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| compared the conversions to the ones you see the Rev. Billy Graham of Montreat, N.C.
doing. There were stories of “browbeating.” God knows what went on in Iowa City, Iowa where our crying N.C. farmer sent $20,000 of plow money to get his daughter deprogrammed, but what happened afterward was a tragedy. “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” - Henry David Thoreau. I was beginning to disinfect this blemish of humanity through journalism, the same way I clean the brown mung caked around the white, ceramic drain of my shower bathtub. Spray a little unwatered-down bleach on it and it will clean itself. Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. Freedom of religion is a constitutional right respected by the Rev. David Long of First Presbyterian Church in Boone. To find a clear, level-headed response and explanation of cult groups, I figured the reasonable place to start was with a Protestant officiant. “We have to allow and protect, under the law, a group like The Way,” Long said. “I’d describe it as a very dangerous cult by what I know and what I’ve read - it’s very dangerous. They accept the scriptures, but they variate from them. Pretty soon, they have you off out here. The church doesn’t have all the truth about the scriptures.” Long described the personal susceptible to a cult: “the person who has biblical or religious or Christian training, the person who has a church background, the person who is not the most popular person, but who needs approval of friends...a rather strict upbringing, a so-called sheltered life, a person who is lonely, lonely from family, lonely from friends, and they really lack a personal relationship with God.” Later when I asked Long about speaking in tongues and exorcism, he said he saw an exorcism in Africa and believed one could speak in tongues. Durn. I never realized that Presbyterians believed in exorcism and towers of psychobabble. Long described brainwashing. I knew what it was. For several months I was on an in- patient unit in Pinehurst, N.C. after flunking out at ASU and becoming extremely depressed. “Hit the wall! Put all your anger into your fists and strike the wall!” The old lady counselor should have had better sense than to allow me to go into the padded room on our hall. Over and over I’d turn my neck and tell one counselor that I couldn’t stop doing it. Finally, my parents and shrink told me I’d better snap out of it or I’d go to Dix Hospital, “Dix Hill,” as the rednecks called it, in Raleigh. After a counselor screweded me late one night in my room after closing hours, I showed a remarkable, timely recovery, and I think the medication should receive no credit. It was strong stuff. New on the market. I forget what it was. I knew what deprogramming was like. “It would be cleansing the mind of all previous conceptions and placing in their place those conceptions that are desired by the one who brainwashes or by the one who modifies behavior. You don’t wash the brain. You don’t have a mental breakdown. You don’t just pull a brain out and scrub it and put it back in.” That’s probably what had happened to me the night before, or maybe it was the 10th Miller at Clyde’s in Blowing Rock and the first lobster I’d ever eaten in my life, microwaved. I faintly remember a female who, on a dare, lifted up her skirt to her chest, revealing to all bar patrons that she was wearing no panties while music of The Dillards blasted over the Bose speakers. Presbyterian Long concluded, “We have to allow and protect, under the law, a group like The Way.” Michael Van Dyke, N.C. Way Director in Greenville, N.C., told me, “One man’s cult is another man’s religion, and one man’s religion is another man’s cult. Ms. Nelms asked me to print that she loves her parents and has not tried to do anything to hurt them. The next time I saw her was with Edwards in our front office buying a classified ad for the sale of a $175 flute. The Nelms experience is not new in North Carolina. “No, it’s not the first case I know of,” said an anti-cult spokesman. “They are in every state.” Colonization of Way groups had evolved into a network encompassing all 50 states and 50 foreign countries since Wierwille, born in 1917, quit his ministry at United Church of Christ in Van Wert, Ohio to inoculate his own herd. He studied at Mission House College, Moody Bible Institute, the University of Chicago Divinity School, getting his masters of theology from Princeton Theological Seminary and his doctorate from Pike’s Peak Seminary, an alleged “degree mill.” During the flower child movement of the 1960s Wierwille had mustered up a flock in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, later moving to his family’s homeplace, a 147-acre farm in New Knoxville. The 197-acre Way College of Biblical Research was in Rome City, Ind. My notes and manuscripts from covering The Way are brown, yellowed, torn and out of order. Some of the original pages were thrown in the trash that day in Perkinsville, a small borough on the east side of Boone, when my landlord instructed employees to throw all my personal belongings out of the apartment in which I was residing. Once when “Big E” and Rusty visited me from Laurinburg, it was about 15 degrees in my apartment even with the electric heat turned full blast. Electrified by the Crown Royal and other chemical additives, I jumped up from my seat, kicked open the flimsy wooden door as cold air rushed in. “Close that damned pneumonia hole!” “What’s got into you?” Hoisting the 20-inch black-and-white Zenith television set to my knee, I pressed it to my chest and then over my head as my friends stopped drinking after our conversation about the next day’s skiing at Beech Mountain and were transfixed upon my steps to the second floor balcony. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” I said as traffic lights streamed by the green stoplight on U.S. 321. “What’s he going to do?” The set had been on the fritz for several months, and I kept it because it spruced up the place along with the painting reproduction my artist friend Chris Rust had done of the first Dire Straits album cover of the out-of-focus woman on a parking deck. We will always remember to our dying day the tiny spark that clicked on somewhere in the 3-D inner dimensions of that zenith as it made like a wounded phoenix and mustering all its remaining static and hidden electricity currents in its white shell. “I HATE TVS!” I said, hurling the television set off the deck as it twisted and turned slowly in transition before gravity pulled it from its lofty position and its tube and cathodes jolted from impact, plastic flying and making the most unforgettable noise an electronic appliance can produce. “I can’t believe you just did that!” “I got it! I got it on film!” Turning to close the door and reenter the room in an anti-climactic 180, I grabbed the decanter and sucked its amber innards like it was a teat and I was a starving refugee. There was a weird, drunken student that I knew through a friend. This guy would come up to smoke a joint every once and a while, and after a dozen such episodes he asked me about the story I had queried with Rolling Stone about on The Way. “John’s” father was a judge from Morganton. The judge told me he’d rather not discuss The Way. His son later decided to ask me not to use any of his quotes, but changed his mind so many times I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted. He told me of when he was 22 six years ago and traveled to the Rock of Ages Festival The Way sponsored every year. “I had just graduated from college,” he said. “I went with two girls and another guy, Nancy, Lisa and Steve. We went in a VW bug. It was fun. I had a good time. A lot of pussy. Itis. We all camped out up there. Everybody walking and saying, “Jesus loves!” All these Jesus freaks. It was wild as hell. It took us, I believe, 16 or 18 hours. We just partied, you know, drove on down the road, drank beer, smoked pot.” This guy was funny to John and I because he was a friendly fellow who would sometimes lapse into a state of quiet oblivion, but the thing that tickled us about him was the fact that most of the time he would not be looking at you when he talked. “I wanted to see what it was like and what they did. She said that I’d like it. I went, I guess, because of her. We all just slept in one big tent. It was a big old fairground deal, a bunch of parking spaces. They had tents all around, mobile homes, trailers and all. There was about 100,000 people there.” He said there was a band and stage and people singing “Jesus Loves You This I Know.” Music could feature groups like The Joyful Noise or The Good Seed. “They’d say, “Yeah, you want to be with The Way,” you know. Most of them were real straight, real flower children. There were a lot of hippies and crap. A lot of people walked around with cups with beer and liquor. A lot of them were smoking. You could walk around and smell it everywhere.” The reason he didn’t want me to include his comments was that his sister had been in the group, and his father, the judge, wanted her out. One of the photocopied documents I got from the Citizens Freedom Foundation involved a 25-year-old guy rescued from The Way in Norfolk after he was approached by a couple in the local shopping mall. He was later deprogrammed “When I first became a member I didn’t think it was a cult. But it is a cult that uses mind control techniques and the issue is not doctrine but mind control,” he said Dec. 3, 1980. His father exploded and his mom “just sat there and wanted to listen to what I had to say.” Melloril, that was the crap I was on...strong stuff, Daddy. I could relate to how deeply the farmer had been hurt. I’ll never forget the day I ran away from home as a teen for a brief day or so, and my father came to where I was at, a home, with tears in his eyes, pleading with me to come home because my mother was crying. I’ll go to hell for that. Satan’s crimson, satin fork is in a corner for me to stoke the coals in the “Run Away From Home” room of Hades. “I read that deprogramming was holding you against your will, for a long period of time, trying to convert you to believe a different belief system and that is not true. What is true is that a deprogramming shows you in a very defined way how hypnosis, self-hypnosis and brainwashing techniques operate.” “A lot of the teachings are what I would consider very good teachings. But even still, though Dr. Wierwille has changed a few basic doctrines around and he knows he has to. because he will not defend his position. He will either become very angry with you and not defend himself or he will remain calm and quiet and act real peaceful.” “While you were in The Way did you know about the anti-Semitism of The Way International?” “No, I hadn’t been aware of that until my deprogramming where it was made known to me that a book that they have on the shelf of the library at the international headquarters teaches that the six million Jews were not killed by the Germans.” “Did you know that when a person makes a contribution to the Nazi Party that they are sent a pamphlet written by Dr. Wierwille?” “No I did not know that until right now Where did you find out your information from Sue?” Sue Martin at Keuka College is described as a student intern at the NEC center. “From an Ex-Way member.” “The Myth of the Six Million” was the publication in question, a document abhorred by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith along with “The Hoax of the 20th Century.” “How do you feel about the people in The Way now that you’re out?” “Oh, I have nothing against them at all. I think that the time we spent together was pretty good. They’re still my friends, but we have one less thing in common. May be more than one thing, but I’m no longer a member and they are.” “Have any of The Way members tried to harass you?” “Well, I know they don’t call it harassment, but I know that when you are invaded, your own privacy, that it’s not right, I believe that they are doing what is called “God’s will” all the time and even if it means they will break man’s laws, to do God’s will.” “And what God’s will is, is Dr. Wierwille’s will?” “You bet.” In “Cults, World Religions and You” there is a chapter on The Way International, stating its college in Emporia, Kan. was established in 1975, and that before the senior year, students had to spend a year as missionaries. There are retreats and “advances” and prison outreaches. The Minuteman Program dispatches PFAL grads to cities for the summer to create twig groups and enroll new students in the PFAL course. I used to go to the Boone Police Department and talk with Phyllis, the secretary, for hours about The Way and what people thought of it, and when we weren’t talking about The Way, we’d talk about the existentialism of Jason in the “Halloween” series. Most of the small mountain churches were scared crapless of a cult group in town, and any such talk was d deemed as a social threat against the crux and cornerstone of “Our Town.” The publication accuses The Way of coordinating and developing businesses owned by members and providing work for members and a larger financial base. There is a 10 percent tithe. The tapes students listen to are described as involving singing, praying and speaking in tongues. Female ministers are ordained along with males. Christmas or Easter are not the most important day for The Way which the publication says Pentecost tops the holidays. Zealous enthusiasm is highlighted, and drugs, alcohol, premarital sex and slothfulness are discouraged. Wierwille wrote a book called “Jesus Christ Is Not God,” “The Bible Tells Me So, “The Word’s Way,” and “Receiving the Holy Spirit Today.” In July 1979 when Wierwille was 62 Ohio Magazine published a story by Michael Harden that begins, “From a farm in Western Ohio, an international multimillion dollar religious cult pulls the strings for its army of tens of thousands of disciples. Many have gone through a religious boot camp, many have received small arms training, all are fiercely loyal to one man.” Wierwille grew up on a Shelby County farm, the article reports, where the international headquarters were built. He was called to be a minister of the Evangelical and Reformed Church in Van Wert and Payne, Ohio. The PFAL course began in 1953. He resigned in Van Wert in 1957 at the United Church of Christ. Wierwille reportedly began with the help of a disc jockey named Steve Heefner who assisted in The Way’s canonization in a seven-page LIFE magazine featured entitled “The Groovy Christians of Rye, N.Y,” a story written by Jane Howard in May 1971. LIFE said Wierwille called Rye a “very dark town in a very dark county.” Ohio Magazine claimed The Way’s East group in New York raised $100,000 in 18 months, and the group was growing. The price of the Power For Abundant Living Course had been free, increasing to $15 and then to $100. There were even groups in Little Rock, Ark. “Blind allegiance,” Ohio Magazine called it. Training for The Way Corps training required one to keep one’s marital status, incorporate a low-protein diet and get to bed around 12:30 a.m, awaking by 5:30 a.m. It was supposedly “okay to sleep with somebody else (other than your spouse) as long as it honors God or builds the ministry or some kind of clowny stuff like that,” a guy is quoted. One publication reported The Way denied the Trinity and Christ’s divinity and incarnation, adding that Jesus was resurrected on Saturday and that four people instead of two were crucified next to the Lord. The Way believed only believers after Pentecost would be saved, and they must remain dead until the final resurrection. Water baptism was discouraged, and speaking in tongues was taught with members practicing 30 minutes each morning. Way Corps trainees supposedly were punished for being five minutes late for dinner or forgetting a name tag by missing a meal. Fasts included only vitamins, water and Colo Cleanse, a “volcanic ash product.” In the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette Tom Jenkinson, director of The Way College of Biblical Research in Rome City, said trainees are free “within the restrictions of the program and within the restrictions I think you would experience, I assume, in most any other training program, be it your first year of college or the Marine Corps.” Bubbling underwater, I emerged from the baptismal pool of First Baptist Church of Laurinburg a saved individual, experiencing the same stifling sensation of drowning the church pest behind me was about to get. It was the scariest moment of my life. There was a painting on the wall behind the pool with the scene of a mountainside that you could slip into during a boring sermon. If you sat close to the front row, you could glimpse a girl’s breast and nipple through the wet white choir robes as they emerged from the pool as Christians. Breathtaking. I wore underwear on my submerging trip underwater. I felt like Lloyd Bridge on “Sea Hunt.” Got water in my ears. It felt good dribbling out that night. Marksmanship and weapons handling and safety courses were offered at the National guard Armory of Emporia over two years, Ohio Magazine reported. The article said The Way had a police force of three people at its headquarters under a 105-year-old Ohio law which first permitted Chautaugua gatherings to have event security. “The Bless Patrol” was the squad’s name Shelby County Sheriff John Lenhart had to worry about. “It is hard to guess what legislators were thinking in 1874,” the sheriff told the magazine, “but this law has the potential of being really abused. They would have police powers to conduct investigations, as I understand it, any place in the state of Ohio. Anybody you can think of could start their own police agency, carry firearms, conduct investigations, and I don’t think that’s healthy. There’s no checks and balances. There’s no mayor they answer to, no town council that hey answer to. It’s the type of thing where they could have five officers today and 500 tomorrow.” Shelby County Prosecutor Scott Jarvis was listed as a Way member and The Way’s legal counsel, and as saying they should refrain from making vehicle stops near Wierwille Road. A “Mrs. Moore” with First Baptist Church in Raleigh, N.C. told me, “It’s just an evil group. I’ll tell you that. It’s a sad situation.” Boone Way fellowship meetings were held at 8 p.m. every Tuesday and Friday night, so on April 29 before a spokesman had invited me to attend, I went with my cousin, Jeff, who lives 45 miles away in Newton. He’s husky like me, and we look and feel like brothers. I asked him to go, and he was hesitant, but agreed when it looked like we would go chasing women in Blowing Rock at the bars afterward. He still wanted to just hit the bars, but sheepishly accompanied me. Twig leader Pat Yaconis was preaching out of the book of Acts and Ephesians, talking about change and how those who persecute might be converted. No way, Jose. It was a nice house on a respectable street above The Flick theatre. Prayers were uttered, and a reed horn of plenty was passed around, so I gave Wierwille a buck. Didn’t even ask for compensation at work. There are a lot of invisible costs for journalists. Karen Nelms had been contributing 10 percent of her waitress money to the group. I’m just not a 10- percenter at heart. One of my stories quoted estimated Way assets at $10 million or near that amount. I thought I’d melt from embarrassment when we started singing some corny oldie-but- goldies from the Sing Along The Way songbook, but everyone else chimed in with laughs and cheer. “Again, what you saw is not different from anything else we do,” The Way spokesman reminded me later. The merriment subsided into a serious conversation when I told them I was a news reporter. Somber indeed. Yaconis said he’d have to refer questions to New Knoxville, but he did say, “David is not guilty.” “THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.” - God Mark Edwards, sitting next to Way member Karen Nelms, said that the group had contacted the FBI in Hickory to report that the group was being railroaded, but no assistance was given. The life of Reilly was in jeopardy. Reilly was a Boone twig member who was in trouble in the court system. On New Year’s Eve David Michael Reilly, 23, of Methuen, Mass., found himself facing charges of felonious breaking and entering and larceny because of an incident in November 1982 at a Japanese steakhouse restaurant where he worked. A vandalized cigarette machine was smashed, and money was stolen. Boone Police Department officers had arrested him at the twig’s $450 a month home, charging that he stole $6,767.77 from the restaurant on Saturday, Nov. 21. Over $5,000 damage was sustained at the location of our newspaper’s company Christmas party, where the showboat chefs feigned translation difficulties until they had captured a fair maiden customer following the flaming shrimp ritual and the miracle of catching a yellow rind of lemon behind the back on the second or third try. Sometimes they did it the first time. Our parties were fun. My last Christmas bonus was great, about $400. The Coffeys were generous. The Jehovah’s Witness photographer flatly refused a Christmas bonus, but he would accept it only as an incentive bonus. Praise the Lord. The company safe was found opened on the lobby floor. After David Michael Reilly, was by the Boone Police Department and went to court, Henry Upchurch of Sugar Grove, eight miles from Boone near Vilas, made his $10,000 bond. Reilly received a three-year sentence. After a Watauga County jury deliberated about four hours April 15 before convicting Reilly, he got a three year active sentence. During his trial, Reilly’s attorney argued fiercely when the judge allowed the prosecutor’s questioning to ramble way out of bounds into The Way’s financial transactions and to a crazy little thing called deprogramming. A Boone detective testified that Reilly protested when he was arrested, and that during questioning the suspect stated that “he had no damned business around that cigarette machine.” Prints found on the cigarette machine were “fresh,” the officer testified, having been applied within 48 hours of the break-in. The prints were identified as Reilly’s. “He has no prior record, to my knowledge,” he said. During the trial I had a rather strong attack of gas and tried to squeak out a silent emission, but all was for naught. The triple treblo horn sounded, and thankfully no one sitting near me in the press box, including the cops, issued any signal that my transgression Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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