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In an Australian first, the Victorian parliament is holding a public inquiry into the coercive practices and abuses of cults and fringe religious groups. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

‘We grow up afraid’: Victoria’s public inquiry into cults

Laura McConnell, aged 15, at a picnic with another member of the Two by Two Christian sect.

Credit: Supplied

For a long time, Laura McConnell occupied a no-man’s-land. Sometimes she wonders if she’s still there. It’s the lonely space between her excommunication and her estrangement from “normal” society. Now in her mid 40s, she remains an outsider to both: a “dangerous” pariah to the sect she was banished from and an alien to the broader culture whose touchstones she never felt.

Laura McConnell was born into a church with no name. Often referred to by members as The Truth, and by outsiders as the Two by Twos for its itinerant ministers’ practice of travelling in pairs, this Christian church expresses no creed and makes no doctrinal statements.

Its beliefs, grounded in the New Testament, are communicated exclusively by mouth. It has no publications, no spokespeople, no centralised administrative headquarters. In Australia, it is not even a formally registered religious organisation. This has helped it elude the National Redress Scheme, designed to compensate victims of institutional child abuse – of which the church has been accused by dozens of people. Including Laura McConnell.

The church professes the sacredness of primitivism and encourages its ministers to submit to a life of self-renunciation and relative poverty. Its near-total avoidance of publicity is argued as necessary for maintaining modesty – critics say its creepy opacity is to deflect accountability. Last year, the FBI began an international investigation into rampant allegations of child sexual abuse.

From a young age, McConnell understood that she didn’t quite fit within the eccentric – she would now define it as coercive – strictures of the church. Her whole family was devoted to it, and their devotion expressed itself by the severe indoctrination of their children and the cultivation, wittingly or not, of their helplessness. After all, her parents were uniquely enlightened and her own private doubts would only spoil her communion with their righteousness.

So, even as McConnell privately wrestled with her “demonic” sexuality and was discomforted by the obsessive management of her behaviour, appearance, thoughts and friendships, she could never imagine leaving this world for the larger one that she had been taught was wicked and dangerous. “It’s a world within a world,” McConnell says. “A country within a country. We grow up from birth being afraid of the world outside, and understanding that this is our closed, safe place. That’s what these groups do. They set you up to believe that they are offering safety from a world which is tumultuous and dangerous. And so we are afraid of everything outside, even when terrible things are happening to us inside – far worse things happening in it than out of it.”

The threat of banishment was extreme. Not only would McConnell have effectively lost her family, she would have lost her place, her purpose, her social definition – awkwardly held as it was. The threat of the outside world was more extreme still: she was raised to believe that it was so dangerous that exile equalled death.

“Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would leave,” McConnell says. “I genuinely thought that you died if you left. You fell off the face of the earth.”

She couldn’t have imagined it, but it happened anyway. McConnell was too strange, too questioning, too reluctant to accept an arranged marriage. So, at the age of 19, she was frozen out. Excommunicated into a world she neither knew nor wished to embrace.

There were immediate and tragic consequences. As her own family had sanctioned her exile, she felt unworthy of the most basic love. As those who shone with sublime truths had found her threatening, she felt spiritually corrupt. Conditioned as she was to an extreme dependency, she felt her life was over.

Last month, the Victorian parliament began a public inquiry into “the recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups” – the first of its kind in Australia.

From my own previous reporting, and the conversations I had this week, it’s clear that survivors of cults or fringe religious groups had an awkward relationship with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse – its terms of reference couldn’t accommodate the histories of fuzzier, unregistered groups. Many survivors hope this inquiry might yield public awareness of secretive practices, avenues of redress and the legislative reform of coercive practices.

There is, of course, a great political sensitivity here: the inquiry should not resolve to empower the state to encroach upon the freedom of religious expression. The Victorian Legislative Assembly’s legal and social issues committee, the one responsible for the inquiry, earnestly addressed this in its statement of intent: “There is a distinction between genuine religious practice and harmful behaviour ... ‘Freedom of religion’ is not freedom, for example, to defraud, nor is it freedom to cause significant psychological or psychiatric harm to any person.”

The inquiry also understands that cults and fringe groups may have any variety of organising themes – alien visitation, say, or self-improvement. Their interest is in “groups that employ cult-like tactics, but which may not necessarily be theologically based or religious in nature”.

One major submission to the inquiry came from the organisations Survivors of Coercive Cults and High-Control Groups (SOCCHG) and Stop Religious Coercion Australia. Their report, “Beyond Belief”, made a similar point: their aim wasn’t to outlaw groups or beliefs but rather certain harmful practices. The submission says the invocation of religious freedom by some groups deliberately obscures behaviours that, in other contexts, would constitute crimes of coercion.

They stress they are calling not for the state to have greater powers to define cults but to isolate and prosecute specifically defined “group-based coercive control”. These are larger scales of control that are often seen within the context of domestic violence: surveillance, isolation, humiliation and cultivated dependency – whether emotional, social or financial. “The danger in focusing on definitional clarity rather than coercive behaviours is this: no victim should be required to prove their group is a cult in order to prove that the coercive behaviours they endured caused harm,” the report says.

One of the report’s authors is Clare Heath-McIvor, daughter of Brian Heath – pastor of the ultra-conservative City Builders Church. Heath-McIvor says she is effectively estranged from her family. “I have a family I love but can’t be near,” she says.

In 2022, Heath-McIvor spoke with 60 Minutes for its investigation into the church. She and others who’d left it alleged pastor Brian Heath preached that homosexuality was demonic, that abortion was unequivocally murder, and that their church’s mission was “dominion in every domain”: religion, family, government, media, education, arts and business.

Raised in regional Victoria, Clare Heath-McIvor had only one year of formal schooling – her prep year, when she was five. After that, her parents submitted her to more than a decade of homeschooling. She describes the church her father runs as “a very homophobic, very Christian fundamentalist and Christian nationalist church – which I define as a cult.

“I was very close to the centre. I look like my dad. There are a lot of shared personality markers. I’m very reminiscent of him; I think perhaps very much a mirror to him in a lot of ways.”

In 2012, Clare Heath-McIvor was wedded to Patrick McIvor, another member of the church, in an arranged marriage. McIvor was gay, a fact known to Brian Heath, and had previously submitted to gay conversion therapy – a practice outlawed in Victoria in 2020, owing, in part, to McIvor’s advocacy.

After his marriage, McIvor began asking Brian Heath about several things. Among them was his question: why, if we were God’s answer on Earth, were so many church members becoming mentally unwell?

“And that was the day our disfellowshipping started,” Heath-McIvor tells me. “Unbeknownst to me, there were a lot of whispers around town about City Builders being a cult. So as soon as news broke that we were out, I became a lightning rod for other people’s stories – it was vindication for people.”

Clare and Patrick separated amicably in 2020. They remain close – in fact, McIvor was the principal author of the “Beyond Belief” report submitted to the Victorian parliament last month. “There’s a simple moral injury when you’re in positions of authority where you might witness things, you might be complicit in things, you might have failed to stop things because you’re also a victim,” Clare Heath-McIvor says. “You’re entrapped in it, but you also feel guilty for it. I will always be a Heath.”

When I speak with Laura McConnell, she’s holidaying in Italy. It’s the first real break she’s had in a very long time, though she’s saddened that the long-planned trip has now coincided with the beginning of the inquiry.

Some time ago, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder – the “complex” part of that PTSD diagnosis is recognition of her multiple traumas and their awful concert. Regardless, she’ll often work with the excommunicated until she breaks. She’ll give them an ear or help them find jobs, shelter, support groups. She’ll assist with their legal cases or filing of police reports.

She can too easily equate rest with idleness and too easily feel guilty if she’s not helping those who resemble her younger self. “I can get to the point where I have pushed myself so far back into cPTSD that I don’t eat or sleep or function, and somebody has to put me away and say, ‘rest,’ ” McConnell says. “But if I’m resting, that usually means I’m failing somebody. All of us remember what it was like to leave. And so, you just think, I can’t let this person be alone through this experience.”

Clare Heath-McIvor says that too often the popular response to cults or fringe religious groups is one of either prurient interest or sceptical derision. There’s curiosity about sexual deviance, or a belief that victims are simply childishly gullible. She says, however, that more often membership of coercive groups resembles the oblivious frog in slowly boiling water – recruits are subject to artfully progressive stages of grooming. “Unlike kidnapping or sudden conversion, most recruitment into high-control groups involves a slow build-up of trust, emotional investment and shifting norms,” the “Beyond Belief” report says. “Often, people join because of personal connections, not doctrine. These bonds are later leveraged to enforce conformity.”

The public inquiry is expected to report by September 30, 2026.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 9, 2025 as "‘We grow up afraid’".

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