Groan – in defence of Gloriavale

ByMartyn Bradbury

Gloriavale ‘can’t afford’ to lose Employment Court battle, member says

A Gloriavale mother-of-eight has told a court the Christian community cannot afford to pay everyone wages and employment relationships would destroy their way of life.

Temperance Hopeful, who is married to Shepherd Noah Hopeful, told the Employment Court hearing in Greymouth that Gloriavale members had a right to live according to their faith and their hard work was not slave labour, but a labour of love.

Six former Gloriavale women claim they lived in servitude at the West Coast commune and are seeking a ruling they were employees, not volunteers.

Hopeful told the court the leavers had painted an unfair and unbalanced picture of Gloriavale, where members wanted to lead a Christian life.

“To us, living in a sharing community has proven to be the most practical way of doing it. For this, we are being unjustly attacked from without to destroy our way of life, which is according to our religious beliefs,” she said.

“I believe this whole case is an attack on our faith. What is being called slave labour is simply a labour of love to those who love to serve Christ by serving one another.”

The latest attempt to gain some type of accountability from the Gloriavale cult is back in the news and I think it’s time to ask, why we tolerate Gloriavale again?

As a liberal progressive democracy we all have to tolerate religion.

We never want a State to tell you what you can and can’t believe, the powers we would need to give the State to enable that level of coercion over the individual would immediately stop it being any type of State any of us would want to support.

You’d have stormtroopers smashing down temples, do we really want that?

If you want to believe in a magical invisible flying wizard for your day to day decisions, that’s your right, as insanely crazy as I think that is.

As good liberal progressive democrats, we have to tolerate freedom of religion because the alternative, a State that can compel you to believe only its truth, is vastly more damaging and dangerous.

And goodness don’t we tolerate religion here in NZ?

We tolerate that the churches don’t pay tax.

We tolerate Scientology – fucking Scientology!

We tolerate Bishop Brian Tamaki. Ugh.

If you as an adult want to believe this garbage, you are free to, just don’t expect me to have to play along with your fantasies.

What is most difficult however about tolerating these religious lunatics is when they stop educating their children so that they remain brainless worker drones for their magical invisible flying wizard.

The Gloriavale cult purposely stops young women from learning and becoming educated so that they effectively remain in domestic servitude!

What parent could ever hold their head high knowing they have purposely kept their children blind and stupid to the wonders of this world?

And it is this tolerance of freedom of religion that obligates us to fully support all Gloriavale survivors who manage to escape this cult with wrap around services and welfare benefits alongside constant outreach programs to ask if families wish to leave.

We tolerate these cultists because we tolerate religion, but by doing so we write off the children they purposely keep stupid. If anyone manages to escape, we have an obligation to support them because we so willingly turn a blind eye to their abuse in the name of tolerating their fucking religion!

We owe those who escape because we tolerate a system that abused them.

Look, I acknowledge the historic role Christianity had in building academia, the arts and the philosophical creation of the Western sense of the Individual, but we moved passed being scared by that which we couldn’t explain and removed the limitations of angry invisible gods who want to punish us for our lack of faith and weekly tithing to the Church.

In the West, we won’t be controlled by the dead ghosts of yesterdays gods any longer, you want to believe in that, knock yourself out, welcome to freedom of choice, but fuck right off if you want to start making rules for the rest of us.

I have no problem enjoying the beauty of religion, the art of religion, the passion of religion, but I also enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I’m not praying to Tony Stark each night for an Iron Man flying battle suit with lasers, guided missiles and a 12 inch cock!

This isn’t just an anti-Christian position, I have this position against all religions. I tolerate them as well, but hold them at the same intellectual standards I would frightened children trying to explain what lightening and thunder is.

We have to allow Gloriavale to exist because NZ is a liberal progressive democracy and if you chose to live this weird life where your invisible magical flying wizard tells you to work on a farm in some strange rejection of modernity, then that is your right and our intrusion as the State should be the same as anyone else who gets accused of crimes and there is evidence.

 

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13 Comments

  1. Glor Glor Gloria…they just bought another massive farm in the last couple of years so God must be throwing them some BIG scheckel. “I don’t know the finances but I know that much. We can’t afford to have everyone as employees,” well, a bit of a contradiction there.

  3. “If you as an adult want to believe this garbage, you are free to, just don’t expect me to have to play along with your fantasies” -Well said but on the issue of taxes, I’d change the word ‘play’ to ‘pay’.

  4. What is the difference between a religion that deliberately limits access to education, so that its adherents “remain brainless worker drones for their magical invisible flying wizard”, and that of our society which employs the exact same structure, including its crucial religious components, to promote and perpetuate the primacy of the invisible flying wizard of exploitation, false promises and inequality that is our pernicious brand of Capitalism?

  5. “I acknowledge the historic role Christianity had in building academia, the arts and the philosophical creation of the Western sense of the Individual”

    Correlation isn’t causation. The problem with your statement is that it insinuates or encourages the conclusion that christianity was the fundamental driver or even caused development of arts and “Western sense of the Individual”.
    That sentiment is often pushed by christian apologists yet the arts, science and whatever you mean by “sense of the Individual” developed just fine in non-christian and pre-christian cultures and would have continued doing so in European culture with or without christianity, although with a different flavour – and who is to say that may not have led to a better result.

    Otherwise a well considered article.

    1. I think you are being optimistic about history if you believe that Christianity did not improve our life today. We know that it went to the dark side for over 1000 years and that only the protestant revolution opened the way for the society and freedom of choice we have today. Martyn did a good job of explaining the issues and grey areas involved but if you want to live in the BC environment you are welcome but you are most likely to be a slave with a limited life span.

      1. It wasn’t the Protestant Reformation that saved the west but The Enlightnment. When Christianity sent Europe tumbling backwards centuries of ancient knowledge from the East was lost and needed to be rediscovered.

        1. You are confusing the Papal system with Christianity, while it is a common mistake there is a huge difference between the beliefs behind each system.
          A fundamental Christian belief is to “love your enemy, do good to those who misuse you” and as you correctly say that did not happen once the Roman church gained control over the state which is why Martyn puts effort into explaining why we do not want any sort of a church-state combination.

      2. the slavery Christians brought about was far more thorough and vicious than that from before the Common Era.

  6. “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, render to God what is God’s”, it goes something like that. In other words, pay your taxes and keep your beliefs. Pay your born-into-servitude employees their wages due as well. Are you not all New Zealand citizens? Then the laws of the land apply also to you, Gloriavale. The only reason these cults are tolerated by those in power is because they own property and businesses. Those in power care nothing for workers everywhere, paid or unpaid. Indeed, it is part of our culture to exploit the underclasses. It’s archaic, but there it is.

  7. People followed leader Jim Jones from the USA to foreign country Guyana in South America, just north of Brazil. It sounds similar to the mantra that Gloriavale people are spouting.
    A couple of important things –
    1 Does the organisation want to take all your assets in exchange for being part of a righteous family?
    2 Are you able to freely leave after a period and be given enough money to keep you in secular society for travel and living for at least three months?
    3 Can you go freely with family, or if family wish to stay have visiting and contacting rights?
    (It is best to find that out because leaders in cults often do become power crazy, not to be crossed, which can lead at least to strong sanctions and go as far as killing.)

    Wasn’t the case in Belize Guyana and when a concerned Congressman went to inspect from the USA he was shot along with other people. Later the people were convinced to poison themselves.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Ryan

    Jim Jones – Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jim_Jones
    James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American preacher, political activist, and mass murderer. He led the Peoples Temple, …
    Cause of death: Gunshot to the head (consistent …
    Died: November 18, 1978 (aged 47); Jonesto…‎
    Children: 9
    The poisonings in Jonestown followed the murder of five others by Temple members at Port Kaituma, including Congressman Leo Ryan, an act that Jones ordered. Four other Temple members committed murder-suicide in Georgetown at Jones’ command.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

    Early life deficiencies often have major importance on development of ‘cranks’.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Jim_Jones

  8. God was pronounced dead only 140 years ago so its going to take a while for the news to spread. If the Gloriaists / Gloryites accept state funding for their independent christian schools then the Education Review Office should be rigourously ensuring the curriculum and education quality standards are adhered to. Another agricultural utopian sect the Amish ‘allow’ their young adults to have a year or two living in the outside world after which they can freely decide to return to the Amish community or not – maybe Goriavale needs such a scheme. Come to think of it its a bit like a Kiwi OE.

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