"Polygamy: Religion or Mind Control?" (MSNBC 2008) FLDS sect

Title: "Polygamy: Religion or Mind Control?"

Network: MSNBC

Release Year: 2008

Commentary: Rick Ross, Cult Expert

Rick Alan Ross is a private consultant, lecturer, and cult intervention specialist. He began his work as an anti-cult activist and community organizer in 1982.

Ross first became concerned about controversial groups and movements in response to a radical religious group that had covertly targeted his grandmother’s nursing home. Since that time he has raised awareness about cults and facilitated more than five hundred interventions to rescue people from cultic situations.

Ross is one of the leading experts on cults in the world today.

He has consulted with the FBI, the BATF, and various other law enforcement agencies, as well as the governments of Israel and China, on the subject of cults. Ross has been qualified, accepted and testified as an expert court witness in eleven different states within the United States including US federal court. He has worked as an expert analyst for CBS News, CBC of Canada, and Nippon and Asahi in Japan.

Ross has lectured at more than 30 universities and colleges including the University of Chicago, Dickinson College, Carnegie Mellon, Baylor, Wuhan University of China, Assumption University of Thailand and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has also been published within peer-reviewed academic journals on the topic of cults.

Regarding his cult intervention work Ross states that historically about 75 percent of the people that he conducts an intervention with decide to leave the group by the end of such an effort. He has done interventions across the United States and around the world. Ross did two successful interventions with the notorious Branch Davidians led by self-styled messiah David Koresh.

Ross has appeared in fourteen documentaries and has been interviewed and quoted in media all over the world.

For more information about this, and much more:

www.CultEducation.com

www.twitter.com/RickAlanRoss

Underneath the tabloid headlines, the battle over the Yearning for Zion Ranch constitutes another chapter in America’s very long struggle to define religious freedom. Given that this nation was founded, in part, by devout believers in search of religious freedom, the issue isn’t a trivial one, or one that’s likely to go away any time soon.

Despite its sensational title, the one-hour documentary “Religion or Mind Control?” (9 p.m. Sunday, MSNBC) adds some compelling fodder to that ongoing debate.

Clearly the children at the FLDS ranch don’t have much say in how their lives are lived or whether they can leave. But do the women of the sect (some have called it a cult) have any real freedom?

Kathy Jo Nicholson, who left the group in her late teens, notes that she didn’t endure a harrowing escape, unlike other ex-FLDS women, notably “Escape” author Carolyn Jessop, who’ve spoken out about the dark side of the sect. But Nicholson had to set out on her own with little education and no skills, and had to forge a life without any contact with her family. It wasn’t easy to make it in the outside world, and like many ex-FLDS men and women, at first she floundered.

That’s not surprising, given that the FLDS, which was also recently profiled in a chilling WE documentary, appears to not just foster but demand passivity in all but a few followers.

Like other children on the ranch – male and female – Nicholson was constantly told to “keep sweet,” which meant, be obedient and smile at all times, no matter what. Unquestioning worship of the group’s prophet was paramount.

When Nicholson was growing up, that prophet was Warren Jeffs, who is now in jail as an accomplice to rape. Jeffs and other leaders strictly controlled who and what entered the FLDS compounds (TV and movies weren’t allowed, but ovulation testing kits were ordered in bulk).

“If you control everything that goes into the mind, you can control the mind,” says cult expert Rick Ross, who was interviewed for the special.

The most chilling part of the documentary are not the tales of abuse and exploitation told by Flora Jessop, an outspoken critic of the FLDS, which she left in her teens. It’s the glazed eyes and expressionless faces of three FLDS women, who were interviewed in April by the “Today Show.”