Posted by Perry on May 05, 2011 at 15:36:44
In Reply to: Re: Gordon & Gary Shepherd discuss their new book on the COG posted by Frank Simmons on November 26, 2010 at 02:19:15:
No, you did not hear someone calling for neutrality. As Thinker points out below, I never claimed to be neutral. I think it's pretty obvious from my post that I am not. On the other hand, as Thinker and Farmer point out, the academics I refer to do claim to be neutral and objective when they clearly are not.
If they truly were neutral and objective they would not completely disregard the experiences of former members or the second generation, who were never members in the first place but religious slaves, who could provide perhaps the most useful insights into the group. Refusing to consider those experiences means they are dishonest academics that have their own biased agenda, in my opinion. You can hardly get more dishonest than Gordon Melton, for example, who for years wrote critically about the COG/TFI saying they could never regain credibility after the child sex scandals, yet after he was payed by the group changed his tune and wrote very favourably about them.
I have some first hand experience with how those academics treat with contempt former members. When I finished a draft of my Chancellor article I decided to first send it to the journal Nova Religio, rather than to the publication that eventually published it, Cultic Studies Review. I did so knowing full well that its board and contributors are largely apologists for new religious movements, the term they prefer over cults. I thought my draft could benefit from their critiques and I was curious to see how they would react to it. Three reviewers read it and I was sent their comments along with the rejection notice suggesting I submit it to Cultic Studies Review instead. There were some good suggestions and I cut out some sections based on them. However, there were just as many condescending comments and put downs that I found rather troubling, and none of the reviewers seemed able to understand the point of my article, one dismissing it is simply an overly long book review. On top of that, in the process of email communication with the editor I received in error a private email between the editor and one of the reviewers who I think hit "reply all" by mistake. That email contained a further insult that indicated they were trying to deal with me carefully and not "ruffle any feathers". Yet by their ignorance and insensitivity, they still managed to offend me.
Here's a quote from Margaret Singer on the subject:
"Hundreds of other cult leaders have gathered far more followers than Jones by promising new psychological and spiritual utopias. They have succeeded by combining various ages-old psychological and social persuasion techniques in an atmosphere os Madison Avenue soft-sell approaches. Because most of the followers have been youthful or poor, little attention and credence has been given to reports from ex-members, families and friends who report the effects of the techniques of manipulation used by the groups. Representative Leo J. Ryan understood the manipulation phenomena people were describing to him and he lost his life in a Guyanese jungle investigating how Jim Jones “bent minds.”
And here's what I wrote on this issue in my article critiquing Chancellor's book:
"Chancellor does acknowledge that his book is not the whole story and that The Family requires a broader assessment from academics as well as former members. 32 It is unfortunate, however, that he does not include the voices of at least some former members to provide counterpoints to the more controversial aspects of life in The Family. Instead, he dichotomizes and characterizes former members pejoratively as being either “ the relatively few hostile career apostates” 33 — whatever that implies —or “the thousands of former Children of God who have little or no stake in the outcome.” 34 That kind of black-and-white thinking disregards the middle ground. Hundreds, if not thousands, of former members who are not “career apostates” do have a stake in the outcome because The Family had a negative impact upon either them or their loved ones, especially those of the second generation, or they still have personal family members and friends in the organization. Some former members might have provided useful insights to Chancellor’s effort to understand what life is like for ordinary members. Instead, their exclusion helps create a distorted picture."
The number 33 in the middle of that text refers to this footnote:
[33] Chancellor’s use of the phrase “career apostates” reveals his bias in the debate over the reliability of accounts by former members of cults or new religious movements. It appears that Chancellor sides with those scholars, such as Melton, who discount the validity of critical former members’ testimonies while naively accepting current members’ testimonies. There are scholars who disagree with that position. Benjamin Zablocki, for example, conducted an empirical study that showed that the reliability of former members is equal to that of those who stayed in one particular group. Zablocki, Benjamin. “Reliability and Validity of Apostate Accounts in the Study of Religious Communities.” Paper presented at the Association for the Sociology of Religion in New York City, Saturday, August 17, 1996. That paper is cited in Langone, Michael Ph.D., The Two “Camps” of Cultic Studies: Time for a Dialogue, C&S: Vol.1, No. 1, 2001 accessed 30 Oct. 2006