Predictably, there are people who look at Word of Life Church, that lunatic fringe cult in New York state (you know, the ones who allegedly beat a teenager to death), and say, “Ah ha! There’s your Benedict Option!” That kind of silly remark says more about the person who makes it than it does about the Benedict Option, in the same way that people who look at the most extreme manifestations of gay culture, or black culture, or (fill in the blank) culture, and call it exemplary of the whole.

Still, there is a Ben Op point to be made about the Word of Lifers. Take a look at this in-depth report in The New York Times, about how the church turned into a cult. Excerpts:

People of all stripes once showed up at the living room Bible study that became Word of Life, many of them disaffected members of other churches drawn by the group’s stripped-down style of worship. It was the late 1980s, and Ms. Irwin’s father, Jerry Irwin, was the founder and soft-spoken pastor.

“They wanted what the Bible says; they didn’t want all this other religious tradition,” said Janet Sylvester, who joined her two brothers in the group in the early 1990s after having a child as a single woman. “It was back to the basics.”

Boom. Big red flag. Declaring oneself liberated from all religious tradition, going “back to the basics,” is a bad sign. Churches and groups should be embedded within a long and established tradition, if only to set boundaries and to be accountable. After 2,000 years of Christianity, anybody who says that they are going “back to the basics” should not be trusted, in my view. Is it really the case that after all this time, someone is going to emerge who discovers that everybody since the early Church has been wrong, and now, at last, the true reform is upon us?

More:

When Mr. Irwin returned to Word of Life in the mid-1990s, it was as a prophet who claimed to be able to see and hear inside people’s homes, former members said. One of his visions was to move his family into the sprawling third floor of the schoolhouse. Over time he drove Mr. Wright from power.

“The freedom that you felt was slowly going away, and the fear was slowly increasing,” Ms. Sylvester said. “And the fear wasn’t necessarily a fear of him; it was a fear because he represented God in your eyes. So your fear was toward God.”

Fear and paranoia are often danger signs. To be clear, there really are scary things in the world, and fear can be a sign of sanity and health. That said, when leaders begin to talk like that, and your primary experience of church, and of God, is fearful, that’s an indication that you should hit the road.

More:

Gates went up outside the schoolhouse, and other ministers were no longer welcome. Members began letting phone calls go to voice mail, feeling the need to get Mr. Irwin’s approval before taking a call. Parishioners were often barred from taking communion because he said they were in too much sin. One member said Mr. Irwin used racial slurs during sermons, though others did not recall that.

Members’ lives slowly became less their own, the former members said, as the building around them transformed into a sort of altar to the Irwin family’s whims. The third floor, where Mr. Irwin’s family took up residence in the late 1990s, became “pretty much a mansion,” Mr. Ames recalled. One room held a trampoline, and another a small basketball court. The bathroom had a whirlpool bath. It was so big the Irwins bicycled through the hallways.

Cult of personality. Classic.

The entire NYT report is here.

As Ken Myers pointed out at our recent Ben Op event in Georgetown, we are simply going to have to develop a tolerance for risking this kind of disaster if we are going to risk something good and healthy developing. How much sense would it make to look at the various sex abuse scandals arising out of churches and conclude that all churches inevitably become nests of abuse? How much sense would it make to say that because some marriages become abusive, the institution of marriage is bound to be a dark trap? At some point, you have to move forward on trust — but that does not mean blind, unquestioning faith in and loyalty to the leadership.