Lilia Tawara has left Gloriavale, yet she still wishes she could hear Neville Cooper preach. The admission complicates the familiar account of escape from a controlling religious community. She can reject the life she had there and retain an attachment to the man who shaped it. Leaving has given her distance. It has not conveniently rearranged her feelings.
I initially wanted to treat that lingering affection as evidence of how thoroughly authority can establish itself inside a person. Perhaps. But that explanation becomes suspiciously comfortable if it allows me to dismiss everything she misses. Tawara’s testimony asks for a harder kind of attention: recognition that something can provide genuine belonging while helping sustain an abusive hierarchy. Her attachment does not acquit Cooper. It does make departure harder to understand through the reassuring language of liberation.
Nicole Rittenmeyer’s three-part documentary, Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal, is strongest when it allows this difficulty to remain visible. Its access to Gloriavale, the isolated Christian community on New Zealand’s South Island, brings current residents into conversation with former members, journalists, and advocates. Residents explain the appeal of shared work, religious purpose, and a life organized around common commitments.
Rittenmeyer gives these explanations space without requiring each speaker to supply an inadvertent confession. The approach produces a useful discomfort: people describing contentment inside an institution whose record gives us substantial reasons to question its authority.
Some residents chose to join during the 1970s and 1980s. Others were born there. These are different relationships to the same community, and the distinction matters whenever continued residence is presented as proof of consent.
An adult arriving with experience of the outside world has made a choice that a child growing up inside Gloriavale has yet to encounter. Former members describe the threat of eternal damnation attached to leaving, alongside the loss of contact with family. Under those conditions, staying cannot explain itself quite as easily as satisfied residents suggest.
The arrangement also distributes its promised simplicity unevenly. Men occupy spiritual leadership and work as providers; women care for children and households. The residents’ accounts of shared purpose deserve to be heard, but the allocation of authority deserves examination too.
A man describing the comfort of an established place in the community is speaking from a different position from a woman whose prescribed responsibilities come without equivalent spiritual power. The documentary supplies enough of these roles to complicate its residents’ collective language, even when their own explanations smooth the differences away. Then there is the matter of who gets to remain in charge.
Cooper, who founded Gloriavale in 1969 and took the name Hopeful Christian, returned to leadership after imprisonment for sexual assault. The series recounts the subsequent handling of abuse allegations within the community, where protecting its reputation became a reason to keep matters away from police.
This history tests the argument, voiced by current members, that convicted offenders were exceptions to an otherwise sound religious order. An individual’s crime and an institution’s response are separate questions. Restoring that individual’s authority supplies evidence about the second.
Howard Temple’s succession after Cooper’s death in 2018, followed by his own conviction for sexual offending, makes the language of exceptional failure still harder to sustain. The issue extends to the community’s ability to recognize wrongdoing without treating its exposure as the greater danger. Residents’ anger toward protesters and investigations is revealing here. Their fear that Gloriavale could be destroyed may be sincere. That fear also gives leaders an extraordinarily useful defense: public accountability can be understood as an attack on everyone’s home.
Rittenmeyer is right to distinguish ordinary residents from the men convicted of abusing others. Responsibility cannot simply be assigned by proximity. Yet the documentary’s generous attention to residents’ intentions sometimes leaves its examination of institutional responsibility less developed.
We hear why people want to preserve Gloriavale. The return of a convicted founder and the internal handling of complaints demand equally sustained attention to what preservation has required. Understanding someone’s defensive response does not settle the claims made in that defense.
The archival material creates productive friction with personal testimony. Television footage of the 1995 police raid places outside intervention within a history that residents cannot explain solely through their present sense of persecution.
Earlier coverage of Phil Cooper, the founder’s son, forcibly removing his wife in 1991 complicates the account from another direction. Phil opposed his father and sought to take his family out. The footage still records a woman being taken against her will. Escape from paternal authority does not automatically resolve the question of who is entitled to decide for a family (apparently the men have another proposal).
That uncomfortable detail helps the series resist a tidy division between enlightened outsiders and obedient insiders. It also demonstrates what its access can achieve when testimony encounters a record that complicates it. Phil’s opposition to Gloriavale remains significant, but the method of his departure prevents opposition itself from becoming a moral credential.
The restraint around survivors’ experiences is valuable. Former members discuss estrangement, religious fear, and the difficulties of life afterward without being made to provide a succession of graphic disclosures. Those consequences give their testimony weight. The documentary needs no catalogue of intimate suffering to establish that abuse matters. Its less resolved task is to explain the protections around authority with the same patience it brings to affection and belief.
For the Leavers, family estrangement creates a further difficulty that the idea of a clean break cannot accommodate. The people who share their upbringing may remain inside, attached to the institution they have rejected. Rebuilding a life outside can mean doing so without those relationships, while still carrying the fear that leaving has placed their salvation at risk. Physical distance offers no immediate answer to either loss.
Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal premiered on Paramount+ on June 2, 2026, where all three episodes are currently available to stream. Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer, the compelling three-part docuseries investigates the secretive Gloriavale Christian community on New Zealand’s West Coast, revealing shocking allegations of systemic abuse, exploitation, and internal cover-ups.
Where to Watch Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal Online
Full Credits
Title: Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal
Distributor: Paramount+
Release date: June 2, 2026
Rating: TV-14
Running time: 46 minutes per episode (3 episodes)
Director: Nicole Rittenmeyer
Writers: Nicole Rittenmeyer
Producers and Executive Producers: Nicole Rittenmeyer, Susan Zirinsky, Terence Wrong, Dame Julie Christie, Diana Byrne, Aysu Saliba, Cara Tortora
Cast: Lilia Tarawa, John Ready, Liz Gregory, Phil Cooper, Virginia Courage, Julia Ratahi
The Review
Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal
Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal understands why leaving Gloriavale can remain painful long after someone recognizes its abuses. Tawara’s lingering attachment and the complicated archival record prevent easy divisions between freedom and obedience. Rittenmeyer’s patience with residents produces valuable understanding, though their explanations sometimes receive greater attention than the arrangements that protected abusive leaders. The series respects the difficulty of departure; its scrutiny of institutional responsibility is less assured.
PROS
- Testimony preserves the contradictions of attachment.
- Archival footage complicates simple escape narratives.
- Survivor accounts carry weight without graphic disclosure.
- Residents receive space to explain their beliefs.
CONS
- Internal complaint handling needs fuller explanation.
- Residents’ persecution claims warrant sharper questioning.
