Matching Tracksuits

Since the doctrinal changes in the Worldwide Church of God (WCG hereafter) in the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent division into the numerous “splinter groups,” there has not been much genuine communication between those who stayed (whom in this essay I will call “assenters,” for they give their assent to the new doctrines) and those who left (whom I will call “dissenters,” for they withhold their assent to the new doctrines).[1] When there is communication, it can generally be described as nothing less than a hateful argument, of which both assenters and dissenters are guilty. Assenters declare that dissenters are not really examining scripture “objectively” (a term which I will deal with shortly), indicating that accepting the WCG’s new doctrines is simply a matter of logic; dissenters declare that assenters are betraying everything they were taught under Herbert Armstrong and that they are hopelessly deceived by Satan. With such divergent presuppositions held firmly, assenters and dissenters often verbally bash each other over the head until one or the other (or both) realizes the futility of the “discourse,” and then communication ceases altogether.

At a WCG-related web site, John Bowers explains this lack of communication this lack of communication in, “Why Christians Hate.” He claims it is simply because of fear: “To be a member of an unpopular religious cult, such as the Worldwide Church of God, is to live in fear.” To some degree, I feel Bowers was on track in this assessment, but it doesn’t go deep enough. It offers a somewhat superficial explanation as to why members of sectarian cults “fear.” The purpose of this essay is to use sociology (specifically sociology of knowledge) to locate a little more precisely the source of this “fear” in Bowers’ essay and to a lesser degree.

The World through Sociology’s Eyes

From the moment of our birth, the world is mediated to us. Usually this is done by our parents, whose job it is to teach us “the ways of the world.” This involves teaching us very simple, physical things, like the fact that touching a hot stove is a bad idea. We could, of course, figure these simple things out for ourselves, and very often we do. That is how we learn to walk, for example.

Yet our parents’ responsibility doesn’t stop with teaching us to keep our fingers away form hot stoves and out of electrical outlets. It also involves teaching us things that we wouldn’t be able to figure out for ourselves – at least not immediately. For example, it is from our parents that we learn our ethnic and national heritage. The average 18-month-old French girl has no idea that she is a French girl. Indeed, she probably has no idea what France is at that point. If she’s born into a Catholic family, she also has no idea what Catholicism is. Nor would she easily figure these things out on her own. Instead, her parents explain these things to her – things that later in her life will appear as normal, everyday reality.

Our parents introduce us to a very specific world that has many facets: social standing, race, religious orientation, ethnicity, etc. As our parents expose us to these aspects of their world, we come to accept it as our world too. In short, our parents define reality for us as we are growing up. This is called socialization, or more specific, primary socialization.

The things we learn in primary socialization are the things that later we take for granted as “everyday knowledge.” They form the basis of what we think “normal” people do. The end result is that within a given culture where certain groups of people undergo a very similar primary socialization process, these people define reality in almost identical ways.

Rules of etiquette provide a good example of this: In the Western world we generally do not slurp our soup, flatulate in a crowded train, make rude comments about our boss’s hair, urinate in a public park, or any number of things, all because we have been taught not to – most often by our parents. The things described above are the “basics” of polite behavior – they constitute the foundation of how everyone knows they should behave.

Yet in and of themselves, these basics that “everyone knows” are arbitrary. Nothing physical will happen to us if we break taboo and do any of the preceding things things. We won’t die if we slurp our soup, or relieve ourselves in the middle of Central Park. We will, however, get glares at the dinner table for our noisy soup eating or be carted off by the police if we duck behind a tree in Central Park.

Thus is the world into which we are born. The rights and the wrongs have already been decided, even though in most cases the decisions made are, from a purely biological point of view, arbitrary. They are not based on universal human needs (like eating or sleeping) and as such they are open to a wide range of interpretation. This fact is most vividly illustrated when you go to a foreign country and find a man standing against a wall in broad daylight, his back to the street, urinating – for all to see. Clearly, you and the man relieving himself define reality in a different manner. Indeed, you define reality in a way different from the man urinating and all the other people walking by him without so much as a second glance. For you it is decidedly disgusting and unnatural; for them, it’s the norm.

The “norm” we receive from our parents during primary socialization is initially not in competition with any other definitions, and we come accept our parents’ reality as reality in its totality. For example, a child raised by Muslim parents in a Muslim community will initially assume that the entire world is Muslim. It’s possible to imagine a grown man who clings to this definition of reality as normative throughout his life. How would such a feat be possible? Simple. If he never encounters anyone who is not Muslim, he will never have any reason to doubt that the entire world is Muslim. However, given the proliferation of mass communication and the ease of contemporary travel, he probably will encounter someone (via television or tourism) who is not a Muslim, and this encounter will constitute a competing claim about the nature of reality.

In a pluralistic society such as America, such primary socialization that excludes all other definitions of reality is simply impossible. We usually become aware of different points of view at a fairly early age, but such alternative points of view can be easily dismissed as “different” or even “abnormal.” Our parents at first do this dismissing. For example, when we’re traveling to Florida for vacation and we encounter a group of punks at a rest area, our father mutters derisively, “Freaks.” We incorporate this into our own worldview and for us, as 5-year-old children, these individuals become “freaks” as well. We don’t question whether our father is right or wrong in his assessment – we simply accept it. He was correct when he taught us “right” and “left” and how to tie our shoes – why wouldn’t he be right here as well? This points out the simple fact that to the extent that our parents are our primary mediators to the world around us for our entire early childhood, they are infallible.

It is from such encounters with people who define reality differently that the “us-them” view of the world comes into play. While this paradigm is often (and rightly) criticized as being “narrow-minded,” it is unavoidable in a sense. As long as there are cultures that define reality different, these different views will have to be sensibly incorporated into our own worldview. As seen above, in can be done in a somewhat flippant manner, writing off the legitimacy of a whole worldview with a pshaw and flick of the wrist.

There are other ways to deal with differing worldviews, though, that don’t amount to an ideological annihilation. The father in the above example could have just as easily explained the punks’ spiked hair and leather in such a way that doesn’t completely debase them. He could have just explained that they’re different and left it at that.

However, there are some things about which even the most liberal-minded and socially tolerant parent will make will have make normative. Incest, for example, is a fairly universal taboo[2] and even those who are willing to accept punks or bikers will be unwilling to condone incest – or murder, stealing, or any number of semi-universal norms.

Primary socialization, then, simply involves our acceptance as children of certain subjective ideas as being objectively true. As a sort of negative example, imagine the following: as a cruel experiment, parents decide to teach their child that everything is the opposite of what it “actually” is. So they teach this child that “up” is “down,” “blue” is “green,” “left” is “right,” and so on. On what basis will this child initially know that her parents are lying to her? Initially, none. Only when she begins interacting with others and makes a comment about how blue the grass is and sees their reactions will she be able to understand that her reality is different than everyone else’s.

We might even ask, “On what basis are the parent lying to the child?” When we encounter this child calling the sky green and the grass blue, on what authority to we exclaim, “Why, you’ve got it wrong – exactly opposite, in fact!” In other words, why is blue blue? Because some omnipotent force decreed that light within a certain range of wavelengths will be called blue? Perhaps, but we have no evidence of that. From our point of view we must accept that blue is blue because that’s how speakers of English define that particular wavelength of color.[3]

All if this is simply to say that reality is a construction. It is something we learn from our parents, who learned it from their parents, who learned it from theirs – ad infinitum. And what’s more, this reality we learn from our parents is all encompassing. It is not simply a matter of colors and direction – it is a matter of what it means to be a good father, or how a man behaves and how a woman behaves, and so on.

To put it bluntly, the things we think of as “objective” really aren’t. Certain things are given objective status simply because everyone around us agrees that they have objective status. Nothing comes from an infallible fount of wisdom; everything we know, we know things because someone else told us – in the case of primary socialization, that someone is our parents. And the simple fact is, they could have just as easily socialized us in any number of ways. The reason they did as they did is simply because that was how they were socialized.

There are many different ways for parents to define reality to their children. What it means to be a man or a woman, for example, is a product of primary socialization and it differs greatly from culture to culture. In Western society, for instance, hand-holding has romantic and even sexual connotations in our society, and we learn these connotations during primary socialization. We also learn (generally speaking) that such romantic connections should not exist between two men. Therefore, it is culturally wrong for two men to hold hands in our society, unless of course they are lovers and are bold enough to show their affection in public. However, in other cultures, hand-holding is not a sign of romantic or sexual attraction, and while homosexuality might be generally socially condemned in that country just as it is in our own, two men holding hands doesn’t even get a second glance. Why? Because just in our society we “know” that hand-holding is a sign of romantic involvement, members of other cultures “know” that hand-holding is a symbol of intimacy and closeness but not sexuality. These two cultures might agree on the point that “men shouldn’t have sexual attractions for other men,” but still disagree on whether or not it is acceptable for me to hold hands as the stroll. Therefore, to be a man means slightly different things in these cultures.

Of course we can push this even further by pointing out that this notion of homosexuality being acceptable or not is something we learn during our primary socialization. From a biological point of view, the only drawback to homosexuality is its inability to produce offspring.[4] The fact that our culture defines reality in such a way that homosexuality is deemed offensive makes more of a statement about our culture than it does about homosexuality.

Not all of our knowledge comes from our parents and peers, though. Some of it comes from teachers, ministers, and counselors and constitutes secondary socialization. While similar in many ways to primary socialization, though, secondary socialization is much more fluid. Both teach us particular realities and provide knowledge about the world around us, but they do so in different ways and to different ends.

While the “knowledge” we learn during primary socialization is general – the taken-for-granted information that everyone in our culture accepts – what we learn in secondary socialization is much more specific. In addition, knowledge from secondary socialization tends to be less objective from a cultural point of view.

One of the things we learn in secondary socialization is how to perform the actions required of us by our jobs. If one is a chemist, these are the things one learned during many hours in the chemistry classroom and lab in college. If one is a garbage collector, these are the things one learned from the “old hands” at work. It doesn’t take long to realize that this knowledge is considered subjective. Not everyone agrees one the best way to keep warm while collecting garbage during the winter, and not everyone agrees on the best way to explain the behavior of certain chemicals under certain conditions. These are “matters of opinion,” we like to say.

It’s also clear from these examples that secondary socialization is much more specific – it is connected to roles that not everyone plays. Not everyone is a chemist, and so not everyone can even begin to explain why chemical x acts this way at time y. And since only a very few of us have collected garbage (in the summer or winter), we won’t all be able to keep warm simply because we’ve never been taught how.

Plausibility

Up to this point we have dealt with two kinds of knowledge – that which “everyone knows” (given to us through primary socialization) and that which a few people know (from secondary socialization). What both these kinds of knowledge have in common, though, is their source: they both come from other people. Other people not only are responsible for giving us knowledge; they are also responsible for making it possible to accept this knowledge as knowledge and not opinion. In short, the reason we can continue to believe most of the things we learned in primary socialization and secondary socialization is that people around us make us feel it is reasonable to believe. The fact that they believe something makes it easier for us to believe it; their belief in it makes the belief itself more plausible.

For example, the reason it is difficult in our modern Western society to hold that sticking pins in a doll will have an affect on a given person is in part because no one else believes it. If we do go around talking about voodoo dolls as if they were as effective as two aspirin, we would be labeled a lunatic, or at the very least, strangely out of touch with reality. If we were plopped down in the middle of a community where voodoo is plausible, we would have quite another situation on our hands. In fact, our insistence that voodoo is nothing but rubbish would have the same effect in this culture as our insistence on voodoo’s efficacy would have in our modern Western culture. In either case, we would constitute a cognitive minority – a group of people (or a single person in this case) who believe something radically different than what the majority of people believe.

If we are a cognitive minority, we have two alternatives. We can sell-out, so to say, and accept the definition of reality of the cognitive majority. If we decide not to sell out but to hold fast to the truth as we see it, we face an uphill battle. To everyone else’s “Yes!” we will always be saying, “No!” Everyone else’s black will be our white. To keep this up indefinitely will be exhausting unless we get some support. As long as someone else is saying, “That’s okay – I believe what you believe and I don’t think you’re a lunatic for doing so,” it will be more bearable to be the cognitive minority. What will happen, then, is we will find that we spend more time with those who believe as we do (after all, we can relax and stop justifying our beliefs to them) than with those who think we’re somewhat off our rockers for our crazy views. Put differently, we eventually will create for ourselves a community that serves to make the reality we take for granted seem more plausible. In doing so, we will implement what sociologists refer to as plausibility structures.

Plausibility structures help determine what is believable and what is not. The more support an idea gets from those around us, the easier it is to believe. In yet simpler terms, it is easier to be a Catholic in Rome than in Mecca. Peter Berger expresses it thus: “The strength of [an idea’s plausibility], ranging from unquestioned certitude through firm probability to mere opinion, will be directly dependent upon the strength of the supporting structure” (A Rumor of Angels, 40).

It is now time to return to John Bowers’ comment, “To be a member of an unpopular religious cult, such as the Worldwide Church of God, is to live in fear.” This really is an empty statement because we all live in a certain fear that the world constructed around us – the world into which we have been socialized and accept as “normal” – will turn out to be contrary to fact. A lie, to be blunt. To return to an earlier image, we’re always a little worried when we sit down at the table that those around us will begin slurping their soup as if it’s just the most natural thing in the world to do.[5]

We have all sorts of mechanisms – from psychotherapy to Mass – that ensure that we keep this fear under control, so much so that it’s almost unconscious. If it were not for these mechanisms, in fact, we would be unable to operate “normally” in our daily lives. Indeed, it is rare that someone is so overcome with the fear that the world she sees around her is somehow “wrong.” Such individuals are usually considered prime candidates for a psychiatrist’s couch – or, if radically different enough, for a straight jacket. This is because we’ve been “shown” (i.e., taught) – and we’ve accepted – the world around us as somehow corresponding to some normative “truth,” and the fact that everyone else around us behaves as if it’s true reassures us. Cars stop at red lights because we drivers have agreed to halt our cars at red lights and because it was somehow ordained at the beginning of time that such should be the case. People don’t slurp their soup because that’s how it’s always been done and it was ordained from the beginning that such should be the case. Or so it feels to us on a normal, everyday basis.

So to a degree, I take issue with Bower’s statement. We’re all a little frightened that what we believe to be reality is not reality. Proof of this is easily found in that disturbing limbo we inhabit immediately after waking up from a bizarre dream. For a moment the ontological status of the dream is unclear, and we’re just a little worried that the dream might be reality and vice versa. This last only for a few moments, however, and as the fog of sleep lifts, we see clearly that it was just a dream–and we are reassured.

Roles and Our Ever-Changing Biography

A convenient way to think about reality through the eyes of sociology is through roles. We all have particular roles we play, and each of these different roles – mother, lawyer, aunt, and sister – comes with built-in cultural expectations. A good aunt if is someone whose behavior conforms to the general cultural expectations of the role of “aunt.”

Some of the roles are defined by primary socialization, such as “mother” or “uncle” while others are delineated during secondary socialization, such as “professor” or “colonel.” Generally these roles coexist rather peacefully so that we have an “office self” that is not radically different from our “home self.” If there is a great deal of difference between these two roles, though, one or the other will have to give. Which one actually does give will depend on which one is more important, which in turn depends on any number of cultural and personal factors. To add to the confusion, a choice we make today to subsume a professional role (perhaps “lawyer”) to a personal role (maybe “mother”) because family life is deteriorating might have been drastically different five years ago when, say, there was rumors that one might be promoted to partner in the law firm.

Peter Berger points out one intriguing aspect of all this role-playing that makes up our lives: our biographies are in fact largely influenced by the various roles we play in our lives. Berger discusses this at length in Invitation to Sociology and it will be helpful here to outline his ideas in this regard.

Most of us like to think that the act of writing our autobiographies would be a fairly simple act. After all, we would simply need to record in chronological fashion a description of what we did in our lives. I was born on this date; I went to this school; I married this person; I had these children; I worked at these places. Yet we obviously can’t include everything in our autobiography, else it would be thousands of pages long. Therefore we have to select some things to include and others to leave out. How do we do this? Simple – it depends on what is important to us at the time of our writing. But here is the interesting catch: were we to write this at a different time – earlier or later – different parts of our lives would stand out as more important than they would now. More abstractly, our autobiography is an interpretation of our lives, not purely a description. What we see as important in our past depends on what is important in our present. Not only that, but we can re-interpret portions of our lives, giving them drastically different meanings than whatever meaning we attached to the moment as we were living it, or at some other point in our lives.

For example, imagine a woman who, after attending rallies and reading books, becomes a Communist. Her life to that point will need to be re-interpreted. What was once a happy, fiscally secure middle-class life will be viewed as an empty, bourgeois false consciousness. A Catholic convert might come to see a series of personal misfortunes as events God was using to bring him into the Mother Church.

It becomes clear, then, that such biographical reinterpretation is critical when one role conflicts with an earlier role. Some kind of explanation must be provided as to how the same individual could have been two seemingly different people, ideologically speaking. To do this, we reinterpret our biography.

Religion and Conversion

One of the most significant acts of secondary socialization is religious conversion. When one converts from one religion to another, it means altering how one defines reality, and very often, accepting one set of religious beliefs involves denying the set of religious beliefs we received from our parents. This type of secondary socialization can be more radical than any another because it often involves drastic changes in how we live our lives, how we explain the world around us, how we interpret our past, and so on.

In a sense, religious conversion is similar to primary socialization. Indeed, one might say it is a second primary socialization since “true” religious conversion results in a complete change of one’s course of life.[6] The primary difference is that this “second” primary socialization within religious conversion does not create a reality ex nihilo (“from nothing”) as one’s true primary socialization did many years earlier. We are not learning and interpreting reality; we are re-learning and re-interpreting reality.

Since it doesn’t create reality ex nihilo necessitates, conversion is one of the biggest stimuli for reconstituting one’s personal biography. That which transpired before conversion must be re-interpreted in order to maintain consistency with one’s current standards.

Frequently this includes the retrojection into the past of present interpretative schemas (the formula for this being, “I already knew then, though in an unclear manner . . .”) and motives that were not present in the past but that are now necessary for the reinterpretation of what took place then (the formula being, “I really did this because . . .”).[7]

This “then-and-now” biography creates a certain internal “us-them” mentality. “Before conversion, I was among the blind; now I can see.” One is no longer among “them,” the blind. Instead, one is among “us,” the enlightened.

Additionally, the conflicts that can arise between our pre-conversional selves and our post-conversional selves are not always easily resolved, and they can sometimes be destructive to relationships of our life that no longer conform to our new definition of reality. This radical new view of one’s past can, of course, necessitate a distance between the friends of the “former me” and the “new me.” This reality-twisting that we engage in when converting necessitates relationship-twisting that some relationships cannot bear. Something will have to give –our new interpretation of reality, our relationship, or both.

Sociology of Religion and the Churches of God

When we put all this together and use it as a tool of examination for the various Churches of God[8] it all seems to make sense – the distancing from non-members, the rigid instance on doctrinal purity and complete acquiescence, the virtual impossibility of assenter/dissenter friendships, etc. Indeed, one gets the uncanny feeling that authors writing general descriptions of sociology of knowledge and religion used the Churches of God as a model. And in fact, sociologists did just that, for the WCG and its sister churches are textbook examples (sometimes literally) of the processes described above.

To begin with, until the recent changes, members of the WCG had been a cognitive minority in the religious community in particular and in society in general. This was certainly not something the leadership and members of the WCG tried to deny. The knowledge Herbert Armstrong shared was special – esoteric knowledge available only to the select few that God has called out. It was not a source of shame. Indeed, the “cult” badge was worn with pride for many years, and still is by various splinter groups.

Armstrong would not even deny that the fact that WCG members constitute a cognitive minority was the reason it formed such a tight community in the local churches. The theological reasoning was simple: don’t be unequally yoked with nonbelievers.[9] The sociological reason for this, though, should now be obvious: since it’s easier to believe something when all your friends and acquaintances believe the same thing, it’s best to stay among one’s own kind. They back you up; they make belief in something plausible.

Herbert Armstrong certainly realized the importance of creating strong plausibility structures (though he never would have used such a term) and in essence, he created an alternative universe within the WCG. Armstrong’s WCG had its separate rules, regulations, and definitions of reality, and the individual churches served to provide social support for believers in time of “doubt.” This is not to say that WCG leaders or congregations nurtured people who had doubts, helping them find resolution to various problems. In fact, they often did quite the opposite and criticized fellow believers for their lack of faith. Instead what I am talking about here is plausibility support for a cognitive minority that the cognitive majority could describe as bizarre. Local congregations provided a community that made it easier to hold these beliefs that flew in the face of most other Christian theologies. Spouting off about the Great Tribulation on any street corner will immediately get one labeled, “Lunatic.” Doing so in the local COG congregation might possibly earn a promotion to deacon.

Sociology also helps explain why it was necessary to quarantine prospective members instead of inviting them to Sabbath services the next Saturday. Perspective members still hadn’t redefined their pre-Armstrongian biography and their new WCG socialization process had only begun. They still had in their heads alternative, “heretical” definitions of reality, and introduction of such an unsocialized element into the local congregation could lead others to adopt these heretical points of view.[10] More succinctly, the new member might re-socialize an established member or two if things are not handled carefully.[11]

It is clear now why Mr. Armstrong taught that sociology (among other “worldly” sciences) was to be avoided. When someone can explain anything from a non-theological point of view, it threatens the authority of those who explain the same thing from a theological point of view. Mr. Armstrong taught members to avoid close contact with people of “the world” because they were just that – the world, deceived by Satan and inherently dangerous from an ideological perspective. Members were called out, set apart, different in every way. This is the theological explanation. The sociological explanation is simply that associating with “the world” would tend to weaken rather than to support WCG members’ beliefs and the authority of Mr. Armstrong by providing alternatives to his explanations. Reading and studying sociology shows Armstrongian reality to be one of several alternative worldviews, and in such a fundamentalist sect such as the WCG, choice – heresy – is a dangerous thing. It also explains the mechanisms by which Armstrong tried to bracket out competing realities. It showed the man behind the curtain.  Again, not a good thing for a fundamentalist sect such as the WCG.

Armstrong and the other leaders of the WCG were of course aware of the various alternative definitions of reality swirling about outside the WCG, but in a sense they had nothing to worry about because they had mechanisms already in place to deal with them. Just as our father in an earlier example “nihiliated”[12] the punks’ worldview with the single word, “Freak,” so Armstrong nihiliated competing worldviews with a single word: Satan. The notion of worldwide satanic deception was convenient for two reasons. First, a different solution does not have to be proposed for each problematic worldview. All can be subsumed under the simple heading of “satanic deception.” Hinduism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Protestantism,[13] and even atheism all have the same flaw: Satan. Second, it helped highlight the lack of satanic deception in the WCG. In strengthened the us-them mentality by simultaneously pointing out their error and WCG’s correctness.[14]

The reinterpretation of one’s pre-conversional biography within the WCG also provided a nice way of setting members apart from the rest of the world, reinforcing the “us-them” mentality. “I was deceivedas the rest of the world is now!” And as pointed out earlier, this tends to force one to internalize the “us-them” view. In addition, the Armstrongian sorteriology provided a strong “us-them” mentality, with WCG members destined to be the leaders while the deceived world were to be subjects.

Whether or not Herbert Armstrong deliberately planned all of this is open to debate, but I for one think it is highly doubtful. While such a book could be written, there does not exist (to my knowledge) a monograph entitled How to Start a Sect.[15] Even to say that Armstrong envisioned a church approaching the scope of the WCG at its height seems to credit Armstrong with much more cunning than he actually possessed. It was all, to some degree, an accident. Armstrong was at the cliché right place at the right time with the right message that appealed to certain people. Once he gained a small following, the process of institutionalization followed its somewhat natural course and a sect formed.[16]

The Split

As the WCG’s initially slight theological changes became more pronounced in the late 1980s and the early 90s, the resulting splintering was hardly avoidable. There was initially an attempt to keep everyone together with assurances that “we can all live together in peace even if we have slightly different theological views.”[17] But as the scope of the changes broadened, expanding beyond make-up and healing, this became increasingly unrealistic for a simple reason: the local church communities, which, once united in a common belief, had served as plausibility structures, no longer provided this sociological necessity for everyone. People became “unequally yoked.”

Not only did individuals’ worldviews cease to support each other but as the changes dug deeper into the fundamentals of Armstrongian theology, individuals’ worldviews began to contradict each other. No institution can survive very long when members hold conflicting views, and so the divisions became not only theologically but also sociologically and psychologically necessary.

This is also the reason assenters and dissenters are hard-pressed to sustain meaningful relationships – their definitions of reality challenge each other. To remain in contact with those who no longer share the same beliefs would produce threats to one’s own worldview. Those for whom common religious beliefs were the defining aspect of their relationship could not long remain close friends with those who no longer share the common beliefs because of a lack of mutual support. If, however, there were other bonds in the relationship – either familial bonds, or perhaps even a strong personal friendship – the relationship might continue, but it’s doubtful that religion will be a frequent topic of conversation.

The Current, Post-Armstrongian WCG Reality

Where does all this leave the WCG today, almost fifteen years after Herbert Armstrong’s death? The future of this church is now questionable and those who were unable to acquiesce to the new teachings (the dissenters, as I originally named them) have formed many churches, which have themselves split (sometimes many times over). Armstrong’s once-great empire is now a fragmented mass of various churches with significant numbers attending no church at all. What are the implications of all this?

Both assenters and dissenters have had to re-think their definitions of reality. No one predicted such a cataclysmic event as what happened in the late 80s and early 90s. No one was prepared, ideologically speaking. Suddenly, a huge event had to be explained from worldviews that were not equipped to do so. An Armstrongian worldview could explain lots of things – why everyone looks at you like a freak when you talk about the Place of Safety, why Europe was moving toward increasing unity – but it couldn’t explain this. It couldn’t make sense of how so many people could turn their backs on the truth delivered through Mr. Armstrong; or, conversely, how so many people could fail to see the mistakes in Armstrong’s theology once they had been pointed out and prayerfully studied.

For each group this had somewhat different consequences. The dissenters had to come up with a way of explaining how God could allow so many “true Christians” to be deceived. Gerald Flurry, of the Philadelphia Church of God (PCG), uses 2 Thessalonians 2.10—11[18] as an explanation, explaining that God is separating the true Christian minority from the deceived WCG majority by sending a “strong delusion.”[19] Other splinter groups explain it in a variety of ways, but most of them deal involve the idea of Satanic deception in one way or another. From the point of view of the dissenters, the assenters have now joined the ranks of the “deceived,” and as such the assenters’ new worldviews have long been nihiliated.

In a way, the predicament of the assenters is more interesting. To some degree those who accepted the new teachings have had to go through yet another socialization process when they came to accept once again the ideas they’d rejected upon conversion to Armstrongian theology. When they joined the WCG, they had to re-evaluate many of the simple facts of their lives, like what it means to be a Christian, what humanity’s potential and destiny are, etc. They had to reject “the world’s ideas” and accept Armstrong’s ideas. Once the changes were made, they essentially rejected Armstrong’s ideas and returned to “the world’s ideas.”

Not only that, but the assenters had to reformulate their worldviews in such a way that could account for the massive number of people who abandoned Armstrong’s teachings. This could be a particularly traumatic experience for some if they come to the conclusion that the reason their friends went with one of the other Churches of God was because their friends were (and are) still in the grip of cultic control. And that, by default, means they themselves were “in the grip of cultic control” – not something one likes to admit to oneself. Such a drastic explanation is not inevitable, though. Another possibility is to say that those who remain with Armstrongian Churches of God do so because they fulfill some basic need in their lives – a need they themselves once fulfilled with Armstrongian theology but now fill with “the grace of Christ.”

Whatever the explanation, one thing is certain – all involved must make some attempt to explain how such drastic changes occurred and further, to explain why John Doe assented to the changes while Susan Jones didn’t. Not to do so would be to leave a huge section of one’s life an enormous question mark – and that’s something very few people can live with.