The Day Herbert W. Armstrong Died

 

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 that the past 13 years of her life had been dedicated to a plagerizing con man from Iowa, no matter how obvious it was to everyone else.

And an entire congregation of faithful converts that had nowhere else to go on Saturdays would be expecting to either see us at services or judge us as unworthy to go to the place of safety.

If you knew my mother, you'd know that being judged as unworthy was only slightly behind being judged as lower class or uncouth in the worst of all possible fates. Honestly, I think the only reason we were in the cult in the first place was the promise of eternal superiority rather than surviving the coming tribulation.

She was recruited into the cult by her best friend's mother. A woman from Dallas named Peggy Anderson. My mom would have eaten a bowl full of shit covered rusty nails to get into that woman's good graces back in the early 70s.

Now it was 13 years later. Peggy had forgotten all about her, and her dreams of being in the select few that would be revered forever in the World Tomorrow were melting away like a sugar cube in a rainstorm.

God had decided to let nature transform his chosen apostle into worm poop, and now his flock was in the hands of a guy 90% of them hadn't heard of until a few short weeks ago when Herbert named him as the next in line to be Pastor General.

How pissed off do you think Garner Ted was when he got the news.

I guess that's what you get when you call your dad out for boinking your sister two weeks after she got her first period. Not that Garner Ted was any kind of upright citizen either, but I digress.

On that fateful January day, I was close to failing half of my 7th grade classes, but I had the intelligence to recognize that my mother would do anything to avoid admitting this whole organization was as precarious as a house of cards in front of an open window. 

I got the sense that when the time was right, I would be able to force her to either admit that either the church doctrine was flawed or that it was God's will that I stay home and watch TV on Saturdays while she and my sister went to cult church.

Herbert W Armstrong was dead.

My mother was dismayed and practically speechless.

My sister was terrified and couldn't stop asking, "what does this mean?"

I was energized and hopeful for the first time in my life.

Looking back almost 4 decades later, I realize that everyone of the right age in January of 1986 who was in the WCG remembers vividly where they were and what they thought when they heard the news that God's favorite human was going to be "sleeping" through the tribulation instead of leading us to safety. Didn't he tell us all along that he was the only one in all of human history that was qualified and strong enough in faith to get us to the place of safety?

It's exactly like that scene in Forest Gump when he decides that he has run long enough to make peace with his past, and is ready to go home.

This crowd of devoted followers who have done nothing but run behind him for the past 3 years are left confused, aimless, and bitter about being forced to rethink their life plan from scratch.

By the summer of 86, WCG headquarters had become an even more hostile and manipulative pack of backstabbing sycophants. 

Within 2 years, more than a few had a firm foundation laid for their emerging splinter groups.

In 1988 Herbert's hand picked successor, Joe Tkach, started making serious doctrinal changes and gave exactly zero f**ks about anyone who didn't agree with him. Herb had put him in charge, and therefore it was God's will that these changes be made.

 By January of 1995, Joe had completely gutted all of Herb's fundemental teachings calling them either flawed or just plain wrong.

God chose to prove Joe wrong by preventing him from attending the Feast of Tabernacles that year, having made him unavoidably and permanantly detained by his own death a few weeks prior. 

This time around, mom didn't even give it a second thought.

And so it came to pass that for one brief and shining moment, right before I went to take my ASVAB test to join the US Navy, my mother did something she had never done before and has never done since.

She admitted that I was right, and she should have listened to me when I gave her the reasons why I needed to leave the WCG and invited her to examine the contradictions of her misguided faith in the legacy of a man rather than the God he pretended to serve.

Of course, shortly afterword she disavowed her statement and indicated that she had known all along that Joe Tkach was a pretender to the throne.

Meh.

I didn't expect the moment to last anyway.

It has been more than 20 years since I last spoke with the woman who concieved me in an ill advised attempt to guilt my father into staying in their clusterf**k of a marriage.

Word is that she is attending home churches and still clinging to most of Herb's bullshit teachings.

I did learn a lot from my mother, but it wasn't any of the things she tried to teach me or get me to believe.

She was an example of how the need to be right can blind someone from the established facts of a situation.

By refusing to listen to an alternate point of view and consider the possibility that you have been mistaken in your beliefs so far, you are preventing yourself from ever being correct or having accurate information to inform your choices.

Everything changed for me on that cloudy winter afternoon in San Antonio.

I can close my eyes and go back to that moment like it just happened 5 minutes ago.

The furniture in the room, the clothes we were wearing, the fear and sadness in the voices of my sister and mother.

And most of all, that feeling of being a prisoner who has noticed the lock on the door of his cell has broken, but he is not sure if he should open it now before anyone notices, or wait for the right moment when a successful escape is more likely.

Do you remember the day that Herbert W Armstrong did us all a favor and once and for all proved himself to be nothing but a lying, degenerate, thief that was as expendable as the rest of us in the eyes of an annoyed God?

Share your stories with us in the comments, or send them to me in an email.

I look forward to reading them.