“I really struggled with speaking up, with documenting what I found,
because it was so disturbing to me, and so painful to relive. But
someone had to tell the truth. Someone had to tell the story of what
happened there.”
__
He wanted to believe the council spoke for God, but already he had
his doubts. He’d heard dark and ugly rumors about their founder, a
bearded Messiah-like figure, and he’d heard stories that horrified him
about the Farm, a remote and secluded resort in the Missouri woods. But
he knew better than to ask about any of that.And yet, for as much as he tried to keep his troubles to himself, something was amiss. For weeks, he’d caught his parents whispering about him. He figured it had something to do with the day one of the men in the commune touched him. Prater had tried to forget that moment, the feeling of terror that washed over him, the searing shame when it was over, but he couldn’t move past it. Since then, he had been acting out in strange ways, desires he couldn’t control aroused inside him. Eventually he told the council, and now he wished he’d never said anything at all.
,,,
On that morning, Prater’s isolation began. Over the next two years it would increase until he was forbidden from contact with anyone in the commune outside of his parents and his brother and sister. He took his meals in his parents’ room, but he spent his days alone at Magnolia, tutored in a broom closet and shunned from the other children, who were instructed to never speak with him again.
“I didn’t understand it at the time, but they were trying to keep me quiet,” Prater says today. “They still are.”
,,,
In 2014, Prater self-released No Place To Call Home, a film documenting his years inside Jesus People, one of the strangest and longest-running religious experiments in American history. The church in which Prater grew up, officially called Jesus People USA, is one of the final vestiges of what may be the last great religious revival in America. Known as the Jesus Movement, it swept up as many as 3 million people in the late 1960s, many of them burned-out hippies who felt disillusioned by the free-love and drugs ethos and ached for some kind of spirituality outside the confines of traditional Christianity.
The movement spawned hundreds of religious communes across the country, including Calvary Chapel, one of the largest and most influential megachurches in America today, as well as the Children of God, the notorious sex cult that once claimed as followers Joaquin Phoenix, Rose McGowan, and Jeremy Spencer, one of the original members of Fleetwood Mac. Most of these communes collapsed within a few years. Jesus People USA, which today has about 300 members, is one of the largest that has survived.
The influence of the Jesus People movement on evangelical Christianity is profound. “It gave birth to Christian rock,” says David Di Sabatino, who made a documentary about Lonnie Frisbee and the Jesus People movement called Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher. “The contemporary Christian music industry wouldn’t exist without the Jesus People.”
The Dark Side Of Jesus People USA, America's Most Influential Christian Movement - BuzzFeed News
A scary read for me, I didn't realize how close my interactions with this cult really were till reading this. The Cornerstone Festivals - went to 3. The Christian rock band Revelations saw them twice AT my college; had two or three of their albums. Billy Graham, lost count of how many times I had to watch him on TV, but went to 3 of his Crusades,,,
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