2 Year Anniversary for Breakout by David Tchappat
Two years ago this week, Australian David Tchappat launched his autobiographical Breakout: How I escaped from the Exclusive Brethren – and last weekend David married Rachel – they are currently on honeymoon.
A Double Congratulation is therefore due to a brave young man who managed to escape the clutches of the Exclusive Brethren, wrote the most recent story of what life was like in the secretive cult, used his media power to launch the book following his appearance in Australia’s ‘Big Brother’ TV show and doggedly rebuilt his life.
peebs.net has reached agreement with David and the publishers of Breakout to serialize a portion of his book. We are hoping that the limited serialization will raise interest in David’s story and help spread the truth regarding the Exclusive Brethren.
As part of the peebs.net coverage of this 2 year anniversary, we hope to arrange a live Webinar where David will answer questions over a live Internet video feed about his life in the cult, his escape and subsequent new life. The Webinar is yet to be scheduled – it will be recorded and made available from this website for those who miss the live event. We will be providing members of the public an opportunity to submit questions for David Tchappat prior to the event.
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Reproduced with permission from:
Breakout: How I escaped from the Exclusive Brethren
by David Tchappat (2009)
The following chapter was written by a former Exclusive Brethren member who wishes to remain anonymous.
A Short History of the Exclusive Brethren
There are many Christians known as “brethren” who trace the origins of their movement to John Nelson Darby who lived just over 200 years ago in Dublin. Schism and division has been a consistent feature of the movement almost from the start. The following summary relates to the Taylor-Symington-Hales Branch of the Exclusive Brethren (signified by the more recent leaders of this group); arguably the most radical and perhaps controversial of all the groups in the Brethren movement.
The Brethren trace the origins of the movement to John Nelson Darby who was born in London in 1800 into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. Lord Nelson, a friend of his uncle, Admiral Sir Henry Darby, was a sponsor at young Darby’s christening.
Darby’s mother died when he was five years old and at the age of 15 his family moved to the ancestral estate in Ireland. He took an honours degree at Dublin University and studied law for three years at the Dublin Chancery Bar. But he never practiced law. To the annoyance of his family, he abandoned his legal career and became a priest in the Irish Church of England in 1826, serving in the parish of Calary in the mountains of County Wicklow.
Almost immediately John Darby fell out with church leaders over matters of doctrine and by 1827-28 he was meeting to “break bread” in the home of one of four other dissenting young men in Dublin. The group believed that the existence of an established church and ordained clergy was contrary to scripture. “I can find no such thing as a national church in Scripture”, Darby wrote at the time. In 1832, he had a major disagreement with Archbishop Magee about a requirement for converted Catholics to swear allegiance to King George IV and, in the same year, disagreed with Archbishop Whately about matters of church doctrine.
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May 30, 2008
A well-researched and sourced compilation of related news appeared today in the Hong Kong-based ‘Mister-Info’ news portal. The article and stated sources appear below:
‘Big Brother Australia’ evictee recounts youth in controversial religious group
David Tchappat, a popular housemate recently evicted from the television reality program Big Brother Australia, has spoken out critically of his childhood experiences in the controversial religious group “Raven-Taylor-Hales Brethren”, referred to in Australian media as “Exclusive Brethren”. Tchappat was a participant in the edition Big Brother Australia 2008, and was voted off the show on May 25.
Tchappat, 33, a former police officer and presently a firefighter, left the controversial group at age 19. He says he attempted to leave at age 17 but was brought back by members of the group and “interrogated” by group leadership for months. Up until he left he had never eaten in a restaurant, listened to the radio or been to the movie theater. According to Macquarie National News, Tchappat’s former community numbers number approximately 15,000 in Australia. Raven-Taylor-Hales Brethren is a sect of Protestant Christianity and a breakaway group from Exclusive Brethren.
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May 28, 2008
So David was ‘evicted’ from the Big Brother house because he was “boring”. What some people do not understand is that it can take years to recover from the damage caused from the trauma of being locked away from society. A typical ex-member of the Exclusive Brethren has been surrounded by rules and restrictions since birth. The ability to hold a ‘normal’ conversation with someone not part of the cult is a skill that has to be learned.
Certainly David Tchappat has had 13 or more years to learn how to socially interact, but his chosen routes of employment are telling – a policeman and currently a fireman. Both roles allow physical communication and an associated authority. Try and pick two other jobs (necessarily attainable without a university education) that depend more on rules and regulations as much as these … ex-Exclusive Brethren are expert at maintaining existence around rules. For the first few years, an ex-member without some form of structure is the psychological equivalent of a body without a skeleton.
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May 26, 2008
David Tchappat is already a winner.
For those mentally and physically trapped within the Exclusive Brethren, leaving is not a rational option. From the moment you are taken as a child a few days old and immersed in a tub of luke warm water under the watchful eyes of your family members and a few local Exclusive Brethren representatives, you are given no choices. Your future is mapped and your ambitions will become sublimated to become part of ‘supporting the Assembly’.
The concept of ‘Household Baptism’ is just one example of where the Exclusive Brethren take choices out of the hands of an individual. To most Christians, Baptism is quite simply a personal decision and an outward expression of a life ‘reborn’. Although Christening is a common practice in many denominations, this is simpler to view as a dedication by the parents to bring up a child in the Christian tradition.
There is no ‘Believers Baptism’ in the Exclusive Brethren. This is the most common form of Baptism in the Christian community where a new believer will decide voluntarily to ‘be baptized’ as a public expression of their new faith and that they have left their old life behind them. It is this form of Baptism that many feel has the greatest meaning and significance – because they made the decision.
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In a possible Quote of the Week, David Tchappat is quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald as stating “Living with the Exclusive Brethren is like living in the Big Brother house…”.
Um … probably not David. Although, we do admit there are some possible similarities.
If you remove the fact that you are living, eating and under the same roof with people who are distinctly not EB material – and add to this the fact that this is a manufactured environment for Television (a pipeline of filth) – and of course, sadly, you are a ‘Person under Discipline’ and this means that you are denied a number of things: including eternal salvation, ability to speak freely with members of your family still inside, and darnit, you’re going to miss the Rapture …
No – we concur that you are there because of money, that you are there because you’re ‘different’ and you’re there because you miss not having a family around you – a circular observation perhaps.
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Breakout – David Tchappat’s escape from the Exclusive Brethren
June 1st, 2009
David has written an unique autobiography in that it represents the first published story of life in the Exclusive Brethren during the last 30 years. There have been a number of books written regarding life in the 1950′s and 1960′s, but David Tchappat was born after the Aberdeen Incident of 1970 and grew up in a brethren family in Australia under the iron-fisted rule of Neche, ND pig farmer James Symington and following his death, John Hales who is the father of Bruce Hales, the current Exclusive Brethren leader.
It is very much an Australian book – Aussie slang terms pepper the pages – non-Aussie readers will need to know the meaning of such words as ‘stoked‘, ‘bloke‘ and the visually effective ‘ropeable‘.
Written over a 5 year period, the autobiography covers the author’s upbringing in the Exclusive Brethren cult and his eventual departure as a 19 year old in the mid-1990′s. It is an important publication in that it is the most contemporary book detailing life within the EB.
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