Heaven's Gate
Page 10
Christian or New Age?
Despite the overall level of pastiche present within Heaven’s Gate, a debate exists among scholars over the nature of the group. Some scholars, notably myself, George D. Chryssides, Christopher Partridge, and Eugene V. Gallagher, envision Heaven’s Gate as a fundamentally Christian movement with some New Age elements. Others, including Robert W. Balch and James R. Lewis, understand Heaven’s Gate as a New Age movement that also drew from Christianity, though Balch cautions that the movement seemed to vacillate and sometimes drew more from Christian sources.18 In fact, one must be careful to not draw too sharp a distinction: New Age groups often incorporate Christian concepts such as “Christ consciousness” and angels, and contemporary Christian groups sometimes draw on New Age themes such as positive thinking and mind cure. Indeed, all of the scholars noted above indicate that Heaven’s Gate blended influences from both the New Age and Christian sources. The question is how and according to what logic.
I argue here that while Heaven’s Gate emerged out of both Christian and New Age milieus—as the previous chapter indicated—Applewhite and Nettles ultimately rooted their theology within Evangelical Protestant Christianity. However, they adopted a particular interpretive schema predicated on ufological ideas drawn from the New Age movement. Heaven’s Gate was Christian, but read through a New Age lens. Leaning on the idea of worldview, one can understand this position as meaning that the group’s fundamental presuppositions and way of interpreting and giving meaning to the world began with Christian assumptions but read these through New Age approaches.
In his “The Evolution of a New Age Cult: From Total Overcomers Anonymous to Death at Heaven’s Gate,” written shortly after the 1997 suicides, Robert W. Balch sets out the position that the movement was primarily a New Age one that drew from some Christian material. He roots this position in the group’s history and the social origin of its converts. Applewhite and Nettles’s first major recruitment success came when they attracted the allegiance of Clarence Klug’s followers in the Los Angeles area. Though Klug was certainly also eclectic in his approach, his movement encapsulated many of the aspects of the New Age movement. Klug incorporated Western esotericism, Christian mysticism, and Asian influences, but Balch argues that his movement was overall a New Age one. “Students were drawn to Clarence and his teachings for many reasons. . . . Yet diverse as they were, they all belonged to a subculture that today is known as the New Age movement.”19 Balch identifies monism—the belief that everything is God—humanism, spiritual seeking, the pursuit of personal growth, and individualism as some of the hallmarks of the New Age movement and Klug’s group. Balch argues that Heaven’s Gate inherited and continued some of these New Age characteristics after absorbing Klug’s movement.
Balch and his co-author David Taylor’s earlier work on Heaven’s Gate also championed this view of the group as predicated on the New Age, though they used equivalent terms since that moniker was not yet in popular use. Balch and Taylor identify Heaven’s Gate as part of the “cultic milieu,” “occult social world,” and “metaphysical subculture,” in their 1977 study.20 Specifically these two scholars looked to the “social world of the metaphysical seeker” as one way of understanding who joined the movement and why. “Before they joined, members of the UFO cult shared a metaphysical worldview in which reincarnation, disincarnate spirits, psychic powers, lost continents, flying saucers, and ascended masters are taken for granted.”21 That cultic milieu—what today we would call the New Age—defined the religious lives of potential converts, and they brought those expectations with them as they joined Heaven’s Gate. In that regard, Balch and Taylor are correct to root the movement within the New Age, though as they note, that meant drawing from some Christian esoteric traditions as well.
James R. Lewis similarly envisions Heaven’s Gate as located within the New Age. Looking to the end of the movement’s existence, Lewis’s “Legitimating Suicide: Heaven’s Gate and the New Age Ideology” identifies the movement as fundamentally New Age. Lewis argues that “though not all aspects of Applewhite’s theological synthesis were drawn from New Age thinking, most components of the group’s overarching worldview were characteristically New Age.”22 He specifies the theosophically oriented idea of Ascended Masters, metaphysical teachings about UFOs, ancient astronaut theories, the idea of “walk-ins” (extra-worldly beings who take over human bodies), the educational metaphor of personal growth, and the out of body experience as specific examples of New Age beliefs within Heaven’s Gate. Lewis argues that “though I do not want to downplay the Christian component of their ideological synthesis, it seems clear that the Christian elements were grafted onto a basically New Age matrix.”23 Lewis also identifies the fact that most of the members were drawn from New Age subcultures as supporting his contention.
Lewis and Balch are correct that Heaven’s Gate drew most of its adherents from the New Age movement, or the cultic milieu to use the older terminology. They are also correct to note the presence of many New Age beliefs within Heaven’s Gate. Despite this, Heaven’s Gate was not fundamentally a New Age movement. Here I concur with Partridge and Chryssides, who envision the movement as a Christian one that adopted some New Age elements. Relying on Peterson’s approach to worldview, one can understand that the fundamental ways that members of Heaven’s Gate explained their surrounding world, oriented themselves within it, and created a sense of norms and values all derived from Christian sources. Yet adherents crafted individual practices, beliefs, and approaches within this worldview from New Age sources.
Historian of religions George D. Chryssides envisions Heaven’s Gate as “remarkably Biblical in [its] teachings.”24 Indeed, the movement’s founders and leaders cited the Bible in most of their writings, advertisements, public addresses, lectures, and videos. Though the movement’s members and founders had many other influences, Chryssides argues that “Applewhite’s ideas can largely be accounted for in terms of his idiosyncratic understanding of the Bible.”25 Though it seems counterintuitive, elements of Heaven’s Gate such as alien visitations, salvation through UFOs, celibacy and monastic living, and psychic powers all originated in Nettles’s and Applewhite’s reading of the Bible. As Chryssides points out, Applewhite applied a particular set of interpretive lenses to the biblical text, resulting in a reading at odds with most other Christians. One can look to the Raelian movement, a more recent Christian UFO group, as engaging in a parallel sort of endeavor.26
Christopher Partridge, also an historian of religion and culture, similarly understands Heaven’s Gate as a Christian movement, and specifically its apocalyptically oriented Protestant sub-current. Partridge correctly argues that the group’s theology emerged from premillennial dispensationalism, a form of Christian millennialism that emphasizes specific timetables for the end of the world and follows a specific interpretation of the biblical book of Revelation as promulgated by C. I. Scofield (1843–1921) and most recently popularized by Hal Lindsey (b. 1929). “While drawing on New Age ideas, science fiction, and the contemporary UFO subculture,” Partridge explains, Heaven’s Gate “needs to be understood primarily as a vernacular and idiosyncratic form of fundamentalist premillennialism.”27 The movement’s millennial timetable, vision of heavenly rapture aboard UFOs, and even its predestinarian theology all originate in various Christian theologies drawn from millennial Evangelical Protestant Christianity. While shaped by the New Age movement, Partridge argues that Heaven’s Gate was most essentially predicated on conservative Christian ideas.28
I agree with Chryssides and Partridge. Heaven’s Gate was fundamentally Christian. Its most important theological positions and texts originated in Christianity. Yet Balch and Lewis are also correct when they argue that the movement appealed primarily to individuals drawn from the New Age, and many of the movement’s ideas and practices seemed to outsiders to be influenced by the New Age movement, albeit sometimes aspects of the New Age movement that themselves originate from Christian sources. Heaven’s
Gate read its Christian theology and texts through the lens of the New Age. Because its adherents came from the New Age subculture, they brought their assumptions, approaches, and worldviews with them and used these assumptions—whether intentionally or not—as lenses through which to interpret Christian ideas. Heaven’s Gate was Christian, but Christian as read through the New Age. Again, the notions of worldview or habitus help explain why. But in order to consider how a group of bricoleurs could fuse a basically Christian habitus with various elements drawn from different traditions, one must turn to another theoretical approach within religious studies, that of hermeneutics.
Extraterrestrial Biblical Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is the science of interpreting texts (usually sacred texts), and as scholars use the term, a hermeneutic functions as a set of guiding positions used to read, interpret, and analyze such sacred texts. Myriad forms of hermeneutics exist: just within biblical hermeneutics one finds historicist hermeneutics, feminist hermeneutics, existential hermeneutics, and hermeneutics associated with a variety of religious perspectives, such as Jewish hermeneutics or Evangelical Christian hermeneutics. Various hermeneutical methods highlight certain questions and invoke different lenses in its interpretation of the texts. Readers who employ feminist hermeneutics forefront issues of gender, whereas Jewish hermeneutists highlight connections to the Midrashic and Talmudic literatures. Yet all hermeneutics guide a reader to focus on specific parts of texts, find particular themes within those texts, and provide a framework for understanding the meaning of the texts. Importantly, hermeneutists all read the same texts, but come to radically different conclusions.29
Heaven’s Gate employed an extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics, reading the Christian Bible (primarily the New Testament) through a fundamental set of assumptions: that life exists on other planets, that such alien life has interacted with Earthlings in the past and will in the future, and that biblical evidence points to such relationships. This hermeneutics draws upon a reservoir of New Age religious thought. However, the hermeneutics utilized by Heaven’s Gate is primarily biblical, since it highlights the Bible and places it at the center of its analysis. Unlike many UFO groups, Heaven’s Gate never strayed far from the Bible. The founders and members of Heaven’s Gate utilized the Bible to explain their beliefs, attract members, defend their religious positions, and ultimately to rationalize leaving their earthly bodies behind.30 While others, such as Chryssides, understand this combination as “an idiosyncratic interpretation . . . a postmodern tendency to combine sources that are not conventionally or readily juxtaposed,” I see Applewhite and Nettles’s biblical interpretations as following a rather clear set of hermeneutical guidelines.31
The extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics of Heaven’s Gate derived from the group’s founders, so it makes sense to start with the Two to consider its origins. As was previously noted, Bonnie Lu Nettles had a history of interest in UFOs and ufology before meeting Applewhite, whereas Applewhite brought with him a background in the Bible from his childhood as a preacher’s son and his short time at a Presbyterian seminary. This nexus of Christianity and theosophically inspired ufology served as the origin for the emergence of the Heaven’s Gate belief system.
Nettles’s interests in UFOs must be situated within the history of both esotericism and ufology. While the nineteenth-century founders of Theosophy proper had alluded to Venusian extraterrestrials who aided humans’ spiritual practices, and the I AM offshoot tradition had elevated such extraterrestrial masters’ importance, Nettles received both of these traditions filtered through the lens of Western esotericism, sometimes also called the occult. Esotericism includes a number of substrands, including astrology, alchemy, magic, spiritualism, and theosophy. Scholar of Western esotericism Arthur Versluis explains that esotericists claim to possess “inner or hidden knowledge” hidden throughout history and known by only a select few. With such knowledge, Versluis indicates, “aspirants seek direct spiritual insight into the hidden nature of the cosmos and of themselves.”32 The esoteric nature of reading the stars (astrology), journeying to them (astral travel), and communicating with extraterrestrials (channeling) all fit within the esoteric worldview. Nettles inherited this worldview from her involvement in the Houston Theosophical Society, and both Nettles and Applewhite explored this esoteric world through their readings. It served as one of the influences to their later extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics, though crucially they rejected esotericism’s foundational assumption that esoteric knowledge must remain secret. Like good Protestants, they claimed that the evidence of the Truth was evident in the biblical text, and that everyone can and should recognize it.
The other source of the extraterrestrial component of their extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics derived from the subculture known as ufology. Ufology emerged in the United States in the 1950s in the wake of pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sightings of what came to be called “flying saucers” in the Pacific Northwest and the crash of an unidentified flying object (UFO)—the nature of which is still in dispute—near an Army Air Base outside of Roswell, New Mexico, both in the summer of 1947. By the early 1950s, Americans had reported numerous sightings of UFOs, attracting the interest of scientists, government officials, and military analysis. Cold War fears, the dawning of the space race, the emergence of nuclear science, and the conspiracy-oriented culture of the era all contributed to a subculture of ufology wherein individuals traded knowledge and experiences about their encounters with UFOs and attempts to study them.
Historian of religions Brenda Denzler has found that the ufology subculture had clear antecedents in religion and clear connections to religious belief and practice. Individuals described encounters with UFOs using religious language to characterize their numinous encounters, and those who claimed contact with extraterrestrials generally offered narratives in keeping with either demonology or revelation. Early “contactees”—those who claimed to communicate with extraterrestrials—“had their roots not in UFO experience and investigation, but in esoteric groups,” Denzler found.33 In Denzler’s assessment, other members of the ufological subculture had created a form of Christ-less Christianity wherein UFOs offered otherworldly illumination, meaning, explanation, and salvation without referent to God, but paralleling Christian theology in their emphasis on heavenly salvation from human corruption.34
Ufology’s specific influence on Nettles’s and Applewhite’s hermeneutic lay in what has come to be called “ancient astronaut theory.” Proponents of this approach claim that in prehistoric or ancient times, extraterrestrials visited planet Earth, interacted with its inhabitants, and subsequently led Earthlings to record these visits using the limited linguistic and scientific abilities of the day. Epics such as Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, the Vedas, and Mahabharata all contain coded evidence of this history, supporters claim. Devotees of this theory also claim that archeological sites indicate records of ancient astronauts, often in the forms of carved images of figures wearing helmets or flying on strange contraptions.35 Denzler has located dozens of major texts and proponents associated with the ancient astronaut approach, any one of which Nettles and Applewhite might have encountered in their avowed explorations of spirituality and ufology.36 The most likely is Erich von Däniken’s (b. 1935) Chariots of the Gods? (1968), a best-selling book wherein the author claimed that everything from the Bible to Mesoamerican architecture evidenced the interaction of ancient extraterrestrials with premodern human beings. Von Däniken went further than most other ancient astronaut theorists in claiming that most human religions originated in these alien encounters, a position he amplified in Gods from Outer Space (1970). Von Däniken proposed that the sacred texts of the world’s ancient religions, including both the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and Hebrew Apocrypha, describe alien visitation (Gen. 1:6, Gen. 6:1–2, Ex. 25:40, Ez. 12; 1 Enoch), utilizing language appropriate to their own time and place. Space ships became chariots and clouds, since the biblical authors could only und
erstand extraterrestrial technology with reference to nature or primitive vehicles. Anthropologists Anne Cross and Pia Andersson have found wide evidence of the spread of ancient astronaut theory throughout the ufology subculture, both among religious and secular proponents of alien visitation.37 Applewhite later cited as recommended readings several videos and books that prominently featured ancient astronaut theory.
The belief that the Bible contains a record of ancient extraterrestrials interacting with human beings, and the corollary perspective that the Western biblical religious tradition is therefore one centered on extraterrestrial contact, served as the center of the hermeneutic that Nettles and Applewhite developed. All hermeneutics require assumptions. The Heaven’s Gate approach had the following assumptions: that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, that such beings have and will interact with human beings, and that the Bible records this interaction. As an explicitly Christian approach, the extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics of Heaven’s Gate builds upon von Däniken style biblical ancient astronaut theory. It assumes ancient astronaut theory’s materialistic model of envisioning supposed miracles or hierophanies as merely extraterrestrial technology or visits. In the Heaven’s Gate belief systems, all such religious events as recorded in the Bible actually represent extraterrestrial encounters mediated by alien technology. Prophetic calling was merely extraterrestrial communication, healings just medicine, angels just aliens in disguise, and visions of heavenly chariots or clouds that bear prophets or messiahs simply extraterrestrial UFOs misunderstood and recorded with what limited comprehension the ancients possessed. As Nettles and Applewhite developed their perspective, even Christ himself became an extraterrestrial, and salvation became not rebirth into Heaven, but into the literal heavens.