Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  The spiritual quest emerges as a commonality among most of the converts from the 1990s. Like Tddody, Qstody did not specify what sort of spiritual pursuits he followed before joining Heaven’s Gate, though he did describe his efforts generally as “constant asking long before I entered the class [which] was the key . . . the constant begging for the real facts, the real truth.”35 Gldody, a member who had joined only three years before the suicides, similarly explained that he had been “searching for a long time” before Tllody first introduced him to the group through some posters and fliers.36 Wknody, a 1994 convert, also did not indicate the details of her spiritual quest, but described her previous life as a growth experience preparing her and culminating in her eventual encounter with Heaven’s Gate. “I [had] more lessons to learn in order to meet the requirements needed to graduate from this human kingdom to the Next Level,” she explained of her life before joining the movement.37

  Of the recent converts, only Yrsody gives any indication of the sort of spiritual pursuits and religious quests in which she participated before joining Heaven’s Gate. While she avoided any mention of such topics in her Exit Video, her written statement made frequent mention of her rejection of “cosmic consciousness,” the “new age,” “meditation, mantras, and many other [meditation] techniques,” and various forms of channeling. Yrsody’s familiarity with meditative approaches and the various channeling techniques indicate her likely previous association with such spiritual pursuits. Her explicit description of the manner in which channelers access spirits and her rejection of it as dangerous because such “disincarnate spirits” posed significant spiritual and psychological harm indicate that she was at least highly fluent with New Age religious pursuits, if not an active participant.38 One can safely infer that Yrsody had explored various New Age spiritual pursuits including channeling and Asian-derived practices before she joined Heaven’s Gate.

  Although not among the thirty-nine adherents who ended their terrestrial lives in Rancho Santa Fe, a Heaven’s Gate member named Gbbody offers another example of the trajectory in—and in his case, out—of the group. Gbbody joined in 1993 after reading one of the group’s newspaper advertisements. His sister remembers Gbbody as introverted yet curious, and Gbbody had previously explored topics including Wicca, Gnosticism, ufology, Buddhism, American transcendentalism, and science fiction. He claimed to have seen a UFO as a child.39 He joined the movement after corresponding with members, flying to Texas to rendezvous with them shortly after Christmas. There he found individuals who shared the same interests and passions, including the same spiritual topics. But more than spiritual connection, Gbbody found a sense of belonging in Heaven’s Gate. His sister reflects, “I could hear the increased awareness and communication skills in the words he chose. I also heard the strong feelings for the cult that was his chosen family, and the struggle to find his own life.”40

  Gbbody left the movement because he felt he could not live up to the demands of his fellows in Heaven’s Gate. Yet the attraction to the movement and the sense of belonging remained. In Gbbody’s own words, written shortly after departing the group in 1995, “But more than anything else they were my family. I loved them dearly. We were a tight group. Leaving was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I miss them greatly.”41 Here we see the same combination of forces that drew other converts into the movement: a search for meaning and identity, but in Gbbody’s case an even stronger need to find a spiritual community in which he belonged. Two months after the Heaven’s Gate suicides Gbbody took his own life, seeking to join his coreligionists in the Next Level.42

  What then can we say about the individuals who (re-)joined Heaven’s Gate almost two decades after it began, nearly all of whom never had an opportunity to meet the movement’s co-founder? In terms of their religious journeys into the movement, very little distinguished those individuals from the first wave of converts in the 1970s. All members had engaged in forms of spiritual exploration and the spiritual quest, in at least one case (and probably more) participating in the same sort of New Age spiritual pursuits though separated by two decades. The picture that emerges of converts to Heaven’s Gate is that of spiritual seekers who had become frustrated by their many pursuits, rejected the various alternatives within the existing religious marketplace, and in turn had begun to reject the very nature of human earthly society. Heaven’s Gate offered a literal escape from this atmosphere.

  Brainwashing and Bounded Choice

  Just three years after Tddody, Qstody, and Yrsody joined Heaven’s Gate, the movement ended in the mass suicides of its members when the adherents and leader of Heaven’s Gate abandoned what they considered a corrupted broken Earth to seek salvation in the stars. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the bodies in Rancho Santa Fe, the news media characterized Heaven’s Gate members as “brainwashed.” Perhaps the most explicit description, since it invoked the original cinematic imagery of brainwashing that subsequently flavored all use of the word, came from literature and arts critic Frank Rich. He opined in the otherwise staid New York Times that Heaven’s Gate members were the victims of “psychological coercion achieved through isolation and sensory deprivation,” and likened them to “a brainwashing victim in ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’”43 Rich’s Manchurian Candidate reference points to a 1959 book and 1962 movie that describes a psychologically conditioned soldier kidnapped and brainwashed by Communists, then released as a sleeper agent to destabilize American society. In popular religious culture, the reference alludes to the image of the brainwashed victim as a passive object of destructive mind control, and was a staple of Cold War stereotypes of American defectors to Communism as well as countercultural youth who had become involved in new religions. This sort of rhetoric discounts the entire notion of religious conversion and why a person would join a group like Heaven’s Gate by offering a ready-made answer: they were duped and psychologically manipulated.

  Brainwashing offers a simple explanation for why people would engage in religious practices and accept religious beliefs that the majority of Americans consider bizarre or invalid. Looking at other examples of how journalists and members of the public employ the term “brainwashing,” it generally functions to distance the subjects of the term from broader society and explain their non-normative behavior. In their study of the phenomenon, sociologists Thomas Robbins, Dick Anthony, and James McCarthy found that the idea of brainwashing was a “social weapon” used by critics of new religious movements, rather than a concept rooted in any empirical evidence.44 Robbins, Anthony, and McCarthy go so far as to accuse advocates of brainwashing of “legitimating repression” through their bias against new religions.45 While striking a far less accusatory tone, historian Sean McCloud has noted that descriptions of brainwashing within media sources served as means of exerting social control, labeling which groups ought to be considered legitimate and which illegitimate. McCloud notes that the claim of brainwashing served to mark authentic from unauthentic religion with special reference to race—groups led by Asian leaders that drew white American converts were especially likely to be seen as brainwashing, though by the time of the Jonestown deaths in 1977, the trope of brainwashing had come to extend across the racial divide.46

  Brainwashing certainly makes it easier for families to understand why their loved ones joined a group like Heaven’s Gate, since it makes the members victims instead of adherents. It also provides a rhetorical tool for ex-members who were embarrassed or ashamed of their former membership in such a group, since it abrogates them of any responsibility for their past actions. Research into the rhetoric of brainwashing shows that this is precisely how individuals use the concept—as a means of transferring responsibility from the adherents of a group to the leaders. It functions on a rhetorical level to delegitimize new religions such as Heaven’s Gate. James T. Richardson, one of the foremost scholars of new religions and the law, notes that the term functions as a powerful metaphor in precisely this way:

  “Brainwashing” is a
metaphor, but has become a powerful social weapon to use against unpopular groups or other entities which are attempting to recruit participants. It is impossible to wash someone’s brain, of course, but the term has come to refer to any form of disfavored persuasion. The concept is the antithesis of agency and volition, and assumes that individuals can be tricked or persuaded by some magical psychological techniques to literally change their minds if not their basic personality.47

  Brainwashing as a rhetorical tool therefore functions as a powerful tool in assuaging public anxieties over the legitimacy of new religions by effectively limiting the need to take them seriously. In the case of Heaven’s Gate this need was particularly acute, since religious suicide is deeply threatening to the social order. Brainwashing also functions as a ready-made explanation for family and friends of those who joined the group, excusing their actions on the grounds that they were not really in control of themselves.

  Useful as it may be rhetorically, the concept of brainwashing has lost all academic credibility. The clearest refutation of brainwashing derives from Eileen Barker’s longitudinal study of the Unification Church, a movement often accused of brainwashing. As already noted, Barker found that the movement she studied failed to successfully recruit the vast majority of individuals with which it came into contact, and that many who did join eventually left. In her interviews with prospective, current, and former members of the Unification Church, Barker found no evidence of brainwashing, but rather a small group of individuals who sought what Barker calls “freedom in a cage,” a sense of spiritual fulfillment achieved by joining a strict and insular religious group.48 The numbers in Heaven’s Gate support this perspective. Hundreds joined the group and most left, with all but three of the first group of converts having abandoned the movement. Only thirty-eight (plus Applewhite) remained, with several more having left the movement in the months preceding the suicide itself. Since 1989, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, American Sociological Association, and American Psychiatric Association have all officially gone on record rejecting any sort of scientific claims as to the validity of brainwashing. Richardson notes that American courts consider the concept pseudoscientific and that the U.S. legal system has rejected its validity both in criminal cases (U.S. v. Fishman [743 F. Supp., N.D. Cal., 1990]) and civil cases (Green and Ryan v. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi et al. [US District Court, Washington, DC, 13 March 1991, Case #87-0015 OG]).49

  In addition to failing on empirical grounds, brainwashing fails on a fundamental level of logic: it is circular. Proponents of this doomed theory have proffered numerous attempts to define brainwashing, yet all attempts to create distinctions between brainwashing and routine religious conversion are entirely subjective and therefore dependent on the perspective of the outside observer. As J. Gordon Melton has indicated, these attempts to define brainwashing lack scientific rigor and are seldom presented in a scholarly peer-reviewed forum. Distilling the various approaches of delineating brainwashing, Melton summarizes the brainwashing paradigm as it is popularly conceived as “that people are put into a hyper-suggestible altered state of consciousness through hypnosis, drugs, debilitation or other means, and then their worldviews are transformed against their wills through conditioning techniques.”50 Yet determining what is or is not against one’s will—especially when the ‘victim’ claims not to be brainwashed and acting within their own free will—is impossible. Nor is there any clear distinction between “hyper-suggestible states” and normal human credulity (some might say gullibility). Fundamentally, one cannot distinguish a victim of brainwashing from any other sort of religious believer without first knowing whether the person was brainwashed! While the vast majority of people—including myself—find the message of Heaven’s Gate unconvincing and its final religious acts appalling, our own psychological or even spiritual discomfort does not provide a good enough reason to simply assume that its members were brainwashed.

  Bounded Choice and Heaven’s Gate

  Several proponents of a revived academic theory of brainwashing have offered new formulations of the concept. Such attempts have resulted in a great deal of controversy within the field of the study of new religious movements, and very few scholars within the subfield have entertained such revivals of what specialists consider a flawed and inherently biased concept. Yet one attempt to craft a modified reformulation of brainwashing bears direct relevance for the study of Heaven’s Gate. This is Janja Lalich’s concept of “bounded choice,” a form of psychological entrapment related to the classic idea of brainwashing. Lalich offers her formulation of this concept in an eponymously named book, and in fact she focuses on Heaven’s Gate as one of the two case studies supporting her theory. In Lalich’s assessment, Heaven’s Gate members represent an example of such bounded choice. Its members lived within a “self-sealing” system wherein they experienced only an illusion of choice, and in fact had become entrapped by the charisma, beliefs, and social controls of the movement. As such, their choices had become bound to the group and its charismatic leader, resulting in their inability to make any choice other than suicide in 1997. This is a somewhat darker version of Barker’s idea of the freedom of the cage, with the added idea that the cage is actually and not only metaphorically locked.

  Lalich’s approach does not really consider why members converted. Rather it focuses on why members stayed, which marks her approach as distinct from the older brainwashing approaches. That is, the bounded choice model presupposes membership and adherence within a group before it can explain why individuals acted as they did. Lalich does not claim that members of the movement were duped, deluded, or manipulated into joining the movement, which marks her approach as far more nuanced than earlier brainwashing theories. This approach therefore does not answer the question posed by this chapter of why people joined Heaven’s Gate. Yet it does attempt to answer the related question of why they stayed, and therefore merits consideration.

  The concept of charismatic commitment functions as the core of the bounded choice concept. According to Lalich, charismatic commitment exists as a state wherein members of a group centered on a charismatic leader or leaders exhibit “a fusion between the ideal of personal freedom (as promised in the stated goal of the group or its ideology) and the demand for self-renunciation (as prescribed by the rules and norms),” with the result that “the believer becomes a ‘true believer’ at the service of a charismatic leader or ideology.”51 Adherents demonstrating charismatic commitment willingly perform actions that otherwise they would not, and engage in practices and hold beliefs that outsiders would consider irrational or bizarre. Lalich notes as examples beliefs such as claims of raising the dead, polygamy, and terrorism.52 For members of the movements predicated on charismatic commitment—groups defined by Lalich as cults—the only true choices present are whether to accept and obey the instructions and requirements of their group, or to leave. Yet even departure may be difficult, for Lalich indicates that leaders exert psychological pressure on their followers to stay, and have configured their belief and social systems to discourage defection.

  Lalich emphasizes a sort of role-oriented maintenance of beliefs and membership, a set of assumptions and practices by which adherents of groups like Heaven’s Gate come to believe that they must follow a strict set of guidelines and cannot deviate from them. As Lalich explains,

  To be a participant in the group means playing by the rules; and in such groups, there is only one set of rules, or rather only one set of rules that matters. Once a person “chooses” to stay in the group, the impermeable, albeit invisible, confines of the structure do not allow for the possibility to “act otherwise” in any significant sense—unless, of course, the person leaves the group.53

  Within Heaven’s Gate, one can find numerous such rules. Most of them appear quite early in the movement’s history, and exist in written forms in the documents that Applewhite and Nettles produced in the late 1970s. These include prohibitions against sex, drugs, entertainment, and v
arious other activities associated with the human level rather than the Next Level. As Lalich points out, individuals who chose to join and stay within Heaven’s Gate accepted the validity and value of these rules, and saw no possibility of acting outside them. Yet I do not quite understand Lalich’s use of scare quotes around “chooses” or “act[ing] otherwise,” nor the claim that these various rules were in some way invisible. Those who chose to join Heaven’s Gate knew exactly what such rules entailed. The group’s 1977 statements that they distributed to potential members before joining included instructions to leave behind one’s humanity, abandon one’s family, give away all of one’s possessions, and avoid all human qualities. The third statement explicitly notes that members will not engage in any forms of affection, sex, or vocation.54 Those who attended the recruitment meetings reported that the founders insisted on a puritanical set of behavioral guidelines. Potential members who joined in the 1980s and 1990s were provided an explicit set of rules that noted restrictions against everything from reliance on one’s own mind (rather than the Next Level mind), putting oneself first, or criticizing the other members or leaders of the movement.55 Members entered a highly regimented system of social control, but they did not only appear to “choose” (as indicated by Lalich’s scare quotes), they really did choose.