{"id":1282,"date":"2022-04-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1282"},"modified":"2024-12-31T09:42:42","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:42:42","slug":"sex-cult-nun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2022\/04\/09\/sex-cult-nun\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex Cult Nun"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Faith Jones<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>HarperCollins<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, April 9th 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Born into the Children of God, an evangelical, end-times religious order established by her grandfather, David Brandt, Californian activist and lawyer Faith Jones spent her first 23 years moving from place to place \u2013 Macau, Thailand, America, Japan, China, Kazakhstan \u2013 &nbsp;spreading the Word and believing <em>\u201cI would be a missionary until I was martyred in the Tribulation or went up in the Rapture\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The movement, now known as the Family International, had its origins in Southern California\u2019s hippy community in 1959 and bore all the hallmarks of a cult: a rejection of mainstream institutions, obedience to its founder\u2019s idiosyncratic teachings, and the sublimation of the self to the collective. What set the Children of God apart (and occasioned the memoir\u2019s tabloid-esque title) was the primacy given to the \u2018The Law of Love\u2019. Although teaching that sex is pure and Godly is not in itself a bad thing, the idea that all things are lawful under love is an open invitation to abuse. Despite active discouragement of sexual contact between adults and children in the late 80s and the cessation of Flirty Fishing (the recruitment of new members and patrons by seduction) with the advent of AIDS, women were still expected to \u2018share\u2019 themselves with men of the Family upon request and shamed or shunned for being unyielding. Increasingly distressed by these and other strictures and ashamed of her inability to submit joyfully to God\u2019s will, Faith eventually left the Family, home-schooled her way onto the American college system and graduated <em>summa cum laude<\/em> from Georgetown University. It is also here, in the outside world, that she began questioning the Family\u2019s teachings and addressing the trauma of her upbringing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Jones\u2019 experiences share significant similarities with those recounted in Tara Westover\u2019s <em>Educated,<\/em> including an ambivalent relationship with her past. Struggling to understand how her parents allowed her to be abused to the point where she can no longer form healthy or emotionally intimate relationships, she recognises them too as victims of the Family\u2019s ideology: <em>\u201cThey saw themselves as loving, Godly parents\u2026I see it\u2019s how they defined child abuse that made all the difference\u201d<\/em>. She reflects on the irony that a community based on sexual liberation and gender equality quickly devolved into one where women were robbed of physical and social agency, and tries to understand how so many intelligent and idealistic people could inflict such damage. Although she acknowledges that the abuse of women and children is a global problem, her answers are distinctly American \u2013 giving up individual ownership to a collective society leads eventually to an abdication of responsibility \u2013 and I am suspicious of her <em>\u201ccrystalization [of] our fundamental moral philosophy, the DNA of our legal system, morality, and human rights into a single simple diagram that I can teach to a curious eight-year-old.\u201d<\/em> Despite this, her analysis of the causes are thought-provoking and her insights into cult psychology are a valuable addition to a growing body of popular and academic discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Faith Jones HarperCollins Otago Daily Times, April 9th 2022 Born into the Children of God, an evangelical, end-times religious order established by her grandfather, David Brandt, Californian activist and lawyer Faith Jones spent her first 23 years moving from place to place \u2013 Macau, Thailand, America, Japan, China, Kazakhstan \u2013 &nbsp;spreading the Word and believing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[381,390,368,18],"class_list":["post-1282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-381","tag-faith-jones","tag-non-fiction","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1283,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}