Blue sect with sex on its mind

In God's name

It's rare that I would recommend anything from 60 Minutes, and now that I do they have no transcript or video on their site. Grrr.

Anyway, the story that caught my attention on last Sunday was about the Cooperite Christian sect of New Zealand, which was a new one for me. The link above will at least show you the form of dress that the women wear.

This is one creepy sect. The aging founder, Neville Cooper, is from Queensland, and has had umpteen kids from 3 wives. (He is currently on wife number 3, apparently, and the show did not make clear what happened to the first 2.)

According to WikiChristian, which also has very little information about them, there are now 400 members, many of them children because Neville believes all women should pump out as many children as possible. (OK, maybe Catholics of barely 50 years ago could be accused of having a similar teaching, but the young women Cooperites on the show indicated that they actively desired heaps of children - 10 or 12 seemed the bare minimum they wanted. Catholic women were not in the same league, and their desire to limit the number of children became clear in practice when the pill became available.)

The weird side of the cult is that it is both very conservative and adopts a puritan-like and uniform standard of dress (mostly blue, for some reason), but its leader seems to encourage a ridiculous amount of openness in sex within marriage. (His son claims that he frequently saw his parents having sex, who saw it as an educational thing to do for the children. He also says he was molested by his father at age 17. It sounded like it was some "hands on" teaching scenario, although the son did not elaborate.)

The son has since left the cult, but his wife went back, and she and their children will have nothing to do with him ever again.

It seems rare to have such a strange mix of a conservative, isolationist, Christian sect, combined with an emphasis on educating children on sex, and encouraging them to start as young as possible. (They marry as teenagers, and the report showed a newly married teenage couple snogging for the camera while being carried to the honeymoon room in a silly carriage with heart shaped windows, with children throwing flowers on the path in front of them. It was a very strange scene.)

I can't imagine that it will survive the death of Neville Cooper for long, as surely internal power struggles will ensue.

I would like to know more about their attitude to modern medicine and things like that, but there seems no way of finding out more.

Sorry if you missed it.