Last week I was just thinking to myself that we hadn't heard about Bishop Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church for a while. Then the silence was broken by both TV3 and the New Zealand Herald who revealed that up to 700 male church members had sworn a 'covenant' to remain faithful and loyal to Bishop Brian and him alone.

Obviously, this is an alarming development and despite protestations to the contrary from Tamaki and his newly sworn Destiny apologists like Richard Lewis, his church (if it can be called that) is becoming a cult. For all those mainly working class and poor Maori and Pacific Island men who took the oath at the church's national conference last weekend, they are now about to become the victims of the world's newest cult religion. And I say victims in that they have been completely brainwashed (as have almost all other church members) into believing that Tamaki is their 'king' and that he should be obeyed, without question.

Indeed, many Maori and Pacific Islanders come from cultures where hierarchical, chieftian-based, authority is the norm. Therefore, what Tamaki is doing is that he is cynically manipulating this almost in-built cultural bias towards authority for his own ends and no one else's. Besides this, Tamaki has successfully tapped into the latent social conservatism of this group and built up his own church empire on their backs.

Effectively with this move, Tamaki is now taking the same route trodden by the likes of Jim Jones, Neville Cooper, David Koresh, Kim Young-Moon and others throughout recent history in making his church/sect into an effective personality cult where no member can question the leader's view that he is the ultimate interpreter of God's word. Religion is not alone in the creation of personality cults, of course, as politics is full of examples of strong individuals who have utilised various ideologies (capitalism, socialism and fascism) to underpin their authoritarian rule of whole nations. Recent history is littered with examples of this from that of Stalin in the Soviet Union, Hitler and Mussolini in Germany and Italy, and the dynastic Kim father/son duo in North Korea.

The scarey thing about religious cults is that they thrive in free, democratic societies such as our own. Freedom of religion is something that we should cherish (as is the freedom to hold no spiritual belief at all) but cults seek to abuse this freedom by using psychological techniques to persuade their members that the church leadership is correct in its interpretation of Scripture and that the rest of the world is heathenist and awaiting conversion. This insider/outsider psychology has been successfully utilised over and over again by these and other religious sects (namely Jehovah's Witnesses, the Exclusive Brethren, the Moonies, etc) to effectively 'trap' their members into their belief system, thereby circumventing the democratic impulse to question and debate.

What is sad is that the central cult figure in religious cults (as is the case with political personality cults) lives a life of privileged luxury, all paid for by the sweat and brow of his or her subservient members/workers/citizens. In fact, the payment of 'tithes' and the presentation of 'gifts' to the leader (as prescribed by Bishop Tamaki's new convenant) only serve to reinforce this virtual master/slave relationship. And what most cult members will be dissuaded to think about is the reality that their leader is actually manipulating them purely for his own selfish ends, rather than in the service of some greater religious or political end.

I would like to make the point that what cult leaders do is to subvert both the purposes of genuine religion and ideology. In terms of Christian-based cults, the New Zealand-based Cultwatch group (comprised of people from mainstream religious groups and those without any religious affiliation) has already severely criticised Tamaki and called his actions effectively un-Christian. The group's director Mark Vrankovich stated this week  that Jesus really detested two groups of people, the first of these being the temple-based money changers and the second the Pharisees-like figures who came between God and human kind. As ever, I can only imagine that if Jesus were here today He would have something to say to Bishop Tamaki.

For all these reasons, might we one day see a movie on our screens entitled 'The Life Of Brian - And His Cult?'

I'm betting that we might do so - unless his congregation are persuaded by non-church family and friends to see Tamaki and his Destiny Church for what it really is - nothing but a cult!