He Said She Said

Some days I’m very glad I am not called upon to do too much judging in this life. Judging my own sin, yes. Discerning good from bad with respect to what constitutes moral conduct, sure. For these things, there is an objective standard: the holy scriptures. Judging correctly involves looking something up in God’s word, then trying to live it out.

That I can do.

Determining the facts about this or that Christian group based on what has been reported about them online? Boy, that’s another thing entirely. There are no objective standards in reporting these days, even among Christians. Documentary evidence? Two or three witnesses? Innocent until proven guilty? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s like being asked to draw conclusions about what actually happened behind the scenes over a period of years in a broken marriage when your witnesses are an angry man, an angry woman and groups of their angry friends who have taken sides with one or the other in blissful ignorance of all the facts. Good luck with that.

Sinless Perfectionism in the Modern Church

A couple of Sundays back I wrote my first ever post on sinless perfectionism, after a friend asked me to look into it. It’s an obscure heresy that goes back centuries, has a bit of a Methodist flavor to it, and makes John Wesley look a little goofy, at least in that one area of his beliefs. It’s also relatively easy to disprove if you are familiar with the scriptures. Like all cultic distinctives, sinless perfectionism is based on weird interpretations of a few select proof texts that ignore their own contexts to get you where their proponents want you to go.

In the process of researching the doctrine of sinless perfection, I came across a group called the Brunstad Christian Church (BCC), a worldwide evangelical Christian church over a century old that is probably the foremost modern proponent of sinless perfectionism. BCC was founded in Norway by Johan Oscar Smith in the early 1900s, and has since grown to 220 churches in 54 countries. BCC has maybe 1,700 members in North America, if we can believe Wikipedia’s stats. The name itself is relatively new, an artefact of recent leadership changes. BCC started non-denominational and didn’t call itself anything at all for decades. People had to refer to their early adherents as “Smith’s friends”.

That bit I kinda like.

The Search for Truth

Anyway, if you want to know why it’s so hard to find out the truth about anything at all these days, BCC serves as a great illustration of the problems one can encounter looking for unequivocal evidence online. Careful perusal of the BCC Wikipedia page shows little that anyone would call blatantly unorthodox. There are few obvious red flags. The usual missionary and humanitarian bona fides. Textbook fundamentalism. Literalism. Faith in Christ. Baptism by immersion. Practice of the Lord’s Supper as a meal or love feast. None of these things troubles me, even if the writers of Wikipedia intend them as pejoratives. There are three lines about the possibility of questionable economic practices among the leadership that (of course) BCC categorically denies.

Then there’s the BCC’s own promotional material, pulled from the dokumen.tips website, which lets you download slides that lay out their basic teachings on “freedom from sin”. These are surprisingly inoffensive, a bunch of platitudes about discipleship with familiar Bible verses to back them up. Also, like any major corporation, we have the church’s financial statements presented, all scrupulously audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. (I do find it mildly questionable that the most recent of these is from 2016, but that’s the only thing that doesn’t quite pass the sniff test, and could easily be explained if more recent public financials exist but are so unremarkable that nobody has uploaded them to dokumen.tips.)

Not really much to see here so far. But wait.

Grifters, Wingnuts and Moderates

Take your Google search a little further and you get other reports about the BCC that are not so squeaky clean. Here we must be careful. Every group of Christians has its critics, including some of the best local churches I’ve ever attended. Claiming victim status doesn’t necessarily make you a victim, and accusations are not evidence in themselves. This is where the comparison with trying to litigate an acrimonious divorce comes in: it’s all “he said she said”, lots of heat and little proof offered.

The BCC has several prominent online critics who have left the group (or been excommunicated — sometimes their actual status is unclear). These folks have things to say about the BCC that would curl your hair. The critics fall broadly into three categories: grifters, wingnuts and moderates.

1/ The Grifter

Heidi Hough has monetized her past with the BCC, turning it into a career as a conference speaker, media personality, documentary filmmaker and lay-therapist, drawing from “cognitive narratology, narrative medicine, internal family systems (IFS), relational neuroscience, and lessons learned in Truth and Reconciliation commissions”, all nutbar nonsense in my book. Her excommunication from the BCC at the age of eighteen has even apparently equipped her to help former QAnon readers find their way out of the “repressive” Alt-Right. You can read Heidi’s interactive workbook on escaping abuse, take her mini-course in moving beyond “the trauma”, order her self-study course in whole-life wellness, or sign up to order her forthcoming memoir Jezebel.

Heidi’s website references narcissism so often I can’t tell whether she’s criticizing or promoting it, but the sheer number of photos of Heidi striking various poses tends to suggest the latter.

People who leave a group of Christians only to spend the rest of their lives hurling darts at the past always leave me feeling a little concerned about their ability to maintain perspective. People who are actively engaged in trying to make a living from their abusive pasts are automatically suspect. I’m not saying Heidi didn’t have a hard time in the BCC, or that there’s no truth to anything she has to say, but her self-promoting presentation and financialization of her trauma make it impossible to take her seriously as an objective witness or learn anything definitive from her about the movement she is criticizing. She has too much invested in being right ... literally.

2/ The Wingnut

To call Millard J. Melnyk obsessive is to understate the case. His website To Christians is profane, raw and wholly consumed with attacking the BCC. He must go at it twenty hours a day. Without reading everything he’s written (an exercise I would compare to pulling my own teeth with pliers), I’m reasonably certain Millard has left the faith altogether. (Calling Abraham’s God “a psychopath” was my first clue.) In an article entitled “Decades of Atrocities in Smith’s Friends”, he accuses the leadership of the BCC of everything from fiscal corruption to serial pedophilia, wife-rape and “rampant levels of spiritual, social, financial, physical, and sexual terrorism and exploitation in BCC chapters all over the world [that] might have impressed even the shysters, ghouls and tyrants of Medieval Catholicism”.

I’m not saying Millard is genuinely out of his mind, but his writing is so rhetorically heated most people would say it calls his objectivity into question. This is one very angry man who might well believe anything he reads about the target of his anger and report it as factual. For all I know, everything he is alleging about the BCC is God’s honest truth. But his presentation is sufficiently long on accusation and short on evidence to deter all but the most determined investigator.

3/ The Moderate

BCCTheTruth is a website created by a former BCC member to allow former and current members to express their views about the church anonymously. Unlike Millard Melnyk’s website, the editor of BCCTheTruth is careful to hedge his criticisms. The main page has this disclaimer prominently displayed:

“BCCTheTruth does not believe nor wish others to believe the lies spread about BCC’s leader, Kare Smith, by NRK. These accusations are not the truth, thus we cannot shine a light on them.”

And again:

“Although we may criticize the actions of the church, we believe the truth is that BCC’s leaders do not steal financial capital from the church. Our standard is the truth.”

The blog contains a history of the BCC comparable to that found on Wikipedia, without heat or hyperbole. It usefully notes, “BCC’s main belief is that humans can become like Jesus. Not in a figurative sense; the belief that we can fully eliminate sin from our lives through faith in God.” That’s a problem, in the sense that sinless perfectionism is, in my view, anti-biblical, but probably not quite so shockingly and indisputably anti-biblical as theft, corruption or pedophilia.

The views of the BCC from former and current members are all over the map, but BCCTheTruth publishes them all, which is commendable. This one is a defense of the BCC from a woman who does not feel oppressed by its leadership and is staying. Another comparatively moderate ex-member thinks the church is unusually secretive, but his criticisms are largely from the perspective of a liberal Christian who would have the same problems with what I believe scripture teaches about the church as he does with the practices of the BCC. He just doesn’t like women wearing head coverings or differences between male and female roles in church and home. Notably, he makes no nasty, unsubstantiated accusations. (He also later discovered he had grown up Calvinist, which appears to be another less-desirable feature of at least some BCC churches, but one they have in common with a significant number of their evangelical brothers and sisters these days.) A third ex-member dislikes BCC’s anti-LGBTQ stance, which is actually a plus in my book. Yet another guest post was from a fellow who clearly just didn’t believe anything at all, and disliked being taken to any sort of church.

My takeaway: even the harshest criticisms of the BCC on this website bear no resemblance to those found on the first two.

Getting to the Truth?

What can we say about all this contradictory information? The obvious conclusion is that it’s very hard to get at truth this way, probably impossible. Either the BCC are a fairly orthodox evangelical group with one major heretical component to their teaching, or they are crazy, evil pedophiles led by thieves and charlatans … or something in between, with no clear indication which end of the spectrum the truth is closer to. From outside, any evangelical group can look terrible if you believe everything said about them. Even from inside, it’s impossible to know everything every leader in every local church in the BCC might be up to. Or not.

A couple of notes: It’s interesting that the same few names show up criticizing the BCC no matter where you click. That suggests its critics are limited to a few very vocal individuals. When the BCCTheTruth website offered current and former members of the BCC the option of airing their views anonymously, they got what appears to be a grand total of four replies in four years.

What does that mean? I sure can’t tell you. I can tell you I’m reserving judgment about the church for the time being. Online critique of the BCC is very much a “he said she said”.

This coming Sunday: One more major problem with sinless perfectionism from a biblical standpoint.