The Society Syndrome
Depressive Illness and Conversion Crises in a
Christian Fundamentalist Sect
by Julius H. Rubin, Ph.D.
The Bruderhof, an intentional community
founded in the 1920s in Germany by Eberhard Arnold, is
now entering its fourth generation with eight settlements
in America, England, and Germany. A cursory
examination of Bruderhof public relations and
publications from their press, The Plough, depicts deeply
committed Anabaptists devoted to the realization of the
Sermon on the Mount -- Christian communitarianism,
pacifism and a peace witness; individuals and families
united to form a vessel for the Holy Spirit, children
cherished as God's gift to the parents and community.
They present themselves as the joyful ones who forge a
life in common according to God's mandate, retreating
from a fallen world to recover a childlike spirit of
simplicity and fellowship within the gemeinde--
the church community. (Zablocki, 1971 and Whitworth,
1975) Enjoined to bear witness to the world and to seek
converts, the Bruderhoefe conceive of themselves as
God's revolutionaries.
However, there is another side of joy, largely hidden
from the outside world. The KIT newsletter, founded in
1989, (KIT, 1990) has started publishing life-histories of
Bruderhof exiles. Apostates from the Bruderhof in forced
or voluntary exclusion describe a community marked by
excessive physical discipline of children, obsessions with
the sexual purity of children and the practice of
"clearings" -- interrogation by adults seeking confession
of sexual sins of children. Wayward, stubborn and
difficult children have been accused of demonic
possession. Many women, former members, have made
allegations of childhood sexual molestation by family or
community members. Families have been disrupted as a
parent or child is placed in ausschluss exclusion --
a temporary or permanent excommunication. And during
times of community crisis, in the Wheathill Bruderhof in
1948, or the Primavera, Paraguay settlement in 1957-
1960, for example, nearly half of the brotherhood
members were summarily excluded. The documented
accounts of collective crises and mass exclusions, the
routine use of excessive discipline and family disruption
through ausschluss, and the records of mental
breakdowns, psychiatric care and suicide cannot be
dismissed as the overstated complaining of a disgruntled
minority.
This paper will demonstrate the special affinity for
depressive disorders found among adherents of a
distinctive religious world view and ethos prevalent
among the Bruderhof during the charismatic leadership
of Heini Arnold (1957-1982). Guided by the religio-
historical interpretation of religious movements of David
Chidester's "Salvation and Suicide," we shall see how true
believers who struggled for the salvation of their souls,
put their psyches in jeopardy. The "costs" of forging a life
committed to the realization of an absolute ethic of
conviction frequently included spiritual trial, desolation,
religious melancholy and religious suicide. (Rubin, 1993)
"Heini-ism"
Bruderhof communitarianism centers upon each
succeeding generation's interpretation of the writings and
teachings of their charismatic founder, Eberhard Arnold.
Revision, perceived declension and revival characterize
Arnold's legacy. During the 1950s, Heini Arnold, one of
Eberhard's sons, revitalized the Bruderhof in the direction
of an inner-worldly mysticism and pietism taken from
the neglected marrow of the founder's theology. This
theological awakening, which I term "Heini-ism," allowed
Heini Arnold to reanimate the pietistic and emotional
contents of Bruderhof conversion and to usurp total
authority over the many Bruderhof communities. Heini-
ism encouraged profound devotionalism among adherents
directing them in the path toward salvation. Heini
Arnold's charismatic "genius" manifested itself in the gifts
of discernment -- of seeing into the hearts and minds of
believers, ascertaining the depths or superficiality of
their faith, and guiding their spiritual pilgrimage. He
mediated to community members the cultural meanings
and "cues" of authentic spirituality -- what to believe,
how to feel, how to think, how to perceive, what was the
agenda or order of things and whom to emulate (Nelson,
1981)
Heini's special gifts, those of a mystagogue, rested
upon the theological foundation of his father and founder,
Eberhard Arnold, whose theology legitimated the
charisma and authority of the son. Heini committed the
Bruderhof press, The Plough, to the English translation
and publication of Arnold's major writings, "Innerland"
(1963), "When Time was Fulfilled" (1965), "Salt and
Light" (1967), "Why We Live in Community" (1972) and
"Seeking For the Kingdom" (1974). Although older
members from the early Sannerz, Rhon, Cotswold and
Primavera bruderhofs had known Eberhard, found
edification in his sermons and read his works in German,
the recent American and English converts lacked this
connection with the founder and his teachings. Heini
lamented the sad fate of "Innerland" that remained
unfinished at Eberhard's death in 1935, untranslated, and
out-of-print.
Heini remarked that the English bruderhof members
of the 1940s and 1950s "somehow did not feel the depth
of the Book speaking to them at this time." (H. Arnold,
1974) Preaching, catechism, and religious instruction
would now proceed from the books of Arnold, the
writings of Blumhardt and Bonhoeffer, and from the
Hutterian and Anabaptist tradition that formed the
Bruderhof canonical texts. Bible study and preaching
from the scripture were de-emphasized.
Heini, never a towering intellectual or theologian,
simplified and systematized his father's ideas into an
inner-worldly pietism adopting the German evangelical
pietist theology of assurance -- the necessity of an
intense, emotionally wrenching inner-struggle
(Busskampf) resulting in the ravishing, joyous
psychological union with God, the inner-worldly mystical
"bride of the lamb." (Stoeffler, 1973:12-16) Each new
being was marked by an existential reorientation,
separate from the Kingdom of Satan and the world,
engaged in a battle to build the Kingdom of God. The new
creation adopted the five distinguishing marks of the life
of faith: 1. trials (anfechtungen), 2. cross-bearing, 3.
obedience to God's law, 4. trust in God, and 5. joy.
(Stoeffler, 1973:19) Finally, the life of faith demanded an
absolute faith in God manifested by a child-like spirit.
Daily life was to become a witness to joy in life and God
-- almost a literal song sung by brethren united.
The life of faith was not easily won. Heini-ism
appropriated the Lutheran concept of Christocentric faith
-- the imitation of Christ's cross-bearing and redemptive
suffering. Heini frequently directed his followers to
Bonhoeffer's work, "The Cost of Discipleship," rejecting
"cheap" and freely proffered institutional grace and
salvation of the churches. Disciples who emulated Jesus,
who devoted their lives completely to the teachings of
the Sermon on the Mount, were destined to suffer.
"Suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship."
(Bonhoeffer, 1963:100) Thus, the life of faith alternated
between joyful surrender to Jesus -- the rapture of
assurance as a child of God, fulfilled by His love, and the
seasons of abject suffering -- cross-bearing, self-
accusations of sinfulness, and religious melancholy.
The new person in faith possessed a renovated heart
receptive to the living word of God, not the dead letter of
Biblical legalism. Heini-ism elaborated a comprehensive
religious world view, a cosmic battle between the forces
of God and Satan. The new person, singly and in unity in
the gemeinde, waged a ceaseless battle against
Satanic attack. The Devil looked to make inroads against
the Bruderhof by turning spiritually weak brethren,
emotionally unstable members, those tempted by sins of
the flesh, and those haunted by obsessive guilt,
blasphemous thoughts, and religious melancholy
believing themselves to be forsaken by God. Each
believer faced the ever-present danger of demonic
possession; the community confronted the perils of
Mammonism from without and disunity and Satan-
haunted sinners from within.
Heini taught the brotherhood in "Freedom From
Sinful Thoughts, Christ Alone Breaks the Curse," that
there is no doubt that the Devil tries by every means to
suggest to us human beings proud, evil, impure, even
blasphemous feelings, ideas or thoughts -- even the urge
to commit suicide or murder. (H.Arnold, 1973:1)
Only a Christ-centered psychology and a religiously-
grounded personality founded upon evangelical pietist
principles could cure the curse of obsessional thoughts
and actions. The power of Christ alone could break Satan's
hold, release frail men and women from the hypnotic
power of autosuggestion where the mere thought or
temptation of evil produced the compulsion to commit
the evil act. The sick in spirit must surrender to Christ,
bear the Cross, purify their hearts and minds, and
separate from the Kingdom of Sin to cleave unto the
Kingdom of God -- to the Bruderhof church-community.
Heini writes, "Jesus is Victor over devils and demons.
But the Brotherhood must be so deeply bound together in
Jesus that no evil spirit can grieve Jesus at the Lord's
Supper." (H. Arnold, 1973:15)
Johann Christoph Blumhardt exorcised a demon from
a servant girl, Gottlieben in 1842, proclaiming "Jesus is
Victor!" and founding a spiritual movement and retreat in
Bad Boll, Germany. Eberhard was profoundly influenced
by Blumhardt and Arnold himself cast out demons in
Sannerz in 1925 when Lotte Henze came under Satanic
attack. Heini fought the Prince of Darkness who had
entered the Woodcrest Bruderhof in 1959, through the
possession of a young novice, Miriam Way. This episode
lasted for several months until Miriam's removal to a
psychiatric hospital. The struggle for the soul of Miriam
Way became the metaphor for the collective renewal of
the Bruderhof movement. "Even though the battle for this
one person did not seem to end in a full redemption for
her personality, it began a breakthrough in our Bruderhof
struggle for renewal in a return to Christ as Center."(Mow,
1989:127)
The religious world view of cosmic battle legitimated
the consolidation of Heini's political authority. Heini allied
himself with young American converts --true believers
who came to Heini-ism from the Fourth Great Awakening
in America, from the Billy Graham Crusades, and the post
war revitalizations of the Church of the Brethren and
Society of Friends. Based in the newly founded
Woodcrest Bruderhof in Rifton, New York, with its self-
sufficient and lucrative toy manufacturing, Heini
achieved the economic, political and doctrinal basis for
the usurpation of the Bruderhof movement. (Allain,
1992)
Using his gifts of the Spirit of discernment, Heini
distinguished those believers who manifested an evil,
impure, insincere, and egocentric Spirit from those souls
who enjoyed the authentic Christ-centered Spirit. He
expelled weaker members as a threat to the collective, as
an opening to Satanic attack. Confronted with devils and
demonic possession, he reaffirmed the absolute necessity
for unity among the brotherhood as the only defense.
Those brethren who raised questions, challenges, or
grievances against Heini-ism, this single-belief system
and its adherents, opened the door to the Devil. Brethren
who promoted disunity had no place in the
gemeinde; they faced expulsion.
Heini thus redirected the communal movement away
from an international, pacifist, social activism exemplified
by the Primavera communities and built an
introversionist sect, separate from the world. (Zablocki,
1971) He directed brothers to turn inward, seek the
opportunities for spiritual maturation, purge themselves
and the gemeinde of all impurities. Heini-ism as a
world view could justify the mass expulsion of members
found wanting in the Spirit, purges of brotherhood lists of
those identified as weak brothers and sisters, the closing
of the Paraguayan and English communities -- the Great
Crisis of 1959-1961.
Heini-ism promoted a totalistic religious community
in separation from the world where brethren devoted
their lives to the charisma of Heini and the canonization
of selected writings of Eberhard Arnold. However, Heini's
successful revitalization and usurpation of the Bruderhof
movement promoted evangelical pietistic conversion
crises -- busskampf, anfechtungen (religious
melancholy) -- the alternation of child-like joy with the
motif of redemptive suffering. At the moment of Heini's
political victory and purges, from within, among the
cherished Bruderhof youth, a spiritual sickness afflicted
the gemeinde.
Heini came to recognize the prevalence of spiritual
sickness, "cramped wills" and obsessive sinful thoughts
and temptations among those youths and adults who
struggled ceaselessly to embrace pietistic conversion --
surrender of the individual self to Jesus. He explains why
he wrote" Freedom From Sinful Thoughts:" "I have put
this book together because there are some in our
households and even some who grew up in the
communities who are really tormented against their will
by evil thoughts, images or ideas." (H.Arnold, 1973:viii)
Religious melancholy, suicide, evangelical anorexia
nervosa, obsessions with unpardonable sin afflicted many
Bruderhof youth. Coming of age brought with it
protracted and unresolved spiritual crises of conversion.
Heini as a Servant of the Word, provided spiritual
direction for troubled souls, prescribing the practice of
daily devotional piety -- prayer, meditation, and reading
from the Arnold canon. He advised sick souls to learn the
technique of inner-worldly mystical "inner detachment"
-- silencing the ego and creature so the heart may open
to receive the Spirit and love of God. "First of all we need
to grow really quiet before God. We should relax
completely. Then we can hear the deeper voice within
our own heart. We hear Jesus, who seeks us and loves
us." (H.Arnold, 1973:74) When pastoral care failed to cure
these spiritual sicknesses, Bruderhof elders turned in
desperation to a system of thought and therapeutics that
they had long disparaged -- secular humanistic
psychiatry.
The "Society Syndrome"
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychiatrists
in the Kingston, New York area treated a number of
adolescents and young adults from the Woodcrest
Bruderhof. These psychotherapists developed a diagnostic
"shorthand" term to refer to a clustering of symptoms
that afflicted the Bruderhof patients under their care. The
young people suffered from the "Society Syndrome," a
culturally specific expression of depressive disorder, a
"culture-bound syndrome" (Prince, 1985, Kleinman,
1985:10-29)
The Society Syndrome includes the familiar
behavioral signposts common to affective disorder
everywhere: chronic fatigue, listlessness, malaise, sleep
and appetite disorders. Patients complained of mood and
ideational problems: profound sadness bordering upon
despair, an abiding feeling of hopelessness, helplessness.
They felt unloved and undeserving of love or
consideration by others. In this state of fugue, life was a
torment, an ordeal where inclinations toward suicide
appeared as a possible escape.
The Society Syndrome shared the above dimensions
of depressive illness. But this clustering of symptoms
constituted a distinctive depressive illness peculiar to the
collective religious milieu of the Society of Brothers
(Bruderhof). The patients, especially the young women,
spoke of their spiritual inadequacies, their pervasive
sinfulness. They felt unworthy to stand before God or
their parents and friends in the Bruderhof religious
community. The adolescent girls interpreted their first
sexual awakenings as sin-pollution, manifestations of the
demonic or Satanic Enemy in their lives. They had
committed sins that cast them seemingly beyond the pale
of human or divine forgiveness. They felt polluted to
their very marrow, beset by ontological guilt, and
convictions of worm-like worthless. Adolescent boys and
girls fasted excessively as rituals of purification from sin,
seeking the moment of joyful surrender to Jesus. These
heroic regimens of fasting developed into a religiously
motivated "evangelical anorexia nervosa."
The psychiatrists had encountered evangelical crises
of conversion. Anabaptist sects like the Bruderhof admit
new members into the church and into full adult
privileges of worship and marriage only after each soul
traverses the spiritual itinerary from sin to salvation.
Before each candidate can enjoy baptism, each must
submit to a protracted period of religious education,
surveillance, and testing as a novice. Only after the
candidate has convinced Bruderhof elders of their
knowledge of doctrine, their possession of the requisite
character traits of brothers and sisters in the faith in a
child-like spirit of humility and selfless surrender to the
group, can the process of conversion move forward. Also,
each novice must convince their spiritual superiors of the
depth and fervency of devotional piety, love to God as
evidenced in private confessions of sin and contrite
repentance for previous error.
During the novice phase of the conversion process,
each candidate was placed under extreme judgment and
employed a probing, relentless self-examination of their
consciences, scrutinizing their hearts for the evidence of
sin. Many discovered overwhelming pollution and
disquieting evidence of evil. Sexual sins in the form of
fantasies, impulses, flirtations, or masturbation came to
light. Inventories of sins pertaining to pride, selfishness,
and questioning the authority of parents, elders and
tradition were uncovered. What distinguished the
Bruderhof from other Anabaptist communities
(Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish) was the peculiar mix of
evangelical pietist theology that made conversion a
protracted struggle, an inward battle against the natural,
sinful self that required a radical restructuring of
identity.
Secular developmental psychology and popular
culture have long accepted the "natural" adolescent
process of sexual awakening and masturbation, of testing
new-found powers of autonomy, iconoclasm,
rebelliousness as the turbulent crucible of identity
formation. The Bruderhof, however, imposed a
fundamentalist Protestant framework of interpretation
when considering these "natural" developments of
adolescence. Bruderhof evangelical pietism endeavoured
to crush willful autonomy by instilling a childlike spirit.
Sexuality before marriage was sin. Temptation to sin was
the active work of Satan. Rigorous sexual repression
would prevent the thinking of sexual thoughts, the
experience of sexual impulse and desire, and the
commission of sexual acts such as flirtation, sexual
experimentation, or auto-eroticism.
Over-zealous spiritual guidance, harsh discipline and
sexual interrogations by elders convinced many novices
that they had sinned beyond the bounds of repentance or
remission. These youths lapsed into spiritual desolation
and religious melancholy. Novices were caught within a
classic trap, in an agonizing vocation crisis. Unable to
move forward toward conversion, church membership,
and the rites of passage to adulthood, they faced the
prospect of being asked to leave. Each novice quaked
before the possibility of exclusion from friends and
family into the sin-ridden outside world that they lacked
the resources to understand or negotiate. At the same
time they felt sinful, creaturely, unworthy of community
membership and hopelessly lost.
Each person who comes of age in the community
ostensibly makes a free and open choice by electing to
enter the novitiate, attend the gemeindestunde
prayer circle and ultimately make a public confession of
faith and enjoy adult baptism and full membership in the
church-community. However, this choice is constrained
and unfree. The adolescent views the community as the
vessel of the Holy Spirit and as the only authentic
Christian existence. The aspirations and prayers of their
family and co-religionists place unrelenting pressure
upon each novice to choose for religious community. Each
adolescent lacks the financial resources, knowledge, skills
and social supports to succeed in the outside world. The
idea of separation and exclusion invokes feelings of dread
at the spectre of isolation. Exclusion equals punishment
and rejection -- a socially administered traumatic injury.
In this context, how can one say that a youth remains
"free" to choose to enter the novitiate or to leave the
community in favor of the secular outside world?
Conclusion
Heini-ism as a world view and ethos promoted a
pietistic conversion crisis, a religiously grounded
personality and life-order that proved pathogenic for
youths trapped in the crux of "the Society Syndrome."
The propensity for evangelical pietists to suffer religious
melancholy has long been associated with spiritual
narratives of conversion and American Protestant
religious identity, from colonial times to the present
evangelical awakening as interpreted by William James
in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," and many
others. (Rubin, 1993) The Society Syndrome represents a
contemporary manifestation of this historical affinity of
pietism with depressive disorders. This paper has
explored the doctrinal basis of the Society Syndrome as a
spiritual sickness and depressive illness, abstracted from
apostate life-histories of Bruderhof youth during the era
of Heini-ism.
Endnote 1
This preliminary paper was submitted for
presentation at the annual meetings of the American
Academy of Religion to be held in Washington, D.C. in
November, 1993. This paper is excerpted from a work in
progress on the Bruderhof. Several people have read
earlier versions of this essay and have provided
insightful comments and criticisms that have improved
my work. I wish to acknowledge Barnabas Johnson,
Hannah Johnson, Joel Clement, and Hilarion Braun for
their kind assistance. Ramon Sender stressed the
importance of demonic possession and exorcism in the
history of the community, and Jere Bruner directed me to
Heini Arnold's published works, particularly the pastoral
tract, "Freedom From Sinful Thoughts."
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