Behind the Exclusive Brethren

BEHIND THE EXCLUSIVE BRETHREN

By MICHAEL BACHELARD

Scribe, 2008, 314 pp, $32.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

It is no surprise, says The Age investigative reporter, Michael Bachelard, in Behind the Exclusive Brethen, that this well-heeled and secretive Christian sect should have been the apple of the eye of “conservative and authoritarian politicians such as John Howard”, the former Prime Minister. Clean-cut and straight-laced; big on ‘family values’ and women staying home to tend children and husband; frowning on abortion and homosexuality; frothing at the mouth about trade unions and the Greens; venerating small business and private schooling; rooting for wars on Iraq and ‘terrorism’; and putting their money where their mouth is by bankrolling conservative parties in election campaigns – what’s not to like, for conservatives, about this spiritual arm of the political right?

Beginning in Ireland and England in the 1820s, the Brethren’s history of sectarian splits, purges, expulsions and ‘rehabilitations’ would leave the old Stalinist left in the shade, the Brethren boasting a minor galaxy of sectarian splinters such as the Kell-Lowe-Continental Brethren, the Darbyites, the Tunbridge Wells/Natural Hall Brethren, the Taylorites, the Raven-Taylor-Hales Brethren, the Connexional Brethren, the Plymouth Brethren No. 4, not to forget The Jimmies.

The sect’s “doctrine of separation”, which keeps the Brethren excluded from the spiritually ‘contaminated’ material world, has resulted in a suite of bizarre rules and prohibitions, including banning shorts and facial hair for men, banning university for everyone, directing that men only must take out the garbage, directing older members with university degrees to urinate on them, and forbidding Brethren dwellings from having shared walls with non-Brethren dwellings. The list of proscribed technology has included radio and TV, computers and mobile phones, and fax machines and automatic garage-door openers.

Under the latest ‘Elect Vessel’ to head the sect, Bruce Hales, a Sydney accountant and furniture-supplier, the bans on fax machines and mobiles were lifted (for business reasons) and computers were allowed but only for email and not that “pipeline of filth”, the Internet. TV, CDs, DVDs and radios remain forbidden, as do novels, theatre and cinema. Separation is enforced literally - the Brethren’s Church meeting rooms are windowless, surrounded by high wire fences and locked gates, and protected by burly men.

Where the Exclusive Brethren have modernised, however, is in financial and tax law which gets as close a scrutiny as scripture. Coupled with political lobbying to seek special exemptions and privileges from government, this has made the Brethren extremely wealthy. Gross annual turnover of the thousand Brethren family businesses in Australia is $2.2 billion, structured as family trusts to pay only the 30% corporate tax rate and not the top 48.5% individual tax rate. Hales is one of the biggest individual property-owners on the planet with holdings estimated by one former Brethren member at $4 billion.

The Brethren family trusts also engage in income-splitting amongst all family members, reducing the tax liability to sometimes none at all in the typically large Brethren family unit. By artificially reducing individuals’ income, Brethren families are also able to rort the public purse by claiming a range of Centrelink income support payments, allowing very rich people to sponge on social security.

Raiding Centrelink, and claiming whatever tax concession or government subsidy they can by using their status as a Church, is given a biblical gloss by the Brethren, who compare this milking of the taxpayer to the Old Testament’s ‘spoiling the Egyptians’ (diverting the wealth of the wicked to the righteous).

A significant part of the ‘spoils’ is the “fabulously generous” private school funding arrangement by the former Howard and current Rudd governments. In 2007, for example, the sect’s six Brethren-only private high schools (where biblical literalism, and not evolution, is taught), with just 838 students, received $50 million in taxpayer funding over four years.

Exclusive Brethren businesses are also enriched by trade union exclusion. Employing 4,000 non-Brethren workers in Australia, Brethren workplaces were allowed by the former Howard government a ‘conscientious objection’ exemption to union entry. So, thousands of non-Brethren employees were denied their democratic right to trade union protection simply as a result of their bosses’ ‘religious conscience’. In New Zealand, too, a Brethren medical supplies business which banned their multicultural staff from speaking other than English used their workplace law exemption to prevent unions coming in to hear complaints. Teachers in Brethren schools (who are all non-Brethren because Brethren can not become tertiary qualified) are hired only on agreement that they will not be members of a teachers’ union.

The Exclusive Brethren found their firmest defenders in the former Howard Government. They found ideologically sympathetic ears when lobbying against abortion, stem-cell experimentation, euthanasia and homosexuality (particularly gay marriage). While Howard’s door was wide open to the reactionary and tiny (15,000 member) Brethren, says Bachelard, it remained closed to much larger Christian organisations which disagreed with him on asylum-seekers or WorkChoices.

Bucking 175 years of political abstentionism, the Brethren splurged $370,000 in electoral advertising during the 2004 federal election in Australia, and provided the shoe leather for delivery of leaflets supporting the Liberal-National coalition and attacking the Greens. The Brethren supported George W. Bush in the 2004 US election, and in the 2005 New Zealand election they hired private detectives to trail Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark’s, husband to dig up or invent homophobic dirt on his private life. Their political involvement has often been carried out with the secret connivance of the conservative parties.

Also sheltering behind the ramparts of ‘religious freedom’ is the sect’s enforcement of discriminatory gender roles. A Brethren woman can not “put herself in a position of authority over a man” and, once married, can not seek paid work. The only job available for Brethren girls is telemarketing until it is time to procreate.

Openness and transparency is greatly feared by the Brethren which retains tight control of its members through instilling fear of the outside world, indoctrination, coercion and intimidating its members with being ‘shut up’ (placed under household solitary confinement) or being excommunicated and losing family contact for ideological deviation or infractions of rules. Criticism of the sect by former members, or journalists, is met with defamation writs and threats of hugely expensive legal action.

Although the new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has called the Brethren an extremist cult and refused to meet with them, he has rebuffed a request by thirty former Brethren to investigate taxpayer funding of Brethren schools, the Brethren’s eligibility for rate and tax exemptions, their political donations, the incidence of suicides, family breakdown and emotional abuse caused by the ‘doctrine of separation’, the alleged protection of child sexual abusers in cases going back 40 years, and their litigious use of the Family Court where they outspend and out-appeal non-sect and lapsed partners to over-ride their rights of child access.

Rudd, with predictable deference to conservative political orthodoxy, has invoked ‘religious freedom’ to avoid shining a light on the human and economic sins of this dark but dangerous little sect.