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The New Yorker, April 24, 2019
How Cults Made America
A new book argues that, politically, messianic movements were often
light-years ahead of their time. But at what cost?
By Tom Bissell
In “American Messiahs,” Adam Morris exhumes the lives and beliefs of a
linked procession of self-appointed prophets who tried to upend American
religion—and the American way of life.Illustration by Daniel Zender
Most people have never heard of Cyrus Teed, which is a shame. He was
born in Trout Creek, New York, in 1839. As a boy, he worked along the
Erie Canal, experiencing some of the worst labor conditions that
nineteenth-century America had to offer. As Adam Morris recounts in a
new book, “American Messiahs,” Teed soon became a staunch
anti-capitalist, and he spent much of his life trying to abolish wage
labor entirely. This didn’t prevent him from pursuing a number of
business ventures. At one point, he ran a mop factory; at another, he
hawked something called an Electro-Therapeutic Apparatus, which provided
its owners with the putative health benefits of mild, recurrent
electrocution. Teed was a student of “eclectic medicine,” a branch of
healing that rose in response to widespread—and frequently
justified—fears of doctors. In Teed’s day, you didn’t become a surgeon
if you didn’t have the stomach to wield a bone saw.
Teed also believed that he had, living within him, a spirit of some
sort. He would go on to proclaim that this spirit had once empowered
Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. The New York Times headline wrote itself: “A
Doctor Obtaining Money on the Ground That He is the New Messiah.” Teed
called himself Koresh, a transliteration from the Hebrew version of the
name Cyrus, and criticized mainstream Christianity as “the dead carcass
of a once vital and active” faith. Then, in the eighteen-seventies, he
founded a commune, Koreshan Unity, and announced that “the new kingdom”
would be formed through women’s emancipation—he envisioned a group of
celibate, bi-gendered beings—and the destruction of monopoly capitalism.
Teed is one of the case studies in “American Messiahs,” in which Morris
exhumes the lives and beliefs of a linked procession of self-appointed
prophets who tried to upend American religion—and the American way of
life. They did so by attracting thousands (sometimes tens of thousands)
of followers while preaching a version of what Morris calls “apostolic
communism,” which has a clear basis in scripture. According to Acts
4:32, the first Christians, in Jerusalem, “were of one heart and soul,
and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own,
but they had everything in common.” The typical history of Christianity
will tell you that this passage has been influential in certain monastic
communities but scarcely anywhere else.
Morris is out to prove this account wrong, and, in many ways, he
succeeds. As it happens, a resilient strain of Christo-Marxist thinking
has endured in America. Its adherents have almost always been celibate,
anti-marriage, anti-family, relatively enlightened on matters of gender
and race, and unblushingly communistic. The Americans who spearheaded
these movements had another commonality: they all believed, in one
manner or another, that they were living gods. For Morris, this fact has
too often been exploited as an excuse to dismiss a radical tradition.
“Far more than for their heretical beliefs,” he writes, “the communistic
and anti-family leanings of American messianic movements pose a threat
to the prevailing socioeconomic order.” In other words, these men and
women were, morally speaking, light-years ahead of their time—and that’s
why we don’t take them seriously.
It is interesting that these movements had progressive goals long before
mainstream society did. One of the first prophets Morris writes about is
a woman: the Quaker pacifist Jemima Wilkinson, who assumed her prophetic
identity in 1776, following a bout of fever, when she was twenty-three.
She called herself the Public Universal Friend, the All-Friend, and the
Comforter, among other names, and answered only to male pronouns. This
had less to do with modern conceptualizations of transgenderism than
with Wilkinson’s belief, hinted at through four decades of missionary
activity, that the spirit who inhabited her was Jesus. Wilkinson cited a
passage from Jeremiah—“A woman shall compass a man”—to account for this
possession by the Christ spirit, and she had an abstemious Christian
desire to expunge sexual activity from the human experience. (Wilkinson
shared this desire with her contemporary Ann Lee, who founded the
Shakers, and who was supposed to have said that there are no “sluts in
heaven.”)
Wilkinson denounced war and slavery, and her burgeoning flock was
largely led by women. Her public image was helped by the fact that she
was a skilled horseman, physically indomitable as she ventured into
Revolutionary War zones to proclaim the nearness of the End Times. Here
is Morris, in one of his typically well-tuned descriptions, relaying the
sight of this gender-bending charismatic galloping across the world of
George Washington:
Nearly every contemporary account remarks upon the dark beauty of the
Comforter’s androgynous countenance: a well-apportioned female body
cloaked in black robes along with a white or purple cravat, topped by a
wide-brimmed hat made of gray beaver fur.
It’s fair to assume that the Christ spirit did not inhabit Wilkinson,
but whether she believed it did is a thornier question. Morris nods at
the likeliest answer when he refers to contemporaneous critics who
guessed that her transformation into the Public Universal Friend was “a
grandiose stunt carried off by a woman who considered herself too clever
to end up an old maid.” Indeed, Morris argues that Wilkinson—and
American messianic movements writ large—often provided shelter to those
trying to escape the hardships of being a woman. Until well into the
twentieth century, “women’s work” was highly exploitative. Not even
marriage shielded women from indignity and assault, as marital rape was
sanctioned by American law. Women have tended to flock to American
messianic movements, Morris argues, precisely because such movements
promised “equal rights among the faithful.”
For instance, the prophet Thomas Lake Harris—who, early in his career,
wrote about doing psychic battle on an astral plane with Milton—ran what
Morris describes as an “interracial, intergenerational, and communistic”
community, which was “practically unheard of anywhere else in the
country.” This was the Brotherhood of New Life, which, in the late
nineteenth-century, had outposts in New York and California. Harris,
too, believed that God dwelled within him, and his precepts included
shared property, celibate marriages, and economies anchored by the
production of wine. (He also believed that fairies lived in our
bloodstream, and that “divine respiration,” a fancy breathing technique,
was the key to paradise.) Like the Public Universal Friend’s incipient
feminism, Lake’s “communalism” represented, in Morris’s words, “the
ultimate repudiation of the values and institutions that Americans
historically hold dear,” among them “the sacrosanct individualism on
which American culture thrives.” This is why, Morris goes on, American
messianic movements have historically found “reliable opponents in the
press, in law enforcement, and in the courts.”
It’s true that America was shaped by extreme religious movements. Every
November, we celebrate the seventeenth-century Puritans who arrived at
our shore seeking religious liberty. We tend to forget that these
Puritans weren’t oppressed because they were religious; they were
oppressed because they were fanatics. They fled Europe to build a “city
upon a hill,” a new and “primitive” Church in which equality reigned and
private property was abolished. Their land reform failed, but their
exceptionalism remains a vital layer of the American bedrock. As Morris
writes, “the impulse to purify the group through separation from
mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not
be more fundamental to the nation’s history.”
Still, as the Puritans prove, the radical religious impulse need not be
accompanied by a leader who claims to be God. At its core, the only
difference between a cult and a religion is antiquity. But antiquity
amounts to a lot. Among other things, it allows followers to live and
believe within the parameters of a complex intellectual tradition. A
human claiming to be God, and making concomitant demands of his or her
community, falls into a much simpler intellectual tradition: the cult of
personality. It could be that the press, law enforcement, and the courts
tend to find fault with self-appointed deities because, as often as not,
they do and believe alarming things. As Morris tells us, Wilkinson,
despite her abolitionist convictions, mooched her way into a mansion
built with a slavery-spawned fortune. Teed was a eugenicist, and his
“mind cures” often proved lethal. Harris preached equality but routinely
subjected the women and children of his commune to sadistic punishment.
To say that these qualities are distractions—that the real reason these
messiahs were scorned is that they threatened the American order—is a
hard sell.
In his author bio, Morris describes himself as “an independent scholar.”
He’s a fine writer of prose, with an instinctive feel for storytelling
and a genius for quotation. One senses while reading this book the ghost
of the proposal behind it—the promise of a smart, revisionist take on
American messianic movements. But that message is often muddled, not
least because Morris is too entertaining a writer to keep from dunking
on his subjects: “Obviously the death of two-thirds of the Trinity was
not an auspicious sign for the community,” he writes of one cult. Of
Teed, he writes, “Overthrowing capitalism with a communist mop factory
proved impossible.”
The two most darkly significant messiahs Morris writes about are also
most indicative of what’s wrong with this otherwise fascinating book.
Father Divine (born George Baker, in Maryland) burst upon the American
scene in the early nineteen-thirties. After learning the preacher racket
from a man who called himself Jehovia, Divine began his public life
running a for-hire work service, gigging out early followers as maids
and day laborers. He’d already forbidden the use of “hello” among his
people, because it contained the word “hell”; instead, his followers
greeted one another with “peace.” That gave his movement its name, the
International Peace Mission Movement, which remains active to this day.
One of the most famous tenets Divine, who was black, put forth was a
disavowal of the concept of racial categorization, as a result of which
he was attacked and mocked by Marcus Garvey and Richard Wright. As
Morris puts it, this teaching is also the reason that “Father Divine’s
Peace Mission has, for the most part, been deleted from the history of
black struggle in America.” Nevertheless, his Peace Missions became some
of the only integrated institutions in the United States.
Early in his career, Father Divine was arrested in rural Georgia. He
refused to give his real name and was booked as “John Doe, alias God.”
This soon became his joke on everyone. After declaring himself “fully
attuned to the Christ Consciousness,” Divine started driving around in a
Cadillac, accompanied by young women who scribbled down everything he
said. An example of his penetrative wisdom: “Positive thoughts will
bring about positive conditions in your bodies, and negative thoughts
will produce negative conditions in your bodies.” A religious thinker
Divine was not, but he was a genius about property scams. By the
nineteen-forties, his movement controlled millions in real estate,
though none of it was held in Divine’s name. This was done purposefully,
so that if he was sued—and he would be—he’d be protected from losing
everything.
Morris tells the story of Ruth Boaz, a former member of the Peace
Mission Movement who later wrote a tell-all about Father Divine,
including time she spent as his mistress. In the book, she detailed his
singular ability to “capture the minds of sincere people and bend them
to his will.” For some reason, Morris rides to Divine’s rescue, writing,
“Her description is at odds with the fact that many of Divine’s
followers were educated professionals, and that a great deal of those
who joined the movement acquired training in nursing and other stable
careers.” Perhaps that’s so, but what does it have to do with Divine’s
credibility? Morris details the man’s many hypocrisies, from rejecting
the New Deal largely because it cut into his recruitment program to
possibly urging one of his less stable supporters to stab a servant of
the court who served Divine with papers. The inclination to defend a
cult leader against the charge of “mind control” is somewhat baffling.
Morris also points out that investigators looked into Father Divine’s
finances, including Adam Clayton Powell, who concluded that Divine
really did lift people out of poverty. This is comforting, but it
appears not to matter to Morris that he did so by encasing his
followers’ minds within a debasing fantasy. Throughout the book, Morris
is so intent on pointing out the good done in spite of his messiahs’
beliefs that he rarely lingers on the lasting harm done to those who
believed in the messiahs themselves. This winds up making the book
appear to argue that these messiahs attracted followers because they
were anti-capitalist visionaries and not because they claimed to be
living gods.
Of course, that is exactly backward. Both Socrates and Jesus recommended
turning the other cheek. Both Socrates and Jesus were killed for their
beliefs. Yet when Socrates’s birthday rolls around, we don’t give each
other presents. All religious movements appeal to ethics, but their
primary draw is spiritual—a surrender to a higher power. When Morris
writes that his messiahs “deemphasized familial bonds,” or that their
communes “lacked organizational structure,” he seems unduly confident
that their goal was to overcome industrial capitalism, rather than to
insure that their followers were easier to accrue and control.
Father Divine died in the mid-nineteen-sixties, but not before a student
minister from the highly segregated state of Indiana came calling. The
power, the people hanging on Divine’s every word—the future founder of
Jonestown liked what he saw. This may be Father Divine’s most damning
legacy: he gave us the Reverend Jim Jones. Morris believes that Jones
may have been genuinely moved by experiencing “an integrated movement,
numbering tens of thousands of adherents who successfully lived
according to the apostolic socialism described in the Book of Acts,”
which Father Divine certainly preached, even if he didn’t always
practice it. Jones might well have found that inspiring, given that he
made improving race relations the special focus of his ministry.
Morris’s account of Jones’s bizarre, star-crossed life is quite good,
and he helpfully lingers on how completely a man of the evangelical left
Jones was. For the vast majority of American history, as Morris reminds
us, movements we would today call “evangelical” were largely leftist,
which is best evidenced by the towering figure of William Jennings
Bryan. Abolitionism was an obviously leftist concern, as was feminism,
but so was, at one time, temperance. All three movements were spurred on
by influential American evangelicals pursuing their own version of
social justice.
This was the Christian tradition from which Jones seemed to emerge:
outspoken, fiery, and unmistakably progressive. In time, Jones would
attract star-studded admirers from the American Left, from Jane Fonda to
Angela Davis to Willie Brown. But Jones was always lying about his true
goals. A crypto-socialist by the nineteen-fifties, and later an outright
Maoist, Jones was a self-professed atheist when he first met Father
Divine. Religion, to Jones, was the opiate of the masses, and he
intended to be the dealer. His early goal was finding a church that
would allow him to smuggle Marxism into his sermons. Here is Morris:
If truly embraced, the principles outlined in the social creed would
require Methodists to engage in community service, work to alleviate
poverty, and foster love and caring in the community. Upon reflection,
Jones realized that “infiltrating” the ministry would be the most
effective way for him to advance his Marxist convictions. Christian
charity and Pentecostal ardor could be combined to achieve radical
social change through the solidarity and strong social bonds that
existed in communities of faith. This was a powerfully transformative
idea that later crystallized into one of Jones’s favorite maxims: “The
ends justify the means.”
On its face, Jones’s project was successful: the Peoples Temple Full
Gospel Church was the first racially integrated church in Indianapolis,
and getting it on its feet was almost entirely Jones’s doing. But his
means to that end were precisely the problem. He’d already learned to
scam his followers with his supposed mastery of telepathy and faith
healing. Even more electrifying to Jones’s largely black congregation
was the fact that he didn’t preach what Morris deems the “patient
forbearance” of the typical black evangelical church. A tireless
promoter of interracial friendship, Jones preached immediate, radical
action—while encouraging his flock to tithe heavily.
Most of us know the end of Jones’s story. The retreat to Guyana, the
drugs, the sex, the failed defection attempt to the Soviet Union, the
assassination of U.S. Representative Leo Ryan, the Flavor Aid packets,
the jungle Masada of Jonestown itself. Morris knows all this, too, which
makes the following passage all the more disquieting:
Jim Jones was a visionary with stunning charisma, nearly boundless
energy, and the intellectual resources of few other religious leaders of
his generation. That he ended up a drug-addled paranoiac with grandiose
delusions about his world-historical significance is one of the great
tragedies not only of American religion, but also of American leftist
politics.
Is this it, then? Has the Jim Jones rehabilitation moment arrived? Jones
wasn’t that intellectually gifted, for one thing; he did have a
“stunning charisma,” but his ideas were a flimsy synthesis of New Age
tropes and spiritual Darwinism. And, going by the evidence Morris
himself provides, Jones was running a one-man psy-op on vulnerable
people who would end up ruinously entrusting him with their lives. This
needs to be said: Jones was a man who spent his last moments on earth
demanding that babies be filled with poison. The tragedy belongs to his
victims, not to the vapors of his political talents.
On his very last page, Morris writes that “American messianic
experiments in apostolic socialism appealed to converts’ highest ideals:
they stood for equal access to jobs and education, gender parity, racial
justice, and more dignified human labor.” This seems fair. But it’s also
true that all socialist experiments have appealed to the highest ideals.
Forget socialism: the art of politics is—or at least used to be—about
appealing to the highest ideals. A movement is more than its worst
excesses, but these particular movements were founded upon the
deification of individuals who were, in the best cases, power-hungry
narcissists. For all their religious fervor, they might have paid closer
attention to the text. The New Testament had something to say about
reaping what you sow.
Still, Morris is onto something. Reading his study of Teed, I came
across an expository sentence, a sentence just trying to direct some
traffic, but the longer I stared at it, the more resonant it became:
“Teed had just been made an honorary Shaker by the North Family at New
Lebanon, and was fresh off a failed attempt to take control of the
celibate Harmony Society at Economy, Pennsylvania.” As a sentence about
America, it has it all: heterodoxy, entrepreneurialism, cultural
appropriation, sexual repression, and a town that could have been named
by the Protestant work ethic made sentient. It occurred to me, reading
it, that perhaps we don’t fear the cult because it threatens the
American way. Perhaps it reminds us of exactly who we are.
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