BHoP#372 Cults and Communal Living

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1:23We are recording in the morning and it is pushing 90 degrees. We got a burn ban on for some time. Burn ban east of the 100th meridian is you're in a strange season at that point. It's Arkansas. I got trash to burn. It's a controlled burn is the only way I can keep the tickling. What's the man supposed to do with this trash if he doesn't have a burn barrel? Yeah. I came home late one evening after a meeting and couldn't get in the back door because it was guarded by the biggest spider I've ever seen. There are a million smaller spiders on its back. And I began to ponder like into the Lajjana or like into Jonah under the Gordvine. And I thought many things as I walked through the darkness toward my front door. But here we are.

2:24I do not have an internet t-shirt. I live in Flutterburger country. That's just stuck in town. Yeah. I don't know if it's Stockholm syndrome or what but when I first had it it was the OKist burger I've ever had and now I'm kind of really into it. So I don't know what that means. Yeah. It's not. It's kind of a kernel curts sort of situation. Yeah. So you have been up the river for a while and it is sweaty there. I think that that's it's really the Dr. Pepper milkshake at Waterburger. It's not. It's not the burger at Waterburger. Yeah. I real real our cans and snow David's burgers is where it's at. OK. But it's a person who has went to and fro in the earth. I don't know what's going to take you or how long it's going to take to get a portillo is down here. But we're working on we're a culverts or a culverts. We're actively working on both of those behind the scenes trying to get the try to get the sponsors Brian Brian Stacker is on it for us. So Brian Brian Stacker get on that.

3:25So yeah, here we are. We're going to an interesting story for you today. One that I don't think has ever been covered in a podcast. I think I think I haven't seen anything. We're breaking the story. It's a it is a first. Yep. And it touches on Luther. Some of you guys might actually like that one. You know, so. So let's let's dive on in there and tell the folks who were who and what we're talking about today. We're talking about a group called Christ household of faith. Located seemingly in some measure still in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. And it's it's commonly called a cult. And so before we tell the story such as this publicly available and not alleged. I want to I want to talk about the idea of a cult. That's the word you're going to find used everywhere except in parts of the press online

4:29that you can find anything about this or about it's it's a long time leader who died a few years back five or six years ago Donald all is Barry. The word cult is interesting because it's still used all over Netflix documentaries, YouTube comments, right? But it's it's not one that people are going to use who studied these things professionally. I think the reason being just the amount of moral disapproval contained in the word. Yeah, yeah, it's a tricky word because it's tricky word. You go like dictionary definition. It's going to be something like intense devotion to specific leader or idea or system. Yeah. And you know, that's not the historical definition because any almost any religious group fits under the historic definition of a cult. The modern definition is this sort of authoritarian or extreme devotion to an idea.

5:31If it's kind of a bad look if everyone who is intensely devoted to a single person or ideas a cult, you know, yeah, don't dig too deep into any religious group's history or modern. Yeah, it it is also very much a 20th century word in the way that it's still used because it's meant to contrast some kind of in group that is generally very devoted. And then also another cold word brainwashed generally by a very strong leader. Brainwashes a word you don't hear enough anymore. It's kind of like quick sand and electric heels despite the fact that everyone is staring at screens all the time. We don't use the word anymore. We don't use the brain. Yeah. So yeah, it's cult along with brainwashing kind of indicates number one. The surrounding society is just not that religious or it's religious in very clearly marked

6:32extremely popular very large ways. Okay. So you got to go back to America is described religiously by kind of a famous book from the 1960s Catholic Protestant Jew. Those are the divisions. They're honestly were never really that many Jews. So you could say Catholic and Protestant to be honest with you. Everything else is kind of a blip on the radar. But you have a couple large divisions. Everyone slots into them somewhere and anything that isn't that then quickly gets defined particularly when and if it's new as a cult. And I mean, obligatory we have to bring it up every episode. This is kind of what Japan does with the concept of religion. You know, everything that isn't the shinto Buddhism mix that is standard Japanese religion is is quote a religion unquote and gets kind of filed as weird, right?

7:37They even come up with a term that we use in English now new religious movements to cover things that are often called if it's in a Netflix documentary a cult. So I think that I think it's just it's worth looking into the word partly because as soon as you say it, you're already implying and probably even alleging certain things. Yeah, you're stigmatizing it the very least. And when you are trying to look into something and so let's just kind of tell the basic story here, you're going to find those implications or allegations in every story. And I'm not trying to decide today what happened, what didn't happen. But you're not going to be surprised to find those implications or allegations in anything that's ever been labeled by anyone else, but particularly by local press as a cult. The Christ household of faith is originally from Northern Minnesota.

8:39It gets started really within a single circuit of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod in Northern Minnesota, especially in the interaction between two pastors who were very recent sem graduates, got named Paul, not exactly sure how or even if he's related to hermenaughtan in any way, probably somewhere back there, but not sure, don't know really. He had just graduated from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, having grown up in Brazil. And the man who really is the leader of Christ household of faith until his death in 2020 is done on Alzbury at that time, a brand new graduate of Concordia Theological Seminary in Springfield, Illinois. Alzbury two years after his ordination would be off the roster of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, we don't have access. I don't.

9:40The Colonel being a Colonel might have access to all sorts of things. I don't have. Right. So all files are redacted. We don't know what's going on. Okay, there you go. So it's the kind of standard Trump 2.0 type of stuff there. We don't have access to why. We know he was removed. It's clear that as of 1967, he is already trying to gather people into what is basically a communal experiment in living that was really not that unusual in 1967. Yeah. We were in another, you know, in the 19th century, we had in America in the early and mid 19th century. We had a lot of experiments in communal living, right? Yeah. Shakers, Onida, Brook Farm, Amanda Colonies, you know, new harmony, places like that. Goes in cycles. So now we're in the 60s, different kind of communal living people from a different side

10:44of the tracks are into it. Unless of course, you happen to be this particular group in the late 60s. You'll get kind of another cycle of it again in the early 90s too. But yeah, it's not entirely going to hurt of an American in the late 60s to do communal living. But you tend to think of it at that time in terms of hippies and kind of leftist isn't the right word, although they would be that way outside mainstream society. Yeah. As communal living always is, you do. Yeah. The fact is that you get it, you get it in pockets even before the late 60s and the most notable one and the one to which this is just oral history stuff that I've collected. So that's all this is worth is that somehow all's berry had some kind of significant contact with a group that still exists called the way international that is headquartered and had recently moved in the 60s to a, I want to say it's like maybe 150 acre farm in Ohio.

11:52And that was led by a former United Church of Christ minister named We're Willie. And that communal living experiment was in some way in some measure. Again, this is oral history. So I don't want to say in public, this is exactly what happened. I don't know. That was all berries model for having a farm and bringing everyone together and living together on the farm in northern Minnesota. The issue that seems to have come up again, oral history is that when you are trying to do that, if it's not sufficiently isolated, you just become the source of immense interest and suspicion. And that's the reason this may be certainly you can see where I'm going to go with my assessment of communal living later on, but certainly distrust from the other people in a small town.

12:53So in 1971, CHOF purchases a just recently closed Catholic girl school in St. Paul, Minnesota began moves their operation, their private school, which will go on to have outstanding basketball teams in Minnesota state competitions. And by buying up dozens of homes in the neighborhood, moving all of the members basically into the same area. Yeah. And that's where they are until filing for bankruptcy in 2016. Yeah, it can be kind of tricky to keep all these groups together. You know, something like the way international, it gets, you know, it's almost an episode in and of itself. Yeah, I always get them confused with the family who host the National Prayer Breakfast. I get my odd 20th century movements mixed up. I'm much better a century before.

13:54I'm very locked in to those respiration groups, but it is when you were born. So this is true. You personally win in those days. And so yeah, I know a lot of those guys, right? You know, this Christ household of faith is kind of in that generation, that era when like predecessors to what we do, right? Like guys like Walter Martin were there riding about this stuff, documenting this stuff. It felt more like in the Christians, guys to keep an eye on these groups, you know, in those days. Today, we don't seem to. Now, you know, we're infotain more or we're yelling at the Calvinists or doing something like that, most of the time. Yeah, I mean, I think I think that mention of the family is a helpful one because that that really survives and morphs into something that is not not so strictly communal. Maybe, right. I mean, we think of the family, you think of the National Prayer Breakfast. Right.

14:55And its origin is in a different vision, right, that is more urban because it's located in Southern California. The way and Christ household of faith start out as specifically agrarian experiments, right? Christ household of faith, I think it's really interesting because it's because it stops being specifically not even predominantly agrarian. They're going to retain a farm and we'll talk about that because that's really some of the best access that we have to a current member explaining the group and we'll leave a link in town. They're in a building in town. And what do you do with how do you use a Joseph who had a whole town? That's a different, that's a different experiment in communal living. Yes. And, you know, there are still groups today that have existed since, you know, there are contemporaneous with Christ household of faith who have, who have still made the communal living thing work.

15:56And you have, you have sort of the hippie types who are sort of hanging on. Yeah. You have the right wing groups that really come up in the 90s. That's when they cut their teeth in the 80s and 90s and new groups today. So, there are always groups trying this. What you have with Christ household of faith, they're holding literally all things in common members, as we understand it, members will receive maybe a small monthly stipend or a small regular stipend. Right. Schools all there together, churches there together, home is there together. Yeah. What does that do? Yeah, in your opinion. Right. I think that one thing that that does is that it's always going to limit the group because you are asking every child born into that group and, you know, birth rates are going to remain fairly high in a group like this. So the start tribune article from the assorted bankruptcy proceedings roughly 10, 9, 10

16:58years ago now estimated that at that time the group had about 500 members of whom 200 were children. I mean, that's not a, it's not a proportion. I mean, in most Lutheran congregations, generally speaking, 500 members or 200 children at one time. So when someone grows up in something like that, and this is where, you know, we're using this discussion to talk about larger issues, not to just true crime, chronicle, Christ household of faith or allegations made about them. So we'll mention some of those later. I think that one of the larger issues you have to think about is that if you have converted to something. So in this case, certainly the, the, the basic layer of CHOF is going to be people who were raised Lutheran sometimes rather deeply so Paul lot and having grown up on the

18:01mission field in a very isolated place because his dad was a Lutheran pastor. And Odin basically was supposed to go back to Brazil out of seminary. I mean, he had grown up there. So it kind of makes sense. And due to what he calls church politics, totally believable, honestly, he was not placed there. In fact, he had been called by a congregation, but was not placed there. He was placed in the state of northern Minnesota, right? Makes all kinds of sense, right? Lot of Portuguese speakers in northern Minnesota, similar climates, snake populations, all that kind of thing. So he's placed in northern Minnesota and it is that experience of church politics that makes him see in his reading of, and he, this is his order, CFW, Walter and Martin Luther, his order. CFW, Walter and Martin Luther, that they were seeking a different experience of Christianity than what the Lutheran Church of Missouri Senate offered.

19:04Deeper is one way to put it. What you are asking when you are raising children in such a group is that they somehow have or sense the experience that you had. Yeah. And that is so hard, if not impossible to convey. I think that that's one place to maybe start a larger discussion today as to say, if you are coming out of something, it is much easier to commit to something that is extremely demanding because you, you feel or you sense the urgency of living a more strenuous life. If you're not, if you have taken those things for granted or, you know, just to put a name to some of the allegations, if you have experienced some kind of physical abuse, some kind of child abuse inside such a group, why would you ever share that commitment to have your whole

20:06life together where, yeah, you don't get a salary because you work at a business that's run by the group and your kids go to school for free to the school that's run by the group and you get health care through the group. I mean, like your whole life is inside of the group. You can leave CHOF. You always have been able to. So it's different from what we know about some other similar groups throughout history. But it's very different to have converted to something than to grow up in it. And it's hard for me to see that you can perpetuate that in any kind of way if you're not constantly recruiting new members. Yeah, the only group that has been, that I can think of has truly been remarkably successful and not convert, not proselytizing. I mean, because you take, for example, to shakers who had a pretty bad idea on how to grow things. So they had no relations and therefore no children. Right. They, they died out.

21:07But the Amish don't proselytize. Correct. And they have relatively high retention rates. Yeah. But they do have a system whereby you can leave. But it's a, it's a morally hard system to leave or at least an experientially emotionally hard system to leave. No, that you're completely raised in that. Yeah, you're right. Right. And that's a good comparison point because what's interesting is I don't think that many of the listeners are going to be very sympathetic to CHOF. Right. Certainly not if they've ever heard of it before. And what, you know, we'll bring in the Kira's Madison at the end just to make sure they're not very sympathetic. I know for a fact, partly because of questions we have sitting in our inbox right now that the listeners are more sympathetic to the Amish. And, and I'm way more sympathetic to the Amish. Oh, you know, shocker, right? But just on a, like a human level, it would be, it, I know for a fact, it is harder to leave the Amish. But not that it's impossible, but it's harder because for one, you are growing up in a

22:10complete linguistic subculture. Right. So more so than the technology. Yeah. I mean, it's more fundamental than, you know, the bishop doesn't allow phones or, or motors. Right. Yeah. So I mean, if you leave CHOF, you're at least you're speaking unaccented American English. I mean, I mean, in large part, a lot of our, even the Missouri Senate retention had to do with culture and linguistics. Yeah. And, and, you know, that's not to say they didn't believe the small catechism of the Oxford Confession, right? Not saying that at all. Yes. But those cultural things certainly bound them together in a very strong way. No question. At least that we discount sometimes. We do. No, no, it was a different. There was a different approach that the immigrants had. Yeah. You know, the, you know, it's, it's a little bit different from today where, like, if you're coming up in the 40s and 50s and your church is still doing German and your parents spoke German in large part, they're going to make an effort to make sure you know English because it's very important that you're Americanized. Yes. And not only for world war reasons, necessarily, in part, yeah.

23:14But in part because they thought it was important for their kids to know these things. And so the natural changes that happen because of that. Yeah. But they're still to this day. Many, many people on the roles who are there ostensibly because they have German last names. Yeah. And I think, I think that's natural, right? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you see this in Judaism, cultural Judaism, right? You'll have a completely atheistic person who identifies as Jewish because of the cultural and linguistic reasons. Yeah. Not a, not a very foreign thing, but language is very powerful. The people in this group don't have that. Correct. They're still living in broader society except they're not. They're still linguistically part of society, ethnically, whatever you want to say. And yet their life is revolving around this building and it's other apparatus. Yeah. And I mean, business wise, it's also quite different to live in a city and your businesses

24:17are there. I think they have a roofing business, maybe a garage, you know, a mechanic shop. They're doing business with other people. Yeah. Rather than living completely secluded from other people, right? I mean, the reason that a lot of colleges have always been in the middle of nowhere, right? Why, why is Dartmouth where Dartmouth is or why is this place where that is, is the same reason that a lot of Amish will leave even the rural Northeast because it's relatively vastly more populated. And the Amish are now going to places like rural New Mexico or Colorado or somewhere where it's much harder to grow food, but you're more secluded when you don't have that seclusion. It is, you have to go to other measures, especially to keep people inside a group that is very distinctive whose distinctiveness you're trying to maintain and the way that CHOF has

25:17historically done that is to occupy everyone's social life constantly. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, paging youth sports, right? I mean, like, right? We're actually culturally very good at this. We are. Yeah. Yeah. Is that if I am taking up your schedule, then if you are a person like myself or the Colonel, that limits the amount of time that we have for pondering many things as he was doing in his, you know, spider story that he told earlier, like you can only have your own thoughts when you have your own quiet. But if you are constantly busy with group activities, it's very hard to think outside of the parameters offered in those group activities. Yeah. I mean, the way to really get people away from wanting to do this is to just say that sounds very church-groughty. You know, we're going to have a million activities at the church throughout the way. And there's nothing wrong with building a strong community.

26:20There is to be fair distinction between building community and straight communal living. Yeah. I mean, this is the pooling of assets. And I'm not even saying that communal living is necessarily wrong either. It's just failed pretty much even in acts they kind of give up on it. Look pretty. The Mormons couldn't even pull it off. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And there are Mormon groups out there trying to make this happen. Yeah. It's called United Order. Look that up. Yeah. This is not a Lou Rockwell, you know, podcast or something like that. But I mean, not explicitly to Danny, I guess I would say. Yeah. Okay. You know, but the maintaining of private, at least some measure of private property is kind of important for people's mental and and how are you spiritual states too? Yeah. So quickly erodes the idea, for example, of, you know, of the father is the head of the house. If he is putting everything that he's working for his family toward something else and something outside of that, I mean, we're talking 100% of that property.

27:21That really erodes his authority in some ways, which is paradox, which is a paradox in a Christ household of faith because it's extremely patriarchal. Yeah. You know, and I mean, patriarchalism, let's say, has like a set of ideas about how fatherly authorities should operate. That is a very well taken point to say, and it's visible in every Mormon group that's ever tried to implement, you know, the United Order, for example, as well, is that you can have on paper the father is the head of the household. But if in practice, really in a Mormon case, the bishop in this case, the prophet, you know, prophet Al'sberry, whoever it may be, whatever leader it may be, if that authority is going to be constantly not, not even directly subverted, but constantly set aside for some other set of prerogatives, then it doesn't really matter that on paper, you are asserting

28:24that authority. Right. And in practice, the actual head of the household is the guy who can get the father to do whatever. Right. Okay. That the father doesn't really have his own sphere. That in this case, the church, in other cases, let's say, whatever the media is telling his wife, whatever it may be, the home is not, does not really have its own authority. It's basically just there to produce people and productivity that is useful to the larger thing that can command it at any time. And this is where, to me, if you look at the functioning of what is called a cult, you will see something that resembles modern society just in miniature with different goals. Right. Yeah. I have to support a family, I have to, et cetera, I have to pay taxes, all this kind of thing.

29:26Well, what is that going to go to? Is it going to go to something that I want? No, not necessarily. How much ability do I have to change that? Quite little. What's the tax rate? You know, I mean, that is a very similar situation in this case, the thinking, and I think part of the reason that these things blossom at certain times in American history is, well, it would be better to subordinate myself to this order, to throw in with this lot, then to suffer in the ways that I do outside of it. And I think that's often the thinking for the people that stay inside the Amish Church, too. Like, there might be things objectively more appealing, or you might want more freedom, or you might not be that hot at like reading the German language or whatever, but you know, you just want to roof with your, with your bros or whatever, you know, farm. But the sacrifices that you're making inside a controlling group are much easier to make, or comprehensive or more rewarding than the ones that if you joined mainstream society,

30:30you would be called upon to make. Right. That everyone's doing so much, we don't even really think about it. Yeah. Yeah. And so, these blossom, as we mentioned at certain times, why do you think that this group came up at the time that it did? It's, you know, it's interesting to me, especially with, and I, I would, I would ask you also to talk about the 80s and 90s in a second, because I, I think that there's something interesting there, too. nostalgia has attached itself very intensely, especially for conservative people in the West to the 1950s, and to some degree, especially in people that are like 30 or under to the 1990s, which I find very interesting, because I just, I just remember people, you know, wanting to look sad like Kurt Cobain, but, but when you think back to the 1950s, there was something that at the time, people recognized as soulless.

31:31And that is one of the reasons for the, the popularity of a book. We don't have popular novels anymore, really. Right. Popularity of the novel, the man in the gray flannel suit, that if the American dream is to have a good job, have a house, go to work, it said, good job, be kind of like everybody else, take your vacations at the same places as everybody else, which honestly, if you say it this way in this context, that just sounds like a giant experiment in communal living. Like we're all going to have, we're all going to have the same forward. And we're all going to go to, we're all going to go to Wildwood or wherever we all go, based on what region we live in and that's going to be life. That is not enough for a lot of people. So that what happens with the people not so much who are like baby boomers specifically, but were born during the depression or during the 1920s, they begin to experiment with these things either dropping out as with, you know, to call back to the Hobo episode, the beat

32:35next and the people that Jack Harrowack called the Dharma Bums, or in the 1960s and then beginning with your first baby boomers who are coming of age in the late 60s, you're getting people who want something that I think offers more to life than you get a job, you have like a two or three bedroom house in the suburbs and, you know, that's life. So they kind of want something more out of that. And it's interesting to me that that impulse earlier in American history also existed. So it's what's weird about it is it's kind of right behind the frontier. So we we talked about the Hobos as preserving some sort of frontier ability to disappear. The things that you mentioned a little bit earlier, the O'Nighted Experiment, Brook Farm among the New England, Unitarians, especially those things are all behind the frontier.

33:39So those are people who are living in the 19th century version of were pretty comfortable. Everybody kind of has a, you know, a decent job, etc. is this all there is to life and communal living experiments come out of that. It's going to be different for some of the German examples that you mentioned like the Harmony Society because they're usually fleeing someone telling them, stop me if you've heard this before. Someone in Germany tells them they have to be a certain way and they collectively don't want to do that. So they come to America in order to be the very precise specific kind of German Lutheran that they want to be. Right. What you're saying is always very was on to something. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I think that you, you know, you're going to have to you're always going to get it to be if the group doesn't have a prior coherence and usually American groups don't usually American groups seem to collect around single individuals.

34:42Yeah. The German groups and some other immigrant groups of other kinds, I would mention the old believers among Russians. They are coming as a group to practice a communal way of life. That's the Amish with American founded groups. So whether it's children of immigrants or or whatever, they're usually building something out of dissatisfaction. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that is the case. I mean, that is why Walter and co do come to America to follow one particular charismatic leader. I mean, charismatic in the, in the theological lower case. Yeah. Yeah. And they do, if you, if you squand, they kind of live in community at first and that's what causes. Initial controversy. As far as the house is getting built first. Yeah. And it fell apart relatively quickly. And then we get Walter riding his essays against communism and stuff later. So it all worked out. But it is interesting.

35:43And I don't know if you want to get into the theological side before we get into the abuse side or not. Do you have a preference? I want to talk about the abuse side because I think it links up to something we, we said. Yeah. Let's go ahead and talk about abuse. Yeah. So if you look for the, it's an, it's an, it's an organic, it's a Minnesota organic farming website called heavy table. Nice. Everybody, everybody in the folks know they know they're reading. They're all going to it. They're reading heavy table. Com. Nice website. Great article. One of the things that the, the journalist starts out by saying is, you know, we thought about once we figured out what we were dealing with with this, this property called Natura Farms, still operated by Paul Odden. We thought about not publishing anything about his farming methods and the way that he's been rebuilding topsoil and his expertise and growing berries and because of abuse allegations,

36:46both physical abuse against children and, you know, other, other forms of abuse to put it, to put it delicately against women and children. C-H-O-F and this stuff is what you're going to find on the Internet, besides discussions of bankruptcy. So I'm not shocking anyone who knows anything about this. What's interesting to me is not that, you know, I or anyone else on the, on the internet can, can prove or disprove those allegations. Those things always come up in groups where the family does not have its own integrity. Mm hmm. So to me, there's the issue of, okay, yeah, how were children being punished? That's a question that people bring up with CHOF. Was it severe? Was it overdone, right? I mean, that's all on the table. But also, notably, the group was sued at various times for child support.

37:51Because someone would leave the group with children and then sue for support to the group knowing that the father of the children didn't have money at his own. Right. And I think what's interesting there is that the family then doesn't really have any particular integrity because it's permeable based on the group decision or prophetic decision or whatever. And that comes up over and over and over again. It's interesting to me that in the case of the early Missouri Synod that you brought up, the, I guess, not so much abuse accusation, necessarily, certainly infidelity accusation, leveled against the the bishop of the Saxons, Martin Stefan, is really in the same vein that potentially anyone can belong to him. And what he says is what needs to happen.

38:52The Missouri Synod shifts that in a very radical direction towards almost total sovereignty of the local congregation. That's a discussion for another time. But it's fascinating to me that particularly, if you look into anything that anyone has ever called a cult, it's not just that the allegation comes up. But things are proven in many cases or explicitly part of the group's teaching in the case of O'Nida that we mentioned earlier that the family doesn't have any particular integrity. Right. It may not exist as in the case of O'Nida or the shakers or if it does exist, the family is subject to the large. You're superseded by a large body. That's right. And this is not unique to this group. I mean, it's a pattern that you see in various different groups who live in this way. Not to be fair. You see abuse in all kinds of organizations, regardless of

39:57theology or polity. But we're talking about CHOF here, which is why it's coming up. One of the things that we see in the research is a lot of this abuse is also extreme discipline. Whatever that means. We don't know what that concretely meant, but it is brought up over and over again by people claiming to have grown up in it too. Right. And yeah, you want to thread the need a little bit finally too, because in the modern day, any kind of group that disciplines their children in any way can sometimes be demonized. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. It seems to be legitimate abuse of situations, things like that. Yeah. And so you have that. It all centers around the group. And to be fair in this case, it centers around an individual as well.

40:58And that's one of the hallmarks of what we're talking about here. You know, extreme devotion to the idea or extreme devotion to an individual. And you can have it on a micro level in congregations, for example, which can not be healthy. You can have it in civil governments as well, which can also be not very healthy for a larger number of people. This is kind of a general human foible. To orbit around people like this. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I don't actually find that this is unique to religion. It's not unique. Not at all. Not at all. Yeah. It seems to have to do, I mean, it, and I want to talk, I do want to talk about the theology of it in a second, but it just as an observation about human nature, it has to do with an individual who becomes indispensable for someone else's life, but not inside any God-ordained means for being a dispensable.

42:06I mean, I'm down with it if we're in a feudal system. You know, I'm the anti-prefecture system, let the record show. There you go. That's different. Something about like certain weights of rice carried in bags of a certain size. My entire economy is built around Koku. Right. But when you become indispensable, but you're not the person's husband or you're indispensable, but you're not the person's grandson or whatever the indispensable role is, that is when these kinds, these things seem to absolutely to blossom. Right. So there might be enormous amounts of infidelity in a mixed-gender workplace. We're not really going to talk about that as a social problem because we are so committed to having men and women together all day, every day in the workplace, spending much

43:06more time at work together than they do with their families. We're not going to talk that much about sexual abuse in public education because we're committed to it as a system. Right. Societally, we're not going to treat it as the same kind of problem. There aren't going to be Netflix documentaries and the same proportions as there are for weird religious groups that are much, much, much smaller. So I think that the inability to see this as a structural problem in human nature is the reason that it gets isolated to a problem with conservative religious groups specifically. I don't see perversion and misuse of closeness to vulnerable people as the as anything like the exclusive preserve of supposedly conservative, supposedly religious people. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, would you talk a little bit about the 80s and 90s?

44:08I'm not really aware of that. And I think it might be interesting to the listeners just for the purposes of if there's an nostalgia bubble, we haven't popped yet today. In which context? Yeah. I mean, the formation of communal living groups. Yeah. I think that. Okay. So as the 70s goes on, you get into the 80s, you get at the same time, the Christian Dominion movement, you get guys like Rushdunee coming into their own, Rushdunee respectors because we couldn't in the homeschool without Rushdunee. And homeschoolers, we are in the Venn diagram of this because we have chosen to remove ourselves from the system, right? Yeah. So you have the Christian Dominion movement and this kind of brings us back to the way international. You know, it's always the Calvinists somewhere. Although somebody, you know, some people I've now associated the way with Calvinism, but if but it's discb-2, it's an interesting mix. Neither here nor there.

45:10So you have the burgeoning homeschool movement, which comes up in right-wing Christianity, truly, and finds its own. Yeah. There've always been left-leaning people that have done it too for different reasons, but the kind of the main, you know, understanding, the stereotype of homeschool really comes from that. Court cases were one, things like that. At the same time, the militia movement is getting very big as well. Those people are going to live not always and really not as a rule, communally, but certainly in communities. And they are coming up in a big way in the 80s, and it really comes to a head in the 90s and two notable events. They all have Christian undertones, however, and it all kind of does go back to Dominionism. I don't have any evidence that Christ household of faith has adopted, you know, Greg Bonds talking points or something like that, because they're a little bit earlier and in a very different stream. Yes. But you have this, so what you also have in the 80s, of course, is Christians really latching onto media,

46:13having big media sources. And so they're being very counter-cultural for the first time in a long time. We talk about the cultural Christianity of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but we forget a lot of what we deemed as, you know, like something that was always Christian was actually a pretty novel at the time. We were getting very comfortable in the 50s and 60s, and things were kind of coming into the churches, people were dropping out of the churches, so the people who were being very committed to their faith, especially as the 80s come on. That's when you see the guy with the mullet saying, he man is the devil, right? Or something like that. And we laugh at it, it's kind of funny, whatever. Maybe the guy has a point. But that was radical to the Christians at the time when they latched onto it because it was calling them out of the world, telling them to be different. The reason why these people got an audience was because it was something different and was something attractive. So you have this dominion mandate, you have this big movement that is

47:16beginning the blossom of Christians who are pulling their kids out of the world, we're pulling themselves out of the world in many different ways. And you see examples of this and virtually every conservative denomination at the time. And so we look back and think, oh, well, the Christians were always kind of weird and goofy and didn't like he man all the way back. It really goes in cycles. And the 80s and 90s were a big cycle of this. Only now, and only say in the last 20 years, because again, it cycles, if you even go into the early 2000s, Christians are still this way. They're writing books against the Da Vinci Code, right? You know, there, that's kind of the last gasps of what I'm talking about here. And now you're in the deconstruction fad. And now media, everybody has a channel, everybody talks. So you get a rapid deconstruction, you have this big push to not look different. People don't realize you're not doing that because you want the gospel to predominate. You're doing that because you're rejecting what you see is the very rigid fences

48:17that your parents erected. And they erected them because of what happened in the 80s and 90s. Yeah. And I mean, that's fascinating because the rigid fences look rigid, whether you're raised in it, something someone else is calling a call, or you were raised on veggie tails and like crossway Bible curricula. Yeah. Exactly. Like, like, you can't rigid is not some like hard line where it's like, okay, like we have now softened up sufficiently or hardened up enough that our children will be bulletproof. I wish that I could tell the listeners, besides the use of the word of God. Here's the bulletproof way. The thing is, you are going to be too conservative, abusive, whatever. Right. If your child has some commitment to contemporary parliance deconstructing, you're going to be lame, you know, all boils off, not cool, liberal, not cool. Okay. To your

49:22child who wants to be harder than you for reasons that may have nothing to do with anything you've ever thought of because you weren't growing up when your child did with the assumptions that your child does. And this is where the generational stuff that Americans use to describe themselves now in their in their Twitter bios. This is where this stuff does have some reality because especially if you're going to base your life off of your experiences and then you're making drastic religious changes on the basis of those experiences, you just cannot expect other people to share them. Right. And just to clarify, I'm not saying that in the 60s and 70s or 50s or whenever that churches weren't stricter. In general, they were. Yeah. What I'm saying is the kind of intentional taking back of education and the discerning media stuff became really at the forefront. Yeah. People were careful about what they watched and did in the 50s, 60s and 70s, not saying that at

50:22all, but a cultural engagement, a very overt cultural engagement or disengagement two sides of that same coin. Yeah. Really comes to the forefront of this time. It's not as if everybody was a liberty in the 50s, 60s and 70s, not saying that at all, but they had become culturalized and and guys like Rush, Joni, and I keep going back to him because I really don't believe we can understate his influence on American Christianity. We've pointed to some other big characters, but he is sort of the intellectual underbelly of a lot of this. What a noun. Yeah. And people will hear that name and go, oh, well, I reject theonemy or something like that. I mean, that's fine. You do that. But the fact is you wouldn't be homeschooling your kids about him. You know, and in large parts. And other people who fought the fight, I'm not taking that away from them. I'm saying for for a lot of what you see, he is a very big figure. He looms large. And that is a historical point, right? So you can you can you can not

51:26want to be omniscient any way, shape or form, even though you're reading Hower Was, which is like the poor man's anabaptism, right? Right. You cannot want to be omniscient at all. You have to recognize that they went to jail in order to have brokyle schools, right? And to opt out of public school mandates. So you have to recognize that people who are going to be uncomfortably weird and demanding, certainly in a democracy or going to move things more than people who are going with whatever the general flow is. I'm not saying that because I like I personally have somebody was like, here's my experiment in communal living. It's going to be so great. We're going to we're going to do mountains and vests every day. We're only going to use TLH. What I mean, whatever kind of Lutheran selling points, no, no, no, and twice on Sundays. I'm not interested. I have no personal interest in such an experiment. You have to recognize however, people that do want to have weird demanding ways

52:28of life in a democracy are going to push boundaries farther and faster than people who say, I'm just kind of doing what's normal. Whatever that is at the time. For the record, I like daily TLH mountains. And I do appreciate the efforts of people that I can we can say that we appreciate the efforts of people pushing the needle. And we profit from that without embracing Christ's household of faith. And then what we're saying with the people who are, you know, quote, unquote deconstructing now is they're going to lump any Christianity like a regular Southern Baptist church. The most the most vanilla thing you can find out there, pick whatever you want. And say it's aarian, whatever. Yeah, it's it's just like this. It's it's the same thing. It's not. We're not saying that everybody who lives in communities like this either. We are pointing out historically how and why they failed. Which is, you know, seems to be true. Right. But but not everybody who lives in community is necessarily going to do this. Their economic realities associated with it,

53:30however, yeah. And their functional family related problems with it at times. But, you know, people, because we're Netflix brained, some people will hear us talking about this and say, Oh, they must be on the side of the people who were taken to vacation Bible school twice. And now they're on Twitter saying, Oh, I was raised in church. Let me tell you about the coat like environment that it was. Yeah. Well, I mean, the the thing about being that flick sprained is that Netflix is is deciding by airing what it airs and telling the stories that it tells. And I'm not blaming Netflix for this. I'm not saying it's some like, you know, algebra as a conspiracy kind of Tucker Carlson talking point here that as a math respecter that really upset me. I'm saying that you can be you can be as a common dating and a common dated as you want to be the fact that you are affirming that the Bible is true. Yeah, they've been used to not any principle. They're now saying you're oppressing me. Correct. Yeah.

54:34And they're going to so you know, don't don't be afraid to be weird. I mean, if you're any kind of conservative Christian in the current year, you're going to be weird. There was a whole political campaign against not being weird very recently if you recall. It's okay to be different. And hey, it's okay to live outside the social norm. It is a it is a spectrum. Truly. We like to talk about spectrums. We do. We do. And and so, you know, make make the most of it. But in this particular case, we know it boils down to, you know, the abuse what we've seen, the economic realities of it because they have gone bankrupt. And and then, you know, kind of at the at the heart of this is a charismaticism. Capital sea. Yeah. And he, he, Al'sbury did identify himself as a prophet from every single scene. Right. It's interesting to me that this comes about at a time when the LCMS was beginning to dip its toes into charismatic theology. I don't know that Renewal and Missouri

55:38exists at in the late 60s. Not as an organization. Yeah. It will be the it will be the early 70s when the LCMS first tackles this in a CTR document. It will be the late 70s when they attack when they when they answer it again. And they will answer it again a couple decades later. Or so with a document on spiritual gift inventories. But they really hit hard and I believe it's 72 and 77, maybe 78. Yeah. When you have open revelation, it becomes a very powerful tool for spiritual abuse. Yes. And yeah, I believe it's really at the heart of what we see here. God is talking to me to now disobey me is to disobey God. And that becomes a very dangerous place. Yeah. I think that that one of the theological takeaways from this is that when the ministers are not limited by the doctrine of Soluscriptura. Yeah. That is you have no authority as a minister of God really outside of

56:39the Bible. Right. You don't you don't have other authority. So the word of God doesn't tell this guy, you know, how to make it how to make his kids dress or whatever. You can have an opinion. You're welcome to your opinion. But that's that's all it is. Right. And I think that in these groups, you never and sometimes it's formal as it obviously was with Allspherry. Sometimes this is just how a normal church slides into situations like this. Whatever the nature of the of the extrabiblical command is, because you can't any longer tell the difference between what God is saying and therefore isn't incumbent on any human being. And what is just your opinion? Can't tell the difference. Right. That always drifts toward in favor of human opinion. Human opinion always. So there's ways. Questions of liberty. I mean, obviously the biblical, you know, admonishment to modesty. That's obviously there. If you want to talk about dress, things like that. But the way of life, the way you conduct your business, the Bible, of course, informs all of these things. But there are places where

57:44there is liberty, but liberty quickly becomes obligatory, becomes an obligation if we're not very careful. And it's been interesting to see the pendulum swing because the Bible does have standards from modesty. The Bible does have standards for conduct and how to run the home. The pendulum has shifted in some circles, even within the LCMS to its anti-gospel. We abuse the language so much. It's hard for me to use the English language sometimes to have any standards too. And so you see hints of this deconstructionism that we talked about with Netflix stuff, even within our own groups, because not only not really necessarily because of pastors per say, but because fathers did their jobs in a good way. And people pushed against that. But the whole idea of fatherhood or motherhood, especially in this case, gets tainted when

58:46when revelations come into the fray, when when obligations are put upon people that the scriptures do not, the whole kind of overarching structure is tainted. And it makes our job as pastors harder, but it makes the job of parent, the vocation of parent, rather difficult as well, living in that society. Which again, as you mentioned before, in the case of, say, travel sports and other things, we're very willing to seed that to other groups, just because of the propaganda machine against religion, it's bad when the church says it. It's bad when dad says it. Okay, when the boss says it. Okay, when the coach says it. I think people have tremendous difficulty seeing that because it's not explicitly religious. Yeah. You know, I mean, the workplace does not announce itself as secular. It's audio operant. That's right. Opera means do what you want to do. Right. And I think I think people have tremendous difficulties seeing that because they think the first commandment just covers what our society

59:50talks about as religious activities. Right. Right. Rather than the hearts commitments. Yeah, exactly. So we aren't time any final words for the folks at home. I hope it's been interesting to you. And again, I will, I will put the heavy table.com big supporters. We are of them. We hope one day they will be of us. Article interview with Paul Odin. Very interesting there. And probably the best access that we have to a current member speaking about the group. If you have more information or you are interested in some of the other things we've mentioned, whether it's on NIDA or the Amish or anything else that's similar to family, please let us know. We're interested ourselves. But I hope that in opening up the realm of questions and discussion, we've also helped you see why this matters more than simply. It's an interesting story. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thank you, everyone for listening. Please be sure to check out Memento at Memento70.com. The first

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