Other Heaven’s Gate sources repeated this phenomenon of utilizing the language of Star Trek. The group’s Internet posting of January 16, 1994, “Last Chance Statement,” repeated the same claims, as did the title of the movement’s final Internet statement, “Heaven’s Gate ‘Away Team’ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space,” though the latter statement itself avoided any direct reference to Star Trek other than its title.67 Former Heaven’s Gate member Crlody, who left the group but remained a believer, similarly invoked Star Trek in order to explain that life without true access to the truth of Heaven’s Gate is “analogous to the holographic characters on the holodeck in Star Trek . . . hav[ing] no idea or concept that they are projections of a simulated environment that can be ‘turned off.’”68 The most extensive treatment is found in the statement written by Heaven’s Gate member Jwnody, “‘Away Team’ from Deep Space Surfaces Before Departure,” which not only directly references the two aforementioned Star Trek series, but in its title possibly also alluded to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1994–99), a series still airing new episodes at the time of the suicides. Jwnody continued the trope of referring to herself as a crew member on an away team mission in the company of her Captain and under the command of her Admiral. Jwnody uses Star Trek quite intentionally, calling it a metaphor and implying that people might understand Heaven’s Gate better through the lens of science fiction. She writes, “[m]etaphorically speaking, in 20th Century human vernacular, I am a member of the current ‘Away Team’ deployed from deep space. As a young and extremely fortunate student, I have been working closely with the ‘Captain’ and he in turn with the ‘Admiral’ (Chief Administrator of this civilization since its inception) on this remarkably complex mission.”69
Jwnody was certainly intentional about her use of science fiction. As one of the most prolific members and one of the co-editors of the movement’s self-published anthology, she made the use of science fiction a cornerstone in her attempt to engage the wider world. Her overview of the movement’s history and theology served as the introduction to the group’s anthology, and as one of its intellectual leaders, Jwnody was in the position to deploy science fiction as a means of reaching her target audience: educated, intelligent, questioning Americans. She explained in her overview, “[t]o help you understand who we are, we have taken the liberty to express a brief synopsis in the vernacular of a popular ‘science fiction’ entertainment series. Most readers in the late 20th Century will certainly recognize the intended parallels. It is really quite interesting to see how the context of fiction can often open the mind to advanced possibilities which are, in reality, quite close to fact.”70 Jwnody’s use of quotes to set apart the concept of “science fiction” indicates her discomfort with the term. This discomfort arose not from disagreements with the validity of the genre or its claims, but the fact that science fiction was in fact, in her own words, “quite close to fact.” Not fiction at all, science fiction represented a means of communicating the deep religious truths that Jwnody believed Heaven’s Gate offered. Like her earlier material and the movement’s USA Today advertisement, Jwnody’s overview in the group’s anthology made extensive use of Star Trek, and sought to portray the group as crew members on an Away Team mission to Earth, led at first by their intrepid Admiral (Nettles) and Captain (Applewhite), and later by the Captain alone.
Science fiction inundated the group’s religious rhetoric and thought, and it appeared within their practices as well. Members attempted to create their community in a form similar to that of the crew of a spaceship, notably invoking elements from Star Trek in attempting to create a model for how to live as a group. Led by a “Captain,” members lived within a “craft” and engaged in various “assignments” and “out of craft tasks.” Members renamed parts of their dwellings using technical-sounding terminology reminiscent of the rooms in a spaceship or space station, such as nutri-lab for kitchen, fiber-lab for laundry, and compu-lab for office.71 Finally, members wore uniforms reminiscent of those from Star Trek and other science fiction franchises. All of this combined to create a religious worldview deeply infused with elements and ideas drawn from science fiction.
The use of science fiction within a religious system naturally raises the question of fiction and its connection to religious belief. Most people assume that fiction and faith commitment are mutually exclusive categories, and that no religious person would invoke fiction as a support or source for religious belief. Yet the recent analytic work of religious studies scholar Carole M. Cusack challenges that assumption. Writing of what she calls “invented religions,” Cusack argues that for many religious people today the absolute distinction between fact and fiction, real and false, no longer holds. For those who adhere to invented religions, fiction can possess more truth than reality, and fundamental facts about the world can exist within works of popular culture, satire, and even nonsense. Cusack identifies several prominent new religious movements that follow in this vein, most notably the Church of All Worlds, an American Pagan community whose founders named their organization after a fictional religious community within science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Adherents of the Church drew multiple beliefs and practices from that fictional source, and have more recently introduced elements from J. K. Rowling’s series of Harry Potter books (1997–2007) into their religious worldview. Cusack identifies other invented religions such as Jediism and Matrixism that similarly look to science fiction as offering religious value. For Cusack, invented religions represent the same sort of consumer-oriented religion that I argue Heaven’s Gate’s style of religious bricolage exemplifies. In her words, “invented religions, rather than being exceptional and best classified as ‘fake’ religions, are properly understood as the inevitable outcome of a society that values novelty, and in which individuals constitute their identity through the consumption of products, experiences, cultures and spiritualities.”72 In Cusack’s reading, fiction serves as an ideal muse for many people in today’s society of cultural consumption and representation.
Worldview, Belief, and Practice
Considered synoptically, several elements drawn from different cultural influences shaped the Heaven’s Gate worldview, a bricolage pulled together by the group’s members: postmodern consumerism, a mentality of pastiche, the Bible, theosophically influenced belief in extraterrestrial life, ufology, Christian millennialism, science, philosophical materialism, and science fiction. As active creators of a religious worldview, the members of Heaven’s Gate drew from all of these sources in creating their religious world. Returning to Peterson’s assessment of the nature of religious worldviews, he argued that such worldviews are orienting, normative ways of conceiving of the world, and 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. The leaders and adherents of Heaven’s Gate crafted such a persuasive normative worldview with use of many cultural and religious sources. Within this worldview as their guide, they then lived within a sort of religious habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu would call it, a set of meanings, values, and assumptions that helped them structure and organize their experiences. The next two chapters turn from the roots of this worldview to the specific elements of the specific theological beliefs and religious practices within Heaven’s Gate, showing how the various sources they utilized appear and reappear within the religious beliefs and practices of the group.
4
Understanding Heaven’s Gate’s Theology
Until recently, most scholars in the field of religious studies have traditionally studied religions through a careful consideration of the beliefs promulgated by those faiths, focusing on doctrines and various theological positions. This approach has come under notable critique in the last half century on the basis of the need to also consider popular or vernacular practices and beliefs, so
cial dynamics, and non-institutional forms of religion. Such critique has reshaped the field of religious studies.1 Yet in the field of the study of new religious movements we have sometimes had the opposite problem; until relatively recently, few scholars have used the approaches of intellectual history or theological studies to research new religious movements.2 Owing primarily to the disciplinary location of scholars of NRMs, much of the early work on new religions employed sociological or social history methodologies. Additionally, people sometimes assume that new religions such as Heaven’s Gate did not have a developed theological system, or that the system made no sense, meaning fewer people have been drawn to study or assess these new theologies. Numerous media outlets openly disparaged the beliefs, actions, and even sanity of the members. Ted Turner, founder and board member of CNN, called the suicides “a way to get rid of a few nuts.”3 By contrast, the members of the group insisted that they were rational beings and that everything they believed made perfect sense to them. They felt this acutely, and in the “Exit Videos” produced just days before the suicides most of the members commented on how their beliefs and actions made sense to them, but they recognized that others would not understand them. Watching the videos it was clear that many members felt deeply wounded by this idea, and wanted to try to explain why they had made the choices they did. In the words of one member of Heaven’s Gate, Drrody, “When we leave I know the media will treat this . . . as some sort of weird bizarre cult, a suicide cult, whatever you might want to call it. But look deeper than those words, look for what we’ve taught people. And the message we’ve left behind because we know that it is difficult to understand.” Drrody explained that he believed in Ti and Do because the evidence supported them, and his experiences told him that they were right. Leaving behind his body represented “commitment to the Next Level,” and rejection of the human level. It made sense to him.4
Deluded crazies, or rational empiricists? Between these two extremes is a simple reality: members of Heaven’s Gate adhered to a system of beliefs that contained all the usual hallmarks of a religious theology, namely beliefs about salvation (soteriology), the order of the universe (cosmology), and the end of things (eschatology). As a Christian group, they also developed an understanding of the nature of Jesus (Christology). Like most religious systems, their beliefs were internally consistent and logical from the inside, though seem circular and bizarre from the outside. From the perspective of Heaven’s Gate members, their beliefs provided them with meaning, identity, and a sense of their place in the universe. They were, in effect, the distilled theological essence of the religious habitus that the group’s members developed and lived within. Ultimately, their beliefs demanded of them that they lay down their lives. This chapter tries to make sense of why, indicating how the members of this religion developed a specific and coherent theology within the context of the religious worldview discussed in the previous chapter.
Soteriology and Christology
The leaders and members of Heaven’s Gate utilized an extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutic throughout its history, but the specific ways in which they read their sacred text changed over the years. Nevertheless, the central features of Applewhite and Nettles’s hermeneutical approach lasted throughout their group’s history, i.e., their reading of the Bible as a record of extraterrestrial contact with human civilization for the purposes of aiding personal self-transformation. Based on their reading of the Bible, the possibility of individual salvation and bodily assumption into Heaven provided the heart of the Two’s teachings, and the form that self-transformation took within their movement. In order for potential followers to join them in this “trip,” as they called it, they needed to leave their human attachments behind them and dedicate themselves exclusively to overcoming the human condition. Those dedicated to the message of Nettles and Applewhite would rise into the heavens and achieve eternal salvation. This process, the Two declared, functioned entirely on the material level, requiring a metamorphosis of the biological and chemical makeup of the human body, and resulting in a transformation into an ideal extraterrestrial creature. The Two believed that the extraterrestrials had brought this method of salvation through transformation to Earth. They called it simply “the Process.”
This systemization of salvation—soteriology, to use the technical term—fit within a theological apparatus that explained the nature of the world and the heavens, the meaning of human existence, and the salvific drama associated with the Bible and its interpretations. Heaven’s Gate offered a vision of the Earth and its relation with Outer Space. It offered a perspective on the nature of Christ and his mission, an explanation of the nature of the divine, and an explanation of the fate of the planet and its inhabitants during the end of days. In other words, the worldview that Heaven’s Gate’s founders and members promulgated possessed the basic qualities of any Christian worldview: soteriology, cosmology, theology, Christology, and eschatology. A very small portion of these positions of course matched what most Americans would call mainstream Christian belief, nor can one claim that Heaven’s Gate’s theological positions were in any way normative within orthodox Christianity. Yet while some might regard these theological positions as comprising a mishmash of science fiction, Christian heresy, and popular religious speculation, the basic hermeneutic remained consistent. The founders and members of Heaven’s Gate read the Christian Bible through their beliefs about extraterrestrial visitations.
On May 31, 1974, Nettles and Applewhite gave to one of their first followers the Bible that they had carried with them and studied during their formulation of the movement’s theology, a copy of which was later provided to me.5 A King James Version (KJV) Red-Letter Bible, the physical text points toward the group’s Protestant biblical origins. Though by 1974 many Protestants utilized other translations, most notably the Revised Standard Version (RSV), the KJV remained the translation of choice for conservative American Protestants. The Red-Letter edition, so called because such editions print the words attributed to Jesus in red ink, holds particular value among American Protestants, since it highlights what many consider the most essential core of the entire Bible, the teachings of Jesus. As biblical scholars Athalya Brenner and Jan W. van Henten have noted in their scholarship of the reception of Bible translation, the particular Bible translation utilized by a group or individual marks their overall religious identity.6 In this regard, the Heaven’s Gate founders’ choice of the Red-Letter King James Version reveals their initial indebtedness to a biblically based conservative American Protestantism. In her own examination of Heaven’s Gate, historian Rosamond Rodman also noted that Applewhite and Nettles’s choice of a KJV Bible clearly identifies them as influenced by Protestant traditionalism, even as they embarked on exploring the text from the perspective of extraterrestrial hermeneutics.7
Applewhite and Nettles marked twenty-six discrete passages in their Bible, spread over four books—Matthew, Luke, Galatians, and Revelation (see table 3.1). Importantly, these four books all fall within the New Testament, indicating that the Two focused on what they perceived to be the salvific drama associated with Christ’s incarnation. Specifically, most of their notations fall within the Gospel of Luke, which scholars identify as the gospel most emphasizing Jesus as both biographic exemplar and savior of the world.8 The Two’s markings included underlines, drawn asterisks, and occasionally written words. Their notations fell into three broad categories: (1) the nature of Jesus as Christ, specifically the incarnation; (2) the need to forsake worldly attachments; (3) eschatological predictions of judgment, persecution, and resurrection. These marked passages, when considered in the context of the three written statements that the two founders of Heaven’s Gate wrote a year later in 1975, demonstrate the manner in which the Two sought to construct an entire theology predicated on their reading of the Bible through an extraterrestrial hermeneutic (see table 3.2).
Table 3.1: Annotated Verses by Biblical Book
Biblical Book
Number of Ann
otations
Gospel of Luke
18
Gospel of Matthew
4
Epistle to the Galatians
2
Revelation
2
Table 3.2: Annotated Verses by Theme
Theme
Number of Annotations
Overcoming Temptations and Attachments
6
Persecution of Prophets and Believers
5
Value of Spiritual Seeking
4
Judgment
3
Resurrection of Believers
3
Miracles (Healings, etc.)
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