The Jesus Army: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

There is a long read on the Jesus Army in today Guardian, and on Sunday the BBC beings showing a two-part documentary series called Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army.

I have been blogging about the Jesus Army several times in the last three years and devoted one of my quarterly Sighcology columns in the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy to it.

Sighcology: The Jesus Army

Somehow Bugbrooke isn’t the sort of place you expect to spawn a dangerous cult. People with well-paid jobs in Northampton, a few miles to the east, search for houses there. It has a pub on its high street and a second just outside the village where you can watch boats go by on the Grand Union Canal. St Michael and All Angels, its church, dates from the early 13th century.

But it was Bugbrooke’s Baptist chapel that in 1969 gave birth to the Jesus Fellowship, later to be popularly known as the Jesus Army. Its leader, a lay pastor called Noel Stanton, soon attracted a younger and larger congregation.

In 1974 the village’s Anglican rectory was purchased to house a Christian commune. By the early 1990s, there were 850 people living in 60 Jesus Army communal households scattered across the Midlands. 

The Army also preached to people in the street, seeking out the addicted and destitute. Some were scooped up and came to live in its communes and work in its commercial activities – the Army operated shops, businesses and two large farms. As Medieval monasteries proved, taking vows of poverty can make you paradoxically prosperous.

Stanton, described in one BBC report as “a firebrand who preached daily about sins of the flesh”, died in 2009. It will come as no surprise to you students of human psychology that allegations he had committed sexual assaults against boys soon began to emerge. 

By 2019, accusations had been made against 43 people who were active in the Jesus Army, and hundreds of former members were seeking damages for alleged abuse. This included rapes, bullying, brainwashing, forced labour, financial bondage and beatings of young boys by groups of men. The BBC was told that children suffered sexual, physical and emotional abuse “on a prolific scale”.

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One of the talents of a backwoods Conservative MP used to be the ability to spot bounders and bad hats – I think it was something to do with the number of buttons on the cuffs of their suits. And you have to hand it to Michael Morris, who sat for Northampton South between 1974 and 1997: he was on to Noel Stanton.

Thanks to the extensive online archive of press coverage maintained by Jesus Army Watch, we can see that in 1985 he expressed concern about members of the Army holding posts as teachers, doctors and social workers: 

“I strongly object to people following a particular cult or philosophy holding an influential position in society where there is a danger they can influence people into their faith.”

A year later he called on Northampton Borough Council to ban the Army from its land and buildings.

Another item you can find in this archive is an article William Dalrymple published in the Independent in 1989 after visiting Bugbrooke. He was only 24, but this was also the year Dalrymple published his first book, In Xanadu. Today he is a much-decorated historian with particular expertise in the Indian subcontinent and its religions.

Dalrymple listed many of the charges laid against the Jesus Army, contrasting this catalogue with the happy experiences of the people he met in Bugbrooke. He then quoted a sociologist as saying that the term “brainwashing” is nothing more than a metaphor used to explain strong religious convictions by people who find them inexplicable.

But Dalrymple had already quoted an account by a former member of the Army that shows this explanation won’t do: 

“You have to fit in,” he says. “They take away your ability to make your own choices and you cannot express your own opinions. If you don't obey Noel you're accused of not loving Christ.”

In the end, he clashed personally with Stanton. “He turned everyone against me,” he remembers. “All my old friends cut me dead. One guy came up to me and fell on his knees crying and weeping, saying 'God forgive him.' It scared the hell out of me. Then they began trying to persuade me I was insane – possessed by demons.”

Eventually he fled to Denmark … but the Jesus People traced him there. “They kept ringing me up and telling me I had the heart of Judas Iscariot and was under God's judgement.”

As a partisan of the Midlands, I take a certain grim satisfaction from seeing a writer who has mastered the subtleties of Eastern religions defeated by those of Northamptonshire.

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It’s easy to call someone like Stanton a hypocrite, but we’re all good at keeping contradictory beliefs and actions well apart in our minds. I recall someone else who shared Evangelical Christians’ remarkable affection for corporal punishment, John Smyth. He was Mary Whitehouse’s barrister and a fellow campaigner for purity, who posthumously brought down an Archbishop of Canterbury.

He had attached himself to Winchester, the public school, leading some pupils in religious discussions. One of the housemasters described a friendly conversation with him. “It’s good of you to give up your time like this,” he said to Smyth, “and the boys obviously enjoy their time with you, but I notice you only ever invite the good-looking boys.”

At this, he recalled, Smyth curled up in his chair into an extraordinary foetal position. I suspect he feared the compartments in his mind were about to be ripped down.

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I no longer see the Jesus Army’s bus, in its Scooby Doo colours, passing through the town where I live; nor do I see it parked up in the centre of Leicester as the crowds are evangelised. The Jesus Centre in Northampton, a striking art deco cinema the cult owned, is now a theatre and conference centre.

A news report I saw late last year said the organisation winding up the Army’s affairs had accepted liability for 264 perpetrators of abuse, but 539 people have been named as offenders by former members.

So far £7.7m has been paid in compensation, the money raised by sale of the Army’s properties. And I am left wondering why this extraordinary scandal has not received more media coverage.

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'Graham', a victim of John Smyth, explains why the attitude of the Church of England means that he cannot move on: "victims have no closure. We do not yet have the truth. We do not yet have personal apology. We do not yet have justice. We do not feel that anything has changed."

"Cottesmore Hunt were about to be forensically challenged - and in real time.  Along with Chris and Megan was Fabian who, armed with a live broadcast camera, captured all the action as it happened and shared it via a live social media stream. The only veil of secrecy the Cottesmore could call upon was the thick mist which shrouded the killing fields."  Northants Hunt Saboteurs are joined for a day by Chris Packham and Chris Packham and the zoologist Megan McCubbin.

Will Tavlin on the strange economics of streaming services: "For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theatre seats."

J.J. Jackson explores East Anglia's hidden man-made and explosive dangers.

A tour of some of the grandest interwar public houses of East and South London in the company of Modernism in Metroland.

"Coming away from a light-hearted festive flick often feels like being sloshed on a cocktail of capitalism and corporate greed. Can’t connect with your children? Just buy their affection with an expensive toy, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All the Way. Want a turkey but there’s hardly any left in stock? Fight with a rival shopper, as per Jamie Lee Curtis in Christmas with the Kranks." Sam Quarton suggests a Christmas horror flick for the anti-festive film lover: The Legend of Hell House.

Alan Robertshaw provides a brief history of blasphemy

They've often been declared dead, but laws against blasphemy haven't quite given up the ghost. Here Alan Robertshaw takes us through their history.

One interesting point is that, in recent centuries, they've been far more about keeping the peace than enforcing orthodoxy in belief. 

Unless you are Mary Whitehouse and John Smyth, of course.

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Madeleine Davies reports on the Makin Review of the Church of England's response to the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth: "Among the conclusions reached by Dr Elly Hanson, the clinical psychologist whose psychological analysis of Smyth is appended to the review, is that 'the beliefs and values of the Conservative Evangelical community in which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, how it went on for so long, and how he evaded justice.'"

"Though Farage has been forced to justify his past praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, there are much deeper questions beyond ideological support that he has to answer about his Kremlin connections, especially given the current war in Ukraine." Peter Jukes lists five questions journalists should ask the Reform UK leader.

Yvonne Jewkes argues that conditions in most prisons mean rehabilitation is impossible.

"Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside." Stephanie H. Murray on the wonder of play streets.

Pamela Hutchinson explains why I Know Where I'm Going is her feelgood film: "Powell had been besotted with the Scottish islands ever since making The Edge of the World in 1937, and he shares that passion here – it’s a film that will make you fall head over heels in love with its landscape."

"Good antiquarian ghost stories emerge from an author’s unsettling experience of dwelling with and delving deeply into the tangled roots of the past." Francis Young reviews The Lammas Ghosts: Fifteen Norfolk Ghost Stories by Barendina Smedley.

John Smyth, Mary Whitehouse and the Gay News blasphemy trial

The blurb on YouTube explains:

In 1977, Gay News, UK, was committed to trial at the Old Bailey for publication of a blasphemous poem, entitled "The Love That Dare Speak its Name" by James Kirkup, which featured a Roman centurion having sexual fantasies about Christ on the cross. Media morals campaigner, Mary Whitehouse, initiated the charge against Gay News for the publication of a blasphemous poem. The programme features re-enactments of the scenes in court as the trial progressed, as well as interviews with Mary Whitehouse and Gay News editor, Denis Lemon.

This dramatisation of the trial was formed an episode of Everyman, the BBC's religious documentary programme, which went out in a late slot on Sunday evenings between 1977 and 2000.

The prosecution counsel was John Smyth QC, who was Mary Whitehouse's favourite barrister but is now best known for posthumously bringing down an Archbishop of Canterbury.

In his piece on Justin Welby and John Smyth, David Aaronovich says of Smyth:

To me, what was clearly being repeatedly beaten and physically punished was his own repressed homosexuality.

It's hard to resist that conclusion, particularly if you add to the evidence this paragraph from p.33 of a Winchester College review of its part in the affair:

The third concern raised in 1978 was described by Euan MacAlpine in an email dated 28 January 2017, as part of the internal investigation conducted by the College. He stated that in 1978 he had confronted Smyth and accused him of inviting "only goodlooking boys" to his house. He stated that Smyth "curled into a ball and admitted he had gone too far". He said he was sitting in an armchair and then "slowly went into the foetal position, knees right up to his chest and arms holding them".

MacAlpine was a housemaster at Winchester, and I have heard him interviewed about this encounter. There he gave the impression that his tone was conversational, not confrontational, and he said he had first observed that it was good of Smyth to give up his time for the boys and that they obviously enjoyed the time they spent with him. Only then did he add the observation about Smyth only inviting good-looking boys, all of which makes Smyth's reaction seem more extreme.

Anyway, the documentary is now of historical interest, and it stands as a warning to those who seek to restore Mary Whitehouse's reputation.

Two questions raised by the John Smyth affair

The announcement that Justin Welby is to hand in his mitre was inevitable. I've formed the impression in recent years that his lack of candour and lack of action over the crimes of John Smyth have made it harder for the Church of England to act against abusers more generally.

I am left with two questions.

The first is to ask if there wasn't something unchristian about the practice of the Iwerne Trust (and of the Titus Trust that succeeded it) of holding camps only for boys from expensive public schools.

Their ambition was to change society by changing its future leaders. But their actions look like a parody of Christ, who included fishermen and a thief among his companions. 

Did they imagine there was a separate heaven for those who'd been to the same schools as them?

My second questions is why Evangelicals are so unhealthily keen on corporal punishment. They continued to fight the ban on it when even the teaching unions had given up:

John Friel, acting for the claimants, told Mr Justice Patrick Elias that the group "believe as part of their religious worship and part of their religious belief, that corporal punishment is part of their Christian doctrine".

Meanwhile, students of human nature will not be surprised to learn that Smyth was an admirer and confidant of Mary Whitehouse.

Do wealthy evangelicals think there's a separate heaven for the privately educated?

You may know the story of Mary Whitehouse's fellow campaigner John Smyth QC. The new Private Eye reminds us:

In a purpose-built garden shed at his home in Winchester, Smyth administered sadistic beatings to his victims until they bled. When his criminal abuse was first revealed to church leaders in 1982, Smyth was hustled out of the country to Zimbabwe there he is set up his own network of Christian camps were at least 90 children were abused and one died.

And the Eye reveals that Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of those who funded Smyth's religious camps in Zimbabwe, even though "he had been warned he was up to no good".

As a young man, Welby helped at the Iwerne Trust's camps in the UK, and Smyth was a leading light of the organisation.

This link between them appears to have stymied the Church of England's efforts to investigate Smyth's activities. The church has now apologised 15 times for delays to the inquiry.

Four of Christ's disciples were fishermen, but to get invited to a Iwerne Trust camp you had to be a pupil at an exclusive public school. It makes you wonder if wealthy evangelicals hope there will be a separate heaven for the privately educated.

Anyway, the best guide to the Smyth affair is Bleeding For Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone.

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"Nearly three in four children’s homes and two in five fostering households are now provided by independent organisations, from both the private and charitable sector. For the largest private providers, income levels increased by 7.3% when comparing data between February and December 2020. Among the top 10 of children’s homes providers, seven are now owned by private equity firms." Katharine Quarmby and Sian Norris show how children in public care have become an opportunity for private investors.

Andrew Brown reviews Bleeding for Jesus, Andrew Graystone's exposé of John Smyth's beating of boys and young men and the cover up that followed. 

Fintan O’Toole on John Le Carré’s decision to become an Irish citizen shortly before he died.

"Public House has echoes of Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1962 book The London Nobody Knows, famously turned into a psychedelic documentary film in 1969. Partly it’s the ambling scope of it, the diverting asides, the delight at the curious and arcane. But it’s also the palette of the illustrations, a poppy array of orange and green that gives it a trippy feel of late Beatles and swirling pub carpets." John Grindrod reviews a new cultural and social history of the London pub.

K.B. Morris looks back at a John Bowen's television play: "Robin Redbreast was written at the tail end of the counter culture of the 1960s and Bowen is exploring the dichotomy of reason versus emotion or Apollo versus Dionysus. This conflict, which was so prevalent during that period, fascinated Bowen throughout his writing career."

"Olivia Laing walks the River Ouse in Sussex from its source to the sea, mediating on its flora, fauna, mythology, history and literary associations along the way. Chief among the latter is Virginia Woolf, who lived near the river, walked by the river, wrote about the river, and died in the river." With the help of Eric Ravilious illustrations, Terri Windling reviews Laing's To the River.

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Peter Geoghegan looks at how a cartel of MPs associated with the European Research Group took over the Conservative Party and broke British politics.

"The story ends with no satisfactory conclusion.  But we have to ask what might have been done to help Graham and the other victims and to bring Smyth to some form of justice. The key person who seems missing in action is of course Justin Welby." Stephen Parsons on the case of John Smyth QC (Mary Whitehouse's favourite lawyer) who used the Church of England to facilitate his sadistic abuse.

"The type of 'placemaking' achieved by global property finance forces out local communities through rising rents and property prices, and airbrushes local culture from existence." Anna Minton argues that 'regeneration' schemes too often result in an unfair fight between local people and global finance.

Marcela Kunova looks at the dilemmas journalists face when asked to delete a story.

British towns and cities that were heavily bombed in the second world war are now likely to have high levels of child deprivation says Sean Coughlan, reporting new research.

Terry Gilliam reveals the secrets of his animations for Monty Python in a 1974 video.

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"The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor." Anne Applebaum on the politics behind the inadequate US response to the coronavirus.

Stephen Parsons looks at the Church of England's response to the John Smyth scandal: "The way that so many individuals were part of the story, not just as bystanders, but sometimes as active colluders, is striking.  Together they have, with varying degrees of culpability, conspired together to suppress the truth about a pernicious evil."

"The story of 4chan is often treated as a sort of grotesque sideshow to the growing populism of recent politics, but Beran’s book shows how central it was to the changes that have taken place as Internet natives reshape political discourse." Hari Kunzru reviews a book on Donald Trump's toxic troll army.

Flickering Lamps visits Barnes Old Cemetery as it is reclaimed by nature.

"Staring down at the drama from his roost, he sees things he really shouldn’t, traumatic, twisted adult things that he’s not ready to see. The high angle shots reveal both Phile’s precarious isolation and the odd degree of power that he ends up holding over the fates of the main characters." Nora Fiore watches Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol.

Eoghan Lyng interviews Alan Parsons of Project fame.

Stephen Moore (1937-2019)

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I was sorry to hear of the death of Stephen Moore today.

Talking Pictures TV shows Clockwise quite often, and during one of those showings I looked up members of the cast on IMDB.

I was surprised to find that the actor who played the personable young teacher on John Cleese's staff had also been the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

He supplied that memorable voice on both radio and television. It's interesting that the television adaptation, which was regarded at the time as a as brave but unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the magic of the radio production, at the time, is now revered.

Moore's IMDB page revealed a raft of appearances in British films and television. Given how young he looked in Clockwise in 1986, it was a surprise to find that the first of them was in 1959.

Another pleasing discovery was that he appeared (in 1962 and 1998) in what look like two television dramas about the notorious Victorian poisoner - and Rugeley's most famous son - William Palmer.

And he must have had quite a stage career too. The photograph above shows him, instantly recognisable, in the 1980 National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, which was the subject of an unsuccessful legal action by Mary Whitehouse and her barrister, the raving pervert John Smyth.

We seem to have strayed a long way from Stephen Moore, so let me end as I began by expressing my sorrow at the death of a fine actor.

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Nick Harvey introduces the Liberal Democrats' 2017 general election review - or at least the version that has been made public.

"The proposed Lib Dem immigration policy is simply not fit for purpose. I knew this as soon as I saw the consultation questions, which were all on the theme of 'immigration: threat or menace?' and 'how much should we punish immigrants? A lot, or more than that?'" Andrew Hickey tells it like it is.

Martin Sewell asks why there has been no Church of England inquiry into the crimes of John Smyth.

Peter Kinderman presents six 'psychological' terms that psychologists never use.

"Dickens uses the "no-popery" uprising inspired by Lord George Gordon’s inflammatory rhetoric against the Roman Catholic "infiltration" of Britain in the 18th century as a means of attacking mob mentality and the hijacking of political causes for crude personal gain. Recommended reading in Brexit Britain, trust me." Joe Sommerlad praises Barnaby Rudge - and seven other lesser-known novels by well-know authors.

"It’s one of those sad English clerk and wife experience strange mystic growth in the dreary London suburbs-type possibly-fairies affairs." John Holbo has been reading Arthur Machen/s A Fragment of Life.

The social and religious background to John Smyth

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Cathy Newman and Channel 4 News have been offering some good reporting in recent days, investigating the case of John Smyth.

The late Mary Whitehouse's go-to lawyer, he has been accused of savagely beating teenage boys and young men in Britain, and other allegations of inappropriate behaviour have emerged in in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

So far he has made no statement admitting or denying the allegations.

Today I have come across two article that fill in the social and religious background to the affair.

Matthew Scott was a pupil at Winchester, the school to which Smyth attached himself. He describes the religious atmosphere of the place of the wider upper-class circles in which the man moved:

Smyth’s apparent taste for flagellation first came to the attention of the Church in 1982 after his behaviour was reported to the Iwerne Trust, a Church organisation that, amongst other things, organised “Christian summer camps” for public school-boys. One of the aims was to foster their leadership potential. Mr Smyth was the Chairman of the Trust. 

To my mind, even without the beatings, the camps sound perfectly horrible on every conceivable level, and so they apparently were for some of those who came under the spell of Mr Smyth.

Meanwhile, Giles Fraser is critical of the church authorities' haste to deny any connection between abuse and some forms of religious teaching.

And he says that failure to face the truth arises naturally from the movement of which Smyth was a member:

Beatings aside, the other problem with the Smyth holiday camps was that they discouraged theological reflection. The camps were founded by Rev Eric Nash – or Bash as he was unfortunately known. He called himself the “commandant”, his deputy was the “adjutant”, other leaders were “officers”. 

Even among evangelicals, he was noted for his hostility to the critical reflection of theology. He “regarded theologians with suspicion and mistrust”, said Rev Michael Green. 

Moreover, as John King wrote in his book The Evangelicals, “controversy is eschewed by ‘Bash campers’; it is held to be noisy and undignified – and potentially damaging. As a result, many issues that ought to be faced are quietly avoided … any who question are liable to find themselves outside the pale. It does not give a place to the process of argument, consultation and independent thought.” 

From Alpha to archbishop, these camps produced the current leadership of the Church of England.

Let us end by noting that evangelicals fought to keep corporal punishment in British schools even after the teaching unions had given up on the idea.

Oh, and Smyth's son is pastor of the Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is cut from the same religious cloth and has in the past had its own problems with accusations of abuse.