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The Day Herbert W. Armstrong Died

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  This is my favorite picture of Herbert January 16, 1986 was a Monday that seemed like any other, until I got home from school and found my mom completely distraught in our living room. She called me and my sister over to her, and through her tears, in a quivering voice, she spoke the most profound words I had ever heard in my young life. "Mister Armstrong is dead." Now, I can't tell you what was going through her mind that day, or what my sister might have been thinking (although she did start to cry as soon as mom shared the news.) I can tell you that what I felt in that moment was cautious optimism. I was smart enough to know that by actually dying, Herbert had proven himself to be a false prophet. But I also sensed that we all might still keep going to church anyway. I had never heard of Leon Festinger, and the term "cognative dissonance," wasn't something I would learn about for another 8 years. But I did recognize that my mom was not about to admit th...
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Art Herbstory (Part 2 of The Plain Truth of the WCG Logo)

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  A lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of sheep,  because rarely are they in the same ecosystem. It would be a huge waste of time.  – Anonymous CS Lewis gave us the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Herbert Armstrong (he and his followers would have you believe) gave us The Lion, the Lamb, and the Little Child. In part one, I took you through the verbiage used in the logo for the Worldwide Church of God. In this post, we’re looking at the image itself to find some interesting clues as to what Herbert was really showing us in that illustration.  
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Pseudo-Scripture (Part 1 of The Plain Truth of the WCG Logo)

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Let’s take a close look at the Worldwide Church of God logo for a quick minute. I want to show you something [I know it's hard to read, but when this was made, high res didn't even exist . ]      The scroll at the bottom of the shield reads The lion shall dwell with the lamb and a little child shall lead them in the world tomorrow and beneath it is another smaller scroll presumably attributing the quoted text above. Isaiah 11:6           When I was a kid, I knew this logo inside and out. It was all over my home, on everything at church, it came in our mailbox at least once a week. In the fall, you could see it on bright green stickers affixed to the bumpers of cars and campers making their way to “feast sites” across America. Not to mention jackets, hats, T-shirts, notebooks, pens, and all the regular tchotchkes of the time.     I could draw it with my eyes closed. The circle, the shield, lion, kid, lamb, and Isa...
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The Four Yorkshiremen of the Apocalypse

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There's a Monty Python skit called "The Four Yorkshiremen" that is reminiscent of a common feeling among cult survivors.     Four rich sophisticated men sit around and discuss the hardships they faced growing up in poor working-class families. Each one trying to outdo the other three with increasingly elaborate stories as to which of them had the worst childhood.   That sketch feels oddly familiar to people who were in cults. The media's penchant for salacious sadistic stories makes living as a cult survivor much more awkward than it ever needed to be.  [Which, let's face it, is pretty damn awkward even without animal sacrifices and elaborate robes]   Me:  I was raised in a cult. Them:  How horrible was it?? Me:  What do you mean by horrible? Them:  Did you have to like, kill babies with a special kind of spoon, or something? Me: Did I WHAT?!??? Them:  Were there orgies every day?  Me: Why would you even.....
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Driven To -and- Fro

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I am 8 years old. My heart is firmly planned in my throat. The warm breeze from the open front seat windows hits the thin plastic of the dry cleaning bags and makes them buzz like a nest of angry hornets. I am all at once terrified, heartbroken, and confused. My stomach starts to hurt. My chest gets tighter with each passing mile. I sit, sweating and smothering, between a full rack of plastic wrapped dresses  and a poorly designed quadrilateral backseat car window that folds out instead of rolling down.  The Dallas suburbs gradually give way to open Texas prairie before performing a subtle  transformation into the hills and pines of northeastern Texas.  My pulse is racing. This is the familiar route to our assigned feast site of Big Sandy, but the Feast of Tabernacles is still  months away.  My mother hangs on every word of an unfamiliar voice emanating from our car's cassette player. The man speaks words I can't quite make out over the sounds of buzzing pl...
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