A few days later, Casey decides to test the water with a chatty e-mail to his mother. “It was full of mundane things,” he tells me. “Small talk. How are her days going? And I just mentioned in the e-mail that I’m thinking of donating a kidney. I haven’t heard anything yet.”
“How do you think she’ll respond?” I ask.
“She may have the impression that I’m being coerced,” he says.
“Does she feel that way about the Jesus Christians, anyway?” I ask.
“She does feel conflicted by our unity.”
“That you’re a live-in group?”
“That we hold ourselves accountable to each other. We make group decisions. It isn’t the kind of personal freedom she feels I should have, I guess.”
During the pre-op psychological tests, the doctors soon realized that Robin and Casey’s altruism was part of a group scheme. “Will your Christian friends think less of you if you don’t donate?” they asked.
“No,” said Robin.
“What if you have an accident in later life?” asked the doctors. “Maybe you’ll need your spare kidney in the future.”
“The Bible says we must step out in faith,” replied Robin. “We must do the good we can do today and not wait until tomorrow.”
They were given questionnaires. They had to tick the statements that they felt most applied to them: “I hear voices most of the time”; “I feel I have a tight band around my head most of the time”; “I’ve always wanted to be a girl.” The doctors told them to answer honestly, because they had ways of telling if they were lying.
“I don’t hear voices, but I do get stressed-out,” Casey tells me. “But they don’t provide little boxes where you can explain these things.” Casey is feeling stressed-out, in part because he feels the process is taking too long. “I wish it would all go quicker, because I’m pretty committed,” he says.
They passed the tests. The hospital warned that “even a hint of publicity” would result in the operations being abandoned. I send Casey and Robin a video camera, to film the trip to Minneapolis.
That night, I receive an anxious e-mail from Dave in Australia: “Jon, I am taking a big risk by sharing this with you before we have donated. Even the slightest leak could sabotage the entire project.”
A flurry of e-mails follows from Dave, more than sixty in all. Sometimes they are chatty. Often they are tense: “You and I both know that the idea of a ‘cult’ donating kidneys en masse is a ‘sensational’ story. Susan said that you were talking like you still suspect that members are being coerced into donating, that they are getting paid for donations, and that the money is going to me. She said that she thought you were quite nervous about being seen with her placing the business cards in waiting rooms. You’ve asked us some hard questions, so I think it’s time for us to ask you a few. ARE you thinking of writing something nasty about us?”
Sometimes Dave seems to regret letting me in on the secret and I begin to wonder why he did. Does he have a plan for me that I’m not aware of? Am I a pawn in some grander scheme of his? Yes, I soon discover, I am.
Dave McKay is a fifty-seven-year-old native of Rochester, New York. He was born into a family of Nazarene Christians. He married young, moved to Australia in 1968, and joined the Children of God sect that was famous for “flirty fishing” (dispatching attractive female members into the secular world to have sex with potential recruits). They preached the virtue and practice of pedophilia too. Dave was horrified by their sexual teachings, so he split from the Children of God and formed the Jesus Christians in 1982.
Dave has always admired martyrs who behave provocatively—the Buddhists who set themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam, and so on. In fact, he once considered setting himself on fire, in India, when a local orphanage was threatened with closure. More recently, when Abu Sayyaf guerrillas took twenty-five people hostage in the Philippines, Dave offered himself in their place, and tried to set up an international hostage-exchange program in which philanthropic Christians would swap places with hostages at a moment’s notice. “I think they were just spiritual tests to ascertain whether I’d be willing to take such extreme steps,” he tells me. “We don’t want to sound a trumpet about how great we are, especially when we haven’t actually done anything—at least, not yet.”
Like most people, I first heard of the Jesus Christians on July 14, 2000, when they were splashed over the front page of the Daily Express—“Cult Kidnap Boy Aged 16.” Susan and her husband, Roland, had apparently spirited away a sixteen-year-old boy called Bobby Kelly from Romford High Street, Essex. Bobby had picked up a Jesus Christians cartoon book outside Marks & Spencer. Within hours, he had forsaken his possessions and moved in with the group. The police were called. The airports and docks were put on the highest alert. The Jesus Christians were suddenly—in the eyes of the authorities and media, tabloids, broadsheets, and television news alike—a sinister, brainwashing, child-kidnapping religious cult, under the spell of their charismatic leader.
There was an emergency High Court action to “rescue” the boy, which led to Bobby’s photo being circulated. That’s when the Jesus Christians panicked and went on the run, with Bobby in tow. They became fugitives for two weeks. (It was a rather provincial run: They went to Hounslow because it has free parking, to Heston service station for nightly showers, and to a campsite on the Surrey–Hampshire border.) When the Jesus Christians tried to put their side of the story to Radio 4’s Today, an injunction was taken out forbidding the BBC from broadcasting the interview.
“Isn’t that classic!” wrote Dave at the time on his website. “Now that our critics have succeeded in slandering our name all over Britain, they want to gag us. And yet some people still tell us that we should have blind faith in the British system of justice! No, something is very wrong here.”
The scandal ended peacefully. Bobby was found safe and well at the campsite and was made a ward of the court. I interviewed him soon after. He spoke highly of the Jesus Christians, and it became clear to me that some of the reporting was biased and verging on the hysterical. This is why Dave decided—a year later—to give me the story on the kidney endeavor.
• • •
IT IS MID-FEBRUARY 2002. Dave tells me that he has invented a woman called Anita Foster and has created an e-mail account for her. The fictitious Anita is writing to influential anticult groups in the UK, such as Reachout Trust and Catalyst. She says she’s a concerned mother whose son has joined the Jesus Christians, and could they offer advice? Reachout Trust sends Anita their Jesus Christians fact file. Dave sends it on to me. Under “Obsession With Death,” it quotes passages from Dave’s pamphlets: “Fear of death is what gives the bosses their power! How long do you think you can survive without eating? Maybe a month or two! OK. Would you rather have one month of freedom or a lifetime of slavery? Anything that isn’t worth dying for isn’t worth living for. . . . If you’d like to be part of this army of martyrs, then please write to us today.”
The e-mails between Anita and the anticult groups are getting chattier, Dave tells me. She’s a likable, concerned mother. He says Anita will soon take on a pivotal role in this story—she will be the one to leak the kidney scandal to the anticult groups. This is Dave’s plan: The fictitious Anita’s fictitious son will donate a fictitious kidney; Anita will inform the anticult groups and imply that Dave is coercing his followers to sell their kidneys on the black market, and that the money will go to him. They will tell the tabloids, and the tabloids will go into a weeklong frenzy about the self-mutilating kidney cult. Then—and here’s my role in the grand scheme—I’ll arrive on the scene with the true story of the Jesus Christians’ remarkable philanthropy.