The New Believers

With David Barrett's new book on the WCG, The Fragmentation of a Sect, due for release at the end of the year, perhaps it's a good time to note his previous work in 2001, The New Believers.  Unfortunately you might now find it hard to track down, but here is a short review - which appeared on the original Ambassador Watch.  (The website for the book is still available at www.thenewbelievers.com.)

After reading The New Believers I'm relieved I wasn't suckered into a really weird cult. Worldwide was bad enough, but compared to some of the groups David Barrett discusses, WCG was downright well-balanced.

Barrett is English, and this large book (500 plus pages) is written with a British audience in mind. But don't let that put you off. Barrett's strength is as a sociologist, someone who is working in the field of alternate religions: as a result he is scrupulously fair to all concerned and generous-spirited. Unlike the more common material on sects, this isn't an "anti-cult" book, and Barrett isn't out to rally the troops to his own version of "the truth". The result is a thinking person's romp through an extensive list of bizarre and colorful "new religious movements". Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are there, along with Christadelphians and Exclusive Brethren, Bahai and the International Church of Christ. Those movements I can deal with, but when Barrett moves to Eckankar, Theosophy and the Aetherius Society: well, give me Herb's shaking jowls any day.

For those of us with a WCG background, the main interest in this book will be Barrett's keen observations of Worldwide and its daughter churches. In fact he devotes the final section of his book to the WCG as a case study, as well as referring to it throughout the book. In doing so he gifts us with the rare ability to "see ourselves as others see us". In the concluding chapter, "Schism of a Sect", he tackles the phenomenon of a church disintegrating following the death of its leader. As an outsider you might expect him to get some of the detail wrong, but no, this is a meticulous piece of research. And, wonder of wonders, it is also highly readable. A small sampling:

Armstrong was often photographed in Plain Truth and elsewhere with great world leaders - kings, princes, politicians, prime ministers, presidents - which gave him kudos and credibility. According to some former senior members, these photographs were intended to show Armstrong's importance by the circles in which he regularly moved; but very often, it seems, the great world leaders had no idea who this short, elderly man was, who asked to be photographed shaking hands. Garner Ted Armstrong disapproved of his father's many trips, calling them "the world's most expensive autograph hunt".
On many occasions Armstrong, as Chancellor of the Ambassador Colleges, is alleged to have effectively "bought" meetings and photographs by making donations to charitable causes supported by a world leader.
...
The Worldwide Church of God has always been very authoritarian, very "top-down", a classic case of establishing and maintaining "the purity of the truth." In sociologist Roy Wallis' words, "its protection... requires extensive control over those to whom access [to the truth] is permitted" - i.e. church membership... As senior leaders, powerful, ambitious men, constantly jockeyed for position in the hierarchy, they would suddenly find themselves demoted or even disfellowshipped  for what often seemed trivial reasons. Six months or a year later they might be back in favor, and the person who had fired them might himself be in the wilderness. One reason for all the many variant offshoots today is the unresolved grievances and lack of trust between people who had worked together for decades.
...
Joesph W. Tkach died in September 1995, and his son, Joe Jnr (now known as Joseph Tkach) became Pastor General. According to a leading member of one offshoot church, Joe Jnr had effectively been running WCG for some years, under the figurehead of his sick father - a close parallel to the Armstrongs in the 1960s and early 1970s. But where Garner Ted Armstrong had been ousted from the Church, Joe Jnr, according to many internal sources, had been the one to push through all the changes in the Church.
...
Although Joseph Tkach had been appointed the successor by Armstrong, the continuing power of the leadership in WCG did not rest on the succession of personal loyalty alone. Armstrong had also enforced a strict top-down form of Church government, and this continued after his death. The Church leadership had its authority directly from God, and must be obeyed even if it was wrong (1 Peter 2:18). This was why so many loyal ministers struggled with their consciences so long to teach what they were told they must now teach, even if they personally still believed the old teachings. Some members... believe... they must remain in that Church even if it is now teaching what to them is outright heresy.
...
The majority still held to the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong. The Tkaches rejected his teachings, but because of their position were able effectively to hijack his Church... If the Tkaches had left the Church Armstrong founded, they could have left the majority of members to remain true to those teachings within the organization founded on those teachings. That would, some feel, have been a more satisfactory, even a more honest, resolution.

Others have set out to chronicle the fortunes of the Worldwide Church of God, but each has had a very clear personal agenda. Joe Tkach and Mike Feazell are, for example, apologists for their reforms. David Barrett has no such constraints. Indeed, the current Pastor General will take little joy from Barrett's analysis. The 18 000 word WCG section of The New Believers is something special. It is an insightful and compassionate overview of the travail the church has gone through.   

And, if Barrett is right, the soap opera is destined to continue well into the foreseeable future and beyond.

AW back up

The archives of the Ambassador Watch blog, which ran from mid 2006 through January 2010, are now back online.

Defragging the WCG

The Worldwide Church of God "experience" has garnered little attention from sociologists up till now, despite offering a rich and diverting history.  In fact for years the WCG, founded by high school dropout and ad man Herbert W. Armstrong, provided unintentional 'soap opera'-style entertainment quite unparalleled in any other similar-sized sect.  Amusing to those on the outside, deeply distressing to those on the inside, and life-altering to those painfully working their way from the centre to the margins and beyond.

Those who have written in any depth on the WCG have largely been caught up in apologetics of one sort or another, pleading for the defence, or throwing stones from inside other glass houses. Ex-members have had a tendency to (ahem, small clearing of throat) gloat over the ongoing pratfalls that have seen a once dynamic, thrusting religious movement reduced to a bare shadow of its former presence.

Where would you find a serious study of the WCG, its leaders and its leadership dilemmas?  Dilemas that have spawned an uncountable number of sub-sects, each aping the original movement in different ways?  Sadly, nowhere.

But that's about to change with the impending release of The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God.  Authored by David V. Barrett, a meticulous and fair-minded observer who has been 'on the case' for many years, this 350 page study is due for release from Oxford University Press in December.

The author has either met or corresponded with many of the big names in the movement, whether in the Tkach-led rump remnant or some of the flakier one-man breakaways.  He wrote The New Believers back in 2001, which focused in its final chapter on WCG as a case study.  That was clearly just the appetiser.  Here's the publisher's description of the new volume.

In the mid-1930s an unsuccessful American advertising executive, Herbert W. Armstrong, founded a millenialist, Sabbatarian Christian sect with a heterodox theology. Over the next half century, despite a number of setbacks, scandals, criticisms, and attacks from former members and anti-cultists, Armstrong's organization, the Worldwide Church of God, grew to around 100,000 baptized members with a world circulation of over six million for its flagship monthly magazine Plain Truth. In January 1986, Armstrong died. His successor changed most of the Church's distinctive doctrines, leading it towards an increasing convergence with mainstream Evangelical Christianity. This revision created a massive cognitive dissonance in ministers and members: should they accept or reject the authority of the Church leadership which had abandoned the authority of the founder's teachings? Groups of ministers left the religion to form new churches, taking tens of thousands of members with them. These schismatic churches in turn faced continuing schism, resulting in over 400 offshoot churches within little more than a decade.

In this major study David V. Barrett examines the processes involved in schism and the varying forms of legitimation of authority within both the original church and its range of offshoots, from hardline to comparatively liberal. His book extends the concepts of rational choice theory when applied to complex religious choices. More important, he offers a new typological model for categorizing how movements can change after their founders' death, including schism, and explores the usefulness of this model by applying it not only to the Worldwide Church of God, but also to a wide variety of other religions.

Features

• The first sociological study of Worldwide Church of God offshoots
• Proposes a new typological model for categorizing various outcomes to new churches on the death of their founder

Now I don't know about you, but I'm excited by this project, which began as a PhD dissertation (in Sociology of Religion at the London School of Economics.)  It's a chance for some of us to take a disciplined look, adding insight to hindsight, at where we've come from, and perhaps learn some new things about ourselves - as well as "our former association" - at the same time.

If you've been crazy enough to follow my blog posts since Ambassador Watch days, or have kept up to date through The Journal, you'll know that David's book has been years in the making.  This is one publication every thinking member and ex-member will want - I'm tempted to say need - to have.

More information to follow as it becomes available.

The First Horseperson rides forth from Elizabethton

Hark!  The drum of hoofbeats at dusk.  'Ware, 'ware, 'ware, pilgrim; hide yourself quickly, the horsepersons are four, and the first is even now upon us, clad in purple.

John Shuck has posted the first of four radio shows in podcast form, each featuring a different revelatory rider.  And lo, wearing faded purple, mounted on a princely steed, is none other than John Shelby Spong.

Spong may have retired years ago from the office of Episcopal bishop, but the fire still burns.  Begone ye cloistered academic critics, peering down your delicate snooters at one you do not deem your peer, this sage's words are worth a thousand dry, self-promoting monographs.

No, seriously, this is a great bit of audio.  Do give it a listen.

But quick!  For the second rider soon approaches, thin-lipped and intense, splattered in muck to the bridle with the severed heads of his enemies bouncing from his buckled belt.

Bart Ehrman under friendly fire

Bart Ehrman must be regretting his decision to take on the subject of Jesus mythicism.  It's not that he's done so, but how he's done it.  His book Did Jesus Exist? was a sloppy bit of work that did him scant justice.  I'm still not convinced Ehrman has done much more than skim-read much of the material he critiques - particularly Doherty's Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

It's not that the mythicists shouldn't be challenged; they clearly should.  And if they're genuine scholars (as many of them are) they would surely welcome the engagement.  But Did Jesus Exist? has turned out to be a disappointment all round, doing little more than stirring up a hornet's nest of largely justified indignation.

Now it seems he's also getting walloped from the historicist centre-ground.  Both Stephanie Fisher and Maurice Casey (author of the somewhat stroppy and high-handed Jesus of Nazareth) have levelled some pertinent criticism at Ehrman's assunptions and insinuations.  Jim West has the details.  Interesting to note that Ehrman refused to allow this criticism to appear on his blog, calling it "mean spirited."

Which seems a bit rich given the approach he takes in his own book.


Jesus of Nazareth

Ambassador Watch - the Second Coming

With the 'Ronpocalypse' - the moronic speculations of Ronald Weinland ramped up as Bible-based certitude - looming later this month, it's fascinating to read how the followers of Harold Camping are coping in the wake of his failure a year ago.  A Year After the Non-Apocalypse is compulsory reading for anyone who wants to move beyond the surface weirdness and understand what's going on in the minds of these true believers.  Highly recommended.

Meanwhile, Otagosh is pleased to announce that, to mark the latest Ronpocalypse, there will indeed be a Second Coming.  The Ambassador Watch blog will reappear (no new content, just the archive) "for a limited time."  The old link (ambassadorwatch.blogspot.com) will be active from around midnight May 26 NZST.  More details to follow.

Ronald Weinland's Groundhog Day

This is a re-posting - slightly condensed - from 2007 when Ronnie Weinland was looking down the barrel of his own prediction stupidity at that time.  Dopey Ron clearly learned nothing out of this experience, and nor did the folk who have continued to follow him.

But take a look at the suggested off-ramps I suggested five years ago.  Which, if any, do you think Ron will use on Monday 28th?  Is anyone stupid enough to continue bankrolling this turkey after the same old failure scenario plays out yet again?

Anyhoo... here's what appeared then on Ambassador Watch.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Weinland's Year of Doom (Pt. 2)

Ronald Weinland ... reveals that April is the page to mark on your calendar... which means there's not even six months left. Maybe we should all take the opportunity to max out our credit cards before the balloon goes up.

Interesting that Ron, when asked directly if he's going to flee anywhere, explicitly denies it! Do we take it that Weinland isn't going to the "Place of Safety"? And if there's no place of safety, well, what's the point? Or is he just being coy to ensure only the right type of people make it to Petra?

But then, heaven forbid, what if Ron has simply screwed up this whole date-setting thing big time?

No worries, there's plenty of precedent. Here are six strategies Ron can adapt to haul his chestnuts out of the fire.

1. It happened - but not visibly. This is what the SDAs did after 1844, and the Jehovah's Witnesses after 1914. A bit disingenuous, but whatever works, right?

2. It happened - but in an understated way. Remember (if you're an oldie) when Herb proclaimed that 1972's terminus to the 19 year time cycle was marked not by falling H-bombs but a new series of Plain Truth ads in the Reader's Digest? This strategy has the advantage that it was used by the not-so End Time Apostle himself, so already has a kind of imprimatur.

3. Fire Drill. The Eternal was just testing, like the almost-sacrifice of Isaac. At the last moment Yahweh can reveal to Ron that he's decided to press the pause button... everyone "as you were."

4. Oops, the numbers got scrambled. Just let me recalculate... which is what the Millerites did back in the 1840s, providing a further opportunity to get it wrong all over again.

5. I never actually said that, or, I'm not technically a prophet. Not really an option, even though there's Herbal precedent, as Ron did say it and does claim to be a prophet, but hey, folks have short memories (especially if they avoid the Internet.)

6. Playing it safe. It was Ron's commission to preach this even if it didn't happen. This is the Jonah defense (after being fish food he preached Nineveh's destruction and then had the Eternal pull out "plan B" without so much as a beg pardon). This may be Ron's best option. Give it a bit of a twist and you can even make it "prove" that Ron is God's prophet (would a false prophet risk saying nutty stuff like this?)

Yes, Judge Rutherford, Herb, the Two Willies (Miller & Dankenbring) and a whole bunch of others have offered up dates that were disconfirmed, but did that stop them? Heck no! So Ron, don't sweat it; hang tight dude.

How many followers/members/happy tithe-payers Weinland has is impossible to gauge from his website, but it's likely to be minuscule. Nevertheless the 2008 prediction seems to have attracted quite a lot of attention, certainly more than he got ministering in either WCG or UCG, and let's face it, there have to be more than a few feeble-minded suckers paying his bills.