The Unwritten Tenets of Armstrongism

Tithing, Hubris, Inward Behavior, Expression of Appearance, Loyalty.


These are what I believe are the Five Unwritten Tenets of Armstrongism that define it's movement more than anything else. Let's break them down one by one.

1. Tithing.

No doctrine was more tightly monitored and enforced than the three tiered tithing system.

Where else does 10% of your income go directly to one place - national headquarters. Where else does the other 10% have to be saved so you could attend their annual convention. And where else on the third year of your baptism does the additional 10% supposedly go to a benevolence fund?  And on top of that, your offerings, your building fund offerings, local church activity funds, money for district meets and other activities - after government taxes and religious taxes (your tithes), you were lucky to have half your income met. That is, if you followed the letter of the Armstrongism law. Many were rebels. But if you had half a mind of wanting any type of ordination, your paycheck lived for the Church, and only the Church. They were first, and you trusted God for the rest.

Headquarters constantly checked up on members who did not tithe with their state of the art computer systems. This, in combination with the lies and destructive tactics that extorted money for their building programs, was what led to the Ambassador Auditorium and the sprawling campus properties and real estate developments of the Church - and the "highest paid ministers in the world", according to Armstrong. 

2. Hubris.

Pride.

Pride of being specially called people. Ministerial pride of prestige. Pride in the belief of kingly inheritance. Pride of being spiritual "Israel". Pride of having the most beautiful college campus in the world. Pride of having the magnificent gold and mammon Auditorium. Pride of hosting the most worldly celebrities and meeting the most worldly heads of state (Armstrong, that is). Pride of being the only ones in the whole world who were properly keeping the Law (don't get me started on that one.) Pride of biblical knowledge (without spiritual application and context). Pride of attending the largest worldwide convention on the face of the Earth. Pride of being the "One True Church". Pride of being God's elect. Pride of being "protected". Pride of "becoming God as God is God". Pride, pride, pride. Of course, if you didn't tithe, then your pride's busted, because you were a slacker headed for the Lake of Fire, so said Armstrong. 

3. Inward Behavior. 

Set Apart and called out from the World God was never trying to save. Friends that were only in the Church, ignorant of the evil of friendships and relationships, family or otherwise, outside of the church. Where anything resembling ancient paganism was the manifestation of evil (except for the things that headquarters deemed OK.) Where birthdays were equated with evil and satanism. Where members hid in the bathroom with their lights off on Halloween instead of letting their lights shine. Where congregations met secretly and silently in bingo halls and gymnasiums. Where the public knowing of their church was shunned for many years. Where The Church was just an "extension program" of Ambassador College. Inward behavior, a defining measurement of nearly all cults, was predominant of Armstrongism and still is. Inward behavior is a major unwritten tenet of Armstrongism. 

4. Expression of Appearance.

Appearance was, and is, paramount within Armstrongism. How you dressed, how you behaved, how you represented Herbert Armstrong was paramount. How clean your house was for ministers when they visited. How manicured and perfect the grounds of the Headquarters were. How cultured you were, how masculine of how feminine you were. This all played into the culture as one of the five unwritten tenets of armstrongism. 

5. Loyalty

Last, but certainly not least, Loyalty. How loyal were you to the Church? How loyal were you as a minister to Headquarters? How loyal were you to Herbert Armstrong's teachings? Were you loyal even if things seemed to appear wrong? Or were not working out as to how you thought? Or to how they thought? Would you remain loyal regardless of how things appear - and have the faith to remain, and be loyal, even if things seemed wrong - believing they would work out in the end? Because in the Church, if you weren't loyal, you would end up in the Lake of Fire. Loyalty to the Church was a chain of bondage that would not let you out and gripped tighter if you tried to escape.

The only way out of the bondage of the Tenets of Armstrongism was for Someone else to turn the key and release you. Yes, Bondage to T.H.I.E.L - Tithing, Hubris, Inward Behavior, Expression of Appearance, and Loyalty - the five Unwritten Tenets of Armstrongism - can only be released by the freedom available in Christ.

And what is the opposite of T.H.I.E.L?

J.O.Y. 

Jesus First, Others Second, Yourself Last. For J.O.Y. is diametrically opposite to T.H.I.E.L.

Something to always remember. 

The Alternative Thinking of the Children of the Cults

The effects of alternative thinking on the lives of young people has been one of the most extensive influences on my life as part of an end-time doomsday cult. One instance that came to mind this morning finally linked to the intensive research into my past to figure out exactly where I came from, fully what I was a part of, as steps of healing in my ongoing journey of de-programming and cult recovery.

There was a season in my young life as a second and third grader that, for whatever reason, I had to convince my classmates that I had supernatural abilities that I did not have. For many of the classmates, it simply did not work. But for one, it did work. It validated my "powers" and my "abilities".

One might consider this perfectly normal for the imagination of a small child in his first years of primary school. Imagine the kid pretending to be Superman, jumping off a small rock and "flying" all the way across the back yard. Or the small child on his tricycle, imagining he's zooming in and out of asteroids on a "star trek" through the neighborhood's church parking lot. Those are the imaginations at work - healthy and part of a brain's natural development.

In my environment, I was taught "not" to engage in "pretend" - or unrealistic imaginations on paper, like coloring the sky purple or the grass red. "pretending" was wrong - as wrong as reading fiction, or listening to different varieties of music. Adherance to realism was paramount. Pretending was to engage in a lie. And lying, after all, was a sin. My family took Armstrongism literally, and seriously.

Enter in the belief system that I had as a child, directly from all of my information sources. I was told I was in training to be God. I was told I would get my own planet. I was told this would happen in just a few years (I didn't quite grasp the fact that my parents were the ones to be converted into a spirtual superpower, and I had to remain on Earth because I was not baptized - this happened a little bit later.) Of course, I was also fully indoctrinated with the whole mother-load of Armstrongism dogma, including the Bible Story imagery from Basil Wolverton. Those who were a part of the cult, or take the time to study into it, can get a good grasp of what that contained.

The difference between the young child pretending on the street - and what my episode in elementary school was - is a matter of belief.

The young child playing superman understood the difference between "pretending" to be Superman, and the thought of actually becoming Superman. It was play, and pretend-time. Once the young child was done "pretending", the mind switched to the next event - peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a glass of milk before running out the door for a full afternoon of more playtime (in the summertime, of course).

The young me believed what he was told. He was going to be God. He was going to have powers and his own planet. He was excited that in a few years, he was going to be one of the pioneers of the Wonderful World Tomorrow. And in the next year or two, our going home from the Feast would be the last physical Feast we would ever experience. For me, this was not pretend. This was real life. It was going to happen. Herbert W. Armstrong said so. And what he said was reality.

I thought of myself as superior to the other children - a higher standard. I thought of myself as different and set apart. I had to set the example. I had to be as perfect as I could possibly be, because I did not want to make my parents, or God, mad at me.

I had spent decades wondering exactly why I acted in the way I did back in the second and the third grade. I attributed everything to an overactive imagination - a normal part of growing up. However, when you have an intentionally stifled imagination and a grounding from pretending - and then actual imagination turned into an alternative "reality" - then you've got a very messed up and abnormal psyche and way of developing as a child. Add on to that weekly meetings of fiction turned into an alternative reality - and again - you're just feeding the brain delusions.

This is one reason how the Church is responsible for the psychological harm and abuse of the children of the Church - from Herbert Armstrong to the ministry to the regular people to their children - weaving a wave of deception from the top down with pure goals of self-centered greed. The methods that Armstrongism used to infiltrate it's members with alternative facts - blatant misuse of mind conditioning and cult psychology to achieve an agenda - were criminal.

I know that those in Armstrongism will turn right around and say that that's what "the World" always does, with teaching about Santa and the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy. These things that we were taught were not fairy tale stories that you grew out of. These thngs that we were taught were not metaphors such as puppets and Sesame Street that teach a lesson and are understood as people grew older and could understand the concepts as an adult. These were beliefs that stuck with you and were reinforced week after week, and year after year. No child grows up to believe Santa is real, or that the Easter Bunny will hop around when you are 30. Those in Armstrongism built a whole religion on one man's fairy tale of becoming Gods and rulers in a universal real estate development program and ruling the whole agri-centric world based on a wholly racist and wholly physical interpretation of the plan of God - where people to this day still believe it, and mess up their children's lives to this day in the process.

Not only do I talk about this for my personal healing - but to show others how whacked and how deep of a con-job the whole mess was, and what it did to the psyche, the imagination, the centers of logic and reasoning, and the faith and belief of God himself. It is incumbent on those who were and have been a part of the entire scam to realize the depth of the deepness of the cancer of Armstrongism, that metastasized itself to delusional psychosis in the worldviews of so many.

Cult Recovery Lesson: I Have the Right to Make Mistakes and Not Have to Be Perfect

This is the third installment of a series on "Basic Rights" by the Blog Owner. 


Overcome! Don't Slack! Or It's the Lake of Fire for YOU!

From the time I was a toddler, just able to hear - these are the words I heard (perhaps, without understanding - but heard, nonetheless). When I was old enough to understand by hearing and by reading - the expectations, subconscious or blatant - were clear. The life I was to lead was very special, as a child of my parents called out of the world. A life of continual overcoming.








I am not saying it's wrong to overcome. "Overcoming" means to clear hurdles and change from ways that are bad for you - like addictions, trauma, depression, pride and greed, for example. It's what you do when you realize you are in a pattern, for whatever reason, that is causing you, or somebody else, negative impacts - that may be in your relationship as a husband or a wife, as a son or daughter, or a father or a mother. Overcoming can be a good thing in these examples.

Overcoming can also be a truly bad thing - if it's abused.

When you are forced to change your individuality - and told to overcome the basic person of who you are - then it's not overcoming. It's control. When you are forced to conform to a mold that is not who you are - then that's not overcoming. It's dictatorial command. When you are told to overcome every aspect of your life that has no relevance to anything spiritual or harmful - than that's not overcoming. That's unauthorized power. And all of it's a form of abuse.

Our expectations in the cult (in my experience - each person has a different story) were to overcome everything that made us individual and unique. Our hairstyles, dress, mannerisms, speech, and what we ate were strictly regulated - things we had to overcome. We had to overcome "worldly" friendships, the fear of tithing over a quarter of our income, and our basic common sense when a ministerial order simply was the stupidest thing you ever heard in your life - but because "it came from a minister of God", obedience was mandatory, and God would "take care of it" in His own time.

Our idea of overcoming was becoming perfect as God is perfect by being as close to as perfect as possible in obedience to the Law, which we interpreted as the expression of holy love - Law keeping. Therefore, when we fell short on our expectations, we fell short on our overcoming - and we risked "not qualifying", or "not making it". We had to expend tremendous energies to simply try our best, not slack, to try to become "good enough" to hopefully qualify to "make it", and somehow have worked hard enough that God would see our efforts and His grace would then grade on the curve and we'd be accepted in His sight.

This caused - for me at least - an intense fear of extreme failure, and a perfectionist nature that made me have an extreme phobia of wrong-doing, of any sort, no matter how minor or trivial. You may see this as extreme. And it is. That does not change it's reality. It is only through years of de-programming and understanding reality that I am beginning to realize, slowly, a realization that is like a ray of light. I'm not there yet in grasping this. But it's this realization that:

I Have the right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect. 

I do not have to accept condemnation on my shortcomings and my downfalls, or take them internally as I have on a lifelong basis. I do not have to accept the harsh criticisms of those who pridefully and arrogantly assert themselves as unqualified experts. More than this - I have had to learn, and am learning, that making mistakes is a part of life, and it is not going to disqualify me from any future reward - so long as I don't engage in harmful activities that go against the golden rule - "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

When you grow up in an environment where you believe that you will be cut off from God for accidentally doing something illegal on the Sabbath one minute before sunset, or forgetting your offering on a Holy Day, or accidentally having a sip of water on the Day of Atonement - or leaving a crumb of bread in the sofa during the Days of Unleavened Bread. When you grow up being judged on your appearance, on your clothes - or you are condemned because you slipped and said "Darn" or "Fart" instead of stinker - (yes, I know - but it's what it was) - and your expectations were to be nothing short of the best role model of the Kingdom that you can be in life and in the Church - you don't believe you have the "right" to make mistakes or the "right" to not be perfect.

And a person never discovers the reality of who they are, individually, or who they can become or what their talents or abilities really are. They simply become a drone in a sea of drones, acting and behaving and seeing and hearing only in ways that make them a conformer, not an individual. It is better to be and live who you are in truth and reality then pretend you're someone you are not in a lie.

Yes, Jesus told us to overcome. But that did not counteract the right we have to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, and to accept our imperfections. The environment of the cult that I grew up in did not believe that. And the harm it is causing people stifled under their oppressive regimes cannot be underestimated.

Learning who I am as a person takes time and patience. I'm not there. But discovering my individuality and freeing myself from the mind control of the Cult Drones - that's freeing. It's one of the lessons I'm trying to grasp in my ongoing journey of recovery.


Basic rights adapted from The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook by Eugene Bourne (Oakland, CA, New Barbringer Publications, 1995)