8: Craig Hoyle & The Exclusive Brethren

Dave speaks with Craig Hoyle, who was raised in The Exclusive Brethren, a church infamous for its separation from the world and shunning of ex-members. The church was established in London in 1848 by John Nelson Darby, and has undergone four major schisms. In recent times, The Exclusive Brethren have been managed by the Hales family in Sydney. Bruce Hales, known as "The Elect Vessel", has been the global leader since 2002. The church has around 50,000 members across the world, mainly Australia, New Zealand, UK, and North America.

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. My guest today is Craig Hoyle, who was raised in the Exclusive Brethren. Craig has released an incredibly compelling account of his experience in a book from Harper Collins called Excommunicated, which I highly recommend if you want the full picture of his journey. The church was established in London in 1848 by John Nelson Darby, who split from a Protestant assembly known as the Plymouth Brethren, whose origins can be traced back to Dublin some 20 years earlier. In recent times, the exclusive Brethren have been managed by the Hales family in Sydney. Most recently, Bruce Hales, known as the Elect Vessel, who has been the global leader since 2002. The church has around 50,000 members across the world, mainly Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and North America. So let's chat with Craig. Craig, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me on my little podcast here. I was very excited to read your book Excommunicated recently, which is a remarkable story, really, and very unique in the context of cult experiences or fringe church experiences, in the sense that your family has been involved in this church for I think eight generations. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yes. So I was a seventh generation, and now my brothers and sisters are having children in there, so we're up to eight.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

And this is the exclusive brethren, which I really did not know anything about until I read your book. And it's surprising to me that I didn't know so much about it because Sydney, where I live, happens to be a very important city for the exclusive brethren, modern-day exclusive brethren, uh, in the sense that the the chieftain, the leader currently is Bruce Hales, who resides in Sydney and directs the various churches or assemblies, I think they're called, of the exclusive brethren that exist all around the world. Someone that you had some dealings with in the latter part of your attendance at the church. So I just wanted to give a little bit of history for the sake of our listeners, and I'll just at a high level tell you what what I understand, and you tell me where I'm wrong. But this church was originally a splinter group from an Anglican church in Dublin, some 200 years ago-ish, that became the Plymouth Brethren. And around 20 years into the Plymouth Brethren, which itself was a more fundamentalist church, there was a schism that resulted in the two churches, the referred to as the Open Brethren and the Exclusive Brethren, the latter of which is the church that your family have been involved in for seven plus generations. Is that an accurate high-level description?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yes, the first of many, many schisms, as is the way with these groups.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Absolutely. Yeah. It's crazy just how often that happens. I mean, it's not crazy, it makes a lot of sense actually when you think about how untethered to reality a lot of these doctrines are. Of course, you know, things are going to shift and change all the time. You know, your book, which I highly recommend people read, it is really excellent and gives a great account of your experience, but also a great account of what your parents went through, your grandparents went through, and so on and so on. Can you give us a little bit? Uh I know that's a lot to deal with in a short conversation like this, but can you can you give us a little sense of of what your early experiences were? Because you were born into this group, and just your sense of what the church was like, what it was like to live in it as a child, and the experience your parents were having when you were young, as far as you could see.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yeah, so I was five before I realized that the exclusive brethren were out of the ordinary. I knew that our neighbors weren't brethren, but because we lived in this um this church bubble that was so completely brethren, like our friends were brethren, our family were brethren, we went to church every day of the week and four times on Sunday. Uh well, we knew that other people were out there, but to me, they were the strange ones. And it wasn't until I started primary school at the age of five, and there were only two brethren students in the class that I realized that we were the odd ones out in society. And that was that first experience of that othering that so many people from religious backgrounds will be aware of, where you are categorized into people that are uh blessed in God's eyes, I suppose, and that that other, the people who are less than. And the brethren certainly had a mindset along the lines of being better than everyone else. It wasn't, at least in those sort of formative years, an unpleasant experience. It was very focused on family and support, and there was we were surrounded by love and people who cared about us, and in that way, that a lot of churches do so well, they provide everything you need for your life in such a way that you don't have to look outside of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

And it wasn't until I became probably a little bit older that I realized that there were gaps in our family. Uh, both of my grandmothers lived without husbands, and as a very young child, I didn't question that. But then um, as I had those early awarenesses of how family dynamics worked, I wondered why they didn't have grandfathers living with them like the other kids had. And then there were names that were mentioned, but you knew you weren't supposed to mention them. So one of my earliest memories was realizing that when I was bad or in certain situations, I was being compared to someone called George.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Uh, but I didn't immediately know who George was, other than that being compared to him was a bad thing. And it was sort of over time that I realized that George was my grandfather. Yeah. Uh, but sort of almost he who should not be named, which made being compared to him even worse. And then there were, um, as I grew older, there were people who I had known who disappeared. So you got accustomed to this. You were surrounded by people who you loved and who were part of this quite intense church network, but you knew that if excommunication was applied, and then the brethren we called it being shut up or withdrawn from, those people could disappear at any moment. And you talk to anyone who's come out of the exclusive brutal, and they will have stories of people that were in their lives who disappeared. They were there one day, they were gone the next. And this was what happened. And so you had this hanging over your head that anyone in your life, no matter how deeply you loved them, could disappear. And the logic or the way we saw that was that your loyalty to the brethren and to God, but honestly to the brethren, came ahead of everything else, including your loyalty to your family and loved ones. And so if you found that your family member or your husband or your wife, your child, your parents were doing something that breached church doctrine, you were encouraged to rat them out to the press. And that could, in some cases, result in instant excommunication.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

And there was this sort of process that the the church is the church the right word?

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

There was a process they would use to address these so perceived failings in their members. There was kind of a almost like a panel that you had to talk to. Is that is that correct? What was the process like?

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Yeah, so typically you would be called to what they called a priestly, which was when two or three elders would sit you down and talk to you about your um sins. There were generally a couple of paths to that. One was if you confessed your sins to the priests, and the other was if they had concerns about your conduct or if they had found something out about you. And that was generally a worse position to be in, because if you were confessing to the priests, it showed that the spirit had already worked in your heart and and here you were um putting things right. Whereas if they had caught you doing something, or if they had received a report, you were hiding your sin, and that was that was more of a more of an issue to them, I suppose. Right. And the way these priests went is they would sit and talk to you for an unspecified length of time and uh determine whether you were repentant and whether it was something that needed to be brought to the wider assembly, i.e. being discussed in open church. And these could go on for weeks or months or years, depending on what the sin was and how repentant they thought you were, and what help you supposedly needed.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Uh and one of the defining features of those priestleys for me as a teenager was they was they seem to have confessions, and uh there was almost always alcohol involved. Right. That was my sort of standout memory from that. And I think the so the brethren are very heavy drinkers.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

You mentioned from the 60s, I think, that it became a real thing and and to this day retain that sort of heavy drinking culture.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Oh, very much so. Um the drink, I mean, I still can't drink like I drank when I was 15, 16. Who of us can, but the brethren were on a whole other level. And I recall sort of Friday night after Friday night, around at a priest's house just being served whiskey after whiskey. And I think the idea was that it sort of loosened you up a bit, got you into a place where you might sort of be less inhibited about confessing your sins. And looking back, I think it was fairly unethical for people in a position of responsibility, especially in a church setting.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Of course. To be getting teenagers, and with children, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yeah, to be getting young people um quite intoxicated and then pressing them for details of their sins, especially sexual sins.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Um, or what they saw as sins.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yeah. And and just to to take a couple of steps back so people understand, you're you're in New Zealand, and this church, when you grew up in it, was uh took place in a small town in New Zealand called Invercargil.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Yes. Well that's where I grew up. It's right at the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Okay. So a small town, how many brethren would have been in the community when you left or at the end of that for year?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

On Vicar there would have been about 160. Okay. Um and that was in the context of probably eight and a half thousand brethren spread across New Zealand.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Okay. And your father was somewhat instrumental in starting that assembly down there, is that right? I seem to recall he was sent down there or or went down there on a sort of evangelical mission with you all.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

So I wouldn't say he was instrumental, but through the early 90s there was a period of um shipping brethren out to smaller regional locations. Um, the brethren tend not to like their congregations to get too big. And what has seemed to happen is every usually about every 10 to 15 years, they'll have a look around, and if there are a bunch of congregations that are getting too big, they will shuffle the numbers around and tell people to move to smaller congregations, or they'll start new congregations and ship a hundred people there. Uh, and so there was this constant reshuffling of where people lived.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

And so do you know why what what the motivation for that is?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Well, I think part of it came from a management point of view. The more people that were in a congregation, the harder it was to keep tabs on them the way the brethren liked to. Right. Um and sort of between 150 to 300 seemed to be their sweet spot.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

And, you know, there were all sorts of stories that went around in Sydney. I think in the 90s, one year they said that everyone who got pregnant that year was gonna have to move out to, say, rural New South Wales or uh And so you'd have these sort of mass exoduses from major centres. And so we were part of that in the early 90s, moving from Hamilton to in the North Island to Invercagor in the South Island.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Okay. And you did eventually start to, of course, as you got older, challenge the church, uh, at least in your own mind, and have certain experiences, especially around your sexuality. Can you tell me a bit about that experience? I think it was more in your teens that that was that was happening.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Um, there were a number of things that really brought that home for me. One was a lack of understanding, like there were things that the brethren did that were not logical. And and I wasn't, at least initially, I wasn't seeking to undermine the brethren. I was seeking to understand the brethren. And I I'm very curious, I have an inquiring mind, and the more I asked about some things, the less sense they made. And I mean, a big thing to me was in 2005 the brethren got quite heavily involved in politics in New Zealand and campaigned for the National Party and other centre-right parties. And despite putting a lot of money into politics and campaigning for these parties, they still wouldn't let their members vote.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Um at the end, and like to me, that was just a logical fallacy. It's like you won't vote because you believe that government is ordained by God, and yet you're prepared to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into trying to get a particular party elected, but you still can't vote.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

That just made no sense, and it still makes no sense. And so that was sort of running in parallel to the questions that I had around my sexuality and realizing that I wasn't going to have a good future with the brethren. I knew that um if there was any way that I was going to be true to myself, the only path was to leave.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

And that process, obviously, the church doesn't, you know, being gay is a problem in the church. Like black and white. There's no sort of way around that, is there?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Very much so. Uh, their stance on it has changed over the last few decades, I think, more in reaction to how society has evolved rather than any meaningful shift in what they believe. Yeah. Uh, but I think they're now much more aware of how it looks to be kicking out young gay people. Uh, and so they do what they can to try and soften the publicity side of things. So they've moved from people who left in the 80s were being told that they were possessed by demons and cast out and being described as sort of wicked and bad apples in the church. And then they moved to believing that it was a tragic situation and people needed help. And so how they would treat gay people in there would probably come from a place of pity and condescension, I suppose I would say. Right. You know, you've got something wrong with you, and we're gonna do what we can to help you. The latest iteration that I've heard from Inside the Brethren is that they have it seems more or less accepted that you can't change a person's sexuality. However, all expression of sexuality, whether you're gay, straight, or anything else, is part of the sinful flesh. And therefore, even if you're gay, you should be able to suppress the flesh and have a marriage. If you're if you're gay, you should be able to have a marriage to a woman that's based on the Holy Spirit, not on fleshly desire.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Right. So d does that imply that there's a certain kind of strange acceptance of it, even though it's unacceptable.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

That's an interesting question. No, there's definitely no acceptance of it. Right. And you wouldn't you wouldn't come out and say that you were gay. That would definitely not be talked about in there.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

I think they would go for more of a y if you suppress it deeply enough, no one's ever going to talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

I see.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

And that you should overcome it. Uh, but even so, it's something that would still carry a lot of stigma, and you're not gonna be going around saying, hey, I'm uh I'm a suppressed guy who's managed to successfully marry a woman and have children.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yeah, yeah, of course. There are so many aspects of this that remind me of, say, the Amish community or or organizations like that that tend to avoid anything modern and try and stick to a very traditional view of the world, and it sounds like the exclusive brethren certainly try to maintain that in their mind, what is a traditional lifestyle without technology, without all the modern bells and whistles. Do you feel that all of these changes they attempt to make, because I mean this change that you're talking about in terms of people's sexuality seems incredibly superficial and obviously not based on anything that's going to help people in their church. Um, it's just something they're doing to seem to fit into the rest of the world. I mean, is this a common sort of approach for them?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, and I think the brethren have sort of grown in a strange direction. They're different to a lot of your more fundamental sort of traditional Christian churches and that they're very focused on business and making money. And I think when push comes to shove, a lot of their church doctrines will move on the basis of whether it impacts whether they can make money in business. Right. And like one of their doctrine of separation, for instance, since the 60s, you haven't been able to eat and drink with people who aren't brethren. Right. However, in the last 10 years or so, the caveat to that has been that they will now eat and drink with non-Brethren in a business setting, if it's someone that does Okay. So you can you can have lunch with a business client. Um, and my interpretation of this as a subtext is that it can impact your business financially if you're refusing to have lunch with your clients and suppliers. However, they're still not going to have a cup of tea with their neighbor.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

And it's got nothing to do with whether the neighbor is more or less of a Christian than their client. It's purely to do, I think, with the fact that the client's a financial proposition.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Yeah, of course. And and when you say making money, are we talking about everyone in the church making money? Is there or are we talking about the people at the top of the chain making money?

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Yeah, so they have a really intense focus on business, and typically brethren will be involved in either manufacturing or wholesale. Um they don't believe in retail and they don't believe in anything to do with the expression of the arts, um, and you can't do anything that involves going to university. Um they're allowing some university study now, but it's only for particular courses like accounting, and it has to be done remotely. So attending campus is still a no-no.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

So so retail attending campus, there's too much connection with other people in the world.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

Yeah. Yeah, so my family had a retail tire shop for a while, and when I had a conversation with Bruce Hales, the world leader in 2008, uh, he made it very clear that he thought that the retail environment had too much contact with the outside world. Whereas in a wholesale or manufacturing setting, you can maintain a lot more control over who you engage with in the outside world.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

A lot more distance, I guess. So I mean, there's this huge drive clearly to keep members of the church away from other people in the community, which is obviously a very beneficial thing to do if you're trying to run a group and have control over a group of people is to keep them as disconnected from the rest of society as possible. Do you uh I know you know there's a lot to your story, and we're sort of skipping a lot of it, but in the process of coming to terms with your sexuality, especially, but also all the other things within the doctrine that you very quickly realized didn't make sense, you realised you had no future in this church. I think you were a teenager, maybe 18 or so when you came out of the organization. 19, okay. And you were born into this, just to remind people. So that's 19 years of this, and gradual, as you detail in your book, a very gradual process. Of coming to the realization that it's not for you. Very heartbreaking at times. When you came out of that, can you tell us a bit about what that experience was like coming into the real world and what you expected that didn't happen or what you didn't expect to happen that did?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Yeah, I think the thing that I found most surprising was that my whole life in the Brethren, I'd been warned that the world was a cold, hard place and that the only place we would find true love and acceptance was in the Brethren. And to my great surprise when I left the Brethren, I found the opposite to be true. And these people that I'd grown up with, people that I loved and trusted, turned their backs on me. And it was as though I'd never existed. Situations like running into family members in town and they would look the other way. Yeah. Or my entire family drove past me once at the beach and they all just looked straight ahead, didn't even acknowledge that I was there. And these were people who, a matter of weeks earlier, I'd been living with. And then on the other hand, there were people I had never met before who heard what had happened to me and came forward and offered me places to stay and sort of family support and all that education and training that I needed to be able to function in the outside world. And bearing in mind, I'd never watched TV, I'd never listened to the radio, I'd never eaten at a restaurant. There were like these huge gaps in my knowledge of sort of what it meant to live in the 21st century. Yeah. And people that I didn't know at all really went out of their way to make sure that I was welcomed into society and that I was accepted and loved and taught me sort of not only how to interact as a normal person, but then went and filled in all the gaps that I'd missed.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

So I was, you know, here are the movies that someone of your age would have watched as a child. Yeah. That's it. That sort of thing. And 19 years is a long time to catch up on.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Of course. A cultural education. Yeah. That's great. How did you get in touch with these people? I mean, you're coming out of this very sort of exclusive church. 19 years. I mean, how do you even connect with people coming out of something like that?

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah, for me, there were a few different routes. One of the first places I connected with people was on websites for former brethren.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Um, I knew that these people who had been excommunicated were out there. I knew that I had, you know, my grandfather, for instance, and uncles and aunts, um, cousins. And so they were some of the early, earliest people that I started talking to because I knew that these people understood what I had been through and would have advice on how to navigate my own situation. And the other thing that I found really helpful was connecting with the rainbow community. So there was a local gay support group in Invercagle that put a listing in the paper every few months. And I knew it came along every now and then. And so, you know, I went for more than a month buying the paper every day and checking the listings because I hadn't saved it the previous time around.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Um, and I knew that when that listing came back up, if I called the number, I would be able to meet other gay people and I would coggle. I'm sorry, my age here.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

This was clearly pre-the-internet, or at least pre-the-internet being easy. You're doing better than me. I think I've got 10 years on you. That's quite extraordinary. I mean, even reading your book and I think this community you speak about, just how welcoming these people were and how quick they were to understand your experience. I mean, I'm sure they maybe didn't understand your experience in the context of the church, but it just struck me that in the queer community there is this real sort of galvanization around the experience of people who have not been accepted as a result of their sexuality, regardless of where you're from or what you've been through. And to me, that was a really extraordinary realization to have reading that book, just how quick people were to go, no, you're with us and we've got you, and and we can sort this out.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Yeah, and I guess that was something I realized quite early on is um in the queer community, if you say I came out as gay and my parents kicked me out, you don't need to do much more explaining than that because it has happened, at least historically, to so many people, especially the older generations, you know, older gay men and women and so on. A lot of them had had this experience themselves. And so I didn't need to do a whole lot of explaining. And likewise, I didn't need to explain myself to the community of ex-Brethren that I found. And I was very, very lucky that Facebook was a thing for all its flaws. And going through my grandfather's papers from when he left in 1981, back then people people were kept out of the brethren and disappeared. And you had to call the phone directory and see if you could find what might be their address in another city and then write a letter and wait weeks and maybe they would reply. Or you'd have to send letters to everyone who had that name in that city.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

And how slowly he reconnected with people. Whereas when I left, I was able to look people up on Facebook and find people quite quickly.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

And more so than that, connect with other people my age who were in the process of leaving. And so it was very reassuring to me that there were people my age in Australia, in North America, in Europe, and the Caribbean who were all leaving the Bridgern, who felt the same way as me, and who also thought it was bullshit. Yeah. And it's it's very isolating when you come out of a group like the Bridgern or when you're thinking about leaving because you can't risk telling anyone else in there how you feel. And so for a long time it can feel as though you're the only one who has these doubts.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

And that's something that has been really illuminating to me in the subsequent years is that far more people in these groups are questioning than any of them would imagine. But because none of them dare talk to each other, nobody realizes 100%.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

100%.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Those of us on the outside who are talking to those people on the inside, I think can have a much better sort of broad overview of how unhappy people are.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Certainly, certainly. And I think this is true across any group like this. It's certainly true of my experience. And, you know, I I've been in touch with someone who was sort of in a similar position to me in the cult that I was in. I was sort of running the show in Toronto, in Canada. She was doing it elsewhere. And it was it's been interesting to reconnect with her and talk about our mutual experiences, someone I haven't spoken to in years. Because unlike you, I didn't really connect with people after I left. I just sort of I tried to initially, but I was rejected. And so I just got on with things. And so it's been a long time since I've reconnected with people. And doing it now has been fascinating. I mean, just to really I mean, this is we're talking 20 years ago, but it's just incredible the things I I wasn't aware were happening because we weren't talking about it. And the doubts that were simmering under the surface for for all of us, certainly all of us who have left. And I assume still for people who are in there, but they're not talking about it, like you say. So it just goes on and on, sometimes for years, sometimes for a lifetime, as you well know with your family history. You know, your your story, it was incredible when you spoke about coming out and then of the group I mean, and then engaging with your grandfather and other relatives over time and piecing together this family history that again had gone back since pretty much the time that this church was founded so long ago. Do you think that that accounts for for why generations and generations stay in it is the seclusion of it, the fact that you're pretty much taught not to doubt anything? Because it's quite extraordinary, eight generations.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Yeah, so obviously there's been a lot of coming and going in terms of beliefs over the last 200 years, but I think what it boils down to is former brethren, well, for a good 60 years now, have talked about the three F's when it comes to what keeps people in there, um, being fear, family, and finances. Right. Um, interestingly, faith has never featured as any of the Fs that keeps people in there. Um, and it's that it's that trifecta, really, fear of what if the church is right, and fear of what will happen if you leave. And that fear doesn't even necessarily need to be fear of eternal judgment or God's punishment. It just could be a very real fear around can I survive? Um and family is an obvious one when your entire family network, or at least the part of your family network that you're allowed to know is in there, it's a massive cost to walk away from. And then uh once you have sacrificed people who have been excommunicated, I think there's an element of you're too far in to be able to admit that it was wrong.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Yes, of course. Of course, the investment's so being so huge. I mean, it's hard to walk away.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Yeah, and I see you see this happen. My cousin's father has just been excommunicated in his early success for disagreeing with the leadership. And, you know, people are put in this position. Well, maybe when I cut my sister off 40 years ago, maybe that was wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have been standing in judgment of her this whole time. What an enormous thing to digest. Yeah, yeah. And this has just happened over and over and over again across families. And so sort of those complicated family relationships are really difficult. And then reconnecting with people, like a lot of the people, you know, when you go to leave, it's like, are these other people who have left or willing to accept me because I played a part in sort of perpetrating their exclusion. Yeah. Um so you're not just saying, hey, here I am again, you're saying, hey, here I am, and I need your support, and I need you to forgive me for everything that I did to you. And that's that's a lot in any relationship. That's a lot for people to overcome.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

And I mean, sometimes we're talking about parents of children who are no longer in touch with their children, or vice versa. I mean, it's kind of I mean, that's an extraordinary it's a very hard thing for most people to imagine that sort of dynamic. But that's what was happening on the regular.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

And then there are these massive, massive gaps in the family. So my great auntie, who left in the 50s as a teenager, was one of ten, and she um was kicked out and lost her whole family, and then sort of since the 50s, it's been this drip, drip, drip. Um, three of her brothers came out over the course of several decades, and then nephews and nieces, and and now she's in the position where the people from the royal family who are coming out of the brethren are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of her brothers and sisters, and so she's missed like their entire generations that are gone.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Incredible.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

So I have a close relationship with her now, but she's never even met my father, her nephew.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Incredible.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Uh, and so you're you're having to bridge these gaps all the time.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

Yeah. You know, you mentioned in the book um a few mental health struggles, uh with your father in particular, some things that he went through. Are you in touch with your parents much these days?

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Not at all.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

Uh there's nothing to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

There's nothing to talk about. Yeah. You spoke of them very sensitively, I have to say, um, given everything that happened. And I think, you know, it's great that you had that sort of I don't know, it must have been hard to look back initially and have any sort of um discernment around some of the things that went on, but there was something about your your dad's story that really resonated with me. I think you mentioned at some point in the book that I think his his sins in front of God were more important than, say, his sins as a parent or his flaws as a parent. So, in some ways, the parenting in a group like this becomes very compromised as a result of the distortions around faith and what they need to be doing, I mean, for God in their eyes, but really for whoever it is that's running the church. What was that experience like as a child when you recognize that your parents were behaving in this way? Because I was a lot like this. Um, you know, I have had a son who, well I have a son, but when I was in the cult, he was, you know, very young. And as a result, he got a version of me that was not my best self. Um, and we've fortunately been able to talk about it since. Um, but in your experience, it sounds like there really wasn't a lot of room for patience, for forgiveness, for attention, and the dogma really sort of superseded all of that.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

Yeah, and I think um I got a particularly unpleasant version of the rhythm doctrine growing up. Uh I would say that my father was someone who applied the letter of the law rather than the spirit, um, and was very, very preoccupied with keeping to the rules um beyond the point at which a lot of other brethren families would.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Uh, so he had a reputation in the Brethren for being much more rigid in his sort of enforcement of some of the rules. No, like with every church, there are the there are the non-negotiable rules, and then there are the sort of the maybe maybe not rules at the edge.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

And and it's those ones where you can tell how dedicated people are. And so it sort of felt like my dad and others were uh on a mission to follow all of those maybe, maybe not rules to prove their loyalty.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

Yes, yes, I can relate to that.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

And I think he really beat himself up going down this path because as I say in the book, he was much later diagnosed with clinical depression, and so he was filling or attempting to fill something in his life with um church and rules and religious dogma rather than any kind of um Christian spirit, is my interpretation of it looking back. And it's sad really because he rove himself into the ground over and over trying to get close to God, thinking that the reason he felt like shit was some kind of moral shortcoming when really he just needed to see a doctor and go on antidepressants and probably code therapy.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Yeah. What was the what was the church's view of mental health issues? Did they have one?

SPEAKER_00 38:01

Yeah, to the extent that they had one, they were um big believers in antidepressants. So the famous saying that often got repeated and attributed to one of the senior leaders who also happened to be a doctor who had trained before the university ban, was that half the brethren were on antidepressants and the other half should be.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

Um and it was a difficult situation for doctors. And most brethren were seeing um doctors who were in regular community. But if you've got a brethren patient who presents to you with clear signs of depression but won't tell you why, your only sort of option is to prescribe antidepressants as a stopgap.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

If you can't find out what's actually going on, they're not, you know, they're not gonna badmouth the church, they're not gonna tell you what's going on in their family, they're not gonna disclose um, or they're very unlikely to disclose sexual abuse or family violence or anything like that. And so Medication's an easy out for the church. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think medication is a way of sidestepping this substantive causes of what's happening.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

And so my impression was that there were a lot of people who were medicated. Yeah. And a lot of people who were self-medicating with alcohol.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:36

You know, I had peers in the brethren who said they couldn't um they couldn't tolerate sitting through a church meeting unless I'd had X number of whiskies before the service. Oh, yeah, we can all relate to that. But you know, this was not a community, at least in my experience, that engaged in any sort of men for discussion around thoughts and feelings. And um, there was also no acknowledgement of the fact that people's feelings were valid in many cases. Like you have just lost a member of your family, they've disappeared from your life, you're not allowed to talk to your child, or you're you've been cut off from a parent, or something else terrible has happened, and you're supposed to see that as God's will, or it's a test from God, and therefore, sort of the more pain you can shoulder, the greater your loyalty is, obviously. And that was something that really bugged me and still really bugs me, is this idea that God only gives you as much as you can handle. Because it means that as soon as you take a step back and say, hey, I can't deal with this, you're questioning what God's put on you.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Yeah, this is look, I this is a huge issue for me. And and when I look back at being sent to Toronto overseas with no family, not being in a financial position to do so with a small child, um, with no one we knew over there, and then to start this this organization from scratch and run it for years and years and years, the financial stress that I went through, the just the the stress in general of that experience was so overwhelming. I was very young, you know, my son was born when I was 19. To this day, I think I tried to put it behind me for a long time, but the stress of that experience was way too much for me to handle. And I think this notion that stress is always good is very naive, scientifically speaking. We know from the psychological literature that, you know, there is a threshold of stress that becomes incredibly damaging for people, especially if it happens in developmental periods. You know, we've all had experience of people who may have reactions that seem very out of proportion. Very often these are people who have been through a lot of stressful experiences and their nervous system just does not know how to handle the stress the way it it may have otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 42:08

Yeah, I've found my reaction has gone in the opposite direction usually, that my experiences have sent my threshold for what trauma and stress are sort of somewhere up into the stratosphere. Yeah, well, that's great. And as a result, people work like, how are you always so calm as everything's turning to shape? Yeah, yeah. This is not yeah, yeah. Um and that's worked really well for my career because I'm often in sort of high pressure, high demand environments where things are coming at me all the time. Yeah. And I just sort of ride over the top of it all. Yes, yeah. But I recognise that that is a trauma response.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Yeah. In the sense that it's in the sense that you're calm.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Yeah, in the sense that it takes a lot to trigger a response for me now. And all of these things that can be sort of quite catastrophic in other people's lives are things that just pass me by or that I shrug off. Uh, and I think there's also an element growing up in the Brethren, it wasn't safe to reveal what you thought because you never knew what the consequences of that were going to be. And so you became very, very good at crafting an emotional response, or more accurately, crafting the suppression of an emotional response. Yeah. Um, where you just dealt with things sort of quite methodically.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

And with perhaps not a lack of emotion, but with a carefully managed emotion.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

And I'm aware that I still do that, for better or worse.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

It's interesting hearing you say that, you know, your threshold for what is worth reacting to is. Is quite high. Because I think I have a reputation for being quite a calm person. So I have that side of it on one hand, but then certain things I've noticed do trigger me, and they tend to have a lot to do with a sense of injustice or betrayal or emotional invalidation of some sort. Where, you know, I think back to times that this has happened. I'm better now than I was, but it all always seemed to have something to do with some sort of emotional sense of not being heard or something unjust happening. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, but there's something that would always trigger a reaction in in me that I would I would even myself go, whoa, calm down.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yes, yeah, I can relate to that. And this is where I found journalism in particular so rewarding is that so much of what happens in journalism is you know, ferreting out injustice and speaking truth to power and taking the fight to the bad guys. And and I get enormous satisfaction out of that side of my job. I bet. But yeah, these things do leave a lasting impact. And often you don't realise I mean, I struggle with knowing where to draw the line and attributing things to my church upbringing. Because I think to myself, you know, I could go down the rabbit hole and somehow trace every single thing that happens in my life back to some formative experience in the brutal. Yeah. But I I don't like to go too far down some of those tracks because otherwise I'll just spend the rest of my life cycling missing myself.

SPEAKER_01 45:36

Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, in the process of doing this podcast, you know, part of me is is trying to do that to an extent because I haven't tried hard enough to do that. But I'm also very cognizant of the fact that I can't make sense of everything conceptually or intellectually. You know, there is a point at which I have to accept who I am and you know what's happened to me and and the way I've you know may have behaved that I don't love at times. Um but also not to try and tie a neat bow on the on the top of all of that. And that's very much what I hope to do when I finish this series is just to stop thinking about it for a while.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

Something that I was particularly conscious of when I was writing my book was locking in a version of what I think. Yes. Because when my grandpa died um and we cleared out his papers, we realized he had documented his whole life. Um but that meant there was a record of what he thought about something in his 20s and then what he thought in his 30s and his 50s and his 70s, and and watching this like evolution of his thought, and often like his perspective completely changed on some of these massive formative experiences he'd had.

SPEAKER_01 46:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

And I think to myself, sometimes, like, which of my very firmly held beliefs about my life are gonna be quite different in 10 years or maybe even next year?

SPEAKER_01 46:56

It's fascinating. I mean, the fact that you had access to all of that is extraordinary, really. That's such an i an insightful experience to have to read through those letters and to notice that. I mean, that's really fascinating for me to hear as well. And uh yeah, I I have the same sense of in this process of trying to sort of make sense of my experience, just how impossible it is to make complete sense of it and how it will definitely shift. You know, I I'm like you, I'm I I have an inquiring mind, I'm very curious, and I'm sure I always will be. And as a result of that, you do change your perspective on things. Um, I imagine there'll be a through line that will probably stay somewhat relevant, but um no doubt the more you look into these things or think about them or don't think about them, of course, views shift.

SPEAKER_00 47:42

Yes, and different things affect them in different ways. I remember my cousin telling me that when she had children herself outside of the brethren, that completely shifted how she felt about her parents. And experiencing the love that she had for her own children just added a whole nother layer of disbelief at what her parents had done to her.

SPEAKER_02 48:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:07

And so all these sorts of things impact how you see your experiences. And you know, my brother came out of the Bertram seven or eight years after me, and that had a significant, sort of major impact on me because he brought all these stories of what had been happening in our family.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

Right.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

And the impact that my leaving had had on my parents and siblings. Um and that you had no knowledge of. No, like I'd like I'd known in the abstract what had probably happened, but hearing what had actually happened was quite different. Of course. And in the same way, I knew writing the book, I you know, had hypothetical scenarios for what they probably said in the church. But now people are leaving the brethren and sort of bringing with them the stories of what was said or not said. Yeah. So there's this constant it's it's it feels like my life is an incomplete puzzle. And every so often there's sort of a random piece appears, and you're oh I I know where that goes, I'll plug it in. And and you're glad it's there, but then every piece of the puzzle that appears is just a reminder of how many are still missing.

SPEAKER_01 49:27

Yeah, yeah. That's a good analogy. I you know, I uh I I find I think one of the the challenges I found with with doing this series and speaking to people, and also, you know, between these episodes, really thinking deeply about, you know, how I suppose putting my puzzle together in a way is just how emotionally taxing it's been to to think about it and to go back over it and to and to say these things out loud, you know, especially talking about the things I believed, which were quite absurd to anyone, um, and the things I put myself through and did, the time I lost and all this sort of stuff. And I think that exhaustion is coming mainly just from being embarrassed and also having been, you know, ashamed for so long about it. You know, I've sort of built up this well of shame that needs to be sort of released, and also the fact that I haven't released any of these episodes yet, and that will probably happen, you know, in the coming months, and just how terrifying that is to me. But I do hope that I do feel like it's given me something. I'm glad I'm doing it. I feel like I'm making sense of something. I hope that I'm for people who listen, that it gives them some insight into the experience. And if people have been through a similar thing, then hopefully, you know, the realizations I'm having or the things that we're talking about help them to come out of their shell and maybe open up a bit more. Yeah, well that's it. And I think it's been good to have, you know, years out of it, and you know, I've done a lot since then, so I don't feel like I need to think too much about you know, I know I'm capable of many other things, and I think it's just the time distance that's made talking about it harder. You know, if I'd come out and just started talking about it straight away, which is easy to say, but if I had done that, maybe it would have been this would have been a less painful process.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Well, at least you have a frame of reference for for not having talked about it. Whereas I did my first TV interview a matter of weeks after I was excommunicated. Yes. Um, and so for my entire life outside of the Brethren, it's been public knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:37

Uh and so I have no frame of reference for what it might have been like to live a life where people didn't know.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Didn't know. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, uh I mean your book covers all of this, so I'll let people read it. But towards the end, you talked about doctors in the in the church. This uh one of the most shocking aspects of the book was this sort of conversion-like therapy that you were given towards the end there, where a doctor within the church prescribed you so thankfully you didn't take it for too long, but still um prescribed you medication that uh is essentially used to chemically castrate people as a way of overcoming your sexuality.

SPEAKER_00 52:14

Yes. And again, that's another example of people doing what they thought was the right thing, but in a very damaging way. And I don't uh I don't doubt that the doctor was acting on what he believed were my best interests, but it also didn't mean that what he was doing wasn't wrong and unethical. Um, and he was subsequently investigated by the authorities in New South Wales and barred from practicing the GP.

SPEAKER_01 52:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

But you see, this was an interesting case, you know, the framing of things for the brethren. And I know that I'm seen as the sort of wicked person who took that doctor down. Right. But I laid a complaint and then the authorities investigated him, and beyond writing a letter saying what had happened to me, everything else was the authorities, their relevant medical bodies. And I see this passing of the buck in the brethren and and in other groups too, where people who speak up about something that was wrong get the blame for any targeting of the group rather than any critical analysis of whether what they said was true and whether it was wrong.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

Yeah. And to my mind, this is where the belief systems get so distorting. You know, people just learn not to think critically about the behaviours within the group. It's sort of set up for them not to do that.

SPEAKER_00 53:36

Yeah, and the most the brethren, you know, and I know that my parents have said that they just wish that I would stop attacking the fellowship and so on and so forth. And then that it's all very well to say that I'm attacking your fellowship, but what am I saying that's not true? Yeah. And if you have specific examples of things that I'm saying that are incorrect or unfair, then come to me with the specific examples and we can talk about those, and I'm happy to correct them if necessary. But these sweeping sort of you're attacking us claims, I think, are just a cop-out.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

Totally. Which the belief system supports and allows them to do. I mean, they're all so absorbed in this system. You know, I had the same experience when I tried to get in touch with people in my cult after I left, and it's just it's like a wall of uh denial and defense and attack. I mean, there's just no way through. And yet, you know, a week or two earlier when I was still in the group before I walked away, we would have conversations that seem nice. As soon as I was gone, I was I was evil. You know, that was it was as simple as that. I don't are you familiar with the name Alistair Crowley? Are you aware that he was raised in the exclusive brethren? That's extraordinary. I did not know that until today, literally. I was doing a little bit more research and saw that this guy, who is actually part of a tradition with uh Helena Blavatsky, who started the Theosophical Society, they're they're separate entities. I think he was born the same year she started the Theosophical Society. But his uh views and his doctrine are very similar to theosophical doctrines. Um, he had a real focus on sexual alchemy and sex magic in some pretty bizarre ways. You know, I think they would he would practice, you know, he'd have orgies and so on, and then like bake the sexual fluids of his partners and and his into biscuits and eat them in some sort of ritualistic process. It was pretty strange. But this was part of a similar tradition to the school I was in in terms of the sexual practices that we use. We didn't do that. We were sort of on the other end of it where there was not celibacy, but we weren't allowed to orgasm, but we would have these sexual experiences and we had to retain that energy in order to become enlightened and develop these superpowers that we thought we could. And Alistair Crowley was seen as like the evil version of that. So we were we use the phrase black lodge and white lodge. So in my group, we were practicing the the white version of this magic in our sexual practices, and people like Alistair Crowley were practicing the the evil version where they develop sort of superpowers that superpowers, they would develop superpowers that were quite, you know, evil and nasty on the demonic side of the um of the spectrum. So these bizarre things that we were doing have this long tradition in people like Alistair Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, you know, they didn't just come out of nowhere. I mean, certainly the philosophies of our school, it was founded in Mexico and Colombia in the in the 50s, but they drew a lot on these traditions. And I think in the same way that, you know, a lot of fringe churches and cults rely on Christianity as a foundational belief system, that's essentially what happens with a lot of new age mystical occult groups as well. They're drawing on these traditions that are less known but have existed for a very long time. Um and people to this day are still fascinated by the likes of Alistair Crowley and so on. And to me, that sexuality aspect, I mean, that suppression of my sexual desires in the context of our practices was a bit of an issue for me as it would be for any guy in their twenties, like to not be, you know, allowed to pursue their sexual desires freely, but have to suppress them. Lust was, you know, very, very damaging. If we had a wet dream, it was like the worst thing that could happen to us, which was happening all the time because we weren't allowed to to reach orgasm under any circumstances. Uh children if you weren't allowed to reach orgasm. Well, the idea was that if a child was meant to be, then it would just happen. Um but I think in many ways, uh there's a reason that no one in the group were having children. But that was the idea. If a child was meant to be, then then it would happen. And I think in some ways that suited the group, because I don't think they wanted people having the burden of children. They enjoyed having adults that were free to make the movement bigger and spread the word and and all the rest of it. But um yeah, I j I just wanted to bring that up because I was fascinated that Alistair was um was raised in the exclusive Brethren early on, because he is kind of an important person in the tradition of the sorts of groups that I'm involved in. Even though, you know, I tend to think of these Christian churches as being very different to these occult cults, all of these things sort of interweave to a degree, especially as you go back through time. That's it, 100%. I would love to hear from you before, because I mean, as I mentioned this podcast, you know, I'm I'm really hoping that people who have been through these things and feel uncomfortable about it, you know, we talk about a lot of negative things on on this podcast sometimes, but are there any positives that you can think of? I know it's a difficult question, but like when you look back and the life you have now, and I know you you're very happy with your life, you said on the phone call that we had some weeks ago. Is there something positive you can share that you feel you got from this experience?

SPEAKER_00 59:04

Experience of leaving.

SPEAKER_01 59:06

Yeah, or just being in in such a strange environment and and coming out of it.

SPEAKER_00 59:11

I think my biggest takeaway from growing up in the prison is a really strong sense of the importance of family and connection and community. And the process of leaving, I think, gave me an unshakable knowledge of who I am. Yeah. And a really strong belief in myself. And that for me is a benchmark, and I know I survived that. So I should be able to survive anything else.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

That's a brilliant note on which to end. Thanks again. Uh, highly recommend your book to all of our listeners. Excommunicated, very, very easy to find online. Craig, thank you. Peter, thanks, Dave. Cheers. Bye. Many thanks to Craig for coming on the show. I found his reflections really useful, especially given the insight he's been able to gain from other family members over generations who had been excommunicated just like him. So that concludes the first season of this series. Uh, I hope those of you out there who have been in cults or high control groups have found these casual chats as helpful as I have. Thank you so much for tuning in. Uh, the great feedback from many of you has been really encouraging. I feel very honored to have heard from so many of you who have been positively affected by this series. It does mean a lot to me, so thank you. Given the great response, we are considering extending the podcast or doing another season. Um, so make sure you subscribe to be notified when we dive back in. Please also consider leaving a rating for the podcast if you've enjoyed it. You can also keep in the loop by following our Instagram at Aftercultpod. So, thanks again for your support, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Thanks to Neil Sutherland for producing and the band PVT for the music.