3.1. The Unspoken Teachings
It is this, the difference between the doctrines as they are publicly proclaimed on the World Tomorrow radio and television programs and The Plain Truth magazine, and how they are privately put into practice in the church, that is the real problem. While many sermons preach essentially what is to be found in church literature, members learn to screen the words carefully in order to discern the "hidden meanings" contained in the phrases they hear.
In this way, the culture of the Worldwide Church of God member, the precepts he follows, the emotions he feels, his relationship to the organization, and ultimately, to God Himself, is brought, by many labyrinthine turnings, to a state he never would have consented to, or even imagined.
This discrepancy between what new members innocently expect, and what they eventually find, causes the major stresses among church members--stresses that continue even after leaving the church, until (if ever) their cause is discovered.
This is not the usual case of a human organization falling short of its ideals: it is a case of an organization's structure actively working against its own advertised goals, doing everything in their power to ensure no one else within their ranks manages to accomplish them, either. This radical difference between the vision the Worldwide Church of God gives its people and the totalitarian oppression of the church itself is so obvious that no one fails to see it--and no one fails to explain it away.
To ministers, the fault lies with the sinful members, who twist good teaching into bad practice. To remedy this, they tirelessly bludgeon the people of the congregation with their personal failure to make the church the Utopian society it was meant to be; whether in church sermons, or in private counselling, the fault is placed squarely upon the individual.
Among church members, opinions vary on what is causing "the problem," which is all they ever call it, if they dare to name it or even speak of it, since many church members dutifully report such conversations to a minister, as they are encouraged to do. (This is enough to make the member feel like he is living in a police state, knowing that his words are often reported to ministers, who may follow up with what feels like an interrogation: it is an unequal match, with the member standing to lose what he believes is everything.) Those who identify themselves closely with the organization concur that the real fault lies only with the membership, and they believe this discrepancy is a collective sin directly Satan-inspired to discredit the church.
Others, even more cautious about whom they will tell, believe it is the administration's harsh interpretations that put undue burdens on the people. Some loyal, long-time members quietly voice the opinion that the church may already have fallen into the throes of the final, decadent, Laodicaean apostasy before the return of Christ. This last belief, however harsh it seems, traps those who believe it into staying with the organization, trying to "endure to the end" (Matt. 24:13), regardless of how outrageous the practices of the administration become, or how obvious it becomes that this organization has nothing to do with godliness.
Before we examine typical examples of this chasm between church culture and tradition versus its public literature, I must make one thing clear. These are not merely random abuses: they show a remarkable pattern, and cannot be accidental. They are also independent of particular bad administrators or bad members of congregations--two red herrings both sides are led astray after: those against the WWCOG dwell unnecessarily on the personal excesses of Garner Ted Armstrong or other ministers; those for the WWCOG dwell on the personalities of various members causing rebellions, and later, splinter groups.
This turmoil itself may be instructive, but the particulars obscure the main point: the very structure of the Worldwide Church of God forces the most humane and intelligent ministers to propagate The Problem, and the most faithful and caring members to bring it to full fruit. Of course, bad ministers and bad members do so little to temper the inherent evil in the organization's structure that time and again they take the blame for the larger, more insidious flaw.
3.2. Ministerial Power
To understand this, you must understand that it is compulsory for a baptized member to follow advice given by a minister in the course of counselling, as though it were a military command. If he does not, the result is similar to court-martial (without actually having a hearing): he may be suspended (told not to come to church or communicate with church members until he recants his decision and shows appropriate penitence) or disfellowshipped (expelled) from the church.
This may not occur for every disobedience, as ministers vary in their strictness or their laxity in this, and many members are too frightened (or too shrewd) to seek counselling, but the fact the ministry has the authority to excommunicate a member at their discretion is enough to put an edge of fear on a member's every contact with a minister.
There are no doubt procedures the ministers follow, including perhaps preliminary counselling and suspension, but the threat is enough to strike terror into the ordinary member. He knows that if he goes to the minister for counselling and confides a problem, he may be faced with suspension. He has been taught if he leaves the church (or is expelled) he is guilty of the Unpardonable Sin, and will face annihilation in the Lake of Fire in the last resurrection (the founder's metaphor for conversion was "becoming a spiritual embryo," which would be born at the Resurrection: leaving the church causes a "spiritual abortion," with all the stomach-churning finality that image brings to mind).
Knowing the compulsion to follow ministerial "advice," it is easier to see how important administrative interpretation is. If a member of any church is ultimately personally required to "work out [his] own salvation in fear and trembling" (Ph'p. 2:12), he preserves his God-given free moral agency, and his motives and actions involve the growth or decay of his own faith.
Once the member's personal responsibility is abrogated by the ministry, he is at the mercy of the differing personalities and views of various ministers, the different moods and winds blowing through the church, and dozens of other concerns more political than spiritual. Ministers are no more than members themselves, with a particular calling: the members of their congregations are not the servants of the ministry, but to their own Master they will stand or fall (Rom. 14:4).
3.3. The Organization Chart
This is the crux. The evil in the Worldwide Church of God is in incorporating God into the church's organizational chart, making each level of the organization intermediary between the individual and God. This soft and rotten foundation of the Worldwide Church of God denies the immediate connection every member has with his own God, making him instead an anonymous part of a soulless herd. Obedience then becomes the prime virtue. Thus, the member's first responsibility is to the organization, which will assure his salvation.
This ties in with their most sensational belief, that of becoming God. What the doctrine teaches the member to expect, though, is to "become God" in the sense of being absorbed into the hierarchy of a universe-ruling God-bureaucracy--which makes being eaten alive by the church while he is still mortal appear not only right, but what he should desire. To do less would be to reject the very essence of his salvation, the reason for his existence.
Sermons often include the hypothetical example of an individual who has gone against his own sense of right and wrong, and trusted in what the church taught, regardless of his own judgement, as an example of "faith" worth imitating, even though the object of faith here is the church organization, not God: this is sheer idolatry. It is as if Paul advised the Philippians to "blindly follow the steps of your teachers and predecessors to find salvation," instead of telling them the awesome and terrible truth that each one of us, alone, will be held accountable before our God. We will not be able so easily to evade that responsibility by claiming to have merely "followed orders": what did not work at Nuremberg is unlikely to wash in the Judgement.
It is this structural evil that causes the remarkable instability of the Worldwide Church of God: by its own estimate, it has a fifty percent turnover rate, and it has given rise to many splinter groups, large and small, in the half century it has existed. The way that different administrators and members adjust to having too much or too little personal power, respectively, leads to the upheavals, unrest, break-away factions, internecine warfare, and shifts in official doctrine.
This appears inevitable. I believe the only way for the organization to avoid the most scandalous and open results of this fatal flaw is to become more and more oppressive and ruthless, along the lines of the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons, and rule its people with greater and greater severity.
This would continue to cause people to leave, but may forestall the more high-profile upheavals. Strong measures are needed to counterbalance the forces that make this church tend to tear itself apart. Of course, reinstating a respect for individual free moral agency would revolutionize this organization, but the last time this was tried, in the 70's, it led to the ousting of the founder's own son, a shakeup in high places, culminating in the invasion of the church by the Attorney General of California, throwing it into a temporary receivership, until subsequent legislation made doing this to a church illegal. After this, there was a severe backlash of strict discipline on the membership. Free moral agency may be a nice idea, but I doubt there is any desire to try the experiment again.
3.4. The Life of the Mind
In every way, the Worldwide Church of God, through its practice and (verbal, not written) teachings, undermines its members' religious experience and capacity for moral choices. I have already mentioned the way its initial respect for reason and verification gives way to an insistence on unthinking obedience: this leads to a contempt for the life of the mind in general.
This surprisingly anti-intellectual bent extends to any education other than job training (which is not "education" in the true sense). While, in their writings, the Worldwide Church of God claims to value education, in the church itself, schools and teachers are spoken of as "pagan" and "Satan-inspired"; not surprisingly, this causes some children to lose respect both for learning and for school authorities.
Children are discouraged from going to any institution but the church's Ambassador Colleges, or perhaps a technical institution. Going to a regular University or College is definitely frowned upon, as learning for its own sake, to expand the mind or increase the understanding is considered frivolous and dangerous: beyond the necessities of earning a living, only what the church can teach is to be desired. Girls, in particular, are discouraged from any education that might give them ambitions beyond the domestic.
3.5. The Other Sex
The church's contempt for women puts the organization squarely in the camp of the most extreme fundamentalists, and is also an example of how it denies in practice what it professes in writing. Many Christian women understand what the WWCOG's literature says regarding male-female relationships, that in a family with only two adults, one method of resolving disputes is to designate a titular head, which the Bible names as the husband. Considering the biblical advice regarding husbands and wives "submitting [them]selves one to another in the fear of God" (Eph. 5:21), as well as the information that all mankind was created in the image of God, male and female (Gen. 1:27), and that in Christ there is no male or female (Gal. 3:28), most Christian women understand that, whatever respect, cooperation, and help they may owe their husband, he is not to be a sort of god to them.
In the WWCOG, women are definitely seen as inferior beings whose function and purpose for existence is to serve men, despite what its publications say. While males attending services are coaxed into joining the men's speech club, and pressed to make a commitment to the church and be baptized, female attendees are not pressed at all. Who needs another woman? The difference is obvious; the message is clear. In mixed groups, conversation is exclusively by the males: women keep silent, and listen to the men talk to each other. If a woman happens to speak, she is often rudely ignored, and conversation continues on as though she had never opened her mouth. Should her remarks be insightful enough, some male will repeat her words, to the general praise of the group. If any men do acknowledge her, and include her in the conversation, she will draw the resentful stares of the other women present. This is not a culture where it is possible to have healthy marriages with equal partners, so the marital problems one sees everywhere come as no surprise.
Regardless of the church's magazine articles, which so cruelly raise false hopes in a woman, women are seen as essentially domestic creatures. The German expression, Kinder, Kuchen, Kirche (children, cooking, church), nicely sums up the scope of a woman's life in this church. In one sermon on "The Human Potential," the minister, referring to a woman's need for creative expression, found the perfect example in wallpapering! Even birds feather their nests, so this example is hardly even exclusively in the human domain, let alone stretching the upper limits of what the human spirit can strive for. That a woman could be a novelist, artist, or scientist was beyond this speaker's comprehension.
Women's inferior status holds true in practice in this church as well. Young women going to Ambassador College in former years were able to major in Theology; later, the only major allowed them was Home Economics. Thus, no spiritual potential could be imagined that could alter the Destiny of women, seen as wholly determined by Biology. Even young single women are encouraged to view themselves this way. The most bizarre example I know of was a young woman, single, working to help support her family at home, being discouraged from pursuing her aptitude for art. Downcast, she told me one day that she could not go out sketching with me that weekend, as we had planned--or ever--because the minister had advised her it was better for her to put "such thoughts" out of her head until her future children were grown! Of course, at that point, the church would find plenty to keep her too busy to fulfil her early promise: the irony is that this is from an organization that makes so much noise in public about "The Incredible Human Potential" (with a book, and formerly a magazine, with those words in the title); but, sadly, this potential is daily truncated, not strived for, in their own congregations.1
In this, the Worldwide Church of God is not, unfortunately, unique: as a matter of fact, I found its women markedly less willing to be beaten down than those from denominations more acceptable to society: obviously, a totally spineless woman would not have the nerve to stand up to family and friends and join such an unusual organization in the first place. Perhaps their own spiritual connection with God, and their commitment to Truth, as they understand it, is so important to these women, who have had to fight for their faith, frightens the organization into browbeating them more than it would if these women had been brought up, from girlhood, and remained, in a religion unquestioned by their society. It often makes the WWCOG's insults against women more overt than those in some other churches, mainstream or evangelical, who may have a female population already "softened up" by the weight of a lifetime of passivity. This neither exonerates other churches, nor excuses the Worldwide Church of God: in either case, Christian women are too often cheated of their birthright.
3.6. Artists and Their Ilk
Like its dubious commitment to female members fulfilling their potential, the Worldwide Church of God is uneasy when any member, male or female, strives for any form of beauty or creativity that does not tie itself to some practical use. If the pursuits showing the highest expression of the human potential must be justified by bare utility, then creativity is devalued amongst the congregation. Seen in this light, even the beauty of the organization's headquarters and colleges fit: they are not beautiful in order to "glorify God," but in order to have the church be openly seen to be glorifying God; like the hypocrite praying on the street corner, they already have their reward (Matt. 6:5). How much the WWCOG really values glorifying God with beauty is shown by what they do when no one (but God) is looking--that is, in their own churches.
Admittedly, as an artist and writer myself, I have been in closer contact with other creative and intellectual members in the congregation than the average member, and this question obviously loomed larger for us than for the majority. However, since beauty and ugliness do have profound effects on the human spirit, and the limitations set on the creativity of the talented minority also make themselves felt on everyone with any ability or ambition, it is a question of interest for the rest of the congregation.
There is something disreputable about any member of the Worldwide Church of God being an artist, writer, actor, or scholar--unless that skill is used only to promote the organization. Bulletin board and Bible Study graphics, acting in a skit for a church gathering, playing an instrument or singing at church services, writing articles or doing illustrations for the church's publications--these are all acceptable. There are restrictions even here, of course, as women are not allowed to "teach" in the church (although they may be schoolteachers in the secular world), so they are not allowed to write articles dealing with anything but domestic issues (so should not be quoting scripture), and are forbidden to lead church choirs.
The attitude towards the arts is that they are a sometimes-necessary evil, despite what is said in the magazines. Ideally, in the future Kingdom of God, there would be no artists or poets -- at least, they want none in the congregation. (And why would they, when they believe all the great works of music and art and culture will be annihilated when Christ returns to rule the Earth?) Because ministerial opinions, once expressed, have the force of commands, the most ignorant, uneducated individuals with no understanding or background in the arts can and do make pronouncements on what is good, or even what is allowed. In this way, every minister, when he is counselling a member, is considered to have the same infallibility as the pope when he speaks ex cathedra; this parallel, though understood, is not, of course, ever spelled out for the scrutiny of the congregation.
Assuming a minister's expertise in an area such as the arts makes for strange decisions. Playing a musical instrument is respectable; composing music is really not, with one exception: when one is composing in a Country-and-Western mode. Often what is acceptable is whatever is about 25 years out of date musically or 100 years out of date visually. Fiction is disreputable; non-fiction is scarcely less so: poetry, beyond sentimental-religious doggerel, is unthinkable. The visual arts must be representational, and what a particular minister would find "uplifting." So far, the Worldwide Church of God is infected with nothing more than the anti-ęsthetic sickness prevalent throughout Protestantism-a hangover from memories of iconoclasm. But ministers of the WWCOG expect their prejudices to have the force of law. I was once told by a minister to get rid of a beautifully-coloured abstract pastel painting on my wall, because it was "confusion," and somehow an evil thing; a modern mask of a woman's face, decorated with stylish and colourful designs also had to go, because it was "demonic."
Like God, humans create; unlike God, they do not do it out of nothing, but by rearranging the elements of the earth and of human tongues to create new things. When God created the Heavens and the Earth, he pronounced them "very good." Good, in and of themselves, and for their own sakes. He did not pronounce them "very functional," which is the Worldwide Church of God's sole standard.
If God were Utilitarian, like this organization, there would be no variety, no beauty, and humans would be naturally incapable of invention, discovery, and the creation of beauty. This church does its best to render them so incapable. Of course, this is ironic, as the greatest example of "intrinsic value," or something to be appreciated simply because it exists, is God Himself -- again, by its underlying philosophy, this church ruins the natural appreciation of goodness that often leads people to God in the first place.
I cannot put out of my mind the irony of the man who first seriously began to seek God after experiencing a sense of enlightenment and desire to go beyond the mundane when listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, now being forced to listen to Country-and-Western music and pretend it holds some spiritual meaning for him, and watch as those who understand him best are, one by one, driven out of the church. The time may come for him (if it has not already) when some minister will forbid Mahler to him as an unhealthy influence, if that minister does not find the music sufficiently saccharine and "uplifting."
It is extremely difficult being an artist or an intellectual in the Worldwide Church of God, unless you are directly hooked into the machinery of the organization, and are, in effect, part of the propaganda fide. This mirrors the subservience of the arts in totalitarian states. The excuse given is the second commandment, which only forbids images of God, not art itself. If there is any idea that this prejudice comes from the "Jewish" aspect of its doctrines, a look at the Jewish community's rich celebration of all the arts, and-as an example of religious art -- Marc Chagall's Jerusalem Windows should lay this idea to rest.
Of course, the WWCOG's literature is full of praise of beauty and excellence: it is only in sermons and counselling, as well as decisions on various issues, that show the underlying belief. This is the most extreme case I have seen of the organization's published views on a subject being twisted into its opposite when taught to the congregation.
1
I heard more about her sad fate later, long after I had left the church: see the mention in section 5.6.
