Apocolyptic cults - 16 March 1990

Every so often, almost always out west, more often than not in California, there appears a self-proclaimed leader, with a capital L.

In bad times they are political mavericks who deplore the regular processes of democracy, from the president and the Congress on down, and offer simple, dramatic solutions.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, there appeared two men whose following, in California, swelled to about, I should think, half a million. There was the radical novelist, Upton Sinclair. His slogan was "EPIC – End Poverty In California", and he was going to do it with direct gifts taken out of the public treasury for everybody with an income below the government's defined poverty level. There was a physician, Dr Townsend, whose plan was to give $100 a month to everybody in the country over 60.

Now, however over simple and cockeyed such plans might be, they did their part in spurring Roosevelt's government to create the social security system. Of course, the largest protest against what we then called "the system" and would now call "the establishment" came from the young, of all classes, who were disillusioned with the collapse of Wall Street and the apparent betrayal of the bankers and big business. They turned to Communism, or fellow travelling variations.

But in good times, there appear religious leaders, equally impatient with the conventional faiths, founders of their own religious cults, and their mission is always to deplore the fruits of prosperity, materialism, pleasure-seeking, and to call sinners to repentance.

The most famous of these, in the heyday of the Coolidge prosperity, was a lady named Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a very handsome woman, proclaiming something called "the foursquare gospel".

She had her own temple in Los Angeles and put on a dazzlingly theatrical show with scenery representing the ocean of love and occasionally – to illustrate the fate of non-believers on the outside – a corner of hell with smoke from the brimstone and flashing red lights. She gathered an enormous flock of disciples who gave her their all, by way of contributions and devotion, and, for a year or two, the Angelus Temple had congregations as large as the outdoor crowd that flocks around St Peter's.

I remember once attending one of her services as a tourist and I suspected that possibly half the audience had come out not so much to receive the foursquare gospel faith, as to gaze on and drool over the very chorus of lissom young women who went with her everywhere as Aimee's angels.

One day in 1926, Mrs McPherson vanished from a bathing beach in Southern California and her flock descended on the beach the next day and, through their tears, gazed out on the cruel sea and held a memorial service for the drowned leader. At least one of her followers walked into the Pacific Ocean to her death.

I think, about a month later, Mrs McPherson reappeared, bedraggled and forlorn, said she'd been kidnapped and whisked off to Mexico, and now had escaped, to the great rejoicing of her newly-assembled flock.

It came out that she had not been kidnapped. She'd been off keeping a tryst with some unidentified gentleman in Mexico. After that she lost her hold and retreated into American folklore.

We've had nobody quite like Aimee since, though during the Reagan prosperity, several gurus appeared out west, either Indians of India, or Americans who had taken Muslim names, the most recent being an Indian who colonised a remote settlement in Oregon and gathered around him a flock who had left house and home and turned over all their worldly goods to the maintenance of the guru's faith and the maintenance of his very large fleet of Rolls-Royces. He was thrown out of the country, went back home and died, I think, late last year.

Now suddenly there has reappeared a type familiar in the late 1940s and '50s, when we were all depressed by the threat of the atomic bomb, and our cities were putting up signs with arrows pointing to the basements of public buildings, the bowels of the underground "To Public Bomb Shelter". There are still one or two frayed, peeling orange signs in Radio City.

This time, it's another lady, and I must say, every bit as comely as Aimee Semple McPherson. Her husband calls himself simply Ed Francis but she calls herself Elizabeth Clare Prophet, PH. She and her first husband did apparently have the surname Prophet and together they founded their religion in 1973. They called it the Church Universal and Triumphant.

He's dead, but the cult goes on from strength to strength. And in the past week, between 2,000 and 3,000 followers have left their homes, closed their bank accounts, gathered carloads or truckloads of personal possessions and food, and descended in the wake of Mrs Prophet, or Guru Ma, as she's formally known. To her followers, she's simply Mother.

They're all settling on 30,000 acres, purchased by the church, in a beautiful valley in the Rockies in Livingston, Montana. The church has built steel-and-concrete shelters and many of the incoming refugees have paid down hefty sums as rent or purchase price on one of the underground bunkers.

Refugees? From what? From us, our world. Specifically, from the coming nuclear war. Mother says that the turbulent events of the past four or five months in Europe, the decline, or abandonment, of Communism, the new relationship with the Soviet Union, by no means have reduced the chances of nuclear annihilation. On the contrary, she says, the Soviets are following a crafty plan to lull the United States into relief and complacency.

This month and next, she thinks, are full of menace. And she's picked out April 23rd, quite incidentally St George's Day, as the possible Doomsday. If the prophecy seems harebrained, the precautions designed to meet it are extremely practical.

The underground shelters are already piled, stockpiled, with every sort of dried food, with a store of medical supplies, generators, household utensils, heating system and computers. Off in the mountains close by is a town of some 12,000 people waiting and watching. Not for Doomsday but for the members of the Church Universal and Triumphant to go underground and start to live in the shelters.

It seems that that's the only time the law, our secular law, can take effect. The church has been buying and building property on its 30,000 acres for the past nine years. That's perfectly regular and nobody can stop them building underground shelters, but the lawyer for the county says that once anybody descends and actually spends a day and a night in the shelters, he can call in the county health officer, known as the county sanitarian. And he can then testify if the place is equipped with standard septic tanks and sanitation. The sanitarian has been there and looked things over and, so far, he says, neither facility is in place.

By the way, these refugee followers of Mother are not all Americans. There are Canadians and people from South America and Europe. Most of them, I gather, if not all, have wound up their lives in their old country, and brought all their possessions and are digging in for the duration.

And how long is that? We've heard all our lives about prophets predicting the date of the end of the world. It's a doctrine, a foresight, common to many religions, though I gather the notion that a chosen people will survive the apocalypse is strictly western. The Jews, for many centuries, have derided the idea.

As for picking the date for the end of all of us, we hear about the choice of some self-styled prophet or cult, the date comes and goes, we're all intact. We laugh. And never seem to follow up the prophets and their humiliation. Well, I can't guess what Mrs Prophet, Guru Ma, Mother, will do if we come safely through 23 April. But if she runs true to type, she'll pick another date.

The United States has sprouted what are known as apocalyptics for certainly 100 years or more. In the 1830s, a guru named Miller confidently predicted the end for 22 October 1843. When nothing happened, he picked another date in 1844.

Again, we came through, and Miller's tribe was disheartened and sufficiently divided to split up into two separate faiths, one of which turned into Seventh Day Adventists. Same thing happened with a man named Russell who called Doomsday for 1914. His followers became even more devoted when the guns of August thundered and the First World War was under way.

But came 1918 and peace, and most of the world still there. Dr Russell's flock was disappointed, as true believers, but no doubt secretly relieved as human beings. Nevertheless they broke with him and incorporated a new faith under a new name. They call themselves Jehovah's Witnesses.

At the moment, the sudden ringing of Mother's alarm bell coincides with another session of the men of Geneva, the delegates, most prominently the Russians and the Americans, who for years and years have sat studying and arguing and preparing the groundwork for the next meeting of the superoowers on arms control.

While most of us, I think, except Mrs Prophet, have come to believe that the threat of nuclear war has faded dramatically and that the prospect of a direct attack, either by the Soviet Union or the United States is now negligible, the word from Geneva is that those arms control experts perceive a growing nuclear threat from the middle powers that already have a nuclear bomb or are known to be equipped to make it, or are importing suspicious amounts of plutonium for, they say, peaceful purposes. That has become the main private preoccupation of the men of Geneva.

Meanwhile, if we do emerge from St George's Day, I shall keep you posted on the future, or should I say the adjusted prophecies, of Mrs Prophet.

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