In the Light is a choral-theatre work inspired by the composer’s own journey to explore decades of abuse and negligence within a Christian sect in New England with a choir at its center. A cautionary tale inspired by true events, In the Light probes the dystopian social dynamics of a religious community where psychological control is maintained through music ministry. This is the second concert-length choral theater work by Thomas Lloyd following his acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Bonhoeffer. Lloyd wrote both the text and music.

Forty years But when my girl
forty years here since gone away
when my girl, drew me out
now gone away, into her new world,
begged me to leave, how could I suddenly feel
then drew me outside, away, that I was now truly free,
from the only world I’ve ever known. suddenly free,
and yet not know why?

“With choral music, Christian liturgy, and support for women’s leadership in those traditions having long been at the center of my own life's work, discovering that such a community was the home of a choir whose professional quality recordings I had long admired was deeply disturbing. I had to find out more about how such a thing could happen.” Starting soon after completing Bonhoeffer, Lloyd began exploring more about the community through public documents, national media exposés, long discussions with former members, and time spent at the community as a guest.

In his earlier Bonhoeffer, Lloyd sought to probe the meaning of the evil of fascism through a community that sang African-American Spirituals and was led by a charismatic leader whose writings about that evil constantly referred to hymns and music he had learned as a pianist. With this new work, he saw a challenge to get beneath the surface of a coercive community dynamic where choral singing was an instrument of control and subjugation in and of itself.

Asking the choir to perform in an open, immersive staging to recreate the feeling of a visit to the community itself, Lloyd has structured the work with distinctly different kinds of scenes where the distinctions between the public and private dimensions of the community are clearly both seen and heard. Transitions between those two worlds are aided by videos produced by Lloyd with electronic music composed by his son Jeremy Lloyd (producer/performer with the Platinum recording artists Marian Hill).

Some scenes bring the two worlds together by having a visiting choral conductor come and rehearse the choir. He hears one kind of ‘public’ singing, after which the audience hears another as the choir acts out the internal dialogue of leaders and followers with the aid of special lighting and electronic sampling. In other scenes, four individuals step out from the community and through the theater’s ‘fourth wall’ to sing soliloquies directly to the audience revealing their conflicted individual perspectives on their life in the community. Three central “light session” scenes reveal through music the seductive energy of the community that leads an ordinary person to subject themselves extraordinary humiliation. The whole work is framed by fragments of a public worship service the composer attended at the community, and scenes that freely imagine how such a community might begin and end.

This work was created not to shock or expose a cultish community that has already received extensive press exposure. Rather, with an unflinching but compassionate view of a coercive community and its members, Lloyd reveals that such a social pathology is not something that can simply be dismissed as extreme, but can be found within social organizations at all levels of our society.

We all need social and political organization to flourish as a society. But when do we cross the line from productive social constellations to the dysfunctional, from life-affirming to demonic? Can individuals survive such an experience and come out the other side with a sense of self still remaining? Can traditional religious faith and artistic culture survive such a reckoning with the persistence of human evil?

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Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality – On cults, cultism, and the mindset of political and religious zealotry, p. 1 (2019; The Real Press):
I have long been concerned with those who claim ownership of the minds of others. And also with those who come to offer their minds to such would-be owners through whatever combination of voluntary self-surrender and psychological and physical coercion. I’ve come to recognize that the mental predators are concerned not only with individual minds but with the ownership of reality itself.

A personal note from the composer on connections between Bonhoeffer and In the Light

My two choral-theater works, Bonhoeffer and In the Light, exist in very different social and historical contexts. But each revolve around two dimensions of the human condition that have haunted me for a long time. The first is the human capacity for both good and evil, moral powers that seem to be much larger and more independent than we can fully understand. The second is related to the first: what seems to be our absolutely essential need to form cohesive communities on many levels as our only hope of navigating those powers (with limited success).

I led what by any account was a relatively “charmed” life myself (no serious illnesses, a comfortable middle class family and social life and education). But I also saw the emotional and physical suffering of family members and others close to me that wasn’t protected by material comfort, and that in many cases seemed to have no reason or purpose at all (contrary to my religious teaching). As I matured I became more aware of the natural and political traumas that also bring about senseless and irredeemable suffering by people I didn’t know, with communities who were kept materially poor or socially marginalized faring worst of all.

I came to believe our capacity for good and evil is a continuum, rather than a clean binary, both individually and collectively. And while we have a certain degree of free will, it has always seemed to me that these moral powers are beyond our individual or collective capacity to control. We tend to think of others and ourselves as “good people” or “bad people” as though the choice was completely ours. I have come to believe it is not, and wonder why?

Given our inescapable moral limitations, how can we do better? Is there anything we can do to lift each other up rather than to tear each other down or be torn down ourselves? Does the human capacity for religiosity provide a moral basis for survival or give us false cover for becoming agents of evil we’re not even aware of?

In both Bonhoeffer and In the Light, the “leading role” is a taken by a religious community – Bonhoeffer’s underground seminary on the one hand, and a pseudo-Benedictine community on the other. Individual characters are identified in relation to that community, either as leaders or followers.

One community had a charismatic leader (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) who desperately wanted to defeat the human malevolence he saw but didn’t know how to overcome it. He even questioned the integrity of his own attempts at doing so. This community was caught between a violent, racist political regime and the Christian religious tradition that had been seduced by it.

The pseudo-monastic community that inspired In the Light also had a charismatic leader, but one who (outwardly) displayed great confidence in imagining she had all the answers. She created a community of psychological coercion camouflaged in high artistic religiosity. This community formed a barrier (some might say an emotional prison) between the public respectability of the world of mainstream Christianity and high music and visual art and the natural human bonds of family and friendship its members were persuaded to leave behind.

Among the variety of individuals given a voice in each work, two spoke to me most powerfully of the painful uncertainty experienced in the midst of great evil: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the unnamed ‘Novice Brother with crucifix discipline’ of In the Light. The first was based on actual writings of a historical character and the latter on a man I encountered during a visit to the community that inspired In the Light.

That visit was arranged by a former member of the community who was still maintaining contact with a family member there, and helped me gain access. I’ll never forget the look in the eyes of this man when I shared with him that connection – they seemed to say to me with deep resignation, “Oh…so you know…”

Here are two short soliloquies each character:

Novice Brother with crucifix discipline:

I should remain in silence with my cross;
but seeing you gazing in from outside                    
like we’re swimming in a fishbowl                            
I just had to come to the side of the tank              
and say a few words.                                                 

How could I stay here, you ask? 
You say I don’t look happy, 
that I don’t look alive?
How do you stay where you are?
How do you know you’re content?

Bonhoeffer: Night voices in Tegel prison (Letters and Papers from Prison):

I hear my own soul tremble and heave.
Nothing else?
But my ear is open wide:
‘We the old, the young,
The sons of all tongues,
We the strong, the weak,
The sleepers, the wakeful,
We the poor, the rich,
Alike in misfortune,
The good, the bad,
Whatever we have been,
We men of many scars,
We the witnesses of those who died,
We the defiant, we the despondent,
The innocent, and the much accused,
Deeply tormented by long isolation,
Brother, we are searching, we are calling you!
Brother, do you hear me?’ 

As a young child, for reasons still perplexing to me, I developed an intense Christian prayer life that I kept secret from even my family. At the same time, I was learning about the Christian faith from an ancient tradition (pre-Vatican II) that taught me to see my own mother as condemned to eternal damnation simply because she didn’t belong to that particular faith tradition.

This of course made no sense to me – but in spite of that, I couldn’t escape the feeling that when I knelt beside my bed after my father or mother left the room I was connecting with something (or someone?) beyond what I could see in the daylight.

Ever since that time, I’ve been pushing to make sense of the reality or projection from that encounter that possessed me so deeply. That exploration has remained in the Christian tradition for me primarily because that is the one I happened to be born into in a world of numerous ancient manifestations of human religiosity. And what keeps me going is something I find life in the life and teachings of Jesus: that while human fallibility and suffering will always be with us, the reality of evil will never completely erase our capacity for kindness, compassion, justice, and courage.

Do we have the capacity to give ourselves over to this possibility of hope in the midst of what will very likely be an ongoing presence of fear and despair? This is why I was drawn to write these two works of choral-theater. - Thomas Lloyd – December 17, 2025