Inside The Church Universal and Triumphant: What happened when doomsday didn’t come and the science behind cults

It was supposed to be the end of the world. TV reporters from everywhere between Israel and Japan had gathered outside the compound. Sociologists assembled to assess the situation. And several stories below them, hundreds of people huddled – waiting in a bunker for a nuclear war that would never come.

One of the people in that bunker was Erin Prophet, the daughter of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant. CUT had moved their headquarters to Paradise Valley, Montana, nine years earlier.

Since then, the organization had become a media fixture; acquiring illegal weapons under fake names and having leaky underground fuel tanks will do that. But CUT’s members weren’t just making an overly paranoid security system; they were preparing for the end of the world, which Elizabeth had predicted would come on March 14, 1990.

Erin Prophet has since left CUT, a religious group that has earned comparisons to Jonestown and Waco. Her memoir, Prophet’s Daughter, details her time with the group, and her life growing up in a doomsday cult.

“A lot of people in the church were offended and upset about my book,” Prophet said. “I was hoping they would use my book to reform…[the church] was really anti-abortion, and homosexuality was seen as a bad thing. You could come to services, but you couldn’t actually join unless you gave up being gay…that was an issue for me, I couldn’t be part of a group who had these extreme ideas about sexuality.”

Prophet describes CUT’s beliefs system as a blend of Eastern and Western religions. The belief combined concepts from Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism and attracted many followers in the ‘70s.

“It had a specific slant, which came out of theosophy, which was a 19th century movement that tried to basically say that all religions were one. So if you asked someone in the church what it was about, they would say that it’s the idea that you can become God.”

Prophet said the group displayed a penchant for doomsday prophecy long before they arrived in Montana.

“The Church always had a little bit of an apocalyptic identity, that the efforts of the Church were believed to be maintaining an equilibrium for the entire planet. So we actually thought our prayers were keeping the world from falling apart.”

It was this belief that caused a media frenzy, and put law enforcement on edge. The influence that Erin’s mother had over the group was staggering. Members prepared wholeheartedly for what they believed was the end. And Erin’s attempts to reassess the leadership model were thwarted time and again.

“I mean, could my mom just have said anything at all, like, ‘today we’re all going to dress like Easter Bunnies’ or, ‘tomorrow we’re going to put on pink elephant heads’, and everyone would have just said, ‘Okay!’? [But] it would have to somehow make sense within the context of her previous work and readings within the group.”

Questioning her mother’s leadership and way of life eventually led Prophet to the decision to leave the group, at first for a set period of time, and then permanently.

“I was always somewhat skeptical, I always just let my mind run on two tracks; on one track I was going along with everything that was happening, and on the other track I was thinking, ‘Why are we doing this, why would God let us do this if it weren’t going to turn out okay?’”

Once away from the compound Prophet came to realize just how different life was outside of CUT.

“I felt that there was no future for me in the church…I had to reassess what religion was, what spirituality was. I stopped doing meditation or prayer, but I found I enjoyed having a spiritual practice. For awhile I just wanted to be like other people, drink and go to bars and listen to music, doing things I had been told were nonproductive.”

Erin eventually returned to CUT’s headquarters to find her mother in deteriorating health; Elizabeth eventually died from Alzheimer’s. Once Elizabeth was no longer in power, and the doomsday predictions proved to be false, life in the compound changed. “People started demanding more autonomy within the group…Once my mother [‘s health] began to decline, it became about preparing for the future, the succession. [The infrastructure] fell apart because the more conservative members of the leadership really didn’t want to go to a more open decision-making model. They wanted to keep things the way they had been.”

Today, Paradise Valley is still occupied by members of CUT, but their numbers have dwindled. Prophet says that although she still keeps in touch with people in the compound, many were offended by her book, and things are tense. Erin spends her time writing and speaking at conferences.

Back in 1990 on the day the world didn’t end, while Erin and her family huddled together in one of CUT’s many underground bunkers, sociologist Robert Balch was standing above ground with other researchers and members of the media. He had been called in to analyze CUT with the hope that violence wouldn’t break out when the world didn’t end. Mercifully the group took the news pretty well. Balch, a Ph.D. in sociology and professor at the University of Montana, has studied the Church Universal and Triumphant, and the science of cults at large. I talked to Balch about doomsday cults, the people who lead them and why anybody would join one.

Montana Report: Why would someone join a cult?

Robert Balch: People joined Church Universal for the same reason they join a lot of other churches, which is, they like the people, something clicks about what the people believe. There’s nothing particularly weird about it, as far as the process goes of getting into it. CUT had a lot of church-like characteristics. When sociologists use the term “cult”, they most often they mean that it’s a religion whose beliefs are outside the mainstream, they’re not part of a Judeo-Christian tradition. So people look at them as being very weird. They like the people… it’s a gradual process of conversion. These people were spiritual-seekers…who were disillusioned with mainstream religion. CUT really grew big in the 1970s, because it started to pick up all these people who were refugees from the hippie counterculture and the anti-war movement of the 60s, who were already disillusioned with mainstream society.

When people joined CUT…they way it was structured…it was like being in a church. But as you move closer to the center [of the leadership], there’s where it becomes more cult-like in the stereotypical terms. If you went on staff…that was sort of like a monastic existence, where there were lots and lots of rules, lots of restrictions…all sorts of stuff that just regulated behavior. But that was just for staff members.

When they were getting ready to move to Montana, they were trying to prepare people in the state that this weird group from Southern California was coming, I listened to some of the stuff that they were talking about, and I thought, “Holy shit, this is pretty weird.” But for people in that tradition, not weird at all. People who had reached a turning point in their lives…who were thinking, ‘Okay, what do I do next?’ MP: Why do people stay?

RB: We’ve got world-rejecting and world-affirming groups, and then in the middle you have groups like CUT, they’re called world-accommodating. So they don’t really want to be fully part of the world, but they’re also not fully rejecting it. This group is difficult to classify, because it depends on where you are in the organization. When you’re on the outer rings, it’s just like belonging to a church; it’s only a partial commitment. But the more involved you get, the more it tends to consume your life, and you end up separating yourself from the world. When you move to Montana, it suddenly becomes a big commitment.

MP: Are there any personality traits that would make someone better at leading a cult than others?

RB: Generally speaking…people who have done studies of charismatic leaders, trying to look for common personality characteristics, number one, it’s really difficult, because it’s rare that you’re gonna find one of these people who’s gonna sit down and go through a psychological evaluation. So you’re always trying to evaluate behavior at a distance.

And so often with charismatic leaders, the only time when you get contact with those people are in specially orchestrated situations, so the leader is always giving a public performance, so you don’t really have access to backstage. A common characteristic is narcissism…but the issue with that is, are you narcissistic and therefore become a charismatic leader, or do you become a charismatic leader and have all these people slavishly bowing at your feet, and then you become narcissistic as a result of that?

The charismatic leaders that I’ve had real contact with are very smart – not necessarily well educated smart – but intuitively smart, just naturally intelligent people; really good social skills, able to read people really well. You got to have a powerful personality…and followers who will believe what you say. People willingly submit to charismatic leaders. Every one that I’ve met can just talk forever…answer any question, and if they can’t answer, you still feel like you got something out of that.

MP: How do cults usually start?

RB: It varies. In this case, with CUT, Elizabeth Clare Prophet only started the name, Church Universal and Triumphant. Previously, it had been run by her husband [Mark Prophet] as The Summit Lighthouse. Elizabeth became the charismatic leader through a process of succession, because her husband, Mark, basically groomed her to take over. There’s all sorts of different ways these groups begin. One way is, tonight I go home and drop six hits of acid, and I have a revelation from God, and it changes my life, and I go out and I try to recruit people to follow me. [Minus the drug use], that’s very common…. [People] who believe they’ve been chosen for a special mission by God. I don’t know if that’s what happened to Mark Prophet; the details of his early history are kinda vague.

Another way is that a fairly ordinary group that may not be religious at all will evolve into a religious cult…it evolves from a little tiny spiritually-oriented commune into this full-blown religion.

A lot of groups get started the way Scientology did, where they’re basically a business. ‘I’ve had some spiritual insight, and if you pay me a certain amount of money, I’ll share my wisdom with you.’ There’s a lot of channeling groups that get started like this; an entity is speaking through them, and before long they’re charging money for it, and an inner circle develops, and then you’ve got a cult.

MP: How do some cults escalate so quickly, without anyone seeming to realize it [relocation, doomsday prophecies, mass suicide]?

RB: A lot of things can push people in that direction. One thing that commonly happens is outside opposition. Usually when there’s violence or weirdness in some cult group, people immediately look to the group for the explanation, when often the explanation is outside the group.

In response to this [doomsday] prediction, they’re thinking, ‘Okay, if we’re going to be underground, and civilization is collapsing, people are going to know that we’ve got stuff and they don’t, so we’re going to have to protect our stuff.’ So they start buying weapons, and made the mistake of buying illegal weapons. Then the government finds out, and then you get that escalation and tension. But you could see how something could happen pretty easily in that situation.

Law enforcement begins to investigate. Then the group becomes increasingly paranoid and buys more guns. Then law enforcement thinks, “we’ve got real trouble on our hands”, so they escalate their activities, and it goes on like this until there’s a confrontation.

Also, threats to the leader’s authority…if they perceive that their authority is being threatened, what they’ll do is close ranks and purge the ranks, making increasing demands for commitment on the part of the followers…by responding in that way, all of a sudden the group has gone to this extremely authoritarian, very small, closed, controlling little community where the leaders now have much more control than they had before.

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