VI. IDENTITY DIFFUSION VS. EXOCENTRIC SECTARIANISM

Herbert Armstrong, it has been argued, had been a conflicted figure from adolescence. Early stage socialization had been affected by the family’s rootlessness and lack of career focus. As Jean Piaget has written: “It has long been thought that the affective changes characteristic of adolescence…are to be explained primarily by innate and quasi-instinctive mechanisms…In reality, the role of social factors (in the twofold sense of socialization and cultural transmission) is far more important.” 37 Erik Erikson adds: “Children feel the tensions, insecurities, and rages of their parents even if they do not know their causes or witness their most overt manifestations. Therefore, you cannot fool children. To develop a child with a healthy personality, a person must be a genuine person in a genuine milieu.” 38 Erikson also noted that healthy identity formation arrives when society takes the aptitudes and personality of the young individual for granted. He is “accepted” in the eyes of his peers. Yet Herbert Armstrong’s touching (in retrospect) depiction of himself as a hard-working 23-year-old, arriving dead broke in Danville, Indiana haunts his life story. Once again he needed his Uncle Frank’s good offices to line him up yet another job in advertising.

This reminds us again of how rugged American capitalism really was in 1915 and how conflicted the young Herbert Armstrong really was. Eight years later – surprising for one so confident on the streets of Chicago – he would turn down a job as advertising manager of the Des Moines Register. 39 His plea was “I am not an executive.” The secret secreted. What he admitted at the time of his conversion was leaking out in the details of his youthful struggles – he was not remotely as able to cope with this turbulent new century as he had thought.

Herbert Armstrong had left adolescence with a burning desire to “be” somebody (somebody but himself?) and to achieve something great in life. His transference upon businessmen such as Uncle Frank, on stylish writer/philosopher Elbert Hubbard and on dynamic President Theodore Roosevelt revealed a sincere drive to build a strong sense of identity in line with the culture’s achievement ethic. Spiritually, James Loder would argue, the restless youth had already experienced the cosmic loneliness at the very base of the ego structure. His human spirit was seeking connection to the Face of God. Armstrong’s ego had been forged amid the uncertain, Dreiserian world of failed dreamers and ruined financiers. The down side of America’s achievement ethic was driven home by the Danville experience. It reinforced his sense of the void and prepared him for his “transforming moment” in 1926. Yet the early failures to achieve a stable identity or even a workable role – the rising young ad man in Chicago – meant that even his conversion experience would be conflicted, as evidenced by his quixotic search for “the one, true church” in the valleys of Oregon.

This should not be read as evidence of a shallow conversion. In reality it is more accurate to see Armstrong’s continued identity diffusion as an inevitable question arising from his undifferentiated immersion into American sectarianism with its penchant for “ultra” movements – the centuries-old American quest for a pure and undefiled city on a hill. Armstrong had never achieved what Erikson described as “the accrued sense of an ever-increased identity at the conclusion of each previous crisis, a certainty now characterized by an increasing sense of identity [separate] from the family.” Rather than independence from the family, Loma encouraged the failed entrepreneur to follow Horace and Eva Armstrong out west. “Going west” was an American archetype of starting over, of forging a new identity.

It could be argued that this was not fully achieved in Armstrong’s case.

Eventually, his way of surviving the psycho-social void opened up by a mortifying sense of failure was to overcompensate and accept identification as someone special – “God’s apostle” and “the end-time Elijah.” In all of this he was trapped by his failure at Erikson’s Stage Four, the need to achieve recognition by doing well at school. “The sponge” would never go back to school. He would thus be caught in a painful double-bind after conversion. Armstrong’s aversion to formal theology stemming from his Quaker roots and his Whining Schoolboy reaction almost guaranteed his being cut off from the doctrinal centering that he needed to win his life-long battle with identity diffusion. After the death of Loma, his helpful anima figure, what Fowler calls “the experience of being central” would dominate. This tendency towards latent narcissism (“God’s apostle”/”the end-time Elijah”) began to dominate in the 1970s. Yet the process could be glimpsed as early as the 1930s. One of Armstrong’s successors, Joseph Tkach, documents just this process at work from an event related by an early Armstrong acquaintance, Elder John Kiesz of the Church of God (Seventh Day):

The men were sharing an office [in Eugene, Oregon], and John Kiesz came in one day to find Mr. Armstrong pounding away on the typewriter. “Herbert, what are you doing?” Mr. Kiesz asked. “John,” Mr. Armstrong replied, “God has revealed this incredible new truth to me.” As John Kiesz peered over Mr. Armstrong’s shoulder and looked at the article being typed, he recognized it. “Herbert,” he said, “this appeared in The Bible Advocate [the Church of God (Seventh Day) magazine] about three months ago.” “Yes, that’s how God revealed it to me,” Mr. Armstrong enthusiastically replied. 40

This is part of identity diffusion, the inability to draw firm boundaries between the Self and the Other. In a footnoted reference, Tkach also records an important written letter from Herbert Armstrong to a superior dating from the late 1920s. Sharing with A.N. Dugger his theological doubts about the weekly Sabbath as an absolute command, Armstrong wrote: “Sooner or later this question will be cleared up for me. The real truth will be revealed to me, whichever it is. I have prayed earnestly for it, and it is God’s promise that a prayer of that kind is going to be answered. Perhaps you can be a means of helping me get it cleared up.”

Megalomania, Winston Churchill once quipped, is the most pleasant form of insanity and we note more than a tinge of it in many of the writings of Herbert Armstrong. “The real truth will be revealed to me” can be seen – indeed, has been seen – by most Armstrong critics as egocentricity in the extreme. It is perhaps more accurate, however, to view these candid confessions in psychoanalytic terms, as major secondary repressions invoked to protect the ego against threats to its sense of comfort and reality. Few of Armstrong’s followers could have contemplated him being so ambivalent about the Saturday Sabbath as mentioned above. How explain this dichotomy? Was it deceit and double-dealing? Not primarily. It more fits the pattern of imbibing an “ultra” theology that could easily lead to feelings of grandiosity imposed upon an insecure sense of personal identity. The flip side of this, of course, is stifling self-doubt and depression and questioning the whole order of one’s life. In Alice Miller’s words: “Grandiosity is the defence against depression and depression is the defence against the real pain over the loss of the self.” 41

Herbert and Loma, by near unanimous testimony, had become one flesh. They had written an amazing success story for a small sabbatarian sect in tension with the mainstream. With Loma dead in 1967 and the WCG whiplashed by almost constant crisis in the 1970s, Herbert Armstrong regressed to age 16 belief – he was a special person destined to accomplish great things in life. How else could anyone explain his remarkable success? Aging, rapidly turning blind, suspicious of the loyalty of those closest to him, he more easily fell prey to the idea that perhaps indeed he was the one foretold by Scripture – the prophesied Elijah destined to restore the Law of God before the dramatic intervention of Jesus Christ. This self-concept was part of the Armstrong fascination – and rejection. The Spirit, however, blows where it will. The tributes to him as a spiritual leader of great influence and integrity are numerous. One had only to be around Herbert Armstrong a short time to note that there was indeed a spiritual force that flowed from him. A typical WCG member meeting him for the first time in 1968, for example, such as the writer of this paper, would notice his shortness of stature – he stood 5’6” tall – and his snow-white hair. Then the cherubic, all-embracing smile would light his face, the bright blue eyes would beam, and the deep, authoritative bass voice would bid you welcome as he enthusiastically pumped your hand. These traits, the flip side of his towering temper tantrums, embodied exocentricity to an unusual degree. 42

There is much empirical evidence which suggests that, in spite of a narrowed base of doctrinal understandings, personal identity diffusion and narcissistic regression to counteract depressive tendencies, Herbert Armstrong’s conversion in 1926 was genuine. Only by the grace of God could he live out his life’s path, a reality he often candidly and publicly expressed. It was indeed an example of James Loder’s Transformational Dynamic, the process by which the Holy Spirit comes to work very dramatically with the human spirit. Loder’s sequence in this transformation can be outlined thus:

1. Basic Conflict

2. Scanning for Answers

3. Insight

4. Release of Energy

5. Proving Out the New Revelation

These steps are linked by Loder to the “Eureka! Moment” in science or physics, a sequence activated by the convictional knowing that Loder describes as the companion of transformation:

Here again the intense engagement with a conflict over a period of time triggers the psychic search for patterns and prototypes. This is followed by bisociative connections [the creative convergence of two incompatible frames of reference] that come by surprise as insights or “revelation”…which favor the intensely engaged and informed mind. This is followed by a sense of relief and release, the “Eureka!” response, and then the proving out for both the coherence of the proof with the terms of the problem and correspondence with the concerned public. 42

The Herbert Armstrong of 1926, as he himself candidly admits, had been pushed to the limits of the human spirit apart from God. Humiliated by business reverses and forced to rely on his in-laws for support he was challenged to white-hot anger by his wife’s embrace of Saturday Sabbatarianism. For six months at the Portland Public Library and elsewhere he “scanned” the information available to him to make sense of this latest challenge. Finally, he came to accept the truth of what he thought the Bible had told him. He gave his life to Christ, was baptized by a Baptist minister and in a short period of time was “proving out” these new insights by written pamphlets, sermons, and finally on the public airways.

In The Transforming Moment, Loder wrote about “an accumulated sense of void and inherent meaninglessness that climaxes usually in the middle years.” Armstrong was 34 at the time of his conversion. The ego, at this time, according to Loder, “is exposed as unable and insufficient in the face of death to center the personality.” The ego is finally recognized as “incapable of embracing its own negation.” 43 Armstrong put it very well and succinctly: “I’m nothing but a burned out hunk of junk.” He never forgot this transforming moment. He would constantly elaborate and rework it in his own homey descriptions of the Self as an Imperial Self that included not only the person but their family, their opinions, their way of looking at the world. As Armstrong correctly summarized, all these attachments to Self must come under the waters of baptism and the blood of Christ.

In a conversation with a WCG official in the 1980s, Armstrong commented on one minister who had left WCG: “He was only convinced by my logic; he never really gave his life to Christ.” Herbert Armstrong knew Jesus as personal Savior. He instructed WCG ministers to baptize new converts “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” and only after they had answered the crucial question: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”

One can explain the WCG’s astonishing affect on hundreds and thousands around the world in two ways. First, the usually unrecognized ability, sacrifice and devotion of the men and women around Herbert Armstrong (Appendix Three). These dedicated men and women from all walks of life and from every inhabited continent were powerfully attracted to his faith story of “unconditional surrender” to God, a sincerity amplified by his stentorian radio voice. Second, the last half of the 20th century was fertile soil for Armstrong’s uncompromising Biblicism and exocentricity. He began his ministry in post-Scopes Trial America, an event that had sent American evangelicals reeling. Armstrong’s convictional knowing appealed to that “deep reservoir of popular piety in mainstream Protestant denominations,” a piety that needed bolstering as the apocalyptic 20th century continued to unfold. 44 His two basic booklets, “Does God Exist?” and “The Proof the Bible” made him part of a media insurgency of the airwaves against the forces of secularism and anomie seeming to infest American life. In all of this, appreciation was rare and usually came as a left-handed compliment for Herbert Armstrong was as paradigmatic a case of Niebuhr’s “Christ against Culture” as was George Fox, the fiery founder of the Quakers. To paraphrase William Manchester, great sectarian leaders seem to need enemies as much as they need friends. Ironically, it took Esquire magazine to summarize the dynamic exocentricity of Herbert Armstrong’s ministry in an article from the December, 1976 issue: “His pulpit was the airwaves, and whatever strength [his] ministry had came from the sincerity of his belief, a sincerity few people have doubted. Conviction, no matter its truth or morality, charges a human voice with an energy fascinating to us all. No doubt it did his.”

Conviction is contagious, also a factor that must be admitted in explaining Herbert Armstrong’s success.

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ENDNOTES

Presented To: Dr. James Loder
For: CN 531 Faith and Human Development
Fuller Theological Seminary
Copyright © 2001, 2004, Neil Earle