matching tracksuits

I was drawn to this book for one reason: I grew up in the same cult as Walker, Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God (WCG). Hence, as I read the book, I felt an eerie similarity with many of Walker’s experiences. His sense of otherness while at school was the same as my sense of otherness. His sense of impending doom while looking at peers in school was my sense of impending doom.

My embarrassment about these beliefs, however, was absent. He seems to have talked freely about the strange things he believed, even going so far as to try to convert his best friend Paul. I, on the other hand, never said a word about my beliefs. Looking back on this, I think it’s because I never really believed. I could imagine someone asking me, “ Do you really believe that?” after I’d explained this or that strange belief, and my only imagined response to their reaction to “Oh that’s weird” would be to agree. That was my fear. This deep abiding embarrassment about what my church believed was central to my religion’s worldview. It was strangely lacking in Walker’s.

There’s a more fundamental sense in which I cannot relate to this book: Walker is African-American, and I am white. This is notable because the WCG’s theology was inherently one of white supremacy. This is not to say that the church was comprised of racists, nor is it to suggest that there were openly racist sentiments expressed in weekly services, but its theology had definite racist shades that appeared in select passages in Armstrong’s writing. He would insist he was not racist, but it’s difficult to argue that when part of the theology was that in the kingdom of God, which we colloquially knew as the World Tomorrow (which was the same name as Armstrong’s weekly religious broadcast), everyone will be sent back to where they “belong.” Armstrong phased it thus in his 1966 book The Wonderful World Tomorrow: What It Will Be Like, which he copied directly into his final book, Mystery of the Ages:

In Noah’s day, the chief cause of the violence and chaos of world conditions was racial hatreds, interracial marriages, and racial violence caused by man’s efforts toward integration and amalgamation of races, contrary to God’s laws. God had set the boundary lines for the nations and the races at the beginning (Deuteronomy 32:8-9; Acts 17:26). But men had refused to remain in the lands to which God had assigned them. That was the cause of the corruption and violence that ended that world. For 100 years Noah had preached God’s ways to the people—but they didn’t heed.

At that time, even as today, that world faced a population explosion. It was when “men began to multiply on the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:1). Jesus said, of our time, right now, “But as the days of Noe [Noah] were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:37)—or, as in Luke 17:26, “And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” That is, the days just before Christ returns. Today race wars, race hatreds, race riots and race problems are among the world’s greatest social troubles.

Noah merely preached to people in his human lifetime. But Noah, in the resurrection, immortal, in power and glory, will be given the power to enforce God’s ways in regard to race. It seems evident that the resurrected Noah will head a vast project of the relocation of the races and nations, within the boundaries God has set, for their own best good, happiness and richest blessings. This will be a tremendous operation. It will require great and vast organization, reinforced with power to move whole nations and races. This time, peoples and nations will move where God has planned for them, and no defiance will be tolerated.

Leaving aside the blindly stupid and racist assertion that “men had refused to remain in the lands to which God had assigned them” when considering the fact that the presence of African Americans in modern America is due almost entirely to the enslavement of Africans rather than people refusing “to remain in the lands to which God had assigned them,” the proposition that there will be “a fast project of the relocation of the races and nations” is essentially the assertion that God is a segregationist. The Kingdom of God runs on Jim Crow laws, it seems.

Note that I never once heard this from the pulpit. I never heard a single discussion about this, and I think that a fair number of people were unaware of this passage and the handful of others scattered in his writing. When I read that passage to a friend who’d also grown up in the church, she was dumbfounded and angry that she’d never noticed it. It was not a central element of the theology: the notion that we’d all become gods was more prominent.

In light of all that passage, though, it’s fascinating to me to think of the African-American constituency in WCG congregations. What was it about Armstrongism that attracted minorities even though it was clear from the theology that Armstrong’s god somehow viewed them as inferior? I was hoping Walker would write more about this than he did because he only deals with it directly a couple of times and obliquely a few more times. Still, it gave a compelling picture, and I cheered when his family finally left the cult.