could put together a similar number of subjects as O'Shea does here. I've yet to meet an Irish person who couldn't say the same. [ Pray for Our Sinners: Powerful account of resistance to 'empire designated to punishing girls' Opens in new window ] One temptation when watching this film's searing testimony, and the artfully curated archive footage featured within, is to consider this a story of sins long past, a cautionary fable from the bad old days of black and white. It's worth recalling, therefore, that the last Magdalene laundry closed in October 1996. To place, at front of mind, the jarring truth that they were still around to see Boyzone and the Spice Girls top the charts. That this nationwide system of barbarous incarceration outlived Tupac Shakur. It is a remarkable, important document covering just one localised sliver of this phenomenon, and if it contains elements that anger and disturb – how could it not? – there is just as much courage, dignity and inspiration. O'Shea's film A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot , from 2017, showed an uncommon knack for capturing small human details. In that documentary she tapped at the shell of poverty and punishment in post-ceasefire Derry, and managed to prise pathos, wonder and even humour from the contents within. Here that knack gives us tender and empathetic testimonies from survivors, but also a deeply human streak of warmth and resolve. Pray for Our Sinners is a film that will, and should, make viewers angry. At the people who did this to several generations of an entire nation. At the institutions still refusing to acknowledge or compensate those they harmed. And at those in our media who would play down such horrors as mere products of their time, loudly nagging that they be afforded some form of grotesque, and unmerited, nuance. More than any of that, however, Pray for Our Sinners reminds us that we have cause to be inspired. Both by those speaking up now about what happened to them and by those who spoke up at the time on their behalf. It is for them, if nothing else, that we should all be thanking God.
Vogue
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
In Her New Graphic Novel, ‘Simplicity,' Mattie Lubchansky Explores the Dark Side of Communal Living (and So Much More)
Mattie Lubchansky has written and illustrated several graphic novels, including 2023's riveting Boys Weekend, but her latest, Simplicity, defies comparison to her earlier work. While it retains plenty of Lubchansky's signature wit and stunning artistry, the book also ventures into timely territory with its focus on commune-slash-cults and the dangers of unquestioning loyalty. Vogue spoke to Lubchansky about stuffing Simplicity with ideas, her longtime obsession with cults, AI's threat to art, and drawing various dystopias. The conversation has been edited and condensed. Vogue: How did the composition process this time differ from those for your two previous graphic novels, Boys Weekend and The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook? Mattie Lubchansky: Well, smarter people than me are talking about this, but you always hear, 'You have to learn how to write each book that you're writing,' and that was certainly the case for me. All three of my books have been pretty different. The Antifa book was a larger outgrowth of short-form political work I'd been doing. Boys Weekend was not autofiction, but it was in the universe of things where I had something happen to me that I transmuted into a fiction story by changing all the details and setting it in the future and adding satire. With this book, I kind of started with the characters—the main character, specifically—and then kind of built everything around him. I did research for this book, which I never do, and as I thought more about it, I just started piling more and more stuff into this book. Boys Weekend kind of has one idea in it, which is the idea that trans people are human, whereas I feel like Simplicity has 40 ideas in it, after a long time of trying to cram them all in there. What got you interested in the theme of communes and cults? I've always been obsessed with cults. I mean, there's one at the center of my last book, too; I realized as I was finishing this book that the two books have kind of similar premises. I think there's something in the air about communes. In the last 40 to 50 years, there's been a lot of queer separatism and, very recently, a lot of specifically trans separatist movements, where it's like, if you are a gay person in a big city, you're probably somebody that went and tried to start a farm with their friends. It's just sort of in the air. In my research, I was doing a lot of reading about 19th-century pre-Marxist socialist groups, and our time now is obviously not similar in terms of what the world looks like. But there's a similarity in the idea that people's lives are being reordered, in a way, and people feel like they don't have control over their own destinies, their own bodies, their own communities. So there is this weird pull of, like, I'm gonna go start a new society. Everyone's gonna see how good it is. I think I've just always been fascinated with what makes a person drop everything and join one of these groups.
The Guardian
18-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Victorian government opposes Moira Deeming-backed push to include ‘transgender ideology' in cults inquiry
Victoria's equality minister says the government will oppose a push to examine 'transgender ideology' as part of an upcoming inquiry into cults. Earlier this month, anti-trans lobby group Binary published a blog post saying the Liberal party MP Moira Deeming was 'urging people to make submissions' to the parliamentary inquiry into cults and organised fringe groups and had 'shared a helpful document with suggested answers'. Deeming has told Guardian Australia she distributed the document that claims transgender ideology 'operates like a cult and harms people in the same way'. The six-page document offers 'tips' for people who believe 'transgender ideology is harmful and cult-like' and stresses submissions highlight three key elements – manipulation, domination and psychological harm. It includes suggested responses for various groups, including parents of transgender children, sports coaches, health professionals and school teachers. One suggested response reads: 'Government enforced Transgender Ideology operates like a cult and harms people in the same way, because we can't leave, we aren't allowed to disagree, we lose our rights against it and it's harmful to us.' The document suggests that submissions call for an investigation into the 'harm caused by the current sex education curriculum', the introduction of 'protections in law for gender-critical beliefs' and 'protections for whistleblowers or conscientious objectors to gender-affirming practices'. It also calls for the 'removal and dismantling of transgender ideology from institutions'. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Deeming denied she wrote the document but said she had shared it, as well as another that claimed the government's Covid-19 response – 'including lockdowns, mandates, coercive messaging, censorship and medical segregation' – was 'cult-like'. That document also provides suggested responses to the inquiry and suggests Covid-19 policies 'used coercive control' and health authorities 'behaved like an ideological cult that punished dissent' during the pandemic. 'Neither of the submission tips documents criticise or target any person or community – they both criticise the government,' Deeming told Guardian Australia. Deeming accused the government of 'exploiting minority groups to shield themselves from legitimate criticism'. 'Many people believe the Victorian Labor government's hard line, extreme and oppressive laws used to enforce vaccine mandates and lockdowns, as well as unquestioning submission to the most extreme elements of transgender ideology, meets the threshold for the inquiry's definition of manipulative, coercive and harmful control tactics that cult and fringe groups employ,' Deeming said. But the minister for equality, Vicki Ward, said the inquiry would not cover gender identity or healthcare, as the issues were outside its scope. 'This inquiry has been established to examine harmful and coercive groups, not target trans and gender diverse communities,' Ward said. 'In Victoria, equality is not negotiable. We will continue to fight discrimination and ensure all Victorians can live safely, wholly and freely as their authentic selves.' Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Deeming was expelled from the Liberal party room by the then leader John Pesutto in 2023 after neo-Nazis gatecrashed the Let Women Speak rally she helped organise. After successfully suing Pesutto for defamation last year, she was reinstated and Pesutto was ousted as leader. In April, the new Liberal leader, Brad Battin, appointed Deeming as his 'representative to the western suburbs'. But tensions have emerged between the duo over Battin's involvement in a $1.5m loan to help Pesutto cover Deeming's legal costs. Ward said the document proved the Liberal party remained 'divided' and said Battin faced a 'test of leadership'. Battin's office was approached for comment and asked whether he was aware Deeming was distributing the document and whether it was appropriate to redirect the focus of the inquiry. An opposition spokesperson responded that it was a matter for the inquiry's committee. 'The inquiry should proceed with the terms of reference agreed to by the parliament,' they said. The inquiry was established in April, after allegations of coercive practices at the Geelong Revival Church, as detailed in LiSTNR's investigative podcast series Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder. The church has not publicly commented on the allegations contained in the podcast. Led by the legislative assembly's legal and social issues committee, it begins public hearings on Wednesday, with its first witnesses former members of the church and the podcast's creator, journalist Richard Baker. The committee's chair, Labor MP Ella George, said the inquiry was 'examining techniques being used by certain groups to attract and retain members and whether they amount to coercion that should be criminalised'. She said the inquiry 'does not focus on a group's beliefs or ideology' and pointed to a guidance note on the committee's website for more information. It is understood the committee reviews all submissions to the inquiry, assessing their relevance according to the terms of reference before deciding whether to accept them. Only submissions that are accepted are published online.
Vogue
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
65 Thoughts I Had While Watching Evita
This was, I'll admit, my first time seeing the movie all the way through. My main takeaways? Cults of personality are dangerous; we've played ourselves by not putting Antonio Banderas into more musicals; Jonathan Pryce is a cutie; and Madonna is heaven. Here, 65 things I thought (and things I learned!) while watching Evita.
Washington Post
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Let's talk about a trend in summer's thrillers: cults
Ah, summertime. When all you want is a big swimming pool, a cold drink and a page-turning novel. Luckily, this summer's slate of new thrillers is rich and diverse, with tales of domestic suspense, espionage, skulduggery and many a whodunit. Among this season's offerings, we noticed an interesting trend-let: thrillers that involve cults. As thriller writers, we see why cults are a perfect approach to the genre: They tie into so much of what crime fiction feasts on — the questioning of authority, the need for power and control, the idea of isolationism versus society and the natural slip into unreliability and secrecy. We decided to take a closer look at two new thrillers with cults at their core: 'The Ascent' by Allison Buccola and 'A Thousand Natural Shocks' by Omar Hussain. Tara Laskowski: Cults have always fascinated me, and I was curious to see how differently these authors approached them. 'A Thousand Natural Shocks' introduces the Liberty Subterraneans, a cult with criminal intentions. In exchange for some breaking and entering and a little bit of identity theft, the group promises its members the freedom of total reinvention by way of pills that make people forget everything they were before — a very appealing prospect for the book's protagonist, Dash, a troubled reporter for a weekly newspaper. He's running from a traumatic event in his past, refusing to sleep (and therefore dream about the trauma) and addicted to illegal prescription medicine that warps his sense of reality. The cult's magic pills, therefore, begin to feel like the only cure for Dash — one he'll stop at nothing to obtain. E.A. Aymar: While elements of 'A Thousand Natural Shocks' play with science fiction, 'The Ascent' is decidedly domestic suspense. Buccola's novel tells the story of Lee Burton, who was raised as a child in a cult called The Fifteen, based outside Philadelphia (imagine a group of Eagles fans, but less violent) and is abandoned by them when they abruptly vanish. Now an adult with a seven-month-old daughter named Lucy and a successful, caring husband named Theo, Lee has tried to distance herself from that secretive past. But the stress of motherhood, a new documentary about the cult and a mysterious stranger threaten her fragile well-being. So we have two markedly different takes on cults. What similarities did you find? TL: I think the appeal of joining a cult is to be a part of a group. And in these books, both Buccola and Hussain take great care in developing this sense of community, particularly through the supporting characters. In 'A Thousand Natural Shocks,' Dash's unusual support group consists of a loyal, exhausted work friend, a sickly old woman who lives in a hair salon and a battered dog. One of the best quirky entourages I've seen in a long time. In 'The Ascent,' there are delightfully snooty friends, a scattered but well-meaning neighbor and a wonderfully drawn vapid mom group. And Buccola does a good job, in general, of describing the fragile mental state of a mother with a baby. I really liked how claustrophobic and monotonous Lee's day-to-day life with the baby felt: 'Today is a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are long and shapeless. I have spoken to three adults since Theo left the house … I hate Tuesdays.' EA: The characters also served as my emotional connection to 'The Ascent.' Lee is a great study. There's this aching, worried relationship with her daughter, and this connection to the figures in her past that go beyond mere mystery. TL: Absolutely. Both of these novels will appeal to readers seeking emotional depth and strong character development, even if one's a quieter domestic thriller and the other is striving to be a summer blockbuster movie. EA: It's daring to cross genres in a debut, like Hussain has in 'Shocks,' and to address such complicated themes without losing the emotional underpinning. And he kept the prose lively, despite the occasional swing and miss. That said, the cults in both books felt vague. In 'The Ascent,' we're never really told what Lee's cult believes in, why her family joined, or if the premonitory sense of danger the cult evoked was warranted. That frustrated me. I will also say that, upon reflection, I saw the author's intent differently than I expected. This isn't about the cult, but rather the psychological aftermath of that traumatic, ultimately isolating experience. And Buccola does a wonderful job of capturing that space. TL: So once folks have gotten their cult fix, what other thrillers being released this summer are you excited about? EA: We didn't include it in this list, but Clémence Michallon's 'The Quiet Tenant' would be right at home in this column, given its focus on a pair of siblings who have escaped a cult and how their past haunts their present. And, although not a cult book, I'm intrigued by Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.'s 'The El,' which plays with some of the themes we've discussed regarding finding leadership and loyalty in suspect groups. TL: I'm really looking forward to Megan Abbott's 'El Dorado Drive,' featuring a secret women's club that promises wealth and independence at a price. I'm also excited about 'The Woman in Suite 11,' the sequel to Ruth Ware's fabulous 'The Woman in Cabin 10.' And Kristin L. Berry's debut, 'We Don't Talk About Carol,' about Black girls going missing in North Carolina, gave me chills, in a good way. EA: Megan Abbott is a modern master, and I'll read anything she writes. These all sound like such fantastic suggestions, perfect for the pool or, if you're like me and can't deal with the sun, for reading inside anything air-conditioned this summer. E.A. Aymar's most recent novel is 'When She Left,' which was one of three novels chosen by PEN/Faulkner for its DC Reads initiative. Tara Laskowski is the author of the suspense novels 'The Weekend Retreat,' 'The Mother Next Door' and 'One Night Gone,' which won the Agatha Award, Macavity Award and the Anthony Award.
