Creepy cult infiltrates Supreme Court
The FBI has interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the People of Praise (PoP), a secretive Christian sect that counts conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a lifelong member, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The individuals were contacted following a years-long effort by a group called PoP Survivors, who have called for the South Bend-based sect to be investigated for leaders’ handling of sexual abuse allegations. The body, which has 54 members, has alleged that abuse claims were routinely mishandled or covered up for decades in order to protect the close-knit faith group.
What’s a Christian sect doing being secretive? What’s the secret? Isn’t the whole point to welcome everyone? All too often the point is to nag and push and pester people to join, but at a minimum surely being wide open to all potential believers is the goal. The fact that the sect is secretive seems…not entirely healthy.
A spokesperson for PoP Survivors said: “We urge the FBI to use their power to unearth the long-standing pattern of child sexual abuse and coverup in the People of Praise. All perpetrators and their enablers must finally be held accountable. We must ensure that no child is victimized and silenced by a People of Praise member ever again.”
I guess that’s why? If the claims are true then the people of praise are secretive because they’re child abusers?
The PoP was founded in the 1970s as part of a Christian charismatic movement. The group is led exclusively by men. Like other charismatic communities, it blends Catholicism and Protestant Pentecostalism – its members are mostly Catholic but include some Protestants. In meetings, members are encouraged to share prophecies and speak in tongues. One former member said adherents believe God can speak through members to deliver messages, sometimes about their future.
Which is a very dangerous belief. “Hello, God speaking. I need to talk to little Betsy alone for half an hour.”
A PoP handbook states that members are expected to be obedient to male authorities, or group heads, and are expected to give 5% of their earnings to the group. Heads are influential decision-makers in members’ lives, weighing in on issues ranging from dating to marriage, and determining where members should live.
And a Supreme Court justice belongs to this sect. And she’s on the court thanks to the dirtiest most criminal ruthless abusive piece of dung ever to squat in the White House.
And that’s putting it mildly.
But on the other hand, a sect member would be an insider regarding close familiarity with Phropecy. Such intimate awareness could only enhance the Court’s decisions, putting the justices all on the same level as the great Biblical phropets such as Moses, Isaiah, Jermiah, Malachi, the Rev Jimmy Swaggart and others.
The key to all justice is phropecy. Phropecy I tell you.
Phropecy!
Religion is the perfect foil for abusers, isn’t it? It lends authority to whatever the “prophet” says that God (or the Gods) want(s.) And if it seems a bit hincky, who are you to question God?
Divine Command Theory says that if “God commands it, then it is morally right!” And if Rev. Joseph gets the prophecy directly from God, you can’t go against him, now, can you?
I went through a charismatic Catholic phase when I was in my searching years and I realized that those people are a bit nuts. One claimed credit for the local theater burning down, as he prayed for, because The Exorcist was playing. (Thanks, George, now we have to drive 30 miles to see a damn movie.)
Speaking in tongues was a bunch of people shouting out in vaguely latinish sounding gibberish until someone spoke a prophecy. The rush I got from being part of that was palpable, so it felt real to me. But many years later it was the same sort of rush that I was getting from dancing in a circle for a Drawing Down of the Moon. So, two conflcting religions were confirming themselves in my bodies’ responses. So, I concluded that either it’s my reaction to the belief that I was communing with God/ The Goddess, or it was actual communion. Using Occam’s Razor I concluded that it was my body’s reaction to belief. That was peak religion for me, and final confirmation that I’m an atheist.
That aside, who is voting when we think that ACB is voting? Some nut who believes that theaters should burn for showing movies he doesn’t like?
But the Catholics aren’t secretive, so that can’t be the complete answer. Also, all the other religions (which seems to be all of them, including atheism which isn’t even a religion) that harbor abusers, whether of children or adult women.
Groups like that are everywhere. I wonder how they compare to ours?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloriavale_Christian_Community
iknklast: Catholics may not be as secretive as these whackjobs, but they’re hardly an open book. They wrap their clergy and their internal processes in a great deal of secrecy and obfuscation–and thus, became a haven for child-abusers, because such individuals flock to positions where secrecy is able to be kept. (Police forces are another attractive position to such types, for the same reason.)
The big difference is that smaller groups tend to have less of a public facade; the bigger orgs have the resources to put a patina of gold leaf on the shitpile. POP and the like just crawl under a rock to hide from the sun.
Do read Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’, which concerns the ‘Magdalen laundries’ & such of a sedulously secretive Church with a great deal of power.
Six right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court of what is supposed to be a secular democracy. But asking about a proposed judge’s religious outlook is not allowed?
#1 – #7 above: agreed on all. But add to to all that a self-proclaimed infallible tribe of Catholic clergy dressed up as fine and as angelically as possible, and church interiors likewise as close as possible to a child’s conception of Heaven, and a total Otherworld has been created. That gulled the gullible, including the candidates for the priesthood themselves, keeping the Holy Gull Machine rolling along.
Protestantism initially went the other way, but one by one its various sects succumbed to temptation, and repeated the process pioneered by the Catholics. High Church Anglicanism after the English Reformation provides an outstanding example of this.