‘We give our genitals to Jesus’: The cult that promoted celibacy while covering up its own abuse
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Sarah left the Jesus Army 21 years ago. She has been in therapy, on and off, ever since, trying to reclaim her personality and dispense with a decade of indoctrination that saw her given the “virtue name” Sarah Submissive and taught to suppress her “Jezebel spirit”.
But it was only while preparing to appear in a new BBC documentary about the church that she finally concluded it was a cult.
In BBC Two’s Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army, Sarah, now 53, is filmed in a group therapy session in Derbyshire trying to unpack her former life. She and other ex-members are seen studying a formal checklist, including points such as “Dangerous leaders make important decisions about converts’ lives”.
It is a session on “trauma theory”, however, that most affects Sarah. She breaks down when the participants discuss “appeasing, that is pleasing others to reduce harm”. She is so distressed that she gasps for breath, says she feels she is going to be sick and flees the room.
It brought back memories of the excuses she made for the “Elder” who psychologically and sexually abused her for four years from the age of 21. “I think I just realised how I’d blamed myself really for somebody else’s behaviour,” she tells the Telegraph on a video call. “I’d told myself I’d been asking for it. It was just that realisation: they literally crushed my personality, particularly that person.”
Her tormentor – whose abuse extended to “having total control over your decision-making” – would molest her under the table while “his wife would be sitting opposite”. The man, who was never prosecuted, was supposed to be “my Shepherd, so looking out for me and not actually violating me”.
The Jesus Fellowship was established in 1969 by the firebrand Baptist preacher Noel Stanton in Northamptonshire after he was “visited by God and received the Holy Spirit”. This led him to favour a brand of Neo-Pentecostal Christianity that involved euphoric worship, having decided he was a prophet speaking God’s will and determined to “make the Earth tremble”.
By the 1980s, it had been rebranded as the Jesus Army, and was drawing in vast numbers of young people through its camouflage jacket-clad street recruiters and warehouse raves. Offering a fresh-faced version of the Salvation Army, it targeted “street kids, addicts, the poor, the homeless”. By 2001, the Army had almost 100 communal homes across the country, from London to Leicester. As late as 2014, months before the police launched an investigation, they appeared in a Grayson Perry documentary and in one of his ceramics, in the style of a medieval enamelled chest containing a holy relic.
Sarah had lost both her mother and father by the age of 15 and was seeking not only a surrogate family but a faith in an afterlife, “because I wanted my parents to be somewhere”. She was just one of thousands of converts amassed by the Army over 40 years, attracted to a dream of harmonious communal living and moral purity. Many signed the “Celibates’ Covenant” or, as Stanton put it in one of his impassioned sermons: “Surrender the middle part of you… now we give our genitals to Jesus.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2025/07/27/inside-the-cult-of-the-jesus-army-bbc-two/.
