One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  In a disappointment to megachurch critics, Grassley’s report, which appeared in January 2011, after more than three years of investigation, found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing and proposed no new legislation related to church tax exemption, transparency, or financial disclosure. Yet despite the odds stacked against the finance committee’s investigation, the report did call attention to a disturbing trend among tax-exempt megaministries: the creation of networks of IRS-shielded co-businesses operating under church umbrellas. These offshoot entities often lacked any clear connection to ministerial activities. They included private airports, aircraft leasing firms, recording companies, hotels, real-estate holdings, and fleets of vehicles. The four churches that had refused to cooperate with the committee were discovered to harbor “multiple for-profit and non-profit entities” and “multiple ‘assumed’ or ‘doing business as’ names were also used.” Kenneth Copeland Ministries, for example, operated under “at least 21 ‘assumed names,’ ” which included record companies and recording studios. One minister who was not investigated by the committee, Star Scott of Calvary Temple in Sterling, Virginia, explained that the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of automobiles that he and his wife used were part of a “racing ministry.”

  “This raises the question,” the committee wrote, “of whether church status is being gamed to shield such activities of a tax-exempt entity from public scrutiny.”

  Ministers Eddie Long and Creflo Dollar, meanwhile, experienced separate legal struggles in early 2011 around the time the Grassley report came out. Reverend Long fended off court challenges by four young men who claimed the prosperity minister had coerced them into sexual relationships, charges the pastor vigorously denied. The cases were settled out of court. Reverend Dollar was arrested in summer 2012 following an argument with his fifteen-year-old daughter, who accused him of choking and beating her, claims that Dollar disputed.

  At the time of the report’s appearance in 2011, it seemed doubtful that the political culture within Congress would permit a more decisive legislative oversight of the megaministries. When challenged with calls for greater regulatory measures, the megachurches raised cries of religious persecution and used a network of magazines, television broadcasts, and social media to fend off calls for reform.

  Critics believed that more oversight was needed not only to determine whether the megapulpits’ finances fell within the boundaries of their tax-exempt status, but also whether their political activities adhered to the law. As part of their privileged IRS status, the megaministries, like all tax-exempt churches, are prohibited from electioneering and significant lobbying efforts. This was another requirement run through with leaks and loopholes. The 2012 presidential campaign witnessed the now-familiar ritual of millions of church “voter guides,” generally prepared by conservative political action committees and foundations, being distributed throughout, and by, many of the megachurches.

  As the twenty-first century opened, many of the nation’s largest ministries conducted their financial and political affairs without transparency or federal tax obligations.

  Pushing the Boundaries

  Outside the domes of the megachurches and the pep-rally atmosphere of motivational seminars, some life coaches and positivity teachers drew connections between physical endurance and peak performance. Rather than use mental preparation to bolster physical stamina, as in athletic training, they reversed the equation: Some motivational coaches prescribed physical challenges to workshop attendees as a means to achieve mental breakthroughs. Such breakthroughs, the reasoning went, would build greater self-assurance and foster a willingness to venture boldly through life.

  Done responsibly, the testing of physical boundaries could bring constructive results, as sometimes occurs in Outward Bound nature programs. From the 1980s onward, several motivational instructors used fire-walking ceremonies as a confidence-building exercise. In such programs, participants were trained to walk barefoot across hot coals. Occasional injuries occurred, usually minor burns and blisters.

  In July 2012, the San Jose Mercury News reported that during a fire-walk event hosted by life coach Anthony Robbins, and attended by six thousand people, three participants went to the hospital for burns and a total of twenty-one were injured. A San Jose fire captain told the Associated Press that several attendees reported second- or third-degree burns. The Mercury News quoted a San Jose City College student who witnessed the fire walk saying that he heard “wails of pain, screams of agony” among participants.

  The Robbins organization vociferously disputed the accounts. The Fox News morning show Fox and Friends issued an on-air correction of a segment that it had run on the event, in which it reported that “nearly two dozen” attendees were hospitalized following the fire walk. Fox’s retraction stated that “none were hospitalized” and “a few of the six-thousand received minor burns akin to a sunburn, they received on-site medical attention, and continued to participate in the event.” Regarding the reported “wails of pain,” a writer in The Huffington Post stated, “Those who participated said the young man must not have realized that seminar participants are encouraged to yell and scream to psyche themselves up and they were not all screaming in physical pain.”

  The conflicting accounts indicated the tension of covering motivational teachers like Robbins. Journalists sometimes cast a jaundiced eye at the ivory-toothed, mountainous man who seemed to be selling miracles to stadium-sized audiences. This titan-of-the-positive did, in fact, proffer innovative programs to teach participants to linguistically and psychologically “model” the habits of highly successful figures through step-by-step protocols of communication, body language, and internal dialogues, sometimes called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Robbins’s insights about self-taught limitation, and the root motives that drive us toward success or failure, were shrewder and more complex than the ideas offered by many on the motivational circuit.

  Tragedy in Sedona

  The success of the 2006 book and movie The Secret increased the demand for motivational seminars and brought new stars to the field. Hungry to copycat Robbins and build empires of their own, a few life coaches devised incredibly busy appearance schedules and developed their own brand of over-the-top methods to lead weekend workshop attendees into “breakthroughs.” In one horrendously tragic case, a motivational superstar showed no decency or judgment in how far he was willing to push his attendees.

  James Ray, a bestselling author and former telemarketer and internal trainer with AT&T, conducted a brutal Arizona sweat lodge in fall 2009 that led to multiple injuries and the deaths of three participants: two from heat stroke and one from heat-related organ failure. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide in November 2011 and sentenced to two years in prison.

  After initially rising to fame for his commentary in The Secret, and subsequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live, Ray drew growing audiences. Known for a frenetic events schedule, as well as a hard-driving presentation style, the former marketer crossed the nation delivering talks, seminars, and weekend and weeklong empowerment programs.

  In October 2009, fifty-six participants joined him at a lodge in the Sedona desert for a weeklong “Spiritual Warrior” retreat. Ray’s program for self-development was extreme: Even before the evening sweat-lodge ceremony—a sauna-like ritual adapted from Native American rites—most of his attendees had endured a night outside in the desert without food or water for thirty-six hours. The two-hour sweat lodge became a nightmarish ordeal as many participants in the darkened, broiling structure vomited, passed out, or struggled to assist others while Ray admonished them to stick it out for the sake of personal growth. Two people died at the scene and another later passed away in the hospital.

  One of the most revealing aspects of the Ray episode was the apparent lack of acknowledgment with which he and his organization initially responded to the deaths. Ray left Arizona the morning after the deaths without speaking to the survivors or v
isiting those hospitalized. He did not reach out to victims’ families until days later, after hosting another positive-thinking motivational seminar over the weekend.

  From the start, Ray was a coarser breed of motivator. Pioneers such as Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale attracted millions of people with promises of self-development. But their methods were private, contemplative, and oriented toward personal illumination. Intense and public displays were never part of their program. Yet a handful of early-twenty-first-century motivational teachers, of whom Ray was the most extreme, used psychologically or physically grueling activities, often without the full foreknowledge of participants.

  In one of the troubling aspects of intense motivational seminars, participants can experience a strong but subtle pull to “go along” with questionable exercises, especially under the urgings of workshop leaders, who typically label refusal to join in as precisely the kind of inner resistance that requires breaking down. The high fees that sometimes accompany such programs—Ray charged up to ten thousand dollars per person—also discourage participants from pulling out.

  A Simple Man

  Prosperity ministries and extreme motivational seminars created a chasm between the promise and the reality of positive thinking. The earlier ideals of the movement seemed at risk. Yet one of the most distinctive and skilled spiritual thinkers of the late twentieth century deftly avoided these pitfalls. He was a man who began his career in the tradition of the success gospel but eventually distanced himself from it. Leaving behind his old life, and with it the ethical and materialist dilemmas of positive thinking, he defined a wholly fresh concept of spiritual mind-power.

  His name was Vernon Howard. While this spiritual writer and philosopher lacked fame or renown, he possessed an extraordinary, and probably singular, gift for distilling the complexities of the world’s religious and ethical philosophies into aphoristic and deeply practical principles. Howard was the most remarkable figure to emerge from the modern mind-power movement; though as his outlook matured, it became impossible to pin any labels on him.

  In the first leg of his writing career, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Howard produced books that could have come out of the conventional New Thought catalogue. They bore such titles as Success Through the Magic of Personal Power; Time Power for Personal Success; Your Magic Power to Persuade and Command People; and Word Power: Talk Your Way to Life Leadership. His oeuvre extended to works of popular reference, trivia, and children’s nonfiction, such as Lively Bible Quizzes and 101 Funny Things to Make and Do. To the outside observer, the Los Angeles–based author was just one more writer-for-hire, of the type found in any large city.

  But in the mid-1960s, Howard’s outlook underwent a remarkable maturation. His personal genesis began with a wish to escape from the cycles of euphoria and depression that characterize the life of an ambitious writer. “I started realizing the uselessness of the extraneous,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1978. “People could tell me I was a good writer and I realized all it did was make me hungry for more applause. And when that didn’t come, I’d get hurt. I decided I had to find something without applause so I could live independently, without the approval of other people.”

  Howard found his own solution to this predicament. He left behind his career as a writer of success literature and resettled in out-of-the-way Boulder City, Nevada. “Not exactly a community noted for breeding literary mystics,” observed the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a 1979 profile. In Boulder City, from the late 1960s until his death in 1992, Howard became a wholly new kind of spiritual thinker. He produced a remarkable range of pamphlets, essays, full-length books, and cable-televised talks in which he expounded with total clarity and directness on the need to abandon the fleeting rewards of outer life in exchange for an authentic and self-directed inner existence.

  In a sense, Howard’s teachings could be said to come down to the inner meaning of the parable of Jacob and Esau. Esau sells out his birthright for a bowl of porridge—not realizing that he has given up his life for a fleeting pleasure, which quickly gives way to pain and resentment. Howard urged people to see how we do this every moment of our existence. He encouraged listeners to exchange the baubles and trinkets of worldly achievement, and the depression that quickly follows, for the rewards of real Truth: a contented, flowing, inner state that is the birthright of all people.

  Howard’s psychology pivoted on two core ideas, which ran throughout his literature. They can be summarized this way:

  1. Humanity lives from a false nature. What we call our personal will is no more than a fearful, self-promoting false “I.” This counterfeit self chases after worldly approval and security, reacting with aggression one moment and servility the next. The false “I” craves self-importance and status, which, in turn, bind the individual to the pursuit of money, careerism, and peer approval. For a person to be truly happy, this false self must be shaken off, like a hypnotic spell. In its place, the individual will discover his True Nature, which emanates from a Higher Will, or God.

  2. Human behavior is characterized by hostility, corruption, and weakness. Friends, neighbors, lovers, coworkers, and family members often manipulate or exploit us, causing agony in our lives. “It’s not negative to see how negative people really are,” Howard wrote. “It is a high form of intelligent self-protection to see thru the human masquerade.” Howard was uncompromising on this point. When someone makes a habit of diminishing you, he taught, you must resolve inwardly—and, as soon as you’re able, outwardly—to remove yourself from that person, without feeling constrained by convention, apologetics, or hesitation. Once we see through human destructiveness, we will attract relationships of a higher nature.

  Howard eventually attracted a circle of fifty or so students in the Boulder City area. “We send our message out but we have no concern for the results,” he told a reporter. “What does the size of our audience have to do with the truth?” He only occasionally ventured out of the Nevada town to deliver talks in Southern California.

  Howard did, however, reach a national audience through a prodigious output of writings, tapes, and talks, which his students videotaped and broadcast through the early medium of cable television. Many of his presentations are today preserved on DVDs and the Internet. In his lectures, Howard appeared exactly as he did in daily life: casually dressed in a polo shirt or short-sleeved button-down, physically robust though slightly paunchy. He looked like any ordinary, late-middle-aged man—not quite professorial (his edges were too rough), more like an avuncular gym teacher. But Howard’s voice and gaze were those of a distinctively poised and purposeful individual: a simple man with a profound message—namely, that inner freedom awaits you at any moment you turn to it, provided you learn to mistrust the attachments of outer life.

  In a carryover from years as a success writer, Howard gave his books sensationalistic titles, such as The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power; Esoteric Mind Power; Secrets for Higher Success; and The Power of Your Supermind. His ever-practical pamphlets—with titles such as Your Power to Say No and 50 Ways to Escape Cruel People—were advertised in popular psychology magazines and in the grocery tabloid The Weekly World News. A typical ad for one of his pamphlets read: “Worried? 50 WAYS TO GET HELP FROM GOD.” The ads were in no way cynical. Tucked amid competing advertisements for weight-loss programs and wrinkle creams, Howard’s ads, like those of mail-order prophet Frank B. Robinson, reflected the dictum to go out to the highways and hedges and bring them in. Howard knew how to reach people in need.

  In a mark of Howard’s virtuosity, his writing could be picked up almost at random—any chapter, any page, any pamphlet or book—and the reader could fully enter into his philosophy. There were no prerequisites involved, no partially thought-through idea to be sat through. Howard’s gift was to fully and continually illustrate and restate core truths in dramatically fresh ways, a talent possessed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but very few contemporary writers.

  Although Howard could not be pl
ainly classified, his psychological insights coalesced with ideas found in the work of spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti and, at times, with the distinctly important twentieth-century spiritual philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. But Howard’s language and methods possessed a down-to-earth, hands-on immediacy that perhaps no other contemporary spiritual figure displayed. He insisted that a program of self-development had to manifest real change in the ordinary hours of a person’s life. He was absolute on that point.

  “Will you trust a religion or philosophy,” Howard asked, “that does not produce a truly poised and decent human being?”

  Prove It

  Howard’s question is one to which every spiritual system must ultimately submit. It has special poignancy for New Thought and positive thinking. Since positive thinking promises achievable, practical results, it cannot sidestep the demand: prove it.

  This returns us to William James’s philosophy of pragmatism. The only viable measure of a private belief system, James believed, is its effect on conduct. And that, finally, is the one meaningful assessment of the legacy and efficacy of positive thinking. If it works, it doesn’t matter much what its detractors say. And if it doesn’t, then the philosophy has no claim on sensitive people—like the misguided instrumentalities of “heroic” medicine, it belongs in books of social history and museum cases but not in the folds of daily life.

  Most contemporary critics begin from the following perspective: well, of course positive thinking doesn’t work; to suggest otherwise is akin to believing in unicorns. Granted, they say, a determinedly positive outlook may make you a nicer carpooler, but it has nothing to do with negotiating the real demands of life, and in many regards it blinds you to them.