美国国家公共电台 NPR 'I Was Full Of Rage': Author Rebecca Stott On Growing Up In A Christian Cult

A MARTINEZ, HOST:

Growing up in an ultra-religious household can be hard to navigate 1. I was raised in a strict Pentecostal family, and I remember not being able to go trick-or-treating with my friends on Halloween or not having any sign of Santa Claus at Christmas because all of these things were deemed to be inspired by Satan. When you're a little kid, it all makes sense because that's just how it is. However, it takes getting older to realize that you're different than everyone else.

That was the experience of Rebecca Stott, but it went deeper. She grew up in England as part of a fundamentalist Christian 2 group that was closed off to the rest of the world. In her new book, "In The Days Of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult 3," she introduces us to the community of Exclusive Brethren. Rebecca, welcome.

REBECCA STOTT: Hello.

MARTINEZ: So Exclusive Brethren - tell us about who they are and what they believe in.

STOTT: Well, they started out as the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s, at a time when there were lots of small groups breaking away from the established church. And they set themselves up to live by the principles of the early Christian church and to worship together and not have priests. It was all very egalitarian. It was very pure.

And within a couple of decades, they started to split. And there was one group that split off from the main group because they thought the main group weren't being strict enough or separatist enough. My family began - I'm fourth-generation Exclusive Brethren. Then in the '60s, the 1960s, just before I was born, a new leader took over and decided 4 that they still weren't strict enough.

MARTINEZ: (Laughter) Oh, wow.

STOTT: So they believe in the rapture 5. And unless they stick to Brethren rules and have no contact with the outside world, they'll be left behind in the rapture. So that's essentially 6 them. They're very conservative, very secretive.

MARTINEZ: So this new leader - when he took over, what kind of things did he change?

STOTT: He upped all the stakes, really. He decided that the Brethren were not being hardline enough, that they weren't being separate enough. And he enforced the rule that if you had a teenager in your house who had been raised in the Brethren but was not yet breaking bread - i.e., fully 7 compliant 8 - you couldn't eat with them. You couldn't eat with non-Brethren outside. You couldn't go to the cinema or have radios or television or newspapers.

So effectively, he not only separated off the Brethren from all contact with the outside world - you know, they might have been able before to have worked for non-Brethren. Now they had to work for other Brethren. And there was a great deal more compliance 9 and surveillance as well. There's a lot of mass confessions 10. There are a lot of punishments for noncompliant behavior.

MARTINEZ: Now, you mention you were born into it. And your father wasn't just part of it. He was a high-ranking leader. How high did his influence go?

STOTT: He was ranked as one of the promising 11 young men. When he was dying, he described himself as a brownshirt and as a young Nazi 12. And I'd say, oh, don't be absurd - that you were a preacher in an extreme religious group. But he'd say, it's not the scale of what we did. It's the pattern, he said. All cults 13 are run in the same way, and they need those kind of young bloods, those zealous 14 young men, to enforce their rules. And he was one of those.

MARTINEZ: How? In what way?

STOTT: He would - one of the ways that they kept the power was to - if anyone was not toeing the party line, they'd be visited by a couple of priests, or ministering brothers. And that person would be interrogated 15 for hours about whatever sinful act or thought they were supposed to have committed. And if they weren't compliant after that, they'd be expected to stay in isolation 16 in a room in their house for as long as it took until the priests, people like my father and my grandfather, deemed them right with the Lord again. And that could go on for weeks. And sometimes people went mad or, in some terrible cases, committed suicide. So...

MARTINEZ: So Rebecca, your father was responsible then, for some of these things in some ways, by enforcing the rules.

STOTT: Him and many, many others. You know, I - when he lay dying, he was absolutely tormented 17 by those memories of things that he had done. He was a very divided man. You know, on the one hand, he wanted to comply. And on the other hand - when I was growing up, I'd listen to him preach about radios and how wicked they were. But I knew he had a radio in the tire compartment 18 of his car, which he listened to the cricket scores on (laughter).

MARTINEZ: Well, how did - OK. Then how did you square that, then? Knowing what your father was telling you, knowing how you were growing up, how did you square that with everything you were taught?

STOTT: Well, I was pretty tormented, too, but I think in a different way because I was full of rage. I remember I couldn't show it. I was very good at not showing it 'cause as it Brethren girl, you know, we had to keep our heads covered. We had to grow our hair long. We had to be silent. So my father had secrets. My brothers had secrets. Everyone had secrets.

MARTINEZ: Wow.

STOTT: Everyone was breaking the rules, you know. So then you think - am I supposed to go and tell? You know, is that what the Lord wants me to do? Or do I protect them?

MARTINEZ: What happened to your family's relationship with the Brethren?

STOTT: We left in the early '70s. So in 1970, there was a huge scandal. Jim Taylor Jr., the big leader, was found in bed with one of the younger sisters. She was married. He was very drunk. He was completely incoherent. He was in his 70s. She was in her 30s. Eight thousand people came out, including my father and my grandfather and our - most of my immediate 19 family. So we came into the big, wide world.

MARTINEZ: How was that?

STOTT: Well, it was astonishing. I think that the grown-ups around us were much too confused themselves to be able to sort of sit down and tell us that when they said that television sets belong to Satan, maybe they hadn't been right. Suddenly, we've got a television set in our house. Suddenly, we've got a radio...

MARTINEZ: Oh, boy.

STOTT: ...(Laughter) In our house. And suddenly, we're being taken to go and see "Gone With The Wind" in the cinema.

MARTINEZ: (Laughter).

STOTT: So for me, I just remember this incredible sense of vertigo 20 and glancing at my mother constantly, like, is this OK? Are we allowed to do this?

MARTINEZ: How did working on this make sense of your childhood for you?

STOTT: You know, when my father died, I promised him I would try to write this book for him really. And then I quickly realized that I was writing it for the little girl who was angry, you know - I call her the girl in the red cardigan. I have a picture of her, and she's biting her tongue (laughter) all the time, you know - and also to try to trace the ways in which that experience had a long tail, if you like.

I have a section of the book called Aftermath. And my father became an addicted 21 roulette player after he left the Brethren, and that put an enormous strain on the family. My parents divorced. My father ended up in prison when I was 16. He was very, very chaotic 22. I understand that now, you know. He was impossible, infuriating and wonderful. In the year that I was studying "Macbeth" for my O-levels, he decided I had to see every single production of "Macbeth" that year. So we saw 13 productions.

MARTINEZ: Oh, wow.

STOTT: And in most car journeys, he'd be playing me music and reciting poetry. So it was really extraordinary being a daughter of such a man.

MARTINEZ: Rebecca, I mentioned earlier how I grew up in a very religious family. I don't go to church that much anymore. Actually, I don't go at all. So I'm wondering, for you, where is your faith now? Do you still have it?

STOTT: No one's asked me that question (laughter). I would say that one of the things I expected from this book was that it would lay some ghosts for me, and I think it has. I still cannot open the Bible without hearing the sound of those men using scriptures 24 almost like rapiers with each other. They knew the Bible inside out, so they would use one scripture 23 to trump 25 another. And it was all men locking horns, you know. So it's hard for me not to see the Bible full of words that have been used for warfare 26, if you like.

And yeah, I've been surprised at the effect on me of writing the book and also of the many, many people who have written to me, ex-Brethren - I would say 70 or 80 by now - beautiful letters from elderly people writing to me to say, the Brethren was a terrible thing. We all lived through it - and telling me their stories but saying, I came to find a kinder God and kinder Christians 27 outside. And I've been really moved by how much people have wanted me to know about their kinder God.

MARTINEZ: Rebecca Stott's book is "In The Days Of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult." Rebecca, thanks.

STOTT: Thank you.

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