Curious link between ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ and a Trump Supreme Court pick
- President Donald Trump to pick another conservative for a lifelong spot on the nine-member Supreme Court bench
- Candidate Amy Coney Barrett was a purported member of a religious community facing renewed interest
Some have likened People of Praise, a self-described charismatic Christian community, to the totalitarian, male-dominated society of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale.
Others call it an ultraconservative group with an unusual mix of Roman Catholic and Pentecostal traditions. Until 2018, it used the term ‘handmaid’ for its female leaders.
In any case there has been renewed interest in the group since US President Donald Trump put one of its purported members, Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh District Court of Appeals, on his shortlist of candidates for elevation to the Supreme Court.
The group has declined to confirm or deny whether Barrett was a member since a New York Times article in 2017 said she was in the group, citing unnamed current and former members.
The group’s spokesman, Sean Connolly, told Reuters that women were not considered subservient in People of Praise and that many hold leadership roles, such as directing schools and ministries.
Barrett did not immediately respond to requests for comment made through a clerk at the Seventh Circuit. Sharon Loftus, a judicial assistant to Barrett, said the judge’s policy was not to give interviews or comments to the media.
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 the home of the Catholic-led University of Notre Dame.
“We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community,” the website says, tracing its origins to the late 1960s when students and faculty at Notre Dame experienced “a renewal of Christian enthusiasm and fervour, together with charismatic gifts such as speaking in tongues and physical healing”.
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Its most devoted members make a lifelong commitment to the group, known as a covenant.
From 1970 until recently, women with leadership roles in the organisation were called handmaids, but the popularity of the 2017-to-present Hulu television series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Atwood’s 1985 book, appears to have led to a change.
“Recognising that the meaning of this term has shifted dramatically in our culture in recent years, we no longer use the term handmaid,” the group said after the 2018 media interest.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian story is set in a future United States where the rules of the male-dominated society are based on the leaders’ twisted interpretation of Old Testament scriptures.
Coral Anika Theill, a former People of Praise member from decades ago, has described the group as an abusive cult in which women are completely obedient to men and independent thinkers are humiliated, interrogated, shamed and shunned.
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Theill, who self-published a book about how her ex-husband dragged her through a number of religious groups, said she was campaigning to stop Barrett from being nominated.
Theill left People of Praise in 1984 but said she has remained in contact with others associated with the group, believing little had changed. Last year she wrote a blog post entitled “I lived the Handmaid’s Tale”.
“A lot of us suffered Stockholm syndrome and many of the women were on antidepressants and tranquillisers,” Theill said. “If you were super submissive, maybe you wouldn’t be dragged in the middle of the night to an interrogation meeting.”
Thomas Csordas, a scholar of comparative religion at the University of California, San Diego, said he would not consider People of Praise a cult, instead saying it was “very conservative”.
He said Theill’s story was similar to ones he had heard from other Catholic charismatic groups.
“There are a number of these covenant communities and some are more authoritarian than others,” Csordas said.
“I don’t think that People of Praise has caused her (Barrett) to be as conservative as she is. I think that she’s doubtless a member of People of Praise because she already was that conservative.”
