Twenty-five years ago this week, the two greatest con men of the 20^th century both died, within the space of eight days of each other. The creativity and sheer chutzpah of Herbert W. Armstrong and L. Ron Hubbard are worth remembering, and in some ways even treasuring as a species of human achievement, with the same sort of awe one reserves for the destructive power of a tsunami. Though both men were failures in the business world, when they turned to religion they discovered a sucker market of breathtaking scope.

Herbert W. Armstrong, born in 1892, worked at several jobs in the world of commercial advertising, failing at each. In the 1920s, he decided that religion was an easier racket, and fought to take control of a small congregation in Oregon. He failed at that, too, but on his way out the door managed to take the mailing list with him.

In 1935 Armstrong launched Plain Truth magazine, initially in mimeographed form; at about the same time he began regular radio broadcasts. To distinguish himself from the evangelical pack, Armstrong specialized in prophecy. He got lucky when an early prophecy, that Mussolini would conquer Ethiopia, actually came to pass. That a mechanized army would defeat spear-carrying tribesmen may seem to be not going too far out on a limb, but Armstrong hyped it into something special.

More prophecies followed, as Armstrong discovered that his audiences ate them up: Italy would conquer Palestine; then Russia would attack Palestine; then Britain would fall to the Germans; then German armies would appear on American shores. The accuracy rate began to deteriorate, but in wartime America where censorship kept the news bland and upbeat, Armstrong’s juicy predictions built his following.

The end of the German threat in 1945 would have dealt a lesser man a serious blow. Armstrong responded by assuring his readers and listeners – for decades on end – that Hitler was still alive, and ready to strike again any minute now.

Armstrong’s Theology

Advertising man Armstrong knew that product differentiation was critical. He offered a unique take on Christianity, based on his own interpretation of the Bible. Key doctrines included:

• Healing is God’s work, not man’s; medicine and surgery are therefore sinful. (In 1967, Armstrong relied on prayer rather than surgery to correct his wife’s colon blockage. She promptly died.)
• Interracial marriage is absolutely contrary to God’s will.
• The use of cosmetics is vanity, and therefore sinful.
• Birthday celebrations exalt the self, and are therefore sinful.
• Voting in civil elections is a rejection of God’s sovereign reign, and is therefore sinful. (I wish more evangelicals felt this way …)
• Herbert W. Armstrong is the reincarnation of the Prophet Elijah.

The prophecy machine kept churning as well. Listeners learned in 1951 that the pope would be moving the Vatican; in 1956 that “the USA [is] riding to total collapse in 20 short years – famine, disease, epidemics, to be followed immediately by World War III”; in 1960 that “In 12 years or less the USA will suffer the worst depression ever suffered by any nation”; in 1964 that we had “Only seven more years before H-Bomb warfare breaks out!”

By far the most important doctrine, though, was that of tithing. Armstrong loved tithing so much that he had his followers do it more than once. One tenth of everyone’s income had to go straight to the church for normal expenses. A second tenth had to be spent on church festivals. A third tenth, every third year, had to go to the church for the support of widows and the needy (though there was never an accounting of how this money was actually spent). A sophisticated computer system designed by a NASA engineer tracked individual contribution histories, to facilitate harassment of members whose contribution levels dropped. When that engineer heard Armstrong deny from the pulpit that he ever practiced these tactics, he quit in disgust.

Revenues grew to over $160 million a year, leaving competitors like Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker in the dust. Armstrong’s head count was far smaller than that of his rivals, but he was able to extract an enormous percentage of his disciples’ income. Armstrong’s World Tomorrow program was broadcast on 382 stations, and Plain Truth magazine grew to a circulation of over 8 million – aided heavily by the popularity of the highly imaginative artwork of church member Basil Wolverton depicting the horrors of the coming catastrophes. Wolverton’s day job, interestingly enough, was doing artwork for Mad magazine. (I am not making this up.) After Armstrong’s death 25 years ago last Sunday, though, his successors blundered by trying to bring the Church’s doctrines more in line with mainstream Protestantism. When the Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God lost its distinctive wacky voice, it lost its earning power, and quickly fell from view.

Scientology

L. Ron Hubbard began his career as the author of pulp science fiction in the 1930s. His particular talent was that he worked amazingly quickly – colleagues claimed he simply sat and typed steadily until a manuscript was done. When World War II broke out, Hubbard joined the Navy, where his fertile imagination got him into trouble. While taking a small ship he was given to command on a shakedown cruise, Hubbard attacked two Japanese submarines, only ten miles off the coast of Oregon! The battle lasted two full days and brought in at least four other American vessels plus two blimps. Nothing was sunk; after reviewing the logs and the other captains’ accounts, the Admiral in command of that sector concluded there were never any submarines in the vicinity. A month later, Hubbard was relieved of command.

That incident plus other misfortunes seems to have driven Hubbard into something akin to a nervous breakdown, accompanied by near destitution as his health issues restricted his writing output. In 1948, he was arrested for check fraud. The following year, though, Hubbard hit a gusher. Starting with some early ideas of Sigmund Freud that Freud himself later abandoned, Hubbard published an article on something he called “Dianetics” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine (an appropriate spot for it). Dianetics was based on the Hindu/Buddhist notion of reincarnation, teaching that all your troubles resulted from trauma in previous lives. By reliving these incidents, through a process called “auditing,” you could somehow erase them, and suddenly your ulcer would disappear – “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch.” The beauty of Dianetics was that it didn’t require a trained professional. By purchasing Hubbard’s instructions, a pair of friends could “audit” each other, a pastime even more entertaining than using a Ouija board. Within a year, Hubbard’s instruction book had sold 150,000 copies.

According to author Jon Atack, Dianetics was supposed to “Clear” people of irrational behavior. A “Clear” would have a near perfect memory and his or her IQ would soar by as much as 50 points. Asthma, color blindness, stuttering, allergies, arthritis, morning sickness and the common cold would all disappear. When pressed for a demonstration, Hubbard exhibited his first complete “Clear” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. To a packed house of 6,000, Hubbard presented a young physics major named Ann Singer. Unfortunately, not only could she not remember a simple physics formula, she could not even remember the color of Hubbard’s tie when he turned his back. A large part of the audience got up and left.

After getting in trouble with the FDA for making specific claims that his “Dianazene” tablets could cure radiation sickness, Hubbard made the shrewd move to turn Dianetics into a religion, which he called “Scientology,” giving him vastly greater Constitutional protection under which to operate. Relying on LSD and other drugs to enhance his already remarkable imagination, Hubbard regaled readers with Bible-type stories of warfare among spirits called “Thetans” that are trillions of years old, ominously warning in 1952 of a “Fourth Invader Force” that still had outposts on Mars. His church was awarded tax-exempt status in 1956, with “auditing” taking on the trappings of the Christian confessional. Paid therapists were called “ministers,” who began performing wedding, naming, and funeral rites while wearing black costumes.

By 1982, Forbes magazine estimated Hubbard’s net worth at $200 million. They were way off; when he died, 25 years ago tomorrow, his estate was actually valued at $600 million.

You and I are definitely in the wrong line of work.

Luis Granados

Last week, we looked at the 1976 origin of Gen. Videla’s “disappearance campaign,” the stated objective of which was to destroy atheists and dissidents who threatened “Western civilization and Christianity.”

When mass graves began turning up in 1982, the Cardinal who headed the Argentine bishop’s conference blithely observed that “I don’t understand how this question of guerrillas and terrorism has come up again; it’s been over for a long time … Things should not be mixed up. Do you know that there are some ‘disappeared’ persons who today are living quite contentedly in Europe?” A year later, he was given a new mansion, worth 8 million pesos, courtesy of the Argentine taxpayers.

Numerous families today tell of fruitless searches for their loved ones, in which officers of the Church not only refused help but instead passed on to the authorities information given to them in confidence so they could seize more people. When the mothers who protested weekly in the Plaza de Mayo sought support and a place to meet, the churches in the center of Buenos Aires flatly refused to accommodate them.

Solace for Torturers

One of the most critical roles played by the Church was in assuaging the consciences of the underlings who were ordered to do the dirty work. Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, for example, was a naval officer responsible for disposing of the disappeared after the torturers had extracted all the information they could. This was frequently accomplished by injecting them with sedatives and then tossing them from helicopters into the ocean. When he had trouble stomaching this, he spoke to a chaplain about it: “He was telling me that it was a Christian death because they didn’t suffer, because it wasn’t traumatic, that they had to be eliminated, that war was war and even the Bible provided for eliminating the weeds from the wheat field.” “When we had doubts,” Admiral Zaratiegui later testified, “we went to our spiritual advisors, who could only be members of the vicariate, and they put our minds at ease.” When Bishop Bonamin retired in 1981, the army chief of staff was lavish in his praise: “Both troops and command used to welcome him, avid to hear his preaching, the irreplaceable spiritual sustenance for keeping up the struggle and overcoming the lack of understanding . . . His advice clearly pointed the military sword in the right direction.” Bonamin’s retirement income was provided by a grateful Argentine government, which rewarded the support of the bishops by pumping up the size of their already generous taxpayer-funded pensions.

The very day after Monica Mignone was seized, an official pastoral letter of the Argentine Bishop’s Conference warned that “We must keep in mind that it would be easy to err with good intentions against the common good, if one were to insist . . . that the security forces must act with the chemical purity of peacetime, while blood is being shed every day; … or that we should be unwilling to accept for the sake of the common good the sacrifice of the measure of freedom that this moment requires.” It was awfully gracious of the bishops to accept the “sacrifice” of Monica Mignone for “the common good.”

A guidebook on military ethics written by an Argentine army chaplain states that torture is usually unacceptable, but there are exceptions “for very special cases.” In such cases, he says: “We believe that the man who is exercising competent and responsible authority, must judge according to his conscience and act accordingly. He is probably acting well if in each particular case he manages to give a satisfactory answer to these three questions: Is the threat to the common good so grave? Am I unable to protect the common good in some other way that is licit? Is it really indispensable that I do this?” Torture seems to have been “really indispensable” at least 10,000 times.

Though Monica Mignone’s father never discovered what happened to her, he did later learn from other bishops that Archbishop Tortolo had championed the army’s use of torture in closed-door meetings, relying on arguments from medieval theologians and Inquisition-era Popes. For example, St. Augustine himself in his 5^th century City of God had urged the beating of heretics with rods until they agreed to toe the line. The chaplain of the III Army Corps explained to one prisoner that torture was sinful only if it lasted more than 48 hours. The Church even rationalized the secrecy with which the campaign was conducted; a priest sympathetic to the junta explained that “If they had a public firing squad, right away the rest of the world would say, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ – and we cannot fight that way.”

Direct action

Sometimes the clergy’s involvement was more direct. Catholic priest Christian von Wernich, chaplain of the Buenos Aires Police, was found guilty of complicity in 7 homicides, 42 kidnappings, and 32 instances of torture, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2007. Between (or sometimes during) torture sessions, priests encouraged kidnapping victims to rat on their friends, to improve their lot both in this life and the next. A Dominican prior at the Catholic University of Tucumán kept a list of students and others he viewed as leftist, and turned it over to the army. The list included the president of the League of Humanist Students of Tucumán, who was never heard from again.

To be perfectly fair and balanced, it must be added that not all the God expert violence in Argentina was on the right-wing side. Radical priests such as Fr. Alberto Carbone, who claimed that the early Christians were model revolutionaries, egged on Marxist violence; Carbone was later involved in the kidnapping and murder of former Argentine President Pedro Aramburu. Catholic youth leader Juan Ignacio Isla Casares masterminded the killings of five policemen in an ambush near the San Isidro Cathedral on October 26, 1975. Carbone, Casares, Videla, Tortolo – they’re all the same, all certain that since God is on their side, anything goes.

Argentina’s military government finally fell from power after its botched attempt to conquer the Falkland Islands in 1982. When democracy was restored, a “National Commission on the Disappeared” was appointed to uncover the truth, which shed light on some 8,960 cases (but was unable to unearth details about Monica Mignone). Its final report, called Nunca Mas [“Never Again”], is one of the most important documents in Latin American history, because it teaches future generations what not to do. Videla and other leaders were first found guilty of mass torture in 1985, but at the urging of the Church they were pardoned by President Carlos Menem in 1990. Upon release from jail, they were promptly feted as guests of honor at a reception held by the Vatican’s representative in Buenos Aires. Menem’s pardon was declared unlawful in 2007, clearing the way for the current round of trials.

Under the Rug

Argentina’s truth commission delicately sidestepped the role of the clergy, though, so the full story of Church involvement has never come to light. In fact, the Argentine Church has done everything in its considerable power to cover up its involvement in the atrocities and pretend it never happened. When Canadian historian Patricia Marchak compiled an oral history of the period in the 1990s, the hierarchy from the Papal nuncio on down flatly refused to participate. Instead, the Church successfully lobbied for a series of amnesty laws, protecting itself and its military accomplices, which were only repealed in 2003.

The idea of a “truth commission” is not novel. The U.S. Institute of Peace describes 41 of them in detail, from Argentina down to the Solomon Islands. Secular governments constantly engage in their own self-criticism, of everything from oil spill responses to plane crashes to intelligence failures. That’s how humanists improve themselves: not by praying for grace, but by admitting screw-ups, analyzing them, and trying hard to learn from past mistakes.

Ever wonder why so many people who distrust the government tend to trust God experts? Government airs its mistakes for all to see, exposing its fallibility; God experts never admit anything, and when backed into a corner they leap immediately into “forgiveness is divine” mode. Abraham Lincoln was right: you really can fool some of the people all of the time.

If the Church had an ounce of decency, it would undertake its own Nunca Mas investigation and publish the results, letting the chips fall where they may, to teach future generations of clergy what not to do. If they get really good at it, maybe they could try the same technique on the sex abuse cover-ups.

Luis Granados

Just before Christmas, former Argentine dictator Gen. Jorge Videla was sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of 31 prisoners, most of whom who were “shot while trying to escape” in the months after his 1976 military coup. Two dozen of his subordinates were given life sentences at the same time.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of crimes for which Videla was actually responsible. Though there are no accurate counts, estimates of those who “disappeared” and were presumably murdered on his watch vary from 9,000 to 30,000, in a country whose population is about a tenth that of the United States.

Videla proudly assumed responsibility for the killings, claiming they were justified to save Argentina from terrorists. What kind of terrorists? According to Videla, exactly the kind of democratically elected terrorists who have run Argentina for the past 25 years, a period of dramatically enhanced personal freedom and economic growth. The terrorists who run Argentina even went so far as to legalize gay marriage last year.

Videla is now 85 years old, so a life sentence will probably not amount to much in terms of years. However, he will live out his days undergoing another kind of torture in the form of a series of additional trials about additional batches of victims.

Monica’s Tale

Numbers numb; a single story chills. Monica Mignone was the pretty 24-year old daughter of Emilio Mignone, a prominent lawyer and educator who had previously held a position with the Organization of American States and was then serving as rector of the National University of Luján. Monica wasn’t a communist, but fell in a suspect class because she devoted her spare time to volunteer work with the poor in the slums of Buenos Aires.

The military coup occurred on March 24, 1976, when Gen. Videla, a deeply religious man, overthrew the democratically elected Argentine government and promised to restore “Christian morals and values.”

Shortly before dawn on the morning of May 14, 1976, five heavily armed men wearing civilian clothes but carrying army identification papers banged on the door of the Mignone home, grabbed Monica, and left. What happened to her then? Her family has never found out, despite the tireless efforts of her well-connected father to discover the truth. Although Emilio pulled every string in the Church and government on her behalf, he went to his grave 22 years later without ever having discovered a shred of evidence as to what happened to Monica, let alone why or how. We do know that the other volunteer social workers in Monica’s group were taken as well. We also know that the 31 victims in the case decided last month were taken to a secret center in Cordoba and tortured with methods including electric shock, rape, simulated asphyxiation with water and mock executions. They were left naked in cold wet cells through the winter, and were told their families would be killed if they didn’t tell what they knew.

As the number of disappearances mounted, mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared began protesting every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo. The military response was straightforward: the leader of the mothers’ group and nine other women were themselves kidnapped from their homes, never to be heard from again. The mothers in fact were violating an official decree prohibiting “comment or reference to themes related to subversive activities, the appearance of bodies and the deaths of subversive elements and/or members of the armed forces or security forces in these happenings, unless they are reported by an official, responsible source. This includes kidnappings or disappearances.”
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Since 1968, the Catholic Church has designated January 1 as a “World Day of Peace,” with appropriate messages and commemorations. This is a fine idea, not least because prior to that time, January 1 was the Catholics’ “Feast of the Circumcision,” and thinking about genital mutilation makes me ill. This year, though, the Pope unleashed a nearly 5000 word message that has little to do with peace, and everything to do with insulting and demeaning those who are unwilling to kiss the Papal foot. Let’s take a look at some excerpts of what the man said:

In other areas we see more subtle and sophisticated forms of prejudice and hostility towards believers and religious symbols. At present, Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith. Many Christians experience daily affronts and often live in fear because of their pursuit of truth, their faith in Jesus Christ and their heartfelt plea for respect for religious freedom. This situation is unacceptable, since it represents an insult to God and to human dignity; furthermore, it is a threat to security and peace.

It’s certainly true that Christians are persecuted in places like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, and Sudan. Strictly as a matter of numbers, the persecution of Shiites by Sunnis in places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Malaysia probably has the Christians beat, but I’m not interested in empirical data here. What I’m interested in is how the Pope defines “persecution.” As he says later:

There also exist – as I have said – more sophisticated forms of hostility to religion which, in Western countries, occasionally find expression in a denial of history and the rejection of religious symbols which reflect the identity and the culture of the majority of citizens.

What he’s talking about is the court case pending in the European Court of Human Rights to take the crucifixes out of Italian classrooms – the ones that have been there since the 1920s as part of the deal Mussolini cut to win Church backing for his wars of conquest. The European Union has rules in its “Convention on Human Rights” along the same line as our First Amendment, and government brainwashing of schoolchildren to favor one religion over another is flatly contrary to those rules. When the Pope talks about symbols of the “majority” of the citizens, though, he treads on dangerous ground. In the Czech Republic, for example, a majority of the citizens now have no religion at all. By the Pope’s logic, it would be okay for schools there to put up signs in every classroom saying “God worship is outdated” because that reflects the majority view.

Next, the Pope repeats the age-old demand for special privileges for believers over nonbelievers:

Religious freedom should be understood, then, not merely as immunity from coercion, but even more fundamentally as an ability to order one’s own choices in accordance with truth.

What he’s talking about here is the alleged right of licensed pharmacists, for example, to choose which medications they will and won’t sell, based on what God experts tell them. Catholic pharmacists should be able to refuse to sell contraceptives, since that would promote sin. Catholics who work in government-funded adoption agencies should be able to pick and choose which taxpayers they will serve, based on their perception of the couple’s morality. Muslims should be able to wear whatever they want, whenever they want, so that only non-Muslims have to comply with their employer’s dress codes.

Not content with demanding free government advertising and special legal privileges, the Pope devoted a major portion of his message to excoriating humanists for being evil, virtually subhuman creatures. Humanists have no lasting ethical values and principles, no “authentic” freedom, and are incapable of building a just society:

Without the acknowledgment of his spiritual being, without openness to the transcendent, the human person withdraws within himself, fails to find answers to the heart’s deepest questions about life’s meaning, fails to appropriate lasting ethical values and principles, and fails even to experience authentic freedom and to build a just society.

Worse yet, humanist freedom is “self-negating,” humanists are incapable of seeking goodness, and thus lack respect for others:

A freedom which is hostile or indifferent to God becomes self-negating and does not guarantee full respect for others. A will which believes itself radically incapable of seeking truth and goodness has no objective reasons or motives for acting save those imposed by its fleeting and contingent interests; it does not have an “identity” to safeguard and build up through truly free and conscious decisions.

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