Tonight we premiere our first Critical Cult News show – a weekly live show premiering for members only, covering 3-5 news stories per week dealing with cults and coercive control. Tonight, we cover the Kenyan cult leader Paul Mackenzie, a North Carolina business in trouble for forcing employees to pray and a New York cult hiding in plain sight.

Here is the entire script and source references for this week’s show:

Hello and welcome to the inaugral episode of my new weekly showl, Critical Cult News. This show will premiere for members on Patreon and YouTube and then be released the next day to everyone. I want to thank you for your support and viewership and for checking out this new experiment.

News is the plural of new, and in this show I’ll be presenting new information about cults and coercive control. Sometimes the stories featured will be of events from the past and sometimes of the present, but always with some tie to now such as a new book or show that has been published on the matter. As most of you know, I cover a great deal of Scientology news and current events on this channel, but this show is not geared for that content, since I already have another weekly show with Tony Ortega where we specifically cover his reporting on Scientology events.

As this is our premiere episode, not everything is up to snuff graphics-wise and I will be taking time to improve the graphic presentation of the stories as I report on them. Now, here’s this week’s first story.

The situation: At last count, more than 400 corpses of people linked to a cult in Kenya called Good News International Church have been exhumed from where they were buried in the Shakahola forest of Kilifi County. The tragedy has sparked debate in Kenya about how to protect both religious freedom and the lives of worshippers.

Cult leader Paul Mackenzie, along with 36 other suspects, are currently being detained by Kenyan authorities. He allegedly pushed his followers to starve themselves so they could meet Jesus and go to heaven.

Here’s what happened: The Good News International Church was based in Malindi, a forested region in coastal Kenya, first developed as a Swahili town between the 5th and 10th centuries and famously landmarked by Vasca Da Gama when he built a pillar there on the shores of the Indian Ocean in 1498.

Pastor Paul Mackenzie started his church in 2003 but claimed he closed down Good News International Church four years ago after nearly two decades of operation. Yet the BBC reported they found evidence of an active YouTube channel and Facebook page still posting new content as of just a couple of months ago.

It appears that instead of closing, Mackenzie moved his ministry to a small Shakahola village about 70 km from Malindi, where he continued meeting and preaching from his home. The village is so remote, mobile phone service is scare and the main activity in the village is tending animals and cultivating crops. It was here that Mackenzie’s semi-permanent home was raided in late April and he was taken into custody in connection with the death of two children a week earlier. Investigations since revealed the extent of the problem was far greater than anyone imagined.

Mackenzie’s Bible-based Christian dogma claimed formal education is satanic and used to extort money as well as reinforce LGBT values.

Quoting from Mackenzie’s sermonizing: “They know education is evil. But they use it for their own gains. Those who sell uniforms, write books…those who make pens…all kinds of rubbish. They use your money to enrich themselves while you become poor.”

In 2017 and again in 2018, he was arrested for encouraging children not to go to school as he claimed education was “not recognised in the Bible”.

He told the Nation news,”I told people education is evil… Children are taught gayism and lesbianism.”

Mackenzie’s preaching also featured anti-vaccination messaging and to avoid doctors and medical attention during childbirth, claiming prayer alone was all anyone needed, going so far as to say that doctors “serve a different God.”

But much of Mackenzie’s preaching related to Biblical prophecy and the inevitable arrival of Judgement Day, weaving in conspiratorial New World Order themes about satanic forces infiltrating the power centers of the world. For example, efforts by the Kenyan government to introduce IDs for their citizens was labelled by Mackenzie as the “mark of the beast.”

Following Mackenzie’s arrest, Kenya President William Ruto has likened the cult-leader to a terrorist, describing his teachings as weird and unacceptable after he radicalised thousands. It has also emerged that the cult-leader has a criminal record, having been arrested on several occasions.

Gideon Goma, priest at Holy Family Parish in Kanamkemer, Kenya, told Baptist News Global he wasn’t surprised by the Good News International Church story.

“The story of Pastor Paul Mackenzie of Kenya was all over the news and social media (that he became) public enemy No. 1. From President William Ruto calling him a ‘terrorist’ on April 24 to the angry mob that destroyed Mackenzie’s former church in the southeastern town of Malindi in Coast province on May 1, the entire country considers this self-proclaimed pastor to be one of the worst killers in the nation’s recent history. I wasn’t surprised because pastors in Africa are fond of doing a lot of funny things all in the name of proclaiming the good news and leading people to heaven.”

“For example, under the instruction of Pastor Lesego Daniel of Rabboni Center Ministries, dozens of followers dropped to the floor to eat grass at his ministry in Garankuwa, north of Pretoria, after being told it will ‘bring them closer to God.’ Again, another South African cleric, Prophet Rufus Phala, made his church members drink disinfectant…in order to get healed…. His controversial methods have drawn criticism from many people, although members of his congregation swear by his methods. He is said to have claimed humans can eat anything to feed their bodies and survive on whatever they choose to eat.”

Kenyan journalist Mkamburi Mwawasi stated: “I would say desperation and poverty is to be blamed for what happened to the victims…. Kenyans have become so desperate because of the issue of the rising (inflation) in the country. Many people believe in miracles and find solace in the church with the hope that their lives might change for the better People believe miracles can just happen by believing and not doing anything. Kenyans should understand that the Bible says if someone does not work, then they should not eat. It’s also sad that most pastors have taken advantage of that and are using it to con people out of their hard-earned money. Most of the stories I have heard and seen are churches soliciting money from poor Kenyans in the name of getting them miracles. This Shakahola thing was the first (time I would) hear that people are dying for fasting so as to meet their Creator.”

Life in Kenya is not easy and living conditions in recent decades have taken such a sharp downturn that Kenyans are looking for security or salvation in these small, intense groups which promise salvation. And these conditions are not just in Kenya, but exist in other African nations as well, a major factor in the rise of Islamic terrorist groups such as Boko Haram in Nigera, al-Shabab in Somalia and al-Qaeda in the Africa Sahel.

Stan Chu Ilo, a research professor of world Christianity and African studies at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago stated: “As a student of history, especially religious history, (what happened in Kenya) was not a surprise. It’s shocking but it didn’t surprise me. Why? Because in my research within the last 10 years in Africa, I would say there is a gradual pathologizing of Christianity and cultist groups in the continent.

“If you go back to the year 2000, you will know about the movement for the restoration of the Ten Commandments that brought people together somewhere in Uganda and close to 300 people were burned to death. So, if you watch what is going on in the last few years in Africa, it is this continuation of pathologization, hatred for life. Let’s put it that way. People have suffered so much.

“I always say, when doing analysis of religion in Africa, never do this in isolation. You have similarities between what you see there and the desire for ‘martyrdom,’ through killing the other in terrorist groups that are waging asymmetrical wars on the state.”

In parts of Africa, “the social reality around them is not real anymore and that’s how these kinds of atrocities can happen.”

“The central message of these groups is that ‘all the evils happening around us in Africa and the world are signs that the end time is near.’ That was what Paul (Mackenzie) sold to this particular audience. Remember also that these are folks who are being battered by poverty [and] suffering, and so they find succor in these groups. It’s kind of a release from suffering, that’s why I call it pathologization.”

Ironically, Malindi is also featured as a high-end tourist destination on tourist sites such as Expedia, featuring private beaches, pools, spas and resort living. The economic disparity is obvious and symptomatic of the Western exploitation of Africa, leaving its native citizens to collect the scraps of whatever business opportunists and tourists leave behind. So long as these conditions persist, and current indications are they are only going to continue, it can be expected that calculating cult leaders will keep rising to power, telling people what they need to hear to make it through their days.

And now we go to the US for our next story.

The situation: Two employees of a Greensboro, North Carolina repair company were fired for not attending mandatory prayer meetings the company’s owner held daily, accusing the company’s owner of creating a hostile work environment and setting cult-like conditions for employment. They sued and won.

Here’s what happened: In June of 2022, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against Aurora Renovations and Developments LLC doing business as Aurora Pro Services, a residential home service and repair company.

According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, since at least June 2020, the company required all employees to attend daily employer-led Christian prayer meetings. The meetings were conducted by the company owner, Oscar Lopez, and included Bible readings, Christian devotionals, and solicitation of prayer requests from employees. These meetings could go on for as long as 45 minutes.

Prayers were sometimes requested and offered for poor performing employees, who were identified by name. The prayer meetings also briefly addressed business matters at the close, but the meetings were primarily religious in nature.

Lopez took roll before some of the meetings and reprimanded employees who did not attend. The EEOC alleged Lopez created a hostile work environment by requiring two non-theistic employees, John McGaha and Mackenzie Saunders to attend these prayer meetings as a condition of their employment.

The owner’s reputation around the office was that he was short-tempered and confrontational, which further exacerbated the hostile religious environment.

When Mr. McGaha asked to be excused from the prayer portion of the meetings in the fall of 2020, Lopez refused to accommodate his employee’s lack of religious beliefs. Mr. McGaha was told that “he did not have to believe in God, and he did not have to like the prayer meetings, but he had to participate” Shortly thereafter, his pay was cut and then he was fired.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Saunders describes the behavior as “ranting.” She began to feel as though the meetings became ‘cult-like’ after the owner required everyone to recite the Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer in unison. A few months later, in January 2021, Lopez terminated Ms. Saunders employment after she stopped attending the prayer meetings because they conflicted with her lack of religious beliefs, since she is agnostic.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits religious discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in the workplace. The EEOC filed suit in U.S. District Court, Middle District of North Carolina after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its voluntary conciliation process. The suit demanded compensatory and punitive damages and injunctive relief against the company to end any ongoing discrimination based on religion and to take steps to prevent such unlawful conduct in the future.

Melinda Dugas, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Charlotte District said: “Federal law protects employees from having to choose between their sincerely held religious beliefs and their jobs. Employers who sponsor prayer meetings in the workplace have a legal obligation to accommodate employees whose personal religious or spiritual views conflict with the company’s practice.”

The EEOC lawsuit succeeded and the fired employees were awarded $50,000. They also were granted injunctive relief against Aurora Pro Services. The court issued a three-year consent decree that prohibits the company from discriminating and retaliating against employees and will put into place a new anti-discrimination, non-retaliation, and religious accommodation policy and train all managers and employees.

All too often in the United States, freedom of religion is interpreted by over-enthusiastic religious business owners as a license to enforce their religious beliefs on their employees. We have seen many examples of this across the religious spectrum from Christianity to Scientology. This is but the latest in a long series of EEOC-backed lawsuits which show the exact opposite is true: freedom of religion means an employer or business owner has no rights whatsoever to force their religious beliefs or practices on their employees and that religion has no place in the secular environment of the workplace.

And for our final story tonight, we look at a new book published this week about a cult hiding in plain sight in New York.

A new book from writer Alexander Stille exposes abuses in a multi-generational therapeutic community started in New York City called the Sullivan Institute. According to Stille, this group was “essentially a secret utopian society that had existed for 30 years in [Manhattan’s Upper West Side] that had functioned according to its own laws and its own precepts and was at variance with mainstream society.”

Pseudotherapeutic cults are those in which trained therapists, counsellors and/or psychologists offer treatment regimens or programs but slowly or quickly over time, these practices become more intrusive, invasive and even abusive as the therapists abandon their codes of ethical conduct and begin putting themselves and their own egos before that of their patients or clients. They can start enforcing arbitrary rules or lifestyle choices, strange diets or exercises, become verbally and even physically abusive, often demand sexual favors or unusual sexual activities or even taking part in group sex. All of this is often concealed under patient/client privilege, which makes discovering these kind of therapeutic cults very difficult for authorities, since even group members have no idea what other members are doing with the therapists. And all of this is reinforced when labelling and us-vs-them thinking enters into the picture, and members believe they hold a special exhalted status where anyone who is part of their group is better than or more enlightened than those outside the group.

As one of the members came to say later, “we asked all the right questions and got all the wrong answers.”

Secrecy is often one of the hallmarks of such a group, with a cloistered environment where members who are even perceived as potential threats are quickly kicked out. The Sullivan Institute was one such group. They achieved isolation, even in the middle of the city of New York, by getting low-rent housing at a time when that was uniquely available. Such a thing couldn’t really be repeated now in New York, but this simply speaks to the random and sometimes opportunistic nature of how cults form. At their peak, they had as many as 600 patient-members in apartment buildings in Manhattan. They also ran an experimental theater troupe called the Fourth Wall, which performed from 1976 to 1991 in New York’s East Village.

Like many ashrams, communes and other intentional communities, the Sullivan Institute lived communally, engaged in polyamory and group parenting and socialist politics. But rather than having a religious basis for their belief set, they had a psychoanalytic one. The members were high-powered and high-paid physicians, attorneys, academics and computer programmers.

Officially known as The Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, this cult was founded by psychotherapist Saul Newton and his wife, Dr. Jan Pearce, in 1957. Newton had no medical degree or psychoanalytic training, but his wife did and she was a student of Harry Stack Sullivan. While they took Sullivan’s techniques and altered them for the worse, they used his name in their organization’s title and eventually that is how they became known as the Sullivanians.

They claimed that traditional family ties were the root cause of mental illness and espoused a non-monogamous lifestyle. So much so that they lived with same-sex roommates and cultivated close platonic friendships and encouraged a lot of heterosexual activity. In fact, refusing almost any sexual proposition from another group member was heavily frowned upon. Yet they were not allowed to form steady romantic relationships and woman had to get permission to get pregnant, and when they were trying to conceive, they were made to have sex with multiple men specifically to create uncertainty about who the father was. Often patients were also encouraged to cut ties with their families, sometimes for the slightest of reasons.

With the rise of the counter-culture movement and push back against traditional conservative values throughout the 1960s, the movement found plenty of potential new members and grew until its peak in the 1970s. The sales pitch was simple: parties, sex, low rent and affordable therapy. What could go wrong? Therapists were even willing to write letters to the draft board to help keep potential draftees out of the military as “psychologically unfit” – a service that had appeal to scared young men looking for a way out of the war. As member and novelist Richard Price wrote, “It felt to me like this is just: add water and it’s instant friends. And you know, girls going in and out…It’s instant sex life. It’s like someone opened the gates of heaven.”

Only two attempts were made to feature this group in news stories, but anyone who came in contact with journalists or researchers was just as quickly kicked out of the group rather than let its secrets be exposed.

A core teaching of the Sullivan therapy was the destructiveness of motherhood and how mothers need to limit their time with their children. Babysitters therefore ended up doing most of the child rearing in the group or the kids were packed up and sent to boarding school before they could even read or write. In one case, a father of one child who was not a member of the group tried to get his miserable child back from the boarding school he’d been sent to, but the group literally kidnapped the child from his father’s home and took the child right back.

By the 1980s, Sullivan and his lieutenants, often trained therapists he had installed and ended up marrying, were running the group with an iron fist. Members were made to donate most of their income for fees, dues and fines and Sullivan had the ultimate say in any life matter, from their social lives and finances to how they raised their children. As Stille writes in his new book, “the Sullivan Institute encapsulates one of the great themes of the twentieth century: the tendency of utopian projects of social liberation to take a totalitarian turn.”

Finally in the 1980s, membership lagged and the group collapsed when they were finally exposed in the press. Investigations began into the professional misconduct of its therapists, there were high-profile child custody cases and former members speaking out against it.

Leader Saul Newton ended up married and divorced six times with ten children. He died in 1991 from sepsis. His son, Keith, made a 4-part docuseries about the group called The Fourth Wall.

To quote from The New Yorker article on the Sullivanians: “Like all cult leaders, Newton ignored his own principles when it suited him, while taking others to sadistic extremes, such as the Sullivanian commitment to free love. He demanded oral sex from seemingly every young woman he encountered, in or out of session, hounding one young patient, Ellen, on a near-daily basis for almost twenty years. And, like all violent patriarchs, Newton triggered cycles of abuse across and down generations.”

The generational effects of cults of this kind cannot be easily measured. The number of lives influenced and ruined by Newton and his squad of domineering, pseudotherapist wives can’t really be counted, certainly not on hundreds of hands, and that legacy is the real tragedy. Children who never wanted anything more than loving parents in a compassionate home were instead born into a kind of group-home madness, all in an authoritarian nightmare of creating the perfect society. The one thing we find in such people who question and seek to tear down traditional values is a complete lack of understanding of why those values evolved in the first place. Authoritarian certainty in new and completly untested therapies combined with experiments in communal living were hallmarks of “new psychology” throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s and each one ended in disaster, from Primal Scream to the Sullivanians. Perhaps someday people will come to learn that society’s structures, the family unit and child rearing are the way they are for a reason and not play God with people’s lives. Had Saul Newton learned that lesson a little earlier in his life, he would have saved hundreds or even thousands from a lifetime of pain and misery.