Book Review: Breaking Free by Rachel Jeffs

In writing about groupthink, I’ve become aware of how amazingly powerful it is. The best illustration of that is people in cults – they are willing to destroy themselves when the group or its leader demands it. In the worst cults, members separate themselves from all other sources of information like books, media, or the internet that stand any chance of getting them to stop believing whatever their dear leader wants them to believe. Anyone can readily see how insane some of their ideas are, yet they all profess to believe them, well, religiously.

And they'll do almost anything they are told. Would you let a child of yours writhe in pain from a broken bone for a week because your leader didn't want them to be exposed to doctors except as a last resort? In the book reviewed here, that's one of the things that would happen.

In this book, the cult is the Fundamentalist Later Day Saints (FLDS) under Warren Jeffs. It was written by one of Warren Jeff’s older daughters, Rachel, who somehow managed to eventually escape and re-establish some sanity.

FLDS was a polygamous offshoot of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jeffs ended up with 78 wives and 53 children. Some of these wives had been previously married to Jeff’s own father before his father's death. Jeff described himself as God’s “prophet” who spoke directly with the supreme being. Despite demanding a puritanical ideology from his followers, he married girls as young as 14 or maybe even younger, and had them commit lesbian sex acts in front of him. He also molested at least two of his own prepubescent daughters, though he managed to get them to keep it a secret. He had six wives at the time.

Many of the rules he insisted his cult members follow were arbitrary, and were all "directed by God," who nonetheless changed His mind from time to time. Jeffs demanded strict obedience and hard work from everyone. Males often did not get paid for their work. And yet everyone almost always followed his instructions to the letter, no matter how crazy they became. Jeff would then offer them “blessings” from the “Heavenly Father.”

Men and women who hardly knew one another were assigned marriages. The “sister wives” — some of whom actually were real sisters and half-sisters — were supposed to get along and not be jealous of one another. But of course they couldn't help themselves.  Again, when it came to actual behavior, they always did what they were told to do. Husbands would often play one of them off against the others by showing favoritism as to which of them he would spend the night with.

Even though Rachel finally managed to escape and start to think for herself, in the book she still seems to indicate that many times she still fears she that is displeasing God.  In the book, this thought  seemed mixed with the horror of never seeing many of her family members ever again, which I think is the real fear. Her five children are never going to be able to see their father, who is still in the cult, ever again.

You can sense that all along she sort of knew her father couldn’t really be talking to God, yet still told herself he was and that therefore her soul was in danger. She knew all too well what happened to members who left or were thrown out of the group, but often thought the source of her conflicted ideas was her own sinfulness. 

It took her father telling others that God had told him that she had engaged in behavior that she knew she had not done. God, after all, wouldn’t lie like that. But as mentioned, at times she felt that a newly-found desire to leave her church was “the most wicked thing possible.” "Flirting with Damnation" is the title of one of the chapters in the book. At times, her real fear of being cut off almost seems to metamorphize into the religious one.

The cult was based primarily in a town called Short Creek, which straddles the border between Utah and Arizona. They had been pursued by the law there in the distant past for their polygamy, but had returned when the heat was off, so to speak. There was also an offshoot of the cult in British Columbia Canada. Young girls were often trafficked from one of these locations to another, often by their own fathers, so the men could marry them.

The cult had been left alone by the government for about 50 years, but in 2003 the state of Utah started to arrest and prosecute cult members for both underage sex and polygamy. Warren Jeffs knew he would be a target, so he started establishing colonies in which to hide in other states. As he moved around, and especially later after he was arrested and given a life sentence, he started to issue more and more strange instructions from God and “corrections” for certain cult members. From jail. More and more normal activities were said to be forbidden – having fun was almost illegal.

Everyone continued to follow him as he issued “corrections” to those who he deemed “unworthy.” They did so after his corrections became more and more heinous. He would send some members, usually males but sometimes females, away. And their children could never see them again. Rachel had been prevented from attending her own mother’s funeral. He moved people from one of his “refuges” to another, and sometimes punished them by putting them with a kind of solitary confinement, with very little food, for a month or two. There were many more horrible pronouncements I won’t describe here.

The level of willful self-destructiveness of people in a cult such as this is almost beyond comprehension. I finished the book wanting to hear more about how she handled the conflicted feelings she surely had after she left and was separated from everything she knew growing up.

 

Book Review: Leaving the Witness by Amber Scorah

One of the review quotes on the cover of this amazingly written, disturbing, enthralling, absolutely brilliant work (I could barely put it down) was “part Orwellian groupthink expose.” Although it is also a tragedy and a suspenseful account of preaching in a Communist country that forbid foreigners from doing just that, for purposes of this blog, I will focus on the groupthink part. I am currently in the midst of editing a book on groupthink in science, and clearly my model of self destructive behavior sees it as a sacrifice to one’s kin group rather than as a selfish act (Selfish self-destructiveness? Only if all such people had the IQ of a kumquat).

The book tells the story of growing up in a cult, in which people were strongly discouraged from talking to anyone or looking at any source of information that might call into question its belief system. Going to college was forbidden. People went to meetings several times a week where the idea that Armageddon was about to happen at any minute was constantly presented, along with the idea that only the true believers would be saved. 

People who broke the rules or questioned orthodoxy were “disfellowshipped.” This meant that they were completely shunned by all family and friends, although they were allowed to sit in the back of the meeting halls, unacknowledged, to be further indoctrinated with the propaganda in hope that eventually they would be accepted back into the fold— after a couple of years of this treatment.

Scorah recounts going to China to surreptitiously preach the cult’s gospel. Once there, she found that there were many fewer group members around than she had been used to, and she credits that fact with how she came to be exposed to other ways of understanding the universe. This in turn led her to start questioning the group’s theology and its claim to have a monopoly on the one true religion. She had to have an above-ground job, and took one working on a podcast about China. One listener began writing to her and helped her to see how badly she had been indoctrinated.

As she started to engage in critical thinking, her entire family then acted as if she did not exist (with one major exception — her sister. Might the sister now be serving in the role of switchboard?). There has been no contact with them.

But was this the whole story? I think not. One has to ask the question: why would the author be the one person who was able to start questioning the groupthink—even with the realistic fear of being exiled hanging over her head— when the vast majority of her fellow preachers in China did not fall into this trap? Although it’s impossible to prove on the basis of what is written about a family in a book, the author’s description of her family certainly leads one to suspect the usual culprit in such scenarios: family dynamics and shared intrapsychic conflict with ambivalence.

In fact, her family was not monolithic in its beliefs in the cult, although they professed to be. Neither of her parents went to meetings more than yearly, and would not explain to the maternal grandmother— who was not born into the cult—why that was. Scorah’s father was an alcoholic and her parents eventually divorced, both huge no-no’s in the cult.  The grandmother also seemed to take great joy in providing the “benefits” of the cult to the author when Scorah was growing up. 

Together this all sounds like there was strong ambivalence about the cult’s beliefs within the family, with her parents acting it out. They may have given up their daughter—who received very little attention from them according to her own descriptions—to the grandmother as a gift, in order so that she could make up for grandma's failure to properly indoctrinate the mother.

Furthermore, grandma’s favorite child, the mother’s brother – I repeat, grandma’s favorite child—left the fold and then proved the folly in doing so by getting into drugs. The family predicted that he would eventually end up in jail, and of course this is exactly what came to pass! This sound exactly like the dynamics I write about in describing the role of the black sheep.

So perhaps (and I really think it’s nearly certain) the author had picked up on the family ambivalence over the cult and its rules. This may have been why she had been attracted to preaching in a far away, forbidding place all along, where she would no long be subject to constant drumming in her ear about the group’s orthodoxy.

Another interesting aspect of groupthink that the author writes about - with the most elegant descriptions of it that I’ve ever read -  is existential groundlessness. This is the tremendously aversive feeling one gets when one breaks the rules or questions the mythology of one’s kin group or social group:

“But if I didn’t believe, my life would be over. I was paralyzed, because there was no answer to this problem. The stakes are too high to do anything.” (p. 171).

“This world was the only one I had ever been a part of, and I didn’t know who I was without it.” (p. 200).

“Nothing was as I had thought it was. And there was nowhere to go back to; I couldn’t, because it was a dream, it was all a story, all of my life was made up, and I had awoken to this concrete.”

That last quote illustrates yet something else about groupthink in the modern world: willful blindness. Throughout the book Scorah strongly implies that until her awakening she truly believed, without question or doubt, every nonsensical myth that was taught to her by her cult. But later in the book she implies that this was not really the complete truth. For example, on p. 231, she lets on that a part of her knew the gig: “We policed ourselves to sustain our nirvana. We shared a willful blindness disguised as innocence and purity…but it takes a great deal of mental effort to hide from what one sees, whether that effort is subconscious or purposeful…That once I decided to believe, I believed, no matter what doubts came…I had been in ‘the truth’ because I was afraid of the truth.”