The $136-million Suit They Lost

For six years, the Living Stream Ministry (LSM) pursued a huge $136-million suit against Harvest House, the most recent in a chain of lawsuits against Christians spanning thirty years. I remind one of that fact to show that they are not nice, tolerant, harmless people. For those six years, the suit was a big deal and indeed the LSM thought it was such a big deal, that they pursued it while losing every step of the way.

Now that it is over, we are to believe that it was no big deal after all. It was just small quibbling.

Here is a quotation I found from the original letter they wrote to Harvest House prepatory to the litigation they lost:

According to Dr. Ankerberg and Dr. Weldon [editors of the Encyclopedia of Cults an New Religion], cults engage in a variety of very bad, unwholesome and morally bankrupt practices. For example, the book alleges that cults subject their members to “physical” and “psychological” “harm”, engage in the “perversion of sexuality,” “restrict” the “independent thought” of their members, and demand “unquestioning obedience” to group “leaders.” The authors further allege that cults engage in “occult practices,” engineer “cover ups of the group’s history” or that of its “leaders,” subject members to “intimidation,” perpetrate “deception and fraud,” engage in fraudulent “fund raising,” and issue deceptive statements concerning “financial costs.” The authors go so far as to suggest that these cults practice “witchcraft” and literally cause “cancer” in their members. (4th paragraph, link here.)

Let's talk about those charges.

First, the LSM cult had only a brief entry in the Encyclopedia. The entry is actually quite fair; it is almost favorable to the Liites. The encyclopedia actually never said any of these things about the LSM cult. But if they did, they would have been correct.

Let's have a look at the above paragraph, point by point.

Physical harm - I know of children who were beaten; elders encouraged it as a way of controlling children who were "rebellious," meaning they wanted to go swimming in the public pool, which was "worldly." Adults are routinely deprived of sleep, especially in the ten-day long training camps. They use that on terrorists at Guatanamo Bay. I would call that physical harm.

Psychological harm - You bet. Most people can spot that there is something seriously wrong with the LSM cult and walk out with frightened looks at their first meeting. When I was a kid, my friends said the cult was "scary." My friends were right.

The psychological harm is to be expected from a cult that takes a literal and complete view of "denying the self." Li taught that man was totally evil, not in the Calvinist way that all things have been corrupted; Li taught that each thing was totally evil. God regretted his creation and would not give it the second chance he gave after Noah's flood. Man, particularly his soul, was wholly evil. So according to Li, believers must deny it wholly. Likes, dislikes, opinions were to be suppressed.

Just how this was to be done was the subject of many of the meetings. Leaders would give examples from their daily lives. Followers were pressured to give public confessions of how they failed to deprive themselves of everything they liked, leaving no stone unturned.

Meetings were five or six times a week (if you count the two Sunday morning meetings separately), sometimes lasting as long as three hours. Followers of Li were also expected to pay for and attend two super intensive training camps a year. This is stressful.

Whatever latent psychological problem you may have had before coming to the group would erupt out of control in these conditions. I knew people who had a minor eating problem suddenly explode to triple their weight. Why? they were taught that dieting was fleshly, and that to deny the self they needed to stop it. I knew a woman who at the age of thirty had a full psychotic episode and was diagnosed schizophrenic, as were others I knew. When her family pulled her out of the cult, her hallucinations stopped. I know several others who became homosexuals after years of suppressing their natural instincts in the cult.

All this is psychological harm.

Perversion of sexuality - Besides the above reaction to unnatural suppression of human instincts, there is the famous impropriety of Li's son Philip, whom Li designated his successor and appointed president of the LSM offices. Top leaders finally saw the light of the nature of Li and left over the incident including: Max Rappoport, who had set Li up in his headquarters at Anaheim, California; John Ingalls, the editor of all things LSM; Albert Knoch, the principle ghost-writer for literature published under Li's name; and Bill Duane, the translator of Li's Recovery Version of the Bible.

Occult practices - If you consider that Li taught that you could literally become God (not like God) by pray-reading his writings occult, then yes, the cult is occult.

Restriction of independent thouight - Absolutely. Elders controlled every aspect of your life, including whom you would marry, and how you should discipline your children. Only LSM materials were permitted in cult meetings. Members were discouraged from watching TV, going to movies, celebrating Christmas or birthdays. If you were ever found to be reading religious material not published by the LSM, you would be shunned and could eventually even be excommunicated.

Cover ups of the group’s history - All the time. Internet forums are full of the Daystar financial fiasco. The LSM denies this ever happened. The internet is filled with information regarding Philip Li's sexual improprieties. The LSM denies this ever happened. Li himself was constantly changing and inflating his own life history, from a poorly educated Chinese peasant to a graduate of a Chinese Christian university. Even the late lawsuit against Harvest House is now being suppressed. It is too recent to deny they lost, but instead they minimize it -- as if $136-million was a small matter.

Intimidation - What is more intimidating than a $136-million lawsuit? They have been suing people regularly over the past thirty years. And what about what happened to Jim Moran's website?

Deception and fraud - I think there are enough references above to more than cover this point and the others remaining. The LSM is an extremely profitable business. All its sales are tax-deductible. Much or most of its income comes from cash donations -- with no paper trail whatsoever.

The LSM charged that Harvest House said all these things. They did not.

They could have.