THE CHOPRA CENTER FOR WELL BEING TIMELINE

1947:  (October 22) Deepak Chopra was born in New Delhi.

1968:  Chopra graduated from All India Institute of Medical Sciences as a physician.

1970:  Chopra married his wife, Rita. Shortly after, they moved to the United States.

1973:  Chopra became a board-certified physician in internal medicine and endocrinology.

1980:  New England Memorial Hospital named Deepak Chopra Chief-of-staff.

Circa 1985:  Chopra turned to Ayurvedic medicine and Transcendental Meditation (TM) to combat drinking and smoking problems.

1985:  After meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Chopra established the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management in Lancaster, Massachusetts, leaving traditional medicine.

1989:  Quantum Healing, Chopra’s first book, was published. He went on to publish over fifty more books over the next two decades.

1991:  Oprah Winfrey featured Deepak Chopra on her television show, sending his book sales skyrocketing and creating celebrity interest in his services. Later that year, he was featured on the cover of People magazine.

1993:  Chopra left Maharishi’s company and began working for Sharp Health Care as the Executive Director at their Institute for Human Potential and Mind-Body Medicine.

1996:  Sharp Institute came under new ownership, which prompted Chopra to open his own organization, the Chopra Center of Well Being.

1998:  The Journal of the American Medical Association published an entire issue devoted to alternative medicine

2012:  Gotham Chopra (Deepak’s son) directed a documentary titled Decoding Deepak, a film which claimed to provide an inside look at the self-help guru’s daily life.

GROUP FOUNDER/HISTORY

Deepak Chopra was born on October 22, 1948 in New Delhi, India to a wealthy Hindu family. His father was a respected cardiologist at the time and encouraged his son to follow the same path. Chopra, however, had other ideas: he wanted to become a journalist or actor. His love for reading prompted his father to give him the book Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, a text which led him to seek a career in medicine after all (“Deepak Chopra Facts” 2010).

In 1968, Chopra graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences as a physician, and in 1970, he married his wife, Rita. The couple subsequently had two children, Gotham and Mallika. The family moved to the United States in order for Chopra to pursue a residency in a New Jersey Hospital and at the University of Virginia. He received his license as a board certified physician specializing in endocrinology. Over the next few years, he practiced in New England, leading to a position as the Chief of Staff at New England Memorial Hospital beginning in 1980 (Baer 2003).

During a trip to India in 1981, Chopra was introduced to Ayurveda, an ancient Indian folk medicine tradition. Ayurveda would prove to provide the basis for Chopra’s future theories. As a result of stress tied to his role as a physician, Chopra reports drinking

and smoking heavily while on staff at New England Memorial Hospital. Having become skeptical of traditional biomedicine, he turned to Ayurvedic medicine to combat these problems (Baer 2003). At this time in the United States, the holistic health movement had gained a foothold in popular culture. Reading a book on Transcendental Meditation led Chopra to attend a seminar conducted by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (MMY), the “father of TM.” Soon after, Chopra began to develop a friendship with the yogi. Reportedly, the combination of TM and Ayurveda caused a dramatic personal transformation, and in 1985, he left traditional medicine to open the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management in Lancaster, Massachusetts (Baer 2003).

Deepak Chopra published his first book, Quantum Healing, in 1989. The book describes ways in which to heal the body from within using quantum mechanics (Ismael 2009). The next book published was titled Unconditional

Life: Discovering the Power to Fulfill Your Dreams. These writings gained widespread popularity after Chopra appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his books, leading to his appearance on the cover People Magazine and launching him into the public spotlight. He has gone on to author over sixty-five books and co-authored many more articles on topics such as leadership, anti-aging, God, wealth and intelligence. He has continued to appear publicly to promote alternative medicine and holistic health regularly. His success has led him to offer classes and products that reflect his spiritual and medical points of view.

Chopra has also been a contributor to the Huffington Post, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Times of India. He has served as a senior scientist with the Gallup Corporation, an adjunct professor at Columbia School of Business, and maintained medical licenses in Massachusetts and California. His net worth is estimated at eighty million dollars.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Deepak Chopra bases his system of healing and transformation on a combination of alternative medicine and scientific concepts. His core beliefs rely on the idea that the body and spirit are deeply connected. Chopra frequently uses the term “quantum healing” in discussing the human body’s capacity to heal itself. In a 1995 interview, Chopra described this as “healing the body-mind from a quantum level…which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body” (Chopra 1995). Chopra indicates that meditation is an important part of bringing about these changes, although he no longer promotes Transcendental Meditation. Overall, his philosophies aim to nurture “balance, healing, transformation, and the expansion of awareness” (The Chopra Center 2014).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

In regards to rituals, Deepak Chopra and the Chopra Center for Well Being promote a variety of alternative practices, often inspired by eastern spiritual principles. Meditation is a large part of affecting transformation within the individual. Online, the Chopra Center Marketplace offers a variety of tools for achieving balance and optimal health, such as aromatherapy products, audio products for meditation practice, books, supplements and herbs, to name a few. Websites associated with the Chopra Center and Deepak Chopra also offer online format programs, online daily meditations and podcasts to aid in individual practice.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

After founding and managing the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management in Lancaster, Massachusetts between 1985 and 1993, Chopra left the Maharishi Health Center to work for Sharp Institute for Human Potential and Mind Body Medicine.In 1996, he left Sharp in order to open the Chopra Center for Well Being with neurologist David Simon. The Center states that its goal is to “guide guests in timeless tools and healing principles that they can use to nurture their own health, restore balance, and create greater joy and fulfillment in their lives.” It offers classes, medical consultations, spa treatments, online Vedic counseling and Ayurvedic products to promote balance and well-being (The Chopra Center 2014). In addition to the original Chopra Center, an alternate center for the treatment of addiction has been established. The Chopra Center maintains a website offering information regarding Dr. Chopra’s theories and links to Chopra’s subsidiaries (Well World, Intent, Deepak Central, Deepak Chopra Radio, Deepak Homebase, Daily Challenge, Ahalife, and Curiosity).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Chopra came under investigation by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1991 when he published an article with two other Indian physicians reporting the benefits of Ayurvedic medicine. Because of their involvement with a commercial Ayurvedic organization, they were accused of misrepresentation (“Deepak Chopra Facts” 2010). This case was settled out of court, but the terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Chopra clearly has attempted to bridge the gap between medicine and spirituality, and he has frequently received criticism from the scientific community. Some members of the scientific community, particularly those working in physics and evolutionary biology, have labeled Chopra a pseudo-scientist, stating that his science is not “real science” as it contains components that cannot be falsified (such as universal consciousness). His strongest critics state that his rhetoric sounds scientific and believable, but upon examination it is pure “quackery” (Chopra and Coyne 2013). The Chopra Center, however, continually co-sponsors university-level research into alternative medicine practices and the effects of meditation (Chopra and Coyne 2013).

Chopra has also been criticized for the financial practices of his organizations. Some critics have referred to him as a hypocrite, citing his contradictory practice of charging large amounts of money to speak on the dangers of materialism while exuding an image of material success (“Deepak Chopra Facts” 2010).

Finally, Chopra’s son, Gotham, produced a documentary in 2012. In the documentary Gotham Chopra offered an inside look at Deepak’s daily life that contained some critical elements. In the film Deepak Chopra is depicted as a self-involved, disconnected husband and father who obsessively monitors his Blackberry, spouts confusing philosophical-existential quotes and plays the guru role even within his family (Harris and Brown 2012). At least publicly, Deepak Chopra has reacted to the documentary as an opportunity for his own personal growth.

Deepak Chopra has faced ongoing challenge and criticism as he has attempted to integrate alternative medicine, holistic health, and spirituality. This opposition and his controversiality notwithstanding, he remains a popular and respected source of spiritual direction for his large following. His organizations continue to thrive, and his books remain influential in holistic health circles.

REFERENCES

Baer, Hans A. 2003. “The Work of Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra – Two Holistic Health/New Age Gurus: A Critique of the Holistic Health/New Age Movements.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2:233-50. Accessed from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655336 on 12 April 12 2014).

Brown, Ely, and Dan Harris. 2012. “Deepak Chopra on His BlackBerry, Snoring and Consciousness: Spiritual Teacher’s Son’s Intimate Portrait.” ABC News , September 27. Accessed from http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/decoding-deepak-deepak-chopras-sons-intimate-portrait/story?id=17340973 on 12 April 2014).

Chopra Center for Well Being. 2014. Accessed from https://www.chopra.com/our-services/chopra-center-spa/chopra-center-spa-location on 12 April 2014.

Chopra, Deepak. 1995. “Quantum Healing.” Accessed from http://www.healthy.net/scr/interview.aspx?Id=167 on 12 April 2014.

Chopra, Deepak, and Jerry Coyne. 2013. “Deepak Chopra Responds to Pseudoscience Allegations. Jerry Coyne Fires Back.” New Republic , November 18. Accessed from http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115600/deepak-chopra-responds-pseudoscience-allegations on 12 April 2014.

Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2010. “Deepak Chopra Facts.” Accessed from http://biography.yourdictionary.com/deepak-chopra on 12 April 2014.

Post Date:
12 April 2014

CHOPRA CENTER FOR WELL BEING VIDEO CONNECTIONS

CHRIST OF THE OZARKS TIMELINE

1898 (February 7):  Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith was born in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, to Lyman Z. Smith and Sarah Smith.

1918:  Gerald Smith earned a degree in Biblical Studies from Valparaiso University in Indiana, then went on to become a minister in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

1922:  Gerald Smith married Elna Sorenson.

1929:  Smith became a pastor at Kings Highway Disciples of Christ Church in Shreveport, Louisiana.

1929:  Seven months after arriving in Shreveport, Smith resigned from the church before they could fire him for his continued association with political populist Huey Long.

1935 (September):  After Huey Long’s assassination, Smith developed an alliance with Francis E. Townsend.

1936:  Smith and Townsend joined Father Charles E. Coughlin to create the Union Party, which soon faltered due to personal rivalries.

Late 1930s–1940s:  Smith organized several groups to fight communism, liberalism, organized labor and Jews.

1956:  Smith made a final bid for the White House as a candidate of the Christian Nationalist Party.

1964:  Gerald Smith and his wife Elna M. Smith bought a house in Eureka Springs and made it their retirement home.

1966 (June 25):  The Elna M. Smith Foundation completed and dedicated the Christ of the Ozarks statue, the first of Smith’s five Sacred Projects, with Emmet Sullivan as sculptor.

1966–1975:  Christ Only Art Gallery, Bible Museum and the outdoor amphitheater (to house the Passion Play) were all built.

1976 (April 15):  Gerald Smith died of pneumonia in California.

2012 (December):  Cornerstone Bank began “amicable foreclosure” of land at Eureka Springs, including the statue.

2013:  The theme park and all land (including the statue) was purchased by the South Central Oklahoma Christian Broadcasting radio ministry.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Gerald L. K. Smith was born to Lyman Z. Smith and Sarah Smith on February 7, 1898, in Pardeeville, Wisconsin. He was descended from three generations of Disciples of Christ ministers and, after earning a degree in Biblical Studies from Valparaiso University in Indiana in 1918, became a minister himself in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. Four years later, in 1922, Smith married Elna Sorenson, and they adopted their only child, Gerald L. K. Smith Jr. In 1929, after Smith moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to work as a pastor at Kings Highway Disciples of Christ Church, he met Huey Long, a lawyer and future U.S. senator. Due to Smith’s association with Long, whose populist leanings were controversial, Smith was forced to resign from his post as pastor to avoid being fired by his angry and conservative church directors.

Smith’s close relationship with Long won him a position as a public speaker for Long’s campaign, while allowing him a platform with which to promote his own anti-Semitic and fascist sentiments. Long was planning to become a candidate in the 1936 presidential election but was assassinated in September, 1935. After Long’s death, Smith joined with retired physician Francis E. Townsend and Roman Catholic priest Father Charles E. Coughlin to form the Union Party. The party chose to back North Dakota Congressman William Lemke against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, the party experienced divisive personal rivalries, and Lemke’s candidacy foundered.

In the years that followed, Smith found several other ways to promote his controversial views. He formed the Committee of One Million, the Christian Nationalist Crusade, a monthly publication called The Cross and the Flag , the America First Party and the Christian Nationalist party. These initiatives all centered around opposition to communism, liberalism, organized labor, or Jews. The organizations served as a base for several unsuccessful campaigns for both the U.S. Senate and the presidency. In his last bid for the presidency under the banner of the Christian Nationalist Party in 1956, Smith only garnered support from the far-right fringe, although he did have enough contributors to fund his campaign.

In 1964, Gerald Smith and his wife bought Penn Castle in Eureka Spring, Arkansas. This Ozark Mountain town would become their retirement home. Two years after their arrival, Smith began his long-term goal of creating his Sacred Projects and the Great Passion Play religious theme park. The first of these projects was the Christ of the Ozarks Statue, a seven-story statue of Jesus. The statue itself was created by sculptor Emmet Sullivan and, with the help of the Elna Smith Foundation, was completed and dedicated in 1966. The statue was built with more than two million pounds of mortar and steel.

In the years that followed, Smith would add the Christ Only Art Gallery, a Bible Museum and a Passion Play to his great Christian theme park. These Sacred Projects were a significant economic boon for Eureka Springs and so, despite some local criticism, Smith planned another, larger project: “a $100 million, Disney-like replica of the Holy Land, including the Great Wall of Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee, and the River Jordan” (Jeansonne 2009). However, only the wall was completed before Smith’s death. GeraldSmith died of pneumonia on April 15, 1976 in his winter home in California. He and his wife were buried at the foot of the Christ of the Ozarks Statue.

The statue stands atop Magnetic Mountain and faces west, reportedly to thank Eureka Springs for allowing Smith to create his lifelong dream (“Christ of the Ozarks” n.d.). Counting the 1,500 foot-tall mountain on which the statue rests, Christ of the Ozarks (which itself is sixty-seven feet in height) is the third-tallest Jesus in the world. By some accounts, the statue originally had feet beneath its robe, but they were removed to meet height regulations so that a warning beacon would not have to be placed on the top of the head.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Until 2013, Christ of the Ozarks, and the 167 acres of land that surround it, were controlled by the non-profit Elna Smith Foundation, named for Gerald Smith’s late wife. Keith Butler served as the chairperson of the Elna Smith Foundation. Sam Ray was the Executive Director of The Great Passion Play until 2013 and played a major role in the day-to-day management of the statue. However, the organization was unable to meet mortgage and tax obligations, which led to initiation of a foreclosure action by Cornerstone Bank and a search for funding by the foundation (Brantley 2012; Millar 2012). Ultimately, the park was purchased by the South Central Oklahoma Christian Broadcasting radio ministry in 2013 (“Saved” 2013).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

This statue has faced a number of obstacles, both prior to and following its construction. The statue’s financial problems began early. Smith began the project with only $5,000 in resources. However, Smith managed to raise $1,000,000 in donations for the project almost immediately (Schick 2013). The project remained solvent until the mid-2000s when declining attendance at the Great Passion Play and a declining national economy combined to create a financial crisis. Long-term financial viability now rests with support from the Gospel Station Network.

The statue has also been the target of some sarcastic humor. Smith chose a sculptor for the project who had never worked on a human figure. This has led to ongoing criticism about the shape and features of the statue. Negative comments about the statue include it having no passion behind its eyes, resembling Willie Nelson in a dress, and looking like a milk carton with a tennis ball on top. Locals sometimes refer to the statue as the milk carton with arms. Nonetheless, as one guide at the statue commented, “I don’t really like the statue. The features are harsh and hard. But it’s a memorial to our Savior, and for that it’s fine” (“Christ of the Ozarks n.d.)

A final challenge that appears to have been resolved is the anti-Semitism associated with the entire project historically. For example, Smith commented once that the theme park was “the only presentation of its kind in the world which has not diluted its content to flatter the Christ-hating Jews” (Jeansonne 2009). However, Smith’s death and the appointment of new management have resulted in a much more open and welcoming environment. Subsequently, the Great Passion Play publicly renounced Smith’s views, opening performances with the statement,”We here at the Great Passion Play believe we are all equally culpable for Jesus’ death. No one people group was or is solely responsible. No, it was the sins of the world that put him on the cross” (Brantley 2012). As of 2012, there were more than 7,500,000 visitors to the Christ of the Ozarks statue, and new financial backing appears to have assured its continued public presence.

REFERENCES

Brantley, Max. 2012. “With Attendance Down, ‘Great Passion Play’ Facing Closure.” Arkansas Times, September 25. Accessed from http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/09/25/with-attendance-down-great-passion-play-facing-closure on 1 May 2014.

“Christ of the Ozarks. n.d. ” Roadside America. Accessed from http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/17113 on 1 May 2014.

“Eureka’s Jesus on the Mountain.” Explore Southern History, 2011. Accessed from http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/eureka6.html on 1 May 2014.

Jeansonne, Glen and Michael Gauger. 2009. “Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith.” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture . Accessed from http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1767 on 1 May 2014.

Millar, Lindsey. 2012. “Great Passion Play’ Closes, Foreclosure Underway.” Arkansas Times , December 4. Accessed from http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/12/04/great-passion-play-closes-foreclosure-underway on 7 May 2014 .

“Saved: Great Passion Play to Resume Shows in May.” 2013. Ozarks First , March 1. Accessed from http://www.ozarksfirst.com/story/saved-great-passion-play-to-resume-shows-in-may/d/story/0Ccfn3SBBkWmGAm81564cg

Schick, Dennis. 2013. “Great Passion Play.” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. December 2. Accessed from http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=5651 on 1 May 2014.

Post Date:
9 May 2014

CHRIST OF THE OZARKS VIDEO CONNECTIONS

CHRIST THE REDEEMER TIMELINE

1850s (mid century):  Father Pedro Maria Boss requested financing from Princess Isabel to build a large religious monument atop a mountain in Rio de Janeiro.

1870:  The idea of building the monument was dismissed.

1889:  Brazil became a republic, with a constitutional provision for separation of church and state.

1921:  A second proposal for building a landmark statue on a mountain in Rio de Janeiro was prepared by the Archdiocese. Funds were raised by donations from Brazil’s Catholics.

1922 (February):  Heitor Da Silva Costa’s design was chosen.

1924:  Costa went to Europe to consult with sculptors. Paul Landowski was awarded the commission.

1926:  Construction of the monument commenced.

1931:  Construction was completed.

1931 (October 12):  A dedication ceremony was held.

2003:  Renovations included addition of an elevator, escalators, and walkways.

2006 (October 12):  A chapel in the base was consecrated, allowing weddings and baptisms to be performed at the monument.

2007 (July 7):  Christ the Redeemer was named as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

2010:  The monument was renovated; another renovation was scheduled for 2020.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

In the mid-1850s, Father Pedro Maria Boss asked Brazil’s Princess Isabel, provisional head of state, for funding to build a large religious monument in Rio de Janeiro to look out over the city. Father Boss proposed that the monument would be constructed in Princess Isabel’s honor (Dunnell n.d.) It was to be a statue of Jesus, called Christ the Redeemer, built on Corcovado, a wooded mountain in the hills of Rio. Princess Isabel signaled her reluctance by not acting on Father Boss’s request. When her father, Emperor Pedro II, returned from the Paraguayan war in 1870, no further mention was made nor action taken on the proposal.

When the monarchy was overthrown and Brazil became a republic in 1889, separation of church and state was adopted as a founding principle, which complicated the construction of a religious monument. In the aftermath of World War I, a group of Brazilians from the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro “feared an advancing tide of godlessness” (Bowater, Mulvey and Misra 2014) and, in 1921, they proposed building a massive statue of Christ as a way of reclaiming Rio de Janeiro for Christianity. Sugar Loaf Mountain, a smooth dome shape rising from the water of Guanabara Bay, was this group’s suggested location, but Corcovado, the site from the initial request, was judged to be a better choice.

Several monument designs were considered. The first commission for designing the statue went to Carlos Oswald. His vision had Christ carrying his cross and holding a globe in his hands while he stood over a pedestal meant to symbolize the world. In the end, the existing statue of Christ, with arms outstretched to show universal love and acceptance, was selected. The Archdiocese asked for donations from the many Catholics living in Brazil, and in the single week set aside for fundraising (Semana do Monumento), enough money was raised to begin the project, with money continuing to come in for its completion (Dunnell n.d.).

Heitor da Silva Costa, a Brazilian engineer, designed the statue, and French-Polish sculptor, Paul Landowski crafted it, with much of the construction work taking place in France. A Romanian sculptor, Gheorghe Leonid, designed the face of the statue. Together, Costa and Landowski, who was Jewish, began building the statue in 1926 and completed it in 1931. The original construction cost was $250,000, which would be over $3,000,000 in current dollars (Dunnell n.d.). A dedication ceremony was held on October 12, 1931, the day of Our Lady of Apareida, the patron saint of Brazil (The wonders of the world). Until 2010, it was the largest art deco statue in the world, before being surpassed in height by Christ the King in Poland.

Since the monuments construction, numerous renovations have been made. The statue is constructed from concrete over a steel frame and faced with over 6,000,000 soapstone tiles. The quarry for the original soapstone has closed, and matching replacement tiles therefore are difficult to obtain. Over time, the statue’s surface has become slightly darker with each renovation. To commemorate the monument’s seventy-fifth anniversary, a chapel commemorated to Our Lady of the Apparition (Nossa Senhora Aparecida) was added in the base of the monument in 2006. It can seat 150 people and accommodate weddings and baptisms. Christ the Redeemer has become one of Brazil’s most frequented tourist sites, drawing about two million visitors annually.

Although its inception and inspiration were religious, the statue has broader significance. One of the early backers of the project in the 1920s, Count Celso, described it as a “monument to science, art and religion” (Bowater, Mulvey, and Misra 2014). Padre Omar Raposo, rector of the chapel at the base of the statue, says, “It’s a religious symbol, a cultural symbol and a symbol of Brazil. Christ the Redeemer brings a marvelous vista of welcoming open arms to all those who pass through the city of Rio de Janeiro” (Bowater, Mulvey, and Misra 2014). During Rio’s annual Carnival, a street party dubbed Suvaco do Cristo (Christ’s Armpit) winds its way beneath the statue in tribute to its outstretched arms overhead.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Corcovado is located inside the Tijuca National Park, and so administration for this landmark is shared between the Archdiocese of Rio and the Ministry of the Environment (Morales 2013). Administration of the chapel is in the hands of Padre Omar Raposo. The Archdiocese and the Ministry of the Environment work together to organize access to the shrine.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The construction of the statue itself was a major challenge. The immense size of the statue and the enormous length of the outstretched arms meant the piece had to be extraordinarily strong, so building materials were considered carefully. Designer Costa decided on steel-reinforced concrete, the “material of the future,” he said (Bowater, Mulvey and Misra 2014). However, he considered concrete to be too rough and crude to be the exterior finish. He happened on a fountain on the Champs Elysees covered in a silvery mosaic. “By seeing how the small tiles covered the curved profiles of the fountain, I was soon taken by the idea of using them on the image which I always had in my thoughts,” wrote Costa. “Moving from the concept to the making of it took less than 24 hours. The next morning I went to a ceramic studio where I made the first samples” (Bowater, Mulvey and Misra 2014). He chose soapstone for the tiles because of its durability. From quarries near the city of Ouro Preto, small triangles of pale colored soapstone, 3cm x 3cm x 4cm and 5mm thick, were cut and subsequently glued to squares of linen cloth by women in one of the parishes near the foot of Corcovado. Renovation also presents a challenge since perfectly matching tiles are not available. As a spokesman for Brazil’s National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage noted, “The stones of Christ are hard to find” (Bowater, Mulvey and Misra 2014).

Given the statue’s size and location on a mountain top, an ongoing threat to the monument will be lightning strikes. The Brazilian Institute of Space Research estimates that there are two to four direct hits each year, but historically the damage has been minor. Some exceptionally severe lightning storms have occurred in the past few years, however. Bowater, Mulvey and Misra (2014) report that “In the past few years, there have been some cases of storms registering more than 1,000 lightning bolts, which did not occur previously.” These events are causing the Institute’s atmospheric electricity group to revise the grounding system of the lightning rods. The statue has lost a middle fingertip and there has been damage to the back of the statue’s head in recent years. The statue has also been the target of vandalism (Ribeiro 2010).

Despite the various problems in maintaining the monument in a hostile physical environment, Christ the Redeemer has continued to receive recognition and serve as a model for other statues. Christ the Redeemer was named to the New Seven Wonders of the World, by a globally organized popular vote, along with other notable sites (the Great Wall of China, Rome’s Colosseum, Machu Picchu, and the Taj Mahal) (Wilkinson 2007). Tentative plans have been announced for Brazil to create a replica statue in England in advance of the 2016 Olympic Games (“Brazil Plans to Build” 2012). Other replicas, inspired by Christ the Redeemer have already been created at sites such as Lisbon, Portugal; Guanajuato, Mexico; Havana, Cuba; and Arkansas, United States.

REFERENCES

Bowater, Donna, Stephen Mulvey, and Tanvi Misra. 2014. “ Arms Wide Open.” BBC News, March 10. Accessed from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_7141/index.html on 27 April 2014.

“Brazil Plans to Build Christ the Redeemer Replica Statue in London.” The Guardian, January 26. Accessed from http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2012/jan/26/brazil-christ-redeemer-replica-london on 27 April 2014.

“Christ the Redeemer.” 2011. The Wonders of the World . Accessed from http://www.thewondersoftheworld.net/christtheredeemerstatue.html on 27 April 2014.

Dunnell, Tony. n.d. “History of Christ the Redeemer Statue, Brazil.” Accessed from https://suite.io/tony-dunnell/2stf2j7 on 27 April 2014.

Morales, Elizabeth. 2013. “Good to Go for Rio.” World Youth Day. Accessed from http://worldyouthday.com/good-to-go-for-rio-jmj-youth-preps-for-pilgrims.

Wilkinson, Tracy. 2007. “The Seven Wonders of the World, 2.0.” Los Angeles Times, July 8. Accessed from http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-wonders8jul08,0,299368.story?coll=la-default-underdog#axzz305XU1q7T on 27 April 2014.

Ribeiro, Patricia. 2010. “Christ the Redeemer Statue in Rio: After the Rain and Vandalism.” Go Brazil, April 16. Accessed from http://gobrazil.about.com/b/2010/04/16/christ-the-redeemer-statue-in-rio-after-the-rain-and-vandalism.htm.

Post Date:
28 April 2014

CHRIST THE REDEEMER VIDEO CONNECTIONS

CHURCH OF ALMIGHTY GOD / EASTERN LIGHTNING TIMELINE

Early 1991:  A precursor organization, “Church of the Lord of New Abilities” (新能力主教会 xin nengli zhu jiaohui), proselytized in Henan province in the People’s Republic of China. The Almighty God began to speak through the woman who later came to be worshipped as the Female Christ.

1995: The Church of Almighty God (hereafter CAG) was formally identified as a cult” (邪教 xiejiao) by China’s Ministry of Public Security, thus making its activities illegal.

1997:  CAG’s scripture, The Word Appears in the Flesh (话在肉身显现 Hua zai roushen xianxian) was completed.

1999:  The CAG was reported to be proclaiming the end of the world in 2000, and was targeted alongside Falun Gong.

?2000:  Founder Zhao Weishan was granted political asylum in U.S.

2002:  Members CAG allegedly kidnapped thirty four leaders of the China Gospel Fellowship network of Protestant house churches in an attempt to convert them to the movement.

2012 (December):  Chinese authorities arrested one thousand who were publicly proclaiming the imminent destruction of the world.

2014 (May):  Five alleged members of Eastern Lightning beat a stranger to death in a fast food restaurant in Shandong province. Two were executed in February 2015; three others were jailed for offences related to this incident and their involvement in the “cult.”

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The Church of Almighty God has historically taught that Jesus Christ has returned to earth as a Chinese woman. The Church previously stated that this Female Christ converted to Protestantism in the late 1980s, when the religion was experiencing rapid growth in northern China. She was said to be of ordinary appearance and background. [Image at right] The basis on which she came to be worshipped as the returned Christ has remained clear; rather, the movement described her advent as “hidden” (Church of Almighty God, “A Brief Introduction” 2015). She does not make public appearances, and only a small number of people are destined to recognize her deity.

Other Chinese sources present a far more complex account of Eastern Lightning’s origins. They charge a middle-aged man named Zhao Weishan 赵维山, once a physics teacher or railroad worker, with founding the movement.  These sources report that Zhao was a member of the “Shouters” religious movement in the late 1980s. He left the group with other believers in 1989 to form an offshoot, in which he presented himself as a “Lord of Ability” (能力主 nengli zhu). In May 1992, a Chinese Christian magazine reported that a group called “the New Church of the Lord of Ability” (新能力主教会xin nengli zhu jiaohui) had been distributing tracts and cassette recordings in southwest Henan since March 1991. One of these tracts was titled Lightning from the East (Xu 1992).

In late 2012, Chinese media began to identify the Female Christ as Shanxi woman Yang Xiangbin 杨向彬.  Reports from this time have stated that in 1991, Zhao Weishan was in the doldrums following the suppression of his fledgling new religious movement in Heilongjiang province. He fled to Henan, where he came across Yang (b.1973), who had experienced a mental breakdown after failing her university entrance examination, and had been writing a religious text that she claimed was “God’s Word.”  Zhao recognized the potential that she and her writing held to attract followers, they became lovers, and Zhao declared her to be the Female Christ in 1993 (Wang “Meiti cheng …”).

Zhao is reported to have entered the U.S. and sought political asylum on the basis of religious persecution in around the year 2000, possibly with Yang. The Church has now internationalized, with a strong presence in the USA and South Korea, and smaller groups of adherents (some of whom have gained political asylum on grounds of religious persecution) elsewhere. Within China, it has transformed from an exclusively rural movement, to one that can increasingly be found in major cities, attracting middle-class converts. The number of adherents within China cannot be ascertained due to the group’s illegal status, but an estimate of 1,000,000 members is credible.

A flashpoint in the Church’s history occurred in May 2014, when five alleged members of CAG beat a stranger to death in a fast food restaurant in Shandong province. Two were executed in February 2015; three others were jailed for offences related to this incident and their involvement in the “cult.” There was, however, significant evidence that those concerned were not members of CAG at the time of the murder (for a forensic examination, see  Lü Yingchun – Zhang Fan Group). Nevertheless, this date was significant for CAG as it marked the beginning of a sizeable crackdown on the group.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The popular moniker of ‘Eastern Lightning’ has been coined by people outside CAG in response to its use of a verse in the biblical gospel of Matthew (24:27): “For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Here, Jesus speaks of his own eventual return to earth and “the end of the age”; he will be the “lightning.” It has historically been the case that to adherents, the Female Christ revealed in the early 1990s is the lightning that Jesus foretold, and as such signals the arrival of the end times. Thus, she fulfills New Testament prophecy as Jesus’ coming fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. The “east” mentioned in the Matthew verse is identified as China, and so Jesus prophesied that Christ would return there, before Eastern Lightning spreads to western nations (Church of Almighty God, “A Brief Introduction” 2015; “Question 17”).

Since this web entry was first written in 2014, however, CAG texts have expunged references to the Female Christ. In the most recent (December 2015) iteration of its “About Us” statement, “he” replaces “she” in the following quotation: “Christ was born into an ordinary family in northern China. From childhood, He had believed in God with all His heart. He gradually grew up as an ordinary person does. In 1989, just as the Holy Spirit was working on a large scale in the house church, Christ gave up His studies and formally entered the house church. At the time, Christ was fervent in His heart and He yearned to serve God and perform His duty” (Church of Almighty God, “A Brief Introduction” 2020). Likewise, a search of the CAG’s websites for “female Christ” now yields only pages criticising popular misinformation about the group. This revision of the Church’s doctrine may reflect the difficulty for Christians to convert to believing in a Female Christ, and / or an attempt to deify Zhao Weishan.

CAG maintains that Almighty God’s interaction with humankind has been marked by three dispensations. The first of these, the Age of Law (律法时代 lüfa shidai), corresponds with the events of the Old Testament. CAG adopts a chronology that is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and believes that the events spanning the Age of Law (i.e. from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ) occurred over a period of 4,000 years. During this time, God revealed himself as Yahweh, and his principal “work” was to create the world, lead the Israelites out of Egypt and give them his commandments.

The birth of Jesus marked the end of the Age of Law and the beginning of the Age of Grace (恩典时代 endian shidai), which covered events up until the advent of the returned Christ. Jesus was compassionate and loving, and during this time the divine mission was to die on the cross for the redemption of humans (Church of Almighty God, “The Vision of God’s Work (2).” However, CAG teaches that Jesus was “only a normal man” until he began his ministry at the age of twenty-nine, three years prior to his crucifixion. Moreover, CAG teaches that Jesus only partially completed the work of salvation. Although he offered himself as a sacrifice for sin, “men” continue to be “corrupted” (败坏 baihuai) by Satan; while Jesus’ death enabled their sin to be forgiven, their sinful nature remains fundamentally unaltered. It is for the transformation of this sinful nature that the Almighty God, through the new Christ, is working in the present Age of The Kingdom (国度时代 guodu shidai).

A big part of the way that transformation occurs is through judgment, frequently dispensed by the Christ or Almighty God in the form of misfortune. As of July 2020 there was scant mention of COVID-19 in the Church’s materials, but a generalized doctrine that the end was nigh continued to feature prominently. Teachings around misfortune well illustrate that in addition to explicit and extensive Christian references, the CAG’s teachings have been influenced by indigenous Chinese religious traditions. I call to mind, for example, the popular Mother of Lightning (电母 dian mu), also believed to punish evil with bolts of lightning (Dunn 2015: 84).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The Church of Almighty God adopts ritual, practices, and indeed some doctrines that resemble those of popular Chinese Protestantism (cf. Kao 2009; Lian 2010; Madsen 2013). In light of the group’s proscribed status in the PRC, worship meetings tend to involve a small number of people and be held in homes or other inconspicuous locations. There is no formal liturgy, and CAG publications do not mention the common Christian rites of baptism and communion. During services, members listen to preaching based around the group’s scripture, share testimonies, and sing the group’s hymns.

As the rapid growth of the movement over the past few decades suggests, the movement emphasizes proselytizing. Much of the group’s activities revolve around the circulation of lay evangelists, and the cultivation of social networks which are conducive to conversion. In the movement’s early days, literature (apologetic, anecdotes of divine retribution, tales of dreams and visions) was circulated in hard copy; now, this is complemented by the sharing of social media and electronic files. CAG’s websites today boast a swathe of feature-length faith-themed movies and concerts. Non-members also allege that CAG routinely uses kidnapping, violence and deception in recruitment (China Gospel Fellowship).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Like other new religious movements, CAG is a tiered organization. A Supervisory Unit (监察组 jiancha zu) is an administrative structure responsible for communicating instructions from “the top,” and inspecting and reporting on churches every six months. Leaders（带领 dailing) and their Assistants (配搭 peida) lead churches at regional (区qü), sub-regional (小区 xiaoqü) and church (教会 jiaohui) levels. Each region and sub-region has a Preacher (讲道员 jiangdao yuan), and Deacons for Evangelism (传福音执事 chuan fuyin zhishi).

Although CAG clearly has the resources to maintain and grow transprovincial and even transnational religious networks, it is likely that its operation at a grassroots level is largely decentralized and informal, particularly in areas where it is being cracked down upon.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) permits the five official, “major” religions of Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Daoism and Islam to operate openly subject to regulation, but it is often difficult for other religious groups to operate within the PRC. Being classified as a “cult” renders the Church of Almighty God’s activities susceptible to prosecution, because Article 300 of the Criminal Law of 1997 prescribes a jail term of three to seven years’ imprisonment for “Whoever forms or uses sects (会道门 huidaomen) or evil cults (邪教 xiejiao) or uses superstition to undermine the implementation of the laws and administrative rules and regulations of the State.” (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xingfa; Full Text of New Chinese Resolution Banning Cults; Palmer 2008.)

The antagonism between Chinese authorities and the Church of Almighty God is mutual. The Church of Almighty God continues to interpret all opposition to as being part of the “trials and tribulations” which the Bible teaches precede the apocalypse and the coming of the new heaven and new earth. CAG’s representation of China as dark and primitive subverts the nationalism which has been a significant source of support for the CCP in recent decades. More confrontationally, the group identifies the CCP as the “big red dragon” of Revelation (9:12), and thereby depicts the CCP as an incarnation of the devil which will soon be slain (Dunn 2008; Church of Almighty God, “A Brief Introduction” 2015, 2020).

In addition to these symbolic challenges, Chinese authorities have been concerned about the Church of Almighty God’s ability to gather members together, in part due to the historical involvement of some religious associations in armed rebellions (Naquin 1976; Overmyer 1976). This was notably the case around the year 2000, as the political campaign targeting Falun Gong was underway and CAG anticipated the end of the world (Chinese Law and Government). Again, in late 2012, groups of CAG members gathered in public spaces throughout China to proclaim that the end of the world was nigh and demand the release of members who had been arrested. Chinese authorities responded with a swift crackdown, arresting approximately 1,000 members in Qinghai and Guizhou provinces.

In China, the CAG has never had any champions, but public opposition to the group has grown in recent years. Chinese Protestants decry the heretical nature of the movement’s doctrine and rue their successful attempts to proselytize Christians (Cao 2012; China Gospel Fellowship). Community-led groups which oppose the Church of Almighty God have also arisen to offer support to those affected by the group.

The group’s notoriety increased both domestically and internationally following the May 2014 murder of a woman in a fast food restaurant in Zhaoyuan city of Shandong province. It was alleged that five members of the group had been soliciting strangers’ cell phone numbers in the diner for the purpose of proselytizing. When a sales assistant in a nearby women’s clothing store refused to divulge hers, the quintet declared her an “evil spirit” and beat her to death with a mop handle (CCTV News; Gracie 2014). Zhang Lidong and daughter Zhang Fan were executed in February 2015; three others were sentenced to jail terms.

While accused ringleaders Lü Yingchun and Zhang Fan had clearly strayed far from CAG by the time of the murder, there is evidence that the pair had come into contact with, and were influenced by, the movement in an earlier phase of their lives. In January 2007, Zhang Fan picked up a book by “Almighty God” and began to believe in Him. Lü Yingchun told the court that she knew that she was “God himself” from the time she was young, but realized that she was the (or one of the) “firstborn” (长子zhang zi) upon reading “the Almighty God book” in 1998. “Firstborn” is a term used in CAG scripture, following the Bible, to refer to those who would receive God’s inheritance (that is, all believers), and also to Christ himself. In their statements to the court both Lü  and Zhang described themselves as “firstborn.” Mention of an “Almighty God book” suggests that Lü too came into contact with CAG teachings. Indeed, Lü recalled that she enjoyed spending time with others who believed in God, suggesting that she was not openly splitting from CAG at that stage of her life (Yang 2014) (for a more detailed examination, see Lü Yingchun – Zhang Fan Group).

Study of CAG remains challenging, though Massimo Introvigne (2020) claims to have gotten “inside” the CAG. In recent years more Sinophone studies of CAG have emerged. While earlier works published in the early 2000s (around the time of the campaign against Falun Gong) were quite general and vague in their descriptions, recent Chinese academic articles have sometimes been based on fieldwork with CAG communities at the county level (e.g. Wang & Xu 2017). The analysis offered by these works is still bound by CCP sensibilities towards “cults” and their suppression, but nevertheless constitutes significant progress in studying CAG.

REFERENCES

Cao Shengjie (曹圣洁). 2012. “Jingti yiduan xiejiao liyong Jidujiao ‘moshilun’ zaocheng weihai 警惕异端邪教利用基督教 ‘末世论’ 造成危害” [Beware of harm caused by heresies and cults using Christian eschatology ]. Zhongguo zongjiao 12:44–45.

CCTV News. “Cult Member: Murdered Woman an ‘Evil Spirit.’” Accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSb67nOPEhg on 22 September 2014.

China Gospel Fellowship. “Report from China Gospel Fellowship of the April 16 Kidnapping by the Eastern Lightning Cult.” Accessed from http://www.chinaforjesus.com/cgf/070702/index.htm on 23 March 2004.

Chinese Law and Government. 2003. 36, no. 2.

Church of Almighty God. n.d. “Question 17.” Accessed from http://www.holyspiritspeaks.org/qa/fuyin-017/ on 12 February 2015.

Church of Almighty God. n.d. “A Brief Introduction About the Background of the Lord’s Coming to China in a Hidden Way to Work.” Accessed from http://www.holyspiritspeaks.org/about/aboutus/?about=2 on 12 February 2015.

Church of Almighty God. n.d. “A Brief Introduction About the Background of the Appearance and Work of Christ of the Last Days in China.” Accessed from https://en.godfootsteps.org/about-us-02.html on 14 July 2020.

Church of Almighty God. n.d. “The Vision of God’s Work (2).” Accessed from https://en.godfootsteps.org/the-vision-of-gods-work-2-2.html on 14 July 2020.

Church of Almighty God website. As of mid-2020 The Church of Almighty God’s website was at www.hidden-advent.org (simplified Chinese characters), www.godfootsteps.org (traditional Chinese characters), www.holyspiritspeaks.org (English) and numerous other locations for other languages.

Dunn, Emily. 2015. Lightning from the East: Heterodoxy and Christianity in Contemporary China. Leiden: Brill.

Dunn, Emily. 2008. “The Big Red Dragon and Indigenizations of Christianity in China.” East Asian History 36: 73-85.

“Full Text of New Chinese Legislative Resolution Banning Cults.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.cesnur.org/testi/falun_005.htm on 14 July 2020.

Gracie, Carrie. n.d. “The Chinese Cult that Kills ‘Demons.’” Accessed from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-28641008 on 6 September 2014.

Introvigne, Massimo. 2020. Inside the Church of Almighty God: The Most Persecuted Religious Movement in China. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kao, Chen-Yang. 2009. “The Cultural Revolution and the Emergence of Pentecostal-Style Protestantism in China.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 24:171–88.

Lian Xi. 2010. Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Madsen, Richard. 2013. “Signs and Wonders: Christianity and Hybrid Modernity in China.” Pp. 17-30 in Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio-Cultural Perpectives, edited by Francis Khek Gee Lim. London: Routledge.

Naquin, Susan N. 1976. Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Overmyer, Daniel. 1976. Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Palmer, David. 2008.  “Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults: Labeling Heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century China.” Pp. 113-34 in Chinese Religiosities: Afflications of Modernity and State Formation, edited by Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wang Kaiyuan (王凯元) & Xu Wenbing （徐文兵）. 2017. ”’Yuan chuanbo’: Pohuai xing mobai tuanti “quannengshen” de jiceng chuanbo fangshi tanxi ‘缘传播’: 破坏性膜拜团体‘全能神’的基层传播方式探析” [‘Linked transmission’: An investigation of destructive worship group ‘Almighty God’s’ grassroots transmission]. Fanzui yanjiu 2:75-82.

Wang Zaihua (王在华). n.d. “Jiemi ‘Quannengshen’ xiejiao jiaozhu Zhao Weishan 揭秘 ‘全能神’ 邪教教主赵维山” [Revealing Zhao Weishan, leader of ‘Almighty God’ cult]. Accessed from http://news.cntv.cn/2012/12/21/ARTI1356082787384518_2.shtml on 21 September 2014.

Wang Zaihua (王在华). n.d. “Meiti cheng quannengshen jiaozhu taozhi Meiguo yaokong zhihui xintu 媒体称全能神教主逃至美国遥控指挥信徒” [Media claim Almighty God leader fled to America: Commands followers from afar]. Accessed from http://news.163.com/12/1221/18/8J92TR1S0001124J_all.html on 26 August 2014.

Xu Shengyi (许圣义). 1992. “Jingti pi zongjiao waiyide fandong zuzhi 警惕披宗教外衣的反动组织 [Beware of reactionary organizations in religious garb]” Tian Feng 5:24.

Yang Feng (杨锋). n.d. “Shandong Zhaoyuan xue’an bei gao zibai: Wo jiu shi shen山东招远血案被告自白:我就是神” [Confession of the accused in the Zhaoyuan, Shandong murder case: I am God]. Accessed from http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2014-08-22/123730728266.shtml on 15 July 2020.

“Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xingfa 中华人民共和国刑法” [Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China]. Accessed from http://www.npc.gov.cn/huiyi/lfzt/xfxza8/2008-08/21/content_1588538.htm on 28 August 2013.

Publication Date:
18 February 2015
Update:
25 July 2020

CHURCH OF ALMIGHTY GOD VIDEO CONNECTIONS

CHURCH OF SATAN TIMELINE

1930 (11 April):  Anton LaVey was born in Chicago, Illinois.

1951:  LaVey married fifteen year-old Carole Lansing.

1952:  LaVey’s first daughter, Karla, was born to LaVey and Lansing.

1960:  LaVey divorced Carole Lansing and formed a relationship with Diane Hegarty.

1964:  LaVey’s second daughter, Zeena Galatea, was born to LaVey and Hegarty.

1966:  Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco, California.

1967:  The Church of Satan performed a satanic wedding ceremony, prompting widespread media interest in the group.

1969:  LaVey published the Satanic Bible, outlining the principles of LaVeyan Satanism.

1975:  Michael Aquino, a former leader in the Church of Satan, left the church to found the Temple of Set.

1980:  LaVey and Diane Hegarty divorced.

1993:  LaVey’s only son, Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey, was born to LaVey and Blanche Barton.

1997:  Anton LaVey died as a result of a pulmonary edema, and Blanche Barton became the Church of Satan’s High Priestess.

2001:  Peter Gilmore became High Priest of Church of Satan after Barton stepped down.

2002:  Peggy Nadramia became High Priestess of Church of Satan.

2006:  The Church of Satan held its first public Satanic Mass in 40 years.

GROUP/FOUNDER HISTORY

Anton Szandor LaVey [Image at right] was born Howard Stanton Levey in
Chicago on April 11, 1930 to Michael Joseph Levey and Gertrude Coultron. Both had become naturalized American citizens in 1900. Soon after he was born, LaVey’s parents moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he spent his childhood. He attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California but dropped out of school and hence was largely self-educated through his life (Knowles 2005). LaVey evidenced musical abilities from an early age and later used those talents as a musician, playing calliope and organ in a variety of venues to support himself financially. He met and married fifteen year-old Carol Lansing in 1950, and the couple gave birth to his first daughter, Karla, two years later. LaVey’s parents allowed the couple to use their home as a residence. The marriage lasted a decade until 1959 when LaVey met and was captivated by Diane Hegarty, who has described herself as a sorceress. He divorced Lansing the following year and began a relationship with Hegarty that lasted for 25 years. Although the couple never married, they were subsequently given joint title to LaVey’s parents’ home. In 1964, Hegarty and LaVey gave birth to a daughter, [Image at right] Zeena Galatea LaVey. The couple divorced in 1980. LaVey subsequently developed a relationship with Blanche Barton, who became his final companion and bore him his only son, Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey in 1993.

A major turning point in LaVey’s life and career occurred on April 30, 1966, Walpurgisnacht (a day of celebration drawn from the Pagan tradition on which the advent of spring is welcomed, often with dancing and bonfires). On that day he reportedly shaved his head, donned a hooded black robe, and pronounced himself the High Priest of the Church of Satan and the “Black Pope.” LaVey then asserted 1966 to be Anno Satanas, the first year of the Age of Satan. The self-proclaimed High Priest continued to live in his parents’ home, which also served as the headquarters of the Church of Satan. He painted the house black and purple, and it became popularly known simply as the “Black House.”

LaVey began to fashion his public career when, together with underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, he organized both the Magic Circle, an occult discussion group, and a topless nightclub act called the “Witches Sabbath,” with strippers dressed as witches and vampires, where he promoted his philosophy. The Church of Satan received national media attention in 1967 when LaVey presided over the first satanic wedding ceremony, marrying a radical journalist, John Raymond, and a New York socialite, Judith Case. He then began performing satanic funerals, including one for Edward Olsen, a serviceman in the U.S. Navy, and baptisms, including one for his three year old daughter, Zeena. In Zeena’s baptism LaVey welcomed her to the “way of darkness:” In the name of Satan, Lucifer … welcome a new mistress, Zeena, creature of ecstatic magic light … in the name of Satan, we set your feet upon the left hand path … And so we dedicate your life to love, to passion, to indulgence, and to Satan, and the way of darkness. Hail Zeena! Hail Satan! (Barton 1990:90).

For his part, LaVey began developing an exotic persona and quickly became a media celebrity (Raymond 1998). He conducted a satanic ritual with a nude member of his congregation, Lois Morgenstern, serving as the altar; drove a coroner’s van as a car; painted the walls of his home black; and kept a variety of exotic pets (a tarantula, python, and pet Nubian lion named Tolgare). In 1968, he released his first record album, “The Satanic Mass.” A string of celebrities, including Jayne Mansfield, Sammy Davis Jr., King Diamond and Marilyn Manson also were linked to the Church of Satan during this period. LaVey gained further public visibility by appearing regularly in national printed media (Look Magazine, Newsweeek Magazine, Time Magazine) and on television talk shows (The Johnny Carson Show, The Phil Donahue Show).

While LaVey became something of a celebrity, the Church of Satan never made him a wealthy man, his claims notwithstanding. By the mid-1970s he and his wife lived at a near poverty level, and LaVey relied on generosity of family and supporters for much of the rest of his life. He lost the headquarters of the Church of Satan, the Black House, which was ultimately demolished in 2001 by the real estate firm that had gained ownership. When membership and public interest in the Church of Satan declined in the 1970s, LaVey withdrew from public view. (Boulware 1998; Lattin 1999). He reappeared for a time during the 1990s, making several music albums, most notably Satan Takes a Holiday in 1995. Two years later LaVey died on October 29 of a pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs). The original death certificate erroneously listed the date of his death as October 31 (Halloween), possibly in an effort to support his satanic persona, but was later corrected. At the time of his death he was writing Satan Speaks (1998), which was published posthumously the following year and contained an introduction by Marilyn Manson.

The Church of Satan held a public Satanic High Mass for the first time in 40 years in Hollywood, California on June 6, 2006 (06/06/06), in part mocking popular superstitions about the Devil’s number (“666”). One hundred invitations were issued to the private gala, which drew considerable media attention.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Satanism has assumed a variety of form s, real and imagined, through human history. Allegations of organized worship of Satan can be traced to Europe during the Middle Ages. Fears of Satan worship surfaced during the 15th century witch hunts, and Christian manuals were produced for depicting and combating Satanism, most notably the Malleus Maleficarum (circa 1486) and Compendium Maleficarum (circa 1620). Historians suggest the existence of a satanic cult in the royal court of Louis XIV that conducted “Black Masses” to mock the Catholic Mass. There were also a few practicing satanists in Europe during the latter nineteenth century that triggered Satanism fears. In America, colonial era New England experienced a period of witchcraft allegations and witch hunting. Beyond the colonial witchcraft episode, satanic imagery has been perpetuated throughout American history by conservative Christian groups that believe that Satan is an active, personal presence in human affairs. Satan serves the function of explaining evil and misfortune, identifying heretical faiths, and bolstering Christian solidarity.

There are several strands of modern Satanism. As Peterson (2005:424) observes, Modern Satanism is a conglomerate of ideas expressed in distinctive ways by individual groups, and although both the groups and the underlying ideas may be difficult to press into a unified mold, they nonetheless display characteristic philosophical and indeed religious aspirations. Peterson (2011:223-24) distinguishes three types of “Satanic milieu:” reactive esoteric, and rational. Ractive Satanism “is in opposition to society, but in a way that reiterates central Christian concepts of evil, making it paradigmatically conform to a Christian context. Satan, is the Devil, and Satanism the adolescent or anti-social behavior of transgressing boundaries and ‘living out’ the mythical frame. Esoteric Satanism is more theistically oriented and uses the esoteric traditions of Paganism, Western Esotericism, Buddhism and Hinduism, among others, to formulate a religion of self-actualization.” Finally, rational Satanism is “an atheistic, skeptical Epicureanism….It considers Satan to be a symbol of rebellion, individuality, carnality and empowerment, and Satanism the material philosophy best suited for the ‘alien elite’; catchwords are indulgence and vital existence.”

The Church of Satan represents the best-known rationalist-oriented satanic group. The foundation of Church of Satan doctrine isfound in Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible , published in 1969. The Satanic Bible instantly became a best seller and has remained in print continuously since 1969. Sales figures aside, the book remains a foundational source among many Satanists. However, LaVey published several other books that further developed his philosophy. The Compleat Witch was published in 1971 (and released again in 1989 as The Satanic Witch). This book provides instruction of using lesser magic to manipulate others in order to achieve one’s own goals. The Satanic Rituals (1972) describes a variety of satanic rituals he discovered in cultures around the world and was intended to supplement the Satanic Bible. Two later volumes were The Devil’s Notebook (1992) and Satan Speaks (1998). LaVey also disseminated his ideas through the church’s periodical, The Cloven Hoof, which later became The Black Flame.

The idea for the Satanic Bible appears to have originated through an acquisitions editor at Avon Books who thought that there was a viable market for a book on satanic philosophy. The editor approached LaVey, who assembled his lectures and ritual material and combined them into a book. It is clear that LaVey’s philosophy was influenced by a number of other writers. Among the most significant were Might Is Right, an 1896 social Darwinist oriented book written by Ragnar Redbeard (a pseudonym); Aleister Crowley’s periodical, Equinox ; John Dee’s “Enochian Keys;” and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) (Schreck and Schreck 1998).

In his writings, most notably the Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey begins with the premises that human beings are simply animals and the Darwinist struggle for survival and survival of the fittest constitute the fundamental laws of nature. LaVeyan Satanism therefore bases its claim to legitimacy on rationality and acceptance of the empirically observable, physical laws of science. Indeed, LaVey asserts that there is no transcendent god or moral order. As Magus Peter Gilmore summarized the Church of Satan’s position (Shankbone 2007): “Satanism begins with atheism. We begin with the universe and say, “It’s indifferent. There’s no God, there’s no Devil. No one cares!” So you then have to make a decision that places yourself at the center of your own subjective universe….So by making yourself the primary value in your life, you’re your own God. By being your own God, you are comfortable about making your own decisions about what to value.”

Correspondingly, Satan is not an actual entity but rather a symbol or icon of acceptance of individualism and self-interest and rejection of institutional controls, particularly religion. The Devil thus simply symbolizes humanity’s true animal nature. At the same time, La Vey asserts that humans do possess a reservoir of power that they can control and that once unleashed can make humans gods. However, these “occult forces” are simply natural forces that are discoverable by science. As Church of Satan Magus, Peter H. Gilmore, puts it, Satanists do not believe in the supernatural, in neither God nor the Devil. To the Satanist, he is his own God. Stan is the symbol of Man living as his prideful, carnal nature dictates. The reality behind Satan is simply dark evolutionary force that permeates all of nature and provides the drive for survival and propagation inherent in all living things. Satan is not a conscious entity to be worshipped, rather a reservoir of power inside each human to be tapped at will” (Gilmore n.d.).

The Church of Satan is openly hostile to and contemptuous of Christianity for suppressing humanity’s naturally physical, animal nature and appetites by labeling them as sinful. From the church’s perspective, this makes Christianity a totalitarian, repressive influence. In addition to its rhetorical opposition to established churches, the Church of Satan calls for the strict taxation of donations to all churches. In its “anti-theology, the church inverts traditional Christian values, such as sexual constraints, pride and avarice, and elevates their opposites, such as indulgence, self-assertion, and sexual freedom, as satanic virtues. From a LaVeyan perspective, since human individuals and human life are the ultimate realities, they are also all that is sacred and the only agents capable of redemption.

The anti-establishment orientation of the Church of Satan is considerably broader than its opposition to institutional religion. The church espouses rebellion to all authority that limits the expression of individual autonomy and authenticity. Individuals, these Satanists hold, are diminished by the socialization process and negative conditioning that limits self-expression. For LaVeyan Satanists, individual interests should always be set above compliance with conventional norms, and individuals should freely indulge their mental, emotional, and physical qualities. There is a hard-bitten Darwinist flavor to the church’s “anti-theology,” as it endorses the survival of the fittest and overcoming the weak; it opposes universal human rights and equality. Members regard themselves as an “Alien Elite.”

The atheistic, hedonistic, anti-establishment, individualistic, and elitist orientation of the Church of Satan is clearly expressed in its “Nine Satanic Statements” (LaVey 1969:25).

* Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!
* Satan represents vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams!
* Satan represents undefiled wisdom, instead of hypocritical self-deceit!
* Satan represents kindness to those that deserve it, instead of love wasted on ingrates!
* Satan represents vengeance, instead of turning the other cheek!
* Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!
* Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, often worse than those that walk on all fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!
* Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification! ● Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!

There do appear to be limits to endorsement of individual freedom and indulgence. The self that is to be expressed is the authentic self. In the list of “Nine Satanic Sins,” members are warned against qualities such as stupidity, pretentiousness, self-deceit, and herd conformity that would be indicators of non-authenticity, and the non-conformity that is advocated is “productive non-conformity.” Further, members are enjoined from drug use and consumerism that would undermine rationality and unique individual expression. Finally, in the “Eleven Satanic Rules of Earth,” devotees are warned against harming children, killing non-human animals, attacking others unless assaulted first. Magus Peter Gilmore (Shankbone 2007) summarized the church’s position this way: “When we deal with other people, our approach is that we want to have maximum freedom, and maximum responsibility without infringing on people as much as possible. So we would set up laws so we really don’t have to spend all of our time defending our territory, being in some kind of castle keep situation.”

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Early in the Church of Satan’s history the “Black Mass” was performed as a means of expressing opposition to Christianity and other institutionalized religion. [Image at right] Specifically, it was organized as a parody of the Roman Catholic Mass, but the symbolic significance was broader. According to LaVey, the Black Mass functioned as a psychodrama through which cathartic blasphemies could be expressed. The anti-Christian symbolism was evident in the incorporation hooded robes; an inverted crucifix; a nude woman used as an altar; and baptisms, weddings, and funerals, with satanic content. As the church became established, these rituals were discontinued, although they continued to be linked to the church in the public mind. The pentagram and Sigil of Baphomet (a point-down pentagram inside a circle, with a goat’s head inside the pentagram) continue to be important symbols of Satanism.

At the center of the church’s ritual practice is magic, which is understood to be the capacity to change outcomes, which could not be changed through ordinary methods, in accordance with one’s will (LaVey 1969:110). There are two basic categories of magic, lesser and greater. There is no distinction between “white” and “black” magic as magic is believed to be inherently amoral. Lesser magic is a system of manipulation that draws on one’s natural abiity to manipulate others. There are three types: sexual (with the objective being seduction and ecstasy), compassionate (with the objective being helping loved ones), and destructive (with the objective being to release anger). Greater magic involves influencing external events by creating an extreme emotional state that produces high levels of adrenaline. If the levels are high enough, one’s vision of what one wishes to happen will penetrate the unconscious mind of the person being influenced. If the time is right, the person will behave as the influencer wishes (Gilmore n.d; Lap 2006).

The Church of Satan observes only a few distinctive celebrative occasions. Consistent with its individualistic thrust, the most significant celebrative date annually is one’s own birthdate. This celebration signifies to members that they are the god in their own lives. Three other important, but not sacred, dates referred to in the Satanic Bible are Walpurginsnacht, which celebrates both the welcoming of spring and the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966; summer and winter solstices; and spring and fall equinoxes. Satanists are free to celebrate other cultural and religious holidays but generally treat those occasions in a secular fashion.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

LaVey and his followers crafted an elaborate hagiography to demonstrate his extraordinary qualities. In the hagiographic account, La Vey’s grandmother was a Transylvanian gypsy who introduced him to the occult as a child. LaVey ran away from home at age 16 and then worked successively in jobs such as an oboe player in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, circus lion tamer with the Clyde Beatty Circus, stage hypnotist, nightclub organist, and police department photographer. He also claimed romantic affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Most of the details contained in the hagiographic account were subsequently refuted as former supporters abandoned LaVey and investigative journalists began probing official records for information.

Despite a variety of challenges to his hagiography and leadership, LaVey led the Church of Satan until his death in 1997. Initially, LaVey’s daughter, Karla, announced that she and LaVey’s partner, Blanche Barton, would serve jointly as co-High Priestesses. However, a legal dispute then erupted, which led to a settlement stipulating that assets (personal belongings, writings and accompanying royalties) would be divided among the three children (Zeena, Karla, and Xerxes). Barton was granted ownership of the corporate entity, the Church of Satan, and she held ownership for four years while moving the church headquarters to the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in New York City. In 2001, Barton appointed Peter H. Gilmore, who had been a long-time member of the church’s Council of Nine, as Magus. Peggy Nadramia became the High Priestess the following year. Karla LaVey subsequently founded the First Satanic Church in San Francisco.

His opposition to institutionalized religion notwithstanding, LaVey concluded that it was necessary to establish a church because he thought that people continued to need the rituals and worship that organized religion provided. As LaVey put it, “People need ritual, with symbols that they may find in baseball games or church services or wars, as vehicles for expending emotions they can’t release or even understand on their own” (Gilmore 2007). He founded the Church of Satan after one of the members of his Magic Circle suggested that a church would be the best vehicle for disseminating his ideas. He was also encouraged by a professional publicist and supporter, Edward Webber, who told LaVey that he “would never make any money by lecturing on Friday nights for donations … it would be better to form some sort of church and get a charter from the State of California … I told Anton at the time that the press was going to flip out over all this and that we would get a lot of notoriety” (Schreck and Schreck 1998).

La Vey initially organized the church into local units, grottoes, which were controlled directly by the church. At the height of the church’s popularity there were grottos in many major cities in the U.S. In 1975, LaVey abolished the grotto system. Blanche Barton (2003) describes the rationale for this decision as follows: “By 1975, a re-organization had taken place and those few who were counterproductive to LaVey’s Satanic ideals, who were more interested in what Anton called “Phase One Satanism” (i.e., group rituals, blaspheming Christianity in a rigidly-structured, limited way) were phased out. With his intensely elitist attitude, Anton was incensed to see his creation degenerating into a “Satan Fan Club,” where the weakest, least innovative members were buoyed up with time and attention at the expense of the most productive, most Satanic members…. LaVey wanted his Church of Satan to evolve into a truly cabalistic underground rather than degenerating into a long-running public pageant or a “Satan pen pal club.” The result was a much more decentralized organization. According to Peterson (2005:430), “Today the Church of Satan is essentially a decentralized, cell-like structure where first-level (registered) membership is attained by filling out a registration statement and paying a hundred dollars to the central administration. Individual members have as much contact with the organization as needed, and most members have little to do with the church or even local grottoes.” The grottoes are independent and self-sufficient. The church itself is administered by a Council of Nine. The council “concentrates on matters of doctrine, general guidelines, and administration of Dr. LaVey’s estate (through the Order of the Trapezoid). As such, the council is engaged in protecting the authority of LaVey’s writings and is only concerned with individual members’ beliefs and practices when they run counter to the interests of the church…” (Peterson (2005:430).

The Church of Satan has two types of members: Registered Members and Active Members. Both must be legally adults. Registered Members are those who have registered and paid the stipulated fee; [Image at right] there are not other requirements for this basic membership. There are five degrees of Active Membership, which available only by invitation. The top three degrees constitute the priesthood and are addressed as either Reverend or “Magister/Magistra” and “Magus/Maga.” The priesthood represents the Church of Satan as spokespersons and constitutes the governing body, the Council of Nine. The Church of Satan has claimed hundreds of thousands of members. While the Satanic Bible has probably sold 1,000,000 copies and has remained in print continuously since its publication, the popularity of the philosophy has not been matched church membership. Even the most generous estimates have been no more than a few thousand at the height of the church’s visibility, and more realistic estimates are several hundred at its peak.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The Church of Satan and its leader, Anton LaVey, both experienced a variety of challenges. These included refutations of LaVey’s elaborate hagiography, defections by key supporters, the formation of schismatic groups, and the impact of the Satanism scare.

LaVey had been able to maintain the hagiographic account of his life without challenge for over two decades until his daughter, Zeena, broke relations with him in 1990 and an investigative journalist, Lawrence Wright, began digging in public records. In 1990, Zeena LaVey Schreck renounced her “unfather,” resigned from the Church of Satan, and attacked Blanche Barton’s biography of LaVey, The Secret Life of a Satanist (1990) as an “absurb catalogue of lies” full of “self-serving bullshit” (Schreck 1990). The couple went on to found the Sethian Liberation Movement in 2002 that set as its goal allowing individuals to practice magic outside of an oppressive, sectarian atmosphere and assist former cult members (Lamothe-Ramosa n.d.). The following year Lawrence Wright (1991) wrote an exposé article in Rolling Stone that discredited the hagiography before a much larger audience.

Virtually all of the details in LaVey’s hagiography were challenged. A mounting number of critics concluded that he had no Gypsy ancestry, there was no San Francisco Ballet Orchestra at the time he claimed to have been an oboist in the group, nor was there an “official city organist” in San Francisco; there is no record of LaVey being a lion tamer in the Clyde Beatty Circus, LaVey had never even met Marilyn Monroe, let alone having had an affair with her; he never studied Criminology at San Francisco City College or worked in any capacity with the San Francisco Police Department; LaVey was not involved in the production of Rosemary’s Baby and had never met its director, Roman Polanski. LaVey’s response to the shattering of his satanic persona was remarkably temperate when confronted by Wright (1991): “’I don’t want the legend to disappear,’ LaVey told me anxiously in our last conversation, after I confronted him with some of the inconsistencies in his story. ‘There is a danger you will disenchant a lot of young people who use me as a role model.’ He was especially offended that I had tracked down his eighty-seven-year-old father in an effort to verify some of the details of LaVey’s early life. ‘I’d rather have my background shrouded in mystery. Eventually you want to be recognized for what you are now’.” In another moment, he was perhaps more candid: “I’m one helluva liar. Most of my adult life, I’ve been accused of being a charlatan, a phony, an impostor. I guess that makes me about as close to what the Devil’s supposed to be, as anyone … I lie constantly, incessantly” (LaVey 1998:101).

The Church of Satan faced a wave of organizational innovations and schismatic groups. In addition to founding of Sethian Liberation Movement by Zeena LaVey Schreck and the First Satanic Church by Karla LaVey, there was a major challenge from Michael Aquino, who founded the Temple of Set. Aquino led several dozen defectors from the Church of Satan in 1975 to found the Temple of Set in 1975, citing disagreement with LaVey over selling degrees and atheistic doctrines, as Aquino teaches that there is a living satanic deity, Set. Beyond these challenges, there were numerous other groups that sought to innovate on the Church of Satan or broke organizationally with the church (Bromley and Ainsley 1995). These include the Church of Satanic Brotherhood, Universal Church of Man, Brotherhood of the Ram, Our Lady of Endor, Coven of the Ophite Cultus Satanas, Thee Satanic Orthodox Church of Nethilum Rite, Thee Satanic Church, Kerk du Satan – Magistralis Grotto and Walpurga Abbey, Church of Satanic Brotherhood, Ordo Templi Satanas, Order of the Black Ram and the Shrine of the Little Mother, and Temple of Nepthys. Most of these groups were relatively small and ephemeral.

Finally, during the 1980s a wave of satanic subversion fear swept North America and Europe, centering around claims of the existence a massive, international, underground, hierarchically organized satanic network (Bromley 1991; Richardson, Best, and Bromley 1991). Satanists putatively were involved in a range of nefarious activity; the most horrific allegations involved the abduction of children, child abuse, commercial production of child pornography, sexual abuse and incest, and ritualistic sacrifices of young children. At the height of the subversion episode, ritual abuse victims were estimated at 50,000 annually, and there were numerous sensational ritual abuse prosecutions.

Proponents of satanic cult theory claimed that Satanism was organized at four levels, with involvement often beginning at lower levels and subsequently graduating to higher level activity. At the lowest level are “dabblers,” typically adolescents who are lured into Satanism through experimentation with heavy metal music and fantasy games containing embedded satanic themes. More sinister were the “self-styled satanists” who employed satanic imagery in committing anti-social activity and were thought to be members of satanic cults. The public face of Satanism was “organized satanists,” consisting of the satanic churches, which publicly engaged in the worship of Satan. Orchestrating the entire range of satanic activity were the “traditional satanists,” who were organized into an international, secret, hierarchically structured, tightly organized cult network that engaged in ritual abuse and sacrifice of children.

The Church of Satan, given its high public profile, was often cited by proponents of the satanic conspiracy as evidence that there were easily identifiable devil worshipers. Church leaders appeared on numerous television talk shows in an attempt to distinguish legitimate satanic worship from the purported satanic cults. Whatever the effect of the defenses mounted by Church of Satan spokespersons, this challenge was defused primarily by the collapse of what has been termed “the satanic panic.” Professional and governmental groups challenged the validity of repressed memory evidence offered by claimants, no convincing physical evidence was produced to support allegations, court convictions were reversed, and American and European governmental investigations concluded that conspiracy claims were without foundation ( Hicks 1994; La Fontaine 1994; Lanning 1989).

REFERENCES

Barton, Blanche. 2003. The Church of Satan: A Brief History. Accessed from http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/CShistory7LR.html on 28 July 2012.

Blanche Barton. 1990. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

Boulware, Jack. “A Devil of a Time: How is the Church of Satan Getting Along? Not So Hot.” The Washington Post 30 August 1998: F1.

Bromley, David. 1991. “Satanism: The New Cult Scare.” Pp. 49-74 in The Satanism Scare, edited by James Richardson, Joel Best, and David Bromley. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Bromley, David G., and Susan Ainsley. 1995. “Satanism and Satanic Churches: The Contemporary Incarnations.” Pp. 401-09 in America’s Alternative Religions , edited by Timothy Miller. Albany: State University of New York.

Gilmore, Peter. 2007. “What, The Devil?” Accessed from http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/WhatTheDevil.html on 29 July 2012.

Gilmore, Peter. n.d. “Satanism: The Feared Religion.” Accessed from http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/Feared.html on 27 July 2012.

Hicks, Robert. 1991. In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult. Buffalo, NY, 1991.

Knowles, George. 2005. “Satanism.” Accessed from http://www.controverscial.com/Satanism%20-%20Anton%20LaVay.htm on 1 August 2012.

La Fontaine, Jean. 1994. Extent & Nature of Organized Ritual Abuse: Research and Findings. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Lattin, Don. 1999. “Satan’s Den in Great Disrepair: Relatives of S.F. hellhound Anton LaVey battle over `Black House’.” San Francisco Chronicle 25 January 1999. Accessed from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fchronicle%2Farchive%2F1999%2F01%2F25%2FMN77329.DTL on 1 August 2012.

Lamothe-Ramos, Annette. n.d. “Beelzebub’s Daughter: How Zeena Schreck Escaped the Church of Satan.” Accessed from http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/beelzebubs-daughter-0000175-v19n4?Contentpage=-1 on 1 August 2012.

Lap, Amina. 2008. “Categorization of Modern Satanism—An Analysis of LaVey’s Early Writing.” Accessed from http://blog.blazingangles.net/soapbox/images/Categorization-of-Modern-Satanism.pdf on 28 July 2012.

Lanning, Kenneth. 1989. “Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective.” The Police Chief LVI: 62-83.

LaVey, Anton. 1998. Satan Speaks. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

LaVey, Anton. 1992. The Devil’s Notebook. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

LaVey, Anton. 1972. The Satanic Rituals. New York: Avon Books.

LaVey, Anton. 1971. The Compleat Witch, or, What to do When Virtue Fails. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Peterson, Jesper. 2005. “Modern Satanism: Dark Doctrines and Black Flames.” Pp. 423-57 in Controversial New Religions, edited by James Lewis and Jesper Petersen. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.

Raymond, John. 1998. “The Satanic Verses; How One Man Helped Get The Church of Satan Off the Ground.” The SF Weekly. 1 July 1998. Accessed from http://www.sfweekly.com/1998-07-01/calendar/the-satanic-verses/ on 1 August 2012.

Redbeard, Ragnar. 1996. Might is Right. Chicago: M.H.P. & Co., Ltd.

Richardson, James, Joel Best and David Bromley, eds. 1991. The Satanism Scare. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Schreck, Zeena. 1990. “Letter to Michael Aquino.” 30 December 1990. Accessed from http://www.skeptictank.org/files/mys5/zeena.htm

Schreck, Zeena and Nikolas Schreck. 1998. Anton LaVey: Myth and Reality. Accessed from http://satanismcentral.com/aslv.html on 29 July 2012.

Shankbone, David. 2007. “Satanism: An interview with Church of Satan High Priest Peter Gilmore.” Wikinews 5 November 2007. Accessed from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Satanism:_An_interview_with_Church_of_Satan_High_Priest_Peter_Gilmore on 1 August 2012.

Wright, Lawrence. 1991.”Sympathy for the Devil: It’s Not Easy Being Evil in a World That’s Gone to Hell.” Rolling Stone 612:63-68, 105-106.

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1 August 2012

CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY TIMELINE

1911 (March 13):  Lafayette Ron Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska.

1938 (January 1):  Hubbard claimed to have a near-death experience and wrote his “Excalibur” manuscript.

1950 (April):  Hubbard and John Campbell formed the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation (HDRF).

1950:  “Dianetics” was published in Astounding Science Fiction in May and then in book form as Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

1950-1951:  Dianetics practitioners began to report memories from past lives. Hubbard developed the idea of the thetan and past lives.

1951-1952:  Hubbard began to use the E-meter in Dianetics auditing.

1952:  Hubbard Association of Scientologists (HAS) was formed in Phoenix, Arizona.

1953:  (December) Hubbard incorporated three “churches,” including the Church of Scientology.

1954 (February 18):  The first church of Scientology opened in California.

1956:  The Washington D.C. Church of Scientology was recognized as tax exempt.

1957:  The Church of Scientology of California (CSC) was recognized as tax exempt.

1958:  The IRS withdrew the Washington D.C. church’s tax exemption.

1963 (January 4):  U.S. Marshals, acting on an FDA warrant, raided the Church of Scientology in Washington D.C.

1963:  The IRS audit of Scientology began.

1966 (July):  Hubbard began to develop the confidential Operating Thetan (OT) levels.

1967 (July 18):  The IRS stripped the Church of Scientology of California of its tax exemption.

1968:  The Sea Organization was formed.

1974-1975:  Scientologists infiltrated IRS offices and stole thousands of documents.

1977 (July):  The FBI raided Scientology headquarters in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

1977 (October):  Eleven Scientologists, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were convicted of conspiracy, L. Ron Hubbard went into hiding.

1985 (November):  Confidential OT materials were leaked to Los Angeles Times.

1986 (January 24):  Hubbard died at age 74.

1987:  David Miscavige became Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center.

1991 (October):  Miscavige and Marty Rathbun held an unscheduled meeting with the IRS commissioner and offered to drop all lawsuits against the IRS in exchange for tax exemption.

1993 (October 1):  The IRS granted tax exemption to all Scientology organizations in the U.S.

1995:  Scientology was classified as a secte in France

1996:  The Cult Awareness Network was driven into bankruptcy, and its name and files are taken over by Scientologists.

2007 (March):  An initiative to ban Scientology began in Germany.

2008 (January 21):  Anonymous released its Message to Scientology.

2009 (May):  Wikipedia banned Scientology.

2009 (October):  Scientology was convicted of fraud in France.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The Church of Scientology was first incorporated in December 1953 in Camden, New Jersey. The church’s founder was Lafayette Ron (L. Ron) Hubbard, [Image at right] who was born on March 13, 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska, the son of a U.S. naval officer. Beyond the date and place of his birth, however, there is little agreement about most other details of Hubbard’s biography, as the narratives provided by the Church of Scientology and those of its many critics are greatly at odds (Urban 2011:30-33; Urban forthcoming; Christensen 2005).

According to his own accounts and official church biographies, Hubbard is portrayed as an adventurer who set out to explore not just the farthest ends of the earth but also the infinite reaches of the human mind, as much a “daredevil barnstormer, a master mariner [and] a Far East Explorer” as the founder of a revolutionary new philosophy (Friends of Ron 1995:102). As a young man, Hubbard claimed to have been initiated into the secrets of the Blackfoot Indians, then to have become the nation’s youngest Eagle Scout, and later to have traveled to Asia where he learned the esoteric teachings of various Eastern sages: “Among the first westerners… admitted into traditionally forbidden lamaseries”, he delved into the “dread mysteries of India,” studied with Buddhist priests and met “the last remaining magician for Kublai Khan’s court” (Hubbard 2009). Back in the United States, Hubbard claimed that he mastered the sciences, studying engineering and atomic physics at George Washington University. At one point, Hubbard claimed to have been “one of the first nuclear physicists in the United States,” an assertion that appeared on the cover of his book All About Radiation (1976:49). During World War II, Hubbard served as a naval lieutenant, commanding several vessels in various theaters. Scientology publications made various claims about his military achievements, some stating that he was awarded as many as twenty-nine decorations (Church of Scientology International 1994). Hubbard also claimed that the war had left him blind and a hopeless cripple, but that he had healed himself using the techniques that later became the basis of his new science of Dianetics (1973:10-11).

Virtually every detail of Hubbard’s biography however has been the subject of debate, and many critics argue that most if not all of this narrative is a fabrication. Skeptics have pointed out, for example, that most of Hubbard’s academic credentials are fictional. Hubbard, the alleged “nuclear physicist,” had only enrolled in one introductory course on molecular and nuclear physics at George Washington University, receiving a grade of F, while his Doctor of Philosophy degree turned out to be the product of a sham diploma mill called Sequoia University (Smith 2009). Far from a decorated war hero, Hubbard was actually investigated for firing on an uninhabited island in Mexican waters and was judged by Rear Admiral F. A. Braisted to be “not qualified for command or promotion” (Atack 1990:79-80; Mallia 1998). As journalist Lawrence Wright points out, there is also no evidence that Hubbard had ever been wounded in battle, much less healed himself (NPR 2011; Wright 2011).

As such, Hubbard’s autobiography is perhaps best understood not as an accurate historical chronicle; rather, as Dorthe Refslund Christensen suggests, it is better read as a kind of “hagiographic mythology:” that is, an idealized narrative composed self-consciously of mythic themes (2005:227-58). In this sense, it is comparable to the highly elaborated and often imaginative narratives of other new religious leaders, such as Madame Blavatsky, Elijah Muhammad or Joseph Smith. It is worth noting, however, that the Church of Scientology has revised many of the details of Hubbard’s biography in recent publications, leaving out some of the more implausible claims about his academic record and military decorations (Urban forthcoming).

Both critics and admirers of Hubbard do agree, however, that he was a tremendous storyteller and an incredibly prolific writer. During the 1930s and 1940s, Hubbard was among the most widely published authors of the Golden Age of science fiction, churning out hundreds of sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure tales under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. More than one observer has also pointed out that there are numerous continuities between his science fiction tales and the elaborate cosmology of his later Scientology writings (Whitehead 1976; Urban 2011:33-37, 73-78).

Hubbard’s first encounter with the spiritual realm is described in an unpublished manuscript entitled “Excalibur,” composed in 1938. According to Hubbard’s account, the manuscript was the result of a near-death-experience that occurred during an operation while under heavy anesthesia. Passing through the curtain of death, Hubbard had a rare glimpse into the “secret of life” and heard a voice cry out “don’t let him know!” Upon returning to his body, Hubbard immediately sat down at his typewriter and hammered out the 10,000-word “Excalibur” manuscript ( Church of Scientology International 2012b; Urban 2011:37-39). This manuscript is said to be so profound that it has never been published in full. His literary agent at the time, Forrest Ackerman, also recounts this story, noting that Hubbard claimed that whoever read the “Excalibur” manuscript “either went insane or committed suicide” (Channel 4 Television 1997). At present, only brief excerpts of the manuscript are available on Scientology websites.

In the years before founding Dianetics and Scientology, Hubbard also briefly dabbled in occultism, magic and the supernatural. In early 1946, shortly after his service in World War II, Hubbard befriended John Whiteside (Jack) Parsons, a fellow science fiction enthusiast and rocket scientist. Parsons was also a follower of the most infamous occultist of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley, and was engaged in some of Crowley’s most esoteric magical rites (Urban 2012; Pendle 2005). Together, Hubbard and Parsons performed some of Crowley’s more extreme magical rites, including sexual rites, which were described in detailed in Parsons’ magical diary from this period entitled The Book of Babalon. The Church of Scientology later downplayed this connection and claimed that Hubbard had been sent in on a special military mission to break up this black magic group (Urban 2012). Nonetheless, Hubbard would later praise Aleister Crowley in his Scientology lectures of the early 1950s, calling him “my very good friend,” and also drew direct parallels between magical rituals and Scientology practices (Hubbard 2007a:27; Urban 2012).

In May, 1950 Hubbard published his “new science of the mind” called Dianetics in an issue of the popular magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Derived from the Greek dia and nous meaning “through the mind,” Dianetics claimed to be a revolutionary new breakthrough for mankind, comparable to “the discovery of fire and superior to the wheel and the arch” (Whitehead 1987:52). Based on his experimentation with a wide array of philosophical, psychological and spiritual ideas, Hubbard believed that he had unlocked the secret to the working of the human mind, the cause of all physical and psychological problems, and the means to achieving an optimal state of wellbeing called “Clear.” Indeed, in an issue of Marvel Science Studies, Hubbard presented Dianetics as the path to transcend the state of Homo sapiens and become a “Homo superior” or superman (1951). Published in book form later in 1950, [Image at right] Dianetics became surprisingly successful and went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-eight weeks. The “Dianetics craze,” as journalists called it, spread like wildfire across the U.S., and many small, grassroots Dianetics clubs sprouted up throughout the country (Gumpert 1950).

Although initially extremely popular, the early Dianetics movement proved to be a short-lived phenomenon and rapidly faltered just a year or two after its birth. The movement suffered a series of embarrassments in the media and growing tensions between Hubbard and early supporters such as John Campbell and Joseph Winter. Already by April 1951, Hubbard’s movement was facing financial difficulty and entered into voluntary bankruptcy in 1952 (Wallis 1976:79-80; Urban 2011:64-68).

In its place, however, Hubbard created the new Church of Scientology, which was now presented not just as a science of the mind but in fact as a “religion” in its own right (Urban 2011:57-88; Kent 1999). The reasons for the failure of the early Dianetics movement and the shift to the religion of Scientology were several. First, throughout the early 1950s, practitioners of Dianetics were being scrutinized by the FDA and by various state medical boards because of their claims to physical as well as psychological healing. Between 1951 and 1953, several individuals were arrested for practicing medicine without a license, and, in 1958, the FDA seized and destroyed a consignment of 21,000 tablets of Hubbard’s anti-radiation sickness drug, Dianezene, claiming that they were falsely labeled for treatment of real illness (Kent 1996; Urban 2011: 62-63). In response, Hubbard began to argue that the aim of his new therapy was not physical healing but rather spiritual freedom, and thus not subject to FDA scrutiny. Hubbard himself would later reflect that this was one of the main reasons “why Dianetics fell out of use” as a form of “healing” and Scientology as means to “spiritual freedom” took its place (Kent 1996; Urban 2011:63).

At the same time, practitioners of Dianetics had also begun to report memories from past lives in the course of auditing; this led Hubbard to explore the idea of an immortal spiritual self, what he called the “thetan,” and a belief in past lives going back thousands, millions and even trillions of years. Thus from the mid-1950s onward, Hubbard began to draw explicit parallels between his movement and the religious ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism, including the ideas of immortality, reincarnation and supernatural abilities (Hubbard 2009; Urban 2011:82-85; Kent 1996).

On April 10, 1953, Hubbard wrote a letter to Helen O’Brien, then the head of the Dianetics movement in Philadelphia. In it, he suggested that they should consider pursuing what he called the “religion angle,” since the current Dianetics movement “couldn’t get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we’ve got to sell” (Hubbard 1953; Urban 2011:65). Finally, in December 1953, Hubbard appears to have embraced the “religion angle” by incorporating the Church of Scientology along with two other churches in Camden, NJ. This was followed by the opening of a church in California in 1954 and the incorporation of the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. in 1955. According to the founding church’s certificate of incorporation, this was explicitly meant to be religious organization, created to act as “a parent church for the propagation of the religious faith known as Scientology” (Urban 2011:65).

With its newly centralized organization and administration, the Church of Scientology expanded rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, following a kind of “franchise” model that proved to be extremely successful. As the respected sociologist of religion, Bryan R. Wilson noted, Scientology combined the “precision of the Gautama Buddha with the productive practicality of Henry Ford” and quickly established new churches across the U.S., U.K. and Europe (1998:132). Other sociologists have compared Scientology’s rapidly growing and lucrative organizational structure to “multi-national enterprises such as the Ford Mother Corporation, Coca Cola or International Telephone and Telegraph” (Wallis 1976:124). By the end of the 1950s, Hubbard’s church was profitable enough to purchase Saint Hill Manor, an impressive eighteenth century building near East Grinstead in Sussex County, England. Previously owned by the Maharaja of Jaipur, Saint Hill became the headquarters of the expanding Scientology empire from 1959 until Hubbard’s departure in 1967.

As Scientology grew and expanded during the 1960s, Hubbard also added more and increasingly esoteric levels of training and organization. Beginning in 1966, Hubbard revealed a series of auditing levels called “Operating Thetan” (OT) in which the thetan or spiritual self is believed to achieve ever-greater freedom from the material world and ever-greater spiritual powers. These OT levels were intended to be highly confidential and only released to Scientologists who had passed through the required levels of auditing, although, as we will see below, they were all eventually leaked to the media and now circulate widely on the Internet (Rothstein 2010; Urban 2011:100-05). The church lists fifteen OT levels in its current roadmap of the Scientology path, “The Bridge to Total Freedom,” though only eight of these appear to have been completed by Hubbard before his death.

At roughly the same time, in 1968, Hubbard also created the Sea Organization or Sea Org, which is the elite, innermost, dedicated core of Scientologists. Modeled on a naval organization, the Sea Org was initially formed to accompany Hubbard on his vessel, the Apollo. Members of the Sea Org sign a “billion year contract,” vowing to come back lifetime after lifetime to assist in Hubbard’s mission to spread Scientology and ultimately to create a “new civilization on this planet. Indeed, the Sea Org was presented in Scientology publications as the only means to save the human race from nuclear war and “the terror of total destruction” (Urban 2011:124; Many 2009). Today, the Sea Org is largely a land-based order centered in Clearwater, Florida, and there is presently only one working vessel, the Freewinds; but Sea Org members continue to wear naval uniforms and maintain strict military discipline. According to the Church of Scientology, the tight discipline of the Sea Org is analogous to a Christian or Buddhist monastic order (Church of Scientology International 2012d; Melton 2001). In the eyes of critics and many ex-members, however, the Sea Org is a manipulative cult that controls, surveils, and manipulates members in a way that borders on brainwashing (Kent 1997; Many 2009; Goldstein 2010; Raine 2009).

In the early 1970s, Scientology also began to attract a wide array of celebrities, who have since served as influential spokespersons, advocates and defenders of the church. Plans to attract celebrities had been suggested as early as the mid-1950s (Urban 2011:150), but in the early 1970s the church began to build a series of opulent Celebrity Centers in Hollywood and around the world specifically catering to actors, musicians, artists and entertainers (Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre International 2012). The church’s more prominent celebrity advocates have included: actors John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, and Nancy Cartwright; musicians Isaac Hayes and Chick Cora, and (formerly) director Paul Haggis (Wright 2011; Reitman 2011).

One of the most complex and convoluted chapters in the history Scientology is the intense debate over its status as a “religion” and specifically over its claims to tax-exemption as a non-profit religious organization in the eyes of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (and other government agencies in other nations). This battle with the IRS, which would later be dubbed “THE WAR” by current Scientology head David Miscavige (1993), first began in the mid-1950s. Hubbard’s movement initially had little trouble winning tax-exempt status, which was awarded to Scientology churches in 1956 and 1957; yet already by 1958 the IRS had begun investigating Scientology and concluded that most of the revenue was benefiting Hubbard and his family personally. Tax exemption was revoked again in 1967, which then led to a series of lawsuits and to a massive twenty-five-year battle with the IRS that involved hundreds of lawyers and literally thousands of lawsuits (Urban 2011:155-77; Frantz 1997; McDonald 1997; Reitman 2011:166-71). During this period, Hubbard also explicitly emphasized the “religious” nature of Scientology. In what the LA Times called Scientology’s “most sweeping religious makeover,” Hubbard gave clear directives that “visual evidences that Scientology is a religion are mandatory.” Scientology franchises became “missions,” and the display of clerical collars and crosses became strictly enforced (Sappell and Welkos 1990a; Hubbard 1969; Urban 2011:155-77).

One of the more bizarre episodes in the church’s war with the IRS was a plan called “Operation Snow White,” which was launched by Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, and the church’s intelligence bureau, the Guardian’s Office (GO). Devised in early 1973, Operation Snow White involved GO agents infiltrating offices of the IRS and other government agencies in order to steal thousands of documents relating to Scientology. GO agents also wiretapped IRS offices during meetings in which Scientology was discussed. When the operation was uncovered in 1977, the FBI launched the largest raid in the Bureau’s history, sending 134 agents into Scientology offices in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles and confiscating over 200,000 documents and other materials (Robinson 1977; Sentencing Memorandum 1980). Mary Sue and eleven other Scientologists were arrested, tried and convicted, while Hubbard was named unindicted co-conspirator and spent the remainder of his life in hiding. Hubbard died on January 24, 1986 at a ranch in California, where he had been living in a Bluebird motor home. Official statements by the church pronounced that he had left this world to move to a higher plane and continue his spiritual research “on a planet a galaxy away” (Sappell and Welkos 1990b).

The church’s war with the IRS, meanwhile, was not resolved until 1993, following a private meeting between Miscavige, Marty Rathbun and IRS head, Fred T. Goldberg, Jr. Although the precise details of this agreement have never been fully revealed, the church agreed to pay back taxes of $12.5 million in exchange for an impressive blanket tax exemption of all Scientology-related entities in the United States (McDonald 1997). This blanket exemption, remarkably, includes not only religious entities within the Scientology empire, but also seemingly quite “secular” entities that have nothing to do with religion, such as Galaxy Press, which reprints Hubbard’s science fiction and fantasy stories. Shortly after the church’s victory with the IRS, the U.S. State Department also began to recognize Scientology in its annual reports on religious freedom and to criticize other governments for their harsh treatment of the church (Urban 2011:175).

Despite its triumph in the United States, Scientology has continued to face numerous challenges in many other countries, particularly in France, Germany, Russia, Australia and the UK. Scientology was the subject of withering government reports in both Australia and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, and it continues to be viewed with intense suspicion in France and Germany. French courts, which regard Scientology as a secte (= cult) and not as a religion, convicted Scientology of fraud in October, 2009; and as recently as 2007, German federal and state interior ministers undertook a move to ban the church (CNN 2009; Urban 2011:201).

DOCTRINES/ BELIEFS

The beliefs of the early Dianetics movement focused primarily on Hubbard’s understanding of the human mind and the cause of suffering in this lifetime. Hubbard’s saw the mind as having two main parts: the reactive mind, which is roughly analogous to Freud’s unconscious, and the analytical mind, which sees the world accurately like a flawless computer. Throughout life, individuals have negative experiences of pain and unconsciousness that become burned in the reactive mind in the form of what Hubbard called “engrams” or negative memory traces, which cause us both physical and psychological problems (Hubbard 1950, 2007c). Through the Dianetics technique called “auditing” (see below) these engrams can be progressively identified, relived and removed from the reactive mind until the individual achieves a state of optimal well-being called “Clear” (2007c:113).

With the birth of the Church of Scientology, however, Hubbard began to incorporate much more explicitly “religious” ideas that extended well beyond the individual human mind and this particular lifetime. In the course of Dianetics auditing, many individuals began to report memories from previous lives, and Hubbard soon incorporated the idea of past lives. At the same time, he developed the ideas of “theta” (spirit) and the “thetan” (the individual spiritual self or true, eternal identity of a person [1975a:429-32]). As he argued in lectures of the early 1950s, Scientology in this regard has much in common with eastern religions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, which are its closest spiritual kin (Hubbard 2007d:34).

Hubbard also introduced the idea of the “Eight Dynamics,” or the urge that all beings have to survive on eight levels of existence, which are symbolized by the eight points of the Scientology cross. These include the desire to survive as an individual, as a family, as a group, as a species, as all life forms, as the physical universe, as a spiritual entity, and finally as Infinity, God or the Supreme Being. However, Hubbard was always reluctant to say much about this eighth dynamic or Supreme Being, even making a point to state that “it is carefully observed that the science of Scn does not intrude into the dynamic of the Supreme Being” (1975a:129).

Hubbard did have quite a lot to say, however, about the thetan, its past history and its ultimate potential. In its original form, the thetan was an inherently infinite and even “godlike celestial entity,” that originally had its own “Home Universe” created by its own free will (Bromley 2009:91; Hubbard 1975a:431). But for reasons that remain somewhat unclear, the thetan has become mistakenly trapped in this present universe of matter, energy, space, and time (MEST). The thetan has had countless past lives in this universe, including numerous life forms on earth, such as clams, birds, sloths, apes, etc (1968:47); but it has also had numerous adventures on other planets among various aliens life forms, what Hubbard called “space opera.” While most Scientologists today downplay these space opera themes, they are pervasive throughout Hubbard’s early lectures of the 1950s (Hubbard 1958, 1985, 1990, 2007a, 2007b). Based on his extensive auditing, Hubbard believed that he had reconstructed the “Whole Track” or the entire history of the universe and the thetan’s various adventures from the time they first “hit the time track” 60,000,000 years ago. These include not only space opera episodes among ancient civilizations on earth (Atlantis, Egypt, etc.) but also on various other planets and among alien civilization such as Arsclycus (a “city in space”), the Marcab Confederacy, and so on (Hubbard 1985, 2007a; Urban 2011:73-78).

Some of Scientology’s beliefs about the origin of the universe are confidential materials that are only revealed in the advanced levels of auditing called “Operating Thetan” (OT). As such, they were originally not meant to be publicly available but accessible only to Scientologists who have passed through all of the preceding levels of auditing. Despite the intense secrecy surrounding them, the OT levels eventually became part of the court record in two lawsuits during the 1980s and were leaked first to the media and then onto the Internet where, despite numerous legal battles, they now circulate freely (Rothstein 2009; Urban 2011:102-05, 178-200). Perhaps the most infamous material in these advanced grades is contained in OT level III (which was also savagely mocked on the animated TV show “ South Park”). The basic outline of the story runs as follows: 75,000,000 years ago there was a Galactic Confederacy consisting of seventy-six planets, ruled by a dictator named Xenu (or Xemu in some versions). In order to solve the problem of overpopulation in his confederacy, Xenu brought billions of people to Earth (then called “Teegeeack”) and placed hydrogen bombs in Earth’s volcanoes to destroy them. The thetans from these individuals, however, survived and eventually adhered to the bodies of modern human beings. Thus, each one of us today has a mass of “extra-body thetans” stuck onto ourselves, which are in turn causing us pain and unhappiness in this lifetime (Urban 2011:103; Whitehead 1987:185; Rothstein 2009).

Although the media has made a great deal of the Xenu story, it is important to note that it is a relatively small part of the larger Scientology belief system and not a concern for most ordinary Scientologists. Moreover, the Xenu story is really quite unremarkable when compared to the more elaborate space opera narratives contained in Hubbard’s publicly available lectures from the early 1950s.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The central practice in Dianetics and Scientology is the unique form of therapy called “auditing” (from Latin auditus, to hear). The practice involves a trained counselor (the “auditor”) who works with an individual to help identify the painful memory traces (engrams) that have been burned into the reactive mind. Through auditing, the individual can relive these experiences and then clear them from the reactive mind. In the early Dianetics system, auditing focused on identifying and clearing engrams from this present life, some going back to the pre-natal state, in order to achieve the state called “Clear.” An individual who is “Clear” has removed all the engrams from his reactive mind and is claimed to achieve a state of optimum physical and psychological well-being, including total memory recall, higher IQ, and greater creativity (Hubbard 2007d:227).

To aid in the auditing process, Hubbard began to use a device called the E-meter (electro-psychometer). The first versions of the E-meter were developed by Volney Mathison, a chiropractor and author of paranormal and science fiction books. After a falling-out with Mathison in 1954, Hubbard devised his own modification of Mathison’s E-meter, which has undergone various upgrades and is still used to this day. The E-meter [Image at right] works somewhat like a lie-detector, operating as a skin galvanometer that measures fluctuations in the passage of a trickle of electricity through the body. The primary component of the meter is an instrument called the Wheatstone Bridge, which measures changes in electrical resistance. The individual undergoing auditing holds two cylinders that are connected by wires to the meter, while the auditor asks a series of questions in order to identify where specific engrams lie. Once the engram has been identified and cleared from the reactive mind, the needle of the meter is supposed to “float,” which indicates that the individual no longer reacts to that painful memory (Whitehead 1987:142-43).

The more elaborate practices of Scientology, begin with the basic form of auditing described in Dianetics but eventually delve into the more complex understanding of the thetan, its past lives and its infinite potential. The ultimate goal of Scientology auditing, then, is not simply to remove the engrams form this present lifetime in order to achieve the “Clear” state but also to unleash the unlimited power and potential of the thetan. Beyond the level of Clear, the Scientologist ascends through the more esoteric OT levels, in which the thetan has increasing freedom from and mastery over the MEST universe. Ultimately the thetan is believed to acquire various “super powers,” such as telepathy, clairvoyance, physical healing and “remote viewing” or seeing things at great distances, a paranormal ability also explored by the CIA during this time (Urban 2011:112-15). Hubbard also wrote extensively about the thetan’s ability to “exteriorize” or leave the physical body and travel at will throughout the universe (2006:115, 1975a:279), which has much in common with the concept of astral travel discussed by Crowley and other occultists of the early twentieth century (Urban 2012). At the Scientology center in Clearwater, Florida the church has also begun construction of a huge (and hugely expensive) “Super Power Building” adjacent to its Fort Harrison Hotel. According to Scientology’s Source magazine, the Super Power building is “an entirely New Universe” and ideal in every detail: “Expanding on technology developed by NASA astronauts, it’s now combined with everything else they never conceived of in terms of space.” Photos of the interior of the building feature space age looking rooms with large shiny orbs and a GyroSpin device (Source 2007:40-1; Urban 2011:112-15).

In addition to auditing, however, Scientology offers a variety of other services that are analogous to and/or modeled upon those of mainstream Christian churches. These include free Sunday services that are open to the public, as well as marriages, funerals, and other rites that resemble Christian practices (Church of Scientology 1998). The Church of Scientology does also celebrate a number of holidays throughout the year; among these are Hubbard’s birthday (March 13), the date marking the first publication of Dianetics (May 9), the anniversary of the maiden voyage of the Scientology vessel, the Freewinds (June 6), and Auditor’s Day, in honor of all auditors (second Sunday in September) (Church of Scientology International 2012c).

ORGANIZATION/ LEADERSHIP

The organization of the Church of Scientology has a long, convoluted and extremely complicated history. The early Dianetics movement was first organized as the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation (HDRF). However, the HDRF went bankrupt in 1952 and was replaced by the Hubbard Association of Scientologists (HAS) and then by the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI). In 1981, the Church of Scientology International (CSI), also known as the Mother Church, was formed; and this was followed in 1982 by the Church of Spiritual Technology (CSI), which owns all copyrights on the estate of L. Ron Hubbard, and then by the Religious Technology Center (RTC). While the RTC claims only to be the ”holder of Dianetics and Scientology Trademarks,” it is the most powerful executive organization within the Scientology empire, and its current chairman, David Miscavige, is widely recognized as the effective head of the church (Religious Technology Center 2011; Childs and Tobin 2009).

Today, what we call “Scientology” is in reality a remarkably complex network of ostensibly independent but clearly interconnected corporate entities. These include not only the many individual churches (or “outer orgs”) but also publishing houses, such as Bridge Publications and Golden Era Productions, as well as various groups and services, such as World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE), Scientology Missions International (SMI), the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), and Foundation for Religious Freedom (FRF), as well as drug and criminal rehabilitation programs such as NARCONON and CRIMINON, among many, many others (Urban 2011:131). As such, the Church of Scientology is perhaps best understood not simply as a “religion,” but rather as a complex, multifaceted multinational corporation of which religion is simply one aspect (Kent 1999).

ISSUES/ CHALLENGES

Since the first publication of Dianetics in 1950 and down to the present, Hubbard’s movement has raised a series of controversies and faced serious challenges from a variety of government agencies, journalists, anti-cult groups and ex-members. Several of these, such as its wars with the IRS and FDA, have already been discussed in the preceding sections. For the sake of brevity, this profile will focus on just five other important issues surrounding the church.

1. Is it a “religion”? Much of the debate surrounding Scientology has focused on its claim to being a “religion” and its recognition as such in the eyes of government entities in the U.S. and around the world. Since the mid-1950s, and above all since the late 1960s, the church has argued fiercely that it is a bona fide religion, putting out numerous books and magazines to prove the point and also enlisting various scholars of religion in its defense. In 1969, the church launched Advance! magazine, most of whose issues were devoted to a particular world religion and the suggestion that Scientology was the fulfillment and completion of that particular religion (Urban 2011:165). Then in 1998, the church published a large, slickly produced book that quoted numerous scholars from around the world, most prominently, British sociologist of religion, Bryan R. Wilson, all arguing that Scientology is a legitimate religion (Church of Scientology 1998).

Meanwhile, from its first incorporation as a “church,” Scientology’s religious status has been challenged by various critics. Particularly during the “cult scares” of the 1980s, Scientology has widely been viewed by ant-cult activists and the media not as a real “religion” but rather as a dangerous “cult” and even as the quintessential “cult of greed” (Behar 1991). Alternatively, because of its lucrative financial structure and the high fees it charges for auditing, Scientology has been described by some legal scholars as a kind of “deviant business” (Passas and Castillo 1992). Hubbard stated quite explicitly that one of the aims of Scientology is to “MAKE MONEY,” and the costs of Scientology auditing run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the advanced OT levels (Hubbard 1975b:384; Urban 2011:133-36). As such, the church seems to straddle the fuzzy boundary between tax-exempt religion and for-profit business (Passas and Castillo 1992). And still other scholars have described Scientology as a kind of “simulacrum of religion,” that is, an imitation of a religion that simply adopts the outward trappings of crosses, ministerial collars, religious jargon, etc in order to win tax exemption and the other benefits that come with religious status (Urban 2011:17). Finally, some scholars have suggested that Scientology might be best understood as a complex “multifaceted transnational” akin to multinational corporation of which religion is one, but only one, of its many components (Kent 1999). In any case, whether we decide to describe Scientology as a religion, cult, business, or simulacrum, this movement represents an unusually clear “test case” for thinking about the complex question of what religion is, who defines it, and what is at stake in calling something a “religion” (Urban 2011).

2. Scientology vs. Critics and the Media. From its inception in the early 1950s, Dianetics was widely attacked in the mainstream media, both in the U.S. and abroad. Hubbard’s science of the mind was frequently mocked as a kind of poor man’s psychoanalysis or a “fantastic absurdity” (Gumpert 1950) and was soon under investigation by the FDA, IRS and various foreign governments. And in turn, Scientology has become infamous for its use of aggressive legal and sometimes extra-legal measures in order to respond to its critics in the media. As Hubbard put in his 1959 Manual of Justice, “People attack Scientology; I never forget it, always even the score” (1959:1). In the mid-1960s, this aggressive strategy toward critics was known as “fair game,” meaning that opponents of Scientology could be confronted by any all means at the church’s disposal; indeed, they may be “tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed” (Hubbard 1967; Urban 2006; Kumar 1997).

Although the use of the specific phrase “fair game” was officially discontinued for PR reasons in 1968, many critics of the church continued to be treated in extremely aggressive ways. Thus in 1971, journalist Paulette Cooper published a scathing exposé entitled The Scandal of Scientology. In response, the church’s Guardian’s Office launched a plan called “Operation Freakout” whose stated aim was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least list hit her so hard that she drops the attack” (Sentencing Memorandum 1980:20-1). Similar tactics were used against journalist Richard Behar while he was researching his Time magazine article, “the Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.” [Image at right] According to Behar’s account, “at least ten attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me…A copy of my personal credit report – with detailed information about my banks accounts, home mortgage…– had been illegally retrieved” (1991:57). A wide array of other journalists, academics and even ordinary college students have reported similar experiences with the church and its lawyers (Urban 2011:11-13, 109-12).

3. Scientology vs. the anti-cult movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, Scientology was widely criticized as one of the most dangerous “cults” in America and became a central part of the larger “cult scare” of the 1980s (Bromley and Shupe 1981). Indeed, Cynthia Kisser of the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) branded Scientology as “the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever known” (Behar 1991). In response, the church attacked CAN as a bigoted, intolerant organization with a Nazi-like attitude and filed numerous lawsuits against the group. Eventually, CAN was forced in to bankruptcy in 1996 as a result of a lawsuit brought against it by Jason Scott. Scott was not himself a Scientologist but rather a member of the Pentecostal Life Tabernacle Church; however, he was represented in the suit by Kendrick Moxon, a prominent Scientology official and lawyer (Moxon, in fact, had also been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous “Operation Snow White” infiltration of the IRS offices in the 1970s [Hansen 1997]). After CAN had been forced into bankruptcy, the network’s logo, furniture, and phone number were auctioned off and subsequently purchased by Stephen Hayes, another Scientologist, who outbid Kisser and won the remainder of CAN’s assets. Jason Scott later sold his settlement to Gary Beeney, also a Scientologist and represented by Moxon, making him CAN’s largest creditor. Beeney in turn donated CAN’s extensive files and records to the Foundation for Religious Freedom, which is itself, according to the 1993 IRS settlement, owned by the Church of Scientology. CAN was subsequently renamed the New Cult Awareness Network and continues to operate to this day under the Scientology umbrella. Ironically, then, the entity that once attacked Scientology as the world’s most dangerous cult is now effectively owned and operated by the Church of Scientology (Russell 1999; Hansen 1997; Urban 2011:150-51).

4. Scientology and the Internet. Perhaps Scientology’s greatest challenges and most intense battles have occurred in cyberspace (Cowan 2004; Fearer 1998; Brill and Packard 1997; Urban 2011:178-200). Ironically, no sooner had the church won its wars against the IRS and the Cult Awareness Network than it faced a new and more difficult war on the Internet. Most of its challenges in cyberspace began after the leak of the confidential OT materials and the Xenu story, which first appeared in court testimonies during the 1980s and then appeared online in the 1990s. The primary guardian of the church’s copyrights on the Internet has been the Religious Technology Center, which has engaged in several massive lawsuits with a variety of websites. One of the first and most prominent cases (among many) was the church’s lawsuit against former Scientologist Larry Wollersheim, who co-founded the website FACTNet.org and posted thousands of documents, including the OT materials, online. In August, 1995, a federal court ordered a raid on Wollersheim’s home, led by U.S. Marshals and RTC representatives, which resulted in the confiscation of all of his computers, software, and dozens of boxes of paper files. This in turn sparked an intense debate over copyright protection, trade secrets and free speech both on the Internet and in public spaces. The church’s lawyers argued that Wollersheim and his kind were “spreading lawlessness on the Internet” by violating religious privacy and the church’s copyright materials, while Wollersheim and his defenders argued that the church had violated his own rights to free speech (Brill and Packard 1997; Fearer 1998:352). This and other cases regarding Scientology and the Internet have generated intense debates surrounding the First Amendment, and specifically the tension between the ideals of free exercise of religion and freedom of speech (Brill and Packard 1997; Fearer 1998; Urban 2011:178-200).

Another major conflict in cyberspace occurred between Scientology and the world’s largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.com. In May, 2009, Wikipedia’s arbitration council voted 10-0 to ban any users coming from any IP address owned by the Church of Scientology. This unprecedented action was taken because the church had been found to have repeatedly and deceptively edited hundreds of articles relating to Scientology, thus “damaging Wikipedia’s reputation for neutrality” (Singel 2009). Tracing all the edits coming from Scientology machines was particularly difficult because numerous editors worked from a small number of IPs, and the address of each editor was constantly changing. This tactic, known as “sock-puppeting,” is not allowed in Wikiland (Metz 2009).

Finally, perhaps the church’s greatest challenge of the twenty-first century has come from an unlikely source, the decentralized, faceless, and anarchic network of Internet users that calls itself Anonymous. The Anonymous collective first began to target Scientology in early 2008, [Image at right] following the leak of a confidential video featuring Tom Cruise. The video, in which Cruise appears even more intense than usual, appeared on YouTube on January 15, 2008 and was viewed millions of times, but it was quickly removed from the site after threats of litigation by the church. Scientology’s threats against YouTube became a powerful catalyst for the Anonymous collective, which saw these actions as dangerous attacks on free speech and the open flow of information online. On January 21, 2008, Anonymous released a video of its own entitled Message to Scientology, which also spread virally online. The message features an electronically masked voice delivering a merciless critique and a chilling promise to “destroy” the church. Not long after the message was released, Anonymous members began to confront the church in both cyberspace and physical space, launching cyber attacks on Scientology websites and also staging large protests outside Scientology centers around the world (Seabrook 2008; Landers 2008; Urban 2011:191-96). Often wearing Guy Fawkes masks from the movie V for Vendetta, Anonymous protesters typically carry signs such as “$cientology Kills” and “Religion is Free: Scientology is Neither” and have been active worldwide, from Clearwater to Copenhagen to Columbus, OH. The church, in turn, has denounced Anonymous in the strongest possible terms as a “group of cyberterrorists” who “perpetrate hate crimes” against a religious organization (Urban 2011:193).

5. Ex-members, Allegations of Abuse and the “Scientology Reformation.” Finally, some of the greatest challenges facing the church have come from a long line of ex-members who accuse Hubbard and his movement with a staggering array of charges ranging from fraud and deception to violence and human rights abuses. Ex-member accounts began to appear even in the early 1960s (O’Brien 1966) but did not become widely known until the 1980s, with the severe attacks from Hubbard’s son, L. Ron Jr. and an array of exposés by former members (Miller 1988; Atack 1990). Since 2008, a flood of ex-member accounts began to appear. Ex-members have charged the church not only with fraud, but also with a wide array of aggressive, abusive and illegal practices (Armstrong 1999; Many 2009; Headley 2010; Rathbun 2012; Childs and Tobin 2009).

One of the most controversial aspects of the church is its Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), which was first established within the Sea Org in the early 1970s in order to discipline members found guilty of deviating from the Org’s norms. Eventually, RPF centers were created at major Scientology centers in Los Angeles, Clearwater, London and Copenhagen. Defenders of the church and more sympathetic scholars have described the RPF as analogous to a “monastic retreat,” where devoted members can find a quiet respite to deal with spiritual problems (Melton 2001). Critics of the church, conversely, have argued that the RPF bears less resemblance to a monastic retreat than it does to an unusually brutal prison or even “a Chinese Ideological Re-Education Center” (Armstrong 1999; Many 2009). Some more critical scholars have charged that the RPF involves actual human rights abuses, such as forcible confinement, physical maltreatment, demanding chores, poor diet and inadequate medical care ( Kent 1997).

Another controversial practice often highlighted by ex-members is “disconnection,” which involves the complete severance of all ties between a Scientologist and any family, friends or colleagues who are considered to be antagonistic to the church. In some cases, disconnection has involved the separation of children from parents and spouses from one another. The church has defended disconnection as a spiritual practice that is necessary in some cases for personal growth; and some scholars have defended the practice as analogous to “shunning” (Church of Scientology International 2013). Critics and ex-members, however, have argued that the practice is extreme, coercive and psychologically destructive (Atack 1990:35-36, 319-320; Many 2009; Headley 2010).

Beginning in 2009, a new series of even more damning charges was brought forward by Marty Rathbun, who had served as the Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center and as a close associate of current church head David Miscavige. In a long set of interviews with the Tampa Bay Times, Rathbun had truly shocking tales to tell about Miscavige’s alleged violence and abuse, which included not just accounts of physical beatings but even more bizarre behavior. In one of the more surreal episodes, Miscavige allegedly forced top executives to play a brutal all-night game of musical chairs to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Childs and Tobin 2009). Still loyal to Hubbard’s legacy, however, Rathbun has called for a “Scientology Reformation” that would clean up the corruption in the church and restore the original message of its founder (2012).

Today, the Church of Scientology claims that its members number in the millions and that it is the “world’s fastest growing religion” (2004). However, most polls of religious affiliation suggest otherwise. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, Scientology’s numbers in the U.S. were not only nowhere near the level claimed by the church but also had fallen significantly from 55,000 in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008. Even scholars who are sympathetic to the church note that its numbers are probably much exaggerated (Goldstein 2010; Urban 2011: 206). Meanwhile the challenges facing the church from ex-members, would-be reformers, journalists, various governments and critics on the Internet have by no means abated but grown more intense in the last decade.

IMAGES
Image #1: Lafayette Ron (L. Ron) Hubbard.
Image #2: Cover of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
Image #3: Photograph of an E-meter.
Image #4: Cover of Time Magazine’s issue containing the story, “Scientology: The Cult of Greed,” written by Richard Behar.
Image #5: A protest by Anonymous outside of a Scientology facility.

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Freedom of Information/ Privacy Acts Section. Subject: Church of Scientology/ L. Ron Hubbard, 1951-1991.

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Materials Related to the Church of Scientology. University of California Los Angeles Library (Department of Special Collections).

Publcation Date:
20 January 2013

 CHURCH OF THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER TIMELINE

1980 (July 18):  Bobby Henderson was born in Roseburg, Oregon.

2000’s (Early):  Henderson graduated from Oregon State University with a B.S. in Physics.

2005:  The Kansas State Board of Education allowed Intelligent Design to be taught in high school science classes.

2005:  Henderson published an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education and then later published it on his website.

2006:  Henderson published The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

2007:  The American Academy of Religion hosted a paper session on Pastafarianism at its annual conference.

2010:  The Loose Cannon was completed and published online .

2011:  Austrian Pastafarian Niko Alm was granted permission to wear a colander on his head in his driver’s license photo.

2014:  Australian Pastafarian Dan Guenther applied to the government to teach Pastafarianism as special religious education in primary schools. The case was pending in 2014 in the office of the New South Wales Education Minister.

2014:  The Polish government recognised Pastafarianism as a religion.

2014:  American Pastafarian Christopher Schaeffer was sworn into office as Town Councillor while wearing a colander on his head.

2014:  American Pastafarian sued the State of Nebraska for preventing him from wearing pirate regalia and worshipping freely whilst in prison. The outcome is pending.

2015:  The New Zealand government authorised the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to conduct legal wedding ceremonies.

2022:  A Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster church building was established in Australia.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Bobby Henderson was born in Roseburg, Oregon in 1980. He attended Oregon State University and earned a B.S. degree inPhysics. By his own account, he travelled to Nevada, Arizona, and later to the Philippines where he lived for three years (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 2016a).

He began to develop what would become the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in November 2005 after the Kansas State Board of Education granted schools the right to teach alternatives to evolution in high school science classes. This meant that Intelligent Design was deemed appropriate for the classroom. Intelligent Design is a theory that adopts a putatively pseudo-scientific approach to argue that the universe is far too complex to have evolved naturally and was therefore created by an “intelligent designer.” It leaves the identification of the designer unspecified, an important element for understanding The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), or as it is also called, Pastafarianism. This is important because Pastafarianism formed after its founder, Bobby Henderson, a physics graduate, wrote a letter of protest to the Kansas Board of Education during their deliberation. In the “open letter,” Henderson made the argument that because Intelligent Design does not specifically identify the “designer,” alternatives to the Christian/Creationist theories were equally valid and should therefore also be taught in schools. He presented the Flying Spaghetti Monster as one of these alternatives, arguing that the universe was created by a flying monster made out of spaghetti, with meatballs, and two eyes on breadstick stalks. He stated that “If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith” (Henderson 2005).

In the letter, Henderson outlined the basic beliefs about the FSM, and argued that there is scientific proof for his existence. Theletter was written as a parody of the ways that some Christians co-opt science for their own religious purposes. Its tone is ironic, as its claims are by no means acceptable by scientific standards (for example, that global warming can be directly linked to “the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s”), yet they are put forth earnestly and confidently in mimicry of the manner in which Henderson believes some Christians try to argue for the existence of an “intelligent designer” (Henderson 2005). By copying, and then exaggerating, the style of arguments employed by Creationists, Henderson satirised creationism, highlighting what he regards as the absurdity of its claims, and criticised the school board’s acceptance of intelligent design as science. His ridicule and true position can be sensed in his choice of language for his request that each theory be given equal time in science classes: “One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (Pastafarianism), and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence” (Henderson 2005). By making this comparison, Henderson drew attention to the flaws in intelligent design theory and ultimately suggested that to teach intelligent design as science is as absurd as a flying spaghetti monster creating the universe.

After receiving no response from the school board, Henderson published the letter on his website. The open letter attracted significant attention, and Henderson began to use his website to expand his theology, explaining in further detail the beliefs and practices of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Within a year of sending his open letter, the FSM had become an internet phenomenon, with millions of hits on his website. Henderson received thousands of emails, including several from members of the Kansas Education Board, the majority of whom “thanked him for the laugh,” while one member told him it is “an offense to mock God” (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster n.d.1). Mainstream media including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Sun-Times reprinted Henderson’s open letter (Narizny 2009:44). The website BoingBoing pushed the hype further by offering a $250,000 prize to anyone who can “produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” (Jardin 2005). The prize was offered in response to a challenge put forth by Intelligent Design proponent Kevin Hind, who would give a quarter of a million dollars to anyone who could provide empirical evidence for evolution. The BoingBoing prize was even raised to $1,000,000 after contributions were offered from supporters. Of course, the fine print indicated that this prize money was to be awarded “with Intelligently Designed currency; void where prohibited by logic” (Jardin 2005), further demonstrating how dismissive the FSM movement is about intelligent design. By August 2005, the FSM had a Wikipedia entry, by 2006 Henderson had gained interest from multiple publishers for the “scriptures” that would become The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and by 2007 academics were discussing Pastafarianism as a legitimate scholarly subject (Chryssides and Zeller 2014:363).

At first, Henderson wrote the letter as an “amusement” and he did not foresee the consequences it would have (Narizny 2009:44). Despite having started as a joke or “amusement,” the Church of the FSM has developed as a religious belief and practice, with its own theology and rituals and followers. Accessing accurate membership details is difficult due Pastafarianism’s online nature and the unstructured, non-committal membership process. As Henderson describes it:

“ So you want to be a Pastafarian. Great. Consider yourself a member.  You’ll notice there’s no hoops to jump through. You don’t need to pay anything” (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 2016b).

The first known Pastaferian church building was established in Australia, which has not granted official recognition to Pastaferianism. Originally a Presbyterian church, the property was purchased in 2012 after the church had closed, by Pirate Priestess Angela Carter and her husband, Captain Colin “Cupcakes” Carter, who use the property both as a church and a residence (Neal 2022).

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Henderson argues that in the Church of the FSM there is only one dogma, that is, there is no dogma. However, there are certain beliefs that are generally accepted by followers, although they may reject, add to, and reinterpret these beliefs freely. The most concrete example of this is in the publication of The Loose Cannon (2010), a scripture that has been compiled from online commentary developed by FSM followers that builds on and expands the original writings of Bobby Henderson.

Pastafarianism in many ways operates as a parody of Christianity, and to a lesser extent other religious traditions. It reappropriates many of Christianity’s myths, beliefs and practices and reinterprets them through the lens of FSM, often comically replacing familiar religious ideas with references to pasta; for example, “He boiled for your sins,” or The Old and New “Pastaments.” Pastafarianism is monotheistic in that there is one supreme deity known as the FSM. The FSM is the creator of the universe. He is made of spaghetti, with meatballs embedded in his body and his eyes mounted on breadsticks. He is also an interventionist god, involving himself intimately with humanity by “touching with his noodly appendage.” Though he is invisible, he uses his noodly appendages to control human history, in particular to confuse scientists by making them think the world is older than it really is. This is the reason that there appears to be evidence for evolution and other scientific conclusions, as Henderson explains:

For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage (Henderson 2005).

Pastafarianism has a creation myth that continues to be expanded and developed by Henderson and FSM followers. Due to the FSM emphasis on Intelligent Design, there is significant focus placed on creation. The FSM created the universe, in what some Pastafarians have called “the Big Boil” (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 2016). Parallels to the Biblical creation story abound, although the earth was created in four days, because the FSM rested on the fifth, sixth and seventh day. According to The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, on the first day the FSM created light and darkness, and on the second he created the firmament, including a “volcano to spew forth beer.” On the third day, the FSM made vegetation, saying “Let the Earth bring forth grass, semolina, rice and whatever else can be turned into food that resembles my Noodly Appendages” (Henderson 2006:70-71). In addition, because he was hung over from the beer volcano, he had forgotten that he had already created land. So he made more land, but, realising he now had “both land and firmament,” he lifted Day Two’s firmament upwards and named it Heaven, making sure to take the beer volcano with it. On the third day, he created the sun, moon and stars. On the fifth and final day, he created the animals, and, after a heavy drinking session from the beer volcano, had created a stripper factory in Heaven and a midget on Earth. After this he took “an extended break from the whole creation gig,” and declared Fridays to be a holiday.

Again borrowing from the Biblical account of the creation of humanity, the midget becomes the Pastafarian “Adam,” and is placed in the Olive Garden of Eden, a playful name that refers to the popular American Italian restaurant (Olive Garden). In the Olive Garden of Eden, the FSM creates woman as a companion for the midget. Similarly, the FSM mythology includes the story of the Flood, the Tower of “Scrapple” and the story of cook-turned-pirate, Mosey. For Pastafarians, the flood was caused by the boiling water that went down the sink and covered the earth when the FSM cooked pasta in Heaven. The story of Mosey is a clear parody of the story of Moses. Mosey is a short-order cook, oppressed by an evil boss, “Phil,” and Mosey is guided by the FSM to help all the exploited cooks escape from under Phil’s regime. In the desert, the FSM speaks to Mosey through a toasted marshmallow, and when Phil will not release the cooks, he brings forth three plagues: a rain of spaghetti sauce, a hail of linguini, and repetitively playing an irritating song in Phil’s head. Pastafarians even celebrate the “Pastover” in memory of when “the angel hair pasta of death” passed over the houses smeared with pasta sauce (Henderson 2006:76).

Mosey was also given the eight “I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts,” the Pastafarian version of the Ten Commandments. They illustratethe lack of dogmatism and rigidity in the Church and its understanding of the FSM’s wishes. His wishes are decidedly more flexible, nuanced and comic preferences, rather than absolutist commandments, and show that the FSM criticises the severity of fundamentalist world views. There are only eight because Mosey dropped two of the tablets, which Henderson says “partly accounts for Pastafarians’ flimsy moral standards” (Henderson 2006:77). However, in fact the FSM moral code is fairly strong in its ethics. For example the FSM would “Really Rather You Didn’t Act Like a Sanctimonious, Holier-Than-Thou Ass When Describing My Noodly Goodness…,” and he would “Really Rather You Didn’t Use My Existence As A Means To Oppress, Subjugate, Punish, Eviscerate, And/Or, You Know, Be Mean To Others.” The other requests from the FSM are a blend of moral standards and jokes about vanity, hunger, “lowering the cost of cable,” and sex (Henderson 2006:78).

In a reflection of the Jews as the Judeo-Christian “chosen people,” Mosey’s people, Pirates, are the favoured people of the FSM. This belief was first laid out in Henderson’s open letter, and plays an important role in faith and practice. Pirates are the chosen people, and therefore all teaching about the FSM should be carried out in full pirate regalia or else the FSM will be angry. Henderson (2006:41) explains that humans were created in His ideal image, the Pirate.

In the open letter, Henderson explains that there is a direct correlation between climate change and the number of pirates. Heexplains to the Board, “You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s” (Henderson 2005).  Henderson also included a graph to illustrate his point, that “there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.” His main point is also that evidence can be fabricated for any argument and passed off as science, something that Henderson considers a tactic used by intelligent design advocates.

Pastafarianism is fundamentally shaped by its origin as a protest against the mixing together of science and religion. It actively participates in dialogue on the relationship between science and religion. It does this primarily through replicating and spoofing the creationist belief that answers to scientific enquiry can be found by looking at the supernatural. Thus, Pastafarians also claim that the FSM can be proven through scientific method, and conversely, that the FSM explains science. For example, in The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, gravity is explained as the force of Him pushing us down with His noodly appendage (Henderson 2006:4), and the “String Theory” of theoretical physics is shown to be misinterpretation of “Unified Spaghetti Theory,” where life was created by cooking “strings” of spaghetti in a giant pot (2006:41).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Much like Pastafarian beliefs, Pastafarian rituals tend to mimic Christian rituals and practices, with a few notable exceptions. The most familiar is the practice of ending all prayers to the FSM with “Ramen,” a combination of the traditional “Amen” and the Japanese noodle. The strongest playful element in Pastafarianism is the act of changing existing religious beliefs and practices into something relating to pasta. In The Loose Cannon (2010), there are chapters titled “The Torahtellini,” “The Book of ProvHerbs,” and the “Acts of the Apastals.” The Loose Cannon also provides a Pastafarian prayer book, containing numerous prayers written by members of the online Pastafarian community. Some are parodies of existing prayers, such as “Hail Marinara” (Hail Mary) (2010:183), “The Spaghettiudes” (the Beatitudes) (2010:194), and multiple versions of the Lord’s Prayer, including:

Our Pasta, who “Arghh” in heaven, Swallowed be thy shame. Thy Midgit come. Thy Sauce be yum, on top some grated Parmesan. Give us this day our garlic bread. And give us our cutlasses, As we swashbuckle, splice the main-brace and cuss. And lead us into temptation, But deliver us some Pizza. For thine are Meatballs, and the beer, and the strippers, for ever and ever. Ramen (2010:181).

Other prayers are simply devotionals to the FSM, although all are humorous attempts to incorporate pasta, pirates and intelligentdesign as themes. There is even a Holy Limerick:

There once was a Prophet named Bobby,
Who challenged ID as a hobby
His Monster (FS)
Was such a success
That he conquered ID in the lobby (2010:194)

This kind of creativity is the most popular form of devotion to the FSM. Devotional art plays a significant role in the practice of Pastafarians. In the open letter, Henderson included a rough sketch of what the FSM looks like, accompanied by some trees, mountains and a “midgit.” This has been the source for further artistic expression of devotion for followers.

The official FSM website hosts numerous examples of religious art that followers of the FSM have created. Pastafarians create images of the FSM for both devotional and evangelical purposes. The most well-known work is Arne Niklas Jansson’s appropriation of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam , in which God has been replaced by the FSM, with a caption that reads “Touched By His Noodly Appendage.” Many followers create illustrations, digital art, and sculptures, and the FSM’s image can be found on everything from t-shirts and mugs, to Christmas decorations, and parade floats.

Pastafarian practice often revolves around the chosen people, Pirates. Pastafarians are encouraged to dress in full pirate regalia, celebrate the International Talk Like a Pirate Day on the nineteenth of September, and have a pirate fish fossil that acts as a symbol for pirate admiration. This also is a playful criticism of intelligent design’s understanding of the fossil record. Halloween is also a significant holiday, as it allows followers to dress freely as Pirates without judgment.

In addition to dressing in full pirate regalia wherever possible, Pastafarians are also encouraged to wear colanders on their head, as an outward symbol of their devotion to the FSM. This is partly for the absurdity, but also for its role in cooking pasta. This has been a controversial aspect of the Church of the FSM developing into a religion, as many followers seek to legitimise their beliefs by wearing colanders in official or legal circumstances. Examples include wearing colanders in their passport or drivers licence photographs where the question arises as to whether or not a colander counts as religious headwear (Cusack 2016:7).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

The Church of the FSM has very little formal structure, both in terms of leadership and organisation. The founder, Bobby Henderson, is sometimes thought of as a prophet, and he largely acts as head of the church through running the official website. While the church began in the United States, it has expanded across the globe, with numerous chapters in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Many chapters simply run through a website, although meeting up as a community it encouraged. While there are discussions of schisms within the Church of the FSM, most new groups are undeveloped and exist online as extensions of the pasta-themed humour. For example, there is a list of schismatic groups on Uncyclopedia.com, a spoof of the popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, that includes followers of Spaghetti & Pulsar Activating Meatballs (SPAM), the Moominist Church of His Flying Spaghettiness, and the Flying Spaghetti-O Monster (Uncyclopedia Website n.d.).

There are ministers of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster; however, there is no training involved as certificates ofordination are available for purchase from the official website and there are no official duties that need to be carried out. The website explains:

These credentials [are] suitable for presiding over social ceremonies such as marriages and baptisms, giving last rites, casting out false prophets, performing exorcisims (sic) and so on. Your name will be added to the official (sic) registry of Ordained FSM Ministers (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster n.d.).

The official written text for the Church of FSM is the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, written by Bobby Henderson and published by Villard Press in 2006. However, the basic theology was developed in the original letter that Henderson wrote to the Kansas school board, which was included in the Gospel and is frequently referenced. Most written material about the FSM has developed through the interactivity of the church’s website, through Henderson’s blog posts and the lively and active forum hosted there. In 2010, Henderson made available a second collection of writings, The Loose Cannon, compiled from the writings that followers posted to the website. While there are texts accepted by the Church as “official,” there is no sense that there is scriptural authority or that any one person’s interpretation of the FSM is more or less valid. Pastafarians are prolific in their development and adaptation of the first writings of Henderson, and Henderson himself regularly updates the website, thus expanding and celebrating the creativity and diversity of Pastafarians.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The main challenge that is faced by the Church of the FSM is the accusation that this is not a “real” religion. The Church is one of many new religions at the heart of the ongoing debate over what constitutes legitimacy in terms of religious belief, practice, and identity. This debate also covers any implications in social, ethical and legal life. Academic study of Pastafarianism is limited, although growing steadily. It has been called a “parody” religion (Boppana 2009), a “fake” or “pseudo-cult” (Obadia 2015:120) and a “joke” religion (Narizny 2009).

For many, the Church of the FSM is not a religion by virtue of its “made up” or fictional origins. It is openly and directly a parody of intelligent design and associated ideas. It could be argued that it exists only as a critique of creationism, where the mimicry is merely one of many tactics (Boppana 2009:54) employed by new atheist movements to attack or subvert religion more broadly and that it therefore is not a legitimate religion in its own right. Pastafarianism is seen by many as either a game, an unhelpful distraction (Jenkins 2011), or as an attention grabbing front for a more important message about the separation of church and state (International Business Times 2016).

It can however be argued that Pastafarianism is what Carole Cusack (2010) has more neutrally termed an “invented” religion, one that is based on fiction, popular culture or imagination and most significantly is open about its imagined origins. In the context of new religious movements, an invented religion is really just another option in the spiritual marketplace. Whether Pastafarianism is “real” in any abstract sense is of lesser importance for scholars of lived religion and, especially, believers whose lives are influenced in some way by the framework provided by the Church of the FSM. As Cusack (2010:3) argues, “[invented religions] can be seen to be functionally similar, if not identical, to traditional religions.” Pastafarianism has “religious discourse at its heart” (Cowan 2007:361) and is modelled on the traditional and strong religious scaffold that is Christianity. Thus is retains many features that would qualify it as a religion under many definitions, including a religious doctrine, identity, and practice.

While many might consider Pastafarian doctrine as parody alone, and Bobby Henderson himself has suggested it was invented for his own amusement, the significance of Pastafarianism is in its growth and development. Whether or not followers literally believe in the FSM is of lesser importance than the fact that they claim this as their religious identity. Henderson convincingly argues that there are many believers from other faiths who do not literally believe everything their faith teaches, stating “A lot of Christians don’t believe the Bible is literally true – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t True Christians” (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 2016a).

The importance of the lived experience of Pastafarians can be seen in the numerous cases of individual Pastafarian attempts toexercise the right to freedom of religious expression. This is frequently the subject of media coverage of the Church of FSM. There are many test cases that have brought the religious freedoms of Pastafarians into conflict with the law, and outcomes have varied in different countries and circumstances. At first, Pastafarians in multiple countries including, Austria, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia, attempted to have their photograph for their drivers licence (or other legal documents) taken while wearing a colander on their head. Their justification was that the colander is a part of their religious clothing, and any refusal impinges on their freedom to express their religious identity. Most cases have been successful, although Russian authorities have responded that if Andrei Filin, the first Russian to have a colander hat on his licence, is found driving without the colander his licence will be revoked (Mehta 2016). Such civic engagement has been expanded. In 2014, New York Town Council member Christopher Schaeffer was sworn in to office whilst wearing a colander on his head (Larson 2014). In the same year, an American prison inmate, Stephen Cavanaugh, sued the State of Nebraska, claiming that his rights had been violated in prison because he was not allowed to dress in full pirate regalia and meet for worship and fellowship (Millhiser 2014). Again in 2014, Pastafarians in Poland were allowed to register as an official religion, after a previous ban was overturned in the courts (Nelson 2014). Also in 2014, Australian Dan Guenther applied to teach Pastafarianism as religious education in primary schools (de Brito 2014). By 2015, the government of New Zealand had approved the Church of FSM to conduct legal marriage ceremonies (Edens 2015).

REFERENCES

Boppana, Kunal. 2009. Parody Religions: A Case Study of the ‘Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’and ‘Discordianism’. Unpublished dissertation. Ahmedabad: Mudra Institute of Communications. Accessed from http://keic.micaapps.net:1026/greenstone/collect/disserta/index/assoc/HASH0123/1913320c.dir/doc.pdf on 28 December 2015.

Chryssides, George and Benjamin E. Zeller. 2014. The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements. London: Bloomsbury.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 2016a. “About.” Accessed from http://www.venganza.org/ on 19 January 2016.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 2016b. “Join.” Accessed from http://www.venganza.org/ on 19 January 2016.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. n.d. “Ordination.” Accessed from http://www.venganza.org/ordination/ on 20 January 2016/

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. n.d.1. “Kansas School Board Responses to the Open Letter.” Accessed from http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/responses/ on 20 January 2016.

Cowan, Douglas. 2007. “Religion on the Internet.”. Pp. 357-76 in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by James A Beckford and Jay Demerath. London: SAGE.

Cusack Carmen M. 2016. Hair and Justice: Sociolegal Significance of Hair in Criminal Justice, Constitutional Law, and Social Policy. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.

Cusack, Carole M. 2010. Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Surrey: Ashgate.

de Brito, Sam. 2014. “ Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”Sydney Morning Herald, November 23. Accessed from http://www.smh.com.au/comment/church-of-the-flying-spaghetti-monster-20141115-11nc2q.html on 19 January 2016.

Edens, John. 2015. “Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster Approved to Perform Marriages.” Stuff.co.nz, December 15. Accessed from http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/weddings/75107725/Church-of-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster-approved-to-perform-marriages on 19 January 2016.

Henderson, Bobby. 2006. The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. New York: Villard.

Henderson, Bobby. 2005. Open Letter To Kansas School Board . Accessed from http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter on 18 January 2016.

International Business Times. 2016. “ Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: How Pastafarianism Emerged as the World’s Newest Religion.” International Business Times, January 16. Accessed from http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/church-flying-spaghetti-monster-how-pastafarianism-emerged-worlds-newest-religion-1538170 on 3 January 2016.

Jardin, Xeni. 2005. “ Boing Boing’s $250,000 Intelligent Design Challenge (UPDATED: $1 million).” Boing Boing, August 19. Accessed from http://boingboing.net/2005/08/19/boing-boings-250000.html on 3 January 2016.

Jenkins, Jack. 2011. “Jedis And Pastafarians: Real Religion Or Just A Joke?” Huffington Post, August 13. Accessed from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/13/jedis-and-pastafarians-re_n_925801.html?ir=Australia on 3 January 2016.

Larson, Leslie. 2014. “Pastafarian Politician Takes Oath of Office Wearing Colander on His Head.” New York Daily News, January 8. Accessed from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pastafarian-politician-takes-oath-office-wearing-colander-head-article-1.1568877 on 10 January 2016.

Mehta, Hemant. 2016. “ Russian Pastafarian Told He’ll Lose His License if Cops Catch Him Without a Strainer on His Head.” Patheos, January 16. Accessed from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/01/15/russian-pastafarian-told-hell-lose-his-license-if-cops-catch-him-without-a-strainer-on-his-head/ on 19 January 2016.

Millhiser, Ian. 2014. “ Inmate Sues Prison Claiming His Religious Liberty Entitles Him To Dress Like A Pirate.” Think Progress, October 29. Accessed from http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/10/29/3586041/inmate-sues-prison-claiming-his-religious-liberty-entitles-him-to-dress-like-a-pirate/ on 19 January 2016.

Narizny, Laurel. 2009. “Ha Ha, Only Serious: A Preliminary Study of Joke Religions.” Unpublished dissertation. University of Oregon. Accessed from https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/9336/Thesis%20Laurel%20Narizny.pdf on 28 December 2015.

Neal, Matt. 2022. “Australia’s only Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster brings visitors to new Pastafarian ‘religion’.” ABC News, June 28. Accessed from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-28/church-of-the-flying-spaghetti-monster-attracts-more-pastafarian/101189332 on 18 May 2023.

Nelson, Sara C. 2014. “Polish Pastafarians Rejoice! Church Of Flying Spaghetti Monster Granted Permission To Register As A Religion.” Huffington Post, April 9. Accessed from http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/04/09/polish-pastafarians-rejoice-church-of-flying-spaghetti-monsterpermission-register-religion_n_5116900.html on 19 Jannuary 2016.

Obadia, Lionel. 2015. “When Virtuality Shapes Social Reality – Fake Cults and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” Online: Heidelberg Journal For Religions on the Internet 8:115-28.

Pastafarian Schisms. n.d. Uncyclopedia. Accessed from http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Pastafarian_Schisms on 3 January 2016.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster. n.d. Accessed from http://spaghettimonster.com/pastafarianism/ on 3 January 2016.

The Loose Cannon . 2010. Accessed from http://www.venganza.org/2010/07/the-loose-canon/ on 3 January 2016.

Uncyclopedia Website. n.d. Accessed from https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Main_Page on 20 January 2016.

Post Date:
25 January 2016

CITY HARVEST CHURCH (CHC) TIMELINE

1989:  With the help of twenty youths, Kong Hee founded a new congregation on May 7 at Peace Center, Singapore.

1992:  City Harvest Church (CHC) was set up as a society.

1994:  CHC’s training school, the School of Theology (formerly known as City Harvest Bible Training Center), was started.

1995:  CHC started holding its services at the former Hollywood Theatre and continued there for another six years.

1996:  Kong Hee and his wife, Sun Ho (Ho is the last name), began Church Without Walls, a community service project.

1996:  Ho founded a social work agency, City Harvest Community Services Association.

2001:  The church built a church complex at Jurong West Street 91 and moved into its first permanent location.

2001:  The church claimed to have 10,310 attendees at its fifteen weekend services. It also had offices and schools in five different locations.

2002:  The church launched the “Crossover Project,” aiming to reach the secular world through Ho’s music.

2002:  The church supported the founding of City College, a social enterprise committed to providing alternative education for young people.

2003:  Ho was named “The Outstanding Young Person of the World” for her humanitarian efforts.

2004:  Ho was named an “Ambassador of Love” for the Children and Youth Foundation of China.

2005:  Kong took himself off the staff payroll and began serving the church as the honorary founder/senior pastor.

2005:  As the church grew, CHC rented another worship site at Singapore Expo for the weekend English service.

2006:  CHC started O School, a street dance training school for young people.

2008:  CHC began a Christian news portal, City News.

2009:  CHC claimed to have a congregation of 23,565 people.

2010:  CHC announced that it had purchased a significant stake in  Suntec Convention Centre, located in the Central Business District, which it would use for its church services.

2010:  CHC claimed to have an average attendance of 23,256 with forty-seven affiliate churches and six Bible schools in Asia.

2010:  Sixteen individuals linked to CHC, including Kong and Ho, were investigated by Singapore police for possible falsification of accounts and criminal breach of trust.

2011:  CHC moved to the  Suntec Convention Centre and claimed to have a congregation of 20, 619.

2012:  CHC reported a congregation of 19,819. There were also 5,937 students from at least thirty countries who were graduates of its training center.

2012:  Kong and five other church leaders were arrested and charged with misuse of funds.

2012:  Ho led a new management and board, which ran the operations of the church. She initiated a new church vision, called CHC 2.0, which was formulated by Kong.

2013 (May): The trial began; it continued for over two years.

2013:  CHC claimed a congregation of 18,192.

2014:  CHC claimed a congregation of 17,522.

2015:  Kong and five other church leaders were found guilty of falsification of accounts and criminal breach of trust. Kong initially received as sentence of eight years in prison, the heaviest sentence among the six who were charged.

2015:  Ho was ordained during CHC’s twenty-sixth anniversary celebrations and became the leader of the church.

2015:  CHC claimed a congregation of 16, 482.

2018 (February): The Court of Appeal upheld a decision by the High Court to convict the church leaders of less serious criminal breach of trust charges.

2019 (August 22):  Kong was released from incarceration after serving two years and four months of a three-and-a-half year sentence.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Kong Hee [Image at right] was born on August 23, 1964, in Singapore. He was the fifth child of Kong Leng, an engineer, and Toh Poh-Eng, a diamond trader. He graduated with a degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the National University of Singapore in 1988. Upon graduation, he worked for a short time in a local publishing house. In 1989, Kong became a staff evangelist with Christ for Asia, a mission organization based in the Philippines. When an opportunity for Kong to pioneer a new church in Singapore arose, Kong returned to Singapore and helped set up a new congregation of twenty youths, with the support and encouragement of some senior pastors in Singapore. On May 7, 1989, City Harvest Church was founded as a department (known as Ekklesia Ministry) of Bethany Christian Centre (Assemblies of God).

The church was set up as a society in 1992 and was registered under the Charities Act on October 16, 1993. In 1994, with the purpose of training pastors, missionaries, and church workers in Asia, the church started its own training school, the School of Theology. For six years from 1995, the church rented the former Hollywood Theatre on Tanjong Katong Road and held its services there.  Then in 2001, it moved to a permanent location at Jurong West Street 91. The 2,200-seater, titanium-clad church complex, which cost S$48,000,000, is one of the largest church buildings in Singapore. In 2005, as the church continued to grow, it had to rent another worship site at Singapore Expo for its weekend English congregations. On March 6, 2010, the church announced that it had purchased a significant stake in Suntec Convention Centre, which is located at the center of Singapore’s business district, and it would be using these facilities for its church services.

Kong’s wife, Ho Yeow Sun (popularly known as Sun Ho), is as (or more) popular and significant to the development of the CHC as Kong. Ho was born on June 2, 1972 in Singapore. [Image at right] The couple got married in 1992 and Ho became involved in the church from its inception. She was one of the youth leaders that helped Kong establish the CHC church. She served as the director of the church’s community services and also led its Creative Department from 1992 until late 2000. In 2004, in recognition of her contributions to the building and betterment of schools and educational facilities in China, Sun was named an “Ambassador of Love” by the Children and Youth Foundation of China.

When Kong and Ho began to promote the idea of “Cultural Mandate” in the CHC in 2002, one that encouraged the church members to excel in the marketplace, they started the Crossover Project to demonstrate their desire to reach out to the secular world. With Kong’s support, Ho resigned from her church position and began a singing career. According to Kong, the plan was for Ho to break into the music market as part of the church effort to do evangelism through her pop music (Miller 2014). By selling over 50,000 copies of her debut album of Mandarin pop, Sun with Love, which was followed by two sold-out concerts at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in June 2002, Ho had the opportunity to advance her career outside of Singapore, and to Taiwan and China. In 2003, she moved to Hollywood to pursue her singing career. Ho’s seven years in the U.S. were glamorous years for her. Local news and church reports showed that she received private dance lessons from top choreographers and worked with top artists, directors, and producers in the U.S. on her music videos. Ho worked with veteran record producer and sixteen-time Grammy Award winner David Foster, who helped produce her debut English single, Where Did Love Go. The song reached the top spot on Billboard’s dance breakout chart (Sen 2015) .

Nevertheless, throughout her music career, she faced serious criticism. Her boldness in trying new things received polemic responses, even though many of her church members adored her. As one of the reports on the church’s online magazine describes her:

…with strik ing blonde streaks highlighting her tender-brown tresses…and with her very J-Lo but not as revealing dressings… have defied all prior definitions one may have had of what a pastor ‘should’ be like (Harvest Times, v.17 March-June 2002).

But there were also many who were perplexed by her seemingly contradictory “pastor-singer” roles. One of the most notorious examples was “China Wine,” a song depicting her as a Chinese exotic dancer in Jamaica, and “Mr. Bill,” i n which she sang about killing her husband. In the China Wine movie she was “ gyrating furiously to the music in a low-cut, midriff-baring top and nothing shorts” (Miller 2014). According to the report, “…horror, scorn and disdain were the primary reactions [towards her MTV]; at their mildest, puzzlement and skepticism at how such a song could help spread the gospel.”

Also, since the beginning of her career, Ho faced criticism that she used her church’s support to aid her album sales. Rumors have been rife that her ventures into local and international stardom were largely engineered and sponsored by Kong and that the church’s leadership using the church’s financial resources. Questions have been raised in regards to the suitability of the church in supporting her pop career by, among other things, reporting her news in the pulpit or in church magazines and requiring church members to buy her CDs as well as to participate in her concerts. Many people raised eyebrows when her luxurious lifestyle in Hollywood was exposed. According to The New Paper, Ho rented a Hollywood Hills mansion for $20,000 per month . It is noted that the property is worth $5,600,000.

Ho’s singing career ended in 2010 after the police began probing into sixteen church leaders, including Kong and Ho, about the misuse of funds at CHC. Following a 2012 arrest and a trial beginning in 2013, there were allegations that Kong and five other church leaders were illegally funding Ho’s singing career and then using another $26,000,000 Singapore dollars to cover it up.   Reports also revealed that her success in the Mandarin-speaking market was exaggerated as two of her Mandarin albums sustained significant losses, and church members had to buy 32,500 copies of her unsold albums (Sen 2015).

The trial ended her pop career but not her leadership in the CHC. On October 21, 2015, Kong and the other five leaders were found guilty of all charges. Two days before the verdict came out on Oct 19, 2015, Kong posted on Facebook that Sun Ho had been ordained as pastor. She was never charged and is now replacing her husband as the leader of the church.

DOCTRINE/BELIEFS

City Harvest Church’s Essential Faith Doctrines are seventeen Bible-based statements which are

1. We believe in the plenary-verbal inspiration of the accepted canon of scriptures as originally given. The scriptures are infallible, inerrant and the sole and final authority for all matters of faith and conduct (2 Timothy 3:16; 1 Corinthians 2:13).

2. We believe in the eternal Godhead who has revealed Himself as one God existing in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, distinguishable but indivisible (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14).

3. We believe in the creation, test and fall of man as recorded in Genesis; his total spiritual depravity and inability to attain to divine righteousness (Romans 5:12, 18).

4. We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of men, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born by the Virgin Mary, very God and very Man (Luke 1:26-35; John 1:14-18; Isaiah 7:14; 9:6).

5. We believe Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again the third day, and personally appeared unto His disciples (1 Corinthians 15:1-4; Romans 4:25).

6. We believe in the bodily ascension of Jesus to heaven, His exaltation and personal, literal and bodily coming again the second time for His Church (John 14:2,3; and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).

7. We believe in the salvation of sinners by grace, through repentance and faith in the perfect and sufficient work of the cross of Calvary by which we obtain remission of sins (Ephesians 2:8-9; Hebrews 9:12, 22; Romans 5:11).

8. We believe in the necessity of water baptism by immersion in the name of the eternal Godhead in order to fulfill the command of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 28:19; Acts 2:34-36; 19:1-6).

9. We believe in the baptism in the Holy Spirit as a real experience at or subsequent to salvation, with the scriptural evidence, namely, speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance (Acts 2:1-4; 8:14-17; 10:44-45; Galatians 3:14-15).

10. We believe in the operation of the gifts and ministries of the Spirit as enumerated in 1 Corinthians 12-14 and Ephesians 4, as manifested in the early Church.

11. We believe in the Spirit-filled life, a life of separation from the world and perfecting of holiness in the fear of God as expressing the true Christian faith (Ephesians 5:18; 2 Corinthians 6:14; 7:1).

12. We believe in the healing of the body by Divine power, or Divine healing in its varied aspects as practiced in the early Church (Acts 4:30; Romans 8:11; 1 Corinthians 12:9; James 5:14) and by deliverance in the name of Jesus (Mark 16:17).

13. We believe in the table of the Lord, commonly called the Communion or the Lord’s Supper, for believers (1 Corinthians 11:28-32; Matthew 26:26-28).

14. We believe in the reality and personality of the Devil and eternal judgment in the Lake of Fire for the Devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41; Revelation 20:14-15).

15. We believe in the eternal life for believers (John 5:24; 3:16), and eternal punishment for the unbelievers (Mark 9:43-48; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Revelation 20:10-15).

16. We believe that there is one true universal Church, made up of genuine believers, but this one universal Church is also composed of many local Churches in given localities. These Churches are under the sovereign headship of the Lord Jesus Christ, exercising autonomous government under Him, administering all its local affairs and ministry, as well as the propagation of the gospel (Acts 15:22; Matthew 16:18; 18:15-20).

17. We believe that Government is ordained of God, and the powers that be are ordained as ministers of God to us for good. To resist the powers and the ordinances is to resist the ordinance of God. We are subject not only for wrath sake but for conscience sake, rendering to all their dues, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. We declare our loyalty to our Government and its leaders, and will assist in every way possible, consistent with our faith in the scriptures as Christian citizens (Romans 13).

CHC embraces a conventional and evangelical theological stance just like most of the Chinese P rotestant churches in Asia and the U.S., along with charismatic/Pentecostal beliefs. Salvation is based on a personal relationship with God and baptism is reserved for adults who have made a decision leading to conversion. Sanctification is the integration of life and belief resulting in a new lif e style. In terms of its charismatic and Pentecostal beliefs, CHC emphasizes, as mentioned in its Mission Statements, “the baptism in the Holy Spirit as a real experience at or subsequent to salvation, with the scriptural evidence, namely, speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance,” “the operation of the gifts and ministries of the Spirit,” and “the healing of the body by Divine power.”

There are a few rather distinctive teachings and values of the church, which are largely responsible for the uniqueness of its ministry and its rapid growth in size and fame. One is its emphasis on Cultural Mandate. In the church’s Mission Statement, for example, it is mentioned that the church goal is “to build a church….to obey the Great Commission and the Cultural Mandate.” This shows the equal importance of the gospel mandate along with the Cultural Mandate, i.e., evangelism and cultural mandate mean being salt and light in the marketplace/secular world. Indeed, the church describes its DNA as the Great Commission, Great Command me nt, and the Cultural Mandate. Since 2002, Kong began to teach about the Cultural Mandate, and many of his teachings and sermons have been based on the idea that believers should excel in the marketplace and that the church should not limit itself to “within the four walls” but rather should engage in the world. As he mentioned in one of his writings (Kong 2007):

Let us decide to be relevant to our society. We shouldn’t be afraid to engage a world that God has created and always loved. We should not be fearful to engage culture by being as creative, as colorful, and as progressive as we could possibly be for the glory of God. We mustn’t shun the sciences and arts out there in the marketplace. Rather, we should work hard and excel in the arena of life God has planted us in. As you do that, you will become the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Ultimately, you will bring many into the kingdom of God!

The Cultural Mandate message targets primarily, as mentioned on its website, “believers who are successful in the business arena and the entertainment world.” Also, “many successful business people and celebrities have discovered a newfound passion for their secular endeavors” and “have been inspired to harness their platforms” to further the kingdom of God.

Both Kong’s and Ho’s lives have been the most successful models of how believers can engage in the secular world. In his writing “Discovering your purpose in the secular,” Kong said:

Sun has always felt drawn to the world of arts and entertainment. Maybe because of the Indonesian-Chinese blood in me, I have always been drawn to business and the corporate world. In the last few years, as we engaged our society more as salt and light, we began to discover our purpose: which is not to be a stereotypical religious couple confined within the four walls of a local church, but to take the kingdom of God into the marketplace of society…Sun got into her singing career and I became a businessman.

Soon Kong and Ho began the Crossover Project, which involved reaching out or crossing over to other cultural strata unreached by Christian faith, and in their case, the “pop culture.” The Crossover Project aims to “redeem” the popular culture through embracing, utilizing, and mastering it as a means of reaching out to the world, and hopefully, remaking it to be an alternative and relevant form of Christianity to the (post)modern world. With Kong’s strong endorsement and the support of the church, Ho embarked on her music career and has become one of Singapore’s leading Mandarin pop stars. Very soon Ho had already scored a number of hits in the Mandarin pop scene, had performed to packed stadiums in Taiwan, and had produced double-platinum selling CDs. Meanwhile, as he was still serving as the senior pastor of the church, Kong also stopped receiving a salary from the church and became like a lay person who volunteered in the church. In doing so, he became free to cross between the two worlds of sacred and secular. Kong was a board member of Dr. David Yonggi Cho’s Church Growth International  (South Korea) and Dr. Luis Bush’s Transform World (Indonesia). Also, he and his wife once owned several companies,  including International Harvest, Skin Couture, and boutiques.

Another related and equally important value of the CHC is its emphasis on “excellence, success, and prosperity.” Worldly success, as viewed by CHC, if not always a sign of grace, is an indication that one is going in the right direction with God. Some quotations from Kong’s writings include, “When your vertical relationship with God is strong, your horizontal relationship in the marketplace will be successful.” Kong said:

Make no mistake about it, God wants the world to envy us and say to us: “We must have your way of life!” Yet, how many among the unchurched are actually jealous of Christians today? Why aren’t the unbelievers rushing to church every weekend, or knocking on our doors saying, “Help me, I have to get into the kingdom of God! I want to be like you—happy, successful and creative!” (Kong 2007).

In the same writing, Kong, using examples from the Old Testament, mentioned Adam, who “plowed the ground, sowed his seed and reaped a harvest to feed his family, but he didn’t stop there. He explored the geology of the land, dug deeper into the ground, and discovered gold and all kinds of precious stones. The more you apply yourself and the harder you work, the richer you will become in life.” There was also Joseph, who “became so successful in his secular vocation that he was promoted to be the number two man to Pharaoh…” And then there were the Israelites, to whom God guaranteed that His laws would make them “wealthy and prosperous.” But, to be successful and wealthy, one needs to show excellence in one’s work.

In one of his writings entitled Understanding Excellence, Kong set the standard of excellence, which would be “to be superior in quality, greater in quantity, to transcend your job description, and to outdo yourself each time.” The values are to be demonstrated not only in peoples’ lives, but also on the corporate level. He adhered to a standard of excellence in constructing an “ultra-modern” church building in which even the toilets “exemplify the very meaning of style” (Harvest Times, v.18 July-December 2002) as well as the corporate office, which is located in the heart of Singapore’s central business district in Suntec City Tower. The church building project is a perfect and concrete manifestation of the value of excellence, as mentioned by Kong in the church’s publication:

…all the finer details of the entire construction were extremely vital to the church leadership. The cleanliness and hygiene, the greenery and landscaping, the positioning of our furniture, the comfort of our chairs, the color scheme and lightings of our halls, the quality of air in the building, the paint job, the cleaning of unsightly scratch marks, fingerprints and sawdust in the facility were all important details that reflect excellence (Harvest Times, v.17 March-June 2002).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The church has been successful in providing an attractive and distinctive religious experience and collective identity for its young attenders, who either attend a church for the first time or have been turned off by traditional religious settings, through effectively integrating rational structure, emotional expressivity, and consumer ethic in its Sunday services.

The church has multiple services, organized in different languages, on each Sunday. To ensure the high quality of each service, it is well-structured. The sermons, although preached by different pastors, have a common theme and application points. It is also carefully timed and programmed. For instance, in the case of serving the Holy Communion to thousands of people (the pastor reciting The Apostle’s Creed and offering his prayer, hundreds of ushers passing on pre-packaged pieces of bread and cups of drinks, which the congregation consumes and throws away spontaneously) all are accomplished in minutes.

The service is always bound up with expectation and entertaining, with its bright colors, garish signs, spotlights beam onto the stage, enthusiastic and contemporary music bounces through the hall, as well as well-harmonized vocals, a sizable choir, and a band. The whole environment is similar to a pop music concert. Thousands of people in the audience rise to their feet, at times shout and jump, at times weep and kneel.

Preaching is another main attraction of the service. Kong has been known as an anointed and popular preacher, both locally and internationally. Also, there are a number of international speakers who regularly preach at CHC. Unlike traditional churches, Kong’s preaching styles are very engaging in nature. His sermons are usually highly relevant and practical to its young audience, and are always easily remembered and inspiring. His preaching is also highly interactive. Instead of confining himself to the pulpit, Kong used to move around with passionate voice, gestures, and personal stories to engage the audience. He would normally encourage or even urge responses from the audience, such as repeating their words to their neighbors. Besides taking notes, the audience frequently show their support or agreement through a simultaneous “yeah” or “Amen” response or applause. On some occasions, after the preaching, Kong would offer an alter call and launch the service into a healing time. Hundreds of people would stream to the stage, to receive praying, miraculous healings and prophetic utterances, opening up their emotional and physical needs to be ministered in a unique and collective way. His preaching, through multiple television programs and internet webcast, have reached millions of viewers from hundreds of countries.

As already mentioned, the church emphasizes the values of success and excellence. To be successful in career and life, one needs to receive divine blessings through generous offering to the church. This practice is part of a belief in a “prosperity gospel:” that is, by giving to God as much as one can, the Christian will reap the fruits of his/her investments in higher returns, both spiritually and materially. Plenty of messages have been carefully built on this concept, and testimonies of many, including business, academic, relationship successes, have proved the message to be true.

In short, from the “proper” way of worship (when to raise hand, knee, shout, etc.), “proper” timing of responding to the sermons or whoever is on the stage (i.e. taking note, the unified “yeah” response after the preacher has said something interesting or challenging), to their weekly and monthly offerings, members receive cues that indicate what is expected of them. Disciplinary actions, taken mainly by cell-group leaders or pastors to correct uncooperative attitude, are not unusual. One can be censured for one’s disagreement with the church’s teachings or over one’s unwillingness to participate in the church’s activities, such as church building project. Discipline is even stricter for students of the Bible Training Center. For instance, according to its Student Handbook item no. 6.5.5., “Students are to be respectful and polite toward the pastors and leadership appointed over them in the Bible Training Center and in the CHC. All students must address all pastors by their titles whenever they meet. Failure to do so will bring about disciplinary action.” The Center had dismissed fifteen students in 2004 because of their problems of “integrity and honesty;” ten were international students (many were full-time workers in their home church).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

The CHC [Image at right] is run as a centralized corporation with a Board of Director s that is legally responsible for the charter of the Church. Kongis at the top of the hierarchy, with all spiritual and practical authority, and below him are other ordained pastors and pastoral staff (there are twenty-two pastors and assistant pastors and sixty-five full-time staff) and hundreds of executive members (these are lay leaders, including senior members and leaders of cell groups), who interact most frequently with the congregations. But the ultimate authority resides with Kong. According to Chan (forthcoming), the church has no concrete church polity as it is still in the stage of development. For example, when responding to questions about ordination, the church leaders told Chan that there is no established rule or regulation on who is able to be ordained.

Judging from the size and operation of the church, Kong seems to have exhibited an outstanding leadership style, a combination of both rational and charismatic authority. The former includes his highly efficient management capabilities and his “logical and systematical” thinking, which he attributes to his training in Computer Science. In 2004, the business-savvy senior pastor brought the church one great leap forward by obtaining ISO 9001:2000, which makes it the first church in the world to be awarded such certification. The latter includes his very personal calling from God, which he describes in this way: God “ said the obvious to me, ‘Kong, raise me a new generation that will take Asia by storm’.” Also, there is his charismatic and visionary personality, which he uses to “both inspire and challenge people to dream big dreams for God,” and his preaching style, which according to his website, is “deeply modern” and “strongly aspirational.”

Seeing his own role as “ transformed from that of a shepherd to a rancher” (The Straits Times, April 8 2004), Kong formed the church on a small-group (cell groups) basis and depended mainly on the lay leaders to perform the regular activities. According to the 2015 annual report, the church has 544 cell groups, which connect 10,825 people with each other, and 665 cell group leaders. Divided into youth and adult cell groups, the meetings take place mostly on a weekly basis following centrally-designed materials. The church offers training and detailed guidelines in order to produce consistent and uniform leading and preaching style, on the one hand, and to equip the leaders with set answers for frequently asked questions, on the other. Likewise, the plans for membership (three levels including ordinary, ministry, and executive member) are neatly structured.

As for its ministerial coverage, CHC places equal emphasis on both evangelism and social services. In terms of its religious services, besides Sunday services, it offers Bible studies and various education classes/programs about the Christian faith in several languages and dialect s. The ministries cover programs from young children to older people, including services for the hearing impaired and mentally challenged people , the first church in Singapore which has dedicated special resources for this group. CHC also runs a School of Theology for local and oversea s students. The School offers seven months of theological and practical training for Christian leaders and pastors as well as ordinary believers. From 1994 to 2015, its cumulative student intake reached 6986 students. In the year 2015, the School had 324 students, most of whom came from Singapore and China.

In terms of social service, there are independently incorporated groups affiliated with CHC, which carry on various tasks: Citycare runs the local and international humanitarian programs including corporate training, and the City Harvest Community Services Association serves the local community. There are other services or businesses that are provided by the church, such as the City College, which provides alternative education pathways for young people , the O School which offers street dance training to young people, and the Little Big preschool which promotes early childhood education emphasizing “creativity, expression and exploration.”

In order to keep the organization running smoothly, the church has an expertly rationalized system in place. It sets quantified targets for each ministry and judges its success in terms of quantity, as highlighted in its annual report: “We count numbers because numbers count!” For example, in its 2015 annual report, everything is about big numbers: It claims that the church has a total of 6303 decisions (salvation and rededication), which includes 2189 adults and 4114 children; 4107 individuals have prayed the sinner’s prayer for the first time; 463 people have been baptized; and 705 people have participated in 181 mission trips to 87 cities in 16 countries. Also, the church has 49 affiliate churches and 29 associate churches in China. The total attendance within the “CHC movement,” including at its Singapore “headquarters,” is 49,032. Other numbers include the total number of patients, 2933, that have been seen by its four humanitarian teams; the total number of people who have attended its 386 mission conferences led by CHC pastors and staff, 120,910; the number of visitors to its website, 14,092,397; its webcast viewership, 576,023; its Twitter followers, 18,036; its Facebook followers, 41,430; total number of mobile app installations, 28,109; its city radio total broadcasting time, 25,710 mins; number of hits per week, 10,912; and so on.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The scandal involving the church was the biggest charity scandal in Singapore history (“City Harvest Church” 2019; Sin 2019; Tan 2019). It revolved around Kong and five other church leaders and fund or finance managers. A total of $50,000,000 Singapore dollars ($35,000,000) of funds were misused to support Sun Ho’s music career. Alarm bells were raised much earlier than the formal investigation, which began in 2010. In 2003, soon after Ho began her singing career, a church member went to the press with allegations of financial impropriety on the part of the church. But then he backed down and apologized after the church threatened to sue him (Wong 2015).

Several years later, on May 31, 2010, the Office of the Commissioner of Charities and the   Commercial Affairs Department   of the Singapore Police began investigating more than sixteen individuals linked to the church, including Kong and Ho, after receiving complaints . The police looked into financial transactions involving the possible falsification of accounts and continuing breach of trust, all of which dated back a number of years.

In 2012, after a review by the commissioner of charities uncovered “ misconduct and mismanagement in the administration,” Kong and five church leaders were arrested. In court, prosecutors outlined a complex web of sham financial transactions in which six church leaders misappropriated $24,000,000 Singapore dollars ($18,900,000) from one of the church building funds to support Ho’s pop music career. Ho herself was never implicated in the legal charges. There was also a second allegation of these six people taking another $26,000,000 Singapore dollars ($20,500,000) to cover up the initial embezzled amount. All six were serving in some capacity on the church board.

In 2015, all six initially were found guilty of criminal breach of trust. Kong was sentenced to eight years in jail as the “key man” behind the scandal and as the one who had led his five accomplices in the criminal breach of trust. Kong apologized for “unwise decisions.” The remaining five were handed prison terms varying from twenty-one months to six years.The case extended on for several years as there were several appeals. Ultimately, Kong’s sentence was reduced to three-and-one-half years; he served two years and four months. On August 22, 2019, Kong was released from incarceration. He returned to the church and was greeted by a cheering congregation (Tan 2019).

There have been longer-term consequences for Kong and the church..In 2017, Kong was permanently barred by the Commissioner of Charities from holding any formal management positions in the church or serving on its board. He does, however, continue to serve as the church’s spiritual leader. In addition, The Straits Times reported that more than twenty-five percent of the members left the church when news of the scandal exploded in 2010. In 2009, CHC had around 23,565 members (according to its annual report), but that number decreased to 16,482 in 2015. Nonetheless, City Harvest remains one of the largest churches in Singapore and in Asia.

IMAGES
Image #1. Photograph of Kong Hee, founder of City Harvest Church.
Image #2: Photograph of Ho Yeow Sun, wife of Kong Hee, and current leader of City Harvest Church.
Image #3: Photograph of City Harvest Church.

REFERENCES

Chan, Kim-kwong. Forthcoming. “City Harvest Church of Singapore: an Ecclesial Paradigm for Pentecostalism in the Postmodern World.” In Global ReOrient: The Rise and Impact of Chinese Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, edited by Fenggang Yang, Joy K.C. Tong and Allan Anderson.

Cheong, Danson . 2015a. Controversy Over City Harvest Church’s “Prosperity Gospel.” The Straits Times, November 11. Accessed from htts://www.straitstimes.com/Singapore/controversy-over-city-harvest-churchs-prosperity-gospel on 10 May 2016.

Cheong, Danson. 2015b. Kong Hee “Key Man Behind Church Scandal” The Straits Times, October 23. Accessed from http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/kong-hee-key-man-behind-church-scandal on 10 May 2016.

“City Harvest Church: A timeline of Singapore’s biggest case in misuse of charitable funds.” 2019. Channel News Asia, August 22. Accessed from https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/city-harvest-church-kong-hee-a-timeline-of-the-largest-case-11830638  on 10/1/2019.

Kong, Hee. 2007a. Discovering Your Purpose in the Secular. Accessed from https://kongheewiki.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/discovering-your-purpose-in-the-secular-by-kong-hee/ on 10 May 2016.

Kong, Hee. 2007b. Our Cultural Mandate (Part 1). Accessed from https://kongheewiki.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/our-cultural-mandate-part-1-by-kong-hee/ on 10 May 2016.

Miller, S. 2014. “City Harvest Church Investment Manager Chew Eng Han Said in Court That He Had Deferred to Founder Kong Hee’s Preference to Keep the Funding of the Crossover Project Discreet.” Strait Times, August 15. Accessed from http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/the-straits-times-news-in-a-minute-aug-15-2014 on 10 May 2016.

Sen, N.G. Jun. 2015. “Sun Who? Why Sun Ho Failed to Crack US Market.” The New Paper, October 25. Accessed from http://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore-news/sun-who-why-sun-ho-failed-crack-us-market on 10 May 2016.

Sin, Yuen. 2019.”City Harvest founder Kong Hee makes his first appearance in church since release from jail.” Straits Times, August 24. Accessed from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/city-harvest-founder-kong-hee-makes-his-first-appearance-in-church-since-release-from-jail on 1 October 2019.

Tan, Theresa. 2019. “At its peak, it had 33,000 members but numbers fell to 16,000 last year; it had $132m in reserves in 2018.” Straits Times, August 25. Accessed from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/city-harvest-fewer-followers-but-still-among-richest-charities on 1 October 2019.

Tong, Joy K.C. 2008. “McDonaldization and the Mega-Church: A Case Study of City Harvest Church in Singapore.” Pp. 186-204 in Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing God, edited by Pattana Kitiarsa. London: Routledge.

Wong, Tessa. 2015. Inside Singapore’s City Harvest Megachurch Scandal. BBC, October 21. Accessed from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34589932 on 10 May 2016.

Post Date:
17 May 2016