Fifteen children die in a fire in an orphanage in Haiti operated by the Church of Bible Understanding – or: Life, and now death, inside the leftovers of one of America’s most enigmatic mind-control cults

With the recent events in Haiti, I decided to call some of the current members of the Church of Bible Understanding (COBU). I was a member of COBU at one time, having spent 14 years as a live-in, full-time member of the organization, from 1980 to 1993.

I reached a brother named Kevin and told him who was calling. It took him a few moments to get his bearings. Did he remember me? Yes, he did. The conversation went like this:

Kevin: “So, it’s been 30 years, and you suddenly decide to call me?”

Me: “Yes, it’s been a while.”

I considered saying that he hadn’t called me in 30 years either, but I didn’t want to be adversarial. No need to worry, it was about to become adversarial anyway. The subject matter quickly escalated to that I had left the church, and at that time, had spoken about my reasons for no longer believing that COBU was the true way and that Stewart Traill, its leader, was God’s only true spokesman. This was not said, but was implied in the dialog that followed:

Kevin: “As I remember, when you left, you had some really sick attitudes toward the church.”

Me: “I wouldn’t exactly call my attitude sick, but I don’t mind talking with you about it.”

Kevin: “I said, you had sick attitudes.”

Me: “Like I said, Kevin, I don’t mind talking about the issues involved, if you would like to.”

Kevin: “I’ll ask you again, did you or did you not have a sick attitude?”

Me: “Well, Kevin…”

Kevin: “Look, I asked you three times and you can’t answer a direct question. Why should I continue talking to you? I have nothing more to say to you.”

The line went dead.

I began to think about my time in COBU. Was it really that long ago, thirty years? Yes, it had been that long. Hearing Kevin’s voice was like talking to a ghost from the past, and the brief sparring on the phone reminded me of what it was like to be in the long nightly interrogation and guilt confessional meetings, which were conducted exactly as the above, using the techniques we learned from our leader, Stewart Traill.

According to Kevin’s line of reasoning, there was only one acceptable way for me to answer his question, and that was, “Yes, I did have a sick attitude.” From there, through further badgering about admitting my guilt, I would have been guided into my “need to make my behavior right.” If I made even the slightest objection from here on in, or tried to explain myself, I would be directed back to my first admission of guilt: “You yourself admitted that you had a sick attitude. Were you telling the truth, or were you lying? Are you a liar?” And so on. I would not be permitted to talk about my legitimate reasons for leaving COBU, because there are no legitimate reasons for leaving COBU.

Now, you may be asking, what does this have to do with the fire in the orphanage run by the Church of Bible Understanding? How does an organization that has an architectural antique business called Olde Good Things that reports profits of 6.6 million dollars run an orphanage in Haiti in which the living conditions are poor, dirty and crowded, and more importantly, cannot even spend money on a generator to supply power when the local power grid fails, a common occurrence in that country? They were using candles instead, the apparent source of the fire.

Welcome, my friends, to the inner psychology of an isolationist, world-denying, high-demand religious group. All of these adjectives are simply euphemisms for the word “cult.” Not that these words are not helpful in describing what a cult is, and more particularly, what the Church of Bible Understanding is.

Another helpful description is: a group of loyal and devoted people in a live-in situation, centered around a single dictator-like authority figure, usually male, who demands absolute obedience from his followers and claims to be the only person having the absolute truth about life, and in the case of COBU, the only truth about God, Jesus and the Bible, and who claims that all other Christians are in rebellion and darkness.

Do you have more of an idea of what COBU is like now?

And the fact that Stewart Traill died in October 2018 has not done much to diminish this scenario. He’s no longer there to harangue and harass his followers, but the remaining thirty or so diehard members, who joined and moved into the group in the 1970s and 1980s when they were teens, are no less loyal now and over time have grown accustomed to this life and know of nothing else.

Now, I cannot present the history and psychology of COBU in a few paragraphs (it would take a book, in fact, I have written several books on that subject). However, there is one aspect that I would like to draw out that may help explain why an organization with a lucrative business cannot, or will not, equip the orphanage it operates in Haiti with anything more than rudimentary facilities at best.

First, it must be noted that COBU started the orphanages over forty years ago, when it had much less money and that the conditions in the orphanages were better at that time. Some credit must be given to their earlier work there. But, there is a disconnect. COBU did not upgrade the orphanages in Haiti accordingly after it grew exponentially richer than it had been in its humble beginnings when it was just a bunch of kids living communally. (It helps to have a loyal unpaid on-tap workforce 24 hours a day, seven days a week, who have no family ties or other commitments – for example, marriage is forbidden in COBU, although there are some live-out members who got married before this restriction was applied, or who left, got married and came back – this of course, helps COBU to undercut its competitors in the same business who need to pay living wages and benefits to their employees, who also have families and their own lives outside of work, meaning that they, unlike COBU, are likely to restrict the time they devote to business to only 40 hours a week.),

You also have to understand the otherworldliness of COBU doctrine. Stewart Traill told us for years that “all of this life is a fraud” and that “living conditions don’t matter,” because “you’re about to die in two seconds and be cast into hell.” This also had the intended side-effect of causing us not to ask to have anything for ourselves and to accept living in dirty, crowded living conditions, not unlike the conditions in the orphanages in Haiti. We lived in crowded conditions in dirty apartment buildings or even warehouses, sleeping in bunks, or on the floor, or on top of rolls of carpet (when COBU was in the carpet installation business before it entered the architectural antique business). Now, the fact that Stewart lived in a large mansion caused us no cognitive dissonance, because, after all, the mansion was a wise investment and Stewart, as the president and CEO of the organization was just managing that property and of course, he would naturally get to live in it, along with his entourage of female assistants, who were there, ostensibly, to help his wife, Gayle with her many projects – after all, they were called the “Gayle Helpers,” not the “Stewart Helpers.”

The COBU brothers and sisters who work in the dirty crowded orphanages in Haiti feel right at home, because it is just like the conditions they live in at home. Living conditions and cleanliness are not the issue. Your eternal salvation is the only issue that matters and because we were so rebellious and disobedient to God (as Stewart pointed out to us at every opportunity), we had to concentrate on nothing else but our desperate condition in order to avoid being thrown into hell, which God was probably going to do to us anyway, no matter how hard we worked and no matter how desperate we were about our dire need to escape hell.

So, I hope I have contributed something to your understanding of life in the Church of Bible Understanding and about why there would be so much neglect about the conditions in its orphanages Haiti. It is sad, but it does not surprise me that they were using candles at night, even though they could have easily afforded to upgrade the orphanages to the same standards shared by the other orphanages in area.

And as far as what Kevin claimed, did I have a sick and weird attitude when I left COBU? After being in COBU for ten years, having joined it when I was 22 years old (a little later than most, who joined in their teens), I began to question the legitimacy of the organization, its beliefs and the claims of its leader. This is, admittedly, a long time to wait to examine my life a little more closely. But, I got into it when I was a naïve and innocent kid. And, if you can believe it, it wasn’t so bad at that time. But through the increasingly degraded living conditions, the leader’s calls for further self-abasement, the forbidding of relationships and marriage (because Stewart said we were too far gone, humanly and spiritually, to marry) through the constant spiritual abuse (yes, there is such a thing), while also examining the disconnect between the way Stewart said we had to live and the way he was living, I began to question everything. While still there, I read books about cults, the history of religion in America (COBU is not a new phenomenon and there have been many groups like COBU and there are many like it today – these groups usually fly under the radar, until some tragedy happens, as is the case now), and also books about organizational behavior, mind control and manipulation (Robert J. Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism was especially helpful and is the gold standard for understanding groups like COBU).

And, any disagreement with COBU and its leader is, in the COBU point of view, a weird and sick attitude, because after all, such a person is rejecting the only true way.

And to wrap up this article, which I hope has helped you to understand at least something about COBU, you also have to realize that they have an us vs. them, entrenched mindset. They are not likely to talk at length with reporters, though they may issue an official statement at some point. They have hired a public relations agency to deal with (deflect) the public. The orphanages in Haiti may, or may not close. They may continue on the same basis as before, with about the same level of cosmetic repair given to them after the last round of reporting in 2013, which exposed the poor conditions there.

Written by James LaRue