People in Glass Houses Page 13

The black and whites of fundamentalist Christianity make it easily digestible for people who are in any way psychologically disadvantaged. The message is simple, repetitive and emotionally based. Those with alcohol or drug-related brain damage, acquired brain injuries, mental illness, children, the elderly and victims of violence may not have the cognitive functioning required to decipher the simple propaganda they are fed.

  Having chronic pain, a terminal illness or a major drug habit can also make it harder to tell what’s real. Faith-healing evangelists are predators of a particularly twisted variety. They are well aware of the desperation in their audiences. They know that some people will do anything at all if they believe it will cure them or their sick child, no matter how poverty-stricken they are. God may be their only hope. If God wants proof of their faith, and clearly he does, then they should be willing to show him their sacrifices in dollars.

  In Australia, where poverty is not at the crisis rate of America’s, we can afford to be more altruistic. We like to think of ourselves as contributors to our community. That participating in a Hillsong group will better the world. As Labor adviser Monika Wheeler said in a speech outlining where the ALP was losing young people to Hillsong, ‘One problem that we have is that people who are going to Hillsong services think that they are doing something for society.’

  Chapter 13

  L AST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE

  My friends all had their salvation dates written in special pen and special writing in the front of their bibles. That glorious day when they met Jesus for the first time. There was a bit of Christian family snobbery among the teenagers about that, or at least there was for me. You know, with some of them, if they hadn’t been in the right place at the right time they would have ended up like the rest of their unsaved family, who are all still going to hell. Not like us from Christian homes, we always were and always will be.

  Still, I was kind of jealous. I didn’t really know when I had become a Christian. There was no late-night tap on the shoulder, no whisper from heaven, no nothing. I never knew any different. I had nothing to convert from. I had decided to follow Jesus all the way to nursery school and there had been no turning back.

  At church, we Christian kids were deemed the most blessed, having never smelt the odour of our own original sin. We had been born to Christian parents and had never known any life other than the abundant one that God had in store for us from the word Go. Not like those kids from broken homes. They were too busy praying for their unsaved step-parents and half-sisters to come to church and leave their fleshly ways behind. I never got saved from anything. With all of my earliest memories come the knowledge that Jesus was Lord, and that the whole world had better know about it.

  When somebody tells the story of their conversion, it’s called a testimony. And every convert has a testimony, we were told, a story of how Jesus saved them from their horrible old life. As a Christian kid, I was in a state of constant gratitude for a salvation I couldn’t put my finger on. This blurriness wasn’t relevant, since we were told that the kids born into Christian homes had a lifetime of knowing God as the best testimony of all. Thus, even though I had no pulled-out-of-the-gutter story to tell, it did make me feel a little like Christian royalty.

  Hills Christian Life Centre was all geared towards getting saved. In my day, people would ask if so-and-so was ‘saved’. Is her family saved? When did you get saved? This word ‘saved’ has now been replaced with the more palatable ‘churched’. Do they go to church? Are they churched or unchurched? Let’s get out there and reach the unchurched of this generation.

  Most people are converted when they are between the ages of ten and eighteen, when their values, cognition and decision-making abilities are neither fixed nor independent from their upbringing. They’re easy pickings.

  The adults are harder, because the older they get the more educated they become. Grown-ups also have life experience that con-flicts with Christian doctrine. Most young adults get converted at university, and usually conversions of adults over twenty-five happen to those suffering relationship breakdown. Being grief-stricken is a perfect place to find God.

  What is getting saved? Why was that song at Hills ‘I’m Saved (S.A.V.E.D.)’ such a winner? Because it’s the wedding day of Christianity.

  If you missed all of the allusions to salvation during the songs, or the message at Hills, or all the references to the difficulties and sadnesses of our unsaved friends and relatives who, for some reason known only to the Lord, continue to resist salvation, you couldn’t miss the altar call. It’s the grand finale of the meeting.

  Even if just one unsaved piece of trash repents, the angels in heaven rejoice, and it was worth everyone turning up to church.

  I’ve wondered if maybe I kept leaving university in the last week of semester because I’m inherently frightened of the altar call, for it is down at the altar that God meets you, shakes your hand and pulls you swiftly over the great chasm between heaven and hell. Powerful things happen at the altar.

  Believing in Jesus isn’t enough. You have to commit to him. You have to get saved from your sin, the universal human condition. This is where the Pentecostals shine, where the boys are separated from the men. The number of salvations—the number of people who put up their hand when the invitation to meet Jesus is given, the number of people who trail down the aisles, down the stairs slowly, hesitant and hopeful, down to the front row to stand by the supportive New Christian pastors—is the equivalent of the number of notches in a gunslinger’s belt.

  At Hills, you knew when the altar call was coming. I never thought of it as a set-up then, except you knew when the message was over because the preacher would say ‘Musicians please’, and quietly and steadily, with heads down, the musicians would file back up on stage and play soft elevator music. The preacher would then start the spiel. Almost invariably, it would go like this: ‘You know, we’ve had a great time today, worshipping God, learning about his greatness. We have a good time in this church, we love God, but that’s because we can worship freely because we know him as our God. I’d like everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes, just for a minute. Just keep your eyes shut, to give those around you privacy.’

  At this point, I would often leave for a bathroom break, to give those around me privacy and to avoid the rush. Having been saved a hundred thousand times in these meetings, it seemed expedient to me to wrap up without going through unnecessary prayers. When I did stick around, though, I wondered about the catch. Everyone was supposed to have their eyes shut for privacy.

  However, when the preacher said, ‘If you’d like to meet Jesus and have him as your personal friend, Lord and Saviour, please raise your hand,’ it seemed a bit odd that they would then say, ‘Please raise them straight up in the air so the ushers can see them.’ Or: ‘We’ve got three on this side, how about some people come meet the Lord on this side of the auditorium? There’s no one in the middle section at all wants to get saved today? Come on, people, let’s meet Jesus.’ There must be laws of spiritual as well as acoustic symmetry in these buildings.

  With everyone except the trusted leaders having their eyes shut, all you have to do to get saved, they tell you, is raise your hand to the Lord. But once it went up there was no turning back.

  I knew inside at a young age that no one had told these people that after they had put their unsuspecting palms heavenward, they were shot ducks. They had a big target on their forehead and there was no going home. Not yet. They didn’t know what they were in for, but everyone knew it was for their own good.

  Once they put their hands back down, they would be told to ‘c’mon down the front’. If they didn’t, well, the ushers knew where they were. Now, who wants to go back on a commitment like that, in front of a room full of people? Nobody I ever saw while peeking ever changed their minds on Jesus, especially not when the preacher indicated to the ushers that there were slow movers who needed some encouragement.

  And so down they would trail. At yo
uth rallies they walk hand in hand, girls and girls, boys and girls, dudes on their own, groups of them sometimes, hundreds of them all over the stadium, down to the front to rid their young lawless lives of their sinful ways.

  And to start making a difference in their high school.

  You can do it anywhere. You can get saved in a hotel room, flicking through cable TV channels and deciding to try God one last time before you overdose. You can get saved at McDonald’s.

  You may get led to the Lord by your parents, your brother, your best friend, a total stranger. Jesus will meet you wherever you’re at, whoever you are—he died for you, all you have to do is ask him into your life. The rest is easy. It’s called the Sinner’s Prayer and when you pray it, you get the gift of salvation. You get saved.

  That’s when you become a child of God, and you are born again.

  There’s no better time to get saved than right now, here, tonight, in God’s house with his people around you. There’s no reason to wait, to spend another day hellbound, without having

  Jesus as your best friend. Come on, people, come on down, is there anybody else who wants to meet Jesus? Maybe you used to be a Christian and you want to come back to the Lord. Come back to him. Come home. He’s waiting for you. He’s been waiting all this time. He never left you and you know he loves you.

  At the altar there is weeping and there is repentance. There is salvation. People recount vivid testimonies about what happens at the altar. How a simple prayer changed their whole life.

  Chapter 14

  WILL YOU MISS ME

  WHEN YOU’RE SOBER?

  I was the last person who wanted to suggest Hillsong was a cult. Me, a wretched backslider, the ultimate example of what Pastor Brian refers to as ‘hurt, negative, bitter, with a wounded spirit, lashing out’. Except, every time I checked, I didn’t feel any of those things. At all.

  No one had assaulted me in my time at Hills. They weren’t mean to me. They didn’t go out of their way to befriend me, but I had always felt it was me who didn’t fit the program. After the Pat and Frank episodes, I knew it was the program, not me.

  A psychologist colleague of mine who is a devout Christian called Hillsong a you-know-what (‘cult’ is a very bad word in the Christian world). She said that the permeation of Hillsong music was dividing her small Anglican congregation. ‘If I wanted to go to Hillsong, I’d go to Hillsong,’ she vented one day, ‘but I don’t because it’s a cult.’ I hadn’t said it, she had.

  So I dipped an apprehensive toe into the fascinating pool of cult theory to see if any of it was relevant to Hillsong. It was all Hillsong.

  Beneath the surface of cult research you find very little difference between the major theorists’ conclusions. The researchers agree on all the criteria necessary for an organisation or a group to be considered to have the qualities of a cult, thought-reform program or mind-control system. They just categorise the process differently. One analysis of twelve-step groups, the most famous of which is Alcoholics Anonymous, suggests one hundred different signs, though psychologist Edgar Schein has suggested belief change happens in only three steps: unfreezing, changing, refreezing.

  Getting people to change their belief systems and to behave differently than they did before is a lot easier than it appears.

  There is no need for whips and chains. Psychological control is agreed to be the most powerful force driving any other form of control, such as physical or financial. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

  What all the experts conclude is that there are definitive ways of creating change in human thought, attitudes and the resulting behaviour. Physical disorientation, sleep deprivation, isolation, the inducing of extreme emotional states, particularly guilt and fear, are some of the basic techniques that will weaken mental strength and increase compliance. It works in domestic violence situations, as a primitive torture method, and in cults. It’s effective, but it’s nothing new.

  The only people who disagree with a relatively uniform body of knowledge are those suggesting that adults cannot be manipulated. Adults, it is argued, are responsible and aware of the choices that they make. Journalists report that no one at Hillsong has a gun demanding money. This is true. So what inspires people to devote so much of their time and money to a group so soon after joining? How do you fi nd yourself applauding the senior pastor’s cover-up of his father’s sexual misuse of the same role and powers? It’s actually not hard. Most importantly, whatever you call it, no one who has been brainwashed believes they’ve been brainwashed. The Western world first heard the term ‘brainwashing’ in 1951 from American journalist Edward Hunter. He had learned, via people coming to Hong Kong from China, that the communist process of ridding people of the vestiges of their old belief system was called colloquially hse nao, meaning literally ‘wash brain’ or ‘cleansing the mind’. Current mainstream theorists maintain that ‘brainwashing’ is an extreme event and only takes place in severe circumstances where people who are facing direct physical threat change their beliefs for survival. The notorious kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst, who later participated in a bank robbery, is one such example. Despite their compliance with brainwashing, the victim knows who is the enemy.

  In 1956 psychiatrist Dr Robert Lifton came up with the idea of ‘thought reform’ after examining how the Koreans changed their political mindset. He looked specifically at how non-violent measures were able to create and sustain brand-new belief systems and behaviours in individuals and communities. He developed eight criteria that, carried out in order and in combination, have been shown to produce measurable thought reform: Milieu Control, Mystical Manipulation, Demand for Purity, Culture of Confession, Sacred Science, Loading the Language, Doctrine over Person and Dispensing of Existence.1Out of all the research, I chose to examine Dr Lifton’s eight criteria more closely because he’s a forefather, so it’s like quoting from the King James Version, Old not New. Many of the more recent theorists based their work on his foundation.

  There is ongoing debate about consent. Some experts in the seventies and eighties were involved in deprogramming people involved in cults at the request of their family. As this often required the physical removal of a person from their environment, some individuals considered themselves kidnapped and subsequent lawsuits bankrupted the professionals involved. At times, consent is in the eye of the consenter.

  Consent can be hard to measure or define. One approach is to inspect whether there is deception involved. What I think I’m agreeing to, and what I’m really agreeing to. Sales contracts allow a ‘cooling off ’ period, in consideration of impulsive decision-making. In any case, influence, persuasion and coercion can be honest. They become dishonest when the power equation is way off keel, when an individual or group’s true agenda is not presented initially and nor are the obligations and requirements involved in what is being offered.

  There are several expressions of thought reform, after all, that we welcome, fund, encourage, demand and expect. We privilege good education for this reason. We want our children to learn some habits and not others. The best schools isolate children and indoctrinate them appropriately.

  We enjoy the gimmicks of advertising and marketing no matter how sneaky. We like going shopping to be like the pretty people in their beautiful houses on TV. We congratulate ourselves on how much choice we have.

  We accept political propaganda as part of the cultural furniture, no matter how frightening or loaded it is. Politicians use all of the same techniques as evangelists, it seems, only with better paid advisers. We see through them. We’re smart.

  We are cynical and world-weary. Can’t shock us. There’s nothing we don’t know, we’ve seen it all before. We know people lie, get caught and lie again. We understand that our society is full of all kinds of manipulations and trends. We live in an age when the buyer had better beware, because there’s no sympathy out there.

  Since we have so many freedoms and options, we think we’re very clever. We think we’re consenti
ng to everything we do. No one makes decisions based on emotions any more. That would be ignorant.

  Because we can isolate muscle groups and Blackberry our time, we assume we know everything about life and people. We believe we are rational decision-makers. Everybody’s an internet-educated expert. We know we’re smarter than ever before and, thanks to Oprah and therapy, much more in tune with our real emotions.

  Especially about the big stuff. We know what’s true. We live in the age of consent.

  We also don’t dare to acknowledge the influence that thought-reform systems have had on us. It has worked for politicians and demagogues down the ages. Does this mean that Hillsong is no better than the Moonies? It all comes down to what you consider to be an individual’s capacity to consent.

  LIFTON’S EIGHT CRITERIA FOR THOUGHT REFORM

  MILIEU CONTROL

  This involves the control of information and communication both within the environment and, ultimately, within the individual, resulting in a significant degree of isolation from society at large.

  The only thing that is missing for me is the dance music and the dealers, although in the good old days there were plenty of people with eyes rolled back in their head. I guess a double-shot of white chocolate mocha coffee from Gloria Jean’s outside might do the same. Apart from that, Hillsong provides everything else that a good nightclub should, and it does it with the finest and most expensive of equipment.

  If there were Christian dance music, I’d have stayed. It’s another thing evangelicals must contact the gay community about: they’re missing the best music. My bet is that they’re not far off as there is Christian dance music now, just not in the actual churches. It goes ‘doof doof doof Christ is the future, doof doof doof Christ is the future’. Suddenly I feel like jumping up on the podium and giving a special offering for no reason at all.

  Are the people using these techniques aware of the science behind what they do? Hillsong is not a meeting place of rocket scientists. Curiously, most of those who have been close to the men at the top report that they generally have no idea of the actual effect a church service has on people’s lives. They’re not doing it on purpose; they just know it works. It’s worked for generations.