We usually associate religious cults with some bizarre made-up religions or with some kind of extreme religious fundamentalism. But one of the worst, most destructive cults grew out of mainline liberal Protestantism. And I saw how that happened.
Whereas one principle of mainline liberal Protestantism was to replace the gospel of salvation through Christ with a political and utopian “social gospel,” as I discussed last week, another was to replace spirituality with psychology.
One wouldn’t think that red-state Oklahoma would be a hotbed of liberal Christianity, but so it was, as Tom Oden testifies in his memoir A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir. He was a professor at Phillips University, the Disciples of Christ college and seminary in Enid, Oklahoma (now closed), before he himself discovered historical Christianity. As he confesses, Oden himself was a pioneer in this new psychological approach to Christianity.
This manifested itself in “Encounter Groups” (a.k.a., “sensitivity-training” or “T-groups”), which replaced traditional Bible study with sessions modeled after the group therapy techniques then popular in psychiatric circles. These were led not by trained psychotherapists, of course, who sometimes make good use of them, but by pastors and youth ministers.
I cannot express how much I hated those. We didn’t have them in our local small-town congregation, which still taught the Bible, but every time I went to a regional or state youth conference–and my wonderful and well-intentioned parents made me go to everything offered by our church–I had to sit through a sensitivity-training group. This was especially when some youth function was held, as it often was, at Phillips University.
These groups–in which everyone took turns “sharing” their deepest darkest secrets, expressing their feelings about each other, and otherwise spilling their guts, then being subjected to commentary from the other members of the group–were torture for me. I am an introvert–little was said about that psychological concept–so this went against every fiber of my being. When it was my turn to “share” (a metaphor I still dislike), I would reply tersely, probably folding my arms in body language that the group would interpret in terms of some “hang-up” I had that prevented me from being “open” to others. But for those who got into it, the Encounter Groups were said to be a life-changing experience, opening themselves up to their deepest emotions and creating a sense of unity with the other people in the group. Ministers would then relate that experience to conversion, spiritual healing, and Christian love.
When we weren’t doing Encounter Groups, we were going through indoctrination sessions on Liberation Theology. Again, as I discussed last week, by this time the Protestant mainline had moved from being the pillars of post-war New Deal liberalism to being antagonistic to almost everything America stood for, particularly capitalism, to the point of buying into the new revolutionary radicalism that had become prominent in the nation’s universities.
Now all of this was not evident in all of the congregations of my denomination, which was known as the “First Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church.” The “First Christian” part reflected the conservative strain in the Restoration Movement. (Today, “First Christians” constitute a separate conservative denomination, like the even more conservative Church of Christ.) But the church hierarchy, the seminaries, and the young clergy eagerly adopted the new version of Christianity. And the Restorationist emphasis on unifying all the churches led to the Disciples of Christ’s active leadership in the 20th century ecumenical movement, which was a major factor in the elimination of the doctrinal distinctives of the different theological traditions, thus leading to the downplaying of the supernatural and the widespread adoption of modernist theology.
I talked to a friend who went to Phillips seminary until he realized that it was destroying his faith. He said that his professors told their seminary students not to necessarily teach their future congregations what they were learning in their classes about the historical-critical approach to the Bible, Liberation Theology, and psychological therapy. Ordinary church members might misunderstand and give you as a pastor trouble about it. Instead, introduce it subtly. You can use conservative-sounding language (e.g., “Jesus sets you free!”), while meaning something else (“Jesus is a revolutionary”). I didn’t tell my parents, who were true Christians, what I was being exposed to at church camp and state youth conferences. I didn’t want to upset them.
Flash forward about 10 years, to 1978. I was in graduate school, had read the Bible, which knocked me over with Law and Gospel, and I had gotten involved in evangelical campus ministry circles. My wife and I still attended a Disciples congregation, which was going through something of an evangelical renewal.
I remember some of our elders who attended a state men’s meeting telling about how they learned about “a really exciting inner city ministry one of our churches is doing in San Francisco.”
On November 18, 1978, I was horrified along with the rest of the nation at reports coming out of Guyana. A congressman and his entourage investigating a cult called the People’s Temple were shot dead by members of the group. Whereupon the leader, Jim Jones, presided over a mass suicide, in which his followers drank cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid. As a result, 918 men, women, and children died, hugging each other as they fell. This was described by Wikipedia as “the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the events of September 11, 2001.”
A day or so later, I was watching a TV report that interviewed a former member in front of the original San Francisco home of the cult. In the background, on the sign of the “People’s Temple” church, I saw a reference to the Disciples of Christ! It turned, out the People’s Temple was an official congregation of the First Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church! And Jim Jones was a rostered minister in our denomination!
I later talked with someone in the church hierarchy about this. How could one of our pastors turn one of our congregations into a cult and then murder his members? How could our church body let that happen?
Well, I was told, as you know, in our denomination, we don’t have set doctrines and everyone is free to believe whatever they want. We really don’t have a mechanism for disciplining pastors or for expelling congregations. What happened in Guyana is just the price of our theological openness and our policy of Christian freedom.
The denomination did a pretty good job of keeping the lid on its affiliation with Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. The truth, though, is that they were in good standing with our denomination. Indeed, they were held up as exemplars of what our churches should be doing. The People’s Temple was the congregation with the great inner city ministry that our elders had raved about!
I dug into the teachings and practices of The People’s Temple. What I saw was a great coming together of the two streams of the new mainline Protestant teaching: the psychological and the political. In Jim Jones’ church, members had their sensitivity trained in Encounter Groups, to the point of attaining the goal of everyone coming together into a true emotional unity. They had such emotional unity with each other and with their pastor that they knowingly drank poisoned Kool-Aid at his command.
And members of the People’s Temple were so indoctrinated with Liberation Theology that they repudiated their homeland in the United States to form their own socialist community in radical-friendly South America. This gave them the righteous zeal that enabled them to murder the American officials who came to investigate them. Also the revolutionary spirit to give their lives–along with the lives of their children–for the cause.
The People’s Temple was a cult of mainline liberal Protestantism. It was no aberration. Rather, it simply took seriously what the rest of the denomination had been teaching. Jim Jones and his congregation took to an extreme what most of the denomination–grounded in the American cultural establishment as it was–simply played around with.
By then, I was nearly finished with my dissertation. We would be moving wherever I could get a job. We resolved to change denominations, to join one that–unlike the Disciples–didn’t let members and pastors believe just anything they wanted, but that held to a theology with genuine substance. Specifically, we wanted to join a church body that believed in the authority of the Bible and that proclaimed the Gospel of salvation through Christ. Also, my dissertation that I had researched and that my wife got to know well because she had to type all the drafts (this was in the primitive pre-computer days), had us reading the theology of the Reformation. So you can see where we were heading. . . .to confessional Lutheranism.
Photo by Nicolas Martin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In