Bnei Baruch

BNEI BARUCH TIMELINE

 1884 (September 24 ):  Yehuda Alevy Ashlag was born in Warsaw, Poland.

1907 (January 22):  Baruch Ashlag, son of Y.A. Ashlag, was born in Warsaw, Poland.

1921:  Y.A. Ashlag moved to Palestine with his family.

1946 (August 31):  Michael Laitman was born in Vitebsk, Belarus.

1954 (October 7):  Y.A. Ashlag died in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur day.

1974:  Laitman emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union.

1979 (August 2):  Laitman became a disciple of Baruch Ashlag.

1991 (September 13):  Baruch Ashlag died in Bnei Brak, Israel.

1991:  Laitman established Bnei Baruch as a study group in his apartment in Bnei Brak.

1997:  Bnei Baruch launched its first website. Laitman began his weekly radio show with Israeli radio.

2001:  Bnei Baruch headquarters moved to Petah Tiqva.

2004:  Laitman received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science.

2007:  Bnei Baruch started a program broadcasted both by the channel “Karma” in the Israeli cable television and in a local channel of the Israeli television.

2008:  Bnei Baruch acquired its own television channel in Israel, Channel 66.

2011:  Arvut, the social activist branch of Bnei Baruch, was established.

2013:  Beyachad, a local political party formed by Bnei Baruch students, emerged as the most voted political party in the municipal elections in Petah Tikva.

2014 (January 1):  Bnei Baruch headquarters moved to a new building, owned by the group, in Petah Tiqva.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

In the early thirteenth century, a corpus of texts transmitting a body of “ancient wisdom,” both theoretical and practical, came to be generally known as the Kabbalah throughout the Jewish world. In the same thirteenth century, the most authoritative statement of Kabbalah, a group of books called Zohar, [Image at right] first appeared in Spain, although it was attributed to a second century Jewish rabbi, Shimon Bar Yochai. In the sixteenth century, Isaac Luria (1534-1572), a rabbi from Safed, then part of Ottoman Syria, also known as “the Ari” (the Lion), emerged as the most prominent interpreter of Kabbalah.

In the eighteenth century, Kabbalah was vigorously challenged by modernists who followed the Jewish version of the Enlightenment (Haskalah). They regarded Kabbalah as hardly compatible with what they perceived as the necessary modernization of Judaism. The cultural establishment of the newly established State of Israel was influenced by that tradition and had in turn an ambiguous attitude towards the Kabbalah. The foremost academic scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), had moved from Germany to Jerusalem in 1923 and was widely revered. Scholem, however, interpreted the Kabbalah as a thing of the past, an important current in Jewish thought well worth of historical studies in the universities, but with very little to contribute to contemporary Jewish culture. Scholem created the category of “Jewish mysticism,” as something that nurtured and kept united the Jewish community in the diaspora but was eventually superseded by Enlightened Judaism and Zionism. This position was shared in Israel by many who believed that, as important as Kabbalah might have been in the past, its contemporary incarnations were obsolete, reactionary and superstitious, and incompatible with Zionism and socialism. Prominent masters of Kabbalah did emigrate to Israel from Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, and Yemen, but their fame was long confined to the ultra-orthodox subculture.

Two prominent rabbis promoted, however, different views and prepared what will later become a revival of Kabbalah in the late twentieth century. Abraham Yizchak Kook (1865-1935), who became the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, integrated Kabbalah into his Jewish nationalist system and insisted that Kabbalah was compatible with Zionism. Yehuda Halevy Ashlag (1884-1954) came to Palestine from Poland and in turn offered a version of Kabbalah compatible with socialism through his theory of “altruistic communism.”

Ashlag [Image at right] was born in Warsaw in a Hasidic family. He famously prophesied that most Jews who would remain in Poland would die, and tried to convince the local Jewish congregation to emigrate to Palestine before it was too late. He even pre-ordered caravans from Scandinavia in order to arrange a small commune in Palestine, where Polish Jews could live and work in tanning, but his efforts were not successful. Both Orthodox and secular Jews in Poland opposed his plans. Eventually, he moved to Palestine alone in 1921.

Ashlag proposed a new interpretation of Luria’s Kabbalah, which included a special interest for social issues. Altruistic communism meant, for him, that Kabbalah will ultimately persuade humans of the need of moving from egoism to altruism, thus building an egalitarian society. This model society, he maintained, will be reached through human transformation rather than political revolution.

Ashlag was known as Baal HaSulam, “Owner of the Ladder,” because he was the author of Sulam, “The Ladder,” a commentary on the Zohar. He also wrote important commentaries to Luria’s works, including “The Study of the Ten Sefirot” (Talmud Eser Hasefirot) and “The House of the Gate of Intentions” (Beit Shaar HaKavanot), as well as social essays and articles. In the Sulam, Ashlag interpreted the Zohar according to his understanding of Lurianic Kabbalah. Ashlag also believed that the time for disclosure of the Kabbalah, kept secret for long centuries, had finally come. In Ashlag’s works there are also hints that the time is ripe for teaching Kabbalah to non-Jews, a theme that would be developed by his disciples.

Yehuda Ashlag passed away on Yom Kippur Day in 1954. As it often happens in spiritual organizations, the unity of his group did not survive his death. Ashlag left four sons, and two of them established Kabbalistic schools and fought each other in a legal dispute about the copyright on their father’s work. They were Baruch Shalom Halevy Ashlag (1907-1991) and Benjamin Shlomo Ashlag (1910-1984). Other disciples of Ashlag followed one of their teacher’s closest associates, Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein (1904-1969), who became Ashlag’s brother-in-law through his second marriage and established a separate branch. There were other students of Ashlag who tried to establish independent organizations, but they met with very limited success.

Benjamin Shlomo’s branch remained the smaller group. He established a seminary in the ultra-orthodox city of Bnei Brak, called Yeshivat Moharal. After his death, his work in Bnei Brak was continued, separately, by his sons Simcha Avraham Ashlag and Yehezkel Yosef Ashlag, and later by his nephew, Yehuda Ben Yehezkel Yosef Ashlag, and by his disciple Rabbi Akiva Orzel, head of the Ateret Shlomo Ashlag Institute.

As for Brandwein, while continuing Ashlag’s work of disseminating Kabbalah, he became the head of the Religious Affairs Office forthe Histadrut, the Israeli Labor Union, which did not fail to raise eyebrows among ultra-orthodox Kabbalists. Brandwein’s branch was further divided at his death in 1969 among three main different groups. A small number sought the leadership of his son, Rabbi Abraham Brandwein (1945-2013), who only later in life came to accept this role. Others followed Rabbi Feivel S. Gruberger, later known as Philip Shagra Berg (1927-2013), [Image at right] who had married a niece of the elder Brandwein, although he eventually divorced her in 1971. Berg’s branch, directed after his death in 2013 by his widow Karen and two sons, acquired an international following as the Kabbalah Center. It became famous after the pop singer Madonna and other Hollywood celebrities joined the organization.

The third separate branch with roots in Brandwein’s teachings was established by his son-in-law Mordechai Scheinberger, who became the head of the community Or-Ha-Ganuz, in Upper Galilee. The community is ultra-orthodox and includes a number of baalei teshuva (i.e. of secular Jews newly converted to Orthodoxy) while it also tries to implement Ashlag’s social ideas about “altruistic communism.” It also operates a college of natural medicine called Elima, led by Rabbi Yuval HaCohen Asherov, a popular figure in the milieu of Israeli alternative healing.

The third main group of spiritual movements following in the footsteps of Yehuda Ashlag originated from his elder son, Baruch Ashlag, known as the Rabash and regarded by many as his father’s true successor. Baruch lived for a time in Manchester, England, where he was one of the tutors of the famous Jewish philanthropist, Rabbi Solomon David Sassoon (1915-1985).

Upon his return to Israel, Baruch [Image at right] led a humble life, teaching a group of selected disciples in Bnei Brak. Eventually, by studying and commenting his father’s works, he came to believe that a core teaching of Yehuda Ashlag was that Kabbalah should be spread to larger circles. He started teaching in several cities as well as expanding his work and synagogue in Bnei Brak. Baruch’s main contribution to Ashlagian Kabbalah was the notion that Kabbalah is best taught and put into practice in a group of students, through their efforts to acquire what he called the quality of bestowal. He also emphasized that the spiritual evolution of individuals is heavily influenced by the environment, and tried to adapt his father’s teachings on “altruistic communism” to a new social climate.

As it happened in other branches, after his death his disciples divided into various groups. The ultra-orthodox members of Baruch community in Bnei Brak, including those who had married the master’s daughters, asked Baruch’s son, Shmuel Ashlag (1928-1997), to lead the community. Shmuel was a shohet, namely a person certified by a Jewish court to slaughter animals for food in the manner prescribed by Jewish law, and had worked as such in Argentina. Most students, however, did not accept that Shmuel should succeed Baruch just because he was his son. Some followed Avraham Mordechai Gotlieb, who established the Birkat Shalom Institute. Gotlieb’s group included mostly ultra-orthodox Jews, with a majority of baalei teshuva. The Nehora School and its publishing branch Nehora Press, currently under the leadership of Jedidah Cohen, follow the teachings of Gotlieb but also try to bring Kabbalah to a larger Jewish audience, mostly though the Internet. Others who studied for a few years with Baruch established their own organizations in the United States. They include Fievel Okowita of the Kabbalah Institute of America, and Rabbi Aharon Brizel, who offers a strictly Hasidic version of the teachings through his Ashlag Hasidut in New York. A handful of other disciples of Baruch, including his son-in-law Yaakov Moshe Shmuel Garnirrer, and Adam Sinai through his organization HaSulam, also continue to teach Kabbalah in Israel to small groups of mostly ultra-orthodox followers.

When Baruch died, on the other hand, only some of his students had an ultra-orthodox background. Many had been brought to Baruch by Michael Laitman, whose claim to be the designated successor of the Rabash was endorsed by Baruch’s widow, Feiga and by senior disciples of the younger Ashlag, including some of the ultra-orthodox. It is Laitman who is at the origins of Bnei Baruch.

Michael Laitman [Image at right] was born in Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, on August 31, 1946. He is referred to as Rav or Rabbi by his disciples as an honorific title, as he is not an ordained rabbi and in fact does not act as one by leading religious services. Interestingly, Laitman’s background is not in religion but in science. He studied Bio-Cybernetics in Russia, worked at the Blood Research Institute in Saint Petersburg, and even started a Ph.D. in this field. However, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer to the deepest questions about the meaning of life. He spent two years in Lithuania as a refusnik (i.e. a Jewish Soviet citizen who was refused permission to emigrate to Israel). He finally managed to move to Israel in 1974. He is referred to as Dr. Laitman on the basis of the Ph.D. degree he earned in Russia in 2004 from the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science.

In 1976, Laitman started looking for answers to his questions in religion, although he was more interested in its “inner” aspects than in the external practices. He studied in the Lubavitcher village Kfar Chabad, where he first heard about Kabbalah. He explored Kabbalah on his own and with a few teachers. He also studied in one of the Berg groups for two months, and received two private lessons from the leader of the Kabbalah Center, which left him dissatisfied because of the New Age-style teachings included. Having explored the teaching styles of other leading Kabbalists, in the end, in 1979, Laitman found Baruch Ashlag, who at that time had six or seven students only in the ultra-orthodox Israeli city of Bnei Brak. During the subsequent twelve years, Laitman remained with Baruch, serving him and studying day and night in his group, as well as in private. Laitman also kept his interest in science, and maintains to this day a cooperation with the leading Hungarian philosopher of science Ervin László.

Bnei Baruch (“Sons of Baruch,” with reference to Baruch Ashlag) started in 1991, after Baruch Ashlag’s death, as a modest study group in Laitman’s apartment in Bnei Brak. In fact, as mentioned earlier, most of Laitman’s followers were not Orthodox Jews. Many were Israeli Jews of Russian origin, a population where the percentage of Orthodox is historically low. Nonetheless, they tried to adapt to life in Bnei Brak. Their number grew, as more expressed the desire of learning about the elder Ashlag and his son through such a close disciple of the latter as Laitman was. The breakthrough came in 1997, with the Internet first and live radio broadcasts later. The systematic use of new technologies in the following years transformed a local group into an international movement, with study groups present in several countries. Headquarters were moved from Bnei Brak to Petah Tikva, in the area north-east of Tel Aviv. Expansion through the use of technology continued in 2007, with a TV program by Bnei Baruch broadcasted through Israeli television. In 2008, Bnei Baruch acquired its own channel, Channel 66, popularly known as “the Kabbalah channel.” Two Internet television channels called Kab.tv (which broadcasts the TV channel) and Open TV, a television production company known as ARI Productions, and the websites www.kabbalah.info and www.kabbalahmedia.info, the latter a mammoth archive of video and audio recordings and texts, remain to this day essential tools for Bnei Baruch’s dissemination of Kabbalistic teachings.

The systematic use of technology notwithstanding, Bnei Baruch still relies primarily on the personal interaction of Laitman with his followers, who he calls “students.” He still teaches daily, except when he travels, in the Petah Tikva international center.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

To Laitman, Kabbalah and science are not separate fields, and in fact Kabbalah is the ultimate level of science for our time. Laitman also maintains, against different interpretations of Yehuda Ashlag, that he taught that Kabbalah should be disseminated to everyone, including non-Jews. Quoting writings of Yehuda Ashlag, Laitman believes that references to Israel and to the Jews in the elder Ashlag’s writings should be properly interpreted. Israel is a word connected to the concept of having a desire to “attain” the Creator. The word “Israel” comes, Bnei Baruch teaches, from Yashar-El, literally “straight towards God,” and refers to humanity as a whole. As for the Jews, after Abraham they started calling themselves Yehudim, Jews, Laitman claims, from the word Yichud (meaning “unity,” “unification”). A Jew is, thus, not a nationality but rather a worldview.

Laitman’s universalistic position on the dissemination of Kabbalah is grounded in a very specific vision of history. Abraham, Laitman teaches, was a Babylonian (not a Jew) who discovered the basic principles of Kabbalah in Babylon. When the ego erupted for the first time in Babylon, Abraham called for the siblings of Babylon to unite about it, using the method of connection he has discovered (i.e. the wisdom of Kabbalah), but only few listened. Those who decided to follow Abraham were named Israel after their desire to cling to the force of nature (i.e. to the Creator). With Abraham and his original “Israel” began a cyclical process of descent into the egotism and ascent above it, with moments of corruption of the unity followed by attempts at its restoration. The highest spiritual “degree” was attained by the people of Israel during the times of the First Temple, when they were united above their egos in mutual love. This spiritual state brought success in all fields of life. But the spiritual and material success of the nation of Israel was not enough, since according to Ashlag the purpose of creation should manifest in the whole of humanity. Thus, the people of Israel had to fall from their high level of success, so that later they will intermingle with the nations and eventually return to their higher spiritual degree of unity, only this time sharing it with the whole world.

At the end of the time of the First Temple the people of Israel started falling from their degree of unity. The growth of the ego and the inability to transcend it into brotherly love brought about a fall from Israel’s high spiritual degree, which resulted in the destruction of the First and the Second Temple. The destruction of the Second Temple was the most extreme outburst of egotism within the Israeli nation. As a result, Bnei Baruch teaches, after the completion of the writing of the Book of Zohar, Shimon Bar Yochai ordered to keep it secret until the emergence of a generation that will be able to resist the growth of the ego. However, a new period of ascent and a time of final cleansing was inaugurated by Luria, who opened the study of Kabbalah to all Jews, and culminated with Yehuda Ashlag, who opened it also to non-Jews.

Laitman also refers to Yehuda Ashlag’s theory of will, that he prefers to call “desire:” “the desire is the root of the mind and not the mind the root of desire.” Desire governs all human activities, yet there are different levels of desire. The first level includes the primary, physical desires, starting from the basic desires for food and sex. The second level concerns money and riches. The third, power and fame. The fourth, knowledge. Humans elaborated different strategies to cope with desires, either by systematically satisfying them or by trying to reduce the level of desire.

Becoming increasingly materialistic, the world is less and less satisfied with the fulfillment of the four levels of desire. Desires no longer satisfy. Some escape in alcohol and drugs, others fall into depression or even commit suicide. It is precisely from disillusion and crisis that a fifth level of desire arises, the desire for spirituality. It should not be confused with a religious experience. It is rather the desire to find an answer to the most fundamental human question: what is the purpose of our life.

Each desire comes with its own method of fulfillment. The specific method for fulfilling the fifth level of desire is Kabbalah. When the fifth level of desire was not widespread, it made sense to teach Kabbalah only to a select few. Since we live now in a time when spiritual desire largely surfaced throughout humanity as a whole, Kabbalah should be disclosed and taught to all those willing to learn it.

Thus, there is no contradiction between a time of crisis, where, as Yehuda Ashlag wrote, “the essence of the souls is the worst,” and the emergence of the fifth level of desire. The crisis itself generates the widespread emergence of spiritual desire. However, in order to be fulfilled, this desire should undergo two processes. The first is reaching its maximum degree: a process fueled by the universal crisis itself and its resulting general desperation. The second is called “correction,” a key concept in Kabbalah in general and in Bnei Baruch’s teaching in particular. Our relation to life should be “corrected” by moving from egoism and selfishness to altruism. This is a long and complicated journey, and it also includes a social dimension. Throughout the centuries, new opportunities of correction have arisen. Moving from egoism to altruism is at the heart of Bnei Baruch’s pragmatic Kabbalah. Not only does it ensure that knowledge, the fourth desire, is used for the best but it makes fulfillment of spirituality, the fifth desire, possible.

Another key Bnei Baruch teaching deals with the idea of “connection.” On the surface, our word is not dominated by connection but by conflict, not by love but by hate. However, even if we cannot erase the ego, we can always connect above it. We cannot eliminate conflict. What we can do is create a bridge above it and build another level. Below, we are conflicting; above, we are connected. The ideal type of our connection, Laitman teaches, was the single soul of Adam, which was shattered into 600,000 souls that are the roots of all human souls, and thus our social reality was created. Connecting again in harmony and mutual love restores that single soul, and this is manifested in the establishment of an egalitarian and harmonious society.

Laitman’s Ashlagian Kabbalah is by no means atheistic. If we connect correctly, he teaches, we discover in the connections among us a special flow and circulation of a force, which is called “the upper force.” We can also call it the force of God. This force, Laitman explains, “is the force of the light, or upper world force. It is called Boreh, Creator, from the words Bo Reh, come and see, meaning that when we connect we discover it and see it.”

Reincarnation is also part of Laitman’s teaching and is connected with altruistic communism. “We incarnate time and time again, he explains, until we come to a point where that “communist” society comes to a state where it is implemented through us on earth. This means we build a balanced society where the upper force, which is the force of connection and love, is among us and connects us, and then by this we will achieve the complete correction.” Laitman insists, however, that Yehuda Ashlag’s communism should not be confused with Soviet communism, which was just a dictatorial system of manipulation far away from “real” communism.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

There are no rituals in Bnei Baruch, which claims to be a secular organization. Students who are Jews and like to pray do this on Shabbat, but separately from the main meetings. As it happened for other Kabbalah groups historically, one can say that studying and following lessons is the main spiritual practice of Bnei Baruch. These lessons are normally scheduled every day at 3 A.M. in the Petah Tikva international center, and are followed by other groups and individual students throughout the world via the Internet. The unusual schedule has raised eyebrows among critics, who insist on its inconvenience for those to have to work next morning. Bnei Baruch answers that teaching at night is a traditional “ritual” in Kabbalistic schools, and was practiced by Baruch Ashlag himself. In fact, the practice also exists in monastic traditions of different religions.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Bnei Baruch [Image at right] is a network of students who recognize the authority of Michael Laitman as the legitimate heir and successor of Yehuda and Baruch Ashlag. There are some 100 full-time workers in Petah Tikva, while most of the students have a regular job and follow the daily lessons by attending a center or through the Internet.

An annual convention in Israel gathers in the Tel Aviv Convention Center some 8,000 followers. In addition, there are local study groups in 107 countries, with approximately 50,000 regular participants in Israel and some 150,000 worldwide, participating either physically or through streaming (the figure of 2,000,000 is often quoted and refers to visitors of the website). Local conventions have been organized in such diverse places as Mexico, Turkey, the United States, and Russia. Conventions and courses are organized through a non-profit association known as Bnei Baruch-Kabbalah L’aam (Kabbalah for the People). Israeli media often use the name Kabbalah L’aam to designate the movement.

While the general scheme of human history and the emergence of the fifth level of desire develops ideas of the elder Ashlag, Bnei Baruch goes on to explain that we are in the middle of an especially serious systemic international crisis, which included the 2008 financial troubles and entered into a new phase in 2011. The crisis affected the Middle East through the so called Arab Springs, as well as Israel. It required, Laitman believes, a sustained effort to offer Kabbalah not only to individuals but also to society. Thus, a social activist branch of Bnei Baruch called Arvut (Mutual Responsibility) was established in 2011. Arvut is not a political party but operates through a number of community projects aimed at defusing tension in Israeli society, promoting the values of mutual responsibility, assisting the elderly and the poor, and supporting gifted youths to achieve success in school and university. Several students of Laitman are active in politics as members of the Likud party, although among the students some also identify with very different parties. Students of Bnei Baruch also formed an autonomous local political party called Beyachad (Together), that participated in the 2013 local elections in Petah Tikva. Beyachad was the most voted political party in the city and elected four representatives to the City Council. They became part of the opposition, against a majority that includes representatives of different parties.

Kabbalah in general has inspired several modern architects, painters, and musicians. Bnei Baruch is very active in the field of music and dance, where it has directly inspired well-known Israeli, Russian, Ukrainian, Canadian, Croatian, and American performers, including Arkadi Duchin, Tony Kosinec, Rami Kleinshtain, and the Israeli rock band HaAharon (The Last Generation). In addition to actors and musicians, Bnei Baruch includes visual artists whose work is directly inspired by its teachings. One such artist is Austrian-born Zenita Komad, whose works include both Kabbalistic symbols and illustrated quotes from Yehuda Ashlag and Laitman. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited in leading galleries in Vienna and elsewhere

In a literary rather than visual form, the same thoughts are expressed in Jeff Bogner’s memoir The Egotist, a travelogue of a journey from the life of a bored New York socialite to Kabbalah, from below to above, from reception to bestowal, and an example of a literary work inspired by Bnei Baruch. Another such example is the novel The Kabbalist, written by Semion Vinokur, a Bnei Baruch student and a movie director who won an Israeli Film Academy Award in 1999. This “cinematic novel,” written in Russian and translated into several languages, tells the story of Yehuda Ashlag in a semi-fictional and poetic way.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Although Israel had its first anti-cult media campaign in 1974, mainly targeting a movement imported from India, the Divine Light Mission, subsequent efforts for specific legislation against “cults” never succeeded. They were restarted in 2015, after self-proclaimed ultra-orthodox rabbi Elior Chen and polygamist Goel Ratzon were sentenced to severe jails penalties for slavery, rape, and child abuse in 2011 and 2014.

As early as 1992, sociologists Nurit Zaidman-Dvir and Stephen Sharot (1992) noticed a unique feature of Israeli anti-cult movement: “In contrast to other western societies, the most active and effective anti-cult activities in Israel have been initiated and carried out by religious interests and organizations and especially by the ultra-Orthodox. Ultra-orthodox organizations in Israel participate in the anti-cult movement together with very secular groups and individuals, and they denounce as “cults” groups seen as luring Jews away from Judaism or being otherwise heretical.

Bnei Baruch has been criticized by the Israeli anti-cult movement both for being a “cult” and for misrepresenting Kabbalah. Particularly vocal against Bnei Baruch in the Israeli media have been four former students, a father of a former student, a former wife of a student, and the leader of the largest Israeli anti-cult organization. They offered depositions in a civil case involving one of them, wrote to politicians, and published hostile articles both in printed media and websites.

Bnei Baruch has been accused of being a personality cult reflecting its leader, of creating a climate where students disconnect from their families and surrender work and career opportunities, of maintaining strict control over its students, and of separating students from the larger society. Critics also claim that the group is exploiting members by requiring excessive monetary contributions.

These arguments are not original and in fact are part and parcel of the standard anti-cult treatment of countless groups labeled as “cults” and attacked by using disgruntled ex-members as a main source. Even if one accepted the standard notion of “cult” proposed by anti-cultists, however, Bnei Baruch would hardly fit. It does not propose a religious “conversion” from one religion to another. Most, if not all, of Bnei Baruch’s materials and lessons are disseminated free of charge. Its main source of income is tithing, although not all students tithe and those who don’t are not sanctioned in any way. This practice has been criticized but is quite common among groups of both Jewish and Christian origin. Tithing is a time-honored practice in many Protestant churches and is a core practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In all spiritual groups, leaders, and particularly founders, are considered with great reverence. In Bnei Baruch there is, however, no extravagant personality cult of the leader. Laitman’s writings are not considered normative, unlike the Zohar and its commentaries by Yehuda and Baruch Ashlag. Laitman’s teaching style constantly calls the attention to what he calls the “method,” which results from the writings of his teachers, rather than on himself or his own writings.

Students dismiss as mere slander the criticism that Laitman “dictates” their choices in matters such as work, marriage, and divorce, although they acknowledge that they may consult with him on personal matters. In particular, they emphatically deny that he invites students to leave work in order to devote their lives solely to Bnei Baruch. Laitman’s writings actually emphasize the value of work. He argues that a person who does not work and thus is incapable to provide for his or her family, is in fact harming his or her spiritual path. Students are asked to be active members of society, pay taxes, serve in the army, pursue a career, and invest in their families.

Another area of criticism concerns women. Men and women are separated during the night lessons (although not in other lessons or courses), with women normally following the meetings from a separate room. For this and other reasons Bnei Baruch has been accused of patriarchal attitudes and of discriminating against women, a criticism also heard against other Kabbalah groups, Hasidic Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism in general. Admittedly, the vision of the woman in the classics of Kabbalah, including the works of Yehuda Ashlag, is somewhat traditional, and the practice of separation during the lessons is also common in Jewish ultra-orthodox groups. This, however, is occasionally reduced to a mere caricature in interviews given by some militant ex-members. They claim that husbands are encouraged by Laitman to devote to their wives “no more than seven minutes of attention per day.” This is regarded as ridiculous by students of Bnei Baruch. Works by Laitman emphasize the value of marriage, family, healthy relationships between husbands and wives. Laitman compiled a series of teachings in the spirit of the Ashlags about the importance of a loving relationship between spouses, and this is indeed a recurring theme in his lectures. He also mentions as an example his own relation with his wife, and the facts that he normally takes a walk on the sea shore with her for at least one hour each day and goes to a family holiday at least three times each year. Laitman’s ideas about women are certainly far away from feminism as understood in twenty-first century liberal culture. But they do not promote abuse or discrimination of women, nor of homosexuals. In fact, the owner of the historical Tel Aviv gay bar Evita, Shay Rokach, is both a well-known LGBT activist in Israel and a student of Bnei Baruch. At his invitation, Laitman spoke in 2011 at the Gay Center in Tel Aviv.

Criticism of Bnei Baruch should be partially understood as part of the recent Israeli remake of the older European and American “cult wars.” Anti-cultists routinely apply to Bnei Baruch accusations of brainwashing and mind control developed during the “cult wars” by Margaret Singer (1921-2003) and other anti-cult luminaries, and thoroughly criticized by mainline academic scholars of new religious movements. Within this context, it is also claimed that students are asked to sign a strict “statute” (takanon) and that some teachings are kept secret and revealed only to a selected groups of initiates. Students deny this, and academic research about Bnei Baruch has not found any evidence of these accusations. On the other hand, the Israeli controversy about Bnei Baruch goes beyond anti-cult stereotypes and is also part of the struggle for the Kabbalah.

Kabbalah has been subject to many different interpretations. They may be distinguished into four groups: academic, religious, esoteric, and pragmatic. Academic interpretations in the tradition of Scholem, whose main contemporary representative is Moshe Idel, try to reconstruct the oldest versions of Kabbalah through a study of the texts. They are often critical of pragmatic interpretations. For them, the latter simplify what is an immensely complicated system of texts and traditions, and impose a coherent meaning to disparate and often contradictory sources. Religious interpretations insist that Kabbalah is intrinsically connected to Jewish precepts and part of a religion, Judaism. In some of these interpretations, although by no means in all, Kabbalah is in fact Judaism’s esoteric content. For those advocating the religious interpretation, teaching Kabbalah to those who are not qualified does not make sense, and teaching it to non-Jews is tantamount to sacrilege.

Esoteric interpretations were proposed by occultists such as Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the main founder of the Theosophical Society, and the founders of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They appropriated Kabbalistic texts and read them through the lenses of their own esoteric systems.

In contrast, pragmatic interpretations such as Bnei Baruch’s deny that Kabbalah is part of a religion or of a given esoteric system. Kabbalah for them is the answer to the deepest human spiritual desires. As such, it can be taught to people of all religions and does not require conversion to Judaism or the observance of Judaism’s prescriptions. While the leading masters of pragmatic Kabbalah do not ignore the academic literature, they look for coherence, simplicity, and sound spiritual advice where scholars emphasize complexity, contradictions, and theory.

The struggle for Kabbalah between these four interpretations is not purely cognitive. In the process, the very notion of Kabbalah is socially constructed and politically negotiated. Each interpretation serves its own purpose. Conflict is almost unavoidable. Religionists who pretend that they have the sole authority to define Kabbalah as part of Judaism see in the anti-cult climate now prevailing in Israel an opportunity to reinforce their position by labeling as a “cult” non-religious pragmatic Kabbalah, of which Bnei Baruch is the most successful example. Academic historians of Kabbalah and scholars of comparative religion, who have little sympathy for pragmatic systems, may contribute the occasional negative comment. Even specific esoteric groups may have a vested interest in disqualifying pragmatic Kabbalah as a competition to their own brands of Kabbalistic teachings.

It would be naïve to see this controversy as motivated by purely theoretical or philosophical reasons. The attempt to “own” Kabbalah is largely a struggle for power. Religious and, to some extent, academic and esoteric definitions of Kabbalah are promoted by groups that have an interest in affirming their power, by proving that public opinion at large accepts their self-assumed role as the sole custodians of an “authentic” definition of what Kabbalah is.

IMAGES
Image #1: Reproduction from the Library of Congress of the t itle page of the first printed edition of the Zohar, Mantua, 1558.
Image #2: Photograph of Yehuda Halevy Ashlag. He is also known as Baal HaSulam, “Owner of the Ladder,” because he was the author of Sulam, “The Ladder,” a commentary on the Zohar.
Image #3: Photograph of Philip Shagra Berg (1927-2013), earlier known as Feivel S. Gruberger. Berg established the Kabbalah Center.
Image #4: Photograph of Baruch Ashlag, follower of Yehuda Ashlag.
Image #5: Photograph of Michael Laitman, who founded and directs the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute. Laitman was a student of Baruch Ashlag.
Image #6: Reproduction of the logo of Bnei Baruch.

REFERENCES

Ben Tal, Shai. 2010. “Bnei-Baruch – The Story of a New Religious Movement.” Akdamot 25:148-67 [Hebrew].

Bnei Baruch. 2008. Kabbalah for the Student. Toronto, Ontario and Brooklyn, NY: Laitman Kabbalah Publishers.

Bogner, Jeff. 2014. The Egotist: A Memoir. Toronto, Ontario and Brooklyn, NY: Laitman Kabbalah Publishers.

Huss, Boaz. 2015. “Kabbalah and Its Contemporary Revival.” Pp. 8-18 in Kabbalah and Sufism: Esoteric Beliefs and Practices in Judaism and Islam in Modern Times – The 8th Annual CISMOR Conference on Jewish Studies (Kyoto: Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions [CISMOR], Doshisha University).

Komad, Zenita. 2015. WE: The Artist, The Kabbalist, and the CircleXperiment. Toronto, Ontario and Brooklyn, New York: ARI Publishers.

Myers, Jody. 2011. “Kabbalah for the Gentiles: Diverse Souls and Universalism in Contemporary Kabbalah.” Pp. 181-212 in Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival, edited by Boaz Huss. Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

Persico, Tomer. 2014. “Neo-Hasidism & Neo-Kabbalah in Israeli Contemporary Spirituality: The Rise of the Utilitarian Self.” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review 5:31-54.

Vinokur, Semion. 2012. The Kabbalist: A Cinematic Novel. English translation. Toronto, Ontario and Brooklyn, NY: Laitman Kabbalah Publishers.

Zaidman-Dvir, Nurit and Stephen Sharot. 1992. “The Response of Israeli Society to New Religious Movements: ISKCON and Teshuvah,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31:279-95.

Post Date:
3 July 2016

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Bodu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power)

BODU BALA SENA (BBS) TIMELINE

1975 (March 4):  Galagoda Atte Gnanasara was born.

1992 (January 2):  Ven. Kirama Wimalajothi opened the Buddhist Cultural Centre in Dehiwala, in southern Colombo.

2004:  The world’s first political party comprised of Buddhist monks, called the Jathika Hela Urumaya (the National Heritage Party), was formed. The BBS is an offshoot of this party.

2012 (May 7):  The Bodu Bala Sena was launched.

2011 (May 15):  The Buddhist Cultural Centre was opened by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, at its new locations in the city of Colombo, in the Sambuddha Jayanthi Mandira complex. This is also where the BBS headquarters are located.

2012 (June24):  The BBS attacked Sirivardhana Buddha, a famous, but controversial Buddhist lay preacher in Vanduramba, Galle District.

2012 (July28):  The BBS held its first national convention in the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall.

2012 (October 14):  The BBS stormed a “house church” in Homagama, on allegations that an evangelical group called the The Name of Lord Jesus were trying to convert Sinhalese Buddhists.

2012-2013:  The BBS was accused of attacking various Muslim and Christian places as it took upon itself the role of policing. In 2012, this vigilantism was mostly directed towards Buddhist “heretics” and hotels they claimed commercialized Buddhism, but in 2013 anti-Muslim campaigns came to dominate their activities.

2013 (February 17):  At a public rally in the Colombo suburb of Maharagama, the BBS made public its “Maharagama Declaration,” a ten-point declaration against certain Muslim practices, such as hala-certification, and women’s dresses, such as the niqab and the abaya .

2014 (June 15 and 16):  Muslims in the town of Aluthgama, Dharga Town, Valipanna and Beruwela were attacked by mobs after a BBS meeting (often referred to as the “Aluthgama riots”).

2014:  As a way of discrediting the BBS, the organization was met with allegations that its monks received support from Western powers, including Norway.

2014 (June 20):  The Norwegian Embassy in Colombo released a press statement in which it denied any connections between the Norwegian state and Bodu Bala Sena.

2015:  Ven. Kirama Wimalajothi resigned from the BBS, partly due to BBS involvement in the Aluthgama violence. Wimalajothi publicly announced that the behavior of BBS monks was against the teachings of the Buddha.

2015 (June):  The BBS decided to register, together with the Eksath Lanka Maha Sabha, as a political party under the name the Bodu Jana Peramuna Sri Lanka (BJP) and to run for parliamentary elections in August.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Post-independent Sri Lanka has a vibrant history of Buddhist pressure groups in public life, whose aim has been to “restore Buddhism” to its “rightful place” in society. Generally speaking, we may say that in spite of internal variation, such groups belong to a broader tradition of political Buddhism. This “political Buddhism” refers to a set of ideologies holding that Buddhism should guide social and political life, and moreover that it is a state responsibility to protect and foster Buddhism. “Political Buddhism” in Sri Lanka denotes a specifically modern ideology developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century against colonial exclusion of Buddhism from formal politics, and from the 1930s onwards, as an ideology accommodated to democratic politics. Political Buddhism is articulated and acted upon by both lay Buddhists and members of the monastic order, the sangha (Frydenlund 2016).

The most radical (and so far the most militant) group is the Bodu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power), or BBS, formed in 2012, by a small group of Buddhist monks and lay people. The most senior monastic figure (now disaffiliated from the group) was Ven. Kirama Wimalajothi, an experienced monk who spent many years in Malaysia. [Image at right} Upon return to Sri Lanka, Wimalajothi started in 1992 the Buddhist Cultural Centre in Southern Colombo, which in the early 2000s had turned into a well-equipped Buddhist bookstore and publication center. By 2011 the Buddhist Cultural Centre had moved to the city centre and turned into a modern multi-million enterprise. The Centre was opened by President Mahinda Rajapaksa on 15 May 2011, and both the center and the BBS were generally regarded as operating under the protective wings of President Rajapaksa.

Wimalajothi´s main aim has long been to strengthen the position of Buddhism in society. In addition to the Buddhist Cultural Centre, he has established a center for lay activities, temporary ordination for lay men into the monastic order (which in contrast to Myanmar and Thailand is not practiced in Sri Lanka), as well as full ordination of women in to the order (bhikkhuni ordination). In addition, Wimalajothi has shown concern for the Sinhala cultural heritage, such as traditional foods and medicine, as well as the long-term consequences of labor migration to the Middle East for Sinhala families. As we shall see, these concerns reappear in BBS ideology.

While Wimalajothi was (until 2015) the senior leader and patron of the BBS, it was the more junior monk, Ven. Galagoda Atte Gnanasara (the BBS general secretary) who became the public face and agitator in the public sphere. [Image at right] Gnanasara had become involved in Buddhist activist groups in the 2000s, and he even ran for parliament for the Jathika Hela Urumaya, a Buddhist monastic political party formed in 2004. In the aftermath of the sudden death of the charismatic Buddhist monk Ven. Soma Thero in December 2003, a group of “patriotic” monks formed in 2004 the world’s first political party comprised of Buddhist monks, called the Jathika Hela Urumaya (the National Heritage Party), of which the BBS is an offshoot.

Also central to the BBS’s founding was Dilanthe Withanage, a lay person, who assumed the title “Chief Executive Officer”. Withanage also served as the BBS spokesperson and appeared in numerous debates and interviews, including international media such as al-Jazeera where he in a stream debate in 2014 defended the need to “protect Buddhism” from “conversions to Islam”.

In May 2015, Wimalajothi publically declared his resignation from the BBS, partly due to the BBS involvement in the Aluthgama violence. In June 2015, together with the United Lanka Great Council (Eksath Lanka Maha Sabha) the BBS decided to register as a political party, the Bodu Jana Peramuna Sri Lanka (BJP), thereby increasing the contest with the JHU for the “Buddhist vote” in the general elections in Sri Lanka that year. The BJP contested in sixteen electoral districts, but obtained only 0.18 per cent of the national votes.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The overall aim of the BBS is to protect Buddhism and the Sinhalese, particularly from what they consider to be a foreign invasion. The movement combines Buddhist “fundamentalist” concerns of secularization, differentiation of society and the alleged decay of Buddhism due to globalization, with specific concerns of Sinhala nationalism like Sinhala culture and heritage. It emphasizes the dominance of Sinhala language and culture over the island’s multicultural past and present and is critical of international the international human rights paradigm, particularly minority rights. It is particularly concerned with Islam.

At its inaugural meeting in Colombo in July 2012 the BBS declared its intention to pursue five goals: 1) to work for the increased birth rate of the Sinhala Buddhist population by challenging the government’s birth control and family planning policies; 2) legal reform to better protect the rights of the island’s Buddhists, to abolish legal pluralism and implement one civil code (thus abolishing Muslim family law); 3) reform of the education system in line with Buddhist interests; 4) the formation of a government-sponsored body to ensure Buddhist “orthodoxy” in books and media; and 5) implementation of a series of recommendations for reforming Buddhism already suggested in the 1950s. This five-fold “resolution” also suggests a government ban of Sri Lankan female labor migration to the Middle East. Maltreatment of Sri Lankan laborers in the Middle East had for long been a contested issue in Sri Lanka, and it was increasingly being perceived as a religious issue by radical political Buddhist groups, including the BBS.

A close look at the constructions of Islam in BBS ideology reveals that the anti-Muslim discourses operate at different levels, serving various interests and concerns: some discourses relate to local business competition, while others portray Muslims and Islam as a security threat to the state. One prominent BBS discourse deals with issues of cultural diversity, citizenship, and human rights, portraying Buddhists as “hosts” and Muslims (and other religious minorities) as “guests,” accredited with limited minority rights. In public speeches in Colombo during 2013, [Image at right] the BBS argued that it was a global principle that minorities must reside in a country [in a way] that does not threaten the majority race and its identity, and, moreover, that the Muslims were ungrateful to their Sinhala Buddhist hosts. In an interview in 2014, Withanage claimed that “[I]t is the Sinhala Buddhists who are in danger. We are the ones who live in fear. Our Sinhala Buddhist leaders are helpless due to the vast powers of these so-called minorities.” Moreover, during sermons BBS monks have claimed that Muslims in Sri Lanka are like “greedy ghosts” threatening the majority race and its identity. Such rhetoric neglects Sinhala Buddhists’ thousand-year-long peaceful coexistence with the ethnically and linguistically diverse Muslim communities of Sri Lanka.

Although Buddhist-Muslim coexistence in Sri Lanka is the rule rather than the exception, BBS construct local Muslims as a threat to national security. Local Muslim associations are seen by BBS monks as representatives of international terrorist networks and local agents of Islamic global imperialism. The BBS has published posters that show Sri Lanka as a niqab -dressed woman with evil-red eyes, symbolically identifying the niqab as a direct security threat to the state and its territory. Radical political Buddhism has garnered unexpected support by successfully interweaving local concerns with international alarmism. Global discourses on terror and new forms of media communication fuel and intensify Buddhist fears of Islam.

Changing global demographics and the expected increase in the Muslim population worldwide is another issue of concern to the BBS. While the numbers of the Muslim population in Sri Lanka is disputed, the alleged growth of the Muslim population is of utmost importance to both the BBS as an increase in the Muslim population is perceived as an existential threat to Buddhism as a social and cultural phenomenon in the world. The BBS argues that Buddhist societies will eventually turn Muslim, not through external pressure but from changing ratios of Muslims and Buddhists in the population. To prevent “Buddhists from becoming minority in their own country” (as the slogan goes), radical Buddhist groups have called for family planning policies, even legal regulation of women’s reproductive health. At the BBS inaugural meeting in 2012, BBS leaders demanded the government shut down all family planning units in the country so that Sinhala women could produce more babies. Finally, the BBS expressed a concern that a decline in the Sinhala Buddhist population would imply a drop in the number of monastic recruits, as small families are less likely to donate one out of perhaps two children of a small family unit to the order.

Protection of Buddhism and the Sinhala race are familiar tropes in Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, so the novelty of the BBS lies in its strong anti-Muslim rhetoric, its militancy in public space and its pro-active international networking. The latter point is particularly remarkable. In 2014, the BBS made a formal alliance with the radical Buddhist group 969 in Myanmar in a shared attempt to rescuing Buddhism from what they perceive as the Muslim threat. To what extent the 969 and the BBS can be grouped together as “Buddhist nationalism” has been contested (Schontal and Walton 2016). However, it may well indicate a move from locally embedded ethnoreligious identities to a more clearly defined regional Buddhist political identity, which imbues their anti-Muslim message with greater importance as well as urgency (Frydenlund 2015). In many regards, the BBS and the 969 fit the classic pattern of neo-traditionalism (or fundamentalism) here defined as the wish to work against the institutional differentiation brought about by colonial rule, modernity, and secularization. According to the MoU signed in Colombo, “subtle incursions taking place under the guise of secular, multicultural, and other liberal notions. . . . funded from overseas . . . subtly spreading into local situations.”

Internal religious purification is another, but often overlooked aspect of BBS ideology (Deegalle 2016). While the enemies of Buddhism are not directly defined in the BBS anthem (but given BBS strong anti-Christian and anti-Muslim stance it was widely interpreted as being non-Buddhist minorities in Sri Lanka), the anthem also refers to false Buddhas. On June 24, 2012 the BBS in fact attacked Sirivardhana Buddha, a famous, but controversial Buddhist lay preacher in the Galle District who claimed to be a future Buddha, a Maitreya. A few days later, the BBS demanded action by the Ministry of Buddhist Affairs against Sirivardhana who, they claimed, insulted Buddhism.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The BBS does not represent an alternative form of Buddhism, and its members and sympathizers belong to “mainstream” Buddhist institutions of learning and practice in Sri Lanka. The BBS organizes gatherings in public spaces, which are open for the general public. At such meetings, BBS monks raise issues of concern, such as Christian proselytism or halal certification in Sri Lanka. [Image at right] The meetings have the form of a Buddhist preaching (called bana in Sinhala) in which Buddhist monks are seated at a palladium from where they speak, while white dressed lay people are seated on the ground. Ven. Gnanasara is a recognized chanter, and the BBS distributes his chanting of protective verses from the Pali canon (for example the Jaya Piritha) through their website. From a doctrinal point of view, the BBS represents a particular strand of modernist Buddhism, which emphasizes revitalization of Buddhist practice through accommodation to the needs of contemporary society. For example, leading BBS monks support temporary ordination for lay people to enter the monastic order (which is not practiced in Sri Lanka in contrast to Thailand and Myanmar), and they support the nuns movement, which seeks to reintroduce the order of nuns (which in Theravada Buddhism is not formally recognized since its decay in the eleventh century CE). The BBS is concerned with the alleged purity of the Buddha’s teaching, and it is hostile to “popular” forms of Buddhism, deity worship and radical religious innovation, as indicated by their attack on the lay preacher Sirivardhana.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

The BBS is a monastic organization, but recognizes four groups as its constituency: monks, nuns, lay men and lay women,welcoming all activists who share their political Buddhist, anti-Islamic and Sinhala nationalist agenda. [Image at right] Its headquarters is in Sri Sambuddha Jayanthi Mandira, Colombo, owned by the Buddhist Cultural Centre.

The BBS has made extensive use of modern communication technology such as internet (see for example its webpage (Bodu Bala Sena webpage 2015) and social media such as Facebook. The BBS anthem was another important tool for the BBS to convey its message. Performed by the famous Sinhala singer Sunil Edirisinghe, the anthem calls upon the Buddhists of the island to take up forces to protect Buddhism against the “fierce forces of Mara” (i.e. forces that will destroy Buddhism) by initiating a pure “dharma war” (dharma yuddhayak). The BBS’ anthem was also made available for downloading as a ring tone in 2013 by Mobitel of Sri Lanka Telecom. According to a BBS announcement, downloading the tone would help finance the organization. After public controversy Mobitel apologized, holding that the BBS was treated like all other content providers of ring tones (based on a revenue sharing method).

While its main base is in Sri Lanka, the BBS also represents a transnational form of Buddhist activism and ethno-religious nationalism as it receives support from Sinhala Buddhists living abroad in nations such as Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.. For example, in 2013 Gnanasara lead the opening chanting of the Indiana Buddhist temple in the U.S.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Global discourses on terror and the politics of changing religious demographics are two important aspects of the rise of Buddhist fear of Islam. Another crucial, but all too often neglected aspect of the Buddhist anti-Muslim discourses, relates to the economic sphere. In Sri Lanka in 2013, the BBS called for a ban on halal slaughter. Later that year, one BBS monk even went so far as to self-immolate over the halal issue, becoming the first monk in Sri Lanka´s history to engage in self-immolation. Animal rights are certainly high on the Buddhist agenda (not only among radical political Buddhists), but a closer analysis of the halal controversy in Sri Lanka shows that protection of animals, and the cow in particular, is only part of the story. At a press conference in Colombo in 2012, Ven. Gnanissara raised the specific issue of Sinhala-Buddhist business competition, claiming that the halal-certification system implied unfair treatment of Sinhala shopkeepers as Muslims then would “boycott” shops with no halal-certification. “This is a Sinhala Buddhist country,” Ven. Gnanissara argued, “from ancient times the Sinhalese have dominated and assisted the business society to build up and carry out their business. Now these businesses are threatened by these Muslims with the Halal symbol and certification just so they could make a business out of it.” High on the Buddhist political agenda in Sri Lanka, therefore, we find Sinhala-Muslim economic competition, specifically between producers of non-halal and halal food items, product locations in the supermarket shelves, and the extent to which one could offer Buddhist monks food items with halal certification on them. In fact, the BBS explicitly address the concerns of the Sinhala business community. It should also be noted that there have been several attacks on Muslim-owned slaughterhouses, supermarkets, and shops.

The most severe allegation against the BBS of direct violent action against Muslims concerns a series of riots often referred to as “The Aluthgama riots.” [Image at right] On June 15-16, 2014, Muslims living in the southern towns of Aluthgama, Dharga Town, Valipanna and Beruwela were attacked by mobs, resulting in three Muslim deaths, hundreds of homes and shops burnt down to the grown and several thousand displaced, principally affecting the Muslim community. Over the two years prior to the violence, hate sentiment had been cultivated by the BBS via social media and through public protests and media statements. There had been sporadic violence against Muslim communities throughout the country in the same period, but the Aluthgama riots showed an unprecedented level of organization and orchestration (Haniffa et al 2014). On June 15, 2014, the BBS held a public rally in Aluthgama after an incident between a Buddhist monk and three Muslim youths. In his speech, the BBS General Secretary Gnanasara ended by saying that “in the future if another yellow robe is even touched, no need to go to the police, let the law of the jungle take over” (quoted in Haniffa et al 2014:19). Later, the rally formed a procession through town, which ended in massive riots. While the actual chronology of events (and the role played by the BBS or Muslim youth in the area remains unclear and contested), it is clear that the riots left the local Muslim communities far more damaged than their Sinhala Buddhist neighbors.

The BBS and several smaller groups of similar kind in Sri Lanka have been given the label “militant” or “extremist,” either by international media or local opponents. The groups themselves would not agree to such labels, as they would not engage in any military activities, or form militant wings. Nonetheless, several of the contemporary Buddhist pressure groups engage in military rhetoric, using or “power” (bala) “army” (sēnā) in their organizational names, and they are accused of being involved in anti-Muslim violence. As discussed above, such violence includes attacks on Christian churches, rampage of Muslim owned shops in Colombo, and the widespread attacks on the Muslim community in Aluthgama in 2014. The authoritarian regime of President Rajapaksa (2005-2015) encouraged and protected such radical Buddhist movements through securing tacit police support (by letting them operate as vigilantes) and later through impunity. Moreover, the President’s brother, the then Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, at several occasions publicly declared his support for the BBS monks. [Image at right] While the BBS itself was not armed, it was widely believed that the state’s armed forces could be mobilized in their support.

With the new regime of Maithripala Sirisena (2015-) the public support and political space for such movements have diminished. It should be noted, however, that radical Buddhist pressure groups form an integral part of Sri Lanka´s political life, and so their current decreased space for operation does not preclude renewed importance in the years to come.

IMAGES

Image #1: Photograph of BBS founder, Ven. Kirama Wimalajothi.
Image #2: Photograph of Ven. Galagoda Atte Gnanasara, the general secretary of BBS.
Image #3: Photograph of Ven. Gnanasara speaking at a BBS mass rally in Maharagama, a suburb of Colombo, in 2013.Image #4: Photograph of lay BBS sympathizers who are protesting against the halal certification system in Sri Lanka.Image #5: Reproduction of the BBS logo.
Image #6: Photograph of a crowd at the “Aluthgama riots” in 2014Image #7: Photograph of the former Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, at a BBS event in 2013.

REFERENCES

Bodu Bala Sena website. 2015. Accessed from http://www.bodubalasena.org on 4 August 2016.

Degalle, Mahinda. 2016. “The ‘Army of Buddhist Power’ in Sri Lankan Politics’.” Pp. 121-44 in Buddhism and the Political Process, edited by Hiroko Kawanami. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Frydenlund, Iselin. 2016. “Particularist Goals through Universalist Means: The Political Paradoxes of Buddhist Revivalism in Sri Lanka.” Pp. 97-120 in Buddhism and the Political Process, edited by Hiroko Kawanami.. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Frydenlund, Iselin. 2015. “ The Rise of Buddhist-Muslim Conflict in Asia and Possibilities for Transformation.” NOREF (Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre): NOREF Report, December 15. Accessed from http://www.peacebuilding.no/Regions/Asia/Publications/The-rise-of-Buddhist-Muslim-conflict-in-Asia-and-possibilities-for-transformation on 4 August 2016.

Haniffa, Farzana. 2016, forthcoming. “Stories in the Aftermath of Aluthgama.” In Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities, edited by John Clifford Holt. New York: Oxford University Press.

Haniffa, Farzana et al. 2014. “Where Have All the Neighbours Gone? Aluthgama Riots and its Aftermath. A Fact Finding Mission to Aluthgama, Dharga Town, Valipanna and Beruwela.” Colombo: Law and Society Trust.

Schontal, Benjamin and Matt Walton. 2016. “The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.” Contemporary Buddhism 17:81-115.

Post Date:
5 August 2016

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Boko Haram

BOKO HARAM TIMELINE

2002-2004:  The genesis of the Nigerian Taliban in Yobe took place.

2003-2004:  Disturbances in Kanamma and Gwoza were attributed to Boko Haram.

2009 (July 26-29):  Boko Haram revolted; founder Muhammad Yusuf was killed.

2010 (September 7):  A prison break, the foundation of militant Boko Haram, and the ascendancy of Shekau took place.

2011 (June 16):  The suicide bombing of police GHQ in Abuja occurred.

2011 (August 26):  The suicide bombing of U.N. headquarters in Abuja occurred.

2012 (December 25):  Boko Haram attacked churches, killing at least twenty-seven in Maiduguri and Potiskum.

2013 (September):  A major Nigerian military offensive against Boko Haram was undertaken.

2014 (February 14):  121 Christian villagers in Borno state were massacred, beginning the large-scale Boko Haram massacres.

2014 (April 15):  Approximately 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from Chibok.

2014 (June 2):  Approximately 200 Christians were massacred in and around Gwoza.

2014 (November 28):  At least 120 people were killed by suicide bombing and gunfire at the Kano major mosque.

2015 (January 3-7):  The Baga massacre occurred; approximately 2000 people killed near Lake Chad.

2015 (January 31-February 1):  The final attack on Maiduguri took place; this was a high-point for Boko Haram political control.

2015 (March 8):  Boko Haram pledged allegiance to Islamic State and changed its name to Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiya.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Boko Haram is a Salafi-jihadi organization, whose true name until the organization swore allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015, was Jami`at Ahl al-Sunna li-l-Da`wa wa-l-Jihad (The Gathering of the People of the Sunna for Missionization and Fighting). It is now known as Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiya (State of West Africa). The name Boko Haram means “Western Education is Forbidden,” aname accorded to the group by Nigerians, and by which it still is popularly known.

The group has two very distinct phases: one under the charismatic leadership of Muhammad Yusuf (d. 2009), who founded the group as a protest against secular education in northern Nigeria, and the second under the flamboyant Abubakar Shakau (whereabouts unknown), who transformed the group into an armed insurrection calling for an Islamic state. A third phase, one in which Boko Haram has been subsumed into the Islamic State (IS), is possibly underway, although thus far it is impossible to draw any final conclusions.

Boko Haram has two basic tactical methods: one, which is individual or small group, and focuses upon individualized terror (assassinations, drive-by shootings, local terror and suicide attacks against local targets), and two, which is massive concerted attacks, usually highly mobile utilizing motorcycles or trucks to attack a given smaller or comparatively less-defended target, and then massacring the target population (or in some cases recently taking them captive). Initially, during the period 2010-2011 Boko Haram favored the first tactical method, and even at the present time still utilizes it. But since the beginning of 2014 Boko Haram has favored the massive attack method. The goal of the secondary method is to create a territorial state.

Although the targets focused upon by Boko Haram have shifted considerably during the last five years, it is possible to make some generalizations. During its first two years (2010-1011), Boko Haram favored local targets that were closely associated with its doctrinal positions. These included attacks on educational and medical facilities, attacks on public-order offenses (from a Muslim point of view), which included bars, gambling establishments, marketplaces where the selling of non-halal meat took place. Above all others were the targeted assassinations of Muslim religious figures who had opposed the group. A second broad group of targets constituted “vengeance for Muhammad Yusuf” targets; these included security forces or military targets. During this period Boko Haram in its public statements usually emphasized that it demanded justice for the murder of Yusuf, among other demands.

During the period 2011-2013 Boko Haram shifted its targets somewhat. While local terrorism of the type described abovecontinued, the group projected its power into two areas: the Fulani-Hausa heartland around Kano and Zaria (north-central Nigeria), and the Middle Belt, most especially the flash-point city of Jos. There are frequent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Jos; Kaduna, capital of the major Middle Belt state, and most especially in the federal capital of Abuja. These attacks were mostly spectacular in nature, and many of them were suicide attacks on very distinctive locations (churches, government buildings, Army bases) that obviously were chosen for their symbolic value. Churches and Christian locations were often attacked on Sundays or at other key Christian holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, again in order to maximize the casualties and symbolism.

During the period commencing late 2011, the Nigerian military enjoyed a period of some success against Boko Haram, especially during later 2012 through summer 2013. Boko Haram continued to carry out operations in northeastern Nigeria, but it was unable (or unwilling) to carry out operations elsewhere in Nigeria. This period of comparative containment ended on May 14, 2013, when President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the three northeastern states hardest hit by Boko Haram.

Operations conducted by Boko Haram during this 2012-2013 period tended to revert back to low-technological means. During this period operations tended to be carried out by small weapons (knives, machetes, and small guns) rather than the automatic weaponry currently favored. It is clear, once again, that the change occurred with the glut of fighters and weaponry that flooded West Africa in the wake of the fall of Libya’s ruler Qadhafi at the end of 2011. At first these fighters and their weapons aided the rise of al-Qaeda in the Maghrib (AQIM), but with its defeat at the hands of the French in January 2013, apparently a large number of fighters and weapons became available in both Nigeria (to Boko Haram) and in the Central African Republic (aiding in the rise of Seleka in March 2013). It is striking how there is a wave-effect on radical organizations throughout the region; when one is defeated, those fleeing the defeat can cause a great deal of destruction to weaker states.

By the end of 2013, it is possible to see a new phase in Boko Haram’s tactics. The first manifestation of this change is the rise inlarge-scale massive attacks, usually on villages, with a heavy loss of life. At least 2,053 people were killed during the first half of 2014 by these mass attacks. Starting in spring 2014 Boko Haram began a campaign of kidnappings, most famously the some 279 schoolgirls who were kidnapped on the night of April 14-15, 2014 from a boarding-school at Chibok. Although some of the girls managed to escape, it is clear from video taken of them (May 12, 2014), and from the statement of Shekau that the vast majority of them remain under the control of Boko Haram, and most probably as he stated, have either been married to the fighters, or sold into slavery. Nor is this the only kidnapping of women and girls carried out by Boko Haram; a number of other raids have been focused upon this end through the summer of 2014. By the end of 2014, Boko Haram probably had at least 10,000-15,000 soldiers, and perhaps as many as 50,000 supporters.

Another concurrent manifestation of the caliphate phase of Boko Haram has been the reintroduction of suicide attacks, which are reflected in recent mass-casualty attacks. These have been directed against civilian targets for the most part, and the perpetrators include a large number of female suicide attackers. Targets have been mosques, markets, bus stations, schools, military encampments, and residential areas. The numbers of dead from the various massacres have yet to be fully tallied.

Although the Nigerian army’s record during the year of 2013-14 is a miserable one, during the course of which Boko Haram managed to carve out for itself a fairly substantial state in the northeastern three states of Nigeria (Borno, Yobe and Adumawa), after a large-scale attack on the key capital-city of Borno, Maiduguri, was repulsed in January 2015, Boko Haram began to retreat. Most of its important towns were recaptured by the Nigerian military through spring 2015, and many of its bases in the Sambisa Forest (along the Cameroonian border) were overrun during the summer and fall of 2015. However, there is still a core Boko Haram following, and virtually none of its leadership has been apprehended.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Boko Haram is a Salafi-jihadi organization that has its religious-ideological roots in a Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. Its name is one bestowed upon the group by outsiders, who identified the primary difference between it and other Salafi groups as beingBoko Haram’s opposition to any forms of secular education. Indeed, Muhammad Yusuf’s book, Hadhihi `aqidatuna wa-minhaj da`watina (This is Our Creed and Method of Proclamation) (c. 2007), does have a substantial section concerning education. Yusuf’s opposition to education stems from the charges that a number of teachings, such as the heliocentric system, the theory of evolution, and other foundational learning methods are un-Islamic. He states, enumerating the negative factors:

1. Mixing of the sexes which is forbidden in our Islamic religion, and its forbiddance is well-known as a necessity.

2. A woman adorning herself, in spite of what God said: ‘Stay in your homes and do not display your finery as the pagans of old did.’ (Q 33:33)

3. Physical exercises which distract from religion, like football (soccer), handball and the Olympic competitions.

4. For the woman to travel alone, without a (male) guardian or a husband, in spite of the forbidding of the Prophet of her, saying: ‘It is not permitted for a woman who believes in God and the Last Day to travel day or night without a (male) guardian or her husband.’

5. Spreading of fornication, and disgusting actions, like forbidden sexual relations (zina), lesbianism, and homosexuality” (Hadhihi `aqidatuna c. 2007: 92-93).

There are sections in the book that detail Islamic opposition to democracy, which is characterized as a religion (similar to the characterization of Abu Musa`b al-Zarqawi, who is cited directly), and there are sections devoted to denouncing Shi`ism and Sufism, as well association with secular government as leading to polytheism.

Yusuf’s thought was fairly marginal within the context of northern Muslim Salafi thought, and it is known that he was taken to task by several scholars, a number of whom were assassinated during the early period of Boko Haram’s activities.

The period of Shekau’s ascendancy has not been characterized by intellectual development. Shekau’s thought is that of a Salafi-jihadi militant, who in contradistinction to Yusuf rarely cites the Qur’an directly, but frequently alludes to Salafi ideas. A good example of his video statements is from the video of May 10, 2014:

“This is a war against Christians and democracy and their constitution; we have not started, we will be in Abuja, and in every state in Nigeria.

This war is against Christians, I mean Christians, generally the infidels. Allah says we should finish them when we get the chance…I am working for Allah and will die for it. No one can stop me. You killed Mohammed Yusuf. Are you not saying he is even better than Shekau? Even if you kill me, other fighters will rise better than me; I am nothing and worthless before Allah, for whom I am working. You are sitting with Christians and saying we are one, saying there is no difference. We are not one with infidels. We are friends with [the Muslims of] Afghanistan, Mali, Yemen and Pakistan, and we are going to wipe out the Christians. Are Christians the people with whom we should play? It is either you are with us or you are with them, and when we see you, we will harvest your neck with knife” (Cook 2014).

Shekau’s style is not an easy one, and although he is capable of producing sensational or chilling quotes for his non-Muslim audience, there is no evidence that his presentation is an effective one in gaining support from his Muslim audience.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

The founder of Boko Haram, Muhammad Yusuf, was a charismatic figure, and apparently attracted a number of people in thenortheast of Nigeria by the strength of his personality. It is by no means clear that he achieved complete operational control over the group that would become Boko Haram, however, and there were probably a number of different small cells throughout northern Nigeria.

Boko Haram under Yusuf’s leadership, and during the period 2010-2012 was much more of a broad-based leadership than it was to become during the period 2013-2015. Two leaders, Manman Nur and Khalid al-Barnawi, were both prominent, and at least Nur was Cameroonian. Both seem to have been disaffected by Shekau’s strategy during the period 2012-13, and apparently were the driving force behind the foundation of Ansaru. This latter group had many of the same goals as Boko Haram, but was careful to direct its violence against non-Muslims. However, Ansaru has not carried out operations during the period 2014-2015, and it is not clear whether it still exists. (Zenn 2014)

Abubakar Shekau concentrated Boko Haram around his person, and during the period of his ascendancy, roughly 2011-2015, hewas virtually the public face of the group. Several times the Nigerian military made the claim that he was dead, or that the person on the over forty videos issued during this period was an impersonator. Whatever the truth of these allegations, the person known as Shekau invariably appeared in military fatigues, spoke in an aggressive, belligerent manner, and did not project a high level of Islamic knowledge. The content of these videos was never very sophisticated, and the text more of a ramble rather than a prepared, carefully thought-out statement.

Since May 2015, Shekau has disappeared entirely from Boko Haram’s videos, giving rise to rumors that he might have been removed or has departed for another section of the Islamic State. At this point, November 2015, there does not seem to be a replacement for Shekau. Perhaps Islamic State has chosen a comparatively leaderless image in order to counteract the personality cult that Shekau cultivated.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Boko Haram suffers from several fundamental contradictions: it is basically a Salafi-jihadi organization that is committed to the establishment of an Islamic state throughout Nigeria. However, because of its lack of appeal among the majority Hausa-Fulani Muslim population of northern Nigeria (not to speak of its inability to gain support among Muslims in the south), Boko Haram effectively turned itself into a local, Kanuri group. This fact created a boundary beyond which Boko Haram has been unable to penetrate: although it can carry out operations in major northern and Middle-Belt cities, it has not demonstrated any ability to generate a mass following outside of its ethnic limits.

This fact is compounded by Boko Haram’s methods of violence, and its inability to demonstrate links between violent actions (for example, suicide attacks or large-scale massacres) and the stated goal of establishing an Islamic state. Many of the victims of its violence have in fact been Muslims, and although Boko Haram highlights its attacks upon Christian or governmental targets, the reality is that it frequently targets mosques and Muslim religious leaders as well. Attacks upon Muslim targets are consistent with the doctrines of takfir, but are inconsistent with the larger range of Islam in northern Nigeria, and even with Salafism. Boko Haram has not demonstrated the ability to attract any serious Muslim scholars to its cause.

For the above reasons, the operations of 2014 were critical. Boko Haram was unable to move beyond the Kanuri region of northeastern Nigeria, and therefore was constrained to attack Kanuri regions in the neighboring countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger. These attacks had the immediate result of drawing the governments and armies of these countries into fighting Boko Haram. Especially the militaries of Chad and Niger proved to be quite serious in fighting Boko Haram, and the successes of these militaries may have shamed the Nigerian government into taking the Boko Haram insurgency more seriously.

With the union of Boko Haram and Islamic State, there are a number of challenges for the new province. One is to survive the onslaught of the Nigerian, Cameroonian, Chadian and Nigerien forces, which are backed by U.S. and French troops as well. Thus far, Boko Haram has accomplished this task. Presumably its best strategy is to wait the coalition out, until new opportunities present themselves. A second is to find new leadership to replace that of Shekau, whose presence precludes any success for Boko Haram throughout the region of northern Nigeria. As he appears to have been sidelined since summer 2015, most probably this is taking place at the current time. The third is to generate a series of tactics and operations that will be consistent with Salafi-jihadism, but will highlight the divide between the Nigerian government and the northern Muslim population. Logically, such tactics and operations would focus violence upon the Christian population instead of upon the Muslims. This change has not yet occurred. Fourth, Boko Haram has to develop a coherent structure coupled with a media program that can both inspire confidence in its leadership, and communicate its message to the Muslim population. This has not occurred either.

The prospects for Boko Haram in the short-term are not good. However, it is very possible that the Nigerian government will make a mess out of its otherwise successful containment of the group. It remains to be seen, also, to what extent the subservience to Islamic State will affect the group ideologically and strategically.

REFERENCES

Cook, David. 2014. “Boko Haram: A New Islamic State in Nigeria.” Accessed from http://bakerinstitute.org/research/boko-haram-new-islamic-state-nigeria/ on 15 November 2015.

Yusuf, Muhammad. c. 2007. Hadhihi `aqidatuna wa-minhaj da`watina. Maiduguri. Thanks to Alex Thurston for supplying me with a copy of this work.

Zenn, Jacob. 2014. “Boko Haram: Recruitment, Financing, and Arms Trafficking in the Lake Chad Region.” Center for Combatting Terrorism at West Point. Accessed from https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/boko-haram-recruitment-financing-and-arms-trafficking-in-the-lake-chad-region on 15 November 2015.

Post Date:
19 November 2015

 

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Braco

BRACO TIMELINE

1967 (November 23) Josip Jelavic was born in Zagreb, Croatia.

1993 (Autumn) Jelavic met Serbian prophet Ivica Prokic, who became his mentor.

1995 Prokic drowned on a beach in South Africa, leaving Braco as his successor.

2002 Braco held his first healing gazing session for two thousand attendees.

2009 Braco first visited the United States.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Josip Jelavic (alternately spelled Grbavac) was born in Zagreb, Croatia to Viktor and Ivanka Grbavac as an only child on November 23, 1967. Few details of his early life are known. He is married, and he and his wife, Dinka, have given birth to one son, Andelon. It is known that he obtained a Master’s degree in economics in 1991 and then worked as a businessman for two years before meeting his future mentor, Ivica Prokic in 1993. Jelavic was immediately drawn to Prokic, and he quickly gave up his business career to work with Prokic. Jelavic’s father, also a businessman, was opposed to his son’s change in direction and had him drafted into the armed forces to separate him from Prokic. Jelavic refused gun training, however, and was incarcerated for his refusal. Jelavic then commenced a hunger strike and was hospitalized briefly before escaping from the hospital, gaining a discharge from the armed services, and returning to work with Prokic (Whitecliff 2009c:17-20). Additional details of both Jelavic’s and Prokic’s lives are spiritual careers are largely available from hagiographic accounts, primarily Whitecliff (2009c).

Jelavic’s mentor, Ivica Prokic, was born on August 4, 1950 in a village in southern Serbia, an area noted for its spiritualenvironment. It is reported that he experienced bodily pain, visions and out-of-body experiences during his childhood. When he was only seven years old he fell and passed out while playing in the water with other children. He later described this moment as one in which “he felt like a piece of the sun did enter his body,” and this moment is understood to be “the determining moment at which his outstanding abilities have been activated” (Ivica n.d.). Prokic moved from Serbia to Zagreb, Croatia in 1971 and worked for a time selling fish. He is reported to have had a variety of visions during this time and to have engaged in astral travel. His powers continued to increase, and by 1989 he could see both past and future clearly; in November of that year he foresaw a local mining accident (Whitecliff 2009c:38). His healing powers emanated from an event in 1989 when he was bathing: “Ivica saw a man falling from a cross. The cross hit Ivica on the forehead and left a permanent physical scar and blood flowing from his hands. Since that time, he had a special ability to heal and could touch someone and make him or her feel better” (Whitecliff 2009c:38). Because he regarded this healing power as a gift, he followed the Croatian tradition of not accepting payment for his services. Prokic reports that he experienced a prophetic vision in which he “was shown the symbol of the thirteen-ray Golden Sun symbol in a prophetic vision, and told that it would be a direct means for the gift of Source, through the Sun, to reach the people. The symbol was to become a physical manifestation in our material reality, a completion of the circle of life expressing both the spiritual and material elements for the body” (“The Golden Sun, Braco & Ivica Prokic.” n.d.). Prokic adopted the thirteen-ray sun as his symbol. He was 43 years old in 1993 when Jelavic approached him with a gift, a gold necklace with a replica of the thirteen-ray sun. Initially Prokic was angered by the gift. However, once Jelavic told Prokic of his dreams concerning the gift, Prokic realized the spiritual nature of the gift and recounted that, ‘The voice of God said, ‘Accept this from the young man and buy him a sun and chain for his birthday too’” (Braco n.d). The two began to work as healers together, both wearing Golden Sun pendants and other golden jewelry. It was Prokic who gave Jelavic the name Braco (pronounced Braht-zoh), meaning “little brother,” which Jelavic then adopted.

Jelavic spent the next two years studying under Prokic, until the latter’s death in 1995. Braco biographer Angelika Whitecliff relates that when Ivica Prokic drowned when he was caught up by a “rogue wave” during a trip with his protege to South Africa, “Braco’s gift of healing emerged spontaneously” (Whitecliff b:2009). Upon Prokic’s death his pupil continued Prokic’s work. Braco built a center in Zagreb to receive visitors and quickly accrued interest from devotees, journalists and scientists. Whitecliff reports that “Braco’s first act of healing occurred when he touched the picture of a very ill boy whose mother came to him after having a dream that Braco would make her son well” (Whitecliff b:2009). In 2002, Braco held his first healing gazing session, with an audience of two thousand attending. Braco continued to hold sessions at his Zagreb center, but also traveled extensively, holding gazing sessions regularly in such countries as Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, United States, Denmark, Italy and Japan. Braco first visited the U.S. in 2009. According to the hagiographic account, before his death Ivica had prophesied that Braco would not visit the U.S. until there had been a “great change of consciousness,” a transformation that is identified as the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 (Whitecliff 2009c:1).

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Braco is not associated with any doctrines, religious beliefs, or religious institutions. As Braco puts it, “I am not a guru or leader or any sect’” (Remez 2010). He also does not claim to be a healer. As Stollznow notes, “Braco doesn’t call himself a healer because he doesn’t make any claims directly; his claims are made by his staff and devotees” (Stollznow 2011). Braco draws the distinction between a healer and his own helping activity; healers claim that it is their energy that producing healing while he asserts that he is the conduit but not the source of healing energy. Braco acknowledges that “ He sends his love and his warmth to the people, but he feels that something positive is flowing through him while he is gazing.” (“Braco – The Gazer 2011). Although he does not provide a detailed explanation of the source of his energy, he ultimately attributes it to the sun (“Il movimento di Braco” 2008). Despite his disclaimers, Braco is often referred to as a healer.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Since 2002 Braco’s ritual events consist entirely of Braco gazing silently. During these sessions Braco makes “fleeting eye contact with each member of the audience” (Stollznow 2011). The sessions typically last five to ten minutes, for groups ranging from fifty to a thousand persons. Attendees are encouraged to bring photos of loved ones who cannot attend, so that they too may experience the power of Braco’s gaze. Braco’s energy is considered so potentially overwhelming that children under eighteen and pregnant women are not admitted to the sessions. Those who participate in gazing sessions through videos are cautioned that eye contact must be limited to seven seconds at most.

Whitecliff describes the ritual in the following way: “Braco simply stands on a platform in front of his audience and silently looks
ahead with a gentle gaze. All present are instructed beforehand to stand and to look at his eyes and to think of their illnesses and problems. During the five-minute healing session, many immediately feel an intensity of energy and bodily sensations; others shed tears or have profound experiences of joy” (Whitecliff b:2009). A group of staff members, called “Guardians,” are available to assist participants who have intense emotional experiences. The Miami Herald reported that a spectator at a Miami Beach Convention Center likened the sensation of Braco’s gaze as similar to his emotional experiences at Woodstock; “others described sensations that also evoked memories of the 1969 concert, such as seeing a glowing aura around the healer or watching his face morph into that of Jesus or their children” (Smiley 2011). For his followers Braco is “a conduit of an ethereal energy” (Smiley 2011). Following the gazing session the session host plays a pre-recorded speech by Braco in his native Croation language.

Accounts on Braco’s website describe his energy as curing people of such ailments as “anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, thyroid conditions, asthma, brain tumors and cancer of various kinds. He reportedly “restored someone’s sight, healed a paraplegic woman, and even cleared someone’s blocked nostrils” (Stollznow 2011). Healings have been reported by individuals who have simply viewed Braco’s videos.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Braco eschews spiritual authority for himself, although he acknowledges that miraculous events do attend his gazing sessions. He has stated that “‘I am only here for those who need me or will need me without their yet knowing it. I look for no gratitude for I am also a man with his own sorrows and joys. I can speak only in respect with what deeds pass through me and which sometimes astound even me by the things they can do’” (Remez 2010).

Braco operates from his center in Zagreb, Srebrnjak 1, but also tours the world to hold gazing sessions in various locations. The groups run from fifty to one thousand people per session. According to his website, his “current form of delivering the energy to the people is by simply gazing at his visitors in groups between 50 and 1000 people without doing any individual meetings or treatment” (Braco n.d.). He performs “twenty sessions a day working 10-12 hours each day at locations across Europe. He is booked with appearances four years in advance” (Whitecliff b:2009). Braco does not charge for his work, though there is an eight-dollar fee at his international appearances to cover organizational costs, such as renting the venue. Braco’s followers also sell books and DVDs about Braco’s life and gazing sessions as well as jewelry. As Braco has begun scheduling gazing sessions around the world, the total attendance at these sessions has climbed above 200,000 (Whitecliff 2009a).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

While Braco’s mentor, Ivika, was an established healer in Serbia, he encountered some resistance to his healing practice prior to his death. According to Whitecliff (2009c:161), “The church, health profession and media attacked him, and he started to lose some power.” Early in his career Braco did speak to participants in his gazing sessions, but this practice stopped when he also faced media scrutiny, criticism and skepticism. Braco’s response was to end all public communication at his events. Whitecliff (2009a) reported that “Many in the scientific community and media have been distrustful, explaining originally that Braco only hypnotized the people, but when he stopped talking completely during healing sessions this explanation could no longer apply.” The controversy continues. Corroboration of Braco’s healing power has been offered by figures such as Professor Alex Schneider, President of the Parapsychological Association of Switzerland and Founder of the World Healing Congress as well as Dr. Harald Wiesendanger, Founder of the International Agency for Outstanding Healers. On the other side skeptics are dismissive of his reputed powers. For example, Stollznow (2011) has concluded that There is no evidence that Braco’s kind of gazing has any benefits at all, but he takes credit for any perceived successes, and absolves himself of failure by claiming he makes no claims. However, the “no claim” claim is disingenuous; whether the claims come from the public or his crew, the claims are promoted by and therefore made by Braco. For his part, Braco no longer speaks in public, nor does he grant interviews to news media; he relies exclusively on his silent gazing sessions to communicate with his audiences. Despite the debate over his healing power, his audiences have continued to grow in size.

REFERENCES

“Braco.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.braco.net/ on 20 February 2012.

“Braco -The Gazer – Biography (and his Teacher Ivica Prokic).” 2011. Accessed from http://lylescott89.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/braco-the-gazer/ on 26 February 2012.

“Il movimento di Braco. 2008. Accessed from http://www.cesnur.org/religioni_italia/m/metafisica_08.htm
on 26 February 2012.

“Ivica.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.braco-info.com/dcms/about-braco/ivica?lang=en on 25 February 20012.

Remez, Sherry. 2010. “Braco: Man of Miracles Returns to Maui.” Maui Weekly, June 3. Accessed from http://www.mauiweekly.com/page/content.detail/id/501548/Braco.html?nav=103 on 20 February2012.

Smiley, David. 2011. “Hundreds Flock to Miami Beach to feel Rare Power of Man’s Gaze on 1-11-11.” Miami Herald, January 11. Accessed from http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/hundreds-flock-to-miami-beach-to-feel-rare-1177907.html?printArticle=y on 20 February 2012.

Stollznow, Karen. 2011. “Braco the Gazer: The Silent Evangelist.” Skeptical Inquirer, April 26. Accessed from http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/braco_the_gazer on 20 February 2012.

“The Golden Sun, Braco & Ivica Prokic.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.braco.net/golden-sun on 26 February 2012.

Whitecliff, Angelika. 2009a. “Braco: Mystery Healing Gazes Causes Miracles.” Examiner, March 17. Accessed from http://www.examiner.com/earth-transformation-in-national/braco-mystery-healing-gaze-causes-miracles on 20 February 2012.

Whitecliff, Angelika. 2009b. “Braco: The Lineage of a Super Healer.” Examiner, March 19. Accessed from http://www.examiner.com/earth-transformation-in-national/braco-the-lineage-of-a-super-healer#ixzz1fO2DJzTR on 20 February 2012.

Whitecliff, Angelika. 2009c. 21 Days with Braco. Kealakekua, Hawaii: Awakening Within.

Authors:
David G. Bromley
Stephanie Edelman

Post Date:
29 February 2012

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Davidians and Branch Davidians (1929-1981)

DAVIDIAN AND BRANCH DAVIDIAN TIMELINE

1885 (March 2)  Victor Tasho Houteff was born in Raikovo, Bulgaria.

1902 (January 5)  Benjamin L. Roden was born in Bearden, Oklahoma.

1907  Houteff immigrated to the United States.

1919   Houteff became a Seventh – day Adventist.

1928  Houteff began intensive study of Bible prophecy.

1929  Houteff began to teach his ideas at his local Seventh-day Adventist church in Los Angeles.

1929  Houteff began to publish his ideas in The Shepherd’s Rod.

1934  After a hearing with Seventh-day Adventist officials, Houteff was officially removed from the church rolls because of his teachings.

1935 (May)  Houteff and a small group of followers moved to a 189-acre parcel of land outside of Waco, Texas, which they named Mount Carmel.

1937 (January 1)  At age fifty-two, Houteff married Florence Hermanson, the seventeen-year-old daughter of two of his followers.

1937 (February 12)  Ben Roden married Lois I. Scott.

1940  Ben and Lois Roden joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, first in Kilgore then in Odessa, Texas.

1940s  In the early to mid-1940s the Rodens encountered Houteff’s Shepherd’s Rod movement.

1943  Houteff’s group was formally incorporated as “the General Association of Davidian Seventh-day Adventists.”

1952  Houteff sent out thirty missionaries from Mount Carmel, with the goal of spreading his message to every Seventh-day Adventist family in North America.

1955 (February 5)  Houteff died at the age of 69.

1955  Florence Houteff assumed leadership of the group of her husband’s followers.

1955  Identifying himself as “the Branch” mentioned in Zechariah 3:8 and 6:12, Ben Roden laid claim to leadership of the Davidians.

1955 (December 7)  The Davidians sold their original parcel of land and relocated to “New Mount Carmel,” 941 acres near the town of Elk, Texas, nine miles east of Waco.

1958  Ben Roden went to Israel to set up a community that would form the core of the new Davidian community of 144,000.

1959  Florence Houteff became convinced that the events of the end would take place during the Passover season, culminating on or about April 22.

1959  Some 1,000 Davidians gathered at New Mount Carmel for Passover, but their numbers dwindled when no significant events transpired.

1959  Florence Houteff left New Mount Carmel for California and ceased to exercise any leadership over the Davidians.

1959  Ben Roden emerged as the leader of the group at the New Mount Carmel Center.

1961  In the wake of Florence Houteff’s failed prophecy, some Davidians decided to relocate first to Riverside, California and then in 1970 to Salem, South Carolina; this splinter group has remained faithful to Houteff’s theology.

1962 (March 1)  Florence Houteff formally resigned as leader of the Davidians.

1960s  Rival factions battled in court for control of the New Mount Carmel property.

1973 (February 27)  Ben Roden and the Branch Davidians completed the purchase of Mount Carmel .

1977  Lois Roden initiated her own prophetic claims and received revelation that the Holy Spirit is a feminine figure.

1978  Ben Roden dies and is succeeded in his leadership role by his wife, Lois.

1980  Lois Roden published the first edition of her magazine, Shekinah.

1981  David Koresh, then known as Vernon Howell, joined the Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel.

1983  Lois Roden recognized David Koresh as her successor.

1986  Lois Roden died and was buried next to her husband on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The sectarian group that became known as the Branch Davidians was part of a complex religious history. The Branch Davidians led by David Koresh, so familiar from the disastrous BATF raid on their Mount Carmel Center on February 28, 1993 and the ensuing fifty-one day siege conducted by the FBI that ended with a fire that destroyed the Center and took 74 lives, were part of a tradition that reached back at least to the nineteenth century.

In the mid-nineteenth century in upper New York state the Baptist layman William Miller (1782-1849) proclaimed that through
diligent study he had been unable to unravel the mysteries of the biblical book of Revelation and, hence, of the time of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus. From 1831 to 1843 he estimated that he had brought his message to a half million persons. By Miller’s calculation, the return of Jesus would happen between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When latter date passed without anything significant happening, Miller, like many others who have prophesied the end, did not lose faith in his prediction. Instead, he adjusted his calculations and reset the date for October 22, 1844. Expectations heightened as summer turned into fall, but the date again came and went without incident. Those who had believed Miller’s prophecy experienced what came to be called the “Great Disappointment , ” and his prophetic career came to an end. But even that second experience of disconfirmation was not sufficient to quell completely an interest in the imminent dawn of the millennium (Rowe 2008: 192-225).

Among the Millerites who held onto the conviction that Miller had actually been correct in his prophecies, was a small group in Washington , New Hampshire led by Joseph Bates, James White and Ellen G. Harmon (1827-1915), whom White married in 1846. They believed that Miller’s prophecy correctly referred to Christ entering the inner room of the heavenly temple in order to begin his final work of judgment. So, the events of the end had in fact begun, but they had not yet manifested themselves on earth. Based on their interpretation of Revelation 14 and other biblical texts, the Whites and Bates advocated for observing the Lord’s Day on Saturday as the seventh day of the week, believed that the final judgment was currently unfolding, and expected to be guided by revelation from God in their own time. Ellen G. White, who became the group’s prophet, came to call that contemporary revelation “present truth” or “new light.” The twin foci of observing the Lord’s Day on Saturday and maintaining the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return to initiate the final judgment would remain central characteristics of Seventh-day Adventism from the time of its origins in the small band of New Hampshire Millerites through its entire history. The openness to receiving prophetic “present truth” introduced a principle of dynamism into the broad Adventist tradition that played an especially important role in the origins of both the Davidians and the Branch Davidians (see Gallagher 2013) .

The more proximate origins of the Branch Davidians can be traced to the activities of Victor Houteff (1885-1955), a Bulgarian
immigrant to the United States who joined the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church in 1919 in Illinois . As Houteff studied the Bible, he developed two distinctive ideas that were out of conformity with established SDA doctrine. First, expressing a vivid sectarian indictment of the SDA Church, he disagreed with Ellen G. White that the 144,000 mentioned in Revelation 7 as being worthy of entering the new Jerusalem referred to the Adventists themselves. Instead, he argued that the Church had become complacent and pervaded by “worldly” influences. He saw his own mission as purifying the church from within and gathering a truly faithful 144,000 in anticipation of the Lord’s return. Second, he argued that it was his task to lead the purified 144,000 to the ancient land of Israel , where they would meet Christ at his return. Both the Davidian and Branch Davidian traditions developed an elitist self-conception according to which they would be the first to be redeemed upon the return of Jesus. Borrowing a concept from the agricultural festivals of the ancient Israelites, Ben Roden , one of the leaders who followed Houteff, described the Branch Davidians as “the first of the first fruits – wave-sheaf, vanguard NOT wave-loaves – 144,000, army” of the final harvest of salvation (Ben Roden 1959: 4).

Unlike Ellen G. White, Houteff did not base his authority on visions or other kinds of immediate interaction with the divine, but he did claim that his own work was important in his day as Moses’ work was in his. He was convinced that the moral and spiritual decline of the SDA Church had led it to a crisis point and that its members could either choose to follow him and embark again on the path towards salvation or stick with the Church’s teachings as recently articulated and experience damnation. In 1929, Houteff, then in Los Angeles , began to teach his message. When the SDA Church formally rejected Houteff’s teachings in 1934 and excommunicated him, he felt he had no choice other than to form his own organization. By 1935, Houteff had decided to relocate with his followers to Texas and he arranged for the purchase of a large tract of land outside Waco where they established the Mount Carmel Center (based on their understanding of the prophecy in Amos 1:2). Signaling his hope for the restoration of a physical messianic kingdom in the land of Israel , he named his group the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Association to evoke the ancient kingdom ruled by King David.

Houteff first published his theological ideas in a tract entitled The Shepherd’s Rod , and the group of his followers was informally known by that name ( Victor Houteff 1930) . The first volume was quickly followed by a second and throughout the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s Houteff produced multiple religious tracts and collections of his sermons that were distributed by the Davidian publishing operation to a growing list of SDA Church members. In February, 1943 he published The Leviticus of the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists , which details the constitution, by-laws, system of government, and form of education for the Davidian community (Victor Houteff 1943) . Much of the one hundred page document is devoted to citing the authorizing precedents from both the Bible and the writings of Ellen G. White.

Under Houteff’s leadership the Davidians consolidated and developed the community at the Mount Carmel Center and devoted considerable time, effort, and money to spreading their message to all SDA Church members in North America and beyond (including Australia, England, India, and the West Indies). They continued to refine their understanding of biblical prophecy while maintaining their hope that the return of Jesus to conduct the final judgment would happen soon.

When Houteff died in February, 1955, the Davidians lost their leader and faced a dilemma that affects virtually every first-generation religious group. Kenneth Newport suggests that at least some of the 100 or so members of the Mount Carmel community probably left after Houteff’s death, but those who remained faced the task of developing new leadership (Newport 2006: 66). Into that breach entered Houteff’s wife, Florence, along with several other contenders. Soon after Victor’s death, Florence began to make predictions about the future of the community, apparently including the idea that Victor himself would be resurrected. Claiming that on his deathbed Victor had urged her to take over his position, Florence quickly and persistently made her case to the Executive Council of the Davidian Association and eventually garnered their recognition.

During her time as the leader of the Davidians, Florence Houteff continued to put out new issues of the periodical The Symbolic Code, of which nine volumes had been published during her husband’s life (Florence Houteff 1955-1958). To this day there remains controversy about whether Florence ‘s “new Codes” contain the genuine teaching of her husband. But by far the most dramatic and controversial move that Florence made was to set the date of the beginning of the end times. Echoing William Miller’s decision that produced the Great Disappointment, Florence proclaimed that at the end of the Passover season, on April 22, 1959, the events of the end would begin to take place (Newport 2006:101). She urged the Davidians to assemble at the Mount Carmel Center, and some 1,000 did.

The scenario that Florence envisioned replicated much of what her husband had already preached. War would devastate the Middle East and open the possibility for the Davidians to set up their messianic kingdom in the land of Israel; the SDA Church would be purified and the 144,000 eligible for salvation would be gathered.

The failure of Florence Houteff’s prophecy nearly devastated the Mount Carmel community. Those who remained in the community resorted to another familiar strategy for dealing with the disconfirmation of prophecy. A 1960 report argued that the kingdom had failed to materialize because Davidian evangelization efforts had been limited only to the SDA church. It urged that the mission be extended to all Protestant churches (Newport 2006:107). That decision, at least, bought the community more time to spread its message.

There was additional fallout from the disconfirmation as well. A 1961 meeting in Los Angeles effectively split the Davidians into two separate groups. One remained centered at Mount Carmel and the other ended up being based in Salem, South Carolina, where it continues to this day (The General Association of Davidian Seventh-day Adventists 2013; Newport 2006:108).

It then took some time for clear leadership to emerge among the Mount Carmel Branch Davidians. When it did, it was in the person of Benjamin Roden (1902-1978). After joining the SDA church in 1940 Roden and his wife Lois (1905-1986) had first encountered Victor Houteff’s Shepherd’s Rod message sometime in the mid-1940s. It appears that the Rodens had first visited Mount Carmel no later than 1945. They returned several times over the next decade, and when Victor Houteff died in 1955, Ben Roden was confident enough of himself that he made an unsuccessful bid for the leadership of the community.

Roden justified his claim to leadership on the foundation of his own prophetic call. Building on texts like Isaiah 11:1, Zechariah 3:8 and 6:12, and John 15:1-3, he began to conceive of himself as “The Branch,” the individual chosen by God to complete the work that Victor Houteff had begun (Ben Roden 1958) . Roden’s self-designation would also carry over to his followers, who came to be known as the Branches or Branch Davidians. Although Roden did not really acknowledge that he was not the leader of Mount Carmel community, he directed his attention elsewhere in the later 1950s. With his wife and family, he turned to Israel and setting up a community that would form the basis of the eventual Davidic messianic community in the Holy Land Ben Roden 1960). While Florence Houteff and the Mount Carmel Davidians moved inexorably towards the date of April 22, 1959, Ben Roden busied himself with establishing a community in Israel, developing his own distinctive teachings as “The Branch,” and setting up a headquarters in Odessa, Texas. In 1965, after Florence ‘s abdication, he tried to purchase the remaining Mount Carmel property from the trustee who was assigned to liquidate it. After extensive legal wrangling about who really held title to the property, among other things, Roden finally completed the purchase in February of 1973 (Newport 2006:128) .

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Roden continued to develop and refine his theological ideas. The establishment of a literal kingdom of God in Israel remained a central focus, and Roden even had himself crowned “Viceregent of the Most High God” in June, 1970 at Mount Carmel (Newport 2006: 148). Ben Roden’s writings are not easily accessible. He follows the example of Victor Houteff in compiling complex mosaics of quotations from the Bible and other authorities like Ellen G. White. Their meaning is apparently intended to be self-evident because he offers very little guidance about how they are to be interpreted. David Koresh would later adopt the same expository style in his unfinished manuscript on the meaning of the seven seals in the book of Revelation.

Roden also emphasized that true Adventists should observe not only the moral law of the Christian Old Testament but the ceremonial law as well. Consequently, he introduced the observation of festivals like Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles to the Mount Carmel community and framed the understanding of them in eschatological terms. The observation of Passover at Mount Carmel would play an important role in the negotiations between the FBI and members of the community during the fifty-one day siege (Tabor and Gallagher 1995:15).

Like the Adventist leaders before him, Ben Roden did not live to see his fondest hopes fulfilled. The return of  Jesus to conduct the Last Judgment was again delayed. But Roden’s death did not threaten the community with disintegration because his wife Lois was already poised to assume the responsibility of leadership, although the Roden’s son George did dispute her right of succession and would remain a serious irritant to the Mount Carmel community for some time. Like her husband, Lois based her claims on charismatic grounds. She had begun to receive revelations in 1977, and they were the driving force for her innovative theological program, particularly the idea that the Holy Spirit was feminine (Lois Roden 1980). George resorted to more traditional grounds for his claims, asserting that his father had appointed him to a central role in the movement, since Ben Roden believed that his sons would live to see the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem .

Even though his mother was clearly elected to lead the Branch Davidians in 1979, George Roden continued to agitate on his own behalf, directing his vitriol first against his mother and then against her and David Koresh, who, as Vernon Howell, joined the Mount Carmel community in 1981. George eventually succeeded in winning a leadership election in 1984, after which he assertively changed the name of Mount Carmel to “Rodenville” and vigorously argued for his primacy. It took a complex series of events, including multiple hearings in court, George’s conviction on contempt of court charges, and his 1989 arrest for murder and eventual confinement in a mental institution, before Koresh could enjoy uncontested leadership of the Branch Davidians.

In the meantime Lois worked assiduously to develop the ideas stemming from her 1977 vision which revealed that the Holy Spirit was the feminine aspect of God. Beginning in 1980, she published Shekinah magazine (always capitalizing or otherwise emphasizing the first three letters in whatever typography she used), which reprinted materials that supported her theology from a variety of popular sources (Lois Roden 1981-1983; Pitts 2014. Like others before her, Lois understood her work as the last stage in the reformation of the SDA church in preparation for the imminent last judgment.

Through the early 1980s Lois continued spread her message, travelling through the U.S., to Canada, Israel, and the Philippines. At the same time, the future David Koresh both learned from her, largely through her Bible Studies, and began to develop his own distinctive theology, which is outlined in the entry on the Branch Davidians (1981-2006). Koresh eventually succeeded Lois as the central teacher for the Mount Carmel Community, though not without interference from George Roden and a contentious break from his former mentor, Lois.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Since the Davidians originated in a sectarian desire to purify the SDA church and that goal remained prominent from Victor Houteff through the time of the Rodens, it is not surprising that many of the distinctive ideas of the SDA church were carried over into the Davidians and Branch Davidians. No matter what theological innovations were introduced, the Davidians and Branch Davidians retained the hope that that the return of Jesus to conduct the last judgment was imminent. Like the Millerites and SDAs before them, they arrived at that conclusion through a painstaking examination of the scriptures, in which the decipherment of the symbolic language of the book of Revelation figured prominently. Their interpretative efforts are preserved in a wide array of theological tracts, Bible Studies, and other literature , much of which is archived on the internet . Davidian and Branch Davidian exegesis frequently makes elaborate and complex typological arguments, in which, for example, figures or events from the Christian Old Testament are viewed as types of figures and events from the New Testament, are viewed which in turn are seen as as their antitypes. The new name adopted by the former Vernon Howell rested on that sort of biblical interpretation in which he could be seen as the antitypical David and Cyrus.

From the time of Victor Houteff through the leadership period of David Koresh, the establishment of a physical Davidic messianic kingdom in the land of Israel was also a prominent theological theme. Ben Roden worked hardest to bring such a kingdom into being in anticipation of the dawning of the end times, taking many trips to Israel in order to set up a community there to which his followers could then emigrate. The central role of Israel in Branch Davidian thinking would later figure into the 1993 siege of the Mount Carmel Center, as David Koresh and his followers struggled to fit the BATF attack into the end-times scenario that they expected.

The SDA notion that a contemporary prophetic figure could be the bearer of “present truth” also animated the various sectarian offshoots from that tradition. In the early days of the SDA Church, James White, a founder of the SDAs along with his wife Ellen, published a periodical entitled The Present Truth. On the first page of its first issue in 1849, he cited the promise of the author of II Peter 1:12 to the early Christian church, “I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth.” White argued that such present truth could not be limited to the apostolic age but must at least potentially be continually available. He wrote that “Present truth must be oft repeated, even to those who are established in it. This was needful in the apostles (sic) day, and it certainly is no less important for us, who are living just before the close of time.” (James White 1849:1). Similarly, with regard to the observance of the Sabbath on Saturday, Ellen G. White wrote in her second volume of Testimonies for the Church (1885) that “The present truth, which is a test to the people of this generation, was not a test to the people of generations far back. If the light which now shines upon us in regard to the Sabbath of the fourth commandment had been given to the generations in the past, God would have held them accountable for that light.” (Ellen White 1885: 693).

In their own distinctive ways, each of the leaders of the Davidians and the Branch Davidians laid claim to deliver such present truth. Victor Houteff was the most reticent about claiming any kind of prophetic authority, but that did not stop him from depicting the Shepherd’s Rod teachings as being of momentous consequence. In the first volume of The Shepherd’s Rod , he wrote concerning his own teaching that “no new-revealed truth was given to the church during the forty years from 1890 to 1930, and that therefore every claimant to a heaven-sent message during that period was a false one.” (Houteff 1930: 86 ). With Houteff’s own teaching, he implies, “new light” once more shone on the SDA church. Florence Houteff’s contribution of present truth centered on her prediction that April 22, 1959 would initiate the times of the end. Ben Roden had a robust prophetic self-consciousness and introduced a number of theological and ritual innovations based on his own ability to deliver present truth. So also did Lois Roden, especially with her teaching that the Holy Spirit was female. In general, appealing to the Adventist theological conception of “present truth” was the primary way in which a succession of Branch Davidian leaders strove to legitimate their authority. In constructing their prophetic personae, they drew on a well-established theological idea that simultaneously linked them to an authoritative past and justified their efforts at innovation. Their theological innovations were grounded in the idea of present truth.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Given the importance of deciphering the Bible’s message about the end of the world and the last judgment, it is not surprising that a central ritual for the Davidians and Branch Davidians was the Bible Study. As conducted by leaders like Lois Roden, and later David Koresh, Bible Studies were less free-ranging investigations into the meanings of certain passages than they were catechetical exercises designed to reinforce the proper understanding of the text. In both Bible Studies and the various theological writings of Davidian and Branch Davidian leaders, the Bible was viewed as a single, coherent, self-interpreting whole. The interpreter’s exegetical ingenuity focused on arranging a mosaic of biblical passages that would clarify any obscurities in the text under consideration and deepen readers’ understanding of it. Transcriptions and audiotapes of Bible Studies also were a way for leaders to spread their messages to audiences well beyond the Mount Carmel Center .

The SDAs were well aware of the Jewish roots of Christianity, which originally led them to the observance of the Sabbath on Saturday. Among the Davidian and Branch Davidian leaders Ben Roden was particularly interested in extending ritual practice at Mount Carmel to include the major Jewish festivals as well (Ben Roden 1965). The Davidians and Branch Davidians favored a contemporary form of Jewish Christianity that emphasized the ritual continuities between the Judaism of Jesus’ day and the movement that he founded.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Although the Davidians and Branch Davidians had well-developed bureaucratic organizations, they were nonetheless highly dependent on charismatic forms of leadership. The concept of present truth prepared Adventists to look favorably on contemporary claimants to prophetic authority, even as religious authority came to be concentrated in one family and then another. In distinctive ways, each of the leaders from Victor Houteff through David Koresh claimed to provide just such guidance. Ben Roden, for example, not only came to understand himself as the biblical “Branch,” he also understood his work to continue that not only of Victor Houteff but of Ellen G. White herself, not to mention the prophets from the Bible. He wrote that “it is plain to see that Ellen G. White and Victor T. Houteff were indeed prophets of God and were, truly, writing under the influence of the Spirit of Prophecy. See Amos 3:7. Since Mrs. White and V. T. Houteff both are in the grave, as are the Bible prophets, it is necessary to consult the Branch and Joshua, the Living Testimony of Jesus in the church today, for an interpretation in harmony with the Scriptures and their writings.” (Ben Roden 1955-1956:95). Lois Roden legitimated her own authority primarily by reference to her 1977 vision in which she learned the true nature and gender of the Holy Spirit. Against the backdrop of his predecessors, David Koresh’s claims to authority in the Mount Carmel community appear as variations on a theme. Like Ben Roden, he saw himself in the pages of the Bible, specifically in the figure of the Lamb of God mentioned in Revelation 5, as being worthy of opening the scroll sealed with seven seals. Like Lois Roden, Koresh also claimed an extraordinary revelatory experience, something like an ascent into the heavens while he was in Jerusalem in 1985. Also, like Victor Houteff and Ben Roden, Koresh saw himself as playing a distinctive role in the establishment of a Davidic messianic kingdom.

Charismatic claims to authority do not have a social impact unless they are recognized and acted upon. All of the Davidian and Branch Davidian leaders proved capable of attracting at least some followers to the Mount Carmel Center and, through the dissemination of their teachings, to persuade others that they had achieved substantial new insight into the meaning of the scriptures. The introduction of distinctive theological innovations, such as Florence Houteff’s setting a date for the beginning of the end times and Lois Roden’s proclamation that the Holy Spirit was feminine, typically provoked moments of crisis for at least some of their followers. Defections and at least one significant schism among the Davidians can be traced to moments like those. On the other hand, those who managed to assimilate the new theological ideas into their pre-existing repertoires of commitments only strengthened their commitment to the group and its current leader. The process of strengthening commitment can be seen clearly in the interactive Bible Studies. Since the Bible Studies had more of a catechetical than exploratory function, every time someone attended one in person, read one, or heard one on audiotape, it became an opportunity for demonstrating and reinforcing commitment to the message being taught. In addition to being occasions to expound the distinctive theology of the Davidians and Branch Davidians, the Bible Studies became opportunities for successive leaders to enact and reinforce their leadership.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Both Davidians and Branch Davidians continued to face a challenge that they had in common with all other millennialists. Like the followers of William Miller who faced the Great Disappointment, they continually had to reckon with the delay of the advent of Jesus at the final judgment. When Florence Houteff, like Miller and others before her, actually set a particular date for the events of the end, the challenge became all the greater. The continued delay of the end inevitably cost the various groups that occupied the Mount Carmel Center members, but even those whose commitment was not thoroughly shaken by failed predictions or evident delays consistently had to calibrate their understanding of when and how the events of the end would, finally, unfold. Leaders faced the challenge of maintaining a sense of urgency in the expectation that the world would soon be transformed at the same time that they had to develop explanations for its undeniable delay.

Despite their substantial missionary efforts, primarily among members of the SDA church, Davidians and Branch Davidians also had to reckon with the reality that their message was being rebuffed by their target audiences much more often than it was being accepted. From Victor Houteff on, Davidian and Branch Davidian leaders were unsparing in their indictments of the SDA church. They also, however, made members of the church their primary targets for proselytization. The comparatively small numbers of members of the Mount Carmel community and sympathizers over time, however, show that the groups remained as deviant and heretical in the eyes of the SDA church as they were when Houteff was first excommunicated in 1934. The various traditions initiated by Houteff’s challenge to the SDA church remained small sects in relatively high tension with their parent body and were persistently unable to recruit more than a few hundred followers. The ongoing tension that the Davidians and Branch Davidians experienced with the SDA church eventually paled next to the armed conflict that the Mount Carmel community of David Koresh experienced with the forces of the U. S. government.

REFERENCES

Gallagher, Eugene V. 2013. “’Present Truth’ and Diversification among the Branch Davidians” Pp. 115-26 in Revisionism and Diversification in New Religious Movements, edited by Eileen Barker. London: Ashgate.

Houteff, Florence. 1958. The Symbolic Code , Vols. 10-13. Accessed from http://www.davidiansda.org/new_codes_or_false_codes.htm on 2 August 2013.

Houteff, Victor. 1943. The Leviticus of the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. Accessed from http://www.the- B ranch.org/Davidian_Association_Leviticus_Bylaws_Constitution_Houteff on 2 August 2013.

Houteff, Victor. 1930. “The Shepherd’s Rod, Vol. I Tract.” Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Shepherds_Rod_Tract_Israel_Esau_Jacob_Types_Houteff on 2 August 2013.

Newport, Kenneth G. C. 2006. The Branch Davidians of Waco : The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pitts, William L. 2014. “SHEkinah: Lois Roden’s Quest for Gender Equality.” Nova Religio 17::37-60.

Roden, Ben L. 1965. “God’s Holy Feasts.” Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Six_Holy_Feasts_In_The_Old_And_New_Testaments_Ben_Roden on 2 August 2013.

Roden, Ben L. 1960. “Branch Field Letter to the Believers in the Land of Promise.” Accesed from http://www.the-branch.org/Lois_Roden_In_Israel_As_Chairman_Ben_Roden on 2 August 2013.

Roden, Ben L. 1959. “ The Three Harvest Feasts of Exodus 23:14-19; Lev. 23.” Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Passover_Wavesheaf_Antitype_Branch_Davidians_Ben_Roden on 2 August 2013.

Roden, Ben L. 1958. “ The Family Tree—Isaiah 11:1.” Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Isaiah_11_Family_Tree_Judgment_Of_The_Living_Ben_Roden on 2 August 2013.

Roden, Ben L. 1955-1956. “Seven Letters to Florence Houteff. ” Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Jesus%27_New_Name_The_Branch_Day_Of_Atonement_Ben_Roden on 2 August 2013.

Roden, Lois I. 1981-1983. SHEkinah. Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Shekinah_Magazine on 2 August 2013.

Roden Lois I. 1980. “By His Spirit . . . .” Accessed from http://www.the-branch.org/Godhead_Masculine_Feminine_Father_Mother_Son_Lois_Roden on 2 August 2013.

Rowe, David L. 2008. God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Tabor, James D. and Eugene V. Gallagher. 1995. Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America Today. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

The General Association of Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. 2013. Accessed from http://www.davidian.org/ on 2 August 2013.

White, Ellen. 1885. Testimonies for the Church , vol. II. p. 693. Accessed from http://www.gilead.net/egw/books/testimonies/Testimonies_for_the_Church_Volume_Two on 2 August 2013. .

Post Date:
3 August 2013

 

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Brownsville Revival

BROWNSVILLE REVIVAL TIMELINE

1917:  Pensacola First Assembly of God Church was founded by L.E. and Violet Moore in Pensacola, FL.

1939:  Brownsville Assembly of God Church was founded by E.C. Ward and his family as offshoot of Pensacola First Assembly in Brownsville, FL.

1982:  Rev. John Kilpatrick began his pastorate at Brownsville Assembly.

1993:  A two year prayer program for revival led by Kilpatrick began at Brownsville Assembly.

1995 (June 18):  Steve Hill appeared as a guest speaker at Brownsville Assembly, marking the beginning of the Brownsville Revival.

1996:  Kilpatrick established John Kilpatrick Ministries.

1999:  Revival meetings were reduced to a one-night-a-week schedule.

2000:  Hill left the Revival and founded Steve Hill Ministries and the Heartland World Ministries Church in Dallas, TX.

2003:  John Kilpatrick resigned his pastorate at Brownsville Assembly to continue to work on his evangelistic association, John Kilpatrick Ministries.

2006:  John Kilpatrick founded the Church of His Presence in Daphne, AL.

2006:  Rev. Dr. Evon G. Horton began his pastorate at Brownsville Assembly of God Church.

2014: (March 9):  Steve Hill died after a protracted struggle with cancer.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The Brownsville Assembly, established in 1939 by E.C. Ward and his family, began as an offshoot of the Pensacola First Assembly ofGod Church, which was founded by L.E. and Violet Moore in 1917 (Pensacola First Assembly of God n.d.; Wojcik 2000). In its early history the Brownsville Assembly was known as the Full Gospel Tabernacle; the church was blessed by the pastor of the Pensacola First Assembly of God Church when it was chartered (Wojcik 2000).

The Brownsville Revival, also referred to the Pensacola Outpouring, occurred within the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, FL. From 1993 to 1995 Kilpatrick and the congregation had been praying for a revival in their church (Brownsville Assembly of God n.d.; Riss 1996). The church reported other prophecies of the coming revival. The pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel Church (Assemblies of God) in Korea announced that God had said to him in 1993 that “I am going to send revival to the seaside city of Pensacola, and it will spread like a fire until all of America ha been consumed by it” (Liichow 2007). A guest preacher reported that “God told him to draw a tabernacle on a piece of paper. He was to then denote at the four directions the following: in the west, he was to write the words ‘ Asuza Street’; In the east, ‘ Cleveland Tennessee’; in the north, ‘ Toronto’; in the south ‘ Pensacola’. This was to indicate a ‘spiritual cross’ across America through which God would pour out His Spirit” (Dager 1997).

It is generally agreed that the Revival began during the sermon of guest evangelist Steve Hill on Father’s Day, June 18, 1995 (Riss 1996). Hill was originally asked to preach during the Saturday evening service but was later asked by Kilpatrick to speak during the Sunday morning service at which the revival manifestations reportedly began (Riss 1996). The official account of what happened that morning was that “Over 1000 people came forward to pray that morning, and Kilpatrick stood on the platform praying with Hill and another man when he suddenly heard a sound like a “rushing mighty wind” sweep over his right shoulder. As Kilpatrick looked over his shoulder, he said his ankles slipped, his knees bowed out, and a sudden “river of the glory of God” moved between his legs. “It felt like a telephone pole,” he said. “An endless telephone pole was coming through my legs and it was coming in the church.” With some help from another man on the platform, Kilpatrick stepped back and listened to the sound of the “rushing mighty wind” and what he described as the “river of the glory of God” as it swept into the church. He suddenly jumped to the pulpit and screamed, “My God, church, get in! This is it! This is what we’ve been praying for! Get in!” (Costella 1997).

Further, the physical manifestations of the Spirit of the Lord reportedly were experienced by some church attendees at the Sunday service (Riss 1996). The service was originally to end around noon but was extended until late afternoon. One member in attendance that day reported that as Hill began praying for individuals who had come to the alter, “ all kinds of things started happening. … People were falling out and people were just getting ministered to, and the next thing we know it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon” (Reeves 2012). Kilpatrick reportedly was so physically touched by the power of God that he was paralyzed for several hours during the service and unable to function normally for the next two weeks, often having to be driven home by other church members and carried into his home (Riss 1996). Following the Sunday service, the church asked Hill to extend his stay, and Hill cancelled his upcoming appointments, including a trip to Russia.

Word quickly spread about the manifestations at the Revival, and attendance at the Brownsville Assembly increased dramatically as visitors from different denominations, states, and countries flocked to the Revival. Within the first two weeks of the Revival approximately 10,000 people attended services, and by the end of July, 1995 the Revival was drawing around 4,000 visitors nightly (Riss 1996). The Revival thrived for several years, but by 1999 Revival meetings were reduced to a one-night-a-week schedule. The decline coincided with the resignation of Kilpatrick and Hill, beginning in 2000. The Brownsville Assembly of God continued as a local congregation with Rev. Dr. Evon G. Horton assuming the pastorate in 2006. Steve Hill died in 2014 after a protracted struggle with cancer.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The Brownsville Assembly of God Church is Pentecostal, emphasizing four core beliefs: salvation, diving healing, second coming, and baptism in the Holy Spirit (Assemblies of God USA 2011a). Salvation is defined as the acceptance of God in one’s life and the acknowledgment of one’s sins. Baptism in the Holy Spirit, a central tenet of Pentecostalism, is described as occurring after one’s salvation when one is filled with the Spirit of the Lord, resulting in a sense of higher fulfillment and closeness to God (Assemblies of God USA 2011a). Once baptized in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit may manifest itself through the practitioner in the form of spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues and prophesy. The Revival epitomized the core beliefs of Assemblies of God, with a strong focus on the salvation of souls and Baptism in the Holy Spirit.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The typical format of services within the Brownsville Revival began with singing, followed by a sermon; parishioners would then approach the altar to be saved, atone, and receive the Holy Spirit (Riss 1996). Physical manifestations of the Spirit (also referred to as being “slain in the Spirit”) became the proof for worshipers that God’s Spirit had fallen upon them. The Pentecostal belief structure of the Brownsville Assembly already allowed for such divine gifts as speaking in tongues. However, other manifestations particular to the Brownsville Revival included shaking and jerking of the body, crying, uninhibited laughter, paralysis of the body and even brief moments of unconsciousness (Riss 1996). These gifts could be transmitted to believers through touch (“impartation”). Hill received an impartation from the Toronto Blessing at an offshoot group, the Holy Trinity Brompton Church in the United Kingdom. At the Revival impartation occurred through touch by Hill, Kilpatrick, or members of the prayer team. In some instances “…many, while experiencing impartation, enter into the heavenly realm and have visions of angels” (Dager 1997). Participants in the Revival also reported miraculous healing experiences, saved marriages, changes in sexual orientation, and recovery from drug addiction. Richard Riss, a member of the Brownsville Assembly during the Revival, captured the dramatic nature of the physical manifestations of the Spirit: “When he touched me it was like a lightning bolt hit me! People were slain in the Spirit all over that place. Some people were jerking, some were crying, and some were lying still. Not everybody fell, but the place looked like a battlefield” (1996).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

The Brownsville Assembly of God falls under the governance of the General Council of the Assemblies of God (USA), which is one of largest Pentecostal denominations in the United States (Assemblies of God USA 2011b). Prior to the Revival, the Brownsville Assembly of God had a congregation numbering under 2,100 (Riss 1996). Within two months 80,000 people had visited the Revival, with approximately 4,000 attending nightly services (Riss 1996). There were long lines of visitors who waited all day for a place in the evening service. Services during the Brownsville Revival often extended much longer than conventional church services, with most ending after midnight but some carrying over into the morning hours. The church purchased additional land, constructed a 2,200-seat sanctuary, and added a second 2,600-seat sanctuary to accommodate the flood of visitors (Reeves 2012).

It appears that the Revival peaked about three years after its inception and then began to decline. The Revival had lost most of its momentum by 2000, although Brownsville Assembly still received visitors interested in the Revival as late as 2003 (Pensacola First Assembly of God n.d.). Nonetheless, it is estimated that by the year 2000 at least four million people from over 150 nations had visited the Brownsville Assembly to participate in the Revival (Heartland World Ministries Church 2011). After the Revival had subsided, the Brownsville Assembly congregation once again became a local Assemblies of God congregation that numbered fewer than 400 (Grady 2005).

Steve Hill was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1954. According to the hagiographic account, Hill’s career as an evangelist began in 1975 in the wake of his history of drug use (Hill 1995). He reports that he was suffering from convulsions when he began appealing to Jesus. The convulsions immediately ceased and he dedicated his life to missionary work and spreading the word of Jesus Christ (Heartland World Ministries Church 2011). Kilpatrick had assumed his pastorate at the Brownsville Assembly in 1982, and he was the acting pastor of the Brownsville Assembly when the Revival began in 1995 (Brownsville Assembly of God n.d.; Riss 1996). Other key figures in the Brownsville Revival include Lindell Cooley, Brownville Assembly’s worship director during the Revival and Michael Brown, founder of the Brownsville Revival School of Ministry.

The Revival leadership team remained in place only a few years. In 1996, as a direct outgrowth of the Revival, Kilpatrick established John Kilpatrick Ministries with the goal of providing insight, guidance and resources concerning revivals for other ministers (John Kilpatrick Ministries 2011). In 2000, Steve Hill left his position as evangelist for the Revival in order to establish Steve Hill Ministries and the Heartland World Ministries Church in Dallas (Heartland World Ministries Church 2011). After 22 years of pastorship at the Brownsville Assembly, Kilpatrick resigned his position in 2003 in order to devote more time to John Kilpatrick Ministries (John Kilpatrick Ministries 2011; Pensacola First Assembly of God n.d). In 2006, Kilpatrick established the Church of His Presence in Daphne, AL (Church of his Presence 2011).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The Brownsville Revival was one of the longest running revivals in the United States, rivaling the now legendary Azusa Street Revival in Lost Angeles, which spanned a nine-year period from 1906-1915. It was impressive in terms of the size and breadth of its draw, with millions of visitors and well over 100 nations represented. A number of other Assemblies of God churches modeled their own revival services after Brownsville. While enormously popular, the revival has encountered opposition from several sources: longtime members of the Brownsville Assemblies of God Church, conservative Christian groups, and various media sources.

The Brownsville Assemblies of God Church had a more than fifty year history as a local Pensacola church prior to the Revival. The Revival inundated the church with new members and visitors, resulting in opposition from long-term members. It is estimated that as many as 800 Brownsville Assembly members left the church between 1995 and 1997 as a direct result of the Revival practices (Crann 1997b). Leavetakers reported that they felt pressured to participate in the Revival and betrayed by Kilpatrick. They reported being rebuffed when they presented concerns about the lack of scripture-based sermons, and some stated that they had succumbed to peer pressure by feigning being slain in the Spirit. Most of these former members chose to maintain personal anonymity rather than publicly voice their concerns (Crann 1997b).

The evangelical community also responded in a highly critical fashion to the Revival. For example, in “The Counterfeit Revival” evangelical leader Hank Hanegraff (1997) wrote that ” …an examination of the revival reveals its serious distortions of biblical Christianity, concluding the movement is simply the latest outbreak in a long history of Counterfeit Revival. Characterized by an overemphasis on subjective experience in opposition to objective tests for truth, nonbiblical spiritual practices, Scripture twisting, and false and exaggerated claims, the Pensacola Outpouring threatens countless believers and depicts to the world a tainted stripe of Christianity.”

The most systematic critique of the Brownsville Revival came from the local newspaper, the Pensacola News Journal, which conducted a lengthy investigation of the Revival and published an award winning series of articles. While the newspaper had initially run some favorable stories on Revival, the later series was scathing in its assessment. The various articles asserted that Hill’s biographical claims, which established the basis for his leadership, were filled with contradictions (Allman 1997). Further, the newspaper characterized the initial events at the church as “orchestrated,” noting that church leaders had been planning for a revival for two years, leaders of the Brownsville Assembly of God had earlier visited the Toronto Blessing where a similar outbreak was in progress, a videotape of spiritual manifestations at the Toronto Blessing had been shown to the congregation, and evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne (who was associated with the Toronto Blessing) appeared at the church prior to the Revival. Most significantly, a videotape of the first service had been made, and on the day that Hill announced that a mighty wind had swept through the church “ videotape and statements of numerous people who were there indicate that nothing like that happened and the congregation in general was far from overwhelmed” (Crann 1997a). Media Spotlight had a similar assessment (Dager 1997). Finally, there were allegations that both Hill and Kilpatrick had personally profited financially from the revival and that reports of miraculous healings at the Revival were unsubstantiated (Blair 1997) .

The church published a point-by-point rejoinder of the newspaper series (Apologetics Research Team 1997), rebutting each of the allegations. However, at least some of the allegations were confirmed by Hill himself. He acknowledged, for example, that he had “inflated” accounts of some parts of his personal history. He stated that “I don’t mean to call myself a junkie. I call myself a drug addict….Heroin addict has more of an impact on peoples lives when they hear it” (Allman 1997). There were similar inconsistencies in his educational, occupational, and arrest histories, some of which he acknowledged.

The controversy surrounding the Brownsville Revival appears to have had little effect on the outpouring of support within the evangelical community. The public debate largely dissipated as the event began to lose momentum toward the end of the 1990s. Hill and Kilpatrick both moved on to establish separate ministries, although neither has had the impact of the Brownsville Revival. Despite its controversial history, therefore, the Brownsville Revival retains a claim as one of the longest lasting and influential revival movements of the twentieth century.

More significantly for the survival of the Brownsville Assembly of God, the waning of the revival led to significant financial problems for the church. The Brownsville Assembly incurred more that ten million dollars in debt from the revival period when it was purchasing land and adding staff and buildings. With a membership that has been reduced to a few hundred, the church now struggles to cope with an enormous debt by reducing staff, selling property, and fundraising to support the remaining facilities (Reeves 2012).

REFERENCES

Allman, John. 1997. “Hill’s Bio Fraught with Fallacies: Revival Leader Admits He Inflated Stories.” Pensacola News Journal 18 November. Accessed at http://www.rickross.com/reference/brownsville/brownsville12.html on 28 November 2011.

Apologetics Coordination Team. 1997. “Official Brownsville Response To Pensacola News Journal Articles.” Accessed at http://www.deceptioninthechurch.com/breaking.html on 25 November 2011.

Assemblies of God USA. 2011a. “Our Core Beliefs.” Accessed from http://ag.org/top/Beliefs/Our_Core_Doctrines/index.cfm on 31 October 2011.

Assemblies of God USA. 2011b. “History.” Accessed from http://ag.org/top/About/History/index.cfm on 31 October 2011.

Blair, Kimberly. 1997. No Medical Proof of ‘Miraculous Healings: Church Does Not Keep Records.” Pensacola News Journal. 20 November. Accessed at http://web.archive.org/web/20080607174620/http://www.intotruth.org/brn/nov20-04.htm on 28 November 2011.

Brownsville Assembly of God. n.d. “About page.” Accessed from http://brownsvilleag.org/about/history/?view=mobile on 27 October 2011.

Church of His Presence. 2011. “New? Page.” Accessed from http:www.churchofhispresence.org/new.php on 27 October 2011.

Costella, Matt. 1997. “The Brownsville Pensacola Outpouring: River of Revival or Pandemonium?” Foundation Magazine. March/April. Accessed at http://balaams-ass.com/journal/warnings/bvcostel.htm on 1 December 2011.

Crann, Alice. 1997a. “Pastor Orchestrated First Revival.” Pensacola News Journal. 19 November. Accessed at http://web.archive.org/web/20080607174609/http://www.intotruth.org/brn/nov19_01.htm on 1 December 2011.

Crann, Alice. 1997b. “Sadness, fear fill members who left Brownsville: worship turned bizarre, frightening.” The Pensacola News Journal, November 17. Accessed from http://www.rickross.com/reference/brownsville/brownsville26.html on 27 October 2011.

Dager, Albert. 2007. “ Pensacola: Revival or Reveling?” Media Spotlight. Accessed at http://www.mediaspotlight.org/pdfs/PENSACOLA.pdf on 1 December 2011.

Grady, J. Lee. 2005. “What Happened to Brownsville’s Fire?” Charisma Magazine. Accessed from http://www.fireinmybones.com/Columns/051906.html on 27 October 2011.

Hanegraff, Hank. 1997. “The Counterfeit Revival.” Christian Research Journal, November-December. Accessed at http://journal.equip.org/articles/the-counterfeit-revival-part-3- on 28 November 2011.

Heartland World Ministries Church . 2011. “About our staff page.” Accessed from http://heartlandfamily.com/about/our-staff.html on 27 October 2011.

Hill , Steve . 1995. Stone Cold Heart, 3rd edition. Together in the Harvest Publications.

John Kilpatrick Ministries. 2011. “About page.” Accessed from http: www.johnkilpatrick.org/about.php on 27 October 2011.

Liichow, Robert. 2007. “Here We Go Again.” Truth Matters Newsletters. 12:5 (May) . Accessed from http://discernmentministriesinternational.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/here-we-go-again/ on 1 December 2011.

Pensacola First Assembly of God. n.d. “About page.” Accessed from http://pensacolafirstassemblyofgod.com/about-us.html on 27 October 2011.

Reeves, Jay. 2012. “Enterprise: Church of Famed Revival Struggles.” Associated Press, March 30, 2012. Accessed from http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/AP-Enterprise-Church-of-famed-revival-struggles-3446240.php#ixzz1qtJ4oePq on7 April 2012.

Riss, M. Richard. 1996. “A History of the Revival of 1992-1995: Pensacola, Florida.” 21 November, 1996. Accessed from http://www.grmi.org/Richard_Riss/history/pensacola.html on 27 October 2011.

Wójcik, Krzysztof. 2000. “Awakening in Brownsville, Pensacola” Translated by googletranslate. Accessed from http://kzgdynia.pl/artykuly/artykuly_przebudzenieBrownsville.html on October 27, 2011.

AUTHORS:
Amanda Tellefsen, Virginia Commonwealth University
David G. Bromley, Virginia Commonwealth University

Post Date:
10 December 2011

Updates:
7 April2012
19 March 2014

BROWNSVILLE REVIVAL VIDEO CONNECTIONS

 

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Burning Man Festival

BURNING MAN TIMELINE

1977:  The Suicide Club was founded by Gary Warne in San Francisco.

1982:  The Suicide Club disbanded.

1986:  The Cacophony Society was founded in San Francisco by former members of the Suicide Club, including John Law.

1986:  Larry Harvey and Jerry James constructed an eight-foot high humanoid wooden effigy and set it on fire with a handful of friends at Baker Beach in San Francisco.

1988:  John Law and other members of the Cacophony Society became involved in what is now an annual event called Burning Man.

1990:  In June, an estimated 800 people converged on Baker Beach for Burning Man, but the event was halted by law enforcement. In September, fewer than 100 people took the Burning Man to the Black Rock desert in Nevada for a Labor Day weekend campout.

1993:  Distinctive artistic and performative elements emerged, including the first “theme camps” and “art cars.”

1996:  John Law departed the organizing team following the aftermath of the first accidental death and other serious injuries.

1997:  Larry Harvey and a handful of close friends formed the Black Rock City LLC to manage and organize the event.

2000:  David Best created a structure called the Temple of the Mind , which led to the development of Burning Man’s annual “Temple” tradition.

2005:  Burners Without Borders formed as a volunteer response to Hurricane Katrina.

2007:  A prankster ignited “the Man” several days early.

2010:  Larry Harvey announced the decision to dissolve the LLC and transition the ownership of the event to a 501(c)3 non-profit structure.

2011:  Burning Man tickets sold out for the first time, leading to scalping of event tickets.

2012:  A ticket lottery held in January sold out quickly, sparking a crisis in the community. However, by the time the event was held several months later, population numbers had stabilized, with a peak attendance of roughly 56,000 participants.

2013:  A new ticket distribution system was developed, in which the initial sale focuses on distributing tickets 10,000 to participants with previous history of contributions to the event. Later that year, the BLM extended the maximum population limit for the event to 68,000. A reported peak population of 69,613 participants attended.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

In 1977, a man named Gary Warne and a handful of friends formed a group called the Suicide Club as part of San Francisco State University’s experimental “Communiversity.” Drawing loose inspiration from a cultural legacy including Dadaism, Situationism, “happenings,” the Merry Pranksters, and the Yippees, among other predecessors, the group’ activities included ironically modifying commercial billboards, scaling both the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, infiltrating events sponsored by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and exploring subterranean sewers and passages. Members of the Suicide Club “agreed to get all worldly affairs in order, to enter into the world of Chaos, cacophony & dark saturnalia, to live each day as if it were the last.” (“San Francisco Suicide Club” n.d.; see also Evans, Galbraith and Law 2013) The Suicide Club disbanded by 1982, and Warne died from a heart attack in 1983. In 1986, former Suicide Club members, including a man named John Law, formed the Cacophony Society in a similar spirit. This new group declared itself to be: “a randomly gathered network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness. You may already be a member!” (Evans, Galbraith and Law 2013; see also “You May Already Be a Member” n.d.).

Also in 1986 (and initially unrelated to either the Cacophony Society or the Suicide Club), a man named Larry Harvey and his friend Jerry James cobbled together an eight-foot high wooden effigy and burned it on Baker Beach in San Francisco on Summer Solstice eve. Harvey was born in rural community outside of Portland, Oregon in 1948, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. Intelligent, self-educated, and talkative, Harvey has described himself as a lifelong misfit(Brown 2005). In his young adulthood, he held a succession of odd jobs and was working as a landscape designer in the mid-1980s when he and a fellow tradesman, James, decided to construct and burn the figure that eventually evolved into the “BurningMan” (although neither of them used this term at the time, nor foresaw the elaborate desert festival that their unpremeditated event would become). Harvey later acknowledged that he had been inspired, in part, by art happenings held by an artist named Mary Graubarger at Baker Beach in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which he had previously attended with a now ex-girlfriend (Doherty 2004: 26-28). However, Harvey has repeatedly stated that neither he nor James had any preconceived meaning in mind when they first erected and burned “the Man.” Approximately twenty people attended this first “burn,” although as Harvey would tell the story in later years, their numbers swelled as the structure caught fire and curious onlookers rushed over. Someone brought a guitar, another a drum, and someone began to dance with the burning effigy. Harvey would later describe this spontaneously gathered group as a “temporary community.”

Harvey and James decided to repeat the event the following year, and in 1988 they joined forces with the Cacophony Society, which began to help publicize and organize the event. The effigy had grown to thirty-feet high, was now officially dubbed the Burning Man; it drew somewhere around 150-200 people. By June, 1990, the Man was now 40-feet tall, the gathered crowd had swelled to an estimated 800 participants, and the local Park Police determined that they could no longer burn the figure at that location. At this point, John Law and others suggested the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada as an alternative location, and he, Harvey, and other core organizers determined to take the Man there to be burned a few months later over the Labor Day weekend.

Located approximately 340 miles from San Francisco, and 120 miles north of Reno, the dominant feature of the Black Rock Desert is a 400-square mile prehistoric lakebed called the playa ( a vast, starkly flat, utterly empty, and intensely arid plane of cracked hardpan alkali clay). The weather there can be extreme as temperatures in late summer typically range from below forty overnight to well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit at midday. Fierce dust storms and white-outs can rage with winds sometimes exceeding seventy-five miles per hour (Goin and Starrs 2005).

Somewhere between eighty and one hundred intrepid adventurers made the first trek to the playa in September of 1990. A prominent Cacophony Society member named Michael Mikel scratched a line across the surface of the playa and invited the gathered attendees to step across the threshold, thus symbolically initiating these first participants into the “Zone.” (The Cacophony Society had held a few other events they called “Zone Trips,” in which they took road trips into strange and exotic territories. See Beale 2007). The event proceeded to grow exponentially over the following years. Jerry James withdrew from the event for personal reasons in 1991. In 1992, Mikel took on the moniker “Danger Ranger” and organized a group he called the “Black Rock Rangers” in order to assist participants who became lost or stuck in the vast, empty playa. The Rangers continue as a vital peacekeeping and safety resource that interfaces with the various federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies that now patrol the event.

By 1993, there were approximately 1,000 attendees, and some of the event’s distinctive artistic and performative elements began to emerge. For example, Cacophonist Peter Doty staged “Christmas Camp” by putting a plastic Christmas tree in front of his tent,dressing up as Santa Claus, and handing out gifts to other participants while singing Christmas Carols, thus instigating what would become the “theme camp” tradition. Other participants began to bring other artistic and ritualistic elements to the event over time, including a contingent of creatively modified automobiles called “art cars.” The encampment eventually came to be called “Black Rock City” and grew more and more elaborate, with a roughly circular layout, designated roadways, a central café, and other civic features.

By 1996, the event had swelled to an estimated 8,000 participants, which began to strain the relatively loose infrastructure the event had developed up to that point. The first accidental death took place a few days before the event had “officially” begun, when participant Michael Fury died while riding his motorcycle (apparently drunk and without headlights) en route back to his encampment on the playa from the nearby town of Gerlach. A few days later, during the main event, two other participants were critically wounded, and one never fully recovered, after their tent was run over by another exceedingly intoxicated participant. In the aftermath of these crises, John Law wanted to stop holding future Burning Man events altogether and departed from the organizing team. He has not returned to the event since, although he remains a prominent figure in the Bay Area arts and alternative culture communities (Law 2013; see also Evans, Galbraith and Law 2013). Harvey and other friends, however, wanted to continue doing Burning Man and so began to develop a more tightly organized infrastructure. The event perimeter and gate became much more carefully controlled, and driving within the event site would henceforth be banned with the exception of art cars. Even these would be limited to five miles per hour and would also eventually be carefully regulated and permitted. Harvey also formed the Black Rock City LLC as business structure for the event with a few trusted friends.

From 1997-2007, the event grew from 10,000 to nearly 50,000 participants, and also developed many of artistic, ritualistic, and other cultural elements that have come to characterize the event. (More on these features will be discussed below under Doctrines/Beliefs and Rituals.) The late 1990s in particular were an exciting but challenging time for Burning Man, as organizers learned to manage tremendous growth and create a fiscally stable organization, while also coming to agreeable terms with local and federal governmental agencies, as well as local landowners and residents in the nearby community of Gerlach, Nevada. By the 2000s, the process of building the annual infrastructure for Black Rock City began to achieve some stability, allowing organizers to turn some of their energies outward. For example, a noteworthy moment in the event’s history occurred in 2005, when Burning Man organizers helped to support and build a volunteer response to the Hurricane Katrina Crisis on the Gulf Coast. This group, which came to be called Burners Without Borders, helped to rebuild a Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in Biloxi, Mississippi, demolished scores of damaged homes at no cost to owners, and also rebuilt a private home in Pearlington, Mississippi. This spin-off organization continues to help organize grassroots disaster response efforts and other initiatives, including in New Jersey following Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (see “Burners Without Borders” n.d.).

Other noteworthy occurrences (including the Man’s premature burn in 2007, the formation of The Burning Man Project 501c(3) in 2011, and a ticket crisis in 2011 and 2012) will be discussed below under Organization/Leadership and Issues and Challenges.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The topic of Burning Man’s doctrines and beliefs is complex. Neither participants nor organizers characterize Burning Man as a “religion,” nor do they profess any shared narratives concerning an unseen or ultimate realm. At the same time, event organizers state a desire to “produce positive spiritual change in the world,” through the experience of Burning Man (“Mission Statement” n.d.). Organizers have also developed a core ideology, encapsulated by “Ten Principles” which organizers and participants alike strive to live out through the event and its surrounding sub-cultures. These principles are: “radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy” (Gilmore 2010:38; see also “Ten Principles” n.d.). Participants (often collectively called “Burners”) bring a wide range of distinct concepts and belief structures concerning the meaning of the event and spirituality in general. My 2004 survey of Burning Man participants found that roughly half described their personal outlooks as “spiritual” or “spiritual but not religious,” while over a quarter described their outlooks as atheist, agnostic, or simply ambivalent (Gilmore 2010:48-49). These general tendencies are also supported by the Burning Man organization’s own annual surveys (“AfterBurn Reports” n.d.). Despite the significant differences between these various points of view, it is likely that most of these individuals would register as “nones” in surveys such as the Pew Forum’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (“Pew Forum” 2008). Relatively few Burning Man participants affiliate with a specific religious tradition. In my survey, those who did name recognizable traditions claimed a wide range of affiliations, including both progressive and conservative forms of Christianity, secular and reconstructionist Judaisms, various strands of Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as varieties of contemporary Paganism.

Although Burning Man is often called a “pagan” event, it has never been organizationally nor theologically connected with contemporary Paganism (a.k.a. Neo-Paganism), Wicca, or other modern “earth-based” religions. My 2004 survey turned up fewer self-professed Pagans than I had anticipated (Gilmore 2010:49-52). However, I argue that Burning Man be understood as a “lower-case” pagan event, in that its ritualizing and artwork draws on a range of symbolic resources, often including indigenous and other polytheistic imagery. Furthermore, given the shared experience and physical intensity of camping on the Black Rock playa, combined with the event’s ritual rhythms, Burning Man affects many participants on a visceral, embodied level that is often associated with “pagan” religions. In these regards, Burning Man resonates with what Michael York has called the “root religious” aspect of Pagan religions (York 2005). Burning Man also displays elements of what Bron Taylor calls “dark green religion” (Taylor 2009). Participants tend to share a general interest in and support for ecological sustainability, which is facilitated in part by the raw physical challenge and harsh experience of nature necessitated by the desert location. Although in some ways the festival itself is not the most ecologically friendly event (as participants consume a large number of resources for a short and somewhat wasteful week of “potlatch”) organizers and participants make a concerted effort to “leave no trace” by effectively and scrupulously cleaning up the event site following each annual event, and also began purchasing carbon offsets in 2006.

In general, Burners display a wide disparity of views as to the nature and meaning of the event itself. In my survey, over half stated quite clearly that they viewed or experienced the event as in some way “spiritual” or “spiritual, but not religious.” What they meant by that varied a great deal, and their views were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Many described a desire for both individual and collective connections with a nebulous “something more,” and many (nearly 40 percent) also acknowledged the clear yet complicated parallels between Burning Man and “religion.” But they often saw these connections as problematic, stemming in part from their own general discomfort with “religion.” Another large share (roughly 15%) disavowed either “religion” or “spirituality” as legitimate frameworks for of the event, and insisted that any such resemblances between Burning Man and religion were either illusory, offensive, or both. In the end, many (over 40%) were most comfortable simply acknowledging that the event could “be whatever you want it to be,” and this outlook is indicative of the event’s malleability, as well as the extent to which it reflects deeply embedded patterns of Protestant American individualism (Gilmore 2010:57-62).

The internal diversity of opinion about Burning Man is, I argue, among the driving engines of the event. As participants both debate and perform the event’s values, ideals, and rituals, its nature, meanings, and contexts continue to evolve. (More on this will be discussed below under Issues/Challenges.) Rather than constituting a discrete NRM, Burning Man is instead a venue for acting out, and otherwise ritualizing, a variety of spiritual impulses often described as alternative, esoteric, new age, or “spiritual, but not religious.” In this regard, Burning Man troubles the boundaries around what can be readily designated or defined as “religion,” according to normative Western standards.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Beginning with the semi-spontaneous inaugural events on Baker Beach in 1986, the burning of a humanoid figure has served as the event’s central, definitive rite. By 1989, the sculpture had assumed what became its characteristic appearance (with occasional minor variations) for the next two decades (a wooden lattice-work figure, reminiscent of a garden trellis or electrical tower, topped with a diamond-shaped shoji screen), although the rite of the Burn has changed in several ways over time. In the early years, nearly all attendees participated in raising the Man to a standing position using a winch and pulley. However, since 2001 the Man has stood atop an elaborate platform (which reflects a particular annual theme) and is put in place by a crane days before most participants arrive. There is no particular liturgy or prescribed manner with which to participate in the Burn, but almost all of the several thousand in attendance at the event converge around the Man for this climactic event. The Burn is preceded by an extensive fire dance performance (intended to lend some gravitas and drama), but most of the several thousand participants are too far back in the crowd to observe these activities.

Other ritualistic events were held at the event from its earliest days. For example, in 1991 a group of women baked fertility goddess-shaped loaves of bread in an earthen oven (Harvey 1991). The “theme camp” tradition that began with Peter Doty’s 1993 Christmas Camp, contains performative and ritualistic elements that pull from a global range of cultural, artistic, and symbolic elements that inspire a range of often idiosyncratic themes (For examples, see “Theme Camps & Villages” n.d.). In 1994, artist Pepe Ozan began to sculpt ten to twenty foot-high hollow towers made of wire mesh and playa-mud that he called “lingams,” which would be stoked with wood and set on fire. Beginning in 1996, these sculptures evolved into the stages for elaborate “operas.” Scripted and rehearsed, these performances each drew on religious and spiritual themes including Dante’s Inferno, Ishtar’s Marriage and Descent, Vedic Hinduism, Vodou, and the Atlantis mythos (“Burning Man Opera” n.d.). These operas ceased to be prominent aspects of Burning Man after 2000, but the community of artists and performers that had produced them would continue to engage in a variety of collaborative endeavors, including an opera about Burning Man (called How to Survive the Apocalypse ) that was staged in San Francisco in 2009, Los Angeles in 2011, and Las Vegas in 2012 (“How to Survive the Apocalypse” n.d.).

Since 2001, a second central ritual known as The Temples has emerged. These are ornate temporary structures in which participants are invited to leave inscriptions and small objects for their beloved dead, as well as other occasional messages concerning burdens from which participants wish to free themselves. The Temples are then burned on Sunday night, the night following the burning of the Man. The Temple tradition was founded by an artist named David Best, who transformed a structure he built for the event in 2000 (constructed out of leftover dinosaur puzzle pieces and called the “ Temple of the Mind”) into a temporary memorial for a recently deceased friend. He then decided to repeat the event the following year, with a much larger structure called the “ Temple of Tears.” Organized by various artists, including Best, every year since, the Temples have become an integral and much beloved feature of the event. In a stark contrast to the atmosphere on the night that the Man burns, the Temple burns tend to be observed with silence and solemnity. (Pike 2001, 2005, 2010, and 2011)

Aside from these large-scale examples, numerous smaller rituals and ritual-like activities take place at Burning Man. In any given year, a perusal through the list of activities and events submitted by participants includes: Yoga classes, Kabbalah classes, Reiki attunement, Vipassana, Zen and other mediation sessions, contemporary Pagan and ceremonial magick rites, Balinese kechack, and sundown Shabbat services (among numerous more clearly “secular” types of events). I have met conservative evangelical Christians distributing bottles of water as a “gesture of prophetic witness” from a theme camp intended designed to represent the biblical Ein Gedi oasis. I once sought out the leader of the “Black Rock City JCC” theme camp, who would not let me tape-record our Saturday morning interview in observance of Sabbath requirements. And Burning Man has also hosted numerous performances by New York performance artist and social justice activist Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping (also sometimes known as the Church of Life After Shopping, and the Church of Earth-a-lujuah) (Talen and D. 2010; see “Church of Stop Shopping” n.d.).

Finally, to a limited extent, Burning Man is shaped by a series of annual themes, such as The Wheel of Time (1999), Beyond Belief (2002), The Green Man (2007), Rites of Passage (2011), and Cargo Cult (2013) to name just a few. These provide a degree of thematic coherence for the artworks, performances, and rituals developed for the event by participants. Finally, there is also a sense in which the entire event can be viewed as a ritual of pilgrimage, with attendant preparations and austerities, travel to a remote and marginal site, threshold crossing, communal activities, culminating rites, and transformative reintegrations back into normative, day-to-day society (Gilmore 2010).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

In the early 1990s, Burning Man was owned via a legal partnership between Larry Harvey, John Law, Michael Mikel that was informally called “the Temple of the Three Guys,” and the event itself was organized primarily by those three, with varying degrees of assistance from and collaboration with a variety of other friends and volunteers. Starting in 1996, Larry Harvey formed a Limited Liability Corporation through which to own and manage the event with a group of trusted friends. The first iteration was called the Burning Man LLC, though this entity would be supplanted by the Black Rock City LLC in 1997. The membership of the LLC shifted a bit in the early years, but eventually settled into a core of six individuals who also held key management positions in organizing the event. Larry Harvey serves as Executive Director and chief visionary of the event. As previously stated, Michael Mikel founded the Black Rock Rangers, and now serves as an enigmatic “Ambassador” and “Director of Genetic Programming.” Crimson Rose became Managing Art Director, and her long-time partner, Will Roger serves as Director of Nevada Relations & Special Projects, although his active management role has waxed and waned over the years. Harley Dubois fills a key role as Director of Community Services and Playa Safety Council. Finally, Marian Goodell (a relative newcomer who was not involved until after the 1996 event) quickly became indispensable as the Director of Business and Communications.

In 2010, Harvey announced that Burning Man would begin transitioning from an LLC to a 501c(3) non-profit called The Burning Man Project (Curley 2010). In 2011, a seventeen-member board of directors for this new organization was formed, which included the six long-time members of the LLC along with a dozen other individuals from San Francisco and the West Coast’s arts and business communities.

As outlined briefly in the timeline above, the peak population of Black Rock City has increased from under 100 participants in 1990 to nearly 70,000 in 2013. (“Black Rock City 2013 Population” 2013) It is difficult to measure the size of the global community of Burners (that is, individuals who have at some point since the early 1990s attended the event at least once), although the number is likely in the hundreds of thousands. As of early 2014, the organization’s primary e-mail newsletter, called the Jackrabbit Speaks, has over 170,000 subscribers and Burning Man’s Facebook page has over 530,000 “likes.”

Geographically, the Burning Man community is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, although there are significant presences in numerous other U.S. cities, especially Reno, Austin, Los Angeles, and Portland, among others. In addition to these being the urban centers closest to the event location, these cities are also home to large artistic and “alternative” sub-cultures. Organizers have sought to foster a “Regional Network” of Burning Man participants in these and other cities, several of which organize and host Burning Man-esque events in their own area. These “regional events” are as far flung as Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and South Africa (“Regional Network” n.d). It is not unheard of for some participants to attend only their own regional events, but never the main event in Nevada, and still consider themselves to fully be a Burner.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The primary issues and challenges faced by Burning Man stem from the event’s rapid growth, related issues concerning financing and commercialization, as well as broader community disputes about the meaning and nature of the event. Burning Man organizers have long espoused decommodification as one of their Ten Principles, saying: “our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience” (“Ten Principles” n.d.). Accusations of Burning Man’s having “sold out” have been an issue since at least the mid-1990s, when the first annual theme (The Inferno in 1996) proposed an imagined and satirical take-over of Burning Man by a satanic multinational conglomeration called “HelCo.” In response to accusations of commodification, Harvey gave a speech at the event in 1998 in which he postulated a distinction between “commerce” and “commodification” (Harvey 1998). The organization would eventually state on their website: “We have drawn a dividing line around our desert event in order to separate direct, immediate experience from the commercial world of manufactured desire. It’s not that we are against commerce, but we are against commerce without community, consumption without purpose and profit without value.” (“Marketplace” n.d.; also see Gilmore 2010). Based on this ideal, they attempt to control the commercial use of the Burning Man name, image, and logo, in order to keep others from cashing in on the Burning Man brand (for a relatively recent example, see Pippi 2012).

Another example of how this distinction is practiced is in the fact that Burning Man has never accepted corporate sponsorship, instead relying almost exclusively on ticket sales to cover the event’s considerable production costs. These costs include the annual construction and clean up of Black Rock City’s infrastructure, a hefty per person/per day fee charged by the BLM, insurance, payroll, emergency health and other public safety services during the event, grants for select sponsored art projects, as well as numerous other miscellaneous and administrative costs. As of 2012, Burning Man reported over twenty-two million dollars in annual expenditures (“AfterBurn Report 2012” 2012). However, participants have continuously complained about the
event’s high ticket prices, which have risen from $35 in 1995 to $380 in 2014. In an attempt to address the cost and make the event more accessible to people with lower incomes, from 1999-2012 organizers offered tickets on a sliding scale depending on time of year purchased. They also continue to make a limited number of low-income tickets available every year, available by application, and tickets are often compensated for reliable volunteers.

In 2011 and 2012, Burning Man faced a crisis over cost and accessibility when tickets to the event sold out for the first time in its history. This resulted in ticket scalpers listing them for sale at hundreds or even thousands more than the already pricey face value ($210-$360 in 2011 and $240-$420 in 2012). A ticket lottery held in January, 2012 backfired when numerous longtime participants found themselves without tickets, and a significant number of tickets once again fell into the hands of scalpers. In response, organizers decided to selectively distribute their remaining tickets to known artistic and theme camp groups. This represented a key policy change for an organization that touted “radical inclusivity” as one of its core principles (Grace 2012). Then, in June 2012, organizers received permission from the BLM to raise their attendance cap to 60,900, and by mid-August there appeared to be a glut of available tickets. In the end, the total peak population for 2012 was reported by the Associated Press to be 52,385, which was actually slightly down from 2011’s reported total peak population of 53,735 (Griffith 2012). In 2013, Burning Man announced a new, simplified scheme in which all tickets would be priced at $380 and the first 10,000 tickets would be available only by applying via a known theme camp or art project group, with the rest being made available in stages (Chase 2013). Although some tickets still wound up with scalpers in early 2013, by the time the event took place in late August supply and demand levels appeared to be relatively stable. Organizers announced a similar scheme for 2014, with the new addition of a $40 vehicle pass, intended to reduce the number of vehicles at the event (“Burning Man 2014 Ticket Information” 2014).

Despite these efforts to stabilize the ticket sale process, and despite the fact that the organization has for many years made some tickets available to select low income applicants at a discounted price, some participants have long complained that costs are exorbitantly high. The situation reflects long-simmering external, and internal, social class pressures within the event and its surrounding communities. On one hand, Burning Man’s cultural roots are squarely in artistic, bohemian, and working class communities. Yet since the mid-2000s, the event has increasingly attracted a wealthy, glamorous, international partying set, who can easily afford the high-ticket costs, and who travel in extravagance and luxury. There is also a growing phenomenon of so-called “plug-and-play” camps that plan, cook, and otherwise organize camps for those willing and able to pay a high premium, sometimes in the $1000s. And the event has long drawn numerous wealthy participants from the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley tech sector (Turner 2009). Rank and file participants, in the meantime, are vociferous in their dislike of these trends, as reflected in online dialogues and forums about Burning Man (for example, see “Burners.Me” 2012).

Burning Man has faced various other challenges and criticism concerning artistic and cultural authenticity over the years. For example, in 2004 and 2005 a group of artists who were long time contributors to Burning Man (led by Jim Mason) formed an alliance they called “Borg2” that challenged the Burning Man organizers to increase funding for art at the event, and to democratize the way art grants were selected. Although no significant changes in Burning Man’s art grant process or policy resulted from the ensuing controversy, Borg2 demonstrated the extent to which participants are often critical of the increasingly bureaucratic entity that the Burning Man organization has become.

Another incident that spoke to these tensions occurred in 2007, when a man named Paul Addis climbed the support structure for the Man and set it on fire several days ahead of schedule. The community response to and dialogue around this event was extensive. Many participants felt that it had been a criminally disruptive, dangerous, and selfish act, while others felt that it made a much needed and humorous statement in attempting to revive some of the chaos and unpredictability that had characterized Burning Man in the Cacophony Society era. Suffering from bipolar disorder but beloved by a large community of fellow artists and pranksters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Addis was eventually fined $25,000 in restitution and sentenced to 12-48 months in prison for arson. In pursuing charges against Addis, Burning Man organizers emphasized that Addis’s actions had potentially endangered other participants who had been sleeping in the tent-like structure that supported the Man that year. Addis was released in 2009 and attempted to pick up his life as a former attorney turned playwright and monologist, but, tragically, he took his own life in late 2012 (Jones 2012).

Each of these incidents indicates the extent to which participants hold conflicting views about Burning Man. For some, it is spiritual event and an opportunity to recreate themselves through ritual and community; for others, it is simply an extravagant and expensive party. Yet, for many the spiritual and hedonistic aspects of Burning Man are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Participants have found various ways to critique the organizers whenever they appear to fail to live up to Burning Man’s ideals and stated Principles, whether concerning costs, commercialization, or artistic authenticity. In doing so, they contribute to the larger dialogue surrounding the event, and thereby shape it by refining and expanding its possibilities.

Given changes in infrastructure, and the eventual retirement of key players, it remains to be seen how the event will change in the future and what further challenges might be faced. Many core participants from the 1990s have stopped attending Burning Man, in part because of the event’s growth and changes, but also because they have simply outgrown the festival or otherwise moved on in their lives. The next generation is bringing its own unique aesthetic and concerns to Burning Man, and, as of this writing, there appears to be no shortage of new participants ready to give considerable time and energy to bring this event to life every year.

IMAGES 
Image #1: Cacophony Society. Source: http://www.lastgasp.com/d/38983/.
Image #2: Larry Harvey, photo by Tony Deifell. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_Harvey_wdydwyd.jpg.
Image #3: Black Rock Desert, photo by Patrice Mackey.
Image #4: Art Car 2007, (artist unknown), photo by Patrice Mackey, Source: http://www.chefjuke.com/burnman/2007/slides/BMAN07-020.html Image #5: Black Rock City, photo by Kyle Harmon Harmon. Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burning_Man_aerial.jpg.
Image #6: “DIY Prophet,” 2003 (artist unknown), photo by Lee Gilmore.  Source: http://www.sjsu.edu/people/lee.gilmore/burningman/Gilmore_DIYProphet2003.jpg.
Image #7: Raising the Man, 1994, photo by Patrice Mackey. Source: http://chefjuke.com/LEE2014/slides/1994-BMAN06-004.html.
Image #8: Fire Lingam, 1995, by Pepe Ozan, photo by Patrice Mackey. Source: http://chefjuke.com/LEE2014/slides/1995-BMANB-004.htm.
Image #9: Temple of Tears, 2002, by David Best, photo by Patrice Mackey. http://chefjuke.com/LEE2014/slides/1995-BMANB-005.html.
Image #10: “Ronald McBuddha,” 2002, (artist unknown), photo by Lee Gilmore. http://www.sjsu.edu/people/lee.gilmore/burningman/Gilmore_Mcbuddha2002.jpg.

REFERENCES

“Afterburn Reports.” n.d. Accessed from http://afterburn.burningman.com on 30 January 2014.

“AfterBurn Report 2012: Financial Chart.” 2012. Accessed from http://afterburn.burningman.com/12/financial_chart.html on 30 January 2014.

Beale, Scott. 2007. “Bad Day at Black Rock (Cacophony Society Zone Trip #4).” Laughing Squid Blog , January 18, 2007. Accessed from: http://laughingsquid.com/bad-day-at-black-rock-cacophony-society-zone-trip-4/ on 30 January 2014.

Bey, Hakim. 1991. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism . Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

“Black Rock City 2013 Population.” 2013. Burning Man Blog, 13 September 2013. Accessed from http://blog.burningman.com/2013/09/news/black-rock-city-2013-population/ on 30 January 2014.

Bowditch, Rachel. 2010. On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man. London: Seagull Books.

Bowditch, Rachel. 2007. “Temple of Tears: Revitalizing and Inventing Ritual in the Burning Man Community in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.” The Journal of Religion and Theatre 6:140-54.

Brown, Damon. 2005. Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock (Film).

Burners.Me. 2012. “Look Dahhling, A Sparkle Pony! Burning Man in Town and Country.” Burners.Me Burning Man Commentary Blog , May 3, 2012. Accessed from http://burners.me/2012/05/03/look-daaahling-a-sparkle-pony-burning-man-in-town-and-country/ on 30 January 2014.

“Burners Without Borders.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.burnerswithoutborders.org on 30 January 2014.

“Burning Man 2014 Ticket Information.” 2014. Accessed from http://tickets.burningman.com on 30 January 2014.

“Burning Man Opera.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.burningmanopera.org/ on 30 January 2014.

“Burning Man Timeline.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/bm_timeline.html on 30 January 2014.

Chase, Will. 2013. “Burning Man 2013 Ticket Sales.” Burning Man Blog, January 4. Accessed from http://blog.burningman.com/2013/01/news/burning-man-2013-ticket-sales/ on 30 January 2014.

Chen, Katherine. 2009. Engaging Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

“Church of Stop Shopping.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.revbilly.com on 30 January 2014.

Curley, John. 2010. “The State of the Man.” Burning Man Blog , September 1, 2010. Accessed from http://blog.burningman.com/2010/09/eventshappenings/the-state-of-the-man/ on 30 January 2014.

Doherty, Brian. 2004. This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Evans, Kevin, Carrie Galbraith and John Law, eds. 2013. Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society. San Francisco: Last Gasp Publishing.

Gilmore, Lee. 2010. Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gilmore, Lee and Mark Van Proyen, eds. 2005. AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Goin, Peter and Paul F. Starrs. 2005. Black Rock. Reno: University of Nevada Press.

Grace, Andie. 2012. “Ticket Update: Radical Inclusion, Meet the Other Nine.” Burning Man Blog , February 9, 2012. Accessed from http://blog.burningman.com/2012/02/news/ticket-update-radical-inclusion-meet-the-other-nine/ on 30 January 2014.

Griffith, Martin. 2012. “Burning Man 2012 Attendance Stays Well Within Cap.” Associated Press , September 2. Accessed from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/02/burning-man-2012-attendan_n_1851087.html on 30 January 2014.

Harvey, Larry. 1991. Burning Man 1991 (Film).

Harvey, Larry. 1998. “Larry Harvey’s 1998 Speech.” Burning Man Website, September 8. Accessed from http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1998/98_speech_1.html on 30 January 2014.

“How to Survive the Apocalypse.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.burningopera.com/home/ on 30 January 2014.

Jones, Steven T. 2011. The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture. San Francisco: Consortium of Collective Consciousness.

Jones, Steven T. 2012. “Paul Addis, Playwright and Burning Man Arsonist, Dies.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 29. Accessed from http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision/2012/10/29/paul-addis-playwright-and-burning-man-arsonist-dies on 30 January 2014.

Kreuter, Holly, ed. 2002. Drama in the Desert: The Sights and Sounds of Burning Man. San Francisco: Raised Barn Press.

Law, John. “Who is John Law.” John Law Website. Accessed from http://johnwlaw.com/about/ on 30 January 2014.

“Marketplace.” n.d. Accessed from http://marketplace.burningman.com/ on 21 September 2013.

“Mission Statement.” n.d. Burning Man. Accessed from http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/mission.html on 30 January 2014.

Pippi, Evil. 2012. “How Not to Burn: Commodifying Burning Man.” Burning Man Blog, May 16, 2012. Accessed from http://blog.burningman.com/2012/05/tenprinciples/how-not-to-burn-commodifying-burning-man/ on 30 January 2014.

“Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.” 2008. The U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Accessed from http://religions.pewforum.org on 30 January 2014.

Pike, Sarah. 2001. “Desert Goddesses and Apocalyptic Art: Making Sacred Space at the Burning Man Festival.” Pp. 155-76 in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, edited by E. M. Mazur and K. McCarthy. New York: Routledge.

Pike, Sarah. 2005. “No Novenas for the Dead: Ritual Action and Communal Memory at the Temple of Tears.” Pp. 195-213 in Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man, edited by L. Gilmore and M. Van Proyen. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Pike, Sarah. 2010. “Performing Grief in Formal and Informal Rituals at the Burning Man Festival,” Pp. 525-40 in Body, Performance, Agency and Experience, edited by Axel Michaels, Volume II in Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual , edited by J. Weinhold and G. Samuel. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz.

Pike, Sarah. 2011. “Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City: A Report from Burning Man 2011.” Religion Dispatches, September 11. Accessed from http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/5082/burning_down_the_temple__religion_and_irony_in_black_rock_city/ on 30 January 2014.

“Regional Network.” n.d. Accessed from http://regionals.burningman.com on 30 January 2014.

St. John, Graham. 2009. Technomad: Global Post-Rave Counterculture. London: Equinox Publishing.

“San Francisco Suicide Club.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.suicideclub.com on 30 January 2014.

Talen, Bill and Savitri D. 2010. The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Taylor, Bron. 2009. Dark Green Religion; Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press.

“Ten Principles.” n.d. Accessed from http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html on 30 January 2014.

“Theme Camps and Villages.” n.d. Accessed from: http://www.burningman.com/themecamps/themecamps.html on 30 January 2014.

Turner, Fred. 2009. “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production.” New Media Society 11:73-94.

York, Michael. 2005. Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion . New York: New York University Press.

“You may already be a member!” n.d. Accessed from http://www.cacophony.org/sample-page/ 30 January 2014.

Post Date:
6 February 2014

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Calvary Chapel

CALVARY CHAPEL TIMELINE

1927 (June 25) Charles (“Chuck”) Ward Smith was born in Ventura, California.

1946 Smith graduated from L.I.F.E. Bible College in Los Angeles, California.

1947-1964 Smith served in a ministerial role in the Foursquare Gospel Church.

1965 Calvary Chapel began as a small Bible study for shut-ins at a trailer park in Costa Mesa, California with Smith as pastor.

1968 Lonnie and Connie Frisbee were invited by Smith to join the staff at Calvary Chapel, and Lonnie began evangelizing individuals in the counterculture.

1968 Calvary Chapel opened House of Miracles, a halfway house for those transitioning from the counterculture to Christianity.

1971 Frisbee and Smith parted ways due to theological differences, particularly over the practice of prophecy and glossolalia.

1971 Smith founded Marantha! Music, a Christian music record label.

1977 John Wimber, a Calvary Chapel pastor, began the Vineyard Movement within Calvary Chapel, emphasizing the expression of spiritual gifts in Calvary Chapel congregations.

1978 Wimber invited Frisbee to Vineyard Movement Calvary Chapel.

1982 Wimber’s Yineyard Movement separated from the Calvary Chapel, adopting the name Association of Vineyard Churches.

1993 Frisbee passed away due to complications with AIDS.

1996 Smith founded Calvary Chapel Music record label.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Chuck Smith was born in Ventura, California in 1927 to Charles and Maude Smith. Smith’s father had been raised Presbyterian, andhis mother attended a Baptist church; however, both parents went on to become born-again Christians. Their faith was strengthened when they witnessed what they believed was a miracle when Smith’s younger sister, who had contracted spinal meningitis, was brought back from the brink of death by a local Pentecostal minister. As a youth, Smith was very athletic and had no interest in the ministry; in fact, he had decided to become a doctor. However, he dramatically changed direction and decided to enroll in Bible school while he was attending a Christian youth camp during the summer. He recalls that “I knew God had called me to Himself and I could not decline” (Smith, Jr. 2009:25). He then did attend L.I.F.E. ( Lighthouse of International Foursquare Evangelism) Bible College in Los Angeles, California, a ministerial training center for the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Although Smith completed his education at L.I.F.E. Bible College, he reports that he always felt out of place in the Foursquare Gospel denomination (Smith, Jr. 2009:41).

After being ordained in the Foursquare Gospel denomination, Smith served in a ministerial capacity for 17 years. He served as pastor in a number of churches, with varying degrees of success and fulfillment. From the outset, Smith was something of a non-conformist. He recalls one incident where his supervisor informed him that he was guilty of the “sin of rebellion and witchcraft” (Smith, Jr. 2009:131). By his own account (Smith 1981), toward the end of his ministry in the Foursquare Gospel, he had become very discouraged: “I was defeated. I had passed the prime of my youth losing a lot of my energy and giving up on most of my ideas.” He also found the denominational structure increasingly confining (Miller 1997:32). Smith (2005:17-18) points to one experience in a church that he started that served as the impetus to leave the denomination. “We decided to change the format from the traditional song service, announcements, prayer, and sermon to a more informal kind of a gathering. We were holding services in the local American Legion Hall. So having arrived early, my wife and I arranged the chairs in a circle rather than in a row. Rather than using the hymnal, we worshipped the Lord in singing choruses. Then we went into a time of prayer. And many people who had been bound were able to open up and pray. It was a very special experience for them.” The church board immediately informed Smith that he should discontinue this innovation. He recalls that “I realized at that moment that this was not going to be my permanent place of ministry” (2005:19).

Smith then left the church to found the Corona Christian Center, which began as a small Bible study group held in Smith’s home, in 1965 (Miller 1997:32). The Center continued to grow and went on to become the Corona Christian Association and provided Smith with his first opportunity to pastor outside of a denominational context. That same year Smith was invited to serve as pastor for asmall Bible study for shut-ins at a local trailer park in Costa Mesa, California, which was the origination of Calvary Chapel. The small group was struggling at this juncture and reported a visitation by the Holy Spirit: ” He said that He would lay a burden upon the heart of Chuck Smith to come and pastor…. God would bless the church and it would go on the radio. The church would become overcrowded…. And the church would become known throughout the world” (Miller 1997:36; Smith 1981). Smith himself reported that the Holy Spirit had spoken to him two years earlier and that he had received a similar message of successes to come. Smith therefore resigned his position in the Corona Christian Association. He accepted the invitation to pastor the Calvary Chapel congregation, which then grew from 25 members to 2,000 within two years (McGraw 1997). By the third year the church had to move to a larger building in Newport Beach. The church continued to grow and ultimately purchased a ten acre tract in Costa Mesa, its current location. In 1974, the church opened a new 2,300 person sanctuary and soon was forced to hold three services on Sunday even with the expanded seating capacity.

Located as he was at a major center of the counterculture, Smith began encountering “hippies” and “Jesus People.” His first impressions were extremely negative: “Actually, at the time of the hippie movement, these long-haired bearded, dirty kids goingaround the streets repulsed me. The stood for everything I stood against. We were miles apart in our thinking, philosophies, everything” (Smith 1981). However, it was shortly thereafter, in 1968, that he met one of the Jesus People who was to transform Calvary Chapel, Lonnie Frisbee. Apparently, Smith’s wife, Kay, had a vision that Smith would reach out to the hippies. Smith remembers that “I turned and saw the tears streaming down her face… and I could see she was praying” (Coker 2005). Smith then asked a friend of his daughter, John Higgins, to find a hippie and bring him to their home. The hippie who Higgins picked up on the street and brought to the Smith home was the then eighteen years-old Lonnie Frisby. Smith (1981) recalls: “I said, ‘Hi Lonnie’. I put out my hand and welcomed him into the house. As he began to share, I wasn’t prepared for the love that came forth from this kid. His love for Jesus Christ was infectious. The anointing of the Spirit was upon his life, so we invited Lonnie to stay with us for a few days.” By May, 1968, Smith, Higgins, and Frisbee had established the House of Miracles, a communal “crash pad” for hippies who had “accepted the Lord” (Miller 1997:33). Smith put Frisbee and his wife, Connie, in charge of the project. The House of Miracles initially housed 35 new Christian converts who needed assistance during their transition out of the drug culture by providing a stable environment and subsidizing their rent (DiSabatino 1995:59). The original House of Miracles subsequently grew into a network of nearly 20 “community houses” supported by Calvary Chapel ( Norridge 1992). Later, the Shiloh Youth Revival Centers emerged out of this network, and, until its collapse in 1978, grew to 175 communal houses and 100,000 participants drawn from the counterculture.

Smith’s decision to reach out to the hippies and incorporate them into his ministry produced a surge of growth in the CalvaryChapel, due largely to Lonnie Frisbee’s charismatic evangelism. Frisbee was born in Costa Mesa in 1950, and his parents divorced early in his life. After his mother remarried and he did not get along with his stepfather, Frisby left home at fifteen. He began participating in the drug subculture and the Laguna Beach gay community. Frisbee then moved to San Francisco where he converted to Christianity, joining The Living Room, the first street Christian community in 1967. For three years after meeting Chuck Smith, Frisbee became a major force in the growth of the Calvary Chapel and in retrospect has been referred to as the “John the Baptist of southern California” ( Di Sabatino 1995:8) . He was ordained in 1971. Smith estimated that during the time period that Frisbee was on the Calvary Chapel staff the church baptized 8,000 people and converted 20,000. However, Frisbee and Smith divided over speaking in tongues as Frisbee was committed to the importance of conversions and to glossolalia as an indicator of the presence of the Holy Spirit, while Smith believed that love was the most important expression of the Holy Spirit. Lonnie and Connie Frisbee divorced in 1973 after Connie had an adulterous relationship with their pastor.

In 1978, Frisbee left Calvary Chapel and joined with John Wimber, who also was committed to Pentecostalism and at the time was pastoring a small Calvary Chapel church in Yorba Linda. Frisbee had the same kind of impact in Wimber’s church that he had previously had with the Calvary Chapel. For example, ” At the Mother’s Day 1980 church service, Frisbee ordered everyone 21 and under to come to the front of the stage. Witnesses claim that as soon as the kids got next to Frisbee, they fell to the floor, whipped into frenzy in the presence of the spirit of the Lord. Some churchgoers marched out in disgust over the spectacle” (Coker 2005). Wimber subsequently left Calvary Chapel where his Pentecostalism was unwelcome and co-founded with like-minded pastors of the Calvary Chapel in Los Angeles what became the Association of Vineyard Churches. However, Wimber soon discovered Frisbee’s homosexual activities and ended their partnership; Frisbee subsequently died of AIDS in 1993.

Smith’s decision to invite hippies into the congregation was not warmly received in all quarters. There was both internal and external opposition. Smith recalls one incident in which the church had installed expensive new carpeting, and some members took offense at hippies dirtying the carpet with their bare feet. He reports having said to other church leaders that “…it is we older established Christians who are on trial before the young people.” And he concluded: “If because of our plush carpeting we have to close the door to one young person who has bare feet, then I’m personally in favor of ripping out all the carpeting and having concrete floors….let’s not ever, ever, close the door to anyone because of dress or the way he looks” (Smith 2005:32). Other Evangelical churches were also not initially enamored with Smith’s initiative. As Richardson notes (1993:213), “participants in the Calvary movement were often viewed by most as losers, trouble-makers, or simply anti-social because of their involvement in street and drug subcultures.” Smith recalls that a number of local churches took the position “If God has truly cleaned them up on the inside then they would show it on the outside” (Smith, Jr. 2009:181).

After the Calvary Chapel and Association of Vineyard Churches parted ways, both thrived. The Vineyard churches grew to over 600 affiliates in the U.S. and 1,500 worldwide, with about 150,000 members in the U.S. The Calvary Chapel network of affiliate churches numbers over 1,000, and the Costa Mesa church serves about 35,000 visitors each week.

DOCTINES/BELIEFS

Calvary Chapel adheres to evangelical Christian doctrine in most important respects. The Bible is understood to be the inspired and inerrant word of God. Calvary Chapel accepts Trinitarian theology, teaching that God exists in three persons – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. With respect to Jesus Christ, the Calvary Chapel teaches that Jesus is the Messiah and was born of a virgin, crucified, bodily resurrected following the crucifixion, and then ascended to heaven, which is understood to be a literal place. Jesus Christ is believed be both fully human and God and to have died in atonement for the sins of all humanity. It is believed that Christ will personally return in the second coming, and return will be premillennial (his physical return will occur prior to the beginning of the millennium). Believers will be raptured before the period of tribulation. Those who accept Christ and are saved are promised eternal lives in heaven, but humans are free to accept or reject God’s grace. Those who do not accept Christ will be eternally consigned to hell. Individuals may be “born again,” by repenting from sin and accepting Jesus Christ; this ensures that their sins are forgiven and they will spend eternity in heaven. The Calvary Chapel rejects certain aspects of Calvinism, such as Irresistible Grace, asserting that everyone has the free will to accept or reject God’s grace. In addition, the Chapel rejects the Calvinistic doctrine of Limited Atonement (the belief that Christ died for the Elect alone), asserting that he died for the sins of all humanity.

Calvary Chapel doctrines are distinctive in certain respects as Chuck Smith has sought middle ground between Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism. As Calvary Chapel explains this impulse: “Over the years,…fundamentalism, while it clung to the integrity of God’s Word, tended to become rigid, legalistic, and unaccepting of spiritual gifts. Similarly, Pentecostalism became enthusiastic and emotional at the expense of the teaching of God’s Word” ( Taylor n.d.). While Calvary Chapel teaches that the Bible is inerrant as do Fundamentalists, the church does not believe in biblical literalism. While Calvary Chapel accepts speaking in tongues as a spiritual gift as do Pentecostals, he does not favor such expression in congregational services. Calvary Chapel services, like Pentecostal services, are high energy, but as is the case in Fundamentalism there is great emphasis on teaching the Bible. Smith has consistently sought doctrinal flexibility as a way of promoting Christian unity and avoiding what Smith regards as division over minor theological issues. Smith also asserts that love of Christ should be the basis for Christian fellowship and should override denomination and minor doctrinal differences. As already noted, dating back to the early years of Calvary Chapel, Smith strongly rejected excluding individuals from Christian fellowship based on their appearance or style of worship.

There was also an element of apocalypticism in early Calvary Chapel doctrine. In End Times (1980), Smith stated his expectation that the generation born starting in 1948 would be the world’s last generation, and he expected that the world would end no later than 1981. In fact, Calvary Chapel held a New Year’s Eve service in 1981 in expectation of the world ending. The failure of that prophecy led to disillusionment and some defections but did not significantly impact Calvary Chapel’s size and growth (Arellano 2011).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The purpose of worship services at Calvary Chapel is to express love, praise, and thankfulness to God. One of the distinguishing features of Calvary Chapel worship services from the time it was founded was their informality. While some members wear formal attire to church services, the church invites those attending to “come as you are” since it is inner transformation and not external conformity that the church seeks to achieve. Pastors also frequently lead services in informal attire to diminish status differences. There is a general structure to the services, although individual churches vary considerably, that includes segments on greeting, praise and worship, message, and payer. Worship services are flexible and open so that they may be guided by the Holy Spirit and encourage the opening of worshipers’ hearts. Therefore, worshipers are not instructed on when to sit, stand, read, or recite. In addition a significant portion of the service involves music, often contemporary but sometimes traditional (Miller 1997:80), because Calvary Chapel teaches that worship should be inspirational. The informality of attire and worship services and the prominence of locally produced music all trace to the early years of the church when it was deeply influenced by countercultural converts.

Another distinctive feature of Calvary Chapel worship services is a commitment to expositional presentation of the Bible. Smith discovered expository teaching by accident when he was running out of material for his sermons. He found W.H. Griffith’s The Apostle John (1984), a book outlining the verse-by-verse study of the epistle of John 1. When this method of teaching produced excitement and engagement in the congregation, he expanded the concept to other books of the Bible (Smith, Jr. 2009:80). As Smith put it, “The transformation contained three parts: I went from preaching to teaching; the sermon went from topical to expository; and the content of the message went from my own development of a Bible text to the Bible itself (Smith, Jr. 2009:88). Henceforth, at worship services the congregation moved through the Bible from beginning to end, reading each verse and book in order. From a Calvary Chapel perspective, the objective is teaching rather than preaching. Longtime congregation members therefore may have studied the entire Bible in this way many times. As Smith ( “Bob Coy, Chuck Smith, Gayle Erwin” 1996) once described his objective: “simply teaching the World of God simply.” This approach also led to Calvary Chapel’s emphasis on teaching rather than evangelizing: growth of faith and knowledge will lead people to a natural sharing of their faith.

Calvary Chapel practices both baptism and communion. In the early days, when countercultural conversions were a primary focus for Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee, baptisms were often performed in the Pacific Ocean and worship services were held on the beach. Those ritual sites largely gave way to baptism in indoor vessels and church worship services, although baptism in natural bodies of water is still acceptable. Baptism is not believed to be essential for spiritual salvation but rather is regarded as emblematic of an inner transformation that has occurred. Individual congregations celebrate Communion, at which members receive bread and wine, with varying degrees of frequency.

Calvary Chapel’s position on the “gift of tongues” reflects the church’s search for a middle position between Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism. Smith’s ambivalence about glossolalia and being slain in the Spirit has been longstanding. He states that while a student at L.I.F.E. Bible College he “doubted that the Spirit of God would inspire behavior that would make people look silly or out of control. That kind of behavior contradicted my idea of the way Jesus, Paul, or any of the disciples would have behaved.” He goes on to note that “I was the only one in my graduating class who was not “slain in the Spirit” when I received my ordination” (Smith, Jr. 2009:42). He is particularly reluctant to immediately attribute such experiences to the Holy Spirit: Pentecostal and charismatic Christians describe being slain in the spirit as “an experience in which God’s Spirit comes to rest on people with such force that they cannot remain on their feet, but collapse in a kind or euphoric swoon. Although fainting is a normal, human experience, I have always had serious reservations about attributing these particular fainting spells to God (Smith Jr. 2009:54). Smith therefore encourages the exercise of the gifts “decently and in good order,” which translates into personal rather than public devotions or expression in “after glow” services ( Taylor n.d.).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Chuck Smith founded and has led Calvary Chapel church network since its inception in 1965. While individual churches are independent and can choose their own leadership structures, most follow what is termed the ” Moses Model” of leadership, which Smith established in Costa Mesa. According this model, God is the ultimate leader, and each pastor plays the role of Moses, serving directly under godly authority and responsible to God. Pastors guide the church as the Holy Spirit instructs ( Taylor n.d.) The pastor may appoint assistant pastors, but there is no formal organizational hierarchy (Miller 1997:80) . Pastors therefore have almost complete authority over their churches. Women and homosexuals cannot be ordained as pastors.

In establishing Calvary Chapel, Smith eschewed the familiar denominational form of organization in order to avoid what he regarded as restrictive rules, divisive practices, and conflict over insignificant doctrinal differences. Calvary Chapel therefore describes itself as a fellowship of churches. The only symbolic connections among churches are that they typically display the image of a dove within the church and they may incorporate Calvary Chapel into the church’s name, although this is not required. The fellowship of churches has no central religious or financial regulatory organization. Individual churches are authorized to participate in the Calvary Chapel network through approval by the Calvary Chapel Outreach Fellowship. In order to be approved, pastors of candidate churches must accept the distinctive features of the Calvary Chapel movement. Pastors of churches are not required to possess a seminary degree. When Chuck Smith was asked what seminary prospective pastors should attend, his response was that they should go to the same seminary the Disciples attended sitting at the feet of Jesus ( “Bob Coy, Chuck Smith, Gayle Erwin” 1996). Throughout Calvary Chapel history, therefore, Smith has ordained those who told him that they had received a call to the ministry and who were dedicated to Smith’s ministerial philosophy. Indeed, many in the initial cohort of Calvary Chapel pastors were men who had come out of the counterculture and had no formal ministerial training (Smith and Brooke 2005). Smith’s ability to train and ordain ministers personally facilitated the church planting that led to the rapid development of the Calvary Chapel Fellowship network. Typically, new churches have started as Bible study groups and gradually evolved into more formal congregations. Churches do not have formal membership; those attending services simply integrate into church services and activities.

In addition to its network of churches, Calvary Chapel established the Calvary Chapel Bible College, the School of Leadership, the Harvest Crusades, Maranatha Music, and a radio network. Calvary Chapel Bible College was established in Murrieta, California in 1975 and has grown to numerous affiliated campuses where students can earn degrees in theology or Bible studies. The Bible College is not accredited but has working relationships with other accredited institutions that facilitate transfer credits for students attending the college. Chuck Smith is president of the Bible College, and instructors are Calvary Chapel ministers. The School of Leadership is independent of the Bible College but provided internship positions for those with ministerial aspirations ( Denna 2001:8). The Harvest Crusades, which began in the 1990s though the Calvary Chapel’s Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, offers a combination of a Christian rock concert and forum for offering Christian testimony. These crusades have produced audiences totaling several million since their inception.One important feature of the Jesus People Movement component of the 1960’s counterculture was hymn and worship music in folk-rock style that was produced by movement members. Calvary Chapel began drawing on this talent pool, and in 1971 establishedMaranatha! (Our Lord) Music as a church outreach program. Maranatha! Music produced its first album that year, The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert. A number of music groups came to be affiliated with Maranatha! and Calvary Chapel.

In the mid-1990s Chuck Smith partnered with his son and another Calvary Chapel pastor, Mike Kestler, to establish a ratio network, Calvary Satellite Network, that was funded substantially from Smith’s Costa Mesa church (Goffard 2007). The network expanded rapidly and ultimately consisted of 400 stations, making Calvary Chapel teachings available across the country. That partnership ended in 2003 amid irresolvable disputes among the parties. Calvary Chapel has also established The World for Today radio ministry that is broadcast around the globe (Austin 2005).

In 2012, he established a 21-member leadership council to oversee the Calvary Church Association, a fellowship of some 1,600 like-minded congregations in the United States and abroad.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Calvary Chapel has been involved in a number of controversies through its history. At the outset, the church drew criticism both internally and within the broader evangelical community for inviting Jesus People and countercultural hippies into the congregation. The church’s casual dress and informal worship style along with its flexible doctrines that sought to bridge denominational differences also were met with disapproval. By seeking a niche between Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, Calvary Chapel drew opposition from both. The church survived the decline of the counterculture much more successfully than many other movements of the 1960s. Individuals who transitioned out of the counterculture became core church members and, in some cases, pastors as they became older and adopted more conventional lives. With its commitment to inclusiveness, the church also identified new groups to which to appeal. Rees (2009:63) observed that: “As the hippies of the counter culture grew up and became more established, Calvary went with them. Eventually, it abandoned the ocean baptisms and beach services, although some of the youth groups are reviving the practice today. By the mid-eighties, Smith was preaching to a new generation of young Californians with a new set of social values: rebellion was replaced with consumerism, and Cavalry adapted. Electric guitars replaced acoustic ones, the charismatic elements of worship were toned down, and the church took on a more mainstream, albeit still very casual, feel. When Costa Mesa became more ethnically diverse in the 80s and 90s, Smith and his staff began broadening their target to the non-English speaking population growing around them. Spanish, as well Filipino and Korean language services were added and quickly filled up.” The informal worship style, doctrinal flexibility, and innovative music that developed within Calvary Chapel were adopted by many other denominations, making the Calvary Chapel much more mainstream in the process.

The centralized form of leadership (the Moses Model) in Calvary Chapels also created continuing problems. There were several cases in which pastors in Calvary Chapel affiliated churches were charged with marital infidelity, sexual indiscretions, or financial irregularities; and, given the leadership structure, there was little accountability. (Billiter 1992; Haldane 1992). In some of these cases Chuck Smith provided positions in the Cost Mesa church after the ministers had been dismissed from their former churches (Moll 2007). Smith’s response to queries about the treatment of pastors accused or found guilty of sexual indiscretions has been that there is an attempt to restore them if the repent: “If they repent, we do seek to restore in a spirit of meekness, considering ourselves lest we be tempted,” Smith says. “We feel that we have a biblical basis [for doing so]” (Moll 2007). Smith says he practices restoration and that pastors who have been restored to ministry after sexual sin have gone on to run successful ministries: “I can tell you of many ministers, great ministers, whom we’ve been in the process of helping restore, and fortunately the problems never became public and so people are not even aware of them. I feel that that’s an honor to God” (Moll 2007).

Calvary Chapel is a thriving network of churches, still led by Chuck Smith. However, the future of the Calvary Chapel fellowship of churches remains to be determined. Smith and his son had a falling out when Chuck Smith Jr. questioned his father’s philosophy and theological beliefs. Protest erupted within the church: “Online protests and fliers distributed at the younger Smith’s church demanded that he drop the “Calvary” name because of his increasingly liberal drift on such non-debatable issues as the evil of homosexuality and the promise of hell for unbelievers (Goffard 2006). The rift led to Smith dismissing his son from the ministry in 2006, eliminating the possibility of a father-son succession. Smith’s death in October, 2013 after a protracted battle with lung cancer brought the leadership transition to the fore (Fletcher 2012; Goffard 2013). Given Smith’s personal centrality to the formation and ongoing governance of Calvary Chapel, the future of the network without Smith’s leadership will pose for it a significant organizational challenge.

REFERENCES

Arellano, Gustavo. 2011. “Remembering When Chuck Smith Predicted the End Times–And They Didn’t Happen.” OC Weekly, 7May 2011. Accessed from
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2011/05/remembering_when_chuck_smith_p.php on 15 August 2012.

Austin, Ian. 2005. Pastor Chuck Smith and the Calvary Chapel Movement: Reasons for the Continued Growth and Success of Calvary Chapel . Asheville, NC: University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Billiter, Bill. 1992. ” Santa Ana’s Rev. Hocking Quits Pulpit After Affair: Scandal: Renowned Minister Acknowledges ‘Sexual Sin’ with Married Woman in Congregation of His Calvary Church.” Los Angeles Times, 09 October 1992. Accessed from http://articles.latimes.com/1992-10-09/local/me-790_1_calvary-church on 28 August 2012.

“Bob Coy, Chuck Smith, Gayle Erwin – Calvary Chapel.” 1996. Calvary Chapel Midwest Pastor’s Conference . Accessed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=5wSW1FEIbKg on 22 August 2012.

Coker, Matt. 2005. ” The First Jesus Freak.” OC Weekly, 3 March 2005. Accessed from http://www.ocweekly.com/2005-03-03/features/the-first-jesus-freak/ on 15 August 2012.

Denna, David. 2001. History of the Calvary Chapel Movement. Louisville, KY: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Di Sabatino, David. 1999. The Jesus People Movement: An Annotated Bibliography and General Resource. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Fletcher, Jaimee Lynn. 2012. ” Calvary Chapel Founder Battling Lung Cancer.” Orange County Register, 5 January 2012. Accessed from http://www.ocregister.com/news/smith-334349-chapel-calvary.html on 15 August 2012.

Goffard, Christopher. 2013. “Pastor Chuck Smith Dies at 86; Founder of Calvary Chapel Movement.” Los Angeles Times, October 3. Accessed from http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-1004-chuck-smith-20131004,0,7276715.story on 4 October 2013.

Goffard, Christopher. 2007. “The Calvary Radio Empire, Built by Partners in Christian Evangelism, is Sundered by Accusations over Sex, Money and Control.” Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2007. Accessed from http://articles.latimes.com/2007/feb/28/local/me-calvary28 on 28 August 2012.

Goffard, Christopher. 2006. “Father, Son and Holy Rift.” Los Angeles Times, 2 September 2006. Accessed from http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/02/local/me-smiths2 on 15 August 2012.

Griffith , W.H. 1984. The Apostle John His Life and Writings. Thomas, MI: Kregel Publications.

Haldane, David. 1992. “Excommunication Shocks, Confuses Disgraced Pastor.” Los Angeles Times, 23 December 1992. Accessed from http://articles.latimes.com/1992-12-23/local/me-2228_1_senior-pastor on 28 August 2012.

McGraw, Carol. 1997. “Let the Flower Children Come to Me: Pastor Chuck Smith Served as Godfather to the Jesus Freaks.” Orange County Register, 1 July 1997.

Miller, Donald. 1997. Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Moll, Rob. 2007. “Day of Reckoning: Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel Face an Uncertain Future. Christianity Today, March 2007. Accessed from http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/march/7.53.html on 28 August 2012.

Rees, Myev Alexandra. 2009. A New Purpose: Rick Warren, the Megachurch Movement and Early Twenty-First Century American Evangelicalism. Oxford, Ohio: Miami University.

Richardson, James. 1993. “Mergers, ‘Marriages’, Coalitions, and Denominationalization: The Growth of Calvary Chapel.” Syzygy: A Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture 2:205-23.

Smith, Jr., Chuck. 2009. Chuck Smith: A Memoir of Grace. Costa Mesa, CA: The Word for Today Publishers.

Smith, Chuck. 2004. Calvary Chapel Distinctives: The Foundational Principles of the Calvary Chapel Movement. Costa Mesa, CA: The Word for Today Publishers.

Smith, Chuck. 1992. Charisma vs. Charismania. Costa Mesa, CA: The Word for Today
Publishers.

Smith, Chuck. 1981. “The History of Calvary Chapel.” Last Times, Fall, 1981. Accessed from http://web.archive.org/web/20080716203806/http://www.calvarychapel.com/assets/pdf/LastTimes-Fall1981.pdf on 8 August 2012.

Smith, Chuck. 1980. End Times: A Report of Future Survival. Costa Mesa: The Word For Today Publishers.

Smith, Chuck and Tal Brooke. 2005. Harvest. Costa Mesa, CA: The Word for Today Publishers.

Taylor, Larry. n.d, “Calvary Chapel History and Beliefs.” Accessed from http://calvarychapel.com/library/taylor-larry/text/wcct.htm#01 on 18 August 2012.

Post Date:
1 September 2012

Update:
4 October 2013

CALVARY CHAPEL VIDEO CONNECTIONS

 

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Catholic Worker Movement

CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT TIMELINE

1877:  Peter Maurin was born in Oultet, France.

1897:  Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York.

1926:  Dorothy Day’s daughter, Tamar Teresa, was born.

1927:  Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism.

1932:  Dorothy Day met Peter Maurin in New York City.

1933 (May 1):  Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin began publishing The Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City.

1933:  Day and Maurin started the first “house of hospitality” in New York City, which later became known St. Joseph House (later joined by Maryhouse).

1939-1945:  The Catholic Worker ‘s circulation dropped due to the pacifist stance of Day and the other editors during World War II.

1949:  Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays were published.

1949:  Peter Maurin died at the Catholic Worker farm near Newburgh, New York.

1952:  Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published.

1980:  Dorothy Day died at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City.

1983:  A proposal for Day’s canonization was put forth by the Claretian Missionaries.

2000:  Pope John Paul II granted Day “Servant of God” status, the first step toward canonization.

2012:  The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops formally endorsed Day’s cause for sainthood.

2014:  Over 225 Catholic Worker communities existed around the world.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The Catholic Worker was co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. While Day is the better known of the two, Maurin was the elder. He was born with the name Aristide Pierre Maurin in Oultet, France in 1877, the son of French peasant farmers and one of 24 children. Born into a Catholic family, as a young man he considered religious life, joining the Christian Brothers. A creative yet quiet person inspired by French personalist philosophy, especially the work of Emmanuel Mounier, Maurin sought to live a simple and dignified life of manual labor. In 1909, he migrated to Canada and later to the U.S., working in a variety of jobs as a manual laborer, which eventually brought him to New York City.

Twenty years after Maurin’s birth in France, Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a journalist, and the family moved to San Francisco and Chicago as he followed the work. Raised nominally Episcopalian, Day later reported having a strong attraction to faith and God as a child despite her parents’ lack of regular religious engagement. As an adult, Day became a journalist herself, writing for socialist and anarchist newspapers in New York City. A strong supporter of workers’ rights and feminist causes, Day rubbed shoulders with radical thinkers, politicians, philosophers, and artists in the bohemian culture of NewYork City in the 1920s, counting playwright Eugene O’Neill as a close friend. During her twenties, she became pregnant and had an abortion. Later, she fell in love with a biologist named Forster Batterham, who became her common-law husband. She spent four happy years with him, during which time she became pregnant. Out of joy and gratitude for her child, she began attending mass at a Catholic church near their home in Staten Island, New York. When she voiced her desire to convert to Catholicism and to have their baby baptized, Forster, an atheist who wanted little to do with religion, urged her not to go through with it. The two ended up separating, an experience that Day later described as one of the most painful decisions of her life: choosing the Church over her love for Forster.

Following her conversion to Catholicism, Day sought a way to bring together her belief in God and her long-standing commitment to social justice. She found a marriage of these two in Catholic social teaching and in the person of Peter Maurin, who she met in New York City in 1932. Together, Maurin and Day decided, in part because of her background in journalism, to start a newspaper focused on issues of workers’ rights from a Catholic perspective. The birth of The Catholic Worker newspaper happened in the midst of the Great Depression in the United States. In addition to publishing pieces relevant to the struggles of workers, Day and Maurin also sought a way to aid poor and unemployed people in material ways, performing what is known in Catholic tradition as the “Works of Mercy:” feeding the sick, giving drink to the thirsty, housing the homeless, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, clothing the naked, and burying the dead. Their response: the house of hospitality.

Day and Maurin began inviting people in to stay at their apartments in the Lower East Side of New York City, sharing their food and offering a bed (or even a floor) to people in need. Both believed that one of the problems with bureaucratic social service agencies was their impersonalism. In contrast, Maurin was strongly influenced by French personalist philosophers, who saw the key to a “society in which it was easier to be good” as directly tied to people reaching out to each other through personal relationships and helping their brother or sister at a
personal sacrifice. Over time, their efforts grew into a group of volunteers who lived in a Lower East Side building (eventually called “St. Joseph House”) with people seeking shelter from the streets, running a daily soup line that often stretched down the block and publishing pieces in The Catholic Worker newspaper critiquing the social, spiritual, and personal crises underlying problems, such as poverty and racism. Over time, the newspaper (and the Catholic Worker community) became focused on issues of violence and militarism as well, with the group’s pacifist stance and nonviolent civil disobedience becoming more central to its existence during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, and into present time.

As the newspaper’s circulation grew and word of the house of hospitality’s work spread, the Catholic Worker community gave birth to what has become known as the Catholic Worker movement. Houses of hospitality, often with their own accompanying newspapers describing their work, began to spring up around the United States. By 1940, over thirty Catholic Worker communities were formed by local groups around the country interested in the kind of work that Day and Maurin described in their newspaper. The movement’s growth was, and has continued to be, decentralized and unorganized. No one’s permission is needed to start a Catholic Worker community, nor do incarnations of Catholic Worker vision and practice need to follow a particular set of rules or models. Indeed, Day’s anarchist past nurtured her commitment to a movement that was informed by those directly involved, which left room for spontaneity and creativity rather than authority and leadership dictating the boundaries for communities. While the de facto leaders of different communities were sometimes familiar with each other, connections between different Catholic Worker communities rarely extended beyond informal friendships.

As of 2014, over 225 Catholic Worker houses and farms exist in the United States and around the world. Some observers thought the movement would disappear following Day’s death in 1980 given her centrality as a symbolic figure for the movement as a whole. And while the movement has evolved over time, including after Day’s death, it continues to thrive in many ways. Catholic Workers in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Mexico, and other countries serve food to the hungry and house the homeless, publish newspapers critiquing social policy and reflecting on spiritual issues, and are arrested for protesting war and militarism worldwide.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Because it is a decentralized movement, beliefs vary from Catholic Worker community to community and within communities as well. Still, many groups throughout the movement do share similar principles, the most common of which are stated in “The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker,” published annually in The Catholic Worker newspaper. These aims and means focus on creating a society, as founder Peter Maurin said, “where it is easier for people to be good” centered in the “justice and charity of Jesus Christ.” They advocate for personalism (a focus on taking personal responsibility for changing conditions rather than reliance on the state for “impersonal charity”) as well as decentralization of societal institutions and a “green revolution” that cultivates agricultural and craft skills for self-sufficiency and meaningful labor. While these principles underlie the culture of many Catholic Worker communities, their actions tend to focus on the four practices listed in the Aims and Means: nonviolence, the works of mercy, manual labor, and voluntary poverty.

The Catholic Worker’s commitment to nonviolence has grown over the years. Dorothy Day’s pacifism took root before World War II, but it was strengthened during that period, when many people left the Worker or cancelled their subscriptions to the newspaper because of Day’s outspoken opposition to the war. These beliefs were rooted in an understanding of Jesus’ teachingand behavior in the gospels as being nonviolent (e.g., turn the other cheek) while also disrupting the status quo (e.g., when Jesus overturned the tables of the temple money lenders). During the Vietnam War, Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan (friends of the Catholic Worker) staged draft card burnings inspired by their Catholic faith. The Worker’s support of the Berrigans and similar anti-war activists solidified its reputation as a major force of nonviolent activism, opposition to war, and Catholic peace activism during a period when many young people had become disillusioned by war and violence. Increasingly, Catholic Worker communities around the country began to attract war resisters looking for communities where their views would be supported, especially if they were Catholics, since the Catholic Church’s official teachings were much more open to war and violence in certain circumstances.

The Works of Mercy (held by most in Catholic Worker tradition to be feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison, and burying the dead) are in some ways more central to the Catholic Worker’s beliefs, since the first house of hospitality was started in order to allow for their practice. In Christian tradition, especially Catholic tradition, the works of mercy are seen as central to the Christian life. In the twenty-fifth chapter of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is reported as telling his followers that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, they had to do these things for their brothers and sisters in need just as they would have done them for Jesus himself. Catholic Worker communities not only perform works of mercy, but also in encourage others to engage in similar practices. Also, these central Catholic Worker beliefs about what it means to be Christian are proclaimed in various works of art, which are often displayed in the houses as reminders of the importance of the works of mercy to Catholic Worker life.

Many Catholic Workers also believe in the importance of manual labor and voluntary poverty, though these beliefs are less central in that not all community members share these commitments. Still, most Catholic Worker communities place a premium on simplicity, living in small rooms with simple beds, eating donated food out of donated dishes, wearing donated clothes, and doing much of the work of the houses (washing dishes, mopping floors, repairing walls) themselves, regardless of whether full-time volunteers have college degrees or come from wealthy backgrounds. Most houses of hospitality are set up as places where people can work with their hands and where often well-educated, middle-class volunteers live in the same conditions as people from the street who have been invited to live in the house as guests. Belief in the importance of manual labor is rooted in the conviction that many of contemporary society’s ills are due to an alienation from the products of one’s labor as well as the belief that manual labor is good for both the body and the mind. Voluntary poverty is seen as important because it separates one from the rampant consumerism in modern capitalist societies as well as helping one to live in solidarity with the poor.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Catholic Worker rituals are centered in the works of mercy and nonviolent protest against militarism, homelessness, and other issues facing many contemporary societies. Many communities also participate in traditional Catholic rituals, such as the mass and praying the liturgy of the hours (typically, vespers). Rituals also include intellectual endeavors such as reporting and writing as part of communities’ publication of newspapers and newsletters. Many of these rituals involve, whether intentionally or not, the act of distancing the Catholic Worker from other groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church and social service agencies (Yukich 2010).

Though each community is different, most Catholic Worker communities engage regularly in the works of mercy. Many have soup kitchens, food pantries, and/or clothing closets. Several books and articles have been written chronicling the work of the original Catholic Worker community in New York City. Many of these include details on the daily rituals of the community, which provide a sense of what Catholic Worker ritual entails. At St. Joseph House in New York City, there is a soupline Monday through Friday. Each morning, there is a volunteer assigned to make the huge pot of soup. Other volunteers show up later to butter bread and to brew pitchers of hot tea. Before the soupline begins, the volunteers all join hands and pray for God’s blessing on the community and all who will eat there that day. Then people began to file in the front door, sitting down at tables where they are served a bowl of soup by one of the volunteers. Volunteers also bring around tea and bread, serving the guests as one might be served at a restaurant. Often volunteers take a moment to sit and talk with one of the guests, especially if they see someone they know.

After the soupline ends, many of the volunteers head to their homes and jobs. Live-in volunteers then make lunch for all of the people who live in the house. The afternoon is typically a quieter time. Some volunteers accompany residents to doctor’s appointments, while someone else makes dinner for the community, which always begins at 5 PM. Someone from Maryhouse, the other New York City house of hospitality located two blocks away, comes with a grocery cart to pick up their portion of the dinner. After everyone is finished eating, the dishes must be done, tables cleaned, and floors mopped. On Tuesday nights, these rituals are followed by a Catholic mass: a priest comes to the house each week just for the occasion. On Friday nights, they are followed by open-to-the-public “Friday night meetings” on topics varying from the spirituality of St. Teresa of Avila to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

In addition to the everyday rituals of the community, in which the works of mercy are central, many Catholic Workers are also regularly involved in acts of civil disobedience protesting war and other forms of violence. One of the most common locations for these protests is the armed forces recruiting center in Times Square. In a typical protest, activists from the Catholic Worker and similarly-minded groups take signs to the recruiting center, stand outside with the signs, and block the entrance to prohibit anyone from entering. After a certain period of time, police officers come and arrest those blocking the entrance. Usually a few activists stay behind to collect the posters and take them back to the house. After spending a short time in jail, the protestors are typically released, though they later have to appear in court. Most use the court appearances as an opportunity to share their views about the immorality and illegality of war and violence.

While these are some of the rituals common in the New York City community, since each Catholic Worker community is different, each community’s rituals differ as well. Some do not hold regular masses at their houses of hospitality. Some are not regularly involved in civil disobedience. However, most have some form of a meal shared with the homeless and other impoverished populations: if there is any ritual common to most communities, it would be this type of activity. The rituals of shared meals, shared time in jail, shared celebration of mass, and others not only enable Catholic Workers to live out their beliefs but also serve to bind them together, creating close-knit communities.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

As of 2014, there are over 225 Catholic Worker houses and farms around the world. Most of these are located in the United States, particularly in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, where a higher percentage of the general population is Catholic than in the South. Approximately twenty five communities are located in other countries, most in Western Europe though a few are in places like Central America, New Zealand, and Africa. Communities vary in size, and because of the decentralized and informal character of the movement, there is no membership list. As an example, in the New York City community, around fifteen people are full-time volunteers living in or near the houses of hospitality. Another thirty people live in the houses as guests, some long-term and some short-term, staying there until they get back on their feet. The larger local community of “friends of the house” (around fifty people at any one time) includes regular volunteers as well as people who attend Friday Night Meetings, house masses, or other community activities. In terms of wider interest and support, the community’s newspaper, The Catholic Worker, has over 20,000 subscribers around the country. The community is financed entirely through private donations from individual supporters, who might loosely be considered part of the movement due to their support of its ongoing work.

In smaller Catholic Worker communities, often a couple will start a house of hospitality, running it in their home with one or two other full-time volunteers and inviting three or four guests to stay with them. In terms of size, most communities lie somewhere in the range between the New York City community and the small, family-run community, with communities in urban areas often larger in size than those in more rural areas, where most of the Catholic Worker farms are located. Catholic Worker farms often provide rest for volunteers from urban areas as well as a place to engage in manual labor, to connect with the land, and to grow food that can be served in urban soup kitchens.

The Catholic Worker is better characterized as a movement than an organization. Catholic Workers seek to differentiate themselves from mainstream society; they also seek to challenge it through providing what they see as a better way to live. The movement is decentralized and relatively unorganized and has no official leader. While Dorothy Day was long considered the unofficial leader of the movement, since her death no single figure has arisen to fill that role. However, certain communities are often seen as particularly important or as role models for other communities. As the original community, the New York City community is often looked to as the standard-bearer by communities elsewhere. Still, some other communities consider it to be too influenced by Day’s legacy and too slow to adapt to current times, demonstrating the diversity of views regarding the Catholic Worker vision within the movement. Authority rests primarily within the local community, and each of these communities organizes that authority differently. In the New York City community, theoretically a designated person “on the house” is in charge for a fixed amount of time, after which someone else is in charge. But in practice, much authority rests on the full-time volunteers who take the majority of those house shifts, particularly volunteers who have lived in the community for a long period of time. In other communities, particularly nonprofit organizations, there is a board of directors or full-time staff members who are in charge of the community.

The Catholic Church is authoritative in the Catholic Worker movement only insofar as most of the communities see themselves as Catholic and wish to engage with the church rather than to ignore it. However, many communities openly disagree with certain Church teachings and practices, claiming that the teaching of the “primacy of conscience” gives them the right (even the duty) to dissent from teachings they believe are against the will of God. Some communities do not identify as Catholic at all, such as Haley House in Boston. Though certain communities adhere more closely to Church teachings and practices than others, the variation in the degree of adherence at times creates conflict within the movement, with some wishing to impose greater uniformity and conformity on communities in the movement.

Most Catholic Worker communities refuse 501(c)3 status and government funding because they do not want to cooperate with what they see as a corrupt, violent system. Instead, their work is supported entirely by private donations. These include cash donations from supporters as well as donations of food and clothing from local businesses and community members. As a result, communities are in theory beholden to the donors who support them. While the degree to which this is actually the case certainly varies by community, in many communities the donors in fact have little impact on decision-making. Because Catholic Workers are attracted to the community based on a commitment to shared principles, they are unlikely to shift those principles simply to makedonors happy. There is a history of this refusal to compromise within the movement. As mentioned earlier, during World War II, Dorothy Day wrote in The Catholic Worker newspaper about her unwillingness to compromise her pacifist stance on the war. Her views were very unpopular, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers (and donors) as a result. Still, Day was convinced that she was right and that God would provide for the community in other ways, and the community survived that period and other rough periods in its history.

Catholic Workers see donations as gifts from God and affirmations of their work rather than as justification for donors to influence the movement. Indeed, most people who donate to the Worker do so precisely because they want to support an anti-authoritarian group that is not beholden to any particular set of interests. In line with their personalist philosophy, community members seek to maintain good relationships with their donors, caring about them as people and showing gratitude to them for their gifts. These relationships form the basis for continuing donations, not just adherence to the same ideas and principles.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The Catholic Worker movement has faced several challenges over time, some common to the movement as a whole and some specific to particular communities. On a broad scale, Dorothy Day’s death in 1980 left the movement a bit rudderless. Her charismatic personality and leadership had been central not only for the New York City communities but also for the Catholic Worker vision in general. Still, the movement’s decentralized and unorganized character allowed it to adjust, survive, and thrive even after the death of its co-founder and central figure. No individual has arisen to take Day’s place as an overarching inspiration for the movement as a whole, though it is not clear that this is necessarily a challenge for the movement and its future other than making it less prominent in the mainstream media.

This may become more of a problem as the Catholic Church moves forward in efforts to make Dorothy Day a saint. Because of her strong association with the Catholic Worker movement, she remains the public face of the movement and all it stands for. But as the Church moves Day toward sainthood, it has systematically downplayed certain aspect’s of Day’s life and thought while emphasizing others that were far less central to her daily work but are more in line with the Church hierarchy’s teachings. For instance, while Church discussions of Day’s life often gloss over her anarchism and pacifism, they often emphasize her regret for her abortion and her orthodox beliefs about sexuality.

Catholic Workers disagree about many things. Some believe all Catholic Worker communities should be Catholic (and, further, some think they should agree with all of the Church’s teachings), while others do not believe in these restrictions. Some maintain strict rules about the use of technology, following Day’s and Maurin’s positions on the ways in which technology was harmful in general and in particular to the poor, while others have slick websites and/or Facebook pages. Some communities refuse to apply for nonprofit (501(c)3) status, arguing that communities should practice noncooperation with the state and should avoid bureaucratization, while others see nonprofit status as a way to perform the works of mercy more effectively. These disagreements are important, but because the movement is decentralized, they rarely threaten the movement’s existence because groups are independent and often have little concrete interaction with each other, freeing each to operate as it wishes.

The movement’s largest challenges emerge not from conflicts between communities but from demographic changes within them. Many local communities were started by a single family or even one couple. While they typically grow to include larger numbers of people, those people are often more transient, with the founders remaining the glue holding the community together. As those founders age, sometimes it is difficult to know who, if anyone, will be able to run the community in the future.

The question of who will keep local communities running is important in larger and more established houses as well. As long-time community members and leaders age, they sometimes worry that not enough new people are becoming involved in the Catholic Worker to keep the houses, and the movement itself, going. In the New York City community, for instance, there are still people in the house who knew Dorothy Day when she was alive, but most of them are in their sixties or seventies or have passed away in recent years. It is possible that the Catholic Worker remained strong after Day’s death because some of her contemporaries were alive to keep her vision going. The real test may be whether these communities will survive once that era is decisively over.

The lack of young people in particular is a pressing concern in some Catholic Worker communities. In many communities, people in their twenties and thirties volunteer once or twice a week or even for several months at a time. However, some communities have difficulty finding young people committed to joining the movement for the long haul. This makes it difficult to predict what the trajectory of communities will be and whether they will have stable leadership in the future. The Catholic Worker’s strong critiques of consumerism and technology are especially challenging for young people in an age in which both are integral parts of daily life. Demographic shifts in the Catholic Church may also present a challenge to continued longevity: increasingly, committed young American Catholics come from more “traditional” Catholic families, with children of more “liberal” Catholics (and most young Catholics in general) increasingly just leaving the Church altogether (Smith et al. 2014). The pool of likely Catholic Workers may be shrinking, at least in the U.S.

In spite of these challenges, new Catholic Worker communities continue to emerge. Recently, the first Catholic Worker community in Africa started in Uganda. Perhaps more established communities will eventually close, while communities in other places, including outside of the U.S., will grow. While they may find it sad to imagine the decline of their own communities, many Catholic Workers would also acknowledge that the ebb and flow of communities is in line with the Catholic Worker vision. Dorothy Day liked to say that the Catholic Worker was like a school where students came to learn and then went away to incorporate the works of mercy into other endeavors (Riegle 2014). She believed that the movement would continue to exist as long as there was a need for it. Today, poverty, militarism, consumerism, and excesses of technology remain central issues in American society. The question is whether they are still seen as problems and whether a specifically Catholic approach to these issues still has resonance on a broad scale. As long as the answer to both of these questions is yes, the Catholic Worker movement is likely to stay vibrant, offering its simple yet prophetic response to the world’s suffering: “the only solution is love” (Day 1952:285).

REFERENCES

Aronica, Michele Teresa. 1987. Beyond Charismatic Leadership: The New York Catholic Worker Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Cornell, Tom. 2014. “A Brief Introduction to the Catholic Worker Movement.” The Catholic Worker website. Accessed from http://www.catholicworker.org/historytext.cfm?Number=4 on 4 November 2014.

Coy, Patrick G. 2001. “An Experiment in Personalist Politics: The Catholic Worker Movement and Nonviolent Action.” Peace & Change 26:78–94.

Day, Dorothy. 1952. The Long Loneliness. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

Forest, Jim. 2014. “Peter Maurin: Co-Founder of the Catholic Worker movement.” The Catholic Worker website. Accessed from http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable/pmbiography.cfm on 4 November 2014.

McKanan, Dan. 2008. The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

Murray, Harry. 1990. Do Not Neglect Hospitality: The Catholic Worker and the Homeless. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Riegle, Rosalie G. 2014. “The Catholic Worker Movement in 2014: An Appreciation.” The Montal Review, August 2014. Accessed from http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Catholic-Worker-Movement.php on 4 November 2014.

Smith, Christian, Kyle Longest, Jonathan Hill, and Kari Christoffersen. 2014. Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church. New York: Oxford University Press.

Spickard, James V. 2005. “Ritual, Symbol, and Experience: Understanding Catholic Worker House Masses.” Sociology of Religion 66:337-57.

Thorn, William J., Phillip M. Runkel, and Susan Mountin, eds. 2001. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: Centenary Essays. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Yukich, Grace. 2010. “Boundary Work in Inclusive Religious Communities: Constructing Identity at the New York Catholic Worker.” Sociology of Religion 71:172-96.

Zwick, Mark, and Louise Zwick. 2005. The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Post Date:
9 November 2014

CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT VIDEO CONNECTIONS

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Chen Tao

CHEN TAO TIMELINE

1955 Hon-ming Chen was born in Pei-pu, Hsin-chu County, Taiwan.

1993 Chen Tao was founded in Taiwan (under the name The Soul Light Resurgence Association).

1995 Chen and about 25 of his followers emigrated from Taiwan to San Dimas, California.

1996 Chen wrote and privately published The Practical Evidence and Study of the World of God and Buddha.

1997 (March) Chen Tao headquarters moved from San Dimas, CA to Garland, Texas.

1997 Chen wrote and privately published God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) on Earth to Save People.

1998 (March 25) Chen predicted God would be seen on Channel 18 across North America.

1998 (March 31) Chen predicted God will descend in human form at the Garland, TX headquarters.

1998 (April) Chen and a few followers travel to Lockport, NY before settling in Olcott, New York.

1999 Chen wrote and privately published The Appearing of God and Descending of the Kingdom of God –Saving Human Beings by Means of God’s Space Aircrafts.

1999 Chen Tao opened a second branch in Brooklyn, New York City.

2002 Schism occurred leading to the exile of Chen and the rebirth of Chen Tao into the Great True Way.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Born in Pei-pu, Hsin-Chu County, Taiwan on April 22, 1955, Hon-Ming Chen lost both his mother and father at an early age. Despite the loss of his parents, Chen completed grade school and went on to receive his Bachelor’s in Political Science and his Master’s in Social Science. By the age of 28, Chen worked as an associate professor for Chai-Nan Junior College of Pharmacy teaching social science from 1983 until 1993.

In 1992, Chen received a revelation from God urging him to pursue the religious life although he had considered himself to be an atheist previously (Covert 1997). After studying the Sutras, the Bible, and the Tao-Te Ching, Chen turned to the new age movement. He joined a UFO religious group in 1992 only to leave with a few other members who agreed with Chen’s claims of corrupt leadership and his disappointment with the large fees associated with the group. Chen and fellow student Tao-hung Ma then formed the Soul Light Resurgence Association (SLRA) in Taiwan (Prather 1999).

Chen wrote and privately published his first book, The Practical Evidence and Study of the World of God and Buddha in 1996. In this text Chen spoke of the “Jesus of the West” whom he claimed lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Chen envisioned the “Jesus of the West’ would be six feet tall, between 27 and 30 years old, and resemble Abraham Lincoln. In an attempt to find the Canadian Christ, the group placed a personal ad in Vancouver Sun and The Province (Rogers 1998).

Believing that North America was the “Pureland of God,” Chen and 25 members of SLRA moved to San Dimas, near Las Angeles, CA in early 1997. While in San Dimas, Chen and his followers established God’s Salvation Church (Prather 1999). In March, 1997, Chen announced that the headquarters for God’s Salvation Church would relocate from San Dimas to Garland (near Houston), Texas. Chosen because Garland sounded like “Godland” (Baker 1998), a home was purchased at 3513 Ridgedale Drive. After becoming the new center for the church, followers living in San Dimas and Taiwan moved to Texas between March, 1997 and December, 1997.

While in Garland, Chen wrote and privately published God’s Descending on Clouds (Flying Saucers) to Save People. In this text, Chen prophesied God would announce his descent into the physical world by appearing on television airwaves of Channel 18 across North America at 12:01 a.m. on March 25, 1998. Furthermore, Chen prophesied that six days later, March 31, 1998, at 10:00 a.m. God would descend in human form at the Garland headquarters (Chen 1997: 74-78). This human incarnation of God would have all the physical features of Chen, but would be able to speak all languages, walk through walls, and replicate himself as many times as necessary to greet everyone (Verhoveck 1998). God’sDescending on Clouds (Flying Saucers) to Save People prophesied other significant world events to occur in both 1998 and 1999. The additional prophesies became components of the group’s belief system.

On April 1, 1998 Chen announced that he and his followers would travel to the Great Lakes area to prepare for the coming tribulation in 1999 and that by May 10 all of his followers would be gone from Garland. On the following day Chen and nine of his followers flew to Buffalo, NY and rented a minivan before travelling to Lockport, NY. Chen had had a prophetic vision in which he had seen the numbers 17 and 78. From Lockport the group travelled to Olcott, a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario (Stephens 1998), which is located at the junction of highways 17 and 78.

In May, 1998 the majority of members did leave Garland, TX on schedule. Around half of the members had visa problems and returned to Taiwan; the remaining members moved to upstate New York. While in Olcott, Chen wrote and privately published another book entitled The Appearing of God and Descending of the Kingdom of God –Saving Human Beings by Means of God’s Space Aircrafts in 1999.

A second branch of the group was opened in Brooklyn, New York City in 1999 which served as a counseling center for the surrounding community. Gathering in Central Park, Chen and his followers offered salvation to people with AIDS and cancer, having deemed the source of the diseases to be spiritual rather than physical (Wojcik 2004). By this time membership of the group had dropped to approximately thirty members.

A schism occurred within the group in 2002, and Chen was exiled from the group due to conflict between Chen and other “high-ranking members.” The schism led to a rebirth and restructuring of the group as the “ Grand True Way” (Cook 2005). According to Cook, the Grand True Way is still located in Lockport, NY and has shifted its religious ideology toward a more “ conventional Chinese Buddhist organization” (personal communication, October 10, 2011). After this time the fate of the Brooklyn office and Chen personally were unknown to those studying the group (Cook, personal communication, October 10, 2011).

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The Chen Tao belief structure is informed by Buddhism, Taoism, UFOlogy, and Taiwanese folk religions (Baker 1998). Borrowing from Christian theology, Chen Tao also included an apocalyptic world view. According to Chen Tao, God is one in the same with the “magnetic field of Void (heaven)” and divides his spiritual light energy into separate beings, creating the origins of all life (Chen 1997:4). Transmigration, or reincarnation, gives each living being the chance to evolve into a higher life form, depending on the purity of his or her “main soul light”.

Chen Tao teaches that each living being has three souls, with the “main light soul” operating as the primary soul in conjunction with “temporal conscious soul” and the “physical soul.” The main soul light, which is the record keeper for a being’s life, is measured by its “spiritual light energy” (Chen 1997:11, 17, 19). Void is listed as having a spiritual light energy of twelve million degrees (Chen 1997:27), while divine beings (ex. Bodhisattvas and angels) have a spiritual light energy of nine million degrees. According to Chen, religious figures such as Jesus Christ and Ju-lai Buddha have a spiritual light energy commensurate with Void. Purity of the “main light soul” is obtained by following the basic principles of transmigration.

The three souls of living beings separate at death. A being with a pure main soul light, registering at nine million degrees and above, will unite its spiritual energy with the Void and consequently with God (Chen 1997:8, 18, 54). If the main soul light is not pure, the other two souls will follow the reincarnated being until the being has atoned for the sins that have accrued through previous lifetimes. This process is described as “causal retribution” and will continue indefinitely until karma is erased, leaving a pure “main soul light” (Chen 1997:62-64).

Besides the accumulation of karma, two other types of entities, “outside souls” and “devils,” impede the spiritual evolution or reincarnation of beings. Outside souls are described as malevolent, temporal, conscious and physical souls who became lost upon death of the being to which they were attached. Outside souls sustain themselves by feeding off the spiritual light energy of human beings, in addition to feeding on the spiritual air of mountains and rivers (Chen 1997:35-39).

“Devils” seek to possess beings so that they may increase the amount of unrest, evil, and violence in the world. “Heavenly devil kings” or “King Satans” are fallen angels who are described as greedy and corrupt (Chen 1997:62-64, 68). According to Chen, 47 percent of the population in Africa and Asia are possessed by King Satans (1997:70). King Satans also have been responsible for all the past great tribulations that have occurred in humankind’s existence (Chen 1997:68).

In Chen Tao doctrine, existence history has witnessed over 888,800,000 tribulations and five great tribulations. According to Chen, the first great tribulation occurred “at a place called Armageddon in the Hebrew tongue” ten million years ago. This first great tribulation was waged by dinosaurs; the remaining great tribulations resulted in battles in the area of modern day Israel. During each tribulation, beings living in the Americas were rescued by God in a flying saucer (Chen 1997:132-33).

The God of Chen Tao “includes all beings; He has the inexhaustible, endless energy, and His energy is the original source of all existence and permeates everything . . . He is omnipresent, He is both in form and non-form” (Chen 1997:3). Chen Tao’s prophet and leader Chen is viewed as one of the original divine creatures fractured from God’s spiritual light energy into the being Ju-lai Buddha. Ju-lai Buddha and several other Bodhisattvas came from Void to populate the earth (Chen 1997:8-9).

In God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) on Earth to Save People Chen made numerous predictions of events during the 1990s. For example, Chen predicted that China would attack Taiwan either during February, 1999 or on April 22, 1999 (Chen 1997: 87,115). The February attack included a vision of simultaneous “war of unification” between North and South Korea. The April 22 attack would include a “thousand million of human-devils” who would initiate a mass slaughter in Chen Tao’s “Holy Land” of Pei-pu, Taiwan (Chen 1997:80). A second prediction was that a “Noah’s Ark” flood of 40 days would devastate Eastern Asia in June and July, 1999, resulting in food shortage that would lead Asians to commit cannibalism (Chen 1997:132-33, 87). Following the flood and fueled by widespread destruction throughout East Asia, China and Japan would join forces to invade Australia and New Zealand, eventually conquering Southeast Asia (Chen 1997:115-119). European and African nations would join the war through territorial alliances, and all the nations would finally destroy each other at Armageddon (Chen 1997:115-119), leaving only 20 percent of the world’s population alive after this final tribulation (Baker 1998).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Chen Tao began in Taiwan as the Soul Light Resurgence Association but has used various other names through its history. Other names used by the group have included God Saves the Earth Flying Saucer Foundation, was used to describe Chen Tao prior to the failure of the two publicized prophecies, and within its own literature, the God and Buddha Salvation Foundation and The Chinese Association of Light of Soul. Once the central group moved to North America, it became the God’s Salvation Church, while still connected to followers in Taiwan.

The Soul Light Resurgence was founded under the co-leadership of Chen and Tao-hung Ma. Chen and Ma parted ways prior to Chen and his group’s emigration to the United States. Chen remained the central leader of the movement from the inception of the God’s Salvation Church until the schism within Chen Tao in 2002. Movement governance also included “high ranking” members and Richard Liu, Chen’s former chief translator, who at one point became a co-leader for the movement. After the schism in 2002, Richard Liu became the new central leader of the Grand True Way.

In both Chen Tao and the Great True way, the group organized itself geographically with members occupying multiple homes within a neighborhood or multiple apartments within the same building. Under Chen Tao, the leader’s (Chen) home served as the group’s church and religious center. Through its history Chen Tao’s membership ranged between 30 and 150. The current membership of the Grand True Way is unknown but believed to be small.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Most of the controversy surrounding Chen Tao involved sensationalized media coverage in response to the 1998 prophecies. The media, police, and public officials were immediately concerned with Chen’s March 25, 1998 and March 31, 1998 prophesies. Those prophecies were announced in the aftermath of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, which had occurred on March 28, 1997. Observers speculated the possibility of a mass suicide in the Chen Tao community should Chen’s prophecies go unfilled. A flurry of media activity followed the story (Bromley 1999).

In response to the media attention Chen and Richard Liu held a press conference on March 12, 1999. Issues addressed included any connections between Chen Tao and Heaven’s Gate (including possible suicide), details of Chen’s prophecies, and allegations of questionable behavior within the group (Bromley 1999). Chen denied any connection to Heaven’s Gate and any intention of mass suicide; he also allowed reporters to inspect the religious shrines and iconography inside the church (Chen’s home) in Garland (Glines and Punzet 1999).

Despite the press conference, extensive media coverage continued, and city officials in Garland planned for extensive crowd control. On Tuesday, March 24, group members prepared for God’s arrival by baptism-like rituals that included some of the male members shaving their heads (Prather 1999). However, at 12:00am on March 25 th, channel 18 showed nothing more than static (Wright and Greil 2011). Chen emerged from his home in Garland at 12:25am to reassure onlookers and media personnel who still believed in the possibility of a mass suicide. Addressing the reporters, Chen announced his intent to still lead his church. One reporter addressed the issue of the false prophecy; Chen replied that he had “never referred to…[himself] as a prophet” (Prather 1999). Additionally, Chen stated “I would highly recommend anybody not believe what I said anymore” (Bachman 1998).

Media attention continued in anticipation of the March 31 st prophecy. In an attempt to prove the transformation of himself into God, Chen stared at the sun directly for a few moments, later explaining to reporters that a mortal would have been blinded by the activity. Media officials noted that Chen appeared to be adversely affected by the demonstration as he blinked copiously afterwards. At this point Chen blamed the media coverage for disrupting the group and incorrectly conveying his religious messages. Chen then said that he would allow anyone to crucify or stone him to death for the next ten minutes in an attempt to reclaim his religious credibility (Glines and Punzet 1990). According to Prather, Chen made similar statements on other occasions, offering to accept the death penalty in the event of a failed prophecy (1999). Media coverage of Chen Tao dropped dramatically after the second failed prophecy.

REFERENCES

Bachman, Justin. 1988. “Predicted TV Showing by God Draws a Crowd.” Fort Worth Star Telegraph, March 25, A3.

Baker, Jason. 1998. “God’s Salvation Church.” Accessed from http://www.watchman.org/cults/godsalvationchurch.htm on February 3, 2005.

Bromley, G. David. 1999. “News on Chen Tao.” Accessed from http:// www.people.vcu.edu/~dbromley/god’ssalvationchurchLink.htm on February 3, 2005.

Chen. 1997. God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) on Earth to Save People. Garland, TX: Privately published.

Chen. 1996. The Practical Evidence and Study of the World of God and Buddha. Garland, TX: Privately published.

Cook, J. Ryan. 2005. “Chen Tao.” December 2010. Accessed from http://www.anthroufo.info/un-chen.html on September 28, 2011.

Cook, J. Ryan. 2003. “Chen Tao.” Pp. 161-62 in The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions, edited by James R. Lewis. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Cook, J. Ryan. 2002. “Chen Tao.” Pp. 68-70 in UFO’s and Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth, edited by James R. Lewis. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Covert, James. 1997. “Group believes God to appear here, save the world March 31.” Garland News, December 25.

Cowan, E. Douglas. 2003. “Confronting the Failed Failure: Y2K and Evangelical Eschatology in Light of the Passed Millennium.” Nova Religio: The Journal of New and Emergent Religions 7(2): 71-85.

Geier, Thomas. 1998. “Is there life after death for Heaven’s Gate? a year after mass suicides, the cult carries on.” US. News & World Report, March 30, 32.

Glines, Lina and Bernard Punzet. 1999. “Chen Tao”; Accessed from http://myweb.lmu.edu/fjust/Students/ChenTao/main.html on February 2, 2005.

Hylton, Hilary and Stephanie Low. 1998. “Lone Star Loonies. (Taiwanese UFO cult in Texas).” Time International, March 30, 41.

Perkins, Rodney and Forrest Jackson. 1998. “Spirit in the Sky: The Transmigration of Dr. Chen.” Fortean Times, April, 109.

Prather, Houston Charles. 1999. “God’s Salvation Church: Past, Present and Future.” Marburg Journal of Religion 4 (1). Accessed from http://www.unimarburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/prather.html on February 5, 2005.

Rogers . D. David. 1998. “TrueWay/God’s Salvation Church Defined.” Trancenet.org News, March 26. Accessed from http:// www.trancenet.org/groups/gsc/index.shtml on February 1, 2005.

Ross, Rick. 1998. “Chen Tao/God’s Salvation Church.” Accessed from http://www.rickross.com/groups/chen-tao.html on February 1, 2005.

Shaeffer, Robert. 1998. “Apocalypse foiled again; UFOlogists shoot for the moon. (Chen Tao cult’s prediction; Citizens against UFP Secrecy).” Skeptical Inquirer, September-October, 51.

Stephens, Paul. 1998. “Is God Coming to Olcott?” Lockport Journal, April 2

Verhovek, Howe Sam. 1998. “UFO cult waits for God in Texas town.” New York Times, March 5.

“Waiting for God. Oh. (Members of Taiwanese church move to Garland, Texas to witness the appearance of God).” 1998. The Economist (US), April 4, p. 29.

Wojcik, Daniel. 2004. “Chen Tao (God’s Salvation Church).” Pp. 408, 415 in New Religions: A Guide, edited by Christopher Partridge. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wright, Stuart A. and Arthur L. Greil. 2011. “Failed Prophecy and Group Demise: The Case of Chen Tao.” Pp. 153-72 in How Prophecy Lives, edited by Diana Tumminia and William Swatos. London: Brill.

Post Date:
22 October 2011

CHEN TAO VIDEO CONNECTIONS

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