6: Lara Kaput & Jehovah's Witnesses

Dave speaks with Lara Kaput, who was raised in Jehovah's Witnesses. Lara is a determined advocate against religious abuse. Like many Christian sects, Armageddon and the book of Revelation are a huge influence here, with the belief that a limited number of places exist in paradise. Lara reflects on her experiences in the church, including the impact of "shunning" and "disfellowshipping". Ostracism is a powerful controlling mechanism within many cult settings.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hi, I'm Dave Mullins. Welcome to Aftercult, a podcast of interviews with former cult members by a former cult member. Today my guest is Lara Kaput, raised in Jehovah's Witnesses and a determined advocate against religious abuse. Like many Christian sects, Armageddon and the Book of Revelation are, once again, a huge influence here, with the belief that a limited number of places exist in paradise, creating palpable pressure among those seeking salvation. The Gnostic movement also implied that there'd be a high failure rate for followers seeking salvation, which creates a strange, unspoken competition within the community, along with envy and a drive to achieve more validation from the leaders. Finally, a reminder that these interviews were recorded a couple of years ago. Let's chat to Lara.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

I think you're more stressed than me. I am more stressed than you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Yeah, I am.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Because I was where you were seven or eight years ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

I was embarrassed like you. Yeah, I was like, what can I say? Like, does everybody sound stupid? Like I'm so embarrassed. Yeah, totally. Yes. It was really endearing. When I listened to the first five minutes, I'm like, oh, this is really nice.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Yeah, good, good. All right. Lara, welcome. Thanks for coming in. Um, now you were not just involved in Jehovah's Witnesses, but were born into Jehovah's Witnesses. And it's been interesting chatting to you on the phone because I genuinely had no idea what Jehovah's Witnesses got up to. I had no idea what the doctrine was. I didn't know what their practices were. I was familiar with the name, I think probably everybody is. They've been around for over a hundred years as far as I can see. Door knocking, obviously, a very, very big feature. And I suppose that's all I really knew about the Jehovah's Witnesses, that they were a church, an evangelical church clearly, that liked to door knock to evangelize and get people on board. But I just sort of thought they were a really big, quiet church. But talking to you and doing a little bit of research myself, I realized that there's a lot more than that going on. And it is quite eye-opening for me, especially the doomsday messages that seem to be front and center of the doctrine and the and the system that's at play there.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

And it's not a light-hearted doomsday prophecy, it's incredibly extreme. And the fact that there's this sort of secretive tone to the organization, yet all this material is very publicly available, it seems. You can see this video footage, you can see what they're talking about. And to my mind, as someone who is in a more stereotypical cult, maybe in the new age sense, you know, weird, you know, we believe this fallen angel was there and we were doing weird Egyptian rituals and all this sort of strange stuff. In some ways, I think to people that looks more like a cult because it's so strange. Whereas these Christian groups, sometimes people underestimate what's going on because they're so similar to these big organizations that we all culturally accept, you know, many Christian churches, Catholicism here in particular, or whatever it may be. But it's absolutely, from what I can see, ticking all the boxes of a cult compared to the experience I went through. Can you tell me a little bit about how you're involved? I mean, I know you were born into it, but what that experience was like, and not just for you personally, but also in terms of being in the church and what that what that was like for you.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Yes, and can I just start by saying that's a really good summary? And I think most people would feel the same way. They don't know a lot, they look beige and safe, perhaps a bit weird. People don't realise they're dangerous. Even I didn't realise myself that I'd been in a cult until the Royal Commission into Child Abuse that happened here in Australia about 10 years ago now. The way that I came into it was my mother and father met in the religion. And so, yes, myself and two of my sisters were born into it. And my upbringing was we would go to a meeting once a week during the week at someone's house. We would go to a two-hour meeting on the weekend, on a Saturday or a Sunday, and also on a Saturday and Sunday, we would generally go what's called witnessing, which is what you just called going door to door.

SPEAKER_02 4:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Jehovah's Witnesses don't do that as much now. They've really moved away from going door to door with bags of magazines and books to sell to having carts, like for example, at the local train station or outside the local hospital or outside the law courts. They generally have a cart full of material.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

And they sort of proselytize that way. Another way that they do it is they write people letters at their house and they also contact people with emails. So it sort of changed. We used to sell the magazines and literature at a profit, which we didn't know it was at a profit, we thought it was not for profit. And these days the they don't sell them anymore. So it's like it's it's like it's free. It's not free, someone pays, but it's like it's free. So I guess what does make them different from big uh institutions, so there's eight million members in the world, there's about 70,000 here in Australia or less. What makes them different is they don't believe in the Trinity, uh, for example. They have elders instead of priests, they have kingdom halls instead of churches, and they appear to be a lot more humble. They have now also moved into online proselytizing. So back in the old days it was very much literature physically printed, and they used to print many, many magazines and books and so on. That's all now moved online, and so all of the material is now available on their website, jw.org is the official website, and a lot of the material has been thrown out, as in they told their members to throw it out.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

And uh some of the material that's now on their website is changing.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

So if they get caught out, for example, in a court case about some material, they'll remove it. Um so yeah, it's it's changing rapidly now, and something that might have been true two years ago is not necessarily the case today.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

So is the doomsday content present in any of that? Did it used to be?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Massive. All the time, every time. So I remember as a child, I wish I'd brought some material to show you, but you can probably visualize it. You know, monsters with multiple heads on them, Armageddon being depicted as a city collapsing with flames coming up, earthquakes, floods constantly on the front page. If you can imagine that uh tsunami that happened in Phuket and other countries, what was it, 10 years ago or so? That's the sort of depiction that us as children used to be presented with. And not only the pictures, but also the words would match that. You know, it was all doom and gloom and about fear. And so, as a child, to answer your question, I very much felt fear when I was a child. I remember waking up with nightmares, having night terrors, they call them. I remember just constantly feeling fearful if there was a storm and uh there was a thunderstorm, I would call on the name Jehovah to protect me. And you do this internally. No one sees this, but it's a Jehovah's Witness child going to door to door was usually terrified.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Uh it wasn't it wasn't a fun childhood from that perspective. And most of my family were Jehovah's Witnesses, so there was never an outlet. We weren't allowed to play sports after school. We weren't allowed to, for example, be in a band. We weren't allowed to birthdays weren't allowed, right? Yeah, birthdays, no birthdays, no Christmas, none of those things that were considered worldly, which is a word that I think you've used in other podcasts, worldly, so we we're the same in that way. Um, so it was a very, very closeted childhood. I remember a very close friend now was my best friend in primary school, and she told me we hadn't seen each other for like 20 years, and she said to me, I remember I wasn't allowed to come to your house.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Right, yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

And that was her memory of our childhood together. Whereas I remembered she was a breath of fresh air, and we would pretend we were horses, run around the schoolyard, and you know, climb fences, and I'm like, I had the best time with Norrell. And her memory was I wasn't allowed to come to your house.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

So yeah, that was sad.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

The childhood, uh you know, you mentioned something before about being afraid of, you know, hearing a storm and you know, fearing the end of the world was upon you and how you went through that experience alone, which really resonates with me. Not that I was raised in a group like that, but I just remember as a child dealing with a lot of those fears alone. To be confronted with that notion of Armageddon and to deal with a fear on that level as a child constantly must have been terrifying.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Yeah. It's funny you should say alone, because although all of us children were going through it, it's not like we had a self-help group of kids where you'd go, Are you scared of Armageddon? Yes, I'm scared of Armageddon. You did really hold it in. And I think the only, the only sort of saving grace, if you like, for me was the pets. You know, I would I would hug my dog and I would pat the cat, and pets were so important because it's one thing we had access to at home that was soothing.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Um, I wouldn't say my parents understood or they weren't necessarily born into it. So my dad joined as an adult, so he wouldn't have understood the feelings we were going through.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Do you think that he understood on any level what was potentially happening, even if you weren't talking about it? Did you get that sense? Because that must have been a peculiar experience in a way as you got a bit older and started to grapple with this.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

I think as a man in the religion, he was dealing with his own issues. And so he was having to control his children, control his wife, try and strive to be a leader, buying the materials, making sure everyone had a suit or a dress and was presented cult-like.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

You know, or we all had dresses that matched.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Um, and so I just think there was so much pressure, and he was always having to study magazines and make sure that we were studying magazines and leading the prayer and make sure we were listening to the prayer and saying amen. So I I don't know what what he was thinking, but I I imagine he was just so busy.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

And isn't that just so commonly the case?

SPEAKER_00 10:24

And the men generally were all about the doctrine. So they would be discussing and arguing the finer points of, you know, they were really focused on the written word and how that was to be interpreted.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

It's a very sort of uh, you know, old school Christian idea, isn't it? The sort of gender separation.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Yeah, I think I think so. And in the Jehovah's Witnesses, only the men can be leaders. So the women don't have that pathway. The women's pathway is to get married and have children and bring them up in the faith. And the but the men's role is to really ensure that the doctrine is passed down to the children and through the congregation, depending on where you are in the leadership. So my father became a ministerial servant. A ministerial servant is one step below elder, so he was sort of like a helper for the elder or the priest in the congregation, so he would have been focused on that as well. Uh but there's something that's quite different between your cult and mine is that we had to talk about the cult to everyone. You said you had to keep yours secret. We had to preach to the neighbors, to the school kids, to, you know, someone in the supermarket. I didn't know that yours had to be kept secret.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

It didn't have to be kept secret. We were public about it, and I was running courses publicly and the rest of it. But I think there was a shame in me knowing that what we were doing was super weird. So for the sake of my life and my work life, I was going to an office, you know, working with people. I didn't want them to know anything about what was going on. You know, I was happy to talk to anyone outside of work, which is interesting. It says a lot about what that experience was like for me. You know, I was so intense about it on one level. I was kind of all in, but I clearly wasn't at the same time. I was so conflicted. There was so much cognitive dissonance going on that I did, you know, without necessarily intending to protect, I think, in some ways, some things, thankfully, as a result of having that attitude. But, you know, Mark and Edith and the people in charge would have loved for me to push it harder than that. Um fortunately, because I was pushing it so hard in domains outside of work and family, it was enough, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

I I think I saw uncles and aunts around me be really neurotic about it. And so I I mean I saw myself as weird and I felt really awkward. I mean, I was one of those teenagers that had, for example, you know, pimples and braces and didn't know how to do my hair, put on makeup, like I looked really culty. But my uncles and aunts were worse. And I think seeing them made me shrink back a little bit from my responsibility to proselytize all the time. So in even though it was expected, and even though I should have been doing it, I think sometimes I did pull back and I don't know why, and that's probably why I had a cognitive dissonance I didn't know was there.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Yeah, yeah. And as a kid, I mean that's it blows my mind in a sense. You know, I know what that experience is like as an adult, but to be very young and going through that and being expected to do this, I suppose is going to affect every child a bit differently. Did you find that some people, some kids like grew up and really embraced that and were really into it?

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah, I mean, I I guess it's like any dynamic where you have introverts and extroverts. For example, there was a kid in my congregation who was really, really outgoing, and he became an elder, and he became a domineering elder. And looking back, I think, of course, you know, he he just had that type of personality. But my sister was an introvert, but she's a lot, she's a very loyal person, and so she stayed in the longest because she's so loyal and didn't want to be controversial. So I think I think a lot of kids' personalities did inform how they coped, whether they left or not.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Yeah, and I like that.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I was always the outspoken one, so we we're usually the first to be. Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And you know, I I do think a lot about the factors that influence people getting involved in cults. I mean, in the case that you're born into something, it's I mean, it's not irrelevant, but you you haven't chosen to be there on any level. Um but the way you naturally are is going to shift the way you develop within that context. And I think a lot about what draws people like me who join these things, you know, as an adult. I mean, granted a very young adult, but what factors that preceded that that made that very appealing to them. And I think, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity about, in some people's eyes, about what a cult is and isn't. And I think for people who haven't thought about it or looked at it very closely, it does seem like perhaps not as dangerous as it actually is to get involved in a group like this.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

And I think one of the reasons that it can be very damaging is that these cults are so different from the broader culture in which we're meant to exist, that when it's particularly strange and particularly odd, as mine was, it's very hard to connect with that outside culture. And you're kind of coerced into not trusting that outside culture, not paying attention to any information, not paying attention to scientific information, not paying attention to journalistic information. You learn to not trust the world deeply. It is very difficult to move away from that and then back into the broader culture, uh especially if you've been in it for years and years and years. And I think speaking of, you know, you talk about kids growing up in the Jehovah's Witnesses and being more loyal, I often think about the way we invest so much in something that it's very hard to walk away from it. Uh, and I think that was certainly why it took me so long to leave. I think I had doubts for a long, long time. But I had just given so much to it. I'd given everything to it. Walking away back into that broader culture, what the hell is that gonna look like? It was scary. And it took me a good year. I mean, it's taken me a lot longer. There have been a lot of damaging effects as far as I can see beyond that year. But that first year out was so bizarre. The way I talked to other people, like I was trying to learn how to be social again, and I was so odd and so awkward. I remember some of these conversations and I cringe, but you know, you have to go through that process to get through the other side. But yeah, I think it's that major cultural difference that makes any cult really, really damaging.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Yeah, I I actually remember, so it took me about 10 years to recover. And I think the only and I think now with Jehovah's Witnesses, it takes them almost unless they get psychological support at the start, it takes them almost as long to recover being out as it was that they were in. Which is really scary for someone leaving at 40 or 50 or 60.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

You need psychological support. But I'll give you an example of one time that I was really embarrassing because I never even believed it. And yet it was so entrenched that I knew all the words to say, all the arguments. So I was working in a pharmacy and a theologian came in, and I can't remember how the conversation started and what the topic was, but I just remember arguing fervently. I mean, I was an employee, it was my shop, you know, working for the boss, and I'm having this full-on argument with a theologian, and I'd only ever been in a small cult. He's a theologian learning about lots of religions. And so he was arguing about the doctrine, and I'm trying to argue back, and I would have been all of I don't know, 16. And I just remember getting really angry and wanting to win. The need to win. But but I don't know what possessed me because afterwards I thought that was really awkward. Why did I do that? Why did I get so, you know, riled up about something I don't even believe in? And I think it I'd just been indoctrinated so strongly with that need to prove others wrong about their religion. It had been fed to us that Catholics were really bad, particularly Catholics. They never picked on the Protestants or or the Anglicans or Presbyterians or other cults. It was always the Catholics are bad. And so we were always thinking about how to win against Catholics. He may or may not have been Catholic, but I just remember how bizarre that was. And still now I'm embarrassed, you know, that was probably 30 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

It's amazing how long we can hold on to embarrassment around things like that. It's kind of insane in a way, isn't it? This group, I mean, you talk about the indoctrination, obviously important to any cult. But I'm I was fascinated looking into the Jehovah's Witnesses to learn that these elders that sort of run the global church, there's like eight of them, seven of them, or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

There might even be nine or ten now. Um it does change. So last year they got two new ones, they got rid of one. This year they got another two new ones. Okay. So it does flex.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

And this is a group of, as far as I can tell, is it is the governing body, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

But the governing body body.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Okay. And is it is it always a sort of older men in this position?

SPEAKER_00 19:02

Definitely no young women as a governing body member. Yep. Uh generally they're middle-aged to old. Um they do tend to hold the positions for a long time. It's basically for life, unless they leave or they're kicked out. So they usually die in the role. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

How would you explain? I know this is a very bored question, but the coercion and and the high control nature of a group like this, how would you explain that in the context of Jehovah's Witnesses?

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Yeah, so um, so it is a US group with a lot of male leaders, which some people would say, well, it's not a cult because there's not one leader, one charismatic leader, and that is a way that they differ from others. But I would say that the coercive control comes from the US is disseminated virtually uniformly around the world through overseers and then elders and then ministerial servants, and then men and then women, and it usually goes age, so a mature woman would have more say than than a young woman. So the way that the coercive control is distributed, I would say, is in an entangled way. So one thing we you and I both noted is that they're shunning is uh underpinning all of the coercion because essentially what they uh have is this right to revoke your friendships, your family, and if you're working for a Jehovah's Witness, your job. So you can lose everything. You can leave, but you won't take any of that with you necessarily. And it's very it's a very compelling reason to not buck up, to not stand against injustice, to continue putting up with human rights abuses because if you do, you'll lose your mother, your father, your brothers, your sisters, your uncles, your aunts, your cousins, all of the friends in your congregation and throughout what's called the circuit. An example of that is so I left when I was 19 and uh about five years ago I was in contact with someone in my congregation who was a friend of a friend. We discovered we've got a mutual friend, and it was her. And the first question she asked me, having not seen me for such a long time, was what's your standing with Jehovah? That meant, are you in or out? Right. Because if you're out, I'm not gonna talk to you. And I didn't answer her initially. I kept trying to continue the conversation, and she said, Again, what's your standing with Jehovah? And never heard from her again.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

That's how powerful it is.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

And you're also sort of engaged in this group where everyone's relying on each other, you're not allowed to get higher education, you're not allowed to do all these sorts of things in the in the world. And then so if you if you are shunned and sent away, there's a lot you have to lose.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah, everything. So uh it didn't happen to me because there are some forms of soft shunning, shall we say? So, for example, my father wasn't born in, a little bit like you, discovered. Later in life, what his sort of cause was and went after that. So because he was not born into the Jehovah's Witnesses, he was he wasn't as strict as other parents. And the other thing was he was a scientist and I wanted to study science. So I was allowed to study science. But had he been born in and not a scientist, there's no way that I would have gotten an education and not been fully shunned.

SPEAKER_02 22:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

And my mother had left, so I was very lucky not at that time to be shunned by her. But the rest of the congregation and all my friends and all my family have shunned me. So I have no relationships with uncles, aunts, cousins unless they've left. Yeah. And the sister who's still theoretically in, I don't have any connection with them, and none of my friends in any of the congregations that I've been to are my friends any longer. They wouldn't have a clue what I've been through in life, and I don't have a clue what they've been through. I don't even know all my cousins' names. And and a few religions are like this, so exclusive brethren do the same thing. I understand that Hillsong also have a version of shunning. But in the Jehovah's Witnesses, it seems to be particularly bad because they won't have a meal with you. You might get a hello, you might get nothing. If you want to come back in to the religion, you have to sit at the back. It could be for years, where people aren't allowed to speak to you. And in fact, there was a movie made about it called Apostasy, where you could actually see this very thing happening where a girl left and then she tried to come back and she's sitting at the back and people didn't greet her. So it's extremely disturbing. It's inhumane.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Especially if you're a child growing up in this environment. I mean, to lose all of that, you know, I think about the ostracism that I dealt with, and that was hard enough. I mean, if I had been raised in that group and relied on them entirely, that would have been devastating.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

I can really imagine. And and and further to that, thanks for raising it. Because further to that, Jehovah's Witnesses are now baptizing children at age eight.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

So if you're if you're baptized at eight and you want to leave at eleven, you lose everything. It doesn't matter how old you are. If you've been baptized, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

You're responsible.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

You're responsible. And this is not so the Scientologists have a billion-year contract. The Jehovah's Witnesses' contract is permanent forever. They believe that you're going to live on earth, not go to heaven, but live on earth in paradise forever after Armageddon. This means that your contract is everlasting. You are expected to be destroyed in Armageddon and have no family or friends from age eight, if that's when you're baptized.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

So if you're eight and baptized, and then you do something that's perceived to be wrong, then you can get shunned as a result of that.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

You can.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

And in that child's mind, they are not going to be living in paradise.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

In that child's mind, yes. Now I caveat that with a recent change, theoretical change. So earlier this year, the governing body released a letter that said that essentially shunning wasn't going to be as harshly dealt with as before. Now, anecdotally, in the community, that hasn't evaluated to everybody getting their family and friends back. I would say that 10 to 20% of people have changed the way that they treat each other, but it's not the rest of the 80%. This is such a long-standing doctrine that people are used to shunning people. None of my friends or family have called me since that change was announced, but they did make a carve-out for people that are apostates like me that speak out against the religion's human rights. Apostates weren't included in the non-shunning policy.

SPEAKER_02 25:29

Of course not. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

We're the ones that really need to be. Yeah, of course. Of course. As you can see, it's not working.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

It's not working. Do you think that they they change these doctrines because they get a sense that it's not going down well publicly?

SPEAKER_00 25:44

I don't think that's the only reason. I think the primary reason is when they lose money or when they lose court cases.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

So what we have seen, we've seen a cause and effect that when they lose a court case, that costs them money, they will then make a doctrinal change.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Right. So because I do know from a Four Corners episode, I think, that I watched in the last week about Jehovah's Witnesses that they do make a lot of cash on property across the world and and do seem to engage lawyers very quickly if in any sort of situation that is threatening to their bottom line. And they did feature quite heavily in the Child Abuse Royal Commission. You do know a little bit about that. Can you tell me?

SPEAKER_00 26:28

I do. I actually know about that Four Corners episode because I was one of the people to have it told that story told. So I contacted Four Corners as did someone else, and for years sent them information and asked them to do a story on the Jehovah's Witnesses. And so with the Four Corners story, I brought along to a room to meet with some of the fixers for the program. I brought along an elder, I brought along males and females to talk to the Four Corners reporters and tell them about their experience. And it was up to Four Corners to present whatever program they wanted to present.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

So that's how that came about. Yeah, so in the Four Corners story, they covered a number of topics, and the primary topic at the time was the fallout from the Australian Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. Right. And that Royal Commission, which was a federal one that ran for a long time and cost the Australian taxpayers a lot of money, found that the Jehovah's Witnesses had 1,800 alleged child sexual abuse survivors or victims, and had 1,006 perpetrators. At the time, they had 850 approximate legal entities or congregations. And that meant that there was more than one perpetrator per congregation and more than two child abuse survivors or victims per congregation. And if I just go back to your question before about coercive control and entanglement, so some of the things that were also discussed in the Four Corners story were things like love bombing. And I think you know this term love bombing.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

And essentially, if I describe it in a Jehovah's Witness way, when we would go from door to door, everything would be rosy, it would be a lot of energy. And how are you today? Isn't it a beautiful day? And what do you think about living in paradise on earth forever?

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

I mean, real, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Very on the nose.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Yes, yes. And then it would happen in the congregation. So, for example, if you weren't being shunned, there would be this real fake, you know, kissing on the cheek and getting dressed up and sort of competing, but having this really sort of community sharing cakes, and we would build kingdom halls to your to your point before about the amount of properties. And we would all just be pitching in everything all the time, lots of energy and lots of happiness, and we the world's happiest people.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

And with meanwhile, a few people being shunned at the back while this is going on.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Yeah, no, you can't love bomb them. You just have to love bomb the ones who are who are not disassociated or disfellowshipped who are not being shunned. But everybody else would be love bombed. Another thing about the entanglement of coercive control was, and you've sort of just captured it there, there's a running hot and cold.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

So, for example, you're in the good books, you haven't been shunned, everything's hot. You know, you know, we're great on great terms, we're gonna go witnessing together. Yeah. I'll see you at the next meeting, we're gonna have hot chocolate after the meeting, bring over your kids so they can play with my kids on the trampoline. But if you're being shunned, you're getting my cold shoulder. I can't talk to you right now. You're required to sit at the back of the kingdom hall. And so uh that could happen also if you're not being shunned, but if you've been something like reproved. So let's say you did something that didn't warrant your exclusion from the church, but you've done something that we're not happy about. In that case, there might be a talk from the platform about you that won't mention your name, but you will be very clear. Have you have you heard of this before?

SPEAKER_01 30:11

I've I've experienced it. Yeah? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

We call it reproving. What did you call it?

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Well, I don't think there was a name for it, but this would happen all the time. You know, I remember chatting to to Mark, who was Bellsy Bub, who was, and I was I was talking to him about my experience on a spiritual level, and he was very, very supportive and really acknowledged me as doing well. And then that very night when there was a public talk and there were questions, and I raised a question that was referencing the same thing without bringing up that it was about me, but bringing up a similar notion, and he kind of shut me down in front of the whole group.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

Yeah, because I remember you talking about charisma and how that would be hot and cold. Yes. Um, and so you're always on your toes, aren't you? You're never comfortable. Never, you're always like striving to perfection, and so this is the coercion is well, you don't know how I'm gonna treat you, so you've always got to be best on your best behavior because you don't know how I'm gonna behave towards you. So that's also part of coercive control.

SPEAKER_02 31:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

The third thing is gaslighting. So I'm an elder and you've done the wrong thing, so I'm gonna make it all like it's your fault. And you're gonna believe it's your fault and you're gonna apologize because I'm gonna gaslight you.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

And that's sort of similar, sort of they sort of can all be used together.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Totally. I mean, that was a huge deal for us as well. You know, we were we were under so much criticism, and it was such a small group as well, that you felt very responsible, especially if you're in a leadership position, if you're giving talks like I was, you felt very responsible. And any mistake you made meant your whole spiritual salvation was at risk.

SPEAKER_02 31:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

That you were hellbound, you know, and so you would be something would go wrong. And somehow in the course of the conversation within the group that was very much being coerced by Mark and Edith, the two people running the show, had this appearance of us all talking evenly about it, but it absolutely wasn't. And it was very much suggested that, you know, a certain person in the group was responsible for what had happened. And you would buy into it.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

And and I'll give you an example of what happened to my father. So Jehovah's Witnesses run hot and cold about having beards and mustaches.

unknown 32:15

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

It's it's allowed sometimes, it's not allowed sometimes. So they do change their doctrine. Um so at the time in the 80s, my mum liked my dad to have a beard and mustache. So he had one or the other or both, I can't recall.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Classic 80s look. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Yeah, yeah, he looked great. But he told me just a couple of years ago, he goes, you know, one time I was at a barbecue, and ten elders came up to me to tell me off about my mustache. And I said to him, Dad, you had reported four instances of child abuse with four different girls and three different adult men. Do you think that might have been why you were gaslighted?

SPEAKER_01 32:55

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 32:56

So, and he goes, Oh no, no, no, no, it wasn't about that. My dad's a bit naive. And so gaslighting can come in lots of ways, and it can happen to a child, to an adult, to a male or a female.

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Definitely.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

And because you're always striving for perfection and because you don't want to lose your salvation, you will take it on the chin and you will try and do better.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

And you'll do the work, so so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 33:19

And pray more.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

And you'll pray more. And you know, in our case, I mean, we were expect if we were suffering and bad things were happening to us, even if they seemed unjust, it was a sign that we were doing something right. So we would suffer through it, but also feel, well, I'm being tested.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

I have to suffer. That's what suffering is for. And you would just take it and move forward.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

And so you would you would overlook the fact that it was coercive control because you thought there was something much more powerful than you. Yeah. And you believed in what was promised. You thought that you were doing something right. And that the suffering was just what you had to do.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

You had a shared cause and you all had to move together. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

And if the master says that you're responsible for this thing and you can't see why, you have to accept that either they're right and you're wrong, or you're being tested. So you need to pull into line.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Yeah, and my dad was very humble and he just thought it was his fault the whole time. And can I pick up on something you said about five minutes ago, which which is a really pertinent thing. So it's about the properties that were talked about in the Four Corners program. I just want to tell you how how that was found out.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

So, what happened was there was a husband and wife couple in the states who were collecting reports of people telling them that congregations were merging. That is two separate congregations, they would they would get rid of one of the kingdom halls, and the two congregations would be in one kingdom hall instead of two, for example, or three or four congregations would be merged.

SPEAKER_02 34:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

And then they would sell off the second kingdom hall. And I was sort of watching this couple on and off for about a year. And eventually I thought, this is really seems to be escalating. And I wonder what the value of these Kingdom Hall sales are. So I contacted them and asked them for the list. You know, I assumed they were collecting a list, and I said, and what's the value of that? And they didn't know. They'd just been collecting the addresses. And some of the some of them they did have value and some of them they didn't, and they were all different values because they were in different countries. So they sent me this list of 30 pages. I put it all into a spreadsheet, validated every line, and it took about two months to do. And this came to something like 4 billion Australian dollars.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Right.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

And I knew that since the Royal Commission, a lot of the Australian properties were selling. And so I was most keen to see the Australian properties. And there have been about a hundred sales, or 50, 50 or 100 sales, off the top of my head, maybe 75. And that adds up to, if you look at the price of property in Sydney and Melbourne, a lot of money now.

SPEAKER_02 35:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Um, and then so what I did is I took that data, I calculated it out to US dollars and converted it to Australian dollars, so I knew the value of it, and gave it to Four Corners.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

And also the BBC in the UK, because there were English properties and about 26 countries represented. But then it was graphed. And in the graph, you can see that an inquiry happens about child abuse, then that there's a delay of one or two years, and then the properties start to sell.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

So I saw that happen in country on country on country. So I saw it happen in Germany, Canada, Australia, the UK, the US. You would see this pattern, this exponential growth of properties.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

And so the Four Corners report only really touched on that, just to say, you know, properties are being sold. But what we've seen, I mean, we've seen this happen with other churches too. You've got to pay the redress somehow. So you see a lot of churches now selling their properties to pay redress. But at the time, the Jehovah's Witnesses had said they're not going to join the redress scheme. And they held off from joining the redress scheme for two years. And it's now six years into the national redress scheme, which I assume you know what that is.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

I I have a vague sense. Can you tell me quickly?

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Yeah. It's basically a government compensation scheme that's national for child abuse survivors of institutions. So schools, sporting facilities, religions.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

They could voluntarily sign up to the national redress scheme to be accountable for the child abuse that happened that was uncovered during the Royal Commission.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

And it's composed of three things: mental health support of about$5,000, an apology from the institution or the leader, and compensation to make up for work or education that you missed as a result of your child abuse.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

And so this would have to be paid to people affected directly by the leadership of the group?

SPEAKER_00 37:48

That's that's right. So that's now been in place for six years. It runs for ten. The Jehovah's Witnesses didn't join up for the first two years. Practically everybody else joined up. They held off. Then they joined. We still haven't heard after six years of a single person who's received an apology.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

So are they to are they so they're trying to avoid responsibility and now they've on paper accepted it as a way of trying to look good and avoid more attention?

SPEAKER_00 38:15

Yeah, they were named and shamed, and then they were threatened. But that doesn't that doesn't work with them. Remember, I said before, they've got to be legally made accountable or financially made accountable. So the government threatened to take away their tax status.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Threaten their charity status rather. Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

So it always blew me away that the Gnostic movement, you know, there's this guy who thinks he's a risen Belzibub who's getting we're getting non-profit status running this school. I'm just, in retrospect, I'm like, what the hell's going on there? Not just in Australia, in Canada, you know, it's like, yeah, there's something wrong with the system that you can just apparently create some sort of random group where people are doing some very bizarre stuff and then just give them all these allowances.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

To be a religion in Australia, you must believe in the supernatural. To have a charity status as a religious group, it must be supernatural. Is that right? Yes. And we found that out when uh something, what were they called again? Was it Raelians?

SPEAKER_01 39:12

The Raelians from Canada.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

Tried to tried to get charity status and they couldn't because they didn't believe in the supernatural. They believed in aliens that were not supernatural.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Aliens aren't supernatural? I mean, this might be a different podcast that we're jumping into here, but yeah, yeah, okay, right.

SPEAKER_00 39:27

It might be better to do it with someone who knows more about that. But I believe that that's when that's when it was made clear.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

And I agree with you, this is crazy. We have in this country more than 50,000 charities. About 15,000 charities are religious charities, and all of those are not having to pay tax. Now, 15,000 charities in a in a country with just what have we got, 25 plus million people, all believing they're the one true God or gods, and and all getting tax-free status of some sort, depending on what charitable status they have. Does it make sense? I don't believe it makes sense. Is this good for cost of living pressures that we have right now? I don't believe it is. And I think if you put this on the front page of the paper, there would be a massive outrage. And I think the only way that they get away with it is it's kind of quiet. It's it's not it's not on the religion and ethics report. Um, you know, it doesn't get its own 60 minutes story.

SPEAKER_01 40:31

I think it's it's interesting because I think we're very accepting of religion, which means we have to be accepting of some pretty fringe things if we're going to be accepting of that sort of supernatural belief system. And it brings up a lot of questions that I think a lot about, you know, what's an acceptable belief system and what isn't. And there are just so many grey areas in this that I can understand why it's complicated, but I really do think we need to find a way to make it less complicated.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

I'm not saying it's easy, but it seems to me that there's a huge hole in this system governmentally.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Yeah, so uh one of the things I did about that, because I have uh my own, I guess, mantra, which is for as long as you spend time complaining about something, spend more time trying to fix it. So I am very much not going to complain about it unless I've done something to try and fix it. So one of the things that I do are government submissions to parliamentary inquiries to try and fix these things. So that entanglement with the tax system, I have written to the government and given testimony to the government about some of the things we've just discussed and asked them to change the system. So the way that this can happen is approximately every five years, laws are reviewed or new laws are introduced, and the public, the general public, have an opportunity through parliamentary inquiries to have a say. And so I've done that about 20 times, and I've done that in this country and elsewhere. Great. And I've done it at a state level, a territory level, and at a federal level. And in on this particular issue of getting these charitable tax benefits, I have written to the Productivity Commission's inquiry on philanthropy. And in that inquiry, I asked for essentially the Jehovah's Witnesses to lose their charity status. And as a result of that, the government has made a recommendation, or the Productivity Commission has made a recommendation to the government to abandon a particular type of charity that is small religious charities. Because the small religious charities, of which the Jehovah's Witnesses have still over 700, have additional benefits that they don't have to report. Yeah. So you don't know how much money they're getting. And so by reducing that, at least we get more visibility of what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 42:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

So yeah, there's there's ways that you can actually take action about these things and not just live with it the way it is. I I don't think it makes sense, and I don't think if more people knew that they would allow that, because we now know that in the next census, Australia is going to be more irreligious than religious.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

So the dynamic's changing, and therefore the votes for politicians are changing. So whereas religion is currently powerful or was powerful, that's now changing where if politicians are going to follow the votes, they've got to understand that there's going to be more irreligious people voting for. And they don't want in this clustered living dynamic where everybody's stretched, the religions to be more enriched.

SPEAKER_01 43:45

Yeah, yeah, and to be not contributing. And let me ask you this a bit tongue in cheek. What if in our culture as we become more irreligious, what if an actual true savior arrives and starts a small group of Small church, whatever it is, and they happen to be right, the culture's not going to accept them. How do we avoid that from not happening? How do we avoid someone now? I don't believe this at all. I don't think anyone's coming to save us in that way. But I think for a lot of small cults and a lot of small religions, that's their attitude. You know, there's a belief that they are the chosen people, that the savior is here or is coming. And they expect to fight the broader culture. They expect to be different. They expect to be punished and treated that way. So we are kind of assuming that that's impossible. And I like that assumption, don't get me wrong. But I think that is on the mind of people who are quite spiritual and seeking out solutions and quite open to extreme solutions. You know, in some ways I think the reason uh the cult I was in appealed to me so what much is that it seemed really extreme. And I thought, well, yeah, the world does seem fucked up. I don't see the point in pursuing it in a normative fashion. Maybe this is real because it is so strange, because it is so extreme, because it is so different.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Well, what would be different is if that new leader arrived and it was a young woman.

unknown 45:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

And not everything was against her, and everything was comfortable and it felt good. Isn't that the different type of leader that we need?

SPEAKER_02 45:21

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Maybe they have the answer. You've said it on a previous podcast that, you know, children get it.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

Why don't we listen to the kids? Like they talk about making things survivor-centric or child-centric. Why don't we ask the kids, what do you think about this? For example, tax implication. Do you think that that should be provided? Maybe we should ask the kids for their opinion.

SPEAKER_01 45:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

I don't know the answer to that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

But I do know.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

It's a ridiculous question, but well, well, it's a it's a good point though. It's good to look at things in a totally different way. I do know that, well, it appears to me rather, I don't I don't know as a fact, but it appears to me that people are moving away from religion and towards spirituality.

SPEAKER_02 46:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:03

It feels like they know that it hasn't worked out. But they still want to have a belief. Yeah. And that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 46:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

And and they may not believe in a religion, but they have a spiritual side, and that's what they want to do. And my father's like that.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:18

You know, and I have friends like that. So it feels like that's the way we're moving. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 46:22

Yeah, my mother's like that for sure. And, you know, I don't want to be too pessimistic or cynical. I mean, when you come out of a cult, you know, you can be quite militant at first against some of these things, and I I certainly was. And I have no problem with people being spiritual and open to forces bigger than them. But I do think it opens the door for some troublesome things to happen. And I suppose, more to the point, there is something that a lot of people are looking for that is not being satisfied by society as it stands now, normatively. And I don't know if this is a product of the Enlightenment era thinking and scientific revolution and the way it shaped our culture. We we think of things in a very reduced sort of way. We're not connected to a bigger power as much as we have been in culture for thousands and thousands of years. And I'm not saying that it isn't good that we've taken all these strides forward. I'm I'm all about science and all about progress in this area, but there's something that I feel is missing in our culture at the moment that makes opportunities for cults to start up and grab people who have this spiritual interest quite risky. You know, I think we have sometimes we have this notion that we've passed sort of the cult era, that that was the 60s and the 70s and well before that, but I just think it's going to keep happening. Look at Nexium in Hollywood and in the States, you know, that made a lot of headlines. It seems to me that there's a persistent lack of meaning or sense of suffering that is not being addressed in society, that these cults are really coming in to deal with and and then ending up sucking people into a system that is coercive, that is abusive, uh, supporting the the leadership.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

I don't know what the answer is, but I often hear people like in a lecture or on TV or even like say reading LinkedIn or something, I s I see them saying education is the answer. We need to educate. And I and I see this all the time. And I think, no, I don't think that is the answer because, although education's great, but we've never had so many educated people on the planet, right? More people than ever have now been to school, primary school, high school, possibly university or trades. So we've got lots and lots of educated people. I don't think it's about that. I think it's about the motivation.

SPEAKER_02 48:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:41

And what are they being motivated by? Now, I don't I don't understand it because I never believed, but they are certainly being essentially brainwashed. And it's all tied back to their motivation. They want to believe something, they want to belong to something, they want to go along with, you know, something they believe is a higher purpose. We all want to have a purpose, and and so maybe it's cause because it's there, made for them, and it speaks to them and what they're looking for on that day. Like I said to you before, Jehovah's Witnesses will be outside hospitals or law courts or train stations. You know, sometimes people are going through some dynamic in their life where they never would have noticed it before, but suddenly someone died and there's a Jehovah's Witness cart outside the hospital, and it speaks to them at that moment. It's not about the education, it's about the motivation. I want to see my family member again in paradise on earth and live with them forever. It's really compelling and powerful.

SPEAKER_01 49:39

Yeah, yeah, I think that's spot on. I I think that yeah, I agree with you. I mean, we talk about education a lot in this area, and I think that it really is there's some deeper emotional stuff going on that draws people into these situations. I'm absolutely convinced.

SPEAKER_00 49:51

And on that note, can I talk to you about why I think that Jehovah's Witnesses are so powerful as an example of a cult and how it differs from, say, the Catholics. If I if we pick up again on that entanglement word and the motivation for either becoming part of a cult or staying in the cult, these are some of the things that I I see as different that keeps you into a cult. So one thing that we've already discussed is fear. So the fear is such that the institutional will find out that you're wanting to leave or or have left and and they will discipline you. That that is a real fear when you're gonna lose your family, friends, and job. Another thing we haven't discussed in any detail is a high incidence of poverty. In cults, generally, in a cult like ours, you need to spend most of your time proselytizing and recruiting. And so therefore, Armageddon's gonna come, you don't need to get an education and you don't need a career path because we could be dead by then. So we may as well donate the money to the church so that we save as many people as we can.

SPEAKER_01 50:57

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, it's a very simple point, but very important point.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

And in a Pew research study from the US, they found that Jehovah's Witnesses had either the lowest or the second lowest earnings by sort of religion.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 51:13

So there's a very high incidence of poverty. Now, if you're poor, you don't necessarily have time either to do things such as joining, I don't know, your local political party or being able to educate yourself after work or being able to afford the things that give you time for convenience to follow other pursuits in life. And as you talked about before, you were so busy in Canada, you were so busy doing all of the requirements of the cult. You were time poor and also were kept poor deliberately, giving money to the church and and becoming very reliant socially and systemically on that group. Exactly. Another thing is, for the Jehovah's Witnesses at least, and I think some others too, there's lots and lots of legal entities. So what that means is records can be moved between Kingdom Halls or or assembly halls in our case. It also means that if there's a human rights abuse that you want to bring to court, it's difficult to nominate which entity was responsible for the human rights abuse. So, for example, they they sold a lot of the kingdom halls. When they sold the kingdom halls, the documents are then gone from that kingdom hall because they used to hold them in the kingdom hall. But also the congregation that you're now saying claiming your redress against no longer exists. So who do you nominate? So that helps keep you confused and unsure of okay, where do you go for accountability?

SPEAKER_01 52:39

And it becomes quite opaque to the legal system, too, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

Very much that so that exact thing just happened in Canada a couple of months ago. In Canada, there was a$300 million class action that failed because they didn't nominate the right entity for the case. Endogamy was something I was keen to discuss with you. So another way that people don't leave cults or are attracted to a cult is that in smaller cults like the children of God, like the exclusive brethren, and in the Jehovah's Witnesses case, you're all related to each other. So let me just talk about that in terms of numbers. If we think about Australia, a normal person that we can call ourselves now a normal person would be able to partner up with half of Australia, you know, the ones of legal age anyway. So you have lots and lots of people that you can connect with, you know, choice of a relationship with if you're not in a cult. But if you're in a cult, you are required, it's it's really uh you're coerced to marry someone within the Jehovah's Witnesses.

SPEAKER_01 53:46

That was certainly relevant in the Gnostic movement, particularly because of the sexual practices that were intended to be between a couple. So you were encouraged to marry in order to fulfill the law of the land, which I think was a protective thing. You know, if you if you follow the law, then no matter what weird stuff you're doing, you're at least you're married. Not that it was necessarily that weird, but we were encouraged to marry people in the group. There were people who were already married when they came and their partner wasn't involved. That never worked as far as I could see. It absolutely collapsed, especially with the belief system we had. How is your partner suddenly going to take that all on board and also you know not be allowed to orgasm anymore? Like it was, you know, it just never worked ever.

unknown 54:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:26

An orgasm was the most uh spiritually damaging thing you could do. Yeah. So it was certainly encouraged, and it makes sense from a cultural point of view within the cult to keep everyone sort of attached to each other and not have those outside influences. And very often the partners of people in the group who weren't part of the cult became an issue in one way or another to the group itself almost every time.

SPEAKER_00 54:51

Yeah. So we were really, you would look around the congregation of a hundred people and you would either have that pick or the next congregation, or if that wasn't good enough for you, you'd look around the circuit. But if you think about it in terms of numbers, so there were 70,000 Jehovah's Witnesses. So of those that you could marry, 35,000 were not of the right sex for you, so you couldn't marry them. So that restricts the amount you could marry to 35,000. Now, if you think about it, maybe a third of those would have been married, and then a third of those would have been children, so you couldn't marry them. So you're left with, I don't know, 10 or 15,000 in Australia that you can marry. So from this massive population, you're suddenly restricted to all be related to each other. Yeah. And I think that that really entangles you because if you picture a ball of string that has knots in it, you pull one side, the other side's gonna pull. So if there's a human rights abuse over here and you report it, someone in your family is gonna get in trouble or tell you off, or you're gonna be reproved, or you're gonna be disfellowshipped. If there's some other grifting going on, everyone knows about it. Because, you know, my aunt's in that congregation, and she told my mum last weekend, and the word of mouth is.

SPEAKER_01 56:08

So there must be a lot of gossiping. A lot of gossiping comes back to this disfellowshipping, as it's called in the Jehovah's Witnesses, and which is effectively ostracism, a shunning that takes place. The the ostracism thing is is fascinating because we do know, and it seems to be a key feature of the coercive control that happens in the Jehovah's Witnesses. And what I've realized from a submission that you sent me that I read is that ostracism, when you're in a cult, not only do you face ostracism almost inevitably when you do something wrong, but you also ostracize others when when they've done something wrong. Yeah. Just by your silence, by omission sometimes. And doing this uh psych degree that I finished a couple of years ago, I almost did a thesis on ostracism because I was so fascinated by it. And one of the things I learned that has stayed with me is that, you know, in the brain, there are very similar neural pathways for physical pain and ostracism. So in some ways it seems that ostracizing someone, cutting them out completely, shunning them, giving them the silent treatment, treating them like garbage in that way is the most painful non-physical thing you can do to a human being.

SPEAKER_02 57:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:17

So when that is enacted all the time, you're on the receiving end of it and putting it out there. Yes. The social dynamic that creates within a small group is a disaster.

SPEAKER_02 57:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:28

Mental health-wise. I mean, everybody is just so lacking in a feeling of self-worth, of control, of meaning, because they're being ejected constantly from the meaning and from the group which their self-worth relies on.

SPEAKER_02 57:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:43

I mean, to go through that over years and years and years and years as at any age, but especially as a child or upwards of twenty-five, when we know we're still developing many ways, is just fucking crazy. And this is happening in every cult as far as I can see, and many, many religions that aren't classified as cults. And obviously happens in social settings too, normatively in many ways, not as chronically and systematically, thankfully. But I think anyone, even if they haven't been involved in a group like this, has probably had an experience of being shunned socially and knows how challenging that is.

SPEAKER_02 58:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:21

So to imagine that happening to someone over and over and over again as a regular experience of life. And when you're trapped in a cult and you don't trust the outside world, and all you have are these people to give you any sense of meaning, and your life is on the line, not just your physical life, your eternal life is on the line. It is fucked up.

SPEAKER_00 58:40

Yeah, it is. I cannot tell you how much it's just taken me not to start crying when you just describe that, because that's our life, and it's like being in isolation in North Korea. And one of the things we felt during COVID when people weren't allowed to see each other, is we felt like now people are gonna understand what our life is like. Because you remember in Melbourne, oh sorry, you're you're in Sydney, but in Melbourne, we were locked up for 10 months, and everybody found it really difficult. And I'm like, this is better out than I normally have it. Like you've got to laugh because it's so crazy. And and I'm glad you picked up on the issue that not only are you shunning, but you have to shun. Because in the Jehovah's Witnesses, 100% of people are involved in shunning. Because at any one time, there is always someone who's been disassociated or disfellowshipped. Just to clarify that disassociated is when you're shunned when you haven't been baptized.

SPEAKER_02 59:41

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

And disfellowshipped is when you have been baptized and you're kicked out and then you're shunned. Right. And so 100% of us are suffering from shunning. So not only am I suffering from being shunned, but all of those uncles and aunts I talked about before, they're probably praying about me to come back over, you know, 30 years or whatever it's been, they're also missing out. And you've got to cut off a part of yourself in order to deal with it. I can't think about it all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

I have to compartmentalize it to go on. And I have to tell myself inside they're dead to me because that's what they do. They say they're dead to me. So in order to cope with it, now what does that mean for other relationships? You know, I can cut someone off. I'm good at it. And it's awful. And and I shouldn't, we shouldn't do that. It it is inhumane. You know, a dog wouldn't like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

Yeah, yeah. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:38

So um there's a group of Jehovah's Witnesses, ex-Jehovah's Witnesses now that are trying to make it a crime. There's actually a website called Make Shunning a Crime, something like that.org.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

Because it is so bad. And I think the fact that barely any politicians or senior government officials have been Jehovah's Witnesses means they don't get it. You don't get it until something worse than COVID makes you see it. You can't see it.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:08

But that that is certainly one of the underpinning fundamental reasons why they're different to another religion you could leave or much.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:18

And again, and again, just sorry to interrupt, but I feel like this point is so important to it. I know I've said it three times, but no, it is the most important. This is in the context of a doomsday culture. You the the the end of the world is coming. There's no point in the future of the world. You are focused on something else entirely. And I just think it's really important to hammer that point home for people listening. That you know, sometimes we talk about certain things, and you might be thinking, Yeah, well, I've been through that, I've been through that. Think about the context in which this is happening.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:44

Yeah. And thank you for driving that home because the Jehovah's Witnesses also do not want you to go and get mental health support.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:56

If if you are in this isolation in North Korea and you're not allowed to get help from someone to understand why you're there, what you're doing there, how to get out of there, then that's a forever thing, like in my case, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:10

So these people sitting at the back of the kingdom hall waiting to see if they're going to be let in, they're in this no man's land that they don't understand that they're trapped in because they can't get support. And what what support do they get? They get elders telling them off.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

They get reproved from the platform, and they're sitting at the back. Yeah. Like it, it's so crazy.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:31

That's terrible.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:32

So they have a certain amount of quackery. They don't believe in blood transfusions.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:37

So the cult that I was in didn't have any issue with getting medical help, fortunately. I think back to when I was in Canada in the cult, and my son got flesh-eating disease. So he had chicken pox, and one of the pox got infected with staph. So I'm not sure if I'm remembering that exactly right. But it led to an infection that was incredibly severe, and he was in hospital for weeks, and the doctors were coming and drawing lines on him as the infection spread down his body. We had surgery. My memory's a bit vague on this because it was a long time ago, but I remember surgeons coming in and saying to us, we're gonna have to cut off his skin because it's getting so deep that it will kill him. Necrotizing fasciitis, I think they called it. So we got through that and he's fine now. But if the group I was in happened to believe that medical attention or blood transfusions, because he was on just bags of white blood cells to survive this, it was what saved him. If we happened to have believed that that medical attention was not spiritually permitted, and we had just kept him at home and tried to pray and say this will go away, and he'd be dead. So it's you know, it's it's easy for me to look back and say, well, that's not what we believed. But we could have believed that. There was some outlandish stuff that I believed, and I didn't even believe it. There's that cognitive dissonance. It's like I I knew it wasn't true, but I felt I had to believe it because everything was it was it was so high stakes. You know, again, our salvation, this was all tied up in us escaping hell and avoiding Armageddon. If we happened to have believed that, my son would be dead. So I I mean to me that just blows my mind, even hypothetically, yeah, to hear this from people who have had that experience. Like, what might have happened if just a different switch had been turned in my particular cult?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:37

Yeah, I actually the other day, this is how much these thoughts ruminate in your head. So I've left like 30 years ago, and the other day I was just walking on the street thinking about blood transfusions, and wondered to myself, if I had needed one, would my mum or dad have given me one? And I didn't know the answer.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:56

Yes, of course.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:58

And we know of thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses who have died. You know, one in Australia in the last 12 months, a woman in Queensland died. They're they're in the news all the time, Jehovah's Witnesses dying. And that's why this movie was made, The Children Act, based on true transcripts from court cases. Um, it was developed from that. And even maybe in the last month, I've seen a child had to have a blood transfusion. It was mandated in court. I can't remember which country it was in, but it's happening all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:30

And another thing that's happening is, and this reminds me of what we were talking about with mental health support and shunning, Jehovah's Witnesses have a very high incidence of suicide.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:41

And poor mental health outcomes. And one of the things that has recently come out, like in the last five years, Jehovah's Witnesses have a three times higher incidence of schizophrenia, I think it is, and a four times higher incidence of paranoid schizophrenia. Than the general population. So these adverse health outcomes then translate into suicide or loss of life through medical neglect. And that then has an add-on effect for health care costs and to the population that's having to deal with the loss of these people. Imagine if you had lost your son because you weren't allowed to do anything, you'd still be suffering today.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:29

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:30

One of the speakers at the D Cult conference said that I can't remember the exact words, but paraphrasing cults are the biggest invisible health issue that we're facing. People don't know it. You can see listening to all this how bad it can be for people's health.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:47

Yeah. Uh well, Laura, thanks so much for for coming in and talking to me. I I have a lot of admiration for the work you're doing, having read a couple of the submissions that you've sent through around ostracism in particular. I mean, a big interest of mine. I think you're doing an amazing job. And I found the conversation really interesting. I hope that everybody listening has found it quite interesting. I know these episodes are sort of quite sort of free roaming and rambling and conversational, but I hope that that you've enjoyed hearing us explore all sorts of tangential ideas. So yeah, thanks so much for coming in.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

Thanks for having me. I know that often Jehovah's Witnesses that are newly out will listen to these sorts of podcasts when they're alone on a Friday or Saturday night. So it's actually really important for our people to hear a long banter between two people that makes them feel not alone.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:33

Awesome. Awesome. Thanks so much. Many thanks to Lara again. The big standout for me in this conversation was the subject of ostracism and shaming. Ostracism is a brutally passive act. It's an omission of love, support, connection, and can really shatter our sense of meaning. And if someone is already struggling, ostracism can be life-threatening. It is a shaming weapon, and in the context of a closed system, an apocalyptic system, it takes on even greater power. Even in regular life, the shunning of others by a group can have significant costs on a person's mental health. Please try to communicate with others, build bridges, make an effort to be compassionate. People get things wrong, make mistakes, often as a result of their own pain. I know that can be hard, especially when we feel someone has broken our trust or acted in a way we perceive to be morally wrong, but knowing the damage it can have, I would implore anyone who has colluded in the ostracism of someone in the past to reach out to them if you're up to it. They will not have forgotten. You don't have to rekindle a friendship, you don't have to say their actions were right, just acknowledging their existence is enough. It might be a game changer for them. We all need to get better at saying sorry, I think. Not because sorry means you were wrong and they were right, but because you recognize suffering and feel compassion for it. We're all flawed. To my mind, an absolute moral system that judges others for eternity is a cult. On that very sober thought, thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join me next time. Bye for now. Thanks to Neil Sutherland for producing and the band PVT for the music. For extra content and updates, please visit us at aftercultpod.com or on Instagram at Aftercult Pod.