On Covenant Community

[viscousmemories]

I'm sure I've posted about this before but when I was 7 yrs old (1975) my family joined a covenant community called "The Word of God" in Ann Arbor. I personally cut ties with the group completely when I was a young teen, but at least one of my siblings and a number of her offspring are still involved.

I don't think about it a lot but I've been listening to the Covenant Community Kids podcast (hosted by two of my nieces) and so have been down the rabbit hole of reading about the history (again) in this collection of documents.

All the documents are interesting but these two articles are enough to give you the big picture of what life in the WOG was like:

Word of God: The Rise and Fall of a Heavenly Empire

Schism in Ann Arbor: Just Another Split?

[beyelzu]

I read the the first article and I was struck with just how similar they were to Amy Coney Barrett’s cult. Some of the names did seem familiar.

people of praise

I found this site getreligion.org, while reading more about the charismatic Catholic movement. they are Christians that think that secular news is unfair to Christians and such Christian persecution complex makes me wary, but the site also seems to take journalism about Christianity seriously.

For example, I think they are too generous with Barrett’s group saying that associations with handmaid’s tale is unwarranted.

Do read the whole of it, because it explains how several publications made stupid mistakes when covering the People of Praise/People of Hope mixup.

Like it wasn’t just similarities in names. People of Praise is another of these mostly Catholic fundamentalist group cults formed in the seventies. Barrett’s cult wasn’t the direct inspiration for Handmaids, but it’s almost exactly the same sort of group. People of Hope was founded later than PoP around 1980, but it’s still a charismatic Catholic group.

Frankly, the dude who started it was almost certainly aware of WoG or PoP, so i it’s not like Barrett’s group isn’t connected.

And

These places really existed because I lived in one. Called Bethlehem Community, it was a group of charismatic American Baptists in Portland, Ore. I was part of it from 1979-1981. One reason why I can’t understand why people assume Barrett’s membership in a community means that she’s some sort of automaton is that I was working as a police reporter for a small newspaper the entire time I lived in community households. I had to submit everything I did at home to the leaders, but the reporters I worked with never knew that.

Anyway, there are links to news stories about the groups,, but apparently People of Praise and WoG came out of the same Catholic renewal movement and it seems to me that PoP is just more controlling and maybe better at it.

After the 1990 meeting and WoG started failing, PoP survived because it was more closed off and controlling.


Amy Coney Barrett, Stephen B. Clark and the Origins of “Covenant Communities” | Billy Kangas

This article on Patheos also discusses their similarities.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by beyelzu

Frankly, the dude who started it was almost certainly aware of WoG or PoP, so i it’s not like Barrett’s group isn’t connected.

Yeah I forgot to mention it, but as I understand it a couple of the leaders of the WoG helped PoP get started. It's hard to know for sure because secrecy has always been a huge part of their evangelism strategy. It's at least clear from this document that they were in close contact as early as 1975.

[viscousmemories]

Two of the more interesting episodes from my niece's podcast are a woman from England (Jess Blatchley) and a man from Scotland (Mark Gallagher) who were involved with branches of the community over there. It's weird to hear them mention Ann Arbor and use arcane religious lingo that I grew up hearing. The influence the WOG had on politics (domestic and international) really shouldn't be underestimated.

[viscousmemories]

I recently read Frances Fitzgerald's classic tome on the Vietnam war, "Fire in the Lake", and it was incredibly comprehensive, balanced, and engrossing. So when I saw that she had a more recent book called "Evangelicals", I snatched it up. I have not read (and may never read) this 650 page monster, but I did look through the index and I was surprised to find only a couple casual references to Charismatic Christians. There was always such a huge focus on the importance of evangelism in the Word of God that I had always assumed the movement came under the rubric of "Evangelical", but apparently they are two largely, if not completely, separate movements. Very strange.

[Miss Shelby]

This is wild and I’m sure the explanation is reasonable but the ratio of views to replies to this is surprising