Brooks: Author reckons with his past growing up in a Minnesota religious cult

This is a story about growing up in a cult, and growing out of it.

Luke Allen was raised on the isolated Pine County compound where members of the River Road Fellowship lived, worked and worshiped under the watchful eye of a charismatic minister, Victor Barnard. Posing as God’s representative on Earth, Barnard convinced his flock to trust him with their lives, their money, their souls...and their children.

He betrayed that trust.

“Cult Life: Tales of a Radical Christian Boyhood” traces the rise and fall of River Road. A community of faith that began with Bible studies in the Twin Cities suburbs ended in an international manhunt for Barnard, the cult leader charged and ultimately convicted of raping girls and young women he called his “maidens.”

“You have ordinary American people, hoping to be part of something,” Allen said, speaking by phone from his home, surrounded by his children’s scattered toys. “Through manipulation, abuse, love, belonging … it gradually slips into a closed-off cult.”

Allen changed every name in his self-published book, including his own. Every name but one.

Victor Barnard is serving a 24-year sentence for what he did to the children of River Road. Now the children are telling their stories.

Allen’s story began before he was born, when his parents met Barnard. He was still in grade school when his family moved to Shepherd’s Camp, an old campground the Fellowship purchased near Finlayson.

His earliest memories of the place were almost idyllic, full of soccer games and lake swims and a tight-knit community that ate together, worked together and prayed together.

Things changed so gradually that members barely noticed how much of their freedom and free will they had given away.

Allen remembers happy moments, full of children’s games and communal meals and the excitement of a community trying to build something together. Bit by bit, page by page, Barnard tightened his grip on his flock.

There were no words for “fun” or “play” in the Bible, Barnard decreed one day, ordering the soccer field to be ripped out and for members to stop watching movies and TV. He told Allen’s father to take the little boy down to the lake and toss his “golden idol” — his second grade soccer trophy — into the water.

“When men and women now talked,” Allen wrote, “they did so like Midwestern farmers, sort of standing shoulder to shoulder and staring in the same direction at nothing.”

Barnard began dressing like Jesus, preaching for hours at mealtimes, berating members of the fellowship until they burst into tears. He discouraged family bonds and separated both boys and girls from their families. Loving your family was too “carnally minded,” Allen remembered him saying. You must hate your family if you want to be a true disciple of Jesus — or Victor Barnard.

He’s haunted by a memory from his teens, when he saw Barnard lying in a meadow, with his head on a young girl’s lap. He wonders why he didn’t speak up then. He wonders why the adults never did.

“If a few families had banded together and said, ‘We’re not going to give our daughters over,’ that would have been the end of it,” he said.

In the end, Lindsay Tornambe and Jess Schweiss spoke out about the abuse they had suffered, at great cost. The courageous Jess lived long enough to see Barnard convicted but died by suicide five years ago at age 31.

He grew up in a world of us versus them, good versus evil. The righteous River Road Fellowship, who dedicated their entire selves to their faith, versus the Christians down the road who go to church on Sunday and then watch football.

Now he lives in a bitterly polarized America, a world of right versus left, the good people who vote like you versus the bad guys who don’t.

“Politics was very much on my mind when I was writing this,” he said. “That’s definitely how it was in our church. We judged other churches. We had the right way and everyone else was wrong.”