August 19, 2020 - 7:00am
The standard liberal template for depicting minority religious communities is escape. As typified by the Netflix series Unorthodox, the narrative tracks a young person breaking free of tradition and superstition to discover themselves in a world of expansive liberal self-fulfilment.
A new BBC documentary, Inside the Bruderhof, surprised me by inverting the trope. It follows Hannah, an 18-year-old raised in the Bruderhof community at Darvell in Sussex. Hannah is embarking on a year in London, in order to explore other ways of living and make an informed decision about whether or not to commit to a Bruderhof life.
It’s not a trivial decision. In The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher advises Christians in our increasingly post-Christian world to give up seeking political and cultural power and focus on religious life in community. Rooted in the radical Protestant Anabaptist tradition, the Bruderhof are ahead of Dreher by some 100 years.
Members hold everything in common: houses, cars, even the clothes they wear. They have no money of their own. Sex roles are segregated, ambition is constrained by the work available within the community, and members have no choice about where they live in the 23 international Bruderhof communities.
But this is not a cult, or a group smothered by traditionalism. Anabaptists believe religious commitment should be made consciously as an adult, and like the Amish, Bruderhof families encourage their offspring to try life outside the community before committing to adult Bruderhof membership.
This emphasis on free choice makes it difficult to tell a story based on breaking free of unreflecting religiosity. Rather, it becomes a story about the modern world as seen from the viewpoint of someone embedded in a strong community. It’s not a pretty sight: arriving in Peckham, Hannah seems dismayed by London’s empty acquisitiveness and lonely crowds. Accustomed to living surrounded by fields, and to life spent working for and within a wider community, she struggles to fill her time meaningfully, describing activities performed just for herself as ‘a waste of time’. We see her grow visibly more unhappy, and after a month she has decided that at the end of her London year she will return to Darvell.
Watching Inside the Bruderhof, I expected a hatchet job. Certainly the final screen makes a veiled reference to ‘allegations’ from former members, a coda that jars so strangely with a very sympathetic film that I wonder if it’s a vestige of the filmmakers’ original angle, abandoned as the footage failed to support it. Because rather than a sense of rubbernecking at religious oddballs, the feeling the documentary left me with was wistfulness, at a way of life that looks odd to normies but appears in many ways idyllic and is clearly fulfilling and supportive for committed members.
I wonder if the filmmakers went to Darvell in search of the ‘breaking free’ trope but ended up making quite a different film. Because with the economic, political and technological certainties that underpinned modern life crumbling beneath us, it’s far from clear that it’s the radical religious communitarians whose way of life is the oddball one.
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Subscribe” she struggles to fill her time meaningfully, describing activities performed just for herself as ‘a waste of time'”
The subject of the documentary has learned both in theory and by experience that living for others is more fulfilling than living for oneself alone. Acting responsibly for the benefit of others is more likely to lead to happiness than constantly demanding one’s own rights. Well done, the Bruderhof!
The Bruderhof community in Peckham used to live near me in Forest Gate, east London. Another run-down area, full of guns and gangs and knives and drugs. Some of us started a community garden on a bit of wasteland, and the Bruderhof were with us from the start, supporting the work and volunteering to clear rubble and weeds. They made biscuits, helped erect a maypole, built ponds and pathways, and mixed freely with the other attendees who were from all corners of the globe, and all possible religions. They were wonderful, really genuine people and if they were on a religious mission to convert anyone, there was no evidence of that whatsoever. We missed them greatly when they moved on.
Peckham? They dropped the poor girl in Peckham? No wonder she was back within the fold a month later. Why not Primrose Hill or Holland Park? (I write as one who has lived in Peckham, Primrose Hill and Holland Park).
I think Peckham is quite Des Res these days…
Classic!
Thank you Mary, great essay.
Of course she felt lonely and alienated coming from the familiar culture of her community and then trying to understand the ways of a big city which are famed for being soulless places full of people in a rush and focused on their own lives. The contrast would be too great for most people. Many university students struggle in the same way.
Many of my holiday choices are of the communal living and sharing experiences types, which I continue to find immensely enjoyable, broadening and fulfilling.
To echo another poster – I’m not surprised she was put off by living in the outside world, if her experience of it was Peckham!
It’s not for me either way, I hope she made/makes a choice that’s good for her.
Now compare and contrast with something like Scientology, or the Westboro Baptists…
Surprising, enlightening………as usual, thank you Mary.
Hello, former resident of the Bruderhof here. I run a website Afterhof.com and FB group Afterhof for people who have left there. I can clear up a few things and answer any questions you may have. The BBC had done a piece earlier this year that focused on grievances of some other leavers so they pretty much had to reference that there were problems at the end of this piece. The Bruderhof and their lawyers had a very heavy hand in toning down the previous piece and now are claiming copyright infringement to keep that piece off YouTube.
The Bruderhof has some very wonderful loving people living there but the way the organization is run often shows some cult like features such as the first three long term leaders were founder, son and grandson. They have manipulated family relationships to suppress public criticism. They have a top down male run structure that is not democratic at all. The decisions are made by a few at the top and then are announced to the wider membership who always unanimously agrees with a loud and rather creepy “YES!!” The few people who have taken a firm stand when they have seen something wrong are treated terribly and put in isolation. If they have a child who is difficult with depression, Autism or ADHD they have kicked the family out (in this piece Hardy’s family) until the children are grown and then allow the parents to return. They have torn minors teens from their family and only life they have known and sent them away with little ability to fend for themselves often with disastrous results. I could go on and on. They are doing better in some ways but this is a puff piece and for the life of me I have no idea why they are engaged in this publicity campaign. They get very few members joining from the outside.
Nice inspiring essay about an extremely rare phenomenon in the Western world.
But why is that rare?
There is no such thing as right and true religion without cooperative human culture. Cooperative Sacred culture is the necessary theater or crucible wherein right and true religious responsibilities and activities can take place.
Over time, the common understanding of religion and religious responsibilities has become abstracted and dogmatized by the institutional church, such that religion has been made to seem to be a merely personal and private endeavor . Thus in this time and place conventional institutional religion has become deficient as a true culture.
In this time and place conventional institutional religion tends to create and to function as an institutional order, but it generally fails to create a practical cooperative order or a true cooperative culture.
The institutions of conventional religion tend to organize the attention and resources of people in much the same manner as the modern-day secular State. That is to say, merely institutional religion fragments the inherent unity (and, thus, the necessary cooperative culture ) of humankind into a chaotic mass of mere competing individuals. Therefore, conventional institutional religion fails to be Right and True religion – not only because if fails to Reveal Reality and Truth, but because it also fails to oblige people to create real, right, and true religious culture (involving mutual cooperation, mutual responsibility, and mutual dependence.
Practitioners of right and true religion must (and,necessarily,do) orient themselves to the free creation of a Sacred cooperative culture.
Without the conscious participation in such a Sacred Culture the great mass of dreadfully sane Christian religionists are really not that much different to the normal dreadfully sane secular every person.
Is it a requisite of the Bruderhof Community to be white? Forgive me if I overlooked any members of other ethnicities.