Hello and welcome to another entrant in the popular television genre Do Try to Be Born a White Christian Man If You Can. This one is entitled Escaping Utopia, a three-part documentary series on Gloriavale, a secretive sect founded in 1969 by preacher Neville Cooper, after he was vouchsafed at the age of 22 a vision of heaven on Earth by God. This vision involved establishing an isolated community in a remote part of New Zealand that would be run along wholly egalitarian lines, and men would live in absolute parity to women to secure their place in feminist heaven.
I jest, of course. Gloriavale ran – and, in reduced form, still runs – on the principles of women’s absolute subservience to men, men’s absolute subservience to the leaders above them (the dozen or so “shepherds”), and the shepherds’ absolute allegiance to Cooper (who renamed himself Hopeful Christian) – until he died in 2018 and was replaced by shepherd Howard Temple. No conversation is allowed between young people of different sexes after puberty. Women, who must wear uniform dresses and expose no skin but for the hands and face lest they inflame men’s uncontrollable lusts, are married off as young as possible – generally to the men Cooper/Christian deemed most suitable – and expected to devote themselves to having as many babies as possible. Everyone lives under the threat of eternal damnation. You get the picture, I’m sure.
