Herbert Armstrong - music, makeup and crass racism

(This article by M.A.M. appeared some years ago on one of my earlier websites.)


In the June-July 1981 issue of The Good News, there is an article titled “After 50 Years – Christ’s Apostle Still Ahead of His Time!” Like just about everything else published by the Worldwide Church of God about Herbert W. Armstrong, this is a lie. Herbert W. Armstrong was a man whose feet were firmly planted in the past. Within his church, Armstrong tried to re-create the world of his youth.

We can see the theme arise again and again in his writings. In Mystery of the Ages, Armstrong wrote:

“I have lived through the horse and buggy age, the automobile and industrial age, the air age, the nuclear age and now into the space age. I have seen America live through the agrarian age when farmers walked behind their horse-drawn ploughs singing happily, and into the urban age when Midwest American farmers are groaning and fighting for more government subsidies to prevent the extinction of farm life. (page vii).”

For farmers at least, the past was better than the present.

Armstrong’s love for the past surfaced again shortly after the murder of John Lennon.

“In disgust, I left TV, but at 10 p.m., I tuned in for the LOCAL news. It was all eulogizing the ‘rock’ ‘musician.’ A local Tucson crowd of 2,000 had flocked to Reid Park bandshell to leave roses, and mourn for their dead idol. The local station had a lot about the ‘man and his “music.”’ (I had never thought of it as music, but a loud raucous SQUAWK and SCREAM with a fast beat - just an irritating noise.)

“Pardon me, please! Perhaps I never had any musical education, although I have played the piano since 8 years old. I must have been terribly misled, for I supposed that the singing of a Caruso or a Galli-Curci of my father's time or a Pavarotti or Beverly Sills or an Arthur Rubinstein of our day produced music. I guess I'm terribly out-of-date. I have heard roosters make a loud raucous squawk when being captured for a Sunday dinner when I was a boy, but I just never had been ‘educated’ to call that ‘music.’

“When as a boy I worked one summer in a flour mill, to the constant ‘beat’ of the machinery till it nearly drove me crazy, I somehow never realized that was ‘music.’

“Please bear with me in my ignorance.”

I'll try, but it isn't easy. At least here he was being truthful. Armstrong was ignorant of popular music. A strong beat has been a characteristic of popular music since the rise of jazz, right after the first world war. Apparently, Armstrong was unaware of anything that occurred outside of the opera house since Caruso's time.

“I do remember, when I was in England at the college just before the mid-'60's, the Beatles were breaking into public notice. The had a new ‘way-out’ style, with an idiotic mop-topped hairstyle, with hair covering the forehead to the eyebrows, the ears and longer hair in the back of the head. The forehead is the seat of intellect - the mark of intelligence instead of animal nonintelligence. They started the style of male hairdo to turn evolution into reverse - man was becoming a dumb brute animal.”

Odds and Ends

LCG on trial. At the time this post went up, the GoFundMe page for the upcoming Scarborough suit had reached only $125 with just 4 donors over the last 8 days. The somewhat optimistic goal is 15k.

Magazine miscellany. Church of God periodicals, especially the minnows, seem to be in an increasingly parlous state; three examples.

CGI's Prevail has long enjoyed a beneath-the-carpets profile. While it has a very nice logo, it just seems to be a random collection of web articles, which means - in my book at least - that it's not actually a magazine. (Update: reading some of the comments it appears even people close to CGI are confused. Has it been discontinued? Was there a print edition late last year? Perhaps even the webmaster is confused...) You can, however, check it out for yourself here.

Meanwhile, David Hulme's quarterly journal Vision seems to be missing in action. It's now Spring up in the Northern Hemisphere and the last issue to see the light was Fall (Autumn) 2015. Vision was (is?) one of the least derivative periodicals in the COG stable, at least in terms of design and layout. Not so much a minnow as a beached whale, this is (was) a major periodical. Does this indicate troubles in paradise? Dave, tell us it ain't true.

Church of God Outreach Ministries (CGOM) is, according to a certain gentleman based in Arroyo Grande, ditching hard copies of its bi-monthly magazine (more a newsletter, really) New Horizons. It will now only be available online. Or maybe not. The latest issue still isn't - as this post goes up -  available on their website, nor anything for January/February. Perhaps energy levels are just running really low in Tulsa.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. The sidebar here on AW has been reorganized, simplified and new links added over the last two weeks. The last several issues of The Journal can now be accessed directly, and just under that there's a new link to WCG stories that have appeared over the years in the LA Times.

If knowledge is power...

If knowledge is power, Joe isn't sharing

Time for a quick quiz, brethren.

Section 1

(a) What is the name of GCI's outreach magazine?

(b) What is the name of GCI's member magazine?

Section 2

(a) Does GCI have a Facebook account for members to follow?

(b) Does GCI have a Twitter account for members to follow?

Section 3

How do GCI members stay current on church news and developments?

There, that wasn't so hard. Five simple questions, 20 points each to provide a nice percentage-like score out of 100.

Answers

Section 1: (a) there is none, Christian Odyssey no longer exists, not even as an "online only" publication. (b) there is none.

Section 2: (a) no. There is a GCI page - here - but it's "automatically generated based on what Facebook users are interested in and not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with the topic." (b) no.

Section 3: apparently whatever the pastor decides to tell them at church services, plus whatever carefully curated items appear on the church's webpage under the heading 'GCI News'.

What's going on here?

If knowledge is power, Joe isn't sharing.

But wait, you cry, there's Joe's online Weekly Update! Not really. Joe uses the Weekly Update to ramble on in sermon mode. The March 2 version, for example, is entitled "Beware historical revisionism". Not a scrap of news about GCI in it anywhere.

So how do GCI members stay informed about developments in their church? Easy. They don't. UCG, COGWA and LCG do a much better job.

There are blogs; Ted Johnston, Tammy Tkach (last updated in August last year). But that's not news. Whatever "in-reach" GCI provides is woefully lacking in content or substance. It's true that some GCI congregations have their own local FB pages, but that hardly counts.

And outreach? What outreach?

It's all a bit gulag-like. Have Joe & Co.

(a) just given up?

(b) a Machiavellian (or Orwellian) method in their madness?

(c) both of the above

Sorry, I don't have an answer for that one, but I suspect 'c'.

So, how was your score?

Discern for March - the "sort of" magazine

Every self-respecting church needs a promotional magazine (except Joe Tkach's GCI apparently), so it's no surprise that the UCG malcontents who formed COGWA (Church of God, a Worldwide Association) have put a good deal of thought into their own flagship publication, Discern.

But is it really a magazine when the only way you can read it is as a PDF? Granted, it's a frugal game plan. No postage costs, no left-over copies gathering dust. Whether people actually read PDFs in the same way they read hard copy is a moot point. There's a certain pleasure in sitting back in an armchair, turning real pages at your leisure that you simply don't get staring at a screen. All of COGWA's 'literature' seems to be available in this form, and only in this form. Time will tell whether it's an effective strategy for the long haul.

If this were a mainline church publication, you'd say it had an Easter theme, with a crown of thorns on the cover. Open it up (so to speak) and the graphics and layout are quite impressive. The first major feature you hit is a lengthy article by Clyde Kilough on Passover. That's followed by one in a similar vein by Jim Franks. Keeping on message is He is Risen! Now What? by Jeremy Lallier. Obviously, COGWA wants to proclaim its message "in due season".

Rick Avent moves to other matters with Does God Exist? He's up to Proof 3: The Origin of Life. I couldn't bear to invest time reading this, life is so short, and I have a copy of New Scientist that's higher on the priority list. Do you think Rick reads New Scientist?

Mike Bennett writes under the intriguing title, 5 Foolish Things we do to Foul Up our Future. Reading virtual COG magazines isn't on the list. Becky Sweat writes on The Loneliness Epidemic. Neal Hogberg beats the drum on ISIS with An Apocalyptic Crisis.

You get the impression that Discern requires a better standard of journalism of its in-house writers than, say, Tomorrow's World. Faint praise given the standard over at TW. That said, it's the same message you'll find in other COG periodicals. The articles in one are interchangeable with another.

The PDF is available to download.

(If you're interested in what's in the latest PCG mag, The Trumpet, you might like to check out Redfox's Living Armstrongism blog where he's got a detailed outline.)

Scarborough Crowdfunding

Patrick Scarborough has opened a page on GoFundMe to help raise funds for the upcoming action with LCG and its legal team.

They have hired a powerful and expensive law firm to fight us. While they have a huge pool of tithe-payer funded cash to pay their legal fees, we do not. We have opened this GoFundMe account in hopes that people will help us fight for justice.  All money raised will go to pay our legal fees. If any should remain, we will donate it to St. Jude's Research Center. Please help if you can. We are most grateful for any assistance! The WCG and the LCG have left many hurt, broken, bullied and abused members in their wake.  Most felt they were defenseless and did nothing. We seek justice both for ourselves and for the many others whose lives have been negatively impacted by these organizations.

Click on the link above or here if you'd like to help out.

(HT to Gary who's been following developments closely.)

A Parallel Universe: the March BA

The Bible Advocate is unlike any of the Armstrong COG publications. Rarely, if ever, is there an article featuring prophetic speculation. No BI. No inane punditry on the hidden meaning of world news. It's clearly not in the DNA of its publishers, the Denver-based Church of God (Seventh Day).

CoG7 is a fundamentalist Adventist body, no question, but it seems to avoid the tabloid apocalyptic speculation that goes hand-in-glove with its two larger relatives, the sibling SDA church, and its ratbag pack of daughters in the Worldwide Church of God tradition. When Herbert separated in the 1930s (they must have thrown a party!) CoG7 was left to follow its own course of development. It currently has churches established in forty countries (p.30).

Back to the magazine. The March issue is themed around baptism. But where, you might ask, are the proliferating exclamation marks! the CAPS, the frequent use of italics? And the lads at UCG's Beyond Today take note, just look at all the names of female writers and staff.

Many hardline Armstrongites would scoff, searching in vain for the heady blend of speculation, pontification and stupidity-on-steroids that they're addicted to. There's absolutely nothing Meredithesque here. Bland by comparison? Yes, but living off a diet of Rocky Road has health consequences. By contrast, a low-key, conversational tone has its own appeal. Not that I'm even faintly endorsing CoG7, just noting that it's one of the healthier options on the lard-laden COG smorgasbord.

The BA has been around a long time (this issue is Vol. 150, No. 2). It's already burned off The Plain Truth (unless you count the invisible Albrecht magazine), The Good News (both versions), GCI's Christian Odyssey, Meredith's The World Ahead, and I daresay it'll burn off the current crop of splinter mags as well.

The PDF is available to download.

Tomorrow's World - March issue

After yesterday's look through the latest Beyond Today, what can be said about the March/April issue of it's leading competition, LCG's Tomorrow's World?

On the surface, it looks like a news magazine, which is a different strategy from the slightly New Age mountaintop sunrise on the cover of Beyond Today. If it's news journalism you're expecting, though, you're bound to be disappointed.

Rod Meredith editorialises about "Make Each Day Count!" Carpe diem huh? How so? Rod exhorts us:

"We in this Work of the living God hope and pray that all of you will truly “check up” on us. We sincerely want you to prove what you believe and why. Do not believe what I am telling you just because I am telling it to you. Check it out in your own Bible."

Where have we heard that before? "Check up" means read the carefully curated proof texts all the way up the garden path.

Rod also has a long article called "The Answer." Eight rambling pages salted with the usual pitch for BI.

'Truly, the spoiled and arrogant descendants of the so-called “Lost Ten Tribes” of Israel are today found among the American and British-descended peoples, and the peace-loving nations of northwestern Europe.'  

Germanic folk should ignore that, sorry.

Adam West (probably not the much-loved Batman actor) in an article about "The Year of Shakespeare" seems to be saying that the Bard's works should be cleaned up - literally bowdlerised.

Bowdler’s cleansing of Shakespeare’s work was ridiculed as tampering and censorship; however, the time is coming when God will seek to clean and purify all language, and therefore thought, enabling humanity better to praise Him apart from the “blemishes” of perverted words and concepts, double meanings, and pagan references so common to all languages today.

Yup, bring out those blue pencils. Why should the Taliban have all the fun?

The feature article by John Meakin is on migration into Europe. Meakin paints as dark a picture as he possibly can then concludes, not unexpectedly, that there is an "Unprecedented World Crisis Ahead!" and the only solution is "Thy Kingdom Come!" (Yes, the exclamation marks are his.)

You've got to give Wally Smith credit for his one-page article on Easter. First, he actually limited himself to one page - perhaps he could pass on some tips to Rod. Second, he takes a fresh approach to the well-worn 'Easter is pagan' line.

I believe in the risen Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior of mankind. I believe that after His crucifixion on Passover, He was three days and three nights in the heart of the earth—as He said He would be. I believe He was then resurrected by His Father, restored to the glory He had with His Father before the world was.

He was the perfect Passover Lamb. He also became the perfect wave-sheaf offering, accepted by His Father as the first of the firstfruits. In His resurrection, I see confirmation of the promise made to all those who truly follow Him that they, too, will one day be resurrected, to live forever as He now does.

Consequently, I do not keep Easter.

Had me going for a minute. Bonus points for originality.

Doug Winnail has an article entitled "Five Books that Changed the World." What? Four more than Doug's annotated, leather-bound wide margin KJV? Well, no. It's a bit of a cheat because the reference is to the Pentateuch, the five books ascribed to Moses.

The five books of Moses, also called the Pentateuch—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—are part of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) and claim to be the inspired words of God (Exodus 3:4–6; 2 Timothy 3:16). In striking contrast to other “holy” books, the Bible—including these five most ancient books—contains unique, internal self-authenticating evidence in the form of nearly two thousand prophecies that confirm its divine inspiration. No other text than the Bible—not the Quran, not the Upanishads, not the Tao Te Ching—can rightly claim to contain such specific prophecies that correctly foretell future events.

Doug wants to prove the inspiration of the Bible by day-dreaming about the non-existent predictive prophecies he thinks are in it? Good luck with that Doug.

There's more, but you know the saying about too much of a good thing...

The PDF is available to download.

Beyond Today - Issue 2

The lads at the United Church of God have just released the second issue of their relaunched flagship magazine Beyond Today.

A major theme is the UCG's position on Passover (vs. Easter); "The Biblical Alternative to Easter" and an untitled follow-on by Jerold Aust. There's a hurry-up article encouraging the waverers to get baptised ("Are You Putting Off Your Salvation?"), and Peter Eddington asks "Was Jesus Really Resurrected?" The quality of Eddington's discourse might be judged by this quote: "Some of the New Testament books were written by eyewitnesses only a couple [of] decades after the purported events. If the whole story was made up, how credible would that have been?"

Defying any speculation about UCG's abandonment of British-Israelism, Darris McNeely has a predictable rant based on American exceptionalism. He asks (rhetorically) "Will America Be Great Again?", with an accompanying plug for the BI booklet. (Any old timers out there remember GTA pontificating on how, after Korea, "America has won its last war!"?)

How's this for a jingoistically myopic introduction?

I have on my desk a copy of Andrew Roberts’ A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. The 2008 book shows the positive impact of America and Great Britain and others in the world since the turn of the 20th century. From the defeat of communism and Nazi aggression to the invention of vaccines and new crop strains that saved millions of lives, the story is one of the most remarkable in history.

The author states at the book’s conclusion that the English-speaking nations are “the last, best hope for mankind.” He goes on to say that, according to the lessons of history, the time of dominance of these peoples will fade and other powers like China or one yet to appear will rise and exert a “global sway.” Roberts concludes with a note of prophetic inevitability in saying that when the time of the English-speaking peoples fades, “the human race will come to mourn the passing of this most decent, honest, generous, fairminded and self-sacrificing imperium” (pp. 647-648). 

Should go down well with the BI brigade. Later he states:

America and the English-speaking nations have forgotten who made them great. These nations created the greatest expansion of wealth in the history of the world. But how? Because the God of Abraham was faithful in His promise to bless that patriarch’s descendants in the modern age. Yes, America and Britain are the foremost nations among them. Sadly, we don’t know this—as Isaiah said, we “do not consider.” Because we do not know this, we have turned to false religion and moral sin.

A nation like America cannot be replicated in this world. If it could, it would’ve already happened through all the foreign aid, intervention and nation-building. There is only one America. God placed this land and its people here for a divine purpose. It has grown large and great and free because the God of heaven made a promise to a man named Abraham. God has fulfilled that promise in history, and because He has, He will fulfill the spiritual promise of the offer of eternal salvation to all peoples. 

Where are the women?

Sounds to me like BI is alive, well and pulsing through the veins in UCG.

Scooping the unintended irony award is the anonymous writer of "False Predictions: How to Separate Truth from Counterfeits." There's also heavy promotion of the "America the Time is Now" presentations which, from all reports, have been wildly unsuccessful so far.

A closing observation. When the lads at UCG are referred to as "the lads", that's pretty much the literal truth. Women staff members, writers, even copy editors? Nope. Might as well be the 1950s.

The PDF is available to download.

Gary's scoop on Scarborough lawsuit

From the court document

News on the Banned by HWA blog of a potentially embarrassing lawsuit that the Living Church of God (LCG) has been keeping under wraps. Longstanding members Patrick and Elizabeth Scarborough of Charlotte, NC are alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress.

According to an informant on Gary's site, both Presiding Evangelist Roderick Meredith and Rod McNair are also being sued individually for defamation of character. Similar charges against the late Bob League have apparently been dismissed.

Gary's informant notes: "The lawsuit was initiated in September of 2015 and they have already gone to court once. It looked like LCG tried to get everything dismissed but was mostly unsuccessful."

Gary's take on the situation is available here. Proceedings are set down for July 11.

COG trivia: In my heart there rings a melody

What relationship has this hymn by Elton M. Roth to Herbert Armstrong? No, it didn't appear in the famous purple hymnal (nor even in the earlier gray hymnal). You wouldn't think, looking at the lyrics (see the original PDF here) that Herb would have had much use for it, and it's clear modern devotees don't. Yet it's an important part of GCI/WCG/Radio Church of God history.

The answer lies in the Autobiography of Herb Armstrong.

In those days "The Radio Church of God" opened with an opening theme, the hymn composed by Elton Menno Roth (who later became my personal friend) "In My Heart There Rings a Melody," sung in lively manner by our "Radio Church Quartette." (1967 edition, p.508)

Yes brethren, this is the foundation theme song to the Church of God. More than that, it was composed by Herb's "personal friend"!

So can we expect to hear it at this year's Feast of Tabernacles I wonder, at least among the most slavishly devoted of Herb's imitators?

A solo by Stephen Flurry, Bob Thiel tinkling the ivories and Dave Pack on the tambourine?

Can't you just picture Ronnie Weinland on the harmonica with Rod Meredith clapping and stomping along in time?

For those of us who don't read music, there's a recording for you to sample here.