Subject: Patricia Nell Warren on HEAVENGATE
From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 01:09:50 -0500 (EST)

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NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV               ****************************
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Commentary by Patricia Nell Warren    ****************************
              
3/29/97                                                    *******************
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HEAVENGATE
By Patricia Nell Warren

As the nation goes into a cult panic over the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, I
am amazed how fast some people forget our long national coziness with cults.

Unkind things about cults are being said or implied by newspeople,
commentators and  "cult experts."  It seems that cults are scary.  Cults are
unChristian.  Cults are New Age.  Cults are dangerous. Public figures rush to
be first to call loudly for "something to be done about cults."  On one talk
show, a distinguished guest suggested the Constitution be amended "to keep
this kind of thing from happening."

In a word, Heaven's Gate is being turned into Heavengate.

I notice that many "cult experts" on the news have religious-right
affiliations.  Yes, the RR is planning to have a field day with Heaven's
Gate. New Agers are high on their hit list.  Now the RR see their big chance:
to use 39 deaths as an excuse to blacken a movement with hundreds of
thousands of adherents.  According to CNN and Washington Post stories,
Heaven's Gate leader Applewhite was homosexual.  The RR will probably twist
this fact into one more "proof" that cults are bad.

Hmm.  Surely saner Americans remember the Jesus Freaks of the '70s?  In those
days, some counter-cult activists  nabbed minors out of extremist Christian
groups and returned them to their parents for "de-programming."   Some of
today's RR leaders were considered Jesus Freaks when they were young. So
their memory about "cults" is conveniently short.

Today the word "cult" has an eerie connotation that doesn't fit the more
benign groups.   Even some benign cults center on an obsessive control by the
group's leader, and obsessive obedience by the members.  But  this kind of
mind control isn't limited to marginalized little groups.   It can be found
in  the shadow of every religion and spiritual system in the world, including
mainstream Christianity.  

In marketing their anti-cult line to the public, the RR will trade on many
people's queasiness about suicide.  As a rule, RR cult groups don't preach
violence against the self.  But some preach violence against others.   Some
war on non-whites.  Others war on gay people.  Still others war on abortion,
tree-huggers, the federal government.  In my opinion, any religious-right
groups that operate on that same obsessive control of others is deserving of
the same media splash, and investigative scrutiny, as Heaven's Gate.

The truth is, "cults" have always been part of the American scene.  Little
groups of believers who emigrated here -- Quakers, Jews, Congregationalists,
Anabaptists, Pilgrims, Masons -- were persecuted in Europe as "scary cults."
 That's why they fled to America!  Later came Mormons, Trancendentalists,
Mennonites, Hutterites,  Christian Scientists, the Ghost Dance, to name a few
-- all considered very dangerous by the more intolerant descendants of our
cultish founders.  Cults are a star-spangled part of the American tradition. 

Protestants even considered Catholics dangerous when the latter emigrated
here in force in the 1800s.   Today some Protestants still have fits over
Catholic "idol worship."  Catholics even use the word "cult", as in "cult of
Mary."  But I don't see Protestants trying to amend the Constitution so that
Catholic cultism can be "prevented."  

Last but not least, the anti-cult script calls for cyberspace to be villified
as a hotbed of cults.  "Spiritual predators"  are said to be joining sexual
predators in the hunt for American children.  Fiddle-dee-dee.  In a nation
founded on culthood, the new cults never had a problem recruiting, whether it
was by radio, phone, telegraph or Pony Express.  Today's  recruitment
includes TV evangelists whose financial and "healing" practices have been
questioned -- proving that controllers don't need the Internet to find people
who want to be told what to think.

How odd to blame the Internet, when  TV and radio news coverage have given
Heaven's Gate a billion dollars' worth of free publicity in the last few
days.  

So before we go off the deep end -- launching witch hunts and passing a bunch
of anti-cult laws -- let's make sure we don't shoot ourselves in our cultish
American foot.

  
Patricia Nell Warren is author of "The Front Runner" and other bestselling 
books, as well as a widely published commentator.  Her publisher is Wildcat
Press. Copyright (c) 1997 by Patricia Nell Warren. All Rights Reserved. 

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