Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army: a troubling documentary

We Brits don't think of ourselves as susceptible to religious cults, said Ben Dowell in The Times. But this harrowing BBC2 documentary serves to shatter that complacency. Its focus is the Jesus Army, a sect established in Northamptonshire in 1969 by a charismatic preacher named Noel Stanton.

Hundreds of people flocked to hear his sermons, and many gave up their livelihoods and possessions to join his "evangelical rural community". Stanton, however, exploited rather than helped his followers, many of whom were young or otherwise vulnerable. He subjected them to an "increasingly doctrinaire" set of rules and punishments, based on strictly patriarchal values, and initiated a horrifying culture of ritualised sexual abuse.

As early as 1978, a cult member who'd been punished for reading books was found dead on a nearby railway line, said Madeleine Davies in the Church Times. Yet Stanton's movement kept growing; by the 2000s, it had 3,000 members and millions in assets.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Jesus Army always seemed weird and sinister, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian, yet the scale of its crimes was only exposed after Stanton's death in 2009, when an investigation revealed that it was "a haven for paedophiles".

The filmmakers estimate that one in six children involved with the cult were abused; 539 ex-members have been accused of abuse, but only 11 have been convicted. The lasting message of the documentary is that, as a society, we are shockingly bad at bringing sex abusers to justice.