Something’s wrong in The Village: issues with separatist sects (Part 1)

In 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released The Village, a film about an isolated community living a seemingly idyllic 19th century rural lifestyle.

The villagers are happy, their elders are wise, and they all speak in a charming olde-worlde brogue. But they have a fear. A fear that prevents them from ever leaving their village. A fear so ingrained that it goes unquestioned.

The villagers believe that terrifying monsters live in the forest surrounding the village. Their co-existence is tenuous – the monsters tend to leave the villagers alone most of the time – and the villagers must always be on guard against the monsters’ displeasure or incursion into their village. The colour red is forbidden in the village, called the ‘bad colour’ because it attracts the monsters.

Shyamalan reveals at the conclusion of the film (spoilers ahead, if you care) that the village is actually situated in the 21st century – a throwback to ’simpler times’, created in the midst of a vast nature preserve by a group of friends who were disillusioned with the modern world (they became the elders of the village). To maintain their illusion, the elders had to prevent their descendants from seeing the outside world, and so created monster suits with which they terrorised the other villagers into submission.

If you haven’t seen the film, it unfortunately ends with the illusion of the village intact. This irked me. If Shyamalan didn’t seem so sympathetic to the cause of these village elders, The Village might have been an excellent indictment against the way separatist religious sects operate.

Which brings me to the point of this post – the problems posed by separatist religious sects to the societies in which they exist. I’m going to focus on two cases, from the US and Australia.

Yearning for Zion
The issues surrounding the case of the recent raid on the Yearning For Zion sect (part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), has knocked me into a bit of a tailspin. It’s no secret that I am not a fan of religion. When I first heard about the allegations of abuse made against the sect, and that the children of the sect had been removed into state custody, my initial reaction, coloured by my negative opinion of religion generally, was that removal of the children was the best scenario. Better to remove the alleged/potential victims from that cloistered environment while investigations are carried out.

But some people, including the American Civil Liberties Union, are worried that the raid on the ranch and the removal of the children was a breach of civil liberties. From the ACLU website:

A representative of the ACLU of Texas is in San Angelo observing the custody hearings currently underway concerning the children of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FDLS), in front of Judge Barbara Walthers of the 51st District Court.  The hearings are part of a standard fourteen-day process mandated by the Texas Family Code, at the conclusion of which the court must return a removed child to the custody of his or her parents unless the government provides sufficient evidence that the child’s physical health or safety is in danger and, despite the government’s reasonable efforts to enable the child to return home, there is substantial risk of continuing danger if the child is returned.

 The ACLU is concerned that:

government may not be complying with the Constitution or the laws of Texas in the execution of its mandate, from how the raids were conducted to whether the current process protects basic rights…The government must ensure that each mother and each child in its custody receives due process of law in determining the placement of the children and other matters regarding the children’s care.

The custody hearings, then, are part of the usual process in suspected cases of child abuse. So what is it about the raids that worries people? As far as I can tell, people are concerned that the government raided the ranch without sufficient evidence of abuse. The phone call that sparked the raids may have been a hoax.

Even if it turns out that the government raided the ranch under a fraudulent report of child abuse, I don’t think the people who authorised the raid are completely at fault. The secretive nature of the sect, their (known) practices concerning marriage at a young age and polygamy, and the previous conviction of their prophet Warren Jeffs for being an accessory to rape, would strain the impartiality of most people. If the sect claims the accusations against it are unfair, then I say it has stacked the deck against itself.

Fear of monsters
Like the village elders in Shyamalan’s film, the modus operandi of groups like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is to use fear to keep their members submissive. The fear of hell, and of the evil forces laying in wait to lead the pious astray, can be used to coerce impressionable sect members into complying with pretty much anything. The testimony of Warren Jeffs’ nephew about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his ‘prophet’ uncle gives us a glimpse into the mindset of a young sect member:

When I was a little boy, around 5 or 6, just attending the regular Sunday school, even when my grandfather was the prophet at the time, behind closed doors, Warren was sneaking around behind and would come down and escort me down the hall and into the bathroom and molest me as a kid. Threatening me with eternal damnation if I did not do exactly what he said.

The children of the sect have no access to the internet, television, radios, newspapers or anything else that might conflict with, or call into question, the teachings of their prophet. The sect has its own doctors and teachers, all on-site at the ranch. The sect members spend their entire lives at the ranch. There is no contact with anyone from outside the sect. Members are told that the outside world is full of evil, and contact with it is a sure way to end up in hell.

As former sect member Carolyn Jessop said:

They were born into this. They have no concept of mainstream society, and their mothers were born into it and have no concept of mainstream culture. Their grandmothers were born into it.

And you couldn’t dream this stuff up: just like in The Village, and just as arbitrary, wearing red is forbidden (in this case, because Warren Jeffs claims that colour belongs to Jesus).

I would say that all this amounts to psychological and emotional abuse, but those things are hard to prove.

Ultimately, the total control the leaders of the sect have over their members leads others to question what they are capable of doing with that control.

If old men have their pick of young women who are brainwashed to believe they are doing their duty by marrying and bearing children, is it such a leap to imagine they might take advantage of that? And in a closed polygamous community, where marriageable women are no doubt in short supply, is it such a leap to imagine that the wife-hungry men (Jeffs teaches that each man must have a minimum of three wives to get the best place in heaven) will reclassify increasingly younger women as ‘marriageable’?

What happens if a young woman decides she doesn’t want to have sex with her 50 year old husband? 

But this post was not written to resolve exactly what goes on at the ranch – it is about the problems the raid on the ranch has posed to the larger society in which it exists. Was the raid constitutional? Were the civil liberties of the sect members breached? Did the Texas government persecute a community for their religious beliefs?

Freedom of religion does not equate to freedom to justify illegal acts in the name of ‘belief’. I don’t think too many people are arguing against that point. But what if the beliefs of a group include complete opacity of their practices to the rest of society? Governments cannot judge if allegations of illegal acts are true if they are unable to penetrate a community. If that community has prior connections to illegal activity (as the FLDS sect did), it is understandable that the government would err on the side of caution. I think it is understandable that the Texas government raided the Yearning For Zion ranch.

I’m going to leave Part 1 there. Part 2 will go into a bit more detail on how the actions of separatist religious sects are not self-contained, but have implications for larger society.

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Tomorrow: When separatists aren’t so separate – The Exclusive Brethren in Australia, their involvement in Australian Federal elections…