Big Brethren

Four Corners (2025)

Film Review

The Plymouth Brethren (formerly the Exclusive Brethren)* is a church of 55,000 members worldwide (mainly Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada). Its international headquarters operates out of a suburb of Sydney. It broke away from the Anglican Church in the 19th century and rarely admits new members.

People who have left the church call it a psychological cult. Car racing, cinemas, camping, pet, radios, jeans, voting and swimming pools are forbidden to Plymouth Brethren members. Banned from leadership positions, women are discouraged from working outside the home. More recently the church has lifted the former ban on cellphones and laptops. However only church-supplied hardware (with pre-installed surveillance technology) is permitted.

The leadership of the church, known as Universal Business Group, runs it as a business with $22 billion annual turnover. Australian Bruce Hales, church president since 2022, is an accountant, and his sons run UBG. Each owns massive property portfolios along with score of companies worth billions of dollars in annual sales. Hales has no training or background in theology.

In 2024 the Australian tax office conducted an unannounced raid on UBG headquarters and confiscated all their computers and phones as part of a tax evasion/fraud investigation. Some lapsed members believe the raid relates to efforts by church leaders to sway Australia’s 2022 election.** Although Plymouth Brethren members have a religious exemption from the compulsory voting laws, they supplied dozens of church members to campaign for Australia’s conservative Coalition and made multiple campaign donations just under the reporting threshold. During the Covid pandemic Australia’s Coalition government paid UBG $54 million for Rapid Antigen tests.

Brethren survivors also report an epidemic of child sexual abuse. One survivor sued the leadership and was offered a $1 million provided conditional on signing a non-disclosure statement. He refused.

*According to historian Matt Ehret, the Plymouth Brethren and other evangelical sects trace back to an agent of the British East India Company named Anthony Norris Groves. Groves was sent to the Ottoman Empire and then India in 1830 as an orientalist engaged in recruiting young elites to train in British universities while carrying out espionage under the banner of Christian missionary work. Groves was soon joined by John Nelson Darby (godson of Admiral Horatio Nelson and father of modern rapture theology).

Darby’s influence can also be seen in the works of Charles Fox Parham (the founder of Pentecostalism), George Pember, (the originator of the ‘fallen Nephilim’ interpretation of demonology now advanced by the alien disclosure movement), Dwight Lyman Moody (founder Moody Bible College), and James Hall Brookes (founding father and president of the Niagara Bible Conference, which helped spread Dispensationalism across America).

In fact, the entire Christian Zionist movement of war-pushing, faith-healing, rapture-loving preachers from John Hagee to Benny Hinn and Pat Robertson all sit on foundations created by Darby’s Plymouth Brethren—not the Bible.

See

Matthew Ehret: The Plymouth Brethren, British intelligence and mystic cults in Palestine

**The Exclusive Brethren made a similar attempt to influence the outcome of New Zealand’s 2005 election. See https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Exclusive_Brethren/New_Zealand_election,_2005