Richard Elfers, a former Armstrong Church of God member writes for The Courier Herald in Enumclaw, Washington. He mentions his time in Armstrongism in relation to his story on John f Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson.
Kennedy, Johnson, and America’s “best and brightest”
The year was 1975. I had just received my master’s in history from Pepperdine University in Central L.A. I had also just left the religious cult I had been involved with since I was a teenager in 1963. Traveling home to Renton from Pasadena, California, in my 1963 American Motors Ambassador station wagon with all my worldly possessions packed in the back, I had a lot to think about.
A few months earlier I had read David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest.”
“Published in 1972, it’s the definitive account of the decision-making process that led to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, written while the war was still being fought.” (Shapiro, David. “Geopolitical Futures”, March 5, 2019)
Halberstam’s book dramatically changed my rather cloudy thinking about the Vietnam War and the Federal government. It was as if scales fell from my eyes and I saw reality from an entirely different perspective.
The cult, the Worldwide Church of God, led by Herbert W. Armstrong, was anti-war. I was classified as an “IV-D” divinity student on my draft deferment. The WCG, as we called it, paradoxically favored the Cold War interpretation of the Vietnam conflict as a war against godless communism. Implicit in that stand was the belief in the domino theory myth: If Vietnam fell to the Communists, all of Southeast Asia would fall, too, all the way through the rest of Asia to Europe.Read the complete article here.
8 comments:
Funny how the WCG and the COGS were against Communism, probably because it advocates atheism, but practice an economic system for its operations that is VERY communistic. For instance, no voting, no accountability , centralization of funds, centralization of spending, and NO WAY OUT!
Seeing ex-church members do well in life outside the church just irks the hell out of so many COG members. After being brainwashed for so many decades that anyone who left the church would be failures, it is a bitter pill to swallow when everyone who leaves live better lives!
ANON AT 12:00 PM
It appears to me that it is a mixed bag for those that have left, in regards to future success and/or happiness. I have seen some who have become successful in the business, social or academic worlds, and also those who are total whack jobs, dysfunctional and in one case, literally dying in the gutter.
Same in regards to marriages , kids, happiness, health and many other areas. My conclusion is that there is a wide distribution of results for those who left and those who stayed, and no wide "broadbrush" will answer all of it.
Do realize that the universe of those who left is also much deeper and broader, with perhaps 250 to 400K people who passed thru the doors of the WCG, vs the tiny universe of those who still attend a COG.
Richard, interesting article. Have missed you on the AC Forum.
Tonto
I've heard the figure of 500,000 who were once members. I recall being told by members in the late 1970s that their experience was that only one third of their original friends were still attending services. And that was the church at its peak. So it seems way more than 250,000.
One of my classmates freshman year at AC discovered that Pepperdine would accept AC credits, and was able to transfer there and finish his education without missing a beat. I was accepted by Pepperdine after my Sophomore year, and also by Fuller Theological Seminary, but opted to study Journalism at Pasadena City College, because it was the most manageable alternative financially and logistically at the time. Pepperdine was in a pretty bad neighborhood of L.A. during the '60s, but became just awesome during the '70s when the Malibu campus opened. A degree from Pepperdine is highly respected. They are especially noteworthy for their business program. It's great to know that Richard was able to obtain his masters there, and to become so successful in life.
We all had some pretty muddy ideas back in the day about 'Nam. Personally, I had no desire to go there, but really wanted to see us win the war. Oddly enough, I didn't see any conflict inherent in that, or view myself as being unpatriotic, because it wasn't as if the commies had launched an attack on the US. One of the films they showed the AC student body, in addition to the Hitler films, was a realistic depiction of a nuclear attack. There was a song popular at the time called "Morning Dew", of that same theme. Strangely, we all felt safe for a time, based on HWA's prophecies, knowing that we'd be in Petra when the bombs dropped. In that, we were all victims of some very simplistic thinking. Nobody ever seemed to even think about nuclear winter, or nuclear fallout. Had the prophecies been accurate, we probably would have been glowing like Moses for 3-1/2 years in Petra!
BB
Ssshhhh! Don't tell the Armstrongites that Enumclaw means "the place of evil spirits" in the dialect of the local Native Americans.
Considering that for the last century, the cornerstone of American foreign policy seems to have been to prevent hostile sea access to North America, Vietnam was a mystery. I think that it devolved from the American desire to prevent any union of Russia and the rest of Europe. Such a union of technology and resources would enable a breach of American sea security. NATO was a tool for that strategy. NATO could only succeed if the Europeans believed they could trust the USA to support American allies. If America had ignored Vietnam,a former French colony, it would have sent the wrong signal to NATO. Maybe this is an erroneous view, but it makes more sense to me than the domino analogy.
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