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By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) – The People of Praise, a self-described charismatic Christian community, has faced renewed interest since US President Donald Trump included one of its alleged members, Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, on its short list of candidates for elevation to the Supreme Court.
The group says on its website that it is made up of liberals and conservatives, with a mix that includes the Roman Catholic and Pentecostal traditions, although at least one expert and one former member consider it very conservative. Until 2018, she used the term ‘maid’ for her female leaders.
The group has declined to confirm or deny whether Barrett was a member since a 2017 New York Times article said he was in the group, citing unidentified current and former members. He says he leaves it up to the members to reveal any involvement. At the time, Barrett did not respond to requests for comment from the Times.
The group’s spokesman, Sean Connolly, told Reuters that women are not considered subservient in the People of Praise and that many have leadership roles, such as running schools and ministries.
Barrett did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment about his People of Praise membership made through a Chicago-based secretary for the Seventh Circuit.
Sharon Loftus, Barrett’s court clerk, said in an email that the judge’s policy was not to give interviews or comments to the media.
Trump has said he plans to nominate a Supreme Court justice this week to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last Friday. He said he is considering both Barrett and Barbara Lagoa of the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
People of Praise has about 1,700 members in 22 cities in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, according to its website, and was founded in 1971 in South Bend, Indiana, also home to the Catholic-led University of Notre Dame.
“We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community,” says the website, whose origins date back to the late 1960s, when Notre Dame students and faculty experienced “a renewal of enthusiasm. and Christian fervor, along with charismatic gifts such as speaking in tongues and physical healing. “
Its most devoted members make a lifelong commitment to the group, known as a pact.
Beginning in 1970, women in leadership roles in the organization were called servants, but that changed after the popular Hulu television series from 2017 to the present “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on a 1985 book by Margaret Atwood. The dystopian story is set in a future America where the rules of male-dominated society are based on the leaders’ twisted interpretation of the Old Testament scriptures.
“Recognizing that the meaning of this term has changed dramatically in our culture in recent years, we no longer use the term maid,” the group said in 2018, without specifically attributing the change to the show.
Coral Anika Theill, a former People of Praise member, has been highly critical of the group, calling it “cultured” and saying in an interview that women are expected to be completely obedient to men and that independent thinkers are “humiliated, interrogated, embarrassed and rejected. “
Theill, who last year wrote a blog post titled “I Live the Handmaid’s Tale,” said she planned to call all US senators to oppose Barrett should she become Trump’s nominee.
Reuters was unable to independently verify his account. When asked about Theill’s allegations, People of Praise spokesman Connolly said the group followed Christian teachings that “men and women share a fundamental equality as image bearers of God.”
“We value independent thinking,” Connolly said.
Thomas Csordas, a comparative religion scholar at the University of California, San Diego, said the People of Praise was “very conservative” but would not consider it a cult, adding that some of the charismatic Christian communities he has investigated were more authoritarian. . What People of Praise.
In popular culture, the word cult can connote brainwashing and authoritarianism, he said.
“My position before the press was that People of Praise is best described not as a sect but as an ‘intentional community’ based on religion,” Csordas said in an email.
“When I first came across Atwood’s book, I was frankly struck by the similarity of terminology to that prevailing in some of the charismatic Catholic ‘covenant communities’ I had been studying,” Csordas wrote in a 1996 article titled ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, without specifically referring to People of Praise.
(This story corrects paragraph 2 to show that the group’s website says it has both liberal and conservative members, it does not describe itself as ultra-conservative)
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta, editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
