In a world where certainties, traditions and faiths are crumbling, the “salvation” call of the guru is easy to play. Leaderism is making inroads almost everywhere, with perverse tendencies such as polygamy
Samuel Rappylee Bateman, 48, of Colorado City, was sentenced in 2024 to 50 years in prison, after which he will be on lifelong supervised release. To avoid a heavier sentence, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and conspiracy to transport a minor for the purpose of sexual activity. The fact is that, if they hadn’t arrested him, he would probably have as many wives today as the years in prison they sentenced him to. When they stopped him, he was already twenty and continued to transport women, including those under 18, across state borders with the aim of abusing them. According to the court, he and his associates would have directed their horrendous attentions even to nine-year-old girls. Bateman had proclaimed himself the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an extremist faction of Mormonism opposed by the official US church. Mormons – after having practiced it for a few decades following a revelation made to their prophet Joseph Smith – formally renounced polygamy in 1890 and, since then, have excommunicated those who practice it. But attempts to bring it back into vogue have never ceased. Jon Krakauer told it in a beautiful book, In the Name of Heaven, which later became an excellent television series for Disney+. In this production, thriller and fiction elements prevail, especially over the characters’ internal torments. But Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey is also visible on Netflix, a well-made and therefore rather chilling documentary dedicated to Warren Jeffs, who was the predecessor of Samuel Bateman (to whom Trust Me: The False Prophet is dedicated, out these days, also on Netflix) at the head of the fundamentalist Church.
Jeffs is currently serving a life sentence in Texas, also accused of child abuse, and of arranging marriages between his followers and some child brides. Jeffs took up the baton from his father, Rulon Jeffs, himself a polygamist with the habit of marrying very young girls even at very advanced ages. All these leaders have always justified themselves by claiming that plural marriage is a spiritual practice, a way to reach heaven in robust company. The fact, however, is that sexual abuse and the multiplication of (or multiple) partners are too recurrent an element in closed and extreme religious groups to represent a simple coincidence or a dogma of faith. The reality is that this type of behavior is one of the inevitable landing places of the absolute power that the various gurus, prophets, and self-styled messiahs have within the sects they founded.
It matters little what the religious beliefs and foundations of the faith of the various groups are: the tendency of the leaders is always to create a harem, and not from today. An important, although not too well-known, historical novel by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen entitled The King of the Anabaptists tells the story of the religious uprising that occurred in 1534 in the German city of Münster, Westphalia. The Anabaptists, a radical and intransigent fringe of Protestantism, took power led by Jan Matthys, declared a prophet. He was succeeded by Jan Bockelson of Leiden, who behaved even worse. Private property was effectively abolished in the city, a sort of religious police state was imposed and polygamy became essentially obligatory. Or, rather, it became obligatory for the women of the city to bend to the requests of the local bosses, and satisfy their desires disguised as acts of faith.
In the history of Münster there are practically all the characteristic elements of sectarian projects that manage to materialize and build their ideal cities. The first is obviously the so-called antinomianism, that is, the claim to rewrite all the rules of the world, of creation. First these are described as wrong, corrupt. The leader of the cult, the guru, presents himself as the only one illuminated by divine light, the only one capable of providing a true, credible and effective way of salvation. The only one capable of guaranteeing total redemption, which goes without saying from absolute obedience and total submission. Which most often leads to physical and psychological abuse.
On digital platforms, from HBO to Prime, there is a wide availability of documentaries and series dedicated to this type of experience. One of the most gruesome is that of the Davidians, who were led to their death by their leader David Koresh in 1993. The episode inspired a TV drama and a documentary series with much unreleased material for Netflix and is one of the darkest pages in recent American history. In the large house where the Davidians had retreated to Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, Koresh had affairs with all the women there, including the married ones. It cannot be proven that he also had relationships with girls, but he certainly also turned his attentions to some minors. The Davidians had amassed an incredible supply of weapons, attracting the attention of the ATF and the FBI. The US government conducted a wrong intervention from start to finish, attempts at negotiation failed and only a few followers left that house during a very long siege that lasted 51 days, which ended with the structure set on fire and the death of around eighty Davidians, including many children.
Of similar horrendous brutality is the story of the so-called People’s Temple of Jim Jones, who created his cult in the United States and then moved to Guyana, in South America, where he built his new Jerusalem: Jonestown, a sort of open-air gulag, a place of exploitation worthy of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Even in that case the American authorities intervened and around 900 members of the sect committed suicide to escape capture. Less dramatic were the events of other cults such as Syanon, founded in California by Charles E. Dederich, and long considered one of the most dangerous groups in America. But the point is not so much to count the deaths or the crimes committed. If anything, it is a question of understanding what the common traits of all these movements are, and what they tell us about Western society.
Eric Voegelin, in a classic just reprinted by the Seventh Seal editions (The myth of the new world), had already provided the main interpretative coordinates. «In 1970», we read in the presentation, «Voegelin posed the problem of the crisis of the modern world, identifying it in the neognostic attitude relating to the myth of progress. The dissatisfaction with the human condition, given this interpretative posture, matures in him the conviction of a final and decisive avoidance of evil, by virtue not of a transcendent intervention, but rather of a human operation of destruction of givenness – considered intrinsically defective and unjust – in view of a progressive project aimed at the construction of a society”. Revolutionary movements basically act like sects, inspired by a Gnostic vision that postulates the corruption of the world and establishes that the only possible salvation comes from a “secret knowledge” (gnosis, precisely) of which a select few are custodians. The followers of the cult are called to submit to the leader who effectively becomes their master. We find similar mechanisms of coercion and blackmail in the Epstein case but also in the very recent events of Italian minors who, shaped by online neo-Nazi and Satanist groups, planned massacres and murders of teachers and parents. These are extreme cases, if you like, but emblematic of a trend that pervades our society on a profound level.
In a modern world where great truths have been crumbled (faiths, cultures, nations), disoriented individuals are desperately seeking certainties. And they find them all too often in storytellers, gurus and false prophets. Some lead sects and cults. Others are more banally political activists. Yes: even Western politics, these days, follows the gnostic and sectarian path. It stimulates fierce contrasts between good and evil, proposes banal ways of salvation and treats anyone who expresses dissent as a heretic. We watch with horror at the stories of plagiarism and manipulation that emerge from documentaries. We do not realize, however, how difficult it is for all of us to exercise truly free thought.
