Open Season on Sects

Ted Patrick is a compact, modishly dressed black man of 43 with an abiding hatred for the new religious movements now proliferating across the U.S. A zealot who despises zealots, he has a list of scores of sects and cults--Christian, Oriental and syncretist. He accuses them of being part of a vast Communist conspiracy to seduce young minds through a kind of spiritual brainwashing. Patrick's remedy is as drastic as his charges: he assists families in abducting the young believers, many of them over 21, from the religious groups they have joined, and then conducts a kind of brainwashing of his own--"deprogramming" them, as he calls it. He is a high school dropout with no psychological credentials; yet he has won the trust of enough parents to have conducted, he claims, 139 successful deprogrammings and to have inspired some 550 others during more than two years of crusading. In Manhattan last week, he faced the judgment of a criminal court for the first time.

Patrick was charged with assault and unlawful imprisonment, each a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail. The charges grew out of an episode on Manhattan's Upper West Side last winter, when Dan Voll, a former Yale undergraduate just 13 days short of his 21st birthday, was suddenly seized and muscled into a waiting car (TIME, March 12). The abductors were Voll's father Eugene, his mother Marie, and Ted Patrick. Summoned by Voll's frantic cries for help, police stopped the car before it had gone two blocks and freed the young man, who suffered a dislocated finger in the struggle.

Instead of challenging the facts, the defense attempted to justify them. Patrick was only acting as an agent of Voll's parents, his attorney said, and the parents themselves were acting in the young man's best interests. Dan Voll's religious beliefs, his parents had been told, had turned him into a "zombie," and they had only wanted to rescue him.

Voll is a staunch adherent of a small, New York-based band of some 40 Protestant pentecostalists who call themselves the New Testament Missionary Fellowship. The group's three-hour Sunday services, in a Manhattan apartment, include robust hymn fests and something called "dancing in the Spirit," a sprightly, solo two-step that expresses their spiritual joy. Otherwise, the fellowship is self-consciously prim. Men wear short haircuts and neat suits; women wear dresses that fall below the knee. Members eschew all nonmarital sex, hold regular jobs, tend to live close to one another as if in some kind of lay monastery. But critics say they are insufferably elitist, consider themselves more enlightened than other Christians, and generally see the devil at work in anyone who disagrees with them. Worse, to some parents, is that they often seem to stress fellowship ties over those of family.

Lost Souls. In the witness stand, thin and intense, Voll confirmed the story of a long-disintegrating relationship with his staunch Missouri Synod Lutheran parents, who live in Farmington, Conn. He refused to go home for Christmas vacation, dropped plans to enter the Lutheran ministry, and eventually decided to take a leave of absence from Yale in order to work for the fellowship's fledgling publishing house. On one occasion when he did go home, he carried off and threw away many of his rock records because he feared that they might contaminate his younger brother and sisters. When his parents warned him that his salvation was in peril, Voll told them to stop criticizing his church or they would "lose their own souls."

Star witness for the defense was Dan Voll's onetime college roommate, a former member of the New Testament Missionary Fellowship himself --Wes Lockwood, a Yale junior who was spirited away from the campus last January and subjected to an intense and apparently successful deprogramming. Still an earnestly evangelical young Christian but fiercely critical of the fellowship, Lockwood testified that he had not thought for himself for the 2 1/2 years he was in the group, until Patrick's deprogramming "released" him. Now, he said, he favors using the technique to rescue all the fellowship members.

Testifying for the prosecution, President William McGill of Columbia University, which employs several fellowship members, called them "perfectly fine young people." But even if such groups seemed "repellent," McGill said, "I would not tolerate any acts restrictive of the freedoms of young people." The Rev. Dean Kelley, a United Methodist minister who is author of Why Conservative Churches Are Growing and religious-liberty director for the National Council of Churches, defended the fellowship's usefulness. Without such "high demand" groups, said Kelley, some people might turn to drugs, alcohol, crime--or even suicide. Moreover, he said, "it's the way all great religions start."

Before the two-week trial ended, Judge Bruce Wright had dismissed the charge of assault against Patrick. Instructing the jury on the charge of unlawful imprisonment, he cited a provision of the New York penal code that permits the violation of law in order to avoid "a greater injury" (a legal principle recently cited by John Ehrlichman in defending the President). If Voll's abductors were justified in believing that he would suffer greater harm by remaining in the fellowship than he would by being forcibly separated from it, then, Wright told the jurors, the abduction could be "excused." That was apparently enough for the jury. After 2 1/2 hours of deliberation, they pronounced Ted Patrick not guilty. Explained one juror, a novelist: the New Testament Missionary Fellowship represented "spiritual fascism."

Civil Action. Patrick exulted after the trial in what he called "a great victory for the nation." Even on the weekend before the verdict, he told TIME Correspondent Richard Ostling, he had been busy in Rhode Island trying to deprogram a young woman member of the Children of God. Now, he said, he might go on a speaking tour to pay his lawyer's fees; when he comes back to deprogramming, he may demand a fee on top of the expenses he has hitherto asked. As for the New Testament Fellowship, whose members now escort each other to avoid abduction, Patrick says, "I would like to get everybody out of that group."

Patrick has already been involved in deprogramming attempts on three other fellowship members besides Voll and Lockwood. Last May he was arrested, along with an irate husband, for trying to hold the man's 31-year-old wife, Esther DiQuattro, but a New York grand jury refused to indict him. Two sisters, Margarett Rogow, 19, and Elizabeth, 21, charge that their parents, influenced by Patrick, have twice tried to abduct them. A grand jury is expected to consider the case soon.

One problem with combatting Patrick's religious bounty-hunting is that it is a private endeavor, and constitutional guarantees of religious freedom only prohibit Government interference. If Patrick is not stopped under criminal statutes, some sort of civil action may be the only legal avenue against his crusade. In the meantime, says Dean Kelley, the verdict has made deprogramming "far and away" the leading religious-liberty problem in the U.S. "Apparently it's now open season on young adults who persist in religious groups that their parents or spouses oppose."

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