Donald Trump and His Followers: Are They a Cult?

Politics, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis
Donald Trump and His Followers: Are They a Cult?
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and others explore the issue.

John Martin-Joy M.D.
Psychology Today
September 27, 2020

Is Trumpism a cult?

This question, among other issues, has preoccupied certain psychiatrists and mental health professionals since Donald Trump rose to political prominence in 2016. How could one even begin to approach the question?

Ever since the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) asked American psychoanalysts to take Hitler’s measure in the 1940s, there have been two approaches to psychological comment on public figures of concern. Though the two are often intertwined, a mental health professional's emphasis tends to fall on one or the other.

One tradition is represented by the psychologist and psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, who emphasized individual personality, early life, and sexual development. The other tradition, represented by psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, explored the “fit” between culture and personality, trying especially to understand (and therefore potentially to weaken) the bond between a leader and his followers.

Both traditions are alive and well.

Psychiatrist Bandy Lee’s bestselling edited volume The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2017) amply demonstrates the point. In this volume, a large group of mental health professionals express their concerns that Trump is dangerous and mentally ill.

In the tradition of Langer, many contributors to the book focus on what they see as Trump’s individual pathology. These experts often invoke a DSM checklist or the equivalent to make their point.

Psychologist Craig Malkin, for example, explains narcissism to his readers and asserts that Trump fits the profile. Malkin then describes with concern how narcissistic leaders can devolve into a “psychotic spiral” over time. Working in a similar vein, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Lance Dodes describes the criteria for sociopathy, then presents evidence that in his view shows that Trump is a sociopath.

Among the book’s most thoughtful contributors in this tradition is that of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Leonard Glass. He sees Trump’s traits as including impulsivity, a tendency toward angry retaliation, and an “insistence on his own infallibility.” (Full disclosure: I will be co-teaching a course with Glass and Dodes at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in October.)

Glass recounts his own personal struggle with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) over the ethical legitimacy of comment. It was a struggle that ultimately led to his resignation from that organization in 2017.

The Erikson tradition is represented in several places in the volume, but is especially notable in the wide social frame of reference used in Bandy Lee and Judith Herman’s prologue and in Robert Jay Lifton's foreword. These three psychiatrists, two of them APA members, lay out a rationale for morally concerned professionals speaking out. This rationale is related to Lifton’s idea of a "malignant normality" that can creep insidiously into a society and affect its accepted norms over time—and to the contravening role of the “witnessing professional” in such times.

Professional ethics guidelines such as the APA’s Goldwater Rule, these experts believe, have an important role in preserving professional integrity and in protecting public figures from defamation. But in their view, the principle of protecting public figures can conflict with other principles, such as the urgent need to address a public emergency created by an ill president.

For Lee and Herman, the central question is the issue of professionals’ collusion with, or resistance to, state abuses of power.

Erikson would have understood. He saw Adolf Hitler presenting himself as a kind of mythic hero to German adolescents of the 1930s, a kind of older brother in an era when traditional cultural institutions were breaking down. Through the skillful use of propaganda, he believed, the Nazi leader was giving his young followers permission to free themselves from conscience—as well as from the confining conventional demands of their own fathers.

Erikson believed it was possible for the West to counter Hitler’s appeal, his authoritarianism, and his abuses. But this would require a different approach to the public. His view was similar to that of psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, who thought Hitler's appeal could be undermined by a nonauthoritarian (democratic) approach to news reporting and to propaganda. Matter-of-fact realism in the media, including the ability to acknowledge difficult developments, could be persuasive.

Jerrold Post and Stephanie Doucette’s book Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers (2019) is related to the social perspective of Erikson, Lifton, Lee, and Herman.

This important book is one of the few to devote serious evidence-based attention to Trump’s relation with his followers. Drawing on Post’s extensive background in studying political leadership, Post and Doucette document not only what they see as Trump’s narcissism but the social and psychological basis of his complex appeal to Tea Party members, fellow Republicans, and other specific constituencies.

But it is Robert Jay Lifton himself who has developed the most Eriksonian approach to Trump—and who has most directly addressed the issue of cultism.

Lifton knew Erikson well and shared with him a concern about the dangers of “totalism.” Lifton, for example, emphasizes that totalistic cults have special appeal during times of “psychohistorical dislocation.” Lifton too is concerned about the weakening of institutions that once organized "the life cycle and its belief systems.”

Lifton, a research psychiatrist, has had a career-long preoccupation with cultism, thought control, and other manifestations of what his memoir calls an "extreme century." He has interviewed survivors of the American bombing of Hiroshima; he sought out and interviewed doctors who cooperated with Nazism; and he has tried to understand the thinking of members of Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese apocalyptic cult that released sarin poison on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

This wrenching moral fieldwork has made Lifton a leader in social psychiatry and in moral introspection. In Trump and his movement, Lifton says, he recognized some of the aspects of cultism that he had discovered in his previous work. In Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (2019), Lifton concludes that Trump “is a special kind of cultist.”

For Lifton, Trump is not totalistic like the leader of Aum Shinrikyo; he is not consistently ideological like many political leaders. Instead, he is a self-absorbed purveyor of a powerful but misleading narrative. Trump’s narrative runs this way: “As a strongman and a dealmaker, he will restore America to its rightful world-dominating military and economic power.”

There is more. Lifton thinks there is “a ritual quality" to the chants that Trump encourages at his rallies: "Lock her up!" and "Build that wall.” Much of Trump’s base, in turn, “can be understood as cultist”—that is, as following a guru who serves as "teacher, guide, and master.” Lifton finds apocalyptic and messianic overtones in QAnon, the group whose conspiratorial theories he believes Trump facilitates and calls forth but does not quite endorse.

Nazism, Erikson famously asserted in Childhood and Society, “was only the German version—superbly planned and superbly bungled—of a universal contemporary potential.”

All of the mental health professionals discussed here share something like that point of view, as they try to grasp the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

Next time: A review of the timely but uneven documentary film "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump."

References

Lee, Bandy X., ed. (2017). The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lifton, Robert Jay (2019). Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. New York: New Press.

Martin-Joy, John (2020). Diagnosing from a Distance: Debates over Libel Law, Media, and Psychiatric Ethics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump. Some of the material presented here is covered in different form in Diagnosing from a Distance.

Post, Jerrold, and Stephanie Doucette (2019). Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers. New York: Pegasus.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/politics-psychiatry-and-psychoanalysis/202009/donald-trump-and-his-followers-are-they-cult

QAnon: #7 Cults in the Occulture

Joseph Szimhart

Cults in the Occulture
September 28, 2020

"I express my views on QAnon, the now notorious pro-Trump Internet conspiracy fad that had bled over into a pseudo reality that people believe. Families have been torn apart, ex- Qs claim it’s a brainwashing cult, and people on the religious right and left are being manipulated from within the context of QAnon websites. I refer to Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, the Federalist Papers, and Sir Francis Bacon. And I wear a tin hat to illustrate my point."

CultNEWS101 Articles: 9/28/2020

  

Shincheonji Church of Jesus, Korea, Church of the Last Testament, Legal, Russia, QAnon

RNS: Shincheonji's latest plasma donation raises questions on treatment from South Korean government

"... Over 1,100 congregants of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus donated their blood plasma in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Their contribution was so significant that the Korea Center for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC) wrote the organization a letter of thanks, addressed to chairman Lee Man Hee.

This donation continues a string of events where the Shincheonji church has attempted to make the best of its unfortunate involvement in the March outbreak. Immediately after the outbreak took place, Shincheonji stopped all gatherings to prevent the further spread of the virus. Chairman Man Hee Lee bowed to the floor in a public apology, and 4,000 members expressed their willingness to donate their convalescent plasma. A $10 Million donation was offered to the Community Chest of Korea as well.

Yet none of Shincheonji's attempts to reconcile with the Korean government were reciprocated. The $10 Million donation was flatly rejected due to negative public opinion about Shincheonji. Lee Man Hee's apology attracted conspiracy theories about his affiliation with the jailed former president Park Geun-hye. And the attempts to donate plasma were met with tepid responses until now. What Shincheonji has received in return is a series of investigations and the Chairman Lee Man Hee being put into jail for falsifying records and embezzlement."

BBC: Sergei Torop: Russian religious sect leader arrested over allegations of harm

"The leader of a prominent religious sect has been arrested in a remote part of Siberia by the Russian security forces, police say.

Sergei Torop, who is known to his followers as Vissarion, founded the Church of the Last Testament in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region in 1991.

He was arrested along with two other leaders of the group.

They stand accused of extorting money and causing physical and psychological harm to their followers.

Mr Torop, Vadim Redkin and Vladimir Vedernikov are suspected of "establishing a religious association whose activities involve violence against individuals and of inflicting grievous bodily harm to two or more people," a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigations Committee said.

"They used the money of [their followers] and also used psychological violence against them," she is quoted as saying by state media."

The Guardian: The QAnon orphans: people who have lost loved ones to conspiracy theories

"For some Republicans, QAnon is an opportunity to garner support. But for those who have lost loved ones to it, QAnon is a destroyer of families and relationships

"I lay awake at night and worry if my brother's going to shoot a bunch of protesters," said Daniel, 36.

Daniel, whose name has been changed to protect his family, always had a close relationship with his twin brother, Greg. They had "that twin thing, that twin bond", Daniel said.

The brothers had visited each other often when they both lived in Wichita, Kansas, usually spent holidays together, and continued to talk at least once a week, even when Daniel moved overseas. They disagreed on politics – Daniel is a centrist Democrat, and Greg had espoused libertarianism – but their political differences had never come in the way of their relationship.

In early June, however, they had a major fight. Daniel had heard from their mother that Greg was posting on social media about the Boogaloo Boys, an armed far-right movement in the US that seeks to incite civil war. When Daniel called to confront his brother about the extent of his involvement with them, Greg had insisted that the Boogaloo movement was just an internet joke – but he also said that he hoped the country would, indeed, descend into civil war. The brothers argued and hung up on each other.

On 1 July, Daniel called to apologize. Greg said he was busy, as he was on his way to a counter-protest to a Black Lives Matter (BLM) rally in Lawrence, Kansas. He had packed his guns in the car, and was intent on helping local police identify BLM protesters. According to Greg, protesters and antifascist activists were "looting and rioting", and he intended to do his part to stop them. "He said that antifa was lynching people and sending them to re-education camps," said Daniel.

The demonstration was not without violence, though not on the protesters' part: two cars attempted to plow through the crowd; no injuries were reported. There was no truth to what Greg had said. The brothers have not spoken since."

Rolling Stone: Former QAnon Followers Explain What Drew Them In — And Got Them Out

"Like those leaving cults, some people who believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate can break free from their beliefs

Recently, QAnon has gotten a great deal of attention in the media due to QAnon-promoting congressional candidates such as Republican nominees Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, thus bringing the theory mainstream. It has also been linked to violence, such as the 2019 shooting of a Staten Island mob boss by a QAnon supporter and a Texas woman attacking two strangers with her car earlier this year because she believed them to be child traffickers. President Trump has refused to overtly discredit or reject QAnon ideology, to the delight of believers, whose primary goal is to win Trump's attention.

"They desperately need a place to put their anger and a way to make sense of the world. Us versus them, the horrible bad guys, is something they all seem to cling to," says cult expert Diane Benscoter, who has spoken to numerous people whose loved ones are involved in QAnon. 'The doctrine makes it easy to say, 'Clearly we have to make a stand against this,' and it feels really good to believe you're on the side of righteousness and saving children.'"

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Clare Bronfman, Facing Sentencing, Refuses to Disavow 'Sex Cult' Leader

Ms. Bronfman will be the first defendant in the Nxivm case to be sentenced. Prosecutors have asked for five years in prison.


Nicole Hong
The New York Times
September 28, 2020 

For more than a decade, Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, devoted her life to supporting a self-help group called Nxivm. She quit her equestrian career, moved to Nxivm’s headquarters in upstate New York and poured millions of dollars into the group.

The organization has since unraveled over accusations that it was a pyramid scheme and a sex-trafficking cult, estranging Ms. Bronfman from her father and turning her into a felon.

And yet, as she awaits sentencing by a federal judge, Ms. Bronfman, 41, has not wavered in her loyalty to Nxivm’s leader, Keith Raniere.

“Many people, including most of my own family, believe I should disavow Keith and Nxivm, and that I have not is hard for them to understand and accept,” Ms. Bronfman wrote in a letter last month to the judge. “However, for me, Nxivm and Keith greatly changed my life for the better.”

On Wednesday, Ms. Bronfman will be the first defendant to be sentenced in the Nxivm case, which led to criminal charges against six of the organization’s leaders and prominent members. After Ms. Bronfman and four others pleaded guilty, Mr. Raniere was the only defendant who went to trial, resulting in his conviction in June 2019 for racketeering, sex trafficking and other crimes.

The United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which investigated Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ee-um), has asked the judge to sentence Ms. Bronfman to five years in prison, saying Mr. Raniere could not have committed his crimes without powerful allies like her.

Ms. Bronfman’s lawyers have argued she should not go to prison at all. She genuinely believed Nxivm was a force for good and had no idea about the human trafficking and sexual abuse within the group, they said. She pleaded guilty to two crimes in connection with her role at Nxivm, involving identity theft and immigration fraud.

The long-awaited hearing will be the first opportunity for a large number of Nxivm’s victims and former members to speak to the judge, both by video and in person. Ms. Bronfman’s sentencing on Wednesday will also be the first major hearing inside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The case became an international media spectacle in part because of Nxivm’s high-profile followers, which included Hollywood actors, corporate executives and professional athletes. The Dalai Lama once spoke at a Nxivm event. A top recruiter for the organization was Allison Mack, an actress on the television series “Smallville,” who has since pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy.

Nxivm, based near Albany, N.Y., was marketed as a workshop that could help successful people overcome their fears and find self-fulfillment. Since Mr. Raniere co-founded the program in 1998, around 18,000 people have taken its courses, which cost thousands of dollars apiece.

Nxivm’s recruiters looked for “trust fund babies” and others who struggled with low self-esteem, according to a lawsuit filed against the organization. The workshops purported to use scientific methods invented by Mr. Raniere, who was promoted as the smartest man in the world.

But Mr. Raniere’s trial laid bare the dark sides of Nxivm. Within the organization, prosecutors said, Mr. Raniere had created a secret group of women who were branded with his initials and groomed to be his sexual partners, leading to Nxivm’s reputation as a “sex cult.”

The women were called “slaves” and referred to Mr. Raniere as “master” or “grandmaster,” according to trial testimony. They were ordered to undergo near-starvation diets and respond to Mr. Raniere’s unexpected text messages at all hours. Women who had failed at their duties were whipped with a leather strap.

The women were regularly required to hand over “collateral” that could act as blackmail, including nude photographs or videos in which they falsely accused their spouses of abuse.

Nxivm generated renewed attention after the debut last month of an HBO documentary series called “The Vow,” which chronicled how a group of Nxivm members escaped the organization, using hours of fly-on-the-wall video footage of Mr. Raniere.

One of Mr. Raniere’s most important enablers, prosecutors said, was Ms. Bronfman.

Ms. Bronfman joined Nxivm in 2003 after hearing about it from her sister and father, Edgar Bronfman, the former chairman of the Seagram Company. She had dropped out of high school to become an equestrian, with dreams of qualifying for the Olympics. She was always shy and lacking in self-confidence, her friends said in letters to the court.

One of her cousins wrote to the judge that Ms. Bronfman suffered from “poor little rich girl” syndrome, and that insecurity about her wealth drove her to seek a sense of purpose through Nxivm. The workshops taught her to develop friendships with humans, not just horses, her lawyers said.

But as Ms. Bronfman became fully immersed in Nxivm, prosecutors said, Mr. Raniere was able to tap a seemingly limitless war chest of cash.

Prosecutors said Ms. Bronfman used her wealth to hire lawyers, private investigators and public relations firms to discredit critics of Nxivm. She tried leveraging her family’s connections to persuade law enforcement officials to investigate Nxivm’s enemies, efforts that prosecutors described as “obsessive.”

She even targeted her own father. After he called Nxivm a “cult” in a 2003 article in Forbes, Ms. Bronfman installed malware on her father’s computer, giving Mr. Raniere access to her father’s email account for years, prosecutors said.

Ms. Bronfman’s lawyers responded in court papers by calling the episode a “family dispute” that “remains unproven.”

In total, Ms. Bronfman poured more than $100 million of her inherited wealth into funding Nxivm’s legal battles and other projects. She gave Mr. Raniere $67 million to invest in the commodities market, which he never repaid, prosecutors said.

Her lawyers have insisted that she did not know about the secret women’s group within Nxivm, saying the case has left “the very unfortunate misimpression that she knew about and funded a sex cult.”

But she still rushed to defend Mr. Raniere after a New York Times article in 2017 exposed the group’s secret branding ritual. In a public statement, Ms. Bronfman said the women had all freely taken vows of loyalty and friendship. (Mr. Raniere’s lawyers have said the group was intended to be a sorority of powerful women who could someday influence elections, and that all of the sexual relationships had been consensual.)

When Ms. Bronfman and Mr. Raniere found out that The Times was about to publish the article, they drafted letters that were sent by lawyers to Nxivm members, threatening criminal prosecution, prosecutors said.

In April 2019, Ms. Bronfman pleaded guilty to identity theft and an immigration violation in connection with her role in Nxivm.

Prosecutors accused her of using false statements to secure visas for young women from Mexico who were recruited to work for Nxivm. She also conspired with Mr. Raniere to commit identity theft by using the credit card and bank account of his dead girlfriend, which kept assets out of Mr. Raniere’s name and allowed him to evade income tax requirements.

At the time, many Nxivm victims were frustrated by the guilty plea, believing the charges minimized Ms. Bronfman's influence within the organization. Ms. Bronfman’s lawyers have said she was unfairly targeted by prosecutors because of her wealth.

Ms. Bronfman’s sentencing comes a month before Mr. Raniere’s sentencing, scheduled for Oct. 27.

In a submission to the court this month, Mr. Raniere’s lawyers said he had no remorse because he maintains his innocence, accusing the government of misconduct and saying he deserved a new trial.

Prosecutors have asked the judge to sentence him to life in prison.

The sentencings for the other defendants have not yet been scheduled.

Ms. Bronfman is one of many Nxivm members who have maintained their admiration for Mr. Raniere. During the pandemic, his followers have regularly organized dance parties outside the Brooklyn jail where he has been held.

Mr. Raniere seemed well aware of Ms. Bronfman’s continued devotion to him. In November, during a phone call in prison to a woman with whom he shared a son, Mr. Raniere asked about Ms. Bronfman, according to a government court filing.

“I don’t think her view of me has changed at all,” Mr. Raniere said. “If anything, it’s gotten stronger.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/nyregion/clare-bronfman-keith-raniere-nxivm-sentence.html

Matthew Gong, gay Mormon, reflects on his journey from inner war to inner peace

Peggy Fletcher Stack

Salt Lake Tribune 

September 28, 2020

Matthew Gong is a minority three times over — in his own words — “Chinese American, Mormon and queer.”

All three parts of Gong’s identity have shaped him, including heroic tales of service and sacrifice, and are worth celebrating.

Still, they often have warred within the psyche of this 29-year-old, leaving wounds that have taken years to heal.

His mother, an avid gardener, once explained the difference between flowers and weeds.

“Weeds,” she told him, “were plants growing where they weren’t wanted.”

His queerness, the opposite of his religious ethnicity, “was something I was born with but not into,” Gong says in an LGBTQ Affirmation conference speech, “I had to discover it, like a secret birthright.”

And thus he came to see his gay self as a “weed” in the Latter-day Saint garden.

Gong is hardly alone in such a feeling of being misplaced, of course, but his experience is unusual. He is the son of Gerrit W. Gong, an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“I don’t think there are many people who are openly queer and whose dad is now in one of the highest positions of authority in the LDS Church,” he quips in an online post that went viral. “If there are, I would love to meet them for a nice cup of group therapy.”

When the senior Gong took his place for a lifetime appointment in the faith’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the younger Gong thought: “Today is the day I lost my father. His life isn’t his anymore, and we are on opposite sides of a great divide.”

His fear was that “people would politicize me and my dad. That our interactions would be nitpicked to brand us as avatars of ideologies,” Gong writes on a Facebook post. “... It didn’t matter if we agreed about everything; we’re still family. So, when I talk about ‘the Church,’ I mean ‘the Church.’ When I talk about my father, he’s just my father.”

Though Gong’s relationship with his parents got off to a “rocky start” after he came out — not for lack of love or rejection but for miscommunication — they are now as close as ever and talk almost every week.

That isn’t to say father and son agree on all things.

When asked in 2018 if having a gay son had affected his views on LGBTQ issues, the apostle replied, “We love each member of our family. We feel the need to be compassionate to all. Even though there are many things we don’t understand, we know in God’s plan there’s a place for every person in [the church].”

But getting to this place of peace with his trifold identity, says Gong, an artificial intelligence engineer in Seattle, has required hard work.

Planting land mines

Until he was 10, Matt Gong, the family’s fourth of four sons, lived in the Washington, D.C., area, where his dad worked at a policy think tank.

When the family moved to Utah, the young Gong found himself in a much more homogeneous community with a “dominant culture,” he says, where his peers and teachers weren’t exactly sure about his ethnicity.

Was he Mexican? they wondered. Arab? One Latter-day Saint seminary teacher kept trying to tell him he was Korean, because the instructor knew a Korean kid with a similar last name.

“I never thought of myself as nonwhite but as ethnically ambiguous,” Gong says in an interview. “There are both benefits and penalties to being racially mixed. I was never so different [that] I couldn’t be potentially included.”

Looking back, Gong sees plenty of clues to his sexuality that he failed to recognize at the time:

Staring at a male underwear mannequin when he was a child. Having crushes on boys in elementary school. (“I should be really friendly to this guy, or I just want to spend a lot of time with that boy.”)

He didn’t want to accept himself as gay, “because the only queerness I had ever seen was bad” — the AIDS crisis, promiscuity, death. In movies, gays were victims, targets for bullies, or “the sassy friend.”

Gong had the same dreams as other young Latter-day Saints, serving in callings with a wife and children, and spending eternity in heaven with his family. Thoughts of not having that became unbearable, he says, and so he repressed them.

His Chinese American family was also highly academic — both parents have advanced degrees — and had wide-ranging conversations, even heated debates.

Sexuality, however, was never discussed. And he never brought it up. It’s not a Chinese, Mormon or academic dinner-table topic.

Even at school, Gong, who easily passed as straight, grew increasingly silent, afraid of hugs and falling in love.

His religion “became a war,” he explains in his Affirmation speech, “and my soul became a battlefield.”

Gong believed so fervently in the mantra that “God loves the sinner but hates the sin” that he “committed war crimes" against himself, he says. “I buried land mines and razor wire in my brain so that my heart couldn’t get out.”

If Gong hadn’t come out, he says, “I would have fought in the war till I died by suicide.”

And he nearly did.

Opening up

One day, during Gong’s freshman year at Brigham Young University, he tried to take his life. His memory is foggy, but he says he woke up four hours later, lying on the floor.

He seemed to remember a conversation with someone or something outside of himself that affirmed he was loved.

That was a message about God that he wanted to share and prompted him to serve a two-year mission for the church, he says in the interview. He was called to London on a Mandarin-speaking mission in 2011.

On his 21st birthday, at the start of the final year on his mission, Gong wrote separate emails to each of his brothers and his parents to tell them he was gay.

“On my mission, I learned that the first things to grow on the battlefields of France after World War I, were poppies, blood-red poppies,” Gong tells the Affirmation virtual audience. “I thought the image was beautiful and so when I came out, I clung to the idea that I was somehow like the poppies.”

Coming out, though, wasn’t the happily-ever-after he had hoped it would be.

Ripping out the razor wire

The storyteller and artist came out “in defiance of my depression,” he says, with a desperate will to survive.

But he still felt lost.

“I experienced confusion, sexual assault and rejection as I stumbled through my new life,” Gong says. “I struggled to find meaning in the spiritual void left by having been a flower growing in the wrong place.”

He hated that God “had been taken from me,” he says. “I had won the war in coming out but was left as broken as the battlefield.”

And he still didn’t know how to love himself.

That took 5½ years, Gong says, and “a whole lot of therapy.”

Mile by mile, he “pulled the razor wire from my mind,” he says. “...I confronted and broke down the lies I had been told about what it means to be queer. I argued my doubts to a standstill and reclaimed my beliefs from where they lay.”

He began to heal, until there was one final battle: to face institutions and people who had harmed and abused him.

“I held my ground … and I silenced their rage with my story as I spoke with my own voice. ‘I forgive you,’” he says. “They hadn’t earned my forgiveness, but I had.”

In doing so, he gave himself the chance to extend grace to his past selves.

A normal heart

(Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Latter-day Saint apostle Gerrit W. Gong speaks to members of the media in Salt Lake City in June 2018.

(Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Latter-day Saint apostle Gerrit W. Gong speaks to members of the media in Salt Lake City in June 2018.

Today, “I love myself, scars and all, and I am awestruck by the simplicity at being happy, something I would never have believed possible in my younger years,” says Gong, who shares an apartment with his longtime partner. “There is joy and warmth as my boyfriend pulls me close for a hug, and I marvel at the easy laughs and unqualified smiles that we share as we sit on the couch watching TV.”

There is celebration, he says, “in my families of both queer and of birth.”

Though Gong still claims aspects of Mormonism in his spirituality, he has added theistic Taoism, Zen Buddhism and any parts of a religion “that seem resonant — civility, care, forgiveness, treating humans with dignity and compassion.”

He learned those principles from “growing up Mormon,” he says, “but they are not unique to the church.”

The church’s “patterns and behaviors of abuse,” he says, “don’t have to be there; they are not inherent in the doctrine.”

But beyond the particulars of Gong’s experience, his story has a universal message of normalcy.

Parents and children can work through the awkwardness and conflict over deep disagreements to arrive at a place where they are simply family.

“Because my story is happening publicly at the highest levels of the church, people ascribe extra meaning to it,” he says in the interview, “but from within the story, it feels like a typical narrative.”

The apostle and the queer son “are just family,” Gong repeats. “There is complexity in every relationship — and we continue to work at it.”

If there’s a single label that he claims for his identity, it’s “Gong,” he says. “My family name.”

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/09/27/lds-apostles-gay-son/

Is Ramtha Real?

Cults in the Occulture
Joseph Szimhart

"After my video on Channeling someone asked me to address Ramtha channeled by JZ Knight since 1977. I use the book Finding Enlightenment by J Gordon Melton (1997) as reference in which Melton tries to describe and explain the new Gnostic teachings of Ramtha. Melton arranged for Stanley Krippner, a parapsychologist with his team to test JZ to rule out fraud and pathology, which Melton claims they did. I argue that they did not because there was no serious peer review and no similar studies with professionals character actors to compare. To me, Ramtha is nothing writhing JZ Knight performing the character."

Visit Houston's Hidden Secrets: Oddities in the Bayou City!

Jacob Tate 

The Rice Thresher 

September 8, 2020

"After I submitted my college applications as a senior in high school, an odd sensation overcame me. I felt glad and freed, of course, but I also felt a little pit in my stomach as I realized that the schoolwork I’d dedicated the last three and a half years of my life to no longer mattered. I grieved for what I had just lost. Starting this school year isolated in an off-campus apartment, I feel a similar void. My priorities are changing, my mind is reorienting. As R.O. Kwon explains in a phenomenal New York Times piece, the pandemic is a constant state of grieving, wishing for what could have, should have been. 

In my angsty high school grief in 2017, I explored the nooks and crannies of my city that embodied the state of limbo I felt in my soul. The eclectic spoke to me as I acted without regard for imaginary futures and instead felt grounded in the odd flux between a rich but ultimately irrelevant past and an electrifying present. As I find myself facing a similar sense of instability this semester, I return to the curiosities of Houston, Texas and share them with others currently bursting with wanderlust.

Heaven On Earth

1802 Travis Street

What once was the continental United States’ largest Holiday Innnow sits derelict and abandoned, towering over the southern edge of downtown. The formerly space-themed Days Inn got passed around between owners like a hot potato before finally settling into the hands of followers of the Beatles-aligned spiritual guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They rechristened the building as “Heaven on Earth Inn,” planning to generate income and house members. Unfortunately for them, cults aren’t known for having great bookkeepers and they were promptly evicted. 

The hotel has remained mostly empty since then, eventually being completely gutted and left hollow, allowing you to see right through it. Graffiti lines the few walls that remain, changing with the seasons. Bold teens sometimes find various entrances — “doors” as they are colloquially called — and sneak inside to climb the thirty flights of stairs for a rooftop view of Houston.* Every two years, a new company buys the building and promises to renovate it. I’ll believe it when I see it." [...]

White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals

Jordana Rosenfeld 

High Country News 

September 23, 2020

Amanda J. Lucia

320 pages, softcover: $29.95

University of California Press, 2020.

In a geodesic dome in Joshua Tree, California, hundreds of festival-goers assemble for a workshop on prānāyāma, an ancient Hindu breathing practice. Amid an acoustic blend of drumming, chanting and birdsong, a workshop leader, flanked by “guardians” dressed in white, instructs participants to drop into their heart centers and prepare to be “introduced to the place inside (themselves) that is pure love.” Many of the participants take these Hinduism-derived activities seriously. But most, if not all, identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) — a phrase-turned-demographic category that describes the growing number of Americans who are critical of organized religion but believe in something greater than themselves. And these festival-goers have something else in common: Nearly everyone at Bhakti Fest, a multi-day annual celebration of spiritual transformation through Indian cultural practices, is white.

To research her insightful new book White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals, Amanda Lucia, a California-based scholar of religion who specializes in global Hinduism, immersed herself in SBNR communities in California, Hawaii, Australia, Nevada and elsewhere, attending 23 different “transformational festivals” — large-scale gatherings of people attempting to create enlightened selves within imagined utopian worlds. The festivals emphasize certain qualities — kindness, inclusion, mindfulness and the rejection of conventional understandings of the self — though they vary in the details of their utopic visions (and in their acceptance of corporate sponsorships). But Lucia, who attends without hiding her role as a researcher, is struck by their overwhelming whiteness. What makes them, as Lucia writes, such “safe spaces of white ethnic homogeneity”? The festivals are intended to facilitate spiritual transformation. But do the participants ever confront their own investment in whiteness? If not, how profound could their transformations be?

Lucia’s sharp analysis and enthusiasm for historical 

and theoretical context dominates the book, but she also takes readers inside the festival scene, with its yogis, prayer beads, ceremonial pipes, chakra wands, crystals and the other spiritual bricolage common to many “alternative” or New Age spaces. We accompany her into catharsis workshops where strangers gather to scream, sob and collapse, and experience the awe-struck silence of the conflagration of Burning Man’s Temple.

Lucia grounds the book in the long tradition of “Americans turn(ing) to religious others when dissatisfied with the dominant culture.” From the Transcendentalist movement of the 1840s to the 1960s counterculture and New Age in the ’90s, the stresses of modern life have pushed Americans to experiment with amalgams of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism and Indigenous religions, attracted by what Lucia terms “religious exoticism.” But while many of the seekers believe they’re reckoning with their own whiteness, Lucia argues that their adoption of nonwhite religious and cultural identities reveals a sense of entitlement — a tendency to rely on “racialized others as unsullied, exotic, premodern subjects whose cultural products supply practical, therapeutic tools.” Religious exoticism not only assumes whiteness as a default, but exploits and erases the legitimate representatives of marginalized spiritual traditions.

But isn’t whiteness, as a learned investment in one group’s inherent superiority, an obstacle to spiritual transformation itself — particularly the respect for human dignity and compassion?

White Utopias shows how deeply whiteness undergirds these gatherings of spiritual seekers. But isn’t whiteness, as a learned investment in one group’s inherent superiority, an obstacle to spiritual transformation itself — particularly the respect for human dignity and compassion? Lucia approaches the question only in the second appendix, where she recounts her research methods. She writes that when she solicited feedback from the individuals she quoted (many of whom are considered expert yogis or spiritual gurus), many had “vitriolic reactions.” They objected to Lucia’s acknowledgment of their “white privilege, practices of white possessivism, and their existence within the structural context of white supremacy,” interpreting it as a personal assault or accusation of racism.

Lucia found these responses disappointing — she had “somewhat naively” assumed that many of her subjects had already done the “internal social justice work” of divesting from their whiteness. Clearly, people can believe they are achieving spiritual growth without interrogating the privileges of white supremacy, but real transformation is limited by the refusal to fully examine the implications of one’s place in the status quo. By relegating these unpleasant confrontations to the appendix, Lucia allows readers — presumably people who are, like her, involved in higher education, itself a predominantly white field — to extend to her subjects the same benefit of the doubt. Lucia’s book suffers for not recognizing that unlearning whiteness and white supremacy is not just justice work; it is also spiritual work.

Lucia remains optimistic that these retreats help their white participants develop the skills to confront white supremacy, giving them the ability to engage with spiritual, mental and physical discomfort and to make empathetic connections with strangers. But these festivals — with their reliance on non-Western spiritual traditions — allow white participants to think they’ve already addressed their own role in perpetuating systemic racism, and that they’ve succeeded in “unlearning whiteness” by the time they pack up their yoga mats. This kind of denial happens in all predominantly white spaces, far beyond spiritual desert getaways. Lucia models a way of seeing the embedded logic of whiteness in social spaces, an analysis her white readers would do well to apply to their own settings — whether they’re attempting to create a utopia or not.   

Jordana Rosenfeld is a writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor.

https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.10/ideas-books-is-spiritual-growth-possible-without-confronting-whiteness

Can you help with a research survey on cults for the Family Survival Trust?

Request to participate in research.

"As you may know, one of the aims of The Family Survival Trust is to improve UK law regarding the problem of cults and cultic control.As part of this work we are launching a survey of ex-cult members’ experiences in the UK.

If you have direct experience of being in a cult in the UK or whilst based in the UK, it would be immensely helpful if you can participate and fill out the survey at the link below.

You can choose to remain anonymous.

We would like to get all responses in by September 30th.

The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete.

Survey: https://forms.gle/DQSYRWrwsrBC5oZw9

This survey is an effort is to begin creating an evidence base that we can use to educate legislators and others about the realities of cults in the UK.

We are planning to publish the results of the survey next year in a report. 

Our stories and experiences are important in raising awareness and bringing about change.

If you have any questions or if you need support completing the survey please feel free to ask.

Thank you very much for your help.

Alex Stein

Trustee, The Family Survival Trust.

Visiting Research Fellow, London South Bank University"

Contact:

Email: thefamilysurvivaltrustresearch@gmail.com
Web: www.thefamilysurvivaltrust.org/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/The-Family-Survival-Trust-101185528082741

The Last Shakers?

Keeping the faith in a community facing extinction


Katherine Lucky
Commonweal Magazine
November 28, 2019

Sabbathday Lake, Maine, is home to the last community of Shakers on earth. Their sect, formally known as the United Society of Shakers, is well over two hundred years old. When I visited Sabbathday Lake in the summer of 2017, I met the only two Shakers who remained: Arnold, blue-eyed and stooped, aged sixty-two, and June, small and shy, aged eighty.

Arnold and June live together in the village Dwellinghouse, but sleep in separate beds. They are not married, nor are they lovers. They pray, read Scripture, and sing. They eat together but don’t take communion; to them, every meal is the Eucharistic feast. They maintain their land and buildings, and though Arnold can do some of the physical work, they must also hire outside help. Arnold and June use computers and cellphones—the Shakers, unlike the Amish, are not averse to technology. They invented paper seed packets, the circular saw, the flat-bottom broom, and clothespins.

Arnold and June are celibate, own property in common, and confess their sins to each other. These are the essential “three Cs” of the Shakers, modeled on the chaste, communal life of Christ. To become a Shaker, you must be debt-free: no mortgages or student loans. You must also be a pacifist. Shakers are wary of nitpicky dogma, and their theology is simple: God is love; Christ’s return is experienced spiritually by anyone open to the “anointing spirit of God.” Shaker faith seems to be more an emulation than a rigid creed. Arnold and June, like the Shakers before them, believe they have found the best way of living, a literal heaven on earth.

Most of the “world’s people” know Shakers for their woodwork: cabinets, chairs, tables. Shaker artifacts are displayed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Shakers are also known for numerous scratch recipes, and a Shaker song, “Simple Gifts,” inspired Appalachian Spring. James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all wrote about Shakers; Ralph Waldo Emerson was an admirer.

At its peak before the Civil War, the Shaker population numbered around five thousand, spread across ten states in the east and midwest. By 1900, there were 855 practicing brothers and sisters. The population was aging—and dying. Celibate, Shakers couldn’t bear children into their faith; they had to rely on converts, and conversions were declining too. While villages had long taken in orphans or children from destitute families, few of those charges remained after reaching adulthood. Eventually, as states began to pass stricter laws, the Shakers, as a non-family unit, lost the right to adopt.

Over time, the loss has been compounded by a reluctance to evangelize. Shakers don’t knock on doors or preach fire-and-brimstone. Instead, they wait, hoping converts will come. Sometimes, today, people do inquire, attracted to Sabbathday Lake by its austere, contemplative lifestyle, making pilgrimages to be evaluated as novices. But nobody has stayed. Either the Shakers said no, or the candidates left.

Which leaves Arnold and June. (Sister Frances, a Shaker matron, passed away in January 2017 at the age of eighty-nine.) On any given day, there are plenty of other people at the village. Staff and volunteers from nearby towns work at Sabbathday Lake: giving tours, overseeing gift shops, posting on Facebook, raking leaves, raising money, and tending the gardens. They help organize the Harvest Festival and Christmas bazaar. They teach soapmaking, bookbinding, and broomweaving, courses that generate revenue for the village. These workers are often also congregants. They attend Shaker meetings on Sunday mornings, then stick around for coffee hour. And yet, they are not Shakers. They don’t divest of their property. They don’t swear off sex. They don’t join.

When the Shaker girls returned to their senses, blinking and thirsty, they recounted visions.

My first trip to Sabbathday Lake was on a Friday in June. Six hours of driving through summer traffic and then, as the Maine Gazetteer promised, the green government sign: Shaker Road. The village stretched out: shingles, green shutters, red barns, whitewash. Long-necked sheep and shaggy cows grazed; there were garden plots, and trees wild with fruit. At the center stood the multi-story brick Dwellinghouse. Across the road that cut through the land was the Meetinghouse, where Shakers worship—two doors, two sets of stairs; one for men, the other for women. The school stood padlocked.

The essential book on Shakers is Stephen Stein’s The Shaker Experience in America (Yale University Press, 1992). It begins before the beginning, with the story of Ann Lees: born in Manchester, England, sometime around 1736, and baptized in 1742. As a child, Lees, the daughter of a blacksmith, likely learned to read but not write; when she married another blacksmith, Abraham, she signed the church registry with just her mark. The marriage was unhappy, and ended in divorce; none of the couple’s children survived to adulthood. Eventually, Ann started spending time with a group of religious enthusiasts who worshipped by shrieking and trembling. Colloquially, the group came to be called Shakers, a people who worshipped charismatically, without clergy—rolling on floors, trembling with spiritual rapture. Ann was jailed several times for her allegiance, and so the Shaker history goes, she had visions in prison. Starving, she was sustained by milk and wine, which was poured by a friend through her cell’s keyholes. She even sweat blood like Jesus.

Ann Lee (at some point, her surname changed) fled England in 1774 with eight other Shakers, her brother William among them. They settled in Niskayuna, New York, and, after laying low for a time, took missionary trips to spread the Shaker gospel of celibacy, communality, and confession. They won converts and suffered persecution. On May 19, 1780, the Shakers held their first “public testimony,” an open service near New Lebanon, New York, on the region’s legendary “Dark Day.” A mixture of fog, clouds, and forest-fire smoke turned daytime sky in the Northeast pitch black: an opportune sign for an apocalyptic people.

Eventually, Shaker settlements sprang up from Maine to Florida, Indiana to Connecticut. They took direction from the central village of Mount Lebanon and followed the example of Mother (Ann’s new title), praising her as a counterpart to Christ. According to Stein, some Shakers claimed Ann was the female “dual adoption” of Christ, the complete fulfillment of God’s male and female nature. But the true Shaker doctrine, according to Arnold, is that Ann is not herself Christ; rather, she is his Helpmeet and Bride.

Ann died in 1784, but the Shakers kept her teachings close. In 1816, they compiled the Testimonies: collected oral histories and eyewitness accounts of Mother, packed with parables and miracles. At Sabbathday Lake, in 2019, Arnold and June preserve her name in their prayers.

The eleven-dollar tour of Shaker Village began in the Meetinghouse with just one other visitor: a woman from Kentucky with two yappy dogs in a carrier.

“You coming to Shaker meeting?” asked the guide. “Ten o’clock Sunday morning. It’s always been open to the public. People are always a little hesitant. ‘But isn’t it only two people?’ Oh no. There’s usually between twenty and forty.”

“They just never convert,” said the Kentuckian.

The guide paused. “Right…yes. And there are a lot of people who come to meeting who’ve been coming for many…”

The Kentuckian interrupted: “It’s hard to give up stuff and sex.”

Our guide remarked on the Meetinghouse’s original cornflower-blue paint, milky with age. Then she took us around the village, showing off workshops staged with crafts and wares: a scarf made from a Shaker cotton-wool blend, chairs with intricate teardrop finials, a brown cider bottle for homebrews, a painting of cats. As we peered at each arrangement, the guide praised the Shakers for cleanliness, practicality, ingenuity: “Hands to work, hearts to God,” as they put it.

After the tour, the Kentuckian drove away. I visited the gift shop and purchased Sister Frances’s autobiography. The cashier placed the book in a sack.

“Would you ever become a Shaker?” I asked.

“No, no,” she said. “Then I couldn’t teach skiing in the winter.”

Back outside, the village was cast in quiet. The air grew thick with humidity; a storm was coming. In the stillness, someone shouted my name. When I turned, there he was: Brother Arnold, in work clothes and boots, barreling forward from the Dwellinghouse porch.

“I can see you at two,” he said to me, as if bequeathing a valuable gift. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he vanished.

“Surely, I have had a wonderful privilege. And it has been a dreary, horrible existence at the same time.”

In August 1837, at the Shaker settlement in Watervliet, New York, a group of girls between the ages of ten and fourteen suddenly went into trances. When they returned to their senses, blinking and thirsty, they recounted visions: angels, hellscapes, and dead Shaker leaders. That November, one of the girls, Anna Mariah Goff, saw Mother Ann herself. During two trances, one lasting five hours, Anna was led by Mother through a Shaker village, thick with flowers and trees. Mother petted a feathered angel, and urged repentance.

This marked the start of the Shaker’s “Era of Manifestations.” Soon, throughout the communities, brothers and sisters were whirling and collapsing, performing new songs, speaking in tongues. Under spiritual influence, Shaker women created colorful “gift drawings” in watercolors and inks (192 of these survive today). Some Shakers claimed they were possessed by Native American spirits; they translated native songs and messages into “primitive,” unconjugated English. At Union Village, Kentucky, one boy was apparently entranced for over thirty-seven hours. Twice a year, Shaker villages conducted “feasts of the passover” on cleared mountaintops; they drank wine, marched, heard speeches, and danced. Villages got new “spiritual” names: Sabbathday Lake became “Chosen Land.”

But the Era of Manifestations, thrilling as it was, also made Shaker elders nervous. They suspended public meetings in 1842 to protect themselves from outside scorn. Eventually, services grew more structured. The mountaintop feasts were discontinued. A set of ascetic 1845 laws set up protocols for the Sabbath (no meat, no fish) and reinforced the separation of the sexes. Winking was banned in meetings, as was perfume.

It’s unlikely that these proscriptions had a direct effect on membership, but around the time of the Civil War, the Shaker population had begun to decline. After that, it was in freefall. In 1880, there were almost two thousand Shakers living in twenty-one villages. By 1900, there were less than one thousand. By 1936, there were ninety-two.

And by 1986, there were only eight, all living at Sabbathday Lake: five women and three men, including one named Wayne Smith, who had joined after graduating from high school. Twenty years later, that number was down to four: Frances, Arnold, June, and Wayne, the youngest. Around that time the Boston Globe ran a story on the village, headlined “The Last Ones Standing.” The reporter’s breathless description of Wayne read: “6-foot 3-inches, tanned and muscular from hours on a John Deere tractor, [with] the look of a strapping farm boy.” Seven months after the article appeared, Wayne left the village. He’d been sneaking calls to the Globe reporter; soon he proposed to her. They were married as Methodists.

At two o’clock, Arnold waved from his porch, wiping his sweaty face with a rag. “Come in!” He ushered me into the Dwellinghouse. To my right, in the dining room, Sister June bent over a jigsaw puzzle. A cat skittered by. Arnold let me use his set of stairs as we climbed to an upper floor, and left me at a long table in an anteroom. Portraits of dead Shakers lined the walls, a row of witnesses.

Arnold Hadd, raised in Massachusetts, joined the Sabbathday Shakers in 1978, at the age of twenty-one. He arrived during a period of conflict with the only other extant Shaker community, in Canterbury, New Hampshire. In 1965, Canterbury had decided that no new Shakers would be accepted into either village. Why the ranks were closed isn’t clear. Some think that the leaders were worried that “outsiders” would join and plunder Shaker assets (like land) once the older members had died. Others suspect the Shakers were wary of 1960s sex-and-drugs youth culture. Whatever the reason, the Canterbury Shakers said the sect would live on as history and principles. But the members at Sabbathday Lake refused to comply. They didn’t believe that the Shakers were done. A bitter feud ensued as Sabbathday Lake continued to accept converts. Those aren’t Shakers, said Canterbury, not if they joined after 1965. In the Shaker heyday, Canterbury had been the larger, more established of the two villages: but eventually, the last Canterburian passed, and Sabbathday Lake carried on.

Arnold returned with tea in a turquoise mug that read It Is What It Is. He took a seat at the head of the table, leaned on his elbows, and waited to begin. Under that gaze I could barely keep my papers straight. I felt I was alone with something ancient, precious, odd. Arnold’s very affect was superior. He was here keeping the faith, not me.

“Are there a few moments that stand out in your mind—peaks and valleys over the past twenty years?”

I expected some platitudes, like those I’d heard on the tour. But Arnold offered a different response. “Not too many high points at all,” he said. “A lot of low points.”

In his decades at the village, Arnold has served as a farmer, chef, nurse, craftsman, archivist, and press secretary. These days, it was all too much: “No matter how early you get up, you’re still behind. We had ten people staying with us this weekend, and I’m the cook. Besides taking care of the barn, besides taking care of all the business, besides taking care of all the people, and besides taking care of everything else.” Just that morning, he’d been “in the barn, trying to sort it all out in my mind, how I was going to get everything done. Thinking, I can’t possibly do this. ‘Don’t anybody come down here and see me,’ because if they do, that means they want something. And I just can’t give anything more than I’ve got right now.”

I got the sense that Arnold was overwhelmed, annoyed at me for taking his time. He also seemed eager to share his grievances.

All Shakers sinned, Arnold went on, and needed someone to confess to. “I mean, some people pay psychiatrists to do the same thing.... You hope you have a good elder to do that for you—some of our elders were not so gifted in those departments.” He elaborated. “I think the ones that aren’t good are the ones that forgot they’re sinners too. We’re all right here.” He whacked the table with a palm.

How would he keep the village from extinction?

“I knock on [people’s] doors and say ‘Hey, we’ve got a religious community. Go sell everything you have, come on up! And just spend the whole rest of your life giving everything you have to us.’” He shook his head. “That’s all we got.

Arnold believed that the Shakers were creating a divine community on earth: “We’re not prefiguring heaven—we’re living it. This is it, right now.” Yet it seemed that his life had not been heavenly. He struck me as befuddled by his situation. “Certainly, I have had a wonderful privilege and it has been a dreary, horrible existence all at the same time.” Especially, I imagined, as caregiver to an older woman. Especially, I guessed, when he considered the end: confessing to himself, weathering winters alone in the cavernous house.

Arnold went on, speaking in fragments, raising his voice, correcting misconceptions. “It’s not like people who live in obedience are just mindless little puppets doing the dictates of some sinister head. Not at all.”

He continued. “A lot of people said that Mother Ann was the personal second appearance of Christ. But if you read the Testimonies, there’s no indication of that at all.”

I’d read in Stein’s book that the Testimonies weren’t trustworthy because they were recorded after Ann’s death. The quotes and anecdotes were conveniently imagined to support contemporary Shaker beliefs. No, Arnold countered. “They remembered, and then they were recorded.... And those first believers never forgot a word.”

Anyway, he said, Stephen Stein the historian was misguided. “It’s a horrible book. It’s a distortion of the whole history of the church. There’s a ton of mistakes in it. ‘The schism’ [with Canterbury] is his big thing. That’s almost a quarter of the book, the last twenty years. That’s disproportionate and it really doesn’t speak to what is.”

Next he turned his attention to the Quakers. “The Quakers, at the time that the Shakers came out? They had lost it. All’s they did was stand outside of public houses to see any member that went in to have a drink, then read them out of meeting the next week. It was a legalistic bunch of merchants.”

He had harsh words for the “world’s people”—those non-Shakers who came to Shaker meeting. “One of the do-gooders in our lives [is a] wealthy person who’s never worked a day in their life.” Arnold again slipped into impersonation. “‘Oh, but if there are no Shakers, we’ll still meet here,’” the do-gooder had insisted, trying to cheer Arnold up. “I said, no, you won’t. There’s no Shaker meeting without a Shaker.” A bitter chuckle. “That’s it, kid. Get it through your head.”

Was Arnold nervous about being the last?

“If people come, that is great and glorious, because I believe this is the ultimate truth revealed to man. If man is not ready to accept the ultimate truth, then they’re not ready...and all the more sad for them. But we have to live.” It was our loss, not his. “People are not meant to be Shakers. It’s always been a few.”

But was there hope, I wanted to know. “I think it is a straight and narrow path,” Arnold answered, “and the more you’re on it, the more straight and narrow it becomes.”

There were moments when he spoke rather beautifully. What will heaven look like when it is fully realized? “I don’t know that it necessarily has to look like a Shaker community,” he mused. “Light, all light, because that’s what God is.”

About to drive away from Sabbathday Lake, I thought to myself that the hardest sacrifice, if I were to become a Shaker, would be having to stay put: to suppress wanderlust, to keep one’s body in one place. Even in such beauty—the sky that evening, tie-dyed lime green and pink; the clean-lined chairs; the proximity to water, teeming with lobsters; the vast, star-punctured sky—one might feel trapped. “Have you ever thought of leaving?” I asked Arnold.

“Have I ever thought of leaving? Of course! Who doesn’t?”

How will one know how to live (and what to live for) when old standards for flourishing no longer apply?

On Sunday morning at 10 a.m., I joined thirty locals at Shaker meeting. Men sat on southside benches, women faced them from the north. We kept from making eye contact by adopting postures of prayer. In front, June sat reading her Bible. Arnold entered last.

The meeting began with June’s bullfrog-thick voice: “Let us all praise the Lord.” She read a psalm. Two female guests read: one from Deuteronomy, one from the gospel story of Jesus healing the bleeding woman. Arnold gave the theme of the meeting: “Receiving God’s gifts.” The visitors—the world’s people—spoke their messages, recalling memories and giving thanks, making church with their voices. Arnold watched, evaluated. A woman and her husband recalled a friend, described her earth-covered coffin. Some gave thanks for a chamber-music concert held the previous night. A bearded man slipped in and out of audibility, his holy message unclear. One woman described a ferry ride: good parking, tasty sandwiches. Arnold glared at this last frivolity.

When it was his turn to speak, he took up a preacher’s posture, meeting eyes, sprinkling in jokes. Throughout the meeting, he sang Shaker songs—impromptu, a cappella, thematically connected to whatever had been shared. His mind was a veritable hymnal. Other visitors joined in; few knew all the verses.

Shakers had once danced and shouted and literally shook, sometimes for hours on end. But noise had long given way to silence. We sat primly in the neat square room. No crosses on the wall or stained glass, only a braided rug, a vase of pussy willows, a puffy bouquet of ballet-slipper flowers. When an hour of messages had passed, Arnold stood. “With the work of the meeting apparently finished…” He led a long prayer for the Shaker dead, then went to make lunch. While the rest of us ate nut-covered doughnuts and played with a spaniel that ran at our feet, he tied an apron over his waistcoat and prepared a midday meal for us, the guests in his home. When there were more visitors than Shakers, was this a Shaker meeting at all?

Arnold had encouraged me to send more questions, so I did. His response came on a Sunday night. When I read it, I knew that we wouldn’t speak again.

Dear Friend:

Good to hear from you.

First of all let me just say that I realize we live in a very egalitarian age, but I truly find it offensive when you address Believers present and past by their first names and apostates with the prefix of “Brother.” We have all given up all to follow Christ and all we ask is to be addressed as Brother or Sister and I would ask you to follow that protocol as well.

I have answered your questions within the confines of the body of your questions.

Also Harvest Festival is a glorious event, but I am out straight between the kitchen and the barn so visiting is out of the question.

Take care and God bless.

Peace,

b. Arnold

It seemed I’d made “a mistake in my communication.” I’d left out some “Brothers” and “Sisters,” and had used “Brother” for “Wayne”—who, apparently, was considered an apostate. I was taken aback by Arnold’s anger. He seemed to think that by misusing titles I’d somehow challenged or ignored his authority. I moved on to read his answers to my questions.

Question: What are your feelings about some of the contemporary “representations” of Shakerism: i.e. the Ken Burns documentary [Hands to Work, Hearts to God, 1984] and Hancock Shaker Village [a museum and historical replica village in Massachusetts]? How do those experiences illuminate or cloud an understanding of the faith?

Answer: Neither represents Shakerism only the Shakers represent Shakerism.

Question: What was it like for you to join the community in the middle of a controversy about membership? I know the other extant village had voted to close the ranks. What does membership mean to you?

Answer: You don’t know that as it is a false statement. To be a Shaker is my continual aspiration.

I asked about Wayne.

Answer: God calls us all to a life, whatever that might be. It does not mean it is forever. If you were to look at the history of the Church you would realize that it is a very small percentage of those who enter and remain faithful unto death. Wayne still has contact with us and there is no hard feeling at all. We did everything to make his leaving smooth as we always have with everyone.

Perhaps Arnold was an unreliable narrator, free to snip out some stories while preserving others. Could he really dismiss the historian, the documentarian, the Shakers who’d lived and spoken before? Perhaps he could. He was the historical arbiter. He was the theologian. He was the “lived experience.” All the others were gone now and Arnold was alive. And if testimony was privileged above all other analysis, then he was the only source that mattered.

In his book Radical Hope: Cultural Ethics in the Face of Devastation, philosopher Jonathan Lear writes of a leader of the Crow people named Plenty Coups. After “the buffalo went away” and the Crow had been moved to a reservation, Plenty Coups claimed that “nothing happened.” This perspective (“nothing happened”) isn’t just a sign of depression, or a figure of speech. Plenty Coups really meant to note the end of history, Lear contends, the end of a conception of the Crow “good life” outside of which nothing makes sense.

It is this “possibility of things ceasing to happen...the possibility of collapse” that Arnold lives with daily, the same possibility facing any ethnic and religious community whose numbers are dwindling, including cloistered Catholic orders. It creates an ethical question: How will one know how to live (and what to live for) when old standards for flourishing no longer apply? It’s impossible to imagine; and so “anxiety,” writes Lear, is “an appropriate response of people who are sensitive to the idea that they are living at the horizons of their world.” This anxiety is something we all might experience, to some extent:

We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name.

Yet, Lear writes, we can still “hope for revival: for coming back to life in a form that is not yet intelligible.” What Arnold does in the face of that recognition—cook meals, make hay, sing hymns—represents not just an homage to the past, but a courageous confronting of the future, “[A] daunting form of commitment,” as Lear writes, “to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”

In 2007, the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake sold their rights to develop the property, and put the funds toward necessary repairs. A conservation easement now protects the land; it can only ever be used for sustainable farming and forestry. “We don’t own any of this,” Arnold insisted when we spoke. “None of this is ours. We’re only stewards as they [past Shakers] were all stewards…. Leave it in a better condition than we found it for the next generation.... So that we can be the blessing that those who have gone before us have been.” But a blessing to whom? A nature preserve isn’t something the Shakers would ever have prayed for. This has been their sacred land for more than two hundred years.

“Unless you live the life,” Arnold had told me, “you cannot truly understand it.” And yet, one can at least understand the stakes. The Shakers are not a business, trying to sell chairs and soap. They are not advocates for gender equality or world peace. They are not a historical curiosity. The Shakers are a religious community. For them, the end means nothing less than the end of an idea of heaven.

Afew months ago, the nonprofit Friends of the Shakers announced their annual retreat at Sabbathday Lake, an educational weekend of lectures, tours, music, and shared meals with the community they help support. The event program made reference to a “Brother Andrew,” who’d be giving a lecture with Brother Arnold. A November advertisement on the Shaker Facebook page for “Shaker-made small batch soap and soy candles” was met with the encouraging comment, “Go Brother Andrew!” Had the Sabbathday Shakers welcomed a convert? A more recent post on the Village Facebook page seemed to confirm that, yes, a new brother had joined in January 2019.

Yet no official announcements, images, or reporting about Brother Andrew seem to exist. Neither Arnold nor the Friends of the Shakers replied to my request for comment. Perhaps Brother Andrew is still discerning. Perhaps the community is rejoicing privately for now, celebrating their increase together. Perhaps they don’t want the “world’s people” getting involved quite yet.

“It is not a matter of numbers,” Arnold had told me. “It is a matter of faith.”

Published in the December 2019 issue:



https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/last-shakers

CultNEWS101 Articles: 9/18/2020

The Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants, Legal, QAnon, Wicca, Tvind  

Vice: Cops Raided and Shut Down the Only Magic Mushroom 'Church' in the U.S.

"The Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants in Oakland, California, was the most prominent  "magic mushroom club" in the United States, if not the country's only brick-and-mortar venue for purchasing psilocybin.

But that all ended last week when Oakland police raided the "church." Officers made no arrests but seized $200,000 in cash, cannabis, and several strains of psychedelic mushrooms, according to Dave Hodges, one of its founders.

Initially a "cannabis church," Zide Door added mushrooms to its offerings last summer after the Oakland City Council approved a resolution declaring that arresting adults "involved" with certain psychedelic plants was among the "lowest priority" for local law enforcement. The council didn't remove any state drug laws from the books; it can't. But it told law enforcement to turn the other cheek to possession and use. Cultivation and sales are another story. The council promised to get to that next.

In the meantime, police paid several visits to the church. They made undercover buys in plainclothes and later returned in uniform with vows to shut the operation down. The last time was on April 21, when Officer John Romero gave Hodges clear instruction to close or risk consequences.

The church had shut down its cannabis smoking lounge following the statewide shelter-in-place order during COVID-19 but continued the exchange of mushrooms for cash throughout the spring and summer. So on August 13, Romero and about a dozen other officers returned to the church, located on the ground floor of a nondescript two-story building on a block in East Oakland."

Foreign Policy: QAnon Destroys Lives. Now It's Coming for Congress.

"It's hard—but possible—to save people from the conspiracy theory's grip.

In just a month, some 15,000 users have joined a Reddit community to share their stories of how the QAnon conspiracy is destroying their personal relationships.

"No longer speaking with my mother," one user wrote. "Thanks a lot, Q."

"My wife was arrested as a result of Q," another posted.

"I lost my friends because of Wayfair," wrote another user in July, referring to an iteration of QAnon that holds that the eponymous furniture store is actually a cover for child trafficking. "It's just a Facebook group of friends but being a military wife they're all I have."

The circumstances of the stories posted to r/QAnonCasualties differ, but they share some core similarities: that the sprawling, complex, and entirely invented QAnon conspiracy theory has effectively brainwashed people close to them. These users just want them back.

The toxic influence of the conspiracy theory is no small matter. A QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has just won her Georgia Republican primary and is almost certain to be elected to the U.S. Congress this November. NBC reported this week that QAnon's Facebook followers can be counted in the millions, to say nothing of its adherents on 4chan, Gab, YouTube, and other platforms.

Its reach is global. Posters to the subreddit hail from the United Kingdom, Poland, and farther afield. As Foreign Policy has reported previously, the conspiracy theory has become married to Donald Trump's political movement, it has infiltrated an Iranian dissident group, and it may have even inspired a would-be assassin in Canada.

But on r/QAnonCasualties, the threat is not general or abstract but real and personal. Posters speak of families split apart, relationships ended, friendships canceled. The subreddit offers a painfully instructive window into how conspiracy theories manifest in everyday lives and how social media has become an incredibly powerful diffuser of even the most outlandish and foolish conspiracies."

First Things: THE WOMAN WHO INSPIRED WICCA

"Just under a century ago, in 1921, one of the strangest books ever to be published by Oxford University Press appeared in print: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Alice Murray. By today's academic standards—in fact, even by the standards of the 1920s—Murray's book was filled with transparent flaws in methodology and research. Furthermore, the book's author (a leading Egyptologist) was not qualified to write it. The few scholars then working on the history of European witchcraft dismissed Murray's contribution. Yet in spite of this, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe became an instant hit and captured the imaginations of readers. Within three decades, the book had not only profoundly influenced cultural understandings of witchcraft, but also directly led to the rise of neopaganism and the foundation of a new religion, Wicca, that today has millions of adherents throughout the world.

Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963) was born and brought up in British India—an upbringing that, as with so many Anglo-Indians of the nineteenth century, may have opened her mind to interests beyond Victorian culture. Determined to pursue a career of her own at a time when opportunities for women were limited, Murray tried out both nursing and social work before entering the progressive University College London in 1894, where she studied Egyptology under W. Flinders Petrie. Murray rapidly rose through the academic ranks, and by 1914, she was effectively running the Egyptology department. Her impressive achievements in advancing knowledge of ancient Egypt and higher education for women have, however, been largely overshadowed by her decision to take a detour into writing about European witchcraft."

Tvind Alert: Tvind's fugitive kingpin filmed while shopping in Mexico

"Last month, the Danish newspaper, BT, published new video footage of fugitive and alleged cult leader, Mogens Amdi Petersen, and two high-ranking aides shopping at a Costco supermarket in Ensenada, on Mexico's Baja coast.

The elusive Petersen is founder of the Tvind Teachers Group, widely regarded as a political cult.  Since 2006 he and four associates have been wanted by the judicial authority of their native Denmark for serious financial crimes.  In August 2013, the five were added to the Interpol website's 'Red Notices' database for wanted persons.

In the video, the two women shown with Petersen are fellow Danes, Ruth Sejerø-Olsen and Marlene Gunst, who — since 1992 and as far as we know, still — form the cult's 2nd-level management, directly below Petersen and his 'number one girlfriend' and co-leader, Kirsten Larsen.

Petersen, Gunst, and Larsen are three of the five who are Interpol-listed fugitives.

The video was shot in October 2019 by the photographer Thomas Vann Altheimer, a Dane who has spent some time in northern Baja."

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