‘This is a cult’: inside the shocking story of a religious weight-loss group – The Guardian
In a wierd new docuseries, the darkish world of the Remnant Fellowship and its ‘pray your self skinny’ chief Gwen Shamblin is delivered to mild
In Could of this 12 months, film-makers Marina Zenovich and Nile Cappello had almost wrapped on a documentary collection about Remnant Fellowship, an insular, eerily cheery church in Brentwood, Tennessee, which preached weight reduction as a non secular project. For greater than three years Cappello and her staff had researched Remnant, which had confronted accusations of being a cult that promoted baby abuse, and its charismatic chief, Gwen Shamblin Lara, a stick-thin girl with an inflated blonde beehive who gained fame for a theological food plan program to hope one’s strategy to thinness.
Cappello, an investigative journalist and government producer, and Zenovich, a director who has made movies on such figures as Roman Polanski, Robin Williams and Lance Armstrong, had spoken to quite a few former members of Remnant Fellowship, explored allegations of harassment and emotional abuse, outlined the path of toxicity behind the Weigh Down Workshop’s teachings of fats as a manifestation of sin, and accepted that Shamblin, 66, would most likely by no means conform to an interview. “They don’t wish to go on document,” Zenovich informed the Guardian. “They wish to proceed doing what they’re doing, which is controlling individuals. So we tried – we despatched letters to a variety of leaders – however nobody responded.”
Earlier this month, in response to allegations made within the movie, Remnant issued a proper assertion, introduced on the finish of the collection, during which the church “categorically denies the absurd defamatory statements and accusations made on this documentary” and assures “kids are glad and wholesome, being raised with essentially the most love, care, help and safety possible”.
On 29 Could, Shamblin and her husband, former Tarzan actor Joe Lara, in addition to 5 different leaders inside Remnant Fellowship, died in a plane crash exterior Smyrna, Tennessee. The crash now opens The Means Down, a multi-part collection on HBO Max, with the primary three episodes – on Shamblin’s rise to recognition amongst evangelical church buildings, her more and more controversial teachings and allegations of kid abuse – premiering this week. Two extra episodes on the crash, its investigation and the transition of energy to Shamblin’s two kids, will land in spring 2022.
For years, Shamblin projected a glowing, bubbly, lavish facade: a self-made Christian businesswoman dedicated to serving to others, significantly ladies, lastly obtain their weight reduction objectives by getting nearer to God, with a plantation-style mansion exterior Nashville. Her Weigh Down Workshop, which she began in 1986, preached primarily a theological model of intuitive consuming: eat solely when your abdomen is growling, pray via cravings. Her express linkage of food plan tradition with holiness – “the best way to cease bowing right down to the fridge and the best way to bow again right down to him,” as she mentioned in an early interview – made her a preferred determine amongst church buildings; by the early 2000s, Shamblin, who educated as a dietician, had bought thousands and thousands of books and appeared on Larry King Stay, The Tyra Banks Present and in a New Yorker profile (Slim For Him, 2001).
The infusion of 90s and early 2000s food plan tradition – books and daytime TV specials and restrictive plans and “eat what you need however drop some pounds!” slogans – with spirituality, from somebody who claims to be speaking on to God, was “a massively highly effective message” to those that grew up Christian, Cappello informed the Guardian. However over the course of 20 years, Remnant grew to become about far more than dropping pounds. As The Means Down illustrates over three more and more ominous episodes, Shamblin exerted an increasing number of energy over members’ funds, marriages, custody preparations, parenting, social media postures and ultimately, all contact with the surface world. Testimonies from ex-members and people threatened with the lack of relations to the insular group, which believes it’s the solely path to heaven, exhibit how Remnant was really “about energy and controlling individuals’s lives, controlling their weight, controlling their marriages, controlling their funds”, mentioned Zenovich.
“Folks speak so much about her make-up and her hair, and naturally there’s a humorous facet to it, however that could be a masks, that could be a facade in itself,” Cappello informed the Guardian. “It’s a excellent illustration of her doctrine and the best way that she approaches the world, and the best way that she has her members painting a picture of perfection and happiness and pleasure to the surface world once they’re struggling internally.”
In 1999, Shamblin broke with the Church of Christ, the conservative department of evangelicalism during which she grew up (and which forbade feminine leaders) and launched Remnant Fellowship, primarily based round her food plan teachings, which noticed weight reduction as a pure reflection of non secular dedication and intent, acquire as failure and sin.
Cappello described a months-long strategy of attending to know former members and people affected by the church and its poisonous teachings. Some, she mentioned, suspected she could be a Remnant member undercover, or a personal eye employed to gather filth on individuals for custody instances. “That worry is actual,” mentioned Cappello, particularly given the church’s litigiousness (quite a few former members within the collection recall threats from Remnant that the church would take away their kids in the event that they left the group). “That’s not paranoia – that’s completely justified.”
Topics embody Natasha Pavlovich, an ex-girlfriend of Lara’s preventing towards Remnant’s sturdy authorized staff for custody of her 10-year-old daughter. Glen and Cary Wingerd, whose teenage daughter Delaney joined Remnant after being recruited by a highschool boyfriend, describe a path of shady deception: burner telephones, dropped conversations, rising isolation from their baby.
The primary-person testimonies by former members soften what can appear, at first look, an unfathomable leap. “It turns into very straightforward for the viewer to distance themselves by saying, ‘I’d by no means do this, I’d by no means fall for that, I’d by no means be part of a church like that,’” mentioned Cappello. However the Weigh Down Workshops promised one thing many ladies had been desperately craving: a framework for weight reduction that felt significant, infused with the righteousness and familiarity of faith; a neighborhood and customary objective past the house. A message of management delivered by one other girl, skinny and perpetually bubbly; an excessive and euphoric manifestation of the food plan mantra “nothing tastes nearly as good as skinny feels”. Remnant Fellowship supplied help, the safety of guidelines and black-and-white considering – plus free babysitters and in-house homeschool, authorized companies.
In the end, it was the identical seduction of society writ massive: price anointed via the pursuit of thinness and deference to males, though delivered by a girl harnessing such need for her personal energy. “The disgrace that you’ve simply being a girl at the moment, compounded with the non secular facet, is actually extremely highly effective,” mentioned Cappello.
Past many accounts of disordered consuming and psychological well being struggles by former members, the third episode particulars a horrific case of child abuse that originally introduced the church below scrutiny. In 2003, two Atlanta-based members of Remnant Fellowship, Joseph and Sonya Smith, had been sentenced to life in jail plus 30 years for beating their eight-year-old son, Josef, to demise as punishment. Investigators discovered the boy was repeatedly abused; a former babysitter featured within the collection alleges that she was ordered to beat the boy at church and heard, together with a number of others, the abuse inside the constructing. Different former members recall Shamblin instructing members the best way to beat their kids with glue sticks and different devices, as obedience was of the utmost significance to God and, by extension, Remnant management. Channel 5 in Nashville obtained a recording during which Shamblin praised Sonya Smith for locking up Josef with nothing by a Bible for 3 days.
Shamblin denied ever condoning abuse; native authorities investigated whether or not Shamblin and Remnant’s instructing contributed to Josef’s demise, and reached no conclusion. The church defended the Smiths as wrongly accused and continued to help them. “The best way the church has spun it’s not mirrored in actuality, it’s not primarily based on info,” mentioned Cappello.
The phrase “cult” is fraught, contested, and has pushed fascination with collection corresponding to LuLaRich, the Amazon collection on the multi-level advertising and marketing firm LuLaRoe, peddled as a type of prosperity gospel by two members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (previously often known as Mormons); or HBO’s The Vow, in regards to the Nxivm cult that additionally wielded a honest impulse for self-improvement to darkish, harmful ends. The Means Down’s subtitle is “God, Greed, and the cult of Gwen Shamblin” as a result of “after engaged on this for a year-plus, it’s very clear to me that it is a cult”, mentioned Zenovich.
“It’s lower than me to make that willpower,” mentioned Cappello. “I take a look at the factors that’s used to find out what’s a cult. And if you happen to take a look at that standards” – isolation from the surface world, reducing off contact with relations, perception of their singular path to heaven, characterizing ex-members as heretics, the management and abuse – “Gwen and Remnant Fellowship match each one”.
The Means Down makes the case for the group’s extremity, but the present goes on: a day after the aircraft’s crash, Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah, whose husband was onboard, promised to uphold Remnant’s mission and “proceed the dream that Gwen Shamblin Lara had of serving to individuals discover a relationship with God”. The ultimate moments of the collection discover her, clad in an extended black gown, on her mom’s stage. Wraith-like, fingers within the air, she leads her followers “into the Promised land, collectively” – or, no less than, additional scrutiny in later episodes.
The Means Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin begins on HBO Max on 30 September and within the UK at a later date
