Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination has brought renewed attention to a part of the American charismatic movement that has been a source of controversy for 40 years. Sadly, very few journalists understand “intentional Christian communities,” or “covenant communities,” which were major fixtures on the American religious scene from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.
Barrett grew up in a family affiliated with one such community -- called People of Praise -- in South Bend. Before her name came to the fore a few years ago as possible Supreme Court material, the only people who knew about these groups were religion reporters who were plying their trade more than 30 years ago.
Even then, People of Praise wasn’t making headlines. You had to be a specialist in Pentecostal-charismatic movements (as I am) to know what they were.
Today, reporters struggle to explain a type of Christianity that was cutting edge during Jesus Movement days but feels very foreign now. And so you get a mishmash of reportage and opinion ranging from the Wall Street Journal’s guest editorial on the benefits of People of Praise to Newsweek’s truly awful story that had to be corrected. There are too many other examples to even survey them.
So, we’re going to get a brief history.
Before I do that, I want to spotlight two outlets that have done a good job of reporting on Barrett, starting with a Vox piece by Constance Grady that correctly explained why the nominee has erroneously been connected to the “handmaids” in People of Hope, a Catholic charismatic group in New Jersey. Grady writes:
One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee is the fight over whether or not People of Praise, the group she belongs to, is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The group isn’t an established inspiration for the book — but the story has developed legs anyway.
Do read the whole of it, because it explains how several publications made stupid mistakes when covering the People of Praise/People of Hope mixup.
The other is a Politico story that takes one on a tour of People of Praise education and ministry sites in South Bend.
Though its members are influential, the People of Praise tends to stay out of the public eye as an organization. Many South Benders say they knew little or nothing about the group prior to Barrett’s 2017 nomination to the federal court; Jack Colwell, the city columnist at the South Bend Tribune, told me he hadn't heard of the group before Barrett’s nomination to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
That rings true with what I know, so read that too.
Now the history:
The greatest Christian spiritual renewal of the late 20th century — the charismatic movement — was undergirded by a simultaneous move of Christian believers into community. Many were charismatics who wanted to live the most radical Christian lifestyle possible. They seized upon a passage in Acts 2:44-47 about believers holding all things in common, breaking bread in each others’ homes and sharing possessions in common and made that their goal.
How did one do that in the 20th century? Some felt that living the most committed Christian life meant that everyone’s belongings was to be held in common: cars, salaries, houses, insurance plans and a lot more. The self-giving this entailed impressed outsiders.
This is not totally unique to Christianity; the founding of Israel was undergirded by the establishment of kibbutzim. It seems that, whenever a religion needs to consolidate its energies for a move forward, there’s a marshaling of people and forces into some kind of common life.
Even non-charismatic groups joined up. Sojourner’s magazine, which many GetReligion readers know, sprang out of the community movement. About 1,000 of these communities sprang up across the United States, 79 of which had 125 members or more. One of those was People of Praise, which I’ll shorten to PoP.
Some of these communities emphasized submission to a “head” or elder who would help one live the Christian life. Starting in the late ‘60s, when converted hippies began flooding into churches, Christian leaders needed some way of quickly teaching them how to move from pot to the Prince of Peace.
One way was to invite new converts into one’s home where the elder/leader could train or disciple the new Christian 24/7.
These places really existed because I lived in one. Called Bethlehem Community, it was a group of charismatic American Baptists in Portland, Ore. I was part of it from 1979-1981. One reason why I can’t understand why people assume Barrett’s membership in a community means that she’s some sort of automaton is that I was working as a police reporter for a small newspaper the entire time I lived in community households. I had to submit everything I did at home to the leaders, but the reporters I worked with never knew that.
In fact, when I told my editor — months after I moved out — about the kind of system I’d lived under, he was astonished because of how I kept my community life separate from my work life. Which is why it’s totally plausible that whatever Barrett may believe of PoP teachings can stay compartmentalized from her work space.
These communities continued well into the 1980s, but most splintered in the early 1990s. The largest Catholic charismatic community, Word of God in Ann Arbor, had a major meeting in October 1990 -– 30 years ago this month -- where their leaders begged for their followers’ forgiveness for exercising undue control over their lives.
This and other events sparked my 1992 master’s thesis on authoritarianism and control in these charismatic communities and I wrote a small piece in the Sept. 14, 1992 Christianity Today about how so many communities fell apart.
At the time, I was also working on my fifth book — “Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community” — about an Episcopal charismatic community in Houston. One thing I learned is that you could not research how the Episcopalians were trying out community without covering how the Catholic renewal led to the founding of the largest communities in the country, including PoP.
People of Praise was not even the biggest. Word of God, which numbered 3,000 people at one point, dominated the group. Others included Work of Christ in Lansing, Mich.; Mother of God in Gaithersburg, Md. (about which Justin Gillis of the Washington Post wrote a searing expose in 1997) and Servants of Christ the King in Steubenville, whose fall was described in my book.
Some of the best reporting on these folks was done by veteran religion reporter Tom Szyszkiewicz. I still have the original of his May 24, 1992, National Catholic Register piece on the “four founding fathers” of the Catholic community movement in my files and how, starting in the late 1960s, these folks created a whole communal movement for laity out of whole cloth in a few years’ time. The Catholic Church had almost 2,000 years’ worth of monastic communities in its ledgers, but what emerged in the late 20th century was something very new. I was in college when a lot of this was unfolding in the ‘70s and I followed the trends with much interest.
A snippet from Szyszkiewicz’s piece explains why, even today, PoP is a hard nut for reporters to crack. The reason centers on Paul DeCelles, one of the four “fathers,” a retired theoretical physics professor at the University of Notre Dame and lead coordinator at PoP. He was also intensely private.
[Unlike other charismatic Catholic leaders], DeCelles … has never published any systematic presentation of his own ideas.
In fact, perhaps intentionally, very little at all is released by the People of Praise about their internal life. POP’s constitution is copyrighted, for example, and no one outside the community is allowed to have a copy of it.
Looking on Amazon, I find that DeCelles did come out with a book in 2017.
In 1981, PoP and Word of God had a nasty split due to a clash of personalities among the four “fathers” and the twain never met again. Word of God maintained a magazine called New Covenant and a publishing arm, Servant Publications, and was more seen as the voice of the Catholic charismatic movement. PoP ran its administrative arm, the National Service Committee, but slid out of public view. Then in 1986, Adrian Reimers, one of PoP’s original founding group, published an expose on PoP in Fidelity magazine. Read it for some really good dirt on PoP.
After the 1990 meltdown at Word of God, PoP was one of the communities still left standing. A June 14, 1992, piece in the Register by Chip Wilson attributed that to the community’s obsession with privacy.
What makes the People of Praise so impressive, observers say, is its scrupulous attention to confidentiality and ‘right speech ‘ – which, in addition to discouraging gossip and protecting personal privacy, also hampers the spread of sensitive information within the community, inhibits dissent and leaves very little ‘paper trail’ for outside scrutiny.
One former charismatic renewal leader, noting PoP’s low media profile, called it the movement’s ‘stealth community.’
Well, I’ve got tons more clips on all this in my files. Most reporters might not find all this minutae fascinating, but it does set the groundwork for what PoP looked like in 2002 when Barrett showed up in town as a new law professor at Notre Dame. Whether she had been part of the community while a student at Notre Dame’s law school in the mid-1990s, no one seems to know.
So what should reporters ask? One complaint back in the 1990s was that PoP is 95 percent Catholic, but it has no official relationship; that is, oversight from the Catholic Church. So, what’s the local diocese saying about PoP? Has anyone asked recently? Was PoP evaluated when the global and national Catholic hierarchy studied, and then embraced, charismatic Catholics? That might offer clues as to how this community has adapted and changed.
What about Barrett? Are her “covenant” promises suspect, if it is confirmed that her family is still part of this movement? Does that make her dangerous? Does she owe the world an explanation for her participation?
I think not. Ask her questions about her work and the law, and ask those who have worked with her to evaluate her career and potential.