Heaven’s Gate was American religion wrought small, a social barometer that revealed the religious climate at the turn of the twenty-first century. Having examined the group’s history, development, worldview, beliefs, practices, and end with reference to that religious climate, this afterword very briefly lays out four ways that I see this to be true: its highly Protestant biblical grounding; its appeal to seekers of new and alternative religions; the place of science and techno-religious thinking in Heaven’s Gate; and their interest in the end-times and apocalyptic thought. Together, these hint at powerful forces at work in American religious culture, forces that shaped the development of Heaven’s Gate as well as a myriad of other religious movements, both old and new, well-respected and marginal.
Although at first glance seemingly bizarre, even alien, the beliefs, practices, and worldview of Heaven’s Gate emerged from a highly Christian foundation, specifically American Protestantism. As shaped by waves of awakenings and revivals, and especially by the rise of the evangelical tradition in the nineteenth century, American Protestantism emphasizes the individual quest for salvation, the centrality of the Bible, salvation through otherworldly action, a primitivistic emphasis on restoring the “original” nature and meaning of Christianity, and a homespun hermeneutical model eschewing higher academic study of the Bible and emphasizing the common sense of relatively untrained people to ascertain the true meaning of the biblical text. Each of these elements appears in Heaven’s Gate as well, as this book has laid out. Nettles and Applewhite long envisioned their religious work as discovering the true nature of the Bible through their idiosyncratic hermeneutic approach, and offering this rediscovered truth to the world where individuals could choose to accept it or not. Even at the end of the movement when Applewhite introduced a neo-Calvinist approach of predestination—itself a highly Protestant theological position—he left room for individuals to decide to accept their predestined state, a theological twist that nineteenth-century American evangelicals would recognize as a typically American synthesis of free-will Arminianism and predestinarian Calvinism.
One can posit several reasons why Protestant assumptions figured so heavily in Heaven’s Gate. Nettles was raised Baptist, Applewhite was the son of a Presbyterian minister who himself briefly attended seminary. Yet even more importantly, Protestant models suffuse American religious culture, influencing how groups and individuals outside specific Protestant orbits have functioned in the American context. Jay P. Dolan’s and Jonathan D. Sarna’s research has shown how American Catholics and American Jews, respectively, have internalized Protestant categories and how this has influenced their religious practices and beliefs.5
Yet while influenced by Protestantism and revealing the broad diffusion of Protestant religious themes into American religious culture, Heaven’s Gate clearly split from its biblical Protestant moorings and moved beyond into the realm of alternative religions. This itself is strikingly American, replicating a pattern stretching back to colonial times. Lacking a national religious establishment and with a long history of relative religious freedom—enshrined in legal form in Pennsylvania’s Great Law (1682), Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777), and of course the Bill of Rights (1789)—alternative religions have long thrived in American soils. Quakers, Shakers, Mormons, Millerites, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine, Zen Beatniks, Hare Krishnas, Moonies, Neo-Kabbalists, Neo-Pagans, Satanists, New Agers, and innumerable gurus, mystics, and channelers have all made America their home. Of course such groups face difficulties and sometimes overt persecution, but their presence speaks to the persistence of this strand of American religiosity. While the individual players have changed, this element of alternative American religious culture continues to thrive.
Scholars have offered several reasons why groups like Heaven’s Gate spring forth in America, ranging from the “supply-side” approach of William Sims Bainbridge, Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and their co-authors that models American religion on an economic marketplace paradigm, to Jon Butler’s or Catherine L. Albanese’s intellectual- and cultural-history-based approaches that emphasize the spread of ideas through diffuse religious and social movements.6 The structural, intellectual, and cultural arguments are all surely correct: America provides suitable and fruitful ground for the development of new religions and alternative forms of spiritual searching. These groups reflect not only their particular historical circumstances, but a strand of religious yearning that permeates American culture, a “democratization,” in the words of historian Nathan O. Hatch, that enables individuals to create and lead their own religious movements, as well as join new ones.7 Heaven’s Gate reflects this strand of alternative American religiosity, continuing the tradition of these other groups of offering new religious options and opportunities that some individuals at least thought more fitting than other options.
Moving from social and cultural forces to specific elements of Heaven’s Gate’s religious worldview, one cannot help but notice the place of science and techno-religious thinking in Heaven’s Gate and how this reflects a broader American preoccupation with science and technology in the late twentieth century. Of course this fascination is not new, and scholars have traced a pattern of interest in the scientific and technological innovations born of the “village enlightenment” back to the nineteenth century.8 Yet the American postwar era—the decades after the development of the Atomic Bomb and the explosion of scientific and technological advances following it—witnessed science and technology becoming increasingly central. American popular culture fixated on new scientific developments such as nuclear science, Einstein’s theories of relativity, and new medical discoveries. Technology became increasingly omnipresent in homes and leisure, invading kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms through televisions and other new appliances. Americans looked to scientists for social and at times even moral leadership, and major technology companies such as DuPont promised “Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry,” often shortened in the public mind to merely “better living through chemistry.”9
Historian Paul Boyer has traced a profound connection between science-infused post-Bomb culture and American religious thought, both the obvious apocalyptic elements as well as more positive millennial dreams of utopian futures.10 Religious movements as diverse as mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Evangelical Protestants have all responded to recent scientific and technological developments, often through either appealing to science as a support for existing theological positions, or attempting to redirect, control, or challenge scientific and technological advances or positions. Rabbinic or ecclesial statements on nuclear proliferation and environmental damage, the Evangelical-dominated Intelligent Design movement, Buddhist appeals to neuroscientific studies of meditation, and attempts from many quarters to harmonize the sometimes-bizarre discoveries of contemporary cosmology and physics with religious cosmologies all represent religious engagements with science and technology. I have elsewhere written of how new religious movements have been similarly engaged, using sometimes similar approaches.11 Heaven’s Gate tracks broader religious currents in this way as well.
For many observers, Heaven’s Gate attracted the most interest because of the way it ended, and its leaders’ and members’ focus on the end-times and apocalypticism certainly captured widespread attention. Yet here too, Heaven’s Gate represented a broader religious sentiment. American popular interest in millennialism has appeared in waves, with particular focus during times of perceived crisis such as throughout the Cold War and the “War on Terror.”12 Evangelical Protestant groups in particular often focus on interpreting the biblical book of Revelation with reference to current events. During the time of Heaven’s Gate’s emergence, Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth heralded this form of Christian millennial thought with reference to the Cold War. Today, websites have replaced books as the main medium for dissemination of such ideas. Readers of websites such as
“Rapture Ready,” “Samaritan Sentinel,” “Rapture Watch,” and “Prophecy News Watch” keep Evangelicals apprised of global developments that might signal the end of times and the advent of Christ, with special interest in terrorism, politics, and economic problems.13 Sandwiched between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror, mass interest in the possible religious relevance of the year 2000 and the possibility of a Y2K computer bug caused by deficient computer programming invoked similar millennial feelings. Heaven’s Gate fits within this American apocalyptic trajectory.
Heaven’s Gate in fact prefigured some of the later developments in millennial thought, especially in the way that they internalized and translated fears about government repression and control into a religious system. Decades later, concerns about such oppression and the emergence of a “new world order” have become so routine among millennially oriented Evangelical Protestants that one can barely speak of such fears as a form of stigmatized knowledge. Particularly after the emergence of the Tea Party, with its quasi-religious appeal to small government and rootedness of America within Christian values and morality, the sort of millennial suspicion Heaven’s Gate directed at the federal government has become quite mainstream.14 Their fears of global conspiracy meanwhile prefigured the left-wing Occupy movement and other anti-globalization groups that fear a global capitalist conspiracy undermining freedoms and the natural order.15
One could posit many other ways in which Heaven’s Gate modeled, prefigured, or reflected developments in American religious culture and society more broadly. The manner in which members of Heaven’s Gate incorporated elements drawn from popular culture—science fiction in their case—into a meaningful religious worldview reveals the breakdown between high and low culture, entertainment, and religion. Collectively, these and other manners in which Heaven’s Gate was embedded within American culture demonstrate how and why this new religion is not the aberration that some might think. Heaven’s Gate is a religious movement worth serious study. Members may have gone beyond what most Americans do, believe, and think about in their religious lives, but in many ways the adherents of this new religion were no different from other Americans. They engaged in spiritual quests, seeking a more meaningful and accessible relationship with what functioned for them as the divine. They looked to heavenly salvation, and asked what relationship bodily human existence could have to that otherworldly salvation. They delved into the Bible, and from it they created and lived within a religious worldview. They built homes and a meaningful social and physical world around that worldview. They formed a community and tried to live (and die) with meaning. In doing all this, they looked to the physical heavens in outer space and the beings and vehicles of that “Next Level.” Like many Americans, they believed in UFOs, extraterrestrials, and superhuman intelligence. They merely fused those beliefs with their religious ones. Heaven’s Gate was, in this sense, a UFO religion. But it was a particular kind. It was America’s UFO religion.
NOTES
Many of the materials I cite are located in a single anthology: Heaven’s Gate, How and When “Heaven’s Gate” (The Door to the Physical Kingdom Level Above Human) May Be Entered: An Anthology of Our Materials (Mills Spring, NC: Wildflower Press, 1997). The pagination within this book is complicated, with page numbers restarting within each chapter. “2:1” therefore refers to chapter 2, page 1; “A:3” refers to the afterword, page 3. Included in this anthology, the “’88 Update” has its own pagination as well, but I have followed its pagination within the chapter of the anthology encompassing this source. Of note, I also cite materials from the unpublished first draft of this book with a nearly identical title: Heaven’s Gate, “How and When ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (The Door to the Physical Kingdom Level Above Human) May Be Entered: An Anthology by Representatives from the Kingdom of Heaven,” (1996), which has the same pattern of pagination.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. Alan Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2.
2. Jacob Neusner, Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991); Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
3. David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr., Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981); Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, In Gods We Trust: New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990).
4. Timothy Miller, ed. America’s Alternative Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Harvey Cox, Turning East: Why Americans Look to the Orient for Spirituallity—and What That Search Can Mean to the West (New York: Touchstone, 1977).
5. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Nones” on the Rise: One in Five Religious Adults Have No Religious Affiliation (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012).
6. Barry Bearak, “Death in a Cult: The Victims: Time of Puzzled Heartbreak Binds Relatives,” New York Times, March 30 1997, A1.
7. For more on this debate, see Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, eds., Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
8. Lorne L. Dawson, “Raising Lazarus: A Methodological Critique of Stephen Kent’s Revival of the Brainwashing Model,” in Misunderstanding Cults, ed. Zablocki and Robbins; Benjamin Zablocki, “Toward a Demystified and Disinterested Scientific Theory of Brainwashing,” in Misunderstanding Cults, ed. Zablocki and Robbins; Stuart A. Wright, “Reconceptualizing Cult Coercion and Withdrawal: A Comparative Analysis of Divorce and Apostasy,” Social Forces 70, no. 1 (1991): 125–45.
9. There is evidence that a member was once confined, though it was because she believed she was under the influence of dangerous spiritual beings and requested that she be confined. She eventually decided to leave the group, and did so on good terms. The fact that the only documented case of such an imprisonment eventually led to the member’s departure in fact further weakens the brainwashing charge! Robert W. Balch, email correspondence with author, October 16, 2013.
10. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
11. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, translation of Part I of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922 ed. (New York: Free Press, 1947), 328.
12. Heaven’s Gate, “Beyond Human—the Last Call, Session 12,” in How and When “Heaven’s Gate” May Be Entered, 4:158.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. Some sources erroneously indicate that Nettles was born in 1928. Her birth certificate indicates a birth date of August 27, 1927.
2. “Boisean Remembers Knowing Bonnie Lu, ‘UFO Recruiter’,” Idaho Statesman, November 2, 1975, 12D.
3. For more on Nettles’s involvement in the Theosophical Society in America, see Catherine Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000), 232, n. 55.
4. Robert W. Balch, “Bo and Peep: A Case Study of the Origins of Messianic Leadership,” in Millennialism and Charisma, ed. Roy Wallis (Belfast: The Queen’s University, 1982), 28.
5. Barry Bearak, “Odyssey to Suicide—a Special Report; Eyes on Glory: Pied Pipers of Heaven’s Gate,” New York Times, April 28, 1997, A1; James S. Phelan, “Looking For: The Next World,” New York Times, February 29, 1976, C62.
6. Frank Bruni, “Death in a Cult: The Personality; Leader Believed in Space Aliens and Apocalypse,” New York Times, March 28, 1997, A1.
7. Robert S. Ellwood, Jr., “The Theosophical Society,” in Introduction to New and Alternative Religions
in America, Vol. 3, ed. Eugene V. Gallagher and W. Michael Ashcraft (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 48–53.
8. See Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
9. Balch, “Bo and Peep,” 34.
10. Jacques Steinberg, “Death in a Cult: The Leader; from Religious Childhood to Reins of a U.F.O. Cult,” New York Times, March 29, 1997, A9.
11. Ibid.
12. At the time, Virginia’s Union Theological Seminary (not to be confused with New York City’s seminary of the same name) affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), the southern branch of American Presbyterian. In 1983, the PCUS merged with the United Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (UPCUSA) to form the Presbyterian Church of the United States of American (PCUSA), the largest national Presbyterian denomination.
13. Hayden Hewes and Brad Steiger, UFO Missionaries Extraordinary (New York: Pocket Books, 1976), 27.
14. Steinberg, “Death in a Cult: The Leader,” A9.
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