Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  It is, however, the best approach. Setting aside whether the claims of the founders of Heaven’s Gate or any other religion really derive from supernatural sources—claims that cannot be proven one way or another—it is hard to deny that the culture and society in which a religion develops shape its ultimate form, worldview, practices, and even beliefs. Scholars have proven this beyond doubt for the major religions of the world, all of which were once new religions. In the often-studied examples of Christianity and Judaism, historian of ancient religions Alan Segal has persuasively demonstrated the manner in which a mixing of ancient Near Eastern cultural forces shaped formative Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity as they emerged in late antiquity. For Segal, “their social, economic, and political context,” or “the real social matrix in which religious thought existed” fundamentally shaped how these two major religions developed.1 Esteemed and recognized scholars of Judaism and Christianity such as Jacob Neusner, Daniel Boyarin, and Bart D. Ehrman have all made similar arguments and claims about these two religions, and represent the academic consensus.2 Religions emerge out of cultural environments and social conditions, and must be understood with reference to those conditions, not as sui generis entities.

  So too for new religious movements (NRMs), the study of which led to the emergence of a new field of scholarship in the mid- to late twentieth century. The first wave of scholarship on NRMs paid extensive attention to how social forces and conditions impacted their development. Some of the earliest and most foundational studies considered issues of social transformations such as new trends in college education, population shifts, and delayed adolescence in the formation of the NRMs that seemed to sweep through Western society in the 1960s and 1970s.3 Scholars also paid attention to how culture shaped these emergent religions, with special attention to the counterculture and its elements of free love, drug use, spiritual exploration, and utopian communal experiments.4 All of these cultural and social developments influenced the NRMs that emerged out of them in the 1960s and 1970s. This remains true for new religious movements such as Heaven’s Gate that emerged and developed into their final form in the late 1970s into the 1980s.

  Why Study Heaven’s Gate?

  When people learn that I’ve been writing a book on Heaven’s Gate they usually want to know why. Wasn’t this a small group, just under forty people, which killed itself off in a far corner of America’s West Coast? Since the group is now long gone, why bother studying them now? I have some sympathy for these sorts of questions, since there seem to be so many important contemporary trends in American religion that merit serious attention, trends upon which scholars like me perhaps should focus instead of studying a small group of dead people. Why not consider the rising number of Americans who consider themselves “none of the above” when asked about their religious affiliation (the “nones”), a group that represents up to a fifth of the U.S. population according to one recent study?5 Why not study the rise of Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, and the various forms of conservative American religiosity that have had such a powerful impact on American politics and society? What of the fusion of religion and popular culture, of individuals who find spiritual satisfaction in bookstores, movies, science, and other individually focused activities?

  These are good questions, and good research topics. And, in fact, this study of Heaven’s Gate is just another way of answering the same questions and considering similar themes, since it uncovers the religious transformations and developments that occurred during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that led to these new characteristics within American religion. The religious “nones,” for example, reject the forms of institutionalized, denominationalized, professionalized religion that members of Heaven’s Gate did as well, and they engage in the same sort of search for alternatives as did the movement’s adherents. Likewise, the same forces that helped Evangelicalism rise and become so prominent also helped Heaven’s Gate, just as some of the same theologies of being set apart and looking toward heavenly rewards shaped these two very different movements. And members of Heaven’s Gate certainly reflected—and pre-dated—the recent turn toward various forms of popular culture and individual spiritual quests as sources of religious truths. All this is to say that, although the group was small and is now defunct, the study of Heaven’s Gate reveals some very important facets of American religious culture.

  But beyond that, I have found that nearly everyone with whom I have spoken regarding this group and my research has agreed that Heaven’s Gate is intriguing and merits a detailed analysis. People find it so fascinating and interesting because it is the sort of transgressive religious movement that seems so utterly foreign and strange that it defies explanation, yet makes the same sort of trite claims of offering salvation, eternal life, and heavenly rewards that bombard Americans every day on the airwaves, public squares, billboards, and streets. Heaven’s Gate’s basic message of offering heavenly salvation and leaving behind a broken life on Earth is not that far removed from the message offered by most forms of American Christianity, yet its specific form of salvation and the means of achieving it transgress the basic assumptions of most Americans. One simply does not wait for the arrival of flying saucers to escape the Earth’s atmosphere, and one does not commit suicide to force the issue. This mixture of religious banality and religious transgression marks Heaven’s Gate as innately interesting to many people. Put another way: the study of a group offering eternal heavenly rewards is not particularly new or noteworthy, nor does it attract much outside interest. The study of a group making seemingly bizarre claims about space aliens and suicide is noteworthy but also foreign and strange. Yet when one combines the two, one discovers a group that is simultaneously foreign and familiar, exotic and ordinary.

  Finally, there is another reason that I have written about Heaven’s Gate. Members of the movement sought above all else to transcend their humanity. They tried to dehumanize themselves and become extraterrestrial heavenly beings. Ironically, after their death the media and broader public sentiment did the same thing: dehumanized them. Journalists, comedians, media commentators, and religious leaders engaged in rhetorical attacks on the Heaven’s Gate dead, dismissing them as crazy, delusional, and better off dead. Yet these were thirty-nine human beings who died in Rancho Santa Fe, and they had histories, feelings, and religious beliefs and practices. In other words, they had a story. This book tells their story.

  But Weren’t Members of Heaven’s Gate Brainwashed?

  This book’s method of study focuses on unpacking the worldview, beliefs, and practices of members of Heaven’s Gate. Yet many in the media and public consider this group a cult, filled with brainwashed victims rather than real religious adherents. One might raise an obvious objection about studying the group in the way I do: weren’t members simply brainwashed into believing and practicing what they did, and therefore the specifics are somewhat irrelevant? Would they not have believed and done anything? In a word: no. In somewhat more words: members of Heaven’s Gate chose to join a group that significantly curtailed their freedoms and ultimately asked of them their lives, but they did so because they felt that they were making the best choice they could. To quote Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Uhura in the Star Trek series much beloved by members of Heaven’s Gate, and the sister of one of the adherents who had committed suicide, “[m]y brother was highly intelligent and a beautifully gentle man. He made his choices and we respect those choices.”6 While one does not need to accept the decisions made by members of the group, one must still accept them as decisions.

  The contemporary academic theories of conversion, socialization, and what one might call “brainwashing” (though few scholars call it that any more) admit that the process works better to keep people engaged within a religious system they have already accepted than it does to explain why they joined in the first place, though one should be clear that most scholars in fact reject the very notion of brainwashing as pseudoscientific.7 As we will see, the idea of brainw
ashing originated in the Cold War era as an explanation for why some captive American soldiers had defected to North Korea, and at its base it is a theory that assumes its victims are prisoners of war subjected to torture, confinement, sensory and nutritional deprivation, and a single-minded attempt to manipulate them. This model does not work very well outside of the prisoner-of-war scenario, as numerous sociologists of religion have noted.8 Members of Heaven’s Gate were not physically confined, nor were they tortured or forcibly imprisoned.9 During the formative stage of the group’s history, its members seldom even saw their leaders. The traditional model does not work.

  This is not to say that members of Heaven’s Gate were not influenced by their leaders, nor that one can so easily dismiss various theories of psychological persuasion. Clearly the leaders of Heaven’s Gate engaged in acts of religious persuasion. They used adherents’ emotions, preexisting convictions, hopes, and fears to attract them to join the movement and stay within it, though it must be noted that they also encouraged members who seemed to be waffling to leave. This is of course basic advertising, and one finds the same process at work in most religious movements. Heaven’s Gate represents an extreme example because the group’s leaders demanded so much from their followers and offered far more in return. According to the rational choice model of religious social dynamics, this sort of trade-off of high demands and high rewards functions to attract a niche of serious spiritual seekers, just as very costly commercial goods (expensive cars or foods) also attract niche consumers.10 This also helps explain why Heaven’s Gate remained so small. Members joined not because of some sort of magical psychological or spiritual trick that the leaders conjured, but because they were looking for something and believed that they found it in Heaven’s Gate.

  Yet members did report that the leaders of the group were special, and this specialness can help explain why individuals stayed in the group even though so much was asked of them. The founders and leaders of Heaven’s Gate, Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, exerted a powerful influence and control over their followers that scholars of religion call charisma. In Max Weber’s formulation, charisma is “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”11 While much of this definition and approach relies upon highly subjective observation and interpretation, first-hand accounts of Applewhite’s and Nettles’ leadership indicated that the two exerted profound charismatic authority and leadership over their followers. While this does not support the idea of brainwashing, it does indicate why some people joined the movement. It also helps explain why some people stayed, since those who left would immediately lose access to the powerful charisma of the movement’s leaders and the ensuing feeling of connection to the “superhuman,” in Weber’s words. Yet others who joined did so without ever having met Nettles or Applewhite, so one can hardly argue that charisma alone accounts for the rise of Heaven’s Gate.

  Still, while the two leaders’ charisma functioned to solidify their authority, it was the content of their religious teachings—namely beliefs and practices—that adherents used to structure their lives and seek transcendence. It is those aspects of the religious system of Heaven’s Gate that are considered here. At its heart, this book presents two basic arguments. First, there is a reason that Heaven’s Gate began, developed, and ended the way it did. The movement’s history and the story of its religious evolution must be understood as integral to understanding why the members of Heaven’s Gate ended their earthly lives the way they did. A lack of attention to the lives and history of the movement’s members before the suicides leads to a failure to understand why people joined, stayed, and died as they did, and why many more stayed for a while but then left. Second, I argue that Heaven’s Gate was not a complete aberration. It reflected many of the same currents at work in American culture and society. Culture and society shaped the movement, and only with reference to them can we understand it. The afterword of this book extends and flips this argument, showing that the study of Heaven’s Gate also reveals certain aspects of American culture and society.

  The first chapter, “The Cultural and Religious Origins of Heaven’s Gate,” considers the manner in which the movement that eventually took the name of Heaven’s Gate arose and developed. It is the only strictly chronological chapter in the book, and looks to how the two co-founders of the movement developed a new religious synthesis and social movement based on their individual spiritual pursuits. I argue in this chapter that Heaven’s Gate reflected not only the idiosyncratic perspectives and experiences of its founders but also the cultural context of its time. Specifically I look to the religious context within which both founders moved and operated, including the theosophical tradition, New Age spiritual seeking, and an apocalyptic-oriented Christianity. I trace the development of the movement from its two co-founders to its eventual fruition into an inchoate social movement that grew, shrunk, then coalesced into a roving monastic community. This initial chapter ends roughly with the summer of 1976, when the movement went “off the grid” and ended its active engagement with the outside world. The only other generally chronologically organized chapter in this book, the final one, likewise considers only the end of the movement.

  Sandwiched between these historically oriented chapters are four thematic considerations of Heaven’s Gate. The first of these, “The Spiritual Quest and Self-Transformation: Why People Joined Heaven’s Gate,” looks to why and how individuals converted into the Heaven’s Gate movement. In following the original sociological scholarship that Robert W. Balch and David Taylor produced in the first year of the movement, I argue that members joined because they were spiritual seekers on quests for religious truth. Heaven’s Gate offered an opportunity to embrace that quest, but it also offered a certainty and finality that allowed adherents to end their spiritual quests and commit to a single religious path. Looking to the movement’s converts from the 1990s I find the same pattern. Finally, this chapter considers the approach of Janja Lalich and her model of bounded choice, which offers some perspective on why members stayed within the movement but is of only limited value in considering their trajectories into the group.

  The third chapter looks to what scholars of religion call the worldview of Heaven’s Gate. Heaven’s Gate emerged out of two theological worlds: Evangelical Christianity and the New Age movement, particularly the sub-movement within the New Age tradition concerned with alien visitations and extraterrestrial contact. Heaven’s Gate’s leaders and members drew from a broad array of influences, including secular ufology (the subculture of people interested in UFOs), science fiction, and conspiracy theories, in addition to their religious influences. I argue in this chapter that such bricolage or pastiche reflects contemporary postmodern culture, but I disagree with scholars who envision the movement’s bricolage as an end in and of itself. Rather, underlying Heaven’s Gate’s postmodern pastiche of ufology, Christianity, the New Age, science and technology, and science fiction was a single ideal of what I call an extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutic. The adherents of Heaven’s Gate read the Christian Bible (primarily the New Testament) through a fundamental set of assumptions shaped by their various influences, but framed by Christian assumptions. My approach in this chapter resolves a scholarly debate over the nature of the Heaven’s Gate movement as either fundamentally Christian or New Age.

  Chapter 4 turns to the specific beliefs that adherents of Heaven’s Gate upheld. Members created a system of beliefs that contained all the usual hallmarks of a religious theology, namely beliefs about salvation (soteriology), the order of the universe (cosmology), and the end of things (eschatology). As a Christian group, they also developed an understanding of the nature of Jesus (Christology). Fr
om the perspective of Heaven’s Gate members, their beliefs provided them with meaning, identity, and a sense of their place in the universe. This chapter pays special attention to the development of the movement’s millennialism, specifically the way in which the group adopted and adapted a form of Protestant Christian apocalypticism called premillennial dispensationalism. It also traces how Applewhite and Nettles successfully transformed their movement’s theology at several points when their apocalyptic predictions failed to materialize, and how after Nettles’s death Applewhite was able to fundamentally transform Heaven’s Gate’s vision of the nature of the human self and the form that salvation would take. This more than any other shift permitted the eventual adoption of a theology of suicide and propelled members to believe that their beliefs demanded of them that they lay down their lives if they truly desired eternal salvation.