A Test of Faith : Montana Events Raise Questions on When Kids May Spurn Parents’ Religion

Some aspects of his parents’ religion have been more difficult to adjust to than others for Chris Gilbert, 16. He has managed, for instance, to tune out the keening chants his mother listens to constantly on a continuous-play cassette.

But he has had a harder time ignoring the looming prospect that he soon may be forced to live under the ground.

Gilbert’s parents belong to the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious group that has been in the news in recent weeks because its leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, has prophesied nuclear war in late March or April.

In anticipation of this predicted cataclysm, thousands of Prophet’s followers, including Gilbert’s parents, have moved to Montana’s Paradise Valley, where they have dug 45 extensively equipped bomb shelters, the largest capable of holding 756 people.

When Prophet gives word that an attack is inevitable, an estimated 2,500 church members are supposed to descend for anywhere from seven months to seven years into their shelters, “like gophers down a hole,” as one of Gilbert’s friends put it.

“I’ve known for a long time I wasn’t going to go underground,” Gilbert said in a recent interview at the foster home where he now lives. “When you don’t believe in it (Prophet’s teachings), and your parents and all their friends bombard you with it, it’s real hard.”

The stress grew so great for Gilbert and at least four other children of church members in recent weeks that they left home rather than face the possibility of moving into shelters.

While they have acquiesced to their parents’ beliefs up to a point--they have moved to Montana, for instance--these teen-agers (and possibly more youngsters, say authorities, who note not all the cases have been reported to officials) have drawn the line at following their mothers and fathers into bomb shelters.

And by their actions, they have thrust themselves into what has become a Montana tempest that tests the practice of some of the most fundamental American rights.

Although no one is even close to going to court, the events in Livingston have raised thorny legal issues and a divisive local debate over questions such as:

* Do youngsters have a right to religious freedom, and may they contest their parents’ attempts to compel them to follow a particular belief?

* And what role, if any, should the state play in cases where young people sharply disagree with their parents’ religious beliefs?

For Wolfgang Schwartz, 15, a non-church member who is the boyfriend of Chelsea Brannon, one of the runaways, the answers are plain.

“I don’t think parents should have the right to put their kids under the ground against their will,” he said.

Explaining her reasons for running away in interviews with area media, Brannon said that although her father loves her and thinks the shelters are in his family’s best interests, “I love myself, too. I have to look out for my own future too, my own safety.”

Brannon is living with her mother, a non-church member, in Seattle, Schwartz said.

At least one other runaway returned home. Others are with relatives or in foster care.

But, while the runaways have defined clearly for themselves the limits of parental rights, adults here and around the country are having a harder time deciding where those lines should be drawn.

The question of whether to give sanctuary to church children has divided many of the 12,000 residents of the mountain-fringed Paradise Valley.

In Livingston, an Old West town full of saloons and hunting shops, an informal group of residents calling themselves the Network of Friends is offering assistance to children who wish to leave the church.

“All we are asking is to provide them some amnesty, some space, some time,” said Gwen Handl, one of the parents involved in helping the runaways.

Handl and others are critical of local authorities who say the runaways must be returned to their homes because they have found no evidence the church children are being physically or emotionally abused--factors that would be grounds for agency intervention.

The Montana Department of Family Services summed up the prevailing official attitude in a letter to the editor of the Livingston Enterprise: “The fact that (Church Universal and Triumphant) members are preparing their children to enter bomb shelters in the event of nuclear war clearly does not fall within the legal definition of mental injury.”

The letter was signed by Robert L. Mullen, director, and Bill Collins, regional administrator of the agency.

And Park County Atty. Nels Swandal said in an interview that the allegations of abuse are “pure speculation. You don’t take away (parents’) rights based on speculation.”

Defining emotional abuse is the task of the Park County Department of Family Services. Social worker Rob Marchetti said he looks for evidence that a child is likely to harm himself or herself or suffer mental illness as a result of the situation at home.

Being forced to take part in a religion you don’t believe in--no matter how extreme--doesn’t necessarily fit that criterion, he said.

“If a child is forced to take Communion on Sundays and does not believe in it, is that emotional abuse?” he asked.

Most publicized cases in which parents’ religious beliefs clash with their children’s best interests have involved the withholding of medical treatment from children because of religious convictions.

In those cases, the courts have generally ruled on the side of the children and their need for care, according to Rita Swan, president of Child Inc., a Sioux City, Iowa, organization that exists, it says, to oppose child abuse masked by freedom of religion claims.

The Livingston situation is different from most, Swan said, because it hinges largely on the question: Can a child be abused purely by his or her parents’ religious beliefs when there is no obvious physical threat?

Although a conflict of belief is at the heart of the debate, church opponents have also called into question the physical safety of the children. Because the bomb shelters are stocked with weapons, some have raised concerns of a militant confrontation or a mass suicide such as occurred at Jonestown, the Guyana cult site where 913 children and adults killed themselves or were murdered at the command of leader Jim Jones on Nov. 18, 1978.

Church leader Prophet, in interviews, has denied any such connection.

“Jim Jones was obsessed with death,” she has said. “We simply don’t see death as a goal of life.”

Chris Gilbert’s father, Kent Noonan, argues that church critics are saying: ‘We’re going to take your child away because you think funny.’

“When is it somebody else’s business to say, ‘You’re out of line in teaching your child?’ ” he asked. “This is the land of the free, isn’t it?”

But Roger Powalisz, a Park High School English teacher who calls himself a “strong believer” in religious freedom, responded: “My understanding of that freedom is that it is not unlimited. I don’t think the state allows abuse in the name of religion.”

Powalisz said he has had four or five students approach him to discuss leaving the church.

One of the most outspoken allies of the runaways, Father Dick Schlosser of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Livingston, said authorities should give greater weight to what the children have to say about the situation: “I would have to give credibility to a child if they feel they are in a threatening position.”

Experts elsewhere, however, say local authorities are acting within the law by not intervening.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that parents have a constitutional right to control the upbringing of their children, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a USC law professor. That decision is based on the assumption that parents have the best interests of their children in mind, and, in some instances, that’s a big assumption, he said.

“It doesn’t do a whole lot to protect children in a case such as this,” he said.

Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Assn. Center on Children and the Law, agreed. “If it basically comes down to the parents having unusual beliefs,” he said, “then probably the state can’t forcibly intervene.”

Though all states, Montana included, have provisions for authorities to intervene in the home life of children who are suffering physical, sexual and emotional abuse, “emotional maltreatment is the vaguest and most difficult to define,” Davidson said.

And Gerald Larue, a USC emeritus religion professor, said fears based on religion alone--even pure terror--should not be grounds for removing children from their homes.

“Many of our religions are based on fear--’If you’re not a good boy, you’ll go to Hell,’ ” he said. “The only difference here is the Hell that they’re promising is right around the corner.”

Richard Kalar, a Church Universal and Triumphant spokesman, says Livingston residents simply hope to use debate over the runaways to discredit the church. Church critics are “looking to grab a child and make headlines with her,” he contended.

Dismissing the notion that children might be traumatized by church teachings, Kalar referred to a television movie about survivors of nuclear war and said, “I don’t think this is anything more traumatic than watching ‘The Day After.’ ”

Kalar and three parents of the runaways told Park County Sheriff Charley Johnson that their children were being recruited by the Network of Friends in an “organized, premeditated effort.”

Johnson said that Kalar told him that church parents would file complaints against anyone harboring their children in the future.

If the situation continued, “they said the potential for violence was pretty good,” Kalar said.

In response to parental complaints, county attorney Swandal has said that any adult who harbors church runaways will be charged with “custodial interference.”

Some network members admit they would be reluctant to help a runaway now that there have been threats of arrest and parental violence.

Yet others are undeterred.

“These children are really being traumatized. I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to help others,” said Schlosser.

April 23, 1990, is the date on which 25,800 years of karma will come due, resulting in apocalypse, according to Prophet, whose group, once based in California, began buying land in the Paradise Valley in 1981, nine years to doomsday.

Preparations for The End proceeded at first at a leisurely pace on the 33,000-acre spread near the northern border of Yellowstone National Park.

But in recent months, as the countdown continues, work on the shelters has become more frenzied. Through blinding spring snows and temperatures in the single digits, church members have labored to complete the shelters and to stock them with books, boots, toys, blankets, syringes, dried food and other supplies.

Church spokesmen have not denied reports that the shelters also will be equiped with straitjackets and Valium in case anyone gets out of control in the close quarters.

Anticipating troubles with confined children, shelter covenants have also spelled out that misbehaving youngsters may be disciplined with food deprivation and cold water dunks.

No one knows exactly how many children of church members stand to be affected by the specter of the shelters.

Spokesmen say they don’t know how many people are in the church, let alone how many children it has.

The public schools don’t keep records of religious affiliation, so they have no way of taking a head count, said Billie Fleming, Park County schools superintendent.

Though some church children attend public schools, the church also runs its own schools, she said. Reported enrollment for Church Universal and Triumphant schools as of November, 1989, was 198.

Fleming said church children tend to be superior students, but that in recent weeks, some have experienced difficulties concentrating. As the prophesied doomsday approaches, teachers have also reported a greater number of absences among church children, Fleming said.

Steve Hopkins, an eighth-grade teacher at the Livingston Middle School, also has seen a change in his students as April 23 nears. Some of the church students “look really out of it,” he said. “I think there are a lot of them in a panic right now, just by the looks on their faces.”

And Schlosser observed that students at St. Mary’s School are “very agitated, anxious. They just don’t know from day to day what will happen.”

To illustrate the urgency the children feel, Schlosser told a story about an elementary school student who showed up for class one day without her books. When the teacher asked where they were, she said she had already taken them down in the bomb shelter.

Gilbert’s father, Noonan, 36, said he talked at length with his three sons to allay fears they may have about the preparations for war.

“The whole reason we’re building shelters is so we don’t have to fear,” he told them.

“We’re not doing this out of paranoia. There’s a possibility the Soviets could do something,” said Noonan, who, like other church members, believes recent events in Europe have been incorrectly interpreted as harbingers of peace, when conflict is actually imminent.

Ultimately, his son chose to leave home, not because of the shelter or the church, but because Chris is “a rebellious teen-ager,” Noonan said. “It was normal kids-growing-up kinds of stuff.”

Noonan said he would not have forced Chris to go underground: “We’ve never pushed our religion on him, and we never told him he was going to have to do anything against his will.”

Further, he said, the shelters would not be occupied purely on Prophet’s whims: “If we do inhabit these things it will only be because you either go in there, or you die.”

While church officials have said the shelters will only be occupied in event of nuclear attack (“No war, no shelter occupancy,” said church spokesman Murray Steinman), critics of the church believe Prophet’s power over her followers is such that they would go underground if she told them to--whether or not there was reason to go.

It was apparently this prospect that inspired some children to run away.

In an interview with local newspapers, Chelsea Brannon said she decided to leave when her parents began making preparations to move from their home in Livingston to be closer to their shelter on church land.

Brannon said the idea of being ordered into the heavily fortified shelters frightened her. “All those people up there with guns . . . something is bound to happen.”

Sheriff Johnson said one of his deputies alerted him that children were planning to run away from the church shortly before an anticipated full-scale drill at the shelters on March 15.

Some did leave before the drill. One girl waited until the knock came on the door at 9 on a Thursday night, according to June Little, one of the adults in town who had contact with her. The teen-ager said a voice outside her door told her: “We’re going under at midnight.”

Little said the girl found an excuse to go outside, then ran to the town of Emigrant, hiding in ditches along the way.

“She just did not want to go into that shelter,” Little said. “I know this (conflict over beliefs) happens everywhere, even in the Catholic and Mormon religions. But I just don’t think what’s happened here is right. There’s got to be some protection for these kids.”

Though only five runaways have been officially reported, Sheriff Johnson said many more may have escaped by contacting friends and relatives, thus avoiding authorities altogether.

And as the “fear time” approaches, some predict more children will flee.

“I know there are other kids in my situation who want out,” Gilbert said.

Teacher Hopkins said one of his church-member students fiddles with a portable radio all day, listening for the emergency broadcasting signal.

“Dozens of them feel trapped,” he said. “They don’t want to go into the shelters and they don’t know what to do.”