‘Undue influence’: How a religious movement spread on university campuses

Three years ago, an anonymous user took to Reddit to write out a warning for young adults in Boston: “IF YOU ARE A STUDENT, BE CAREFUL.”

The almost 1,800-word message, posted on a page called “r/excoc,” warned users about the Boston Church of Christ, or BCOC, and its parent group, the International Church of Christ, or ICOC. Both Christian organizations have faced allegations for decades of targeting students and young adults with high-pressure and manipulative tactics.  

The author of the post, John, a pseudonym to protect his identity due to fear of retaliation from the church, made a point to warn students specifically, writing, “Interns and ministry staff are active on college campuses in Boston trying to recruit students.”

Since the 1970s, the BCOC has earned a reputation for attracting students on college campuses in the Boston area. At Northeastern, the ICOC and the BCOC are classified as “unauthorized groups” by the university’s Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service, or CSDS, banning them from all its campuses. Unauthorized groups, according to a CSDS pamphlet, refer to religious or faith-based organizations that “practice destructive behaviors,” including lovebombing and absolution to attract students.

The BCOC is among four other groups barred from campus: Boston Alpha Omega, ICOC, Boston International Christian Church and NU Bible Talk. All of these groups are connected to the ICOC or BCOC and are student-focused church groups. (BCOC maintains an active webpage where individuals can express interest in joining Northeastern Bible Talk, despite being banned from campus.) 

The BCOC has had a presence at Northeastern since the 1980s. In a 1986 article published in The Northeastern News, now The Huntington News, a Northeastern student and former BCOC member reported that the group used these high-pressure tactics on her. The member, identified only as “Diane,” said she experienced social isolation, exacerbation of her insecurities by the group and pressure to become baptized in the church.  

The BCOC did not respond to more than a dozen requests for comment by email, website inquiries or phone calls over the course of one year. 

According to the CSDS pamphlet, unregistered religious groups are “approaching Northeastern students” and use “high-pressure and manipulative tactics which can affect our students’ well being.” Julie Rothhaar-Sanders, assistant vice chancellor of engagement at Northeastern, said that a group does not have to be established at the university to become an unauthorized group.

“It might be folks on the corner that are on public property, but our students are saying, ‘I’m being harassed by this person,’ or ‘They’re giving me these flyers,’” she said. If community members report such behaviors, Student Life and CSDS meet in order to determine the next steps in protecting students. Sometimes, Rothhaar-Sanders said, that results in a group gaining “unauthorized” status. 

When John joined the BCOC in February of 2022, he had just moved to Boston after college and was looking for community and a church to join. However, he was unaware that the group was under scrutiny for proselytizing. Lawsuits and public pressure have loomed over the church. The group also faced allegations of manipulation, sexual assault and excessive control, with former members turning to social media and crowdsourcing websites to warn about the group. 

Why college campuses? 

The ICOC has over 700 churches in 147 countries worldwide, according to their website, Disciples Today. The organization grew out of several other religious movements, namely the Campus Evangelism movement, a 1960s religious crusade within the Churches of Christ network. At the time, its leaders were focused on spreading Christianity to college campuses.

One of the founding members of the movement, Jim Bevis, said in a 2008 lecture series that Campus Evangelism dissolved in the 1970s. Although the Campus Evangelism movement ended after only five years, according to the lecture, the principles of spreading religion on college campuses have been a pillar within the Churches of Christ for decades. This is in part driven by the BCOC’s Campus Ministry, also referred to as Boston Alpha Omega, which is still active. 

The News was unable to reach any current members of the BCOC. According to crowdsourcing sites like Reddit, members are still reporting similar tactics and behaviors at the time of publication. 

The BCOC has drawn scrutiny from Massachusetts colleges for decades. According to the U.S. News & World Report cited by a 2002 Harvard Crimson article, 39 colleges, including Harvard, Boston University, Northeastern and the College of the Holy Cross, have all restricted the BCOC from organizing and recruiting on their campuses. 

For decades, universities in the area have put up guardrails, preventing the church from recruiting. “Boston University barred the Boston Church of Christ from recruiting in university residences last summer, and Northeastern took similar action in December. At Harvard University, Rev. Larry Hill is concerned about reports of harassment by the church,” a 1988 Boston Globe article reads. 

Esther Friedman, a licensed mental health counselor who specializes in treating former cult members, said that college-aged students are among the most vulnerable populations when it comes to recruitment by high-pressure groups. 

“Most young college students, they’re transitioning, they’re leaving home, they’re meeting new friends, they may or may not be having a good experience on their college campus,” said Friedman, who was previously in a high-pressure group herself. She added that young adults’ brains have not yet fully developed, often leading to more compulsive decision-making. 

She went on, “If they’re not having a good experience, something like a group coming in to embrace them is going to be really appealing.”

In August 1987, Boston University’s then-Dean of Students Ronald Carter and Dean of Marsh Chapel Robert Watts Thornburg addressed a letter to the Boston Church of Christ. “The continued pressure and harassment of students to attend meetings, to leave other faith traditions and join the extensive activities of the Boston Church of Christ will not be tolerated,” they wrote.  

Carter and Thornburg cited instances when church members made repeated telephone calls to students’ rooms and instances where church representatives entered residence halls as guests to conduct door-to-door scouting. 

Northeastern’s administration echoed Boston University’s concerns more than a decade later. According to a February 1999 Northeastern News article, reporter Christine Walsh wrote that the BCOC had been banned from Northeastern’s campus for “at least the past 10 years, said Sister Rosemary Mulvihill, director of NU’s Spiritual Life Office.” 

According to the article, Mulvihill said the church was banned mainly because of its recruiting methods. “Their recruitment is often duplicitous; it’s not always as it seems,” she said. “They follow up with phone calls and continually pursue the person. It really takes away a person’s freedom.”

When John was still an active member of the church, he recalled campus ministries being a focal point of the BCOC. He said there was a time while he was still attending the BCOC, when two Northeastern students who acted as campus ministers were allegedly reprimanded by Northeastern CSDS for attempting to recruit students on campus.

He told The News that the campus ministers were brought to the dean or “some kind of board of spiritual life” and were told to stop. “It was probably like a slap on the wrist,” he said. He said he was unsure of how much the university could’ve done to intervene, as the ministers were students operating in a “social way” on campus. 

“But it was celebrated at the church, which I thought was so weird,” John said. “They were ‘standing up for their faith’ or ‘standing up against persecution.’ Now that I look at it, it just seems dishonest.”  

When The News asked about the confrontation in an interview with Chong Kim-Wong, Northeastern’s dean of students, and Rothhaar-Sanders, neither administrator could recall if or how the alleged interaction between Northeastern and BCOC campus ministers may have occurred. 

Alexander Kern, who John identified as the “leader of spiritual life” at Northeastern, and former CSDS director who left the university in October, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Kim-Wong said that while students have access to university resources if they encounter high-pressure groups, such as Student Life, cultural and spiritual centers within CSDS and Northeastern police, students also should trust themselves if “something doesn’t feel right.” She said that even if a student may not feel “unsafe but just uncomfortable,” they have options to report it or even just “put it on someone’s radar” at the university. 

Life in the church

Steven Hassan [Read the Cult Education Institute disclaimer concerning Steven Hassan] got his doctoral degree and became a licensed mental health professional after leaving the Unification Church, a religious group colloquially known as the “Moonies” with a reputation for psychological manipulation and mind-control tactics. Now, Hassan is the founding director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, an organization dedicated to helping individuals reclaim freedom of thought after experiences in high-pressure groups. 

“You’ll meet happy, smiling people who want to play volleyball with you and help you move in because you’re a new student,” Hassan said of many recruiters. “But you have no idea what’s really going on and what their goals are.”

Chris Lee joined the BCOC in 1991 during his sophomore year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, after a peer introduced him to the organization. Lee left BCOC during his senior year and now manages REVEAL, an organization that tells the stories of BCOC members who left the group. 

On REVEAL’s main webpage is the Bible verse 2 Corinthians 4:2. “We have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God,” it reads.

Members recruit students by first inviting them to casual social events and then to a “Bible talk,” or Bible study, Lee said. He recalled that members invited him to dinner and a movie, and ended the night by telling him that they would like to “study the Bible” with him. 

“I studied multiple hours with them, and then joined about nine days later,” Lee said.

John’s introduction to the BCOC through “Bible Talks” used methods similar to the “high-pressure and manipulative tactics” CSDS mentions in its Healthy Groups pamphlet. The recruitment process uses an eight-step program, which he said is designed “very intentionally.”

“It’s got some elements to it that bring in some undue influence,” John said of the group’s Bible studies. “Not all the information about the group is revealed until maybe later, or it’s suppressed. And so I just thought I was joining a group that was Christian, that was serious about Christianity.”

From his research on cults, Hassan said that people in “an authoritarian cult” want to change and isolate members from any negative information about the group.

“The idea is that as you go deeper into the study, you are more and more indoctrinated into the beliefs of the group, and these beliefs will narrow you more and more and more and more to get to this point where you either have to join the group, or you’re convinced that if you don’t join the group, you are damned to hell,” John said. 

Gerette Buglion, is a founding member of Living Cult Free, an organization for survivors of high-pressure groups and cultic coercion, and spent 18 years in what she describes as “an everyday cult.” (The group is not associated with BCOC.) She said that as time went on, she realized she was unable to make decisions without the leader’s involvement.

“I thought that my life was becoming richer and deeper and wider and more expansive, but it actually was closing in on itself more and more,” Buglion said, adding that many high-pressure groups follow a very similar pattern, painting an idealized version of self or of the world to be attainable only through the group. 

“Once you’re in [the group] and feeling the beauty and taking that in, you get kind of hooked into it a bit,” Buglion said.  “Then the problem comes out, and that involves shame, and they find your insecurity.”

She went on, “That problem is leveraged, and not only is it leveraged, it’s actually made bigger. It’s exacerbated, and then very often, people are actually bringing in false memories, too, that go along with that narrative of how horrible I was and how wonderful this group is that is saving my life.” 

Bible study groups run by BCOC have also popped up on college campuses in the greater Boston area, including at MIT, where Lee was first approached in 1992. At Simmons University, campus ministers for the BCOC, hosted a Bible study group in the basement of a residence hall and recruited students from neighboring colleges, according to a 2021 article from The Simmons Voice.  

Lee also mentioned that some higher education institutions banned the organization partially because student members of the church were suffering academically, and it was a violating their academic charter. 

“[It’s] not every single case, but the members’ grade point averages drop. They take longer to graduate. They switch into easier majors, and some of them even drop out,” he said.

He emphasized that church involvement took up a substantial amount of time in his life. Students, Lee said, may be spending at least 12 hours a week on church activities or events and that he felt “enormous pressure to do all these things and it was frowned upon if you missed any events.”

In a 1994 Los Angeles Times report, religious scholars and former church members accused BCOC of intentionally using social pressure and targeting techniques to draw in crowds, particularly young students on college campuses. They called it “love bombing,” claiming that members used friendship as a facade to establish relationships with individuals before pressuring them to join the church.

Between sinking grades and loss of downtime, Lee dropped out of MIT’s chamber orchestra by the end of his sophomore year. “By the end of my time, and this is January 1994, I was so burned out from all the time that I was giving at MIT [and] the Boston Church of Christ, that I was actually clinically depressed and I needed sleep,” he said.

Hassan said he believes that universities and educational institutions have a duty to keep students safe from high-pressure groups and manipulative tactics.  

“I think [universities] have an obligation to educate their students how to be good consumers, especially around religious groups, but any groups, and especially about online undue influence,” he said. “I’ve talked with other administrations, they’re like, ‘Well, we can’t like opine on religious groups. I say, ‘Fine, don’t talk about religion. Talk about undue influence. Talk about brainwashing and mind control in any form, and educate your students.’”

Friedman and Lee told The News that former members continue to come forward and share their experiences, both in recent years and from decades ago. 

Breaking free  

As an international student from Canada searching for a group that studied the Bible seriously, Lee was hopeful about joining the church. Despite warnings from his friends, he continued on a personal mission to figure out whether these accusations were true or not.

“Little by little, it turned over my life,” he said. “I had multiple orchestras that I’d been involved with, including one that was on Wednesday night and interfered with their midweek meeting,” he said, adding, “By the end of six or seven months, they were like, ‘If you’re really serious about your spirituality, you should highly consider going to midweek.’” 

Eventually, Lee took on a role as a BCOC Bible talk assistant leader and then a co-leader around June 1992. Shortly afterward, he began to grow suspicious of the church’s recruitment tactics and became disillusioned with its use of love bombing. 

John similarly rose in the ranks of the church and started leading introductory studies with new members. Through conversations with potential new members, some of whom also rang the alarm bells on some of the group’s practices, John started to doubt the BCOC.  

This started a chain reaction, leading to anxious phone calls and conversations with other group members and research into the beliefs of the church. John finally opened up to his family about his experiences within the BCOC. 

“​​When I had left the group, I think my self-esteem was pretty tarnished at that point, because I had thought I knew what was right or true, and then through this whole process, I let my guard down for a group that was not trustworthy, and it just took advantage of me,” John said. 

After he left, he said spent a lot of time working on rebuilding his sense of self and trust in himself. Friedman said that this is a key aspect of recovering from being in a high-pressure group. 

“I still wanted to be a Christian, which is also mixed,” John said. “A lot of people don’t want to be a Christian after they leave this group because they think this is what Christianity is all about, which is unfortunate.    

“I go to a church in Watertown now. It’s very healthy,” he said. “They do exist.”