Cult deterrent fails

Press, 15 March 1980, Page 17

Cult deterrent fails

Crazy for God: The Nightmare of Cult Life. By Christopher Edwards. Prentice Hall, 1979. 233 pp. $12.85. (Reviewed by Charles P. Sedgwick) It took four weeks for the United States Armed Forces to produce a shorn, emaciated child out of this adult so I feel qualified to review this book. Christopher Edwards’s “Crazy for God” is interesting as a document purporting to describe an academic sceptic’s personal conversion to the Moonies cult. However, if it was l intended, to deter would-be victims, it is hardly successful. The book drags the reader through several phases of Edwards’s journey with the Moonie Community. Capture and conversion take Edwards to the “Boonville Baby” camp or “Training Centre” where he is subjugated with love", controlled with despair, and motivated by hope. Aside from the love, the method is no more than Edwards would have found in basic training had he been drafted. After one week he develops the Moonie ego and is already trying the technique himself, and by the third week he is almost a professional. The next phase takes him back to Berkeley where he begins the long and arduous task of working up the MoOnie echelons. A little less love, a little more despair, but mobility through the ranks. He experiences several of the “fronts” the Moonie organisation uses to acquire its wealth and to capture the people needed to further its empire. As a slave he sells flowers, washes dishes and is constantly chastised for even contemplating the “Satan-filled” environment of Berkeley. Still persevering after five months (from which the reader is spared), Edwards finds his niche and is assigned to be responsible for another front, the private elementary school, which attempts to work on the

“Satanic” children of committed Moonie parents. After eight mpnths he has status, a girlfriend whom he loves, but. who leads to “the cold shower condition,” and finally he gets to see the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and company. At the peak of his career, Edwards’s parents, having obviously worried about his condition, set the wheels of the de-programming machine in actiom Edward is recaptured by one father, two thugs, one detective and the deprogramming guru, Ted Patrick, and is subjected to debriefing. While the book is portrayed as “a chilling warning about the perils of cultism” and specifically The Unification Church, it seems far more like a sceptical intellectual’s guide to becoming a Moonie. While, one gets glimpses of the insidious nature of the organisation, one is at the same time showered with information about its benefits to the members. Edwards has not been able to avoid using the same, method that was used on him to lure his readers along. . ? The book is a stream of love, despair and hope, both in the conversion process and ‘in his description in retrospect. One does not get the impression that the ' de* Programmed Edwards is really deprogrammed Edwards has now, according to the dust jacket, spent a year at Princeton Theological Seminary, and is currently founder and project director of the Centre for the. Study of Coercive Persuasion. I find it hard, knowing this, to see how this self admitted “intelligent . and independent human being” has set out to “expose their (Moonies’) secrets’’ There were far too many questions the Community never answered for Edwards, and there are far too many questions he never answers for the reader. (Charles P. Sedgwick is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Canterbury.)