The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe - Hardcover

Hallman, J. C.

 
9781400061723: The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400061725 ISBN 13: 9781400061723
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A multifaceted study of religion in America journeys to the offbeat corners of the nation's spiritual life, ranging from Druidic ceremonies and dog-raising Orthodox monks to Christian wrestlers and Satanists, guided by the life and work of philosopher William James. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. C. Hallman, a graduate of the Iowa and Johns Hopkins writing programs, has published fiction and nonfiction in GQ and other national magazines. His first book, The Chess Artist, was published to wide acclaim. Hallman is currently a writer in residence at Sweet Briar College.

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Infinite

Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible--but yet their life! Their life! It is normal! It is happy! It is an answer to the question!

--William James

The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music

converged on by ambulance sirens

and they understand everything.

They're on your side. They forgive you.

--Denis Johnson

1. Applewhite

I coasted my rental over Lake Hodges, on I-15 toward Del Dios Highway. The hills of California wriggled and waved like crumpled bedsheets. This was homecoming for me. I grew up on the messy suburban folds. The January warmth and the chaparral minimalism outside the car were offset by nostalgia, the scrutiny of personal faith attendant to voyages home.

When I was a boy, Lake Hodges had appeared overnight. The lake had dried long before I was born but the bridge had always been there, an anachronistic hulk, spanning a divot where cows roamed. One winter it rained for a month and there was the lake, proof that Noah had been right. I crossed the span and the road doubled back to follow the shoreline, pretty curves connecting the dry inland burb of Escondido to the coastal paradise of Del Mar. Del Dios Highway means "God's Highway." The twisting road jutted from steep canyon walls above the lake. Palatial estates rode the crest of the hills.

I left Del Dios well before the coast, turning in toward a residential neighborhood that ranked among the richest in the nation. I stopped the car to jot a note. I smelled the air outside for the first time since the airport and thought: shampoo. It was eucalyptus--that's how long I'd been gone. California, a state-sized mecca for new religious movements, was that place where plants didn't have leaves. Instead they had fronds, silver dollars, feather dusters, spines, the juicy tubules of ice plant, the thick gnarls of cacti.

I was looking for a house where thirty-nine adults had killed themselves in the name of seeking. The incident was five years old now, and I found that all my maps were wrong. The names of the nearby streets had been changed in the wake of the event. And that wasn't all. The house where the seekers took their poison had been razed. I learned all this by fumbling about, knocking on expensive doors and lying about my credentials as a journalist. I triangulated from a few sets of vague directions and found myself on a sloping street with four driveways climbing away from a dead end. Each had an automatic gate and an intercom system. One of the driveways appeared abandoned, covered with pine needles blown into curvy drifts like sand. Everything was quiet. I jumped the gate and ascended.

If California was a draw for new religious movements, then San Diego, for some reason, drew UFO groups. I'd come home to visit two such groups, each founded by an unlikely couple. One was now a ghost; the other had just experienced the failure of the prophecy that had fueled their existence for twenty-seven years.

This was still early in my study of religion--in fact, it was my first step, taken on a whim--but even so it had a Jamesian goal. If you know nothing else about the thinking of William James on religion, you might still know of James's categories of the healthy-minded folk and the sick souls. The healthy-minded type were the world's optimists, cheerful almost to a fault, and the sick souls were the pessimists, the cynical intellectual brooders. That's about what I knew of James when I first went back to California--from a mostly forgotten course in psychology--but even with just that scrap of knowledge I'd had the thought that the two UFO groups I was there to visit might neatly express James's most basic human bifurcation.

Details on the first group were hard to come by. Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles had been drawn together in the early seventies by mutual interest in pop metaphysics. Applewhite had checked into a Texas hospital where Nettles was employed as a nurse. She quickly became his Nightingale. The relationship was immaculate--Applewhite was a homosexual secure in his closet--and the belief they came to shape together combined Christian scripture, metaphysical teachings, and UFO lore.

The couple quickly turned prophet, pitching themselves as seers of a Revelation model. They took new names: Guinea and Pig, Bo and Peep, Ti and Do, or just The Two. Their first success at recruitment came in 1975 in Los Angeles. Twenty-four people abandoned their lives to fall in behind the message. An even more successful event followed in Waldport, Oregon. The earliest teachings of the group described the familiar Human Level of experience, and told of a cloud that was actually a spaceship that would take them all to the Next Level. Recruitment efforts continued through 1975 with meetings throughout the Midwest. Then they hit a snag. Two men from Oregon infiltrated the group in an attempt to find a friend who had vanished. The Two feared it was an assassination attempt, and vanished themselves.

The group struggled without them. They lost members as often as they attracted them and split into weak factions spread thin through the country. The Two reappeared in 1976, and gathered the hundred members who remained to initiate what sociologists have since called the group's "camping phase." Now the emphasis shifted toward deindividualization. Members wore uniforms and were assigned a variety of tasks, such as "fuel preparation" (cooking) and "brain exercises" (jigsaw puzzles). They were also encouraged to deny their sexuality (a number of members eventually underwent voluntary castration like early Christian ascetics). Nettles died around 1985. The camping phase continued until the early nineties, when Applewhite inherited $300,000. The group changed direction again, renting suburban homes and taking mainstream jobs. In 1994, they ran a full-page advertisement in USA Today announcing that civilization was about to be recycled. They rented a large home in Rancho Santa Fe and went high-tech, starting a webpage design company called Higher Source. The company's own webpage was called Heaven's Gate.

The Hale-Bopp comet, streaking past Earth in 1997, offered Applewhite the opportunity to claim that his spaceship-cloud had arrived. The Heaven's Gate website announced that a shadow in the wake of the comet was the ship that would carry them to the Next Level. The group had been heavily studied by sociologists in the seventies and eighties, but by the mid-nineties it had been years since anyone had paid any attention to them. It would take an anonymous phone call to the police to reveal that late in March 1997, the group had arranged their ascension to the comet by mixing phenobarbital with either applesauce or pudding and washing it down with vodka. The members were all dressed identically, and some had recorded video farewells. Each was found with five dollars and several quarters in one pocket.

Heaven's Gate was precisely the kind of group that William James's detractors have cited to criticize the voluntaristic system that James crafted to finagle his combination of belief and cynicism. But the criticism isn't fair. Not even James was willing to wipe away what he called the "wrong side of religion's account." Fanaticism, he said, was loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme, and to the charge "that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial." The problem, as James saw it, was fanaticism's conception of...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400061725
ISBN 13 
9781400061723
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
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