Heaven's Gate
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Lalich argues that these behavioral restrictions resulted in a sense of bounded choice wherein members felt they could not act other than the ways in which their leaders wanted. Members lived within a sort of forced membership within a group predicated on psychological control and manipulation. As Lalich indicates: “it is my contention that the combination of a transcendent belief system, an all-encompassing system of interlocking structural and social controls, and a highly charged charismatic relationship between leader(s) and adherents results in a self-sealing system that exacts a high degree of commitment (as well as expressions of that commitment) from its core members.”56 To put Lalich’s approach into simple and direct language as it relates to Heaven’s Gate: members believed that one cannot achieve salvation apart from the religious system that Nettles and Applewhite taught, and that the only means by which they could achieve their goals of transcending human existence were to follow the strictures set forth by the Heaven’s Gate religious system. They accepted their leaders as offering a form of charismatic leadership that one could not challenge, and that only through Applewhite and Nettles could one achieve communion with the Next Level. They therefore followed them unconditionally.
Lalich’s approach of bounded choice offers some guidance in understanding why members of Heaven’s Gate remained within a group that made strong demands on them, and in fact eventually demanded their suicides. Her approach has merit because it does help indicate how members would have conceived of their own choices as free but also limited, as something akin to Barker’s “freedom of the cage.” While I think Lalich is wrong to imply that members were somehow duped into this belief, I concur that as a result of their choices, adherents would have considered leaving the movement to be an act of spiritual suicide. Yet we must remember that some members did leave the group, and that the movement lost adherents throughout its history. While choices within Heaven’s Gate may have been bounded, choices still existed, and individuals such as Neoody, Swyody, Srfody, Mrcody, and Crlody not only chose to leave the group but are still actively discussing and disagreeing with each other about the true nature of Heaven’s Gate a decade and a half after the suicides.57 Each of these individuals not only chose to leave but chose particular strands of beliefs and practices within Heaven’s Gate on which to base their religious lives outside of the movement.58
Lalich’s brush paints a broad stroke. Everyone’s choices are bound, and the sort of psychological self-limitation that she describes exists equally within the confines of nearly every religious movement, especially those demanding adherence to a set of ethical or behavioral guidelines. One can equally well apply bounded choice to describe membership in a Catholic monastery or convent, adherence to forms of Protestant fundamentalism requiring obedience to strict moral codes, Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and a variety of forms of conservative Islam. In each of these cases, members believe in transcendental belief systems, strict social controls, charged relationships with charismatic leaders, and totalistic systems requiring high levels of commitment. As Lalich describes, they even subscribe to beliefs that outsiders consider bizarre. Tellingly, Lalich notes that individuals affected by bounded choice believe such bizarre claims as the raising of the dead, or the legitimacy of polygamy. Yet nearly every form of Christianity accepts the validity of the various stories of Christ’s miracles, including his raising of a dead man named Lazarus—not to mention the Resurrection itself! Similarly, proponents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all upheld the validity of polygamy at various points. Such claims and practices are bizarre only from the perspective of those outside the religious communities that hold or perform them. Bounded choice affects all religious believers. While one can certainly adopt Lalich’s perspective to explain why members of Heaven’s Gate stayed within this strict religious system that ultimately called for the laying down of their terrestrial lives, a much simpler answer is even more evident: they believed it. The rest of this book considers why.
3
The Religious Worldview of Heaven’s Gate
In the immediate hours after the discovery of the bodies of Heaven’s Gate’s adherents in Rancho Santa Fe, the news media began a frenzy of producing copy. The sheer oddness of the suicides—the uniforms, the incongruity of mass death in an exclusive gated community, the media-savvy way that the group had left behind a web page and videotapes—attracted international media attention. The vast majority of the articles that the media quickly spun out attempted to frame or characterize the religious beliefs and practices promulgated by Applewhite and the members of Heaven’s Gate. Yet this was no easy task. Even scholars debate the extent to which Heaven’s Gate represented a religion predicated on the New Age, Christianity, ufology, or science fiction. Media reports generally conglomerated all these influences together. To consider only one example, that of the major American newsweekly Newsweek, its journalists depicted Heaven’s Gate as a “strange brew of Christian theology, castration, science fiction, belief in UFOs and mastery of the Internet,” “a delusional cocktail of just about every religious tradition and New Age escapist fantasy,” and a “farrago of early-Christian heresy and 1970s-era science fiction.”1 The magazine’s full-length article on the beliefs of members introduced its subject as “a bit of everything, from the Gospels to science fiction to Eastern mysticism. Inside their twisted theology [was] an odd mixture of Biblical apocalypse, New Age mysticism and science fiction.”2 While journalists associated with more staid outfits such as the Los Angeles Times or New York Times wrote less sensationalistic descriptions, their inability to pigeonhole the beliefs held by members of Heaven’s Gate percolated through their articles. The Los Angeles Times characterized the group as possessing a “complex theology and strident beliefs . . . a synthesis of ancient and modern religious themes, mixing space-age images with biblical citations in a quest for salvation,” and invoked everything from present-day Christianity to Star Wars to ancient Gnosticism to explain the group.3
Yet the beliefs and theology of Heaven’s Gate did not represent, in Newsweek’s words, “a bit of everything.” Nor did its sources include “just about every religious tradition.” (Whether it was delusional is of course a matter of perspective.) Heaven’s Gate emerged out of two theological worlds: Evangelical Christianity and the New Age movement, particularly the element of the New Age movement concerned with alien visitations and extraterrestrial contact. The movement’s leaders and members certainly drew from a broad array of influences, including secular ufology, science fiction, and conspiracy theories, in addition to their religious influences. Yet ultimately the group’s theology was a Christian one, as read through a New Age interpretive lens.
This chapter looks to what scholars of religion call the worldview of Heaven’s Gate. A direct translation of the German concept Weltanschauung, a worldview encapsulates the basic approaches and assumptions that an individual or group of individuals bring to how they perceive and understand the natural and social cosmos in which they live. Scholars of religion have made extensive use of the concept, with Ninian Smart’s treatise on the world’s religions as worldviews perhaps the best known example.4 Scholars have employed the concept of worldviews to consider topics ranging from African Christian communities to Asian Buddhists to postmodern theology.
Religious studies scholar Gregory R. Peterson argues that religious worldviews possess three characteristics: they are fundamental, meaning that those who accept them consider them centrally important and relevant; they are explanatory, giving meaning to the surrounding cosmos; and they are global, meaning they encompass all of existence. Peterson calls these religious worldviews “orienting” and “normative,” meaning that they root individuals in their visions of the world and that individuals use them to make judgments and value considerations of that world.5 The worldview of Heaven’s Gate functioned precisely in this way, providing a means by which members understood and interpreted the world around them, rooted themselves in a livable cosmos, and made value judgme
nts about their world. Another way to consider this idea of worldview is through social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, what he calls “a lasting, generalized and transposable disposition to act and think in conformity with the principles of a (quasi) systemic view of the world and human existence.”6 For Bourdieu, habitus is the socially constructed world of meaning, value, and order. Like Peterson’s approach, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus stresses a set of meanings and values that transcend specific doctrinal belief statements and imbue individuals’ ways of looking at the world around them. Both worldview and habitus describe the pre-cognitive assumptions and approaches that characterize how persons try to make the world around themselves livable. As I use it, the concept of worldview envelops that of habitus, since it not only includes the meanings and values of a community but also how they use those values to contextualize, understand, and relate to the world around them.
Postmodern Pastiche
Before considering the elements and influence of the habitus or worldview of members of Heaven’s Gate, one must consider its influences, sources, and characteristics. Hugh Urban, in one of the first academic studies produced on Heaven’s Gate after the 1997 suicides, argued that this new religious movement represented “the ultimate postmodern pastiche and the idea of spirituality for the age of hypertext.”7 Urban is not a scholar of Heaven’s Gate itself, and some of his characterizations of the group are not correct—notably, the group was not a “technological, on-line religion,” as Urban states; in fact it came to the Internet very late in its history—yet his overall assessment offers some value to understanding how the leaders and members of Heaven’s Gate assembled their religious worldview.8 According to Urban, Applewhite and Nettles—and presumably the group’s adherents—constructed their theology through a process of pastiche (creating a medley of various components), drawing from multiple sources to construct a meaningful theological worldview. These included Protestant Christianity, ufology, contemporary theosophical thinking, science fiction, and New Age mysticism.
Urban is fundamentally correct that the contemporary United States—what he characterizes as the postmodern capitalist world—enables and ennobles the sort of processes of pastiche that defined the theological work and worldview of Heaven’s Gate’s founders and members. Individualism, consumption, and technology have created a world wherein pastiche defines culture. Personal choice in terms of religion and a capitalist-derived emphasis on consumption combine to permit the sort of religious borrowing that characterizes religious pastiches. Just as consumers purchase jeans at one retailer, shirts at another retailer, and accents drawn from fashion and technology—ranging from purses to iPods—from other retailers, so too do religious consumers draw from multiple sources in the construction of their religious worlds. This is true far outside of the world of new religious movements. Adherents of one of the fastest growing sectors in American religion during the era that Heaven’s Gate emerged, Evangelical Christians, borrow theology from different denominations, social patterns from different eras of Christian history, and practices that originate in medieval Christianity, turn-of-the century America, and even other world religions, e.g., “Christian yoga.”9
In fact, pastiche is not particularly new in religion, though Heaven’s Gate may represent a heightened form of it. Throughout religious history such pastiche has defined how new religions create and foster new cultures. To take just one example, early Christian leaders adopted elements from Pagan and Roman winter holidays—generally occurring just before the winter solstice—and fashioned the Christian holiday of Christmas, while simultaneously drawing from Jewish traditions as well.10 Art historians have linked Christian iconography with Egyptian and Greek traditions, and certainly some early Christian traditions mirror those of Greco-Roman mystery religions.11 Northern European Yule traditions shaped the eventual cultural practices of Christmas. Analogous examples of pastiche exist for all the other major religions of the world in addition to Christianity, most notably the evangelizing religions of Buddhism and Islam that seek to adopt local practices and adapt them to the spread of the new religion. Pastiche seems a basic fact of religious operation rather than something unique to postmodern American culture.
Urban envisions Heaven’s Gate as predicated on such practices of pastiche. “I would suggest Heaven’s Gate be regarded as a specially late capitalist or postmodern religion—a religion not simply containing elements of syncretism of religious borrowing, but one essentially founded on the art of pastiche and the free-wheeling appropriation of a remarkably wide diversity of religious and cultural artifacts.”12 In Urban’s reading, the founders of Heaven’s Gate self-consciously drew from a variety of religious traditions in producing the theology of Heaven’s Gate. He sees this process as fundamental to the movement, and wide in scope. While Urban is correct in noting the presence of pastiche, it would be wrong to argue that admixture represented the sole operating principle at work as the leaders and members of Heaven’s Gate developed their theology. Pastiche represents the process, not the principle. The principle is that of hermeneutics, or interpretation. As I will argue later in this chapter, Heaven’s Gate developed a hermeneutical approach founded on a set of principles drawn from ufology and the New Age, but it applied this interpretive framework to Christian sources. Urban’s approach is valuable in that it indicates the place of combinativeness, but one must not read too much into that process. Applewhite and Nettles were quite careful in choosing the sources from which they drew and how they used them. It was not a “free-wheeling appropriation.” Rather, the idea that truths existed in multiple sources and that religion exists as a form of pastiche served as one of the assumptions within the Heaven’s Gate worldview. It was not so much a principle or intention as it was an assumption.
That being said, something about American culture in the 1970s and 1980s—when Heaven’s Gate emerged and grew—made the membership in new religious movements and the production of religious pastiche particularly apt. Postmodernity does provide part of the answer. As George D. Chryssides has argued in his study of Heaven’s Gate, the movement possessed several fundamental features of postmodernity. He notes that the movement engaged in an eclectic combinativeness, piecing together elements of various sources without any apparent interest in producing a systematized academic theology. “Consistent with postmodernity, there were no grand theories to explain or legitimate, or inherent connections between the disparate ideas, only fragments blended together.”13 Chryssides is entirely correct that Heaven’s Gate functioned in this manner, and that Applewhite and Nettles somewhat spontaneously produced new aspects of their theology predicated on bricolage rather than rigorous empirical or positivist study. Applewhite did not learn Greek so as to better understand the New Testament, for example, and neither did the members study astronomy so as to better understand the physics of space travel.
Postmodern bricolage is in fact a growing aspect of American religious culture, and while Heaven’s Gate represented a radical form of such, it was quite representative. In some ways it foreshadowed what was to come in the decade that followed. The Pew Forum’s 2009 study of American religious life revealed that Americans combine a variety of Christian, New Age, Asian, and quasi-scientific positions in their self-conceived theologies. For example, 29 percent of Americans (both Christians and non-Christians) believe they have communicated with the dead, 18 percent claim to have seen a ghost, and 15 percent have consulted a psychic. Among self-professing Christians, the numbers are nearly the same, with 17 percent claiming to have seen a ghost and 14 percent having visited a psychic. Clearly, American Christians have no trouble combining elements of Spiritualism in its classic sense—communicating with the dead and ghosts—with their spiritual practices and activities. When it comes to beliefs, American Christians reveal the same predilection for combinativeness, with 23 percent believing in the presence of spiritual energy in trees, the same percentage believing in astrology, and 17 percent believing in the evil eye. One
in five American Christians accept reincarnation and believe that yoga can be a spiritual practice, showing that in their religious pastiches, such individuals draw from not only the Western occult tradition but Asian religious traditions as well.14 In some cases, Americans look to new religions that explicitly combine these disparate beliefs within a single religious tradition, as opposed to creating their own. Demographer Barry Kosmin’s 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) survey showed a small but growing number of Americans looking to such traditions, with just over 2.8 million Americans identifying with a new religious movement in the most recent 2008 survey, versus 1.3 million in 1990. Such new religions—Kosmin provided a few examples, such as Eckankar, Scientology, Druidism, and the Rastafari—follow the same patterns of religious pastiche as Heaven’s Gate.15
While the Pew Forum and ARIS surveys pointed to religious culture in the decade following the demise of Heaven’s Gate, the 1970s and 1980s were no different. During this era religious seekers flocked to new and alternative religions. Sociologists Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah labeled this “the new religious consciousness,” and rooted in it an extension of the counterculture of the 1960s. For Glock and Bellah, this new religious consciousness represented a rejection of mainstream American religion and an embracing of alternatives rooted in Asian, esoteric, political, or psychological traditions.16 Fellow sociologists and specialists in the study of new religions Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins similarly noted “new patterns of religious pluralism” born of new and alternative religions. They understood these new religions as emerging from the ferment of American culture. “The growth of nontraditional new religions and quasi-religious therapies is taking place in the context of a broader challenge to American society. Various factors—Vietnam, Watergate, increasing structural differentiation of the public from the private sector—have undermined traditional civil religion and created a legitimation crisis for the nation.”17 Within this context, Heaven’s Gate offered one among many possible options for spiritual seekers. Again, seekerhood served as part of the worldview (or habitus) of the adherents of Heaven’s Gate.