Douglas has a poignant post on
DNA Refutes British Israelism about a former WCG member who experienced first hand the "brotherly love" of the ministry and members after years of dedicated service. It is appalling and utterly disgusting what the church and the members did to this guy. You can read the entire article here:
Cult Life: Bruce
Bruce felt the world was screwed up, and coupled with his being highly
religious, he went on a quest to both find a religion and to satisfy his desire
to prove the world at large wrong. He tried some rather fringe cultic types of
Christian congregational churches with political leanings, but it wasn't until
he listened to the World Tomorrow on Radio that he connected with his new
religious reality.
Ambassador College, the Radio Church of God, The Plain Truth and Herbert
Armstrong had an answer for everything in a neat package, and in 1962, he took
the plunge. He had significant savings he had stored up over the years -- enough
that he could afford to do what he wanted for several years without having to
work because he was industrious, prudent with his money and frugal.
This was perfect for this particular British Israelism Cult: A man with money
they could rip off.
Bruce impressed the college entrance personnel and started at Ambassador College
in 1962. A year later, Garner Ted Armstrong told him that Bruce should seek to
serve the work elsewhere: His technical interests were getting in the way of his
path to becoming the smarmy picture perfect plastic minister material they were
looking for.
Bruce left and worked "out in the world". He settled into a church area in the
Pacific Northwest and found a job making plenty of money from repairing cameras
-- a result of just one of his technical hobbies of photography, building
telescopes from scratch for astronomy, rock collecting and polishing, building
electronics including high end amplifiers and phonographs replete with speakers.
Everything he did was quality.
Bruce was generous, and besides "loaning" tens of thousands of dollars to the
Radio Church of God at another crisis brought on by the profligate spending of
the cult leader, he also gave people stuff. He gave them jewelry he had made,
polished rocks (some with more than sentimental value), loaned people high
fidelity collections -- he gave freely and generously. He also loaned over 6,000
quality 35mm slides he had taken over the years to Ambassador College and many
of them were used for the front cover of The Plain Truth
and The Good News.
Due to unfortunate circumstances, Bruce was temporarily unemployed. Though he
was a bachelor, he had a nice apartment with several bedrooms. A family in the
cult had a husband and father who was also out of work and needed a place for a
family of five to stay, so Bruce, not wanting to......
read the rest of the article at the link above.
After reading The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo and purusing www.lucifereffect.com concerning the 1971 Princeton Prison Experiment at Princeton University at Palo Alto, it is much more clear how a corrupted Church Corporate as the WCG was could turn people evil and uncaring. In fact, in its own right, it could be called The Ambassador College Prison Experiment.
ReplyDeleteIt is ironic that an organization which is dedicated to the ultimate social activism "on paper" and projecting the image it had, could actually enslave people in a prison system with Herbert Armstrong as the Prison Superintendant, Roderick Meredith as the Warden and Garner Ted Armstrong as a corrupt chief guard, raping the prisoners. The subjugation of the prisoners to become submissive to the most outrageously invasive control of their lives was in the extreme cases, not very far from the 1971 Princeton Prison Experiment and the dramatized version in the German Movie, "Das Experiment".
One of the ironies brought out in the book is that people subjected to the abuse -- who you would think would be compassionate when they got into positions of "power" -- turned just as mercilessly abusive as those who abused them in the first place.
The Radio Church of God and the WCG were certainly innovative in creating ever more odd and unusual abuses to keep their prisoners "in line". The cult was full of arbitrary rules which changed, often as soon as the people adapted to them (lipstick comes to mind). The entire system was designed to keep people confused and off balance to maintain mind control.
Sadly, "Bruce" is only one example of the stories which abound in Armstrongism as its own "Lucifer Effect" -- good turned to evil.
The good news is that there are a few heroes who always seem to emerge from these communities: Those who have the integrity not to turn.
I suspect that the ACoGs which do not begin to reform through this next year will have much more for which to answer than they could ever imagine.
Guys -- don't get comfortable.
I read the full story of Bruce from the link. It makes me sick to my stomach, and I can believe every word to be true given what I know about the WCG obtained through first hand experience.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Bruce should have been paid by the WCG for any of his photos that appeared on the covers of The Plain Truth or Good News magazines.
Bruce appears to have been "a giver". As Herbert Armstrong and the WCG cleverly and manipulatively taught, "God's way is give".
What the WCG didn't teach was the rest of the equation. By definition, for there to be "givers", there must also be "getters". The corporate Church were the "getters", and there were also members in the WCG on a much smaller scale who were also "getters". Aparently some of those members were happy to "get"" from Bruce, and wanted to continue doing so even after Bruce's death.
The demand letter Bruce's parents received from the WCG doesn't surprise me. What did surprise me was the minister who told Bruce to go to the emergency room. I guess this happened after the WCG started relaxing its teachings on the use of the medical profession. In my era of the WCG, it was taught from the pulpit, "If you die in the hands of Doctors, you will go to the Lake of Fire".
So, I surmise since Bruce didn't make it to the emergency room, according to the changing WCG doctrine regarding the medical profession, Bruce will not be going to the Lake of Fire (LOL).
By the way, I don't believe in the Lake of Fire - I think it is in the Bible to scare us into submitting our lives (and our wallets) to religious authorities that come between us and our God Diety.
Sounds like Bruce was a good guy who was used and abused by WCG and some of its "less than exemplary" members.
Richard
Richard, Bruce died in the shower as he was getting ready to go to the emergency room and had planned to call a taxi (since he did not drive and he had no one to take him to emergency).
ReplyDeleteThis was mid 1970s when the ministers didn't know the hell the deal was with healing, anointing and doctors.
In the next year I heard Herbert Armstrong say that there were some ministers in the WCG who would be embarrassed to anoint someone -- or words to that effect.
Postscript
ReplyDeleteWhile there may have been a picture of Bruce in the Envoy, I do not believe that any notice of his death made it into the Worldwide New.
After the initial inquiries by the WCG to get what they could from what was left of Bruce's possessions and money, the entire church just put him totally out of mind: He might as well have never existed -- he became a total non person who was never there.
It is also disgusting that WCG and its hundreds of entities are probably still using some of his pictures to this day. I wonder if they were part of the deal Flurry struck with WCG when he lost his plagiarism case leading to him groveling at WCG's feet as he forked over millions of dollars for those rights.
ReplyDeleteThe con artist who wanted to live the easy life at Bruce's expense might be just another person who noticed that many of the higher ups in the WCG were living the easy life at the expense of the little people. He might have just wanted to get his own unfair share of it too.
ReplyDeleteIn the WCG splinter groups, especially in Gerald Flurry's PCG, there are many horny old hags and dirty old men who are just there to prey on unsuspecting younger people. They might have heard about GTA's fooling around and just wanted to get their own unfair share of it too.
Totalitarian systems headed by perverted, heartless narcissists attract other stony-hearted perverts and narcissists who realize early on what a gold lined gravy train it is.
ReplyDeleteTheir attitude is set by such scriptures as "let the dead bury the dead." Maybe Jesus actually said that, but I suspect it may be a fiction dreamed up by the real authors of the New Testament. It soon permeates the whole group in a system of osmosis. The Third Reich is a good example.
Disregard by the privileged few for the welfare of the many is very evident in the present-day political system worldwide. When I hear the heartless pronouncements some of them make, it's not hard to visualize old Herb or Rod Meredith standing in their place.
Bruce had thought that at last he found his extended family, with an important place in it. He trusted that everyone cared for everyone else.
ReplyDeleteHerbert Armstrong was a grandfather figure who projected that he really cared about the people in the church and Bruce related to that.
It is ironic, because earlier this week, I went to the site of our grandparent's home. Grandma learned how to cook from the old Pennsylvania Dutch on a wood stove. For thanksgiving, she added cream puffs to the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, yams (she made them all) along with the various pies: Pumpkin, cherry, apple, lemon merangue, banana, mince meat which were all better than anything you could ever buy. The farm is far different today -- it was a bit like visiting the Outer Limits of the Twilight Zone after not being there in over 4 decades.
Our brother would load up his plate with three different pieces of pie at once and everyone pointed to him for taking so much. Bruce quietly took one slice of pie at a time, no one noticed and he actually had more pieces of pie than anyone else.
It seems fairly certain that it is this background to which Bruce related when he was batized in Spokane (with 7 others) in 1962.
It is truly a tragic shame the fantasy did not seem to measure up to the reality.
Doug, your account of Thanksgiving meals brought back some great memories of my own early life. Women like her and my mother could work wonders on those old stoves. The tastes and aromas fill my memories. Oh, how I'd love to cut into another of her fresh baked, crispy-crusted loaves of bread and spread it with some home churned sour cream butter!
ReplyDelete