Surrounded by FBI agents attempting to coax them into their vehicles, five of Samuel Bateman’s underaged wives huddled tightly.
With trembling arms around one another, they sang, “And he will come again, and one by one we’ll rise, to praise his holy name.” Then as their friend reassured them they would be OK and said it was time to go, they kept singing, “Risen, to bring us home again.”
Trust Me: The False Prophet is the latest docuseries from Netflix exposing the dark underground of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It follows Christine Marie and her husband, Tolga Katas, who moved to Colorado City, Ariz., and befriended a group called the Samuelites, followers of the self-declared prophet Samuel Bateman.
Under the guise of creating a documentary to share the Samuelites’ vision for the world, Marie and Katas earned the trust of Bateman and his wives, filmed their lives and collected evidence that eventually led to prison sentences for Bateman and a multiple of his adult followers.
After Bateman’s wives, which included multiple 9- year-olds, were eventually separated and placed in foster homes, they began to realize what they had endured.
“They were no longer communicating with Sam or the other older wives,” the FBI agent working the case observed. “And that’s when things in this case started to open up.”
“We leave the church, begin to listen to the stories of our neighbors and start to recognize how we were harmed.”
One way they were liberated was by recognizing their own story in Marie’s story. That’s a common journey many survivors of religious abuse go through. We leave the church, begin to listen to the stories of our neighbors and start to recognize how we were harmed. And whether the stories come from Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Catholic or Mormon environments, patterns immediately emerge.
The abusive men in virtually every liberation story — from Sarah Stankorb’s Disobedient Women to Christa Brown’s Baptistland to Tia Levings’ A Well Trained Wife to Megan Phelps Roper’s Unfollow to the girls of the FLDS — all have a very specific assumption in common: Each group thinks their ego-driven demand to submit to their male hierarchy under the threat of hell is totally different than everyone else’s.
Self-promotion and supremacy
“Sam was always kind of a joke,” one person mentioned. It was a common theme at the beginning of the docuseries. Bateman was struggling financially, wasn’t being taken seriously in the workplace or in his community. So after Warren Jeffs, the previous prophet of the FLDS, had been in prison for years and the community was struggling, Bateman declared himself the next prophet.
According to Bateman, anyone who joined his cause would be “part of the greatest events in history.”
This meant projecting their own obsession with ego onto God. “Heavenly Father gets the credit,” Bateman would declare. And as an image bearer of a God obsessed with self-glory, so was Bateman.
“My goals are to be the most influential person on earth,” Bateman proclaimed. “And to bring the queen of England to my home.”
Samuel Bateman (Screencap)
During one scene, Marie and Katas mention how Bateman wanted them to film him jumping and running through the mountains. And many who have watched the series have mentioned being shocked to see a man committing such crimes so excited about being filmed.
In an interview with Baptist News Global about perpetrators of chronic abuse and coercive control, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Shane Moe said: “Ultimately, they’re really concerned about self-promotion and self-protection, or about supremacy and sustaining it.”
Total submission to male hierarchy
“This is for the king,” one of the women said on Bateman’s birthday. “We were gonna literally bring you a crown.”
The hierarchy was the prophet, the husband and finally the wives. Children didn’t seem to have any place on the hierarchy since they also were married to the men.
While each man ruled over the women in his house, he had to remain in submission to Bateman, the prophet. “I knew (Bateman) had a position before Heavenly Father that was above me,” one of the men says. His submission to Bateman went so far as to include giving Bateman his underage daughters as wives.
“Women are taught to submit to the men,” a woman named Julia says. “And as the father, he was the ruling power over our family. And so when Moroni started following Sam, that made me make that change too.”
“We’re not teaching them to be critical thinkers. We’re teaching them strict obedience.”
A relative named Carole adds: “We groomed our girls for this. We’re not teaching them to question authority. We’re not teaching them to be critical thinkers. We’re teaching them strict obedience.”
It’s ironic how often men who demand that everyone under them submit to them as the heads of the family or the church fail to recognize how they aren’t submitting to what the Bible says God requires of them. According to Moe, this pattern is common because abusive men “have little to no real concern with their own patterns of deception, hypocrisy or immorality (or with those of the leaders they support) — to say nothing of any real concern with how antithetical their patterns are to what we see in Jesus’ life, example and teachings.”
Under the threat of hell
At every point in the hierarchy, the people on the underside of the authority and submission dynamic were coerced through fear of hell.
Despite Warren Jeffs forbidding everyone from getting married or having sex after he went to prison, one of the men named Moroni ended up getting married. Because he stopped obeying Jeffs, he thought, “I’m going to hell. Life is over.” So when Bateman claimed to be taking over as the prophet, Moroni thought, “He’s offering a path to salvation.”
This September 24, 2007, file photo shows Warren Jeffs watching as the jury leaves the courtroom to restart deliberations during his trial in St. George, Utah. Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs was found guilty of sexually assaulting two young girls by a Texas jury on August 4, 2011. (Photo credit: POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Obedience to the prophet was “the way to heaven.” And the women had this fear drilled into them. As one of them admitted, “Your eternal life is in his hands.”
According to the FBI evidence, despite enduring “daily sexual assaults,” the girls were “forced to stay quiet” and were told they would “go to hell for not wanting this.”
One haunting absence in the series is underage boys. The entire series is filled with adult men, women and underage girls. But where are the boys?
According to People magazine, for the men of the FLDS to “reach the highest level of heaven,” they had to acquire more wives, which meant eliminating competition. So in a 2005 report, “up to 1,000 teenage boys had been separated from their families and exiled from the FLDS community.” These boys, some just 13 years old, became known as the “Lost Boys.”
Being exiled from his community, one boy said, “I absolutely believed I was going to hell.”
“There are a lot of broken-hearted parents, but you question this decision at the risk of your own salvation.”
And why would the parents agree to send their 13-year-old boys away so adult men could have less competition for their underage daughters?
One witness explained, “There are a lot of broken-hearted parents, but you question this decision at the risk of your own salvation.”
Hell can be a difficult topic for many evangelicals to reconsider because it seems so literal in the Bible. Like the men of the FLDS, the men of conservative evangelicalism also demand loyalty to their hierarchies while threatening hell for all who don’t bend the knee. So many, if not most, white evangelicals are completely unaware of the fact that there are other options to interpret hell than the eternal conscious torment view that traumatizes them.
But however one thinks about hell — whether as eternal conscious torment, annihilation or a purifying fire of love that makes new and restores — the warning about hell in Jesus’ teaching isn’t to terrify kids into obeying violent men, but to warn violent men about hurting kids.
Unfortunately, ego-driven men who demand submission and threaten kids with hell don’t tend to consider hell a deterrent for their own wickedness. According to Moe, “Men in power who are abusively/coercively using women and children’s fear of hell to exert power and control over them arguably aren’t concerned about the truth or personal threat of hell or eternal conscious torment so much as they are about the doctrine’s usefulness in preserving, protecting and defending their power.”
Questioning everything
The healing journey for these women is the bravest journey on earth. Because they’re taught that coming to different conclusions will damn your soul to infinite punishment, asking questions puts your soul at risk. So for them to ask questions is to face their traumatized bodies toward the violence of the infinite.
But as one of the women said, “I should be able to ask questions as a woman.”
“Asking questions is a basic part of being human.”
For those outside cult-like communities, such an idea seems like common sense. It’s not asking for much. Asking questions is a basic part of being human.
But for the men at the top of sacralized hierarchies, women asking questions threatens their entire control over reality.
It’s the same story we see over and over in these memoirs or documentaries about religious abuse across a variety of fundamentalist adjacent denominations. Since hell as eternal conscious torment doesn’t register as a deterrent for these men, it’s not going to produce any positive fruit on their end. But if it could be fully deconstructed for those on the underside of their ego-obsessed male hierarchies, their coercion would lose all its power.
Once we’re brave enough to face eternity and ask our questions, the thread gets pulled and the questions continue beyond anything we ever imagined when we’re being abused by the men at the top of high-control religion. The deeper we go into our questions, the closer we connect to compassion for ourselves. Then compassion for self, when it is conceived, gives birth to love for self; and love for self, when it is full grown, gives birth to love for our neighbors.
As one of the women put it: “Once I questioned one little thing, then a whole flood, like a tsunami of questions came in. What am I doing with my life? Why do I believe the way I believe? Is there even a God? And I realized I had been lied to my entire life. I was born in lies. And I couldn’t even blame my parents for it. They were born in lies.”
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.