An excellent investigation and analysis of a church that attempted to reform many of its teachings and shattered in the process. ( )

It’s not often that I review books where I have some personal knowledge of the topic.

For the first 20 years of my life, I was a “member” of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG), the faith I was born into.

So, when I saw that David B. Barrett, sometime reviewer of science fiction books in the Fortean Times and also author of occasional religiously-themed articles in that magazine, had written a book on the WCG I was intrigued.

Barrett, formerly trained as a sociology of religion, uses the history of the WCG to answer a question about what happens to faiths founded by one man when that man dies.

Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA -- the W being as meaningless as the S in Harry S. Truman) founded an authoritarian and legalistic religion. The date is a bit nebulous because he led a breakaway group from another church, but he was preaching by 1928.

What he was preaching was a faith that most definitely set its members apart from not only Satan’s world but mainstream Christianity.

There was the observances of Jewish festivals – though not necessarily on the same day that Jews did and Jewish dietary laws.

There was an emphasis on prophecy, an end time apocalypse, “pre-millenariansim”, the belief that the horror of the Book of Revelations would be unleashed on the world, and Christ would return to the world and reign for a thousand years before the Final Judgement. This prophecy was fueled mostly by British-Israelism, the notion that “lost tribes of Israel” emigrated to Europe and can be identified with European nations. The notion goes back to 1590 but really took off after 1840 with John Wilson’s Lectures on Our Israelitish Origins. HWA lifted, without attribution (Barrett rightly says the exact mixture of deception and self-deception is unknowable) from Wilson while passing it off as the product of divinely guided study.

WCG’s day of worship was Saturday, the true Christian Sabbath, and to be observed by a strict sundown Friday to sundown Saturday refraining from worldly pleasures and labor.

Tithing was ordered, three tithes to be specific: ten percent to the church, ten percent to be saved for attending distant religious festivals, specifically the week long Feast of Tabernacles, and, in every third year, another ten percent to be used for the support of poor church members.

Christians are not saved by grace but by works. This was later finagled to be saved by grace but eternally rewarded by works.

Similar to Mormonism, though there is no evidence of any direct influence on HWA, WCG preached that “all resurrected and perfected mortals become gods”.

There was no “immortal soul” thus no eternal damnation to Hell. The dead were to be resurrected upon Christ’s return. The bad were to be destroyed forever. The good became those gods. (Isaac Newton, incidentally, believed in this idea of “conditional immortality”.)

Christmas and Easter and Halloween were deemed pagan holidays and not to be celebrated at all.
And, last, but certainly not least, of its major deviations from traditional Christianity was a renunciation of the Trinity for binarianism, a belief in God and Christ as entities with the Holy Spirit being but an impersonal force. It was that belief, more than any other, that caused traditional churches to denounce WCG as a cult.

All this doctrine was delivered from HWA with no room for deviation. God’s true church, as HWA frequently reminded, was not a democracy.

Barrett’s book, like other Oxford University Press publications I’ve seen, is usefully and clearly organized with evidence followed by concise conclusions.

Barrett is impeccably fair. When addressing the most serious personal criticism of HWA’s behavior, a long term incestuous sexual relationship with his daughter by blood, he merely cites the evidence pro and con. (For what it’s worth, I believe the charge and some church leaders believed it to but tried to rationalize it away in various ways.) Based on my own personal experience, Barrett’s descriptions of church doctrine are accurate.

Barrett did a great deal of research into writings by and about the church. He also conducted extensive interviews with ex-members of the church. (Virtually everyone is an ex-member here because that’s the whole point of the book. They all went to other churches or started their own.) And, of course, being a sociologist, he has a questionnaire.

Barrett looks at how closely HWA matched traditional traits of the schizophrenic or a religious guru. His conclusion is that he was not a schizo, but he fits a lot of the traits of the guru.

WCG was already have problems in the 1970s. HWA’s son, the even more charismatic Garner Ted Armstrong, was once and for all “disfellowshipped” for sexual improprieties. In a high profile legal case, the State of California put the church into receivership. Garner Ted started his own church. But it was really on HWA’s death that the fragmentation began.

HWA’s successors tried to bring WCG more into the mainstream. But, when you’ve spent decades telling your members that God’s only true way is keeping the Sabbath, scorning the Trinity and Christmas, it can be tricky to get them to change their minds when you change yours.

The question Barrett is interested in is how did WCG members react to all this. Take the new dictates as new revealed knowledge from God’s apostles on Earth or decide the Church is corrupt and go elsewhere?

One theory, from religious sociologists Rodney Stark and Richard Finke, is that family and friends, “social capital”, is the main factoring determining whether a person stays or go in a reforming religion. Barrett disputes that, and my own experience backs that up. I was the first out the WCG door and not one of my immediate family members shares the same religion.

Barrett says that “moral capital”, adherence to religious doctrine, was the determining factor in the fate of ex-WCG members. Their schisms were doctrinal disputes. Barrett strongly disagrees with the notion that doctrinal disputes are just disguised schisms in social networks.

I agree. It’s hard for the non-religious to realize that these things are important to some people. They want to get right and keep right with God.

And the schism is still continuing.

A few months ago, I had occasion to talk to an ex-WCG member of my acquaintance from years back. Like everyone else I knew and kept track of from the WCG, he left. He told me of a church he joined that fragmented over doctrine.

It had six members. ( )