Escaping Eden: life after the Plymouth Brethren | Audio Long Reads

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🗓️ 26 August 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

For those who leave the ultra-conservative Christian sect, separation comes at great personal cost.

The New Statesman’s assistant editor Pippa Bailey had always been curious about the Plymouth Brethren, ever since discovering that her maternal grandparents had left the group in the 1960s. What might her life have been like if they stayed? Who were the cousins separated by a doctrine of isolation from non-Brethren ‘worldlies’?

In this week’s deeply reported and moving magazine cover story, Pippa tells the story of the breakaway group, from its origins in 1820s Ireland to its modern-day incarnation as a global church and effective lobbyist. She speaks to former members, many of whom mourn the loss of family and friends to an organisation they consider repressive. It’s a fascinating journey, even if, as Pippa writes, her grandmother has no interest in resurfacing the past: “After all, she says, it’s all part of the Lord’s plan, and He does not test us more than we can bear.”

This article originally appeared in the 25-31 August issue of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here.

Written and read by Pippa Bailey.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy How to build a language: inside the Oxford English Dictionary, by Pippa Bailey, or our reported feature by Stuart McGurk, A year inside GB news.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to audio long reads from the New Statesman, the best of our
0:11.4	reported features and essays read aloud. In this episode, escaping Eden, life
0:17.2	after the exclusive brethren written and read by me, Pippa Bailey. It was first
0:24.2	published in the 25th of August 2023 issue of the New States magazine. The link to
0:28.5	read the article online is in the show notes.
0:36.8	Abby Thompson has two birthdays. The day she was born in 1996 and the day she left
0:43.0	the exclusive brethren on the 20th of September 2022. The latter, she
0:48.5	describes as the rebirth of the actual me. Thompson's story is unusual. Unlike most
0:54.4	members, she wasn't born into the brethren. Officially, the Plymouth
0:57.6	Brethren Christian Church or PBCC. Her mother left the sect in the mid-90s,
1:02.8	married and had two children before returning, taking her family with her.
1:06.9	Thompson, then six, can no longer see her friends. Contact with her paternal
1:11.7	grandparents was limited to a few meetings a year. Thompson had a difficult
1:16.0	childhood. Problems at home and she was often sent to live with relatives or
1:19.7	other brethren families. She found she didn't fit in with the brethren
1:23.2	children. He viewed her as an outsider, nor with the children at her mainstream
1:26.9	primary school in Tornton, Somerset. I was bullied by the non-breath and for
1:31.0	being different. Thompson, now 26, told me over Zoom. But I was bullied by the
1:35.7	brethren even more severely because I was an alien to them. As she grew older,
1:40.4	she suppressed any doubts about the brethren way of life. You were taught
1:43.9	not to trust your mind. They'd related to the scripture that talks about the
1:47.1	renewing of your mind. You need to have a new mind and become a new person, and
	...

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