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This Just In: Media

The commentators and the cult angle

By Dan Kennedy

Commentators weighing in on a controversial child-custody decision that favored the religious rights of an Orthodox Jewish mother over those of a Christian father have all missed a salient point: the father belongs to a religious organization that is widely regarded as a cult.

Boston Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald and Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara have both taken the side of Jeffrey Kendall, who has been barred by the state's Supreme Judicial Court from attempting to proselytize his three children or take them to church. "Hostility toward evangelical Christianity," Fitzgerald called it on December 11. "This opinion strikes at the heart of the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of religion," McNamara thundered two days later.

Kendall is a member of the Boston Church of Christ, whose aggressive recruiting tactics have resulted in its being banned from a number of college campuses, including Boston University. (Robert Thornburg, dean of BU's Marsh Chapel, calls the church "the most destructive religious organization I've ever run into.") The Los Angeles-based International Churches of Christ, of which the BCC is part, has also been investigated by the Washington Post and Time magazine.

"This is not a fundamentalist group. This group is a mind-control cult that uses deception," charges Steven Hassan, an internationally recognized anti-cult expert and founder of the Resource Center for Freedom of Mind. (Hassan testified in the original divorce trial as an expert witness on behalf of Kendall's then-estranged wife, Barbara Zeitler.)

According to Hassan and other experts, the BCC -- which is not related to the mainstream Churches of Christ -- controls its members through a process called "discipling," in which each person is assigned a mentor who controls many aspects of his life, including how much money to give to the church. (According to the International Churches of Christ Web site, located at http://www.icoc.org, "Being 'discipled' does not mean that someone else makes our decisions for us nor does it mean blindly doing whatever we are told.")

Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby came down on Zeitler's side on December 16, detailing -- as Fitzgerald and McNamara failed to do -- Kendall's grossly intolerant behavior. Among other things, he told his children that they and their mother would go to hell if they weren't "saved," and he cut his son's religiously significant sidecurls. But Jacoby, too, missed the cult angle, chalking Kendall's actions up to fundamentalist doctrine.

The BCC declined to comment on the case. Although Fitzgerald, McNamara, and other critics of the SJC's decision have characterized it as a threat to religious freedom, Hassan applauds the ruling. "Normal, healthy religions," he says, "do not go to the extremes where the daddy says the mommy will go to hell."