Sunday, October 25, 2020

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part V

When I first agreed to take the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class I was unaware that the fellowship that I had been attending was part of a larger organization. Up until that point I had not attended "branch" meetings, or met any Way people outside of the group that met at Tom & Joe's apartment. The class would be taught in approximately three hour increments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday over four weeks at a home in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. As I have mentioned in earlier installments, the PFAL class had been taped in the late sixties, but at the time I did not realize I would be watching a recording. Wierwille was talked about as the "teacher" of the class. I had also heard about someone named Jerry, who was mentioned as the class instructor. Unaware that The Way called someone who coordinated and oversaw the running of a PFAL class an instructor, I conflated "instructor" and "teacher" and thought a guy named Jerry Wierwille from Ohio would be teaching the class in Flushing. What was actually happening was that Jerry McSherry (his real name) would be in charge of running the class for me, my cousin Kathy and seven other students. He would be assisted by several other graduates of PFAL who had responsibilities such as parking, refreshments, and audio-visual (actually just audio). We would be listening to cassette tapes of Wierwille. A video version, on Betamax of all things, was only run if there were 12 or more students. Charts and illustrations that would ordinarily be part of the video, would be shown to us by a class crew member who sat up front with a flip chart.

As I mentioned, each class session was approximately three hours. Two hours of teaching, a break, and a third hour. The first few sessions were pretty hard to get through. Imagine trying to sit through that much talking without even anything to look at other than some cheap flip charts. But part of what kept us going through those first few sessions was that we had paid for it. $100 was a lot of money for a barely employed college student in those days. We lost one student halfway through, but the rest of us stuck it out. The first three or four nights were variations of the theme of "the Bible is true", he really hammered into us the premise that what the Bible said was the standard for everything else. I sort of already believed that, despite not knowing much about the Bible. Toward the end of the first week, two things got my attention and piqued my interest. One was that the Bible interpreted itself. You didn't need someone to interpret it for you, because if you just read what was written, in context, the meaning would be crystal clear. The other was that by the end of the class, Wierwille would provide undeniable proof that Jesus Christ not only existed, but rose from the dead. After that I was all in.

In retrospect, the approach was brilliant. Even if you didn't believe that the Bible was divinely inspired before you took the class, twelve hours of verses on the subject was bound to wear you down. Looking back, it was pure circular reasoning, but he wasn't trying to convince the skeptical. His oratory wasn't going to convert an atheist, but if you had any tendency toward a Bible-based mindset, his teaching was going to sweep away any doubts about the heavenly origins of the Bible, and therefore it's veracity. And that set the stage for the second week, were things really got serious.

Now that we "knew that we knew that we knew" that the Bible was true, we were ready for some crazy stuff. In the midst of all the "The Bible is the Word of God" stuff, we were admonished to read what was written, not only right in the verse, but in the context, how words were used before, how words were used when the King James was written, and be aware of customs in Biblical times. Wierwille then started showing us parts of the Bible where what we had always been taught was wrong. He started out by simply pointing to a plain reading of the text where it contradicted what "everyone knew" about the Bible. Again, this was brilliant. He started off with some fairly innocuous things, where the "accurate" reading didn't make much difference in how we lived our lives, or even touched on contentious doctrinal issues. Eventually, however, the stakes got higher. After several sessions of having much of what we always thought we knew shown, by reading the actual Bible, to be false, any confidence in what our priests or ministers had been telling us had been undermined. Ostensibly, this was to show us that we had to read the Bible as written and allow it to interpret itself. The real reason, as I saw much later, was to set up Wierwille as the authority, despite the encouragement to read and study ourselves.

The final week of the class was devoted to what Wierwille called "the manifestations of the spirit", which most denominations called "the gifts of the spirit". The most well-known of these was speaking in tongues, although other "manifestations" were included. Wierwille billed speaking in tongues as proof of the truth of the Bible. For most of the third week we were regaled with instances of speaking in tongues in the Bible culminating with a group speaking in tongues session right at the end of the final session. In contrast to the dry pseudo-intellectual tone of most of the class, this final session was emphatically emotional. Wierwille asked the class rhetorically, just before we were "led into" speaking in tongues, "don't you want to speak 'the wonderful works of God'?" before having us stand and, in unison, and backed by the crew and other graduates of the class loudly speaking in tongues themselves, speaking in tongues as Wierwille's recorded voice encouraging us. 

For many people, including me, it sealed the deal. Not only had I been led, step by step, through an intellectual shedding of previous beliefs and acquisition of a new perspective, but it all came together with an emotional capstone. 

The Way had successfully got me to change what I believed about God and the Bible, but I still wasn't committed to regular involvement. I wasn't in a cult...yet.


Part VI
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