Hello and welcome to another entrant in the popular television genre Do Try to Be Born a White Christian Man If You Can. This one is entitled Escaping Utopia, a three-part documentary series on Gloriavale, a secretive sect founded in 1969 by preacher Neville Cooper, after he was vouchsafed at the age of 22 a vision of heaven on Earth by God. This vision involved establishing an isolated community in a remote part of New Zealand that would be run along wholly egalitarian lines, and men would live in absolute parity to women to secure their place in feminist heaven.
I jest, of course. Gloriavale ran – and, in reduced form, still runs – on the principles of women’s absolute subservience to men, men’s absolute subservience to the leaders above them (the dozen or so “shepherds”), and the shepherds’ absolute allegiance to Cooper (who renamed himself Hopeful Christian) – until he died in 2018 and was replaced by shepherd Howard Temple. No conversation is allowed between young people of different sexes after puberty. Women, who must wear uniform dresses and expose no skin but for the hands and face lest they inflame men’s uncontrollable lusts, are married off as young as possible – generally to the men Cooper/Christian deemed most suitable – and expected to devote themselves to having as many babies as possible. Everyone lives under the threat of eternal damnation. You get the picture, I’m sure.
Allotting three hours to such a documentary is often a sign of a padded narrative forthcoming, but Escaping Utopia has almost too much material to be covered even by that generous span. It follows members – including some offspring of Hopeful himself – who have broken free and been exiled from all remaining family and friends. Many are now part of a semi-underground network that helps others to flee the Gloriavale compound. It visits the Indian outpost of the community that Hopeful set up after authorities started taking an interest in his original venture, probably to give himself a refuge if and when it became necessary. There we see a group of frightened-looking, near-silent women with multiple children, overseen by a leader who, unprompted, tells the visitors that rape is part of the culture and that women’s lives are always harder than men’s.
The series also covers the landmark 2023 employment case brought by female former members of the community. They argued that their relentless work as cooks and laundresses in a place they felt they couldn’t leave made them employees, if not virtually enslaved people, rather than volunteers. And above all, it tracks the investigations into endemic sexual abuse that were first sparked by journalist Melanie Reidin the mid-90s. “I was always,” says former member Elijah Overcomer quietly, “glad that I wasn’t a girl.” Claims, charges and convictions have proliferated since Reid brought the cult to public attention – though the last, as ever, not quite commensurately with the first two.
The escapers who have time to regroup and gain perspective on their nightmarish childhoods, during which Hopeful made sure they knew what sex entailed by making them watch their parents in the marital bed – just one form of the abuse they were subjected to – talk frankly about the truths they can now see. Pilgrim, one of Hopeful’s sons, describes his father’s growing power (especially as the community became increasingly composed of people who had been born there and knew no other way of life) and the terrible freedom it gave him to exercise his perversions.
More than most documentaries on the subject, Escaping Utopia concentrates on the psychological aspects of the members’ experiences and sufferings. Rosanna Overcomer remembers being paralysed with fear whenever her laundry partner was late for work, in case this was the moment that all the deserving had been taken up to heaven and Rosanna had been found unworthy and left behind on Earth and would face eternal torture in the afterlife. Sharon Ready, who has been with the community for more than 50 years since she joined, age 11 (though she is now being shunned for her growing doubts), is visibly stricken as she struggles to reconcile her enduring love of Christ with the sexual abuse she has suffered and the “slow coercion … a little bit here, a little bit there” that meant “you actually lost your identity … and felt like you were doing it willingly”.
It is an unusually detailed study of multiple aspects of cult formation and survival, examined with endless compassion for the victims and pitiless scrutiny of the perpetrators of the crimes carried out in Christ’s name. If the Rapture ever comes, I hope he damns the right ones.
• Escaping Utopia aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now in the UK, and on ABC iview in Australia.
