Have you seen the new Netflix drama Unchosen? Don't worry if you haven't. We will not spoil it for you. Watch it here .

The drama is about a cult, and contributors to the series have confirmed the group shown is the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. We call it a cult, as the Australian Prime Minister did last year.

What Unchosen captures so well is a community cut off from the rest of Britain and wider society, with rules so strict that even being caught with the Beano can bring punishment and warnings of hellfire.

Lance Christie, a former member of the Plymouth Brethren from Leeds, watched all six episodes and kept notes throughout. He has been shunned by his family, and he has endured multiple court cases that sought to have him imprisoned . Those cases failed.

How close does the Netflix drama come to documenting what is publicly known about the Plymouth Brethren cult, and how does Lance, as an ex-member, compare it with his own experience?

Nothing Looks Wrong From the Outside

One of the things that makes high-control religious life so hard to talk about is that it rarely looks like what people expect. There is no obvious cage. The people inside drive cars, eat lunch, pick up their children. Everything looks like a close, devout community with traditional values. And in some ways, it is exactly that.

What people outside tend not to see is the interior architecture: the unspoken rules about who is safe to know, what is safe to read, whether your family will still speak to you if you start asking the wrong questions. Unchosen is a British drama that spends its time inside that interior. Its observations on the cult are not interested in villains with obvious malice. It is interested in the texture of a life shaped by rules that most people inside have stopped consciously noticing.

Researchers use the term “high-control group” for communities where leadership governs identity, relationships, and dissent, usually through social penalties rather than physical ones. The psychological term “coercive control” captures what that can feel like over time: a slow accumulation of pressure, fear, and dependency that limits a person's freedom without ever quite crossing a line that outsiders would recognise as violence. These are not rare conditions. They exist inside ordinary-looking communities in towns and cities across Britain right now.

The Things You Learn Before You Learn Anything Else

Unchosen opens with children. That choice matters, because the drama understands something important: the most durable rules are the ones absorbed before you have language for them.

Early in the first episode, a child does something small and unremarkable, and is met with “It's okay. No one's looking”. It is said gently. Almost kindly. But what it teaches is not gentleness. It teaches that the action is something to be hidden, and that the problem with it is visibility rather than the thing itself.

A few minutes later, reading the wrong kind of book is met with “you'll go to hell”.

Again, not shouted. Just stated, the way you'd state a fact about the weather.

Children in the Plymouth Brethren are separated from their peers when they reach age 7, when they are enrolled into Brethren Schools for both Primary and Secondary education. Brethren schools operate as OneSchool Global, and their website suggests 24 UK schools .

A Word That Does a Lot of Work

The title of the series is how the outside world is described by the group; “unchosen” is what they call someone who does not belong. In Episode 1, a character dismisses someone with “not some unchosen”.

This is easy to read as just a harsh expression, but Lance points to something deeper in the way that label functions. In his notes he quotes a child saying, “You are unchosen so I can’t be your friend. This keeps me safe from the devil.” That is more than name-calling. It is a social boundary in one sentence, teaching children who is safe, who is dangerous, and who they must avoid.

By Episode 2, the word lands with full weight. “You're an unchosen” is not a description. It is a verdict. And everyone who hears it understands what they stand to lose by earning one.

In the real-world Plymouth Brethren cult, they don't use the term “unchosen”; they say “excommunicated” or “withdrawn from.” The Brethren point to a Bible chapter, 1 Corinthians 5, to justify and explain “splitting” on those they love.

The Plymouth Brethren's own Bible, the Darby Translation, reads Chapter 5 thus :

But those without God judges. Remove the wicked person from amongst yourselves.

Refusing to obey everything in Brethren doctrine and learned behaviour is considered wickedness.

Technology as a Dividing Tool

Technology is not treated as neutral in Unchosen. The language around phones frames them as contamination rather than communication, with the line “This is not just a mobile phone” followed by “This is an instrument of the devil”.

In a modern society where phones are essential for work, safety, and social life, that framing does more than set a moral preference. It creates a practical boundary between insiders and the wider world.

The next step in the drama is social discipline, not private disagreement. Pressure escalates into repentance language and collective enforcement.

Lance underlines that point from his own experience: “Up until 2005 in the PBCC, mobile phones had to be avoided at all costs. Many in the church were withdrawn from for owning mobile phones.”

He tells me that even today Brethren members must buy their mobile phones from the Brethren. These phones are locked down and inhibited; web access is limited to vetted websites. The information age is denied to those behind the Brethren firewall.

Lance tells me of a time when he too was relegated in the assembly room to a rear pew. He had been mediating between more vulnerable members and the leadership. This led to blowback against Lance, who sought reasonable change.

Bruce Hales, the leader of the Plymouth Brethren, is not depicted in Unchosen. But Lance was summoned to meet the leader. For his efforts to help others he was belittled. His state of mind was questioned. A prescription was arranged. Lance says he experienced this period as an attempt to break him psychologically; in his words, he was “dismantled by Bruce Hales.” Lance says Hales cited Proverbs 6 v 19 to describe Lance as an abomination:

16 These six [things] doth Jehovah hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto him:
17 haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood;
18 a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations; feet that are swift in running to mischief;
19 a false witness that uttereth lies, and he that soweth discords among brethren.
20 My son, observe thy father's commandment, and forsake not the teaching of thy mother;
21 bind them continually upon thy heart, tie them about thy neck:
22 when thou walkest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and [when] thou awakest, it shall talk with thee.

He rebuked him for helping others, and that this marked the beginning of his transition toward excommunication - becoming, in effect, “unchosen.”

Come Back on Our Terms

Of everything Lance observed across the six episodes, the material about family is what he describes as most recognisable. In Episode 2, a character says simply “My brother will stay in the fold”.

That sentence is doing a great deal. The brother is not choosing to stay. He is being told that he will. The speaker is not threatening. They are stating, with complete certainty, how things are going to go. It is the kind of sentence that only makes sense if the speaker already knows that family membership is conditional on compliance, and if the brother knows it too.

When the people you love most are also the people you will lose if you step out of line, control does not need to be overt. It can be almost invisible, running quietly underneath ordinary life: underneath Sunday dinner, underneath every phone call, underneath the question “are you still coming home for Christmas?” Love and leverage become genuinely difficult to tell apart.

The Cost of Being Yourself

The sections of the drama that deal with sexuality are handled with care, and Lance names them as the area of closest personal recognition. When a character is told “You are living in sin”, this is not just a harsh phrase. It is a verdict about identity.

In a separate moment, another character hears themselves described with the phrase “ungodly perversion”. Again, the person is not being told they have done something wrong. They are being told that who they are is incompatible with belonging.

For people outside this experience, it can be difficult to understand why someone would not simply leave when they are treated this way. Lance offers a partial answer: when identity has been coded as sinful since childhood, and when the people you love are the ones delivering that verdict, leaving is not a simple act of self-preservation. It is the loss of almost everything you have. Many people who have been through it describe years of trying to reconcile their sense of self with the framework they were raised inside before they could even begin to imagine a life beyond it.

Ex-members of the Brethren talk about the struggles caused by being denied sex education and the conflicts that arise in adult life when natural urges mystify them. One ex-member talks about how Conversion Therapy is recommended - a combination of self-denial, prescription drugs and social conditioning. There are also reported rumours about the private lives of the leader’s family. Seen through this lens, some former members argue that repression helps sustain the Brethren’s closed, self-sealing structure.

The Money Makes It Harder to Leave

Episode 3 contains a line that sounds reassuring until you sit with it. “There's no poverty in the Fellowship”. It is meant as a comfort, and within the community it probably functions as one.

Lance answers that line directly: “And how chillingly false it was when they were told 'There’s no poverty in the fellowship, there’s no homelessness in the fellowship, just love and family.' What a front!”

If the group provides work, housing, and financial security, and if the world outside has been consistently described as hostile and corrupting, then leaving does not just require courage. It requires resources that many members may never have had the chance to build independently. The economic dependency and the spiritual dependency are not separate things. They hold each other in place.

Despite three Gospels quoting Jesus with “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”, the Brethren's prosperity gospel is a fixture. Leader Bruce Hales is attributed with saying “May the Lord bring blessing on our wealth” - mixing religion and money.

As men ascend to leadership in the Brethren (never a woman, of course), so does the lucre. When you get to the top, it is said you might receive around £50k annually (£500 from each locality around the world).

During Unchosen, we see alcohol featuring in many scenes. From the waterboarding with whiskey that occurs in the first episode, to boozy lunches leading to sexual assaults, and even boozy picnics. Ex-Brethren will often talk about how alcohol is a significant part of Brethren life. I know this myself, having downed a few with ex-Brethren while we compared notes.

I ask Lance about the relationship between alcohol and dissociation, having used alcohol as a means to offset and shelve my own cultic abuse. While Lance never saw any waterboarding, he did see drunkenness. Bruce Hales would easily drink a bottle of wine for lunch, and there are stories of women who drank themselves to death.

We agree that alcohol might be an acceptable way of coping with the compromises Brethren members make against their own spirit. The fermentation of matter soothes the torment.

When the Police Can't Help

Episode 4 contains perhaps the starkest moment in the series for anyone thinking about safeguarding. Members of the community explicitly acknowledge that they do not cooperate with police. “We don't like the police”.

Moments later the same message is repeated with even less ambiguity: “We don't trust the police”.

In Lance’s account, this was not paranoia but policy. Lance writes, “The leader explained that the brethren don’t trust the police.”

The consequences for people inside who are in genuine danger are serious. Information does not flow outward. When investigators do make contact, they encounter testimony that has already been shaped. People who might otherwise reach out for help have been taught, often since childhood, that outside institutions are a threat rather than a resource.

The people who most need help are the ones most thoroughly insulated from it. Social workers and police who work in and around closed religious communities describe the same frustration repeatedly: they can see the surface, but they cannot get inside, and by the time they do, the situation is often far more serious than it appeared.

At a court hearing in 2024, I met a police officer who took great interest in the Brethren, especially how they treat their children. He spoke of the unique challenges they face, especially when they choose to integrate themselves into British society after leaving the Brethren.

So we know British police are aware of these matters and take an interest.

Who Gets to Leave, and on Whose Terms

One line in Episode 4 is easy to pass over, but Lance did not. “Only men can get a divorce in the Fellowship”.

It is a short sentence, but it reveals the greatest injustice in the Brethren. For women inside a community where exit is governed by male authority, leaving is not simply a personal decision. It requires permission from, or at least negotiation with, the same structure they may be trying to escape.

That is not a coincidence or an oversight. It is a structural feature. The communities that make leaving hardest tend to make it hardest for the people with the least formal power inside them.

This imbalance is structural rather than incidental. Former members describe how it begins in childhood and is reinforced over time, creating a cycle that repeats across generations.

Yet we know of the power and might in women who have left the Brethren. There are renowned academics whose studies into this group and similar communities have revealed the abuse that is concealed in plain sight. This knowledge, so powerful, has seen the Brethren follow the author around the world - such is the undeniable robustness of their findings.

It is women who have shone the brightest light on the Brethren.

The Ordinary Surface of Things

It is worth coming back to where we started: the fact that none of this is visible from the outside. The drama does not exaggerate or melodramatise this. It just shows what ordinary community life looks like when the interior rules are what they are, and lets you notice how thoroughly invisible those rules would be to anyone not already inside them.

Lance finished all six episodes with something he described as recognition. Not surprise. He has described these patterns before, in other contexts, in relation to his own experience with the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. What struck him about Unchosen was not that it depicted something unusual. It was that it depicted something ordinary. These patterns are not exotic. They exist in communities across British towns and cities - in the same roads, parks, and shops everyone else uses.

The violence that sustains these environments is mostly social. It lives in language, in conditional love, in the quiet weight of what happens to people who ask the wrong questions. Unchosen understands that. Sitting with it, the underlying pattern becomes harder to dismiss.