While many of my generation were training in combat in the paddies, jungles, and hills of Southeastern Asia, I was training for the Battle of Armageddon, for spiritual combat with Satan and his minions. Some of our teachers believed we would engage in actual fighting-an ethereal, supernatural war against evil spirits. I always pictured it in terms of science-fiction fantasies with flaming swords, thunderbolts, and Gods own lasers. Years later, upon seeing Star Wars, I was struck with a vivid sense of deja vu. Actually, it sounded like a hell of a good time a phantasmagoric, cosmic shootout with what we were anticipating was Jihad, a holy war in which we would slay the infidel and the rule the world as princes and priests of the Almighty God (Rev. 3:21, 5:10). Years later, I had no trouble understanding the Ayatollah Komeinis Revolutionary Guards. Fundamentalists, no matter what the particular religion, are more alike than different.
As in any army, our paramount lesson was respect for authority unquestioning obedience to superiors. God was our commander-in-chief, but he had divinely appointed the Armstrongs as His all-powerful lieutenants, and they in turn had designated other men as theirs. The church hierarchy was formal and rigid, with actual ranks within the ministry and a clear pecking order for the rest.
I entered WCG and AC flush with hope and idealism. We were preparing the way for the return of Jesus Christ to end all pain and suffering in the world. It was heady wine, sometimes the source of an actual physical rush. I was ready to obey and conform, and I did. This was good for me, and I was good for the world. Doubt crept in slowly, nearly always squelched by the overwhelming presence of too many people doing, saying, and thinking the same things. Toeing the line was supposed to make us happy, and when people know they are supposed to be happy that unhappiness is the result of sins against God then they act happy, even if they are not. Who was I to doubt the word of God (and the Armstrongs) as exemplified by the all-smiling faces of four hundred fellow students and seekers after righteousness? Could smiles be pernicious? Who was I to criticize the lieutenants and representatives of the Creator?
But early in 1972,a minister named Howard Clark was transferred to Texas from the headquarters campus in Pasadena, California. He was something of a legend in the WCG. While serving with the Maine Corps in Korea, he was severely wounded and subsequently paralyzed. He received one hundred percent disability from the Veterans Administration and was confined to a wheelchair. But then God called him into the Work, as we liked to say, and after being anointed with oil and prayed over by a WCG minister, he was healed he was able to walk. He attended AC and rose through the ranks, demonstrating a remarkable talent for preaching and public speaking.
He was loud and irreverent, articulate and keenly intelligent. One had to wonder why he was allowed to stay; he did little obeisance to sacred cows.
The presence of such a renegade was a revelation, but Clark offered us more than his own puzzling existence. That summer when life on campus slowed and many students and faculty were gone, he initiated what he called waffle shops. These were informal evening gatherings advertised by word of mouth, There might be poetry readings (of all things!), a film, Bible study, and of course listening to Clark as he waffled extemporaneously expounding on just about everything. To cadets in the army of God, regimented in body and spirit, this could be shocking.
During one waffle shop, Clark quipped: If Jesus Christ was a student at AC today, wed kick him out. We had strayed too far from the original precepts to be tolerated by the original teacher. It was that heretical thought, and a thinly veiled reference to some WCG ministers as con artists that spurred the gestapo into action. A senior who had attended the gathering, a leading upper-classman, went to the Dean of Students (Ron) Kelly the next day and reported what distressing things he had heard. The waffle shops were officially banned.
Unlike most of the faculty, Clark lived off campus, away from the bosom of the institution. Students began filtering out there, alone or in small groups, to sit in his office and listen. Rumors of a heretical underground, a free thought movement, began to circulate. People felt threatened. But Clark was not attempting to undermine AC. His main point was that we were all individuals before God and that we must truly cultivate independent minds. But that was not necessarily good for the cohesiveness of the army.
In the meantime, we were buying books-under the counter. Clark recommended The Faith of a Heretic by Walter Kaufman, and one of the students who worked at the college commissary ordered a few copies and kept them discreetly out of sight, far from the Louis Lamour westerns. If someone specially requested a copy, he would slip it into a bag and quietly had it over. The eyes of the true believers were everywhere; this was not an acceptable book for Gods students.
On page twenty-two, Kaufman had written: The aim of a liberal arts education is not to turn out ideal dinner guests who can talk with assurance about practically everything, but people who will not be taken in by men who speak about all things with an air of finality. The goal is not to train future authorities, but men who are not cowed by those who claim to be authorities".
These were not words that Chapman would have us memorize, especially since one of the conceits of AC was that it was providing us with a liberal arts education. My friend Gerry, who was on the staff of the college newspaper, once neglected to perform some small task that the faculty advisor expected him to have done.
I thought (so and so) was going to do it, Gerry told the man. That's your problem, replied the journalism instructor/ordained minister, you don't think! He then told Gerry that he wanted him to be robot, and, to demonstrate; he walked stiffly and jerkily around the room. It was a sincere performance, devoid of irony.
Leschak also tells a story about Ben Chapman (as so-called evangelist in WCG). Chapman married Richard Armstrong's wife sometime after Richard was died because of Herbert's refusal to allow proper medical care. Chapman was not a well liked person in Pasadena. He rode around on the coattails of GTA. He was an arrogant ass, cruel, mean spirited and spiritually violent. Leschak has this to say about the idiot:
But my mind soon took a decisive turn, and it began in a classroom. Bill stood up to ask a question in Theological Research, the third-year Bible class. He was genuinely puzzled, and politely (I thought) disputed the conclusion we were supposed to have reached as the result of completing a homework assignment concerning the canonization
of the Bible. The instructor, a minister named (Benjamin) Chapman, immediately bristled. I could actually see him stiffen, tensing up as if for a physical battle. If he had been a dog, his hackles wouldve risen. An argument ensued, with Chapman not addressing Bills question, but rather accusing him of arrogance and insubordination. Bill stated repeatedly that he wasnt challenging Chapmans authority (though the question by its very nature of course had) nor showing disrespect, but the irate professor ridiculed him, demanding to know if he even believed in the Bible. A few students told me later that they had grown increasingly bewildered, amazed at what they considered to be a serious overreaction by Chapman. They said that if Bill had walked out, theyd have followed. (Thered been many complaints about the class among students.)
But finally Bill decided to just shut up and sit down. He was shocked, genuinely perplexed by what vehemence and contempt of Chapmans reaction to what Bill considered a legitimate question. This public attack by a superior, an ordained minister of God, was so distressing that Bill felt the whole thing mustve been his fault. That evening he went to Chapmans home and apologized. This humbling, magnanimous effort received a cold, Well, you should apologize response. There was no sense of warmth or conciliation, and absolutely no admission of at least partial wrong. Bill left angry and humiliated, violated once again. He believed that at Gods college there should be some recourse, so he made an official appointment with Chapman through his secretary, and asked if I could tag along. We discussed the mission at length and decided our purpose would be to respectfully inform Chapman that the majority of his students were dissatisfied with the way his course was run, and to propose some changes we felt would be beneficial. We believed the attitude of the class, especially after Bills excoriation, was ugly and that Chapman should be aware of it.
Unfortunately we were not granted an audience for three long weeks.
On a Friday evening in December, we finally entered Chapmans office, nervous and intimidated. . We spent two hours discussing these matters, and all was serene and friendly, at least on the surface. We shook hands as we left, and Bill and I were satisfied that all had gone well. We congratulated each other, convinced we had accomplished some good. Silly boys.
Next morning at Sabbath services, Chapman delivered the sermon. The standard length of a sermon in the WCG was one to two hours (though I sat through some as long as three, and heard about a few legendary five-hour marathons). Chapman all but personally attacked Bill and me for nearly an hour and half. I was stunned. Bill had opted for the afternoon services and thus missed another public thrashing, In a vicious assault upon those who question and doubt, Chapman referred to several points we had discussed only several hours before in the apparently benign atmosphere of his office. I expected to hear our names spewed out at any moment, held up as pariahs or perhaps insidious dupes of Satan. He set up straw men and violently knocked them down, quoting excessively from an outside theological work, which was obviously sloppy and in error as far as his audience was concerned. He used the book as an intelligent scapegoat, a means to ridicule contemporary scholarship in general (and hence thinking in general). He lambasted and belittled those who critically examined what he billed as the Truth. He laid it right out, asserting clearly, without equivocation: ITS NOT YOUR PLACE TO QUESTION WHAT YOUR TEACHERS TELL YOU! So there it was-the true face of AC and the WCG. The hierarchy was not after truth, but power. They had all truth; there was no need to seek more and there was especially no need to take any gruff from mere students-lowly sheep of the flock.
