Abuse of Power in Alternative and Emerging Spiritual and Cultural Organizations

One of the core mandates of Harvard’s new Program for the Evolution of Spirituality is to look honestly at both the positive and negative dimensions of emerging spiritual movements.

We are keenly aware that the abuse of power is a sensitive topic. Open discussion of past experiences of abuse has the potential to be re-traumatizing. Organizations that abuse power exist on a broad spectrum, and it is important to acknowledge differences and ambiguities as well as recognize that each person’s experience is a complex mix; abuse of power can be entered into intentionally or unintentionally, and many of these spaces present the potential to be greatly empowering for people who have been disempowered in the past. Simultaneously, it is equally important to be forthright in naming those realities that are unacceptable.

In this virtual panel, we hope to foster a complex conversation on power dynamics in emerging and alternative organizations.

About the Panelists:

Amber Scorah is a writer and media activist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is author of the memoir Leaving the Witness, published by Viking Books. After growing up in the Jehovah's Witness faith, Amber learned Mandarin Chinese and moved to Mainland China to become an underground missionary. Her aim was to convert people to her religion, in order to save them from the coming apocalypse. Preaching covertly in China, she encountered a new culture and made friends outside the faith for the first time. This led her to question the beliefs she had been taught from childhood, and ultimately she left the religion. Shunned by her family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had only known from the periphery, with no education or support system.

Amber is a TEDx speaker and has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR Morning Edition and more. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Believer, The Boston Globe, The Cut, The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture by Brooklyn Magazine.

Margaret Smith currently holds the position of Director of Trauma Healing and Community Resilience at the Institute of World Affairs, Washington, DC. She earned her doctorate from the Fletcher School in 1999 and taught in the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at American University in Washington, DC, from 1999 to 2017. She is the author of Reckoning with the Past: Teaching history in Northern Ireland (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005) as well as book chapters and book reviews. Before becoming an academic she worked seventeen years with the international NGO Moral Re-Armament, now called Initiatives of Change. This group, which was called The Oxford Group in the 1930s, is perhaps best known these days because it spawned Alcoholics Anonymous, but it has a long track record of Christian-based interfaith reconciliation work on all continents. Smith’s parents and grandparents worked for the movement and she grew up within it.

Helen Zuman is the author of Mating in Captivity (She Writes Press 2018), a memoir of her five years, post-Harvard, at Zendik Farm, a cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. After leaving Zendik in 2004, she helped expose its twisted innards via her Zendik FAQ. More recently, she's shared her story at the conferences of the International Cultic Studies Association, the Communal Studies Association (which honored Mating in Captivity with its 2020 Timothy Miller Outstanding Book Award), and the International Communal Studies Association. She's also written about aspects of her cult and communal experiences for Communities and Livelihood magazines, and the Foundation for Intentional Community’s website. In all, she's visited or lived at more than a dozen co-ops, cults, communes, and intentional communities throughout the United States; she now homesteads with her husband on a steeply sloped quarter acre in Beacon, New York.

Souki Mehdaoui is a documentary director, writer, and cinematographer based in Denver. Her work can be seen on Netflix, HBO, the New York Times, A+E, Yahoo and Refinery29, as well as in the Sundance-premiering documentaries “The Great Hack” and “Mucho Mucho Amor.” Raised in Morocco, France, and a smattering of states across America, her work comes from a third culture— a few steps to the left, lots of accents, and a pot of strange spices on the back burner. As an artist, she finds hope in dark corners. As a human, she strives to enjoy every flavor of skittle.

Learn more about the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality on the HDS site: https://hds.harvard.edu/faculty-research/programs-and-centers/program-evolution-spirituality

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