Cult Religions (Part Two)
Anatomy of a Cult Leader
Most religions are not cults.
Most churches are not cults.
Most religions did not start off as cults.
Few established denominations are cults.
The difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is broad, distinct and definite.
Meet Dave.
Dave was born in 1948. Dave has been preaching the Gospel as he knows it since 1971. During that time, Dave has been employed by three different denominations—all with essentially the same theology. What has Dave spent every professional moment since the age of 23 preaching?
The End of the World is Immediately at Hand!
That’s 41 years and counting. Sadly, that’s not a record. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been predicting the same since 1910. Dave’s old boss, “Doctor” Roderick C. Meredith has been at it since 1952, some 60 years. The person they learned this stuff from was at it for over 50 years also, starting in the mid 1930s.
It’s a proven schtick (piece of business). I mention Dave and his mentors and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the same breath because they appeal to the same demographic, have largely the same cause for being and preach the same overall theology. This isn’t an accident. The guy who ordained Dave and Roderick essentially ripped the Jehovah’s Witnesses off. Not that the Jehovah’s Witnesses actually have much in the ways of original religious thought, either.
David C. Pack and his pals are the inspiration for this series. Although their theology has little appeal today, their methods of operation are illustrative of a type of cult leader. In the last posting I introduced you to Matt, a fictional new cult leader. Dave is something of the opposite of Matt—or at least a distinction in type. Whereas Matt the Music Minister has a good grasp of his target audience (the people from his last church), but is flailing around for a template, Dave already has a good idea of what the people he is looking for want. Matt’s going to go as far as the magnetism of his personality, and the overall imagination (and sweat engine) of whatever organization he can muster, will take him. Dave is standing on someone’s shoulders. Copycats like Dave are probably more typical—at least on the single church level. Thinking up an entire cosmology and séance for delivering such is pretty rare.
Which is to say that most cults are copycats. As with most cults, most cult leaders are copycats. I suppose you could say that of most businessmen and entrepreneurial types. Why go into an entirely new field when you can simply refine the methods used to service an already proven market? Many a business plan is founded on just this idea—and cults are no different. To take this a tad further, it is easier to start and operate a business that someone has heard of than it is to attempt to service the market of people who think that microscopic aliens are eating their brains. (More later.) In either case, a known brand name will help you, which is why so many people go in for franchising. Oddly, the history of franchising dovetails into the history of modern American cults. And it pertains specifically to our pal Dave.
As convoluted as that transition was, every word of it is true. In our last posting we gave you the anatomy of the cult form. In this posting we will focus on the leader. As you will see, a fish rots from the head down. As we will also see, no one who starts a cult does so to increase the overall happiness of the world. To be sure, Cult leaders are a peculiar lot, but they do fit into identifiable categories.
Matt the Music Minister from our last entry would be an unusual cult leader, at least in one regard. Matt’s success in founding a cult would be highly unlikely unless the church he was spat out from was also a cult. Remember, cults have four necessary and sufficient properties: (1) they are Proprietary, owned by a single person or tight group; (2) there is No Accountability over how the leader spends money; (3) there is a Double Standard amongst the members—clear ranks of more holy than thou or an actual double set of rules; and finally (4) concentration in one or more of three themes: (A) The way is narrower than you think; (B) God wants to make you rich; and (C) I have magic powers. No one forms a cult by splitting off the youth ministry of Saint Paul of the Cross Lutheran Church. Splits in staid churches are along staid lines, usually about doctrinal issues (Lutherans from Catholics, Unitarians from Trinitarians). Splits in Carnival religions are about which clown gets to drive the clown car. Thus unless Matt is some sort of Rasputin, chances are what he’s offering in the basement of the local Stuckey’s is very similar to the services at the church he was unceremoniously spat out of.
Charismatic Evangelical Fundamentals
Christianity is a fairly simple religion: follow the teachings of Christ or at the least believe that Christ can salvage you from your moral failings. It’s user manual, the Bible, is not so simple. It is, by any cold reading, contradictory. For the past 2000 plus years or so various denominations have done their best to reconcile this problem. To many, the solutions and doctrines contrived as a result of this problem solving process constitute in and of themselves a distraction. Movements have been afoot since the time of the Iconoclasts to strip the doctrine of bloatware and get back to its binary (trinary, in this case) truth. It is from this Back To Basics wellspring that the entire flurry of American Cults have sprung.
(And a bunch of other religions, not all of them cults.)
It is my dismal heritage as an American that the majority of this nonsense has taken place in my country. Most cults are American. Most cults are Christian. Most cults are Charismatic, Evangelical and Fundamentalist. And they hate the Catholics. Together they are the black eyes of Christianity, the open spewing puss sores of spiritual sentiment. That the world would be a better place without the lot of them is an understatement.
Not all charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist churches are cults—but that’s where all the June Bugs are. FINAL SNIFF TEST: if you are in a church that HATES Catholics but LOVES Jews, you are in a CULT. (I’m not saying that loving Jews is a bad thing. I am simply pointing out a key dichotomy.) How things got this way is not the purpose of this posting. To understand the cult leader, you need only understand the basics of forming cult theology.
The basics amount to: the Catholics are wrong about everything. And are active agents of Satan. Hate them. Hate their trappings. Call all of their feasts Pagan or whathaveyou. Do the opposite of them to the extent that you can get away with. Then you can branch into an attack on Salvation By Grace. Salvation by the simple miraculous say so and death of Christ doesn’t seem fair. Not manly enough for the fundies. Or you can grant Salvation By Grace and pitch some higher form of salvation. You can create several levels of heaven. (Why not? Dante did it for hell.) Conversely, you can pick on the book. It’s either all right or all wrong. If it’s all wrong (James Jones, People’s Temple), you have kind of left the religion business. Saying it’s all an analogy infringes on Calvin. Saying parts of it are historical truth and other parts are morality plays is to adopt the theology of the hated Pope. If the core story is true and the rest of it is an analogy, you may join Luther. As I said, it’s really pecked over—and doubly so as far as half steps are concerned. The real shelf space as far as creating distinction to your movement is in declaring the entire Bible absolute historical fact. It also sounds certain.
(That’s not the evolution of it, but rather just a quick explanation.)
Making the Bible a literal text is problematic. You can ignore the contradictions. (Weirdly, an untried approach.) You can explain the contradictions away. (Cult tactic one.) You can overwrite the Bible, either through revision or creating additive texts. (Cult tactic two.) To contrast your efforts with actual learned attempts to harmonize or understand the Bible, please have no skills in linguistics, lack interest in any translation that isn’t authorized by English monarchs and have zero grounding in history. If you really don’t like something, blame Constantine.
Sans blaming Constantine, this is pretty much what the Jehovah’s Witnesses did. They weren’t the first and they weren’t the last. Entire libraries can be stocked with tomes explaining how one snippet of the Bible explains everything or some new thing or some other out of context snippet.
That’s it. Theology done. Add distinctive revelation (matter does not exist, the end is near), Rasputin- like figure, shake (in the case of the Shakers) and bake. You are in the cult business.
Wait! Oh giver of the anatomy lesson, you have just defined a cult leader as Rasputin-like figure. That is not very descriptive of any type. Rather, it is cartoon shorthand. Surely, there must be more!
Short answer: No. Wrong. Long Answer: You don’t want to be the Alpha Dog. It’s not a fun life. Ask Aimee McPherson. Aimee is about as close to Matt as an Alpha can be, inasmuch as she is mostly a showman. Aimee wasn’t much for theology and most of her”act” was playing off the novelty of a new invention called radio. Even as straightforward as her routine was, the constant toil caused her a breakdown. Her movement dwindled dramatically during her life. The money was good to the end, but she was hardly happy. That said, she was mostly sane, something your average Alpha Dog isn’t. If they aren’t a flunk out from another religion, they have a resume similar to that of Charles Manson. Think flunk out at life. Think drifter. You don’t want to be the guy who gets caught cheating on his wife with a maid and then goes into heated delusions about being called BY GOD to do such as opposed to just begging for forgiveness. Most of us aren’t that delusional—or that good at being delusional. Alpha Dog gets broken out of jail by people who want to shoot him. Alpha Dog dies in a hospital, screaming about how he’s going to hell. Alpha Dog wanders his house naked, attempting to control gravity with his feet or living in dread of microscopic aliens eating his brain. Alpha Dog gets high on his own supply. Don’t be Alpha Dog. Be Dave.
David C. Pack wakes up every day knowing exactly what he needs to do and say at work. There isn’t an original piece of thinking involved. No one expects him to be clever. (Though he is.) They expect him to be certain. (Check!) And severe. (Double Check!) After forty years, he has the act down. Thanks in equal parts to talent and good fortune, his enterprise is all his. He didn’t think of a word of it and he doesn’t have to pay a dime for it. It’s like Colonel Sanders died and left him all the herbs and spices. Now, thanks to advances in technology. Dave is ready to take fried chicken where it has never been before.
Since I have already covered their religion in some detail in my David Pack Internet Cult Guru post, I will not do so here. And if you don’t trust me, you can check out Dave’s extensive web trove at Restored Church of God. I will not link to it. If you wish to strike a blow for justice, Google it and hit Dave’s sponsored link. It’s at the top. Anything that costs Dave money is good with me.
Take Dave’s bio with a grain of salt. As opposed to hearing the call of Alpha Dog Herbert W. Armstrong on radio and suddenly converting, I have it on fair authority that his folks were members of the cult to start with. (This doesn’t have to be a contradiction. Dave might have converted the family.) The bits about being an All American and Ivy League material is fairly typical cult fluff.
Whatever Dave’s opportunities were, by the age of 19 he had decided to enroll in the cult’s unaccredited—and expensive--Bible school, Ambassador College in Pasadena, California. The first class graduated from this institution in the year of Dave’s birth. 19 years later it still didn’t have a filled out curriculum. In effect, the only real purpose of attending this school was to become a minister in the Radio Church of God, later called the Worldwide Church of God.
It’s a very pretty campus. The campus also did double duty as the church’s headquarters and broadcast production facilities.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s the purpose of the college was broadened somewhat. Not all of the students went into the clergy, but the more select of them were encouraged to. From what I have been told, some students were there for the draft deferment. (Although the church was anti-war, draft dodgers on campus were viewed with distain by the faculty.) For some students this was the only college they could get into, given that it didn’t have any academic standards. For the most part, however, sending kids to cult church was a good way of goosing the process of making sure your spawn married within the cult.
The linebacker sized Dave was selected for ministry and, after graduation, sent off to be a regional minister. In the Worldwide Church of God each minister was paid directly by the denomination, to the tune of about $40K in 1970s dollars. On top of this, ministers were provided with a house and a car, both owned by the church but provided to the pastor free of charge. If it wasn’t the best starting compensation package in all of American religion, it was close. But there was a downside that I will go into later.
Dave moved around a lot, as was common in this church. Herbert Armstrong didn’t like his ministers to become too familiar with their flocks. To hear Dave tell it, he was something of a roaming Enforcer, bringing stray flocks to heel. To hear others tell it, Pack was a bully and a jerk. That he was only doing what he was told excuses only part of this. Despite these constraints Pack eventually developed a distinct and highly effective style of oral presentation. It’s a mix of controlled rage and black humor. Coupled with a bombastic manner and physical size, it gives Pack quite a presence.
That said, Pack’s career was largely undistinguished. During the entirety of Pack’s slog for Worldwide, the core church was in a constant state of disorder. The church had to back off its constantly heralded date for the End of the World. This date came and went—first without explanation and then with the bald faced lie that no date had ever been set. Having at that point outlived his usefulness, cult leader Herbert Armstrong refused to step aside in favor of his own son. This despite the fact that he had been grooming his son for just this purpose for over ten years. Worse, he may have been behind a sex scandal which engulfed his son soon after. (This actually happened twice.) An association of former Ambassador students started a newsletter exposing the cult’s financial gamesmanship. Then the church was on 60 Minutes. (Never good.) Its assets were seized by the state of California. And then after having weathered those storms, Herbert Armstrong went on a spree of changing the church’s doctrines.
Pack stayed put during all of this, towing the line, cashing a check. Herbert Armstrong 180ed church teachings back and forth at whim. If there were reasons based on principle to leave the church, Armstrong was providing them in abundance at the time. Pack didn’t leave. Very few of the ministers left. Instead they stood by stupidly while their obviously demented leader played kangaroo court with the spiritual lives of 120 thousand brethren. And then Armstrong did a very fast fade. The old boy ran out of stupid and became the prisoner of strangers he thought were trusted henchmen. In the wake of Armstrong’s death, these henchmen seized control of the church’s assets, exposing Armstrong’s many misdeeds-mostly as camouflage for their own looting. It was only then that rats like Pack started to jump ship.
Pack didn’t jump immediately. He stood as the campaign of defaming Armstrong progressed to fruition. It was only after it became clear that the church’s financial losses (linked to a wholesale flight of membership) might lead to cutbacks in paid clergy, did David “Restored Church of God” Pack jump ship. And then, he didn’t go into his own ministry, but rather a rickety raft piloted by “Doctor” Roderick Merideth. The rest of the story will have to wait until our next posting.
Dave is fairly typical of the type that pitches his own tent. It’s pretty much all they can do. We will go into the variations of Cult Leaders using Dave and his pals as our examples in our next posting.
Coda:
If you are reading this, it means the Maya were wrong. Or the people who thought the end of the Mayan timeline meant anything were wrong. So it looks like we may have Christmas after all.
We may leave this topic for a post or two, as other ones have cropped up. But I am hoping to have the basics of Cults down for you in short order. We will be covering them as a part of our beat going forward.
I hope this Christmas finds you all well.
God Bless Us, Every One!