NEWS FEATURE: Study into Religious Melancholy Turns Into an Adventure

c. 2000 Religion News Service HARTFORD, Conn. _ Julius Rubin is joyful these days, a welcome change for a sociologist whose research into “religious melancholy” led to some depressing consequences. He has had to endure a federal lawsuit, threatened legal action against his English publisher and harrassing telephone calls from persons known and unknown _ […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ Julius Rubin is joyful these days, a welcome change for a sociologist whose research into “religious melancholy” led to some depressing consequences.

He has had to endure a federal lawsuit, threatened legal action against his English publisher and harrassing telephone calls from persons known and unknown _ all for writing a book about what makes religious people depressed.


For some mysterious reason _ maybe related to his research and maybe not _ someone even broke into his tiny, cluttered office on the campus of St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Conn. Only the day before, he had shipped off his completed manuscript to his publisher.

“It really has been an adventure,” said the professor, who hopes it is all over now that his new book is off the press after six years of work. The book, published in March by Oxford University Press, is entitled, “The Other Side of Joy: Religious Melancholy Among the Bruderhof.”

The Bruderhof, which was founded in Germany in 1920, is a pious group of about 3,000 members who live in five communes in New York and Pennsylvania, two in England and a new one in Australia.

The Deerspring Bruderhof in Norfolk, Conn., had been another until its 350 members packed up and moved out to the other communes in 1997. Rubin had thought since the Norfolk group was so close it would make an ideal place to investigate how some fervent religious believers lapse into despondency, characterized by a sense of abandonment by God.

He wrote about that in an earlier book, “Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America,” published by Oxford in 1993. It was based on 19th century medical diaries Rubin found in the archives of the Institute of Living, a Hartford psychiatric center.

He was aware that other sects rooted in a German movement known as Pietism _ such as the Hutterites, the Amish and the Mennonites _ had cooperated with social scientists who wrote about their way of life.

The Deer Spring Bruderhof seemed to Rubin like a ready place to do live research into the phenomenon that the 16th century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.”


Bruderhof leaders had other ideas. They objected from the start to Rubin’s plan.

J. Christoph Arnold, the group’s leader who is based at the central Bruderhof in the rural northeastern New York community of Rifton, made it clear that social scientists, with their probing, secular values, were unwelcome.

“Take a flower in the field. Break it or take it apart and you can explain all the parts of the flower. But what happens to the flower? The flower’s dead,” Arnold once explained in an interview about why he turned Rubin away.

Bruderhof leaders in Rifton declined a request for comment on the publication of Rubin’s new book.

The movement has garnered a growing chorus of critics in recent years, including a group of former Bruderhof members who call themselves Children of the Bruderhof. The former members complain they are not allowed to visit their relatives and that anyone who does not conform to the wishes of the leadership is forced out. Rubin and several other academics say the movement has gone in an authoritarian direction, contrary to its founding principles. Through interviews with about 100 former members and published writings of the Bruderhof itself, Rubin did a historical and psychological analysis of a communitarian movement seeking utopia.

He drew case studies of people who were so overwhelmed by their sense of guilt, sin and worthlessness that they lapsed into severe depression.

“Instead of building a heaven on earth, they built a purgatory for many of the believers,” Rubin said.


Bruderhof leaders are sensitive to such criticisms. When Rubin spoke critically about the Bruderhof in a 1995 Philadelphia radio broadcast, the Bruderhof sued him. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

Similarly the Bruderhof sued CBS-TV when it broadcast a “48 Hours” program that aired critics’ complaints. That lawsuit was also dismissed. In the wake of his Philadelphia broadcast Rubin said he got some anonymous telephone calls denouncing him for his views on the Bruderhof.

“I got caller ID after that and they stopped,” he said.

He also heard directly from a Bruderhof leader that he could expect to be sued if he went ahead with his book.

After that, Rubin worked with more than an editor. A team of lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic vetted his drafts. It was a complicated arrangement because libel standards differ in the United States and England.

His book was originally supposed to be published in the fall of 1997 but working with Oxford’s attorneys delayed it.

“I finally finished with the English lawyers in November,” he said. Rubin admits that because he did not have Bruderhof cooperation he could not do any scientific sampling of how wide the incidence of depression might be among the Bruderhof members.


Even so, he is satisfied that he did a scholarly service in a study of a religious commune in transition and of people who foundered in the faith and fell into a funk.

He has already begun working on his next research project.

The subject is the 18th century Mohegan Indian and Christian preacher Samson Occom, who wrote about his periodic episodes of religious melancholy. Occom raised the money to establish Dartmouth College. Later, disillusioned that the college would not be solely for Indians, Occom attempted to establish a utopian Christian community of native Americans called Brothertown in New York.

“I am writing about dead people now because they can’t sue,” Rubin said with a wry laugh.

KRE END RENNER

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