Ethical Record The Proceedings of the Conway Hall Ethical Society Vol. 118 No. 6 £1.50 July 2013 BARBARA SMOKER’S 90th BIRTHDAY PARTY Photo: Andrew Philippou Sunday , 2 June 2013, being Barbara Smoker’ s 90th birthday, and in recognition of her 62 years active membership (during which time she had been elected to all its major posts) of the Ethical Society , it s GC offered to fund a celebration for her in Conway Hall ’s main hall. As a result, a splendid buffet luncheon was prepared by members of the Society and by members of the Shaw Society (which she had joined even earlier – in Shaw’ s own lifetime ). Among the 158 guests there were three former chairmen of SPES — four if we include Barbara herself. Pasted along one wall were two-dozen photographs (selected from our archives by our librarian and enlarged ) of Barbara, with various notables including Michael Foot, Hermann Bondi and Harold Blackham. The display of birthday cards, standing side by side, reached right across the stage, wh ile long strands of glittery letter Bs hung down from the balcony. When Barbara made the first incision in the big iced cake, everyone sang “Happy Birthday”. (see page 17) WHEN RELIGIONS FALL APART - THE FRAGMENTATION OF A SECT David V Barrett 3 SURVIVING CREATIONIST SCHOOLS Jonny Scaramanga 7 THE RISE OF THE LAPTOP LIZARDS: THE NIGHTINGALE COLLABORATION Alan Hennessy 10 ONE LAW FOR ALL – CAMPAIGNING AGAINST SHARIA AND RELIGIOUS LAWS Anne Marie Waters 15 TRIBUTES AT BARBARA SMOKER’S 90TH BIRTHDAY PARTY 17 FORTHCOMING EVENTS 24 CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.conwayhall.org.uk G.C. Chairman: Chris Bratcher G.C. Vice-chairman: Giles Enders Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Lamnica Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Hon. Archivist Carl Harrison carl @ethicalsoc.org.uk Programme Co-ordinator: Sid Rodrigues Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Brian Biagioni, Sean Foley, Tony Fraser, Rogerio Retuerma Maintena nce: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected] New Members We welcome the following new members to the Society: Geoffrey Cantor, London, N4; Elaine Giedrys-Leeper, London, SE21; John Hunt, Isleworth; Helen Keenan, London, SW16; Sean Kennedy, London, N1 0NT; Clair Lester, Watford; Robert Mould, Maidenhead; Terri Murray, London. NW5, Andreea Pirvu, London SE16; John Webb, Southampton; Tom Weston, London, SE26. CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Library and Archives. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record , is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65) YOU CAN NOW RECEIVE ETHICAL RECORD ONLINE Every new issue of the Society’s journal will be added to the members’ area of the Conway Hall website in PDF format - easily viewable by PC, laptop or tablet reader. We are also uploading back issues! Consider opting out of receiving hard copies of Ethical Record . Email now to opt out and you will receive an email notification every time a new version of Ethical Record is uploaded. Jim Walsh, CEO 2 Ethical Record, July 2013 WHEN RELIGIONS FALL APART - THE FRAGMENTATION OF A SECT David V Barrett Lecture to the Ethical Society, 12 May 2013 In the mid-1930s an unsuccessful American advertising executive, Herbert W Armstrong, founded a millenarian, Sabbatarian Christian sect with a heterodox theology, the Radio Church of God, renamed the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) in 1968. Religions rarely spring out of nowhere. WCG’s teachings were drawn largely from the Church of God, Seventh Day, which had common roots with the Seventh-day Adventist Church which was founded in 1860 in the wake of the ‘Great Disappointment’ of 1844 when the expected Second Coming [Of Jesus Christ {Ed.}] didn’t occur. Armstrong was God’s Prophet First and foremost was obedience to God, and this included obeying the fourth Commandment, to worship on the seventh day, the Sabbath, Saturday, not on the first day of the week as most Christians do. It was millenarian, expecting the imminent return of Jesus. It was also British-Israelite, believing that the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel ended up in Britain, that the British people (and by extension the Americans) are the physical as well as the spiritual descendants of Israel, and that all biblical prophecy about Israel refers to Britain and America today. Many of its other beliefs were different from mainstream Christianity; for example, it taught that the Trinity was a false doctrine. Armstrong was God’s appointed Prophet, his Apostle to the 20th century, restoring the true teachings of Christianity after nearly 2,000 years. For the members, these teachings and the practical impact of them on their lives – such as being unable to work on Saturdays, and strict adherence to the Hebrew rules on ‘unclean’ foods like pork and shellfish – were part of their social construction of reality, the meaningful framework of their lives. Over the next half century, despite a number of setbacks and scandals, and criticisms and attacks from former members and anti-cultists amongst others, Armstrong’s Church grew to around 100,000 baptised members, with a world circulation of over six million for its flagship monthly magazine Plain Truth . In January 1986 Armstrong died in his 94th year. And then everything changed. Armstrong’s successor Joseph W Tkach gradually withdrew all Armstrong’s books and booklets and started changing the Church’s doctrines. In a Church in which strict top-down authority was a fundamental tenet of belief, Tkach’s doctrinal changes set up a conflict in members: how could they continue to accept the authority of the leadership of the one true Church which God had caused Armstrong to found and had called them to join, now that it had rejected all the truths which the man they believed was God’s Apostle had taught them for half a century? Resolving the Tension These conflicting demands – the authority of the leadership and the authority of Armstrong’s teachings – were cognitively dissonant elements; both were vitally Ethical Record, July 2013 3 important to the members, but how could the tension between them be resolved? One minister found the solution. Gerald Flurry left the Worldwide Church of God in 1989 to found the Philadelphia Church of God, writing, “We are not rebelling – we are taking a stand against those who are!” Other ministers and members joined him. Three or four years later the longest-serving senior evangelist in WCG, Roderick Meredith, left to set up the Global Church of God. The last major group, the United Church of God, left following Joseph W Tkach’s Christmas Eve sermon in 1994 in which he detailed all the changes in doctrine, including embracing trinitarianism, and announced that Worldwide was now an Evangelical Church. Hundreds of ministers and tens of thousands of members of WCG who refused to ‘convert’ to conventional Christianity and wanted to hold fast to the beliefs which were central to their lives, left WCG to join these new Churches. Although doctrinally very similar to an outsider’s gaze, they formed a spectrum from hardline (Philadelphia COG) to comparatively liberal (United COG). Over the coming years these three Churches, and others which had split away from WCG, themselves split, forming many new small Churches, which then continued to fragment; by 2009 when I completed my doctoral study the WCG offshoots were estimated to number around 400. My study on the Worldwide Church of God and its offshoots told this story in some detail: the origins, history and doctrines of the Church, its controversies and its troubled decade of the 1970s when Herbert W Armstrong threw out his own son Garner Ted Armstrong for being too liberal (and for not keeping his trousers buttoned); then I described the revolutionary doctrinal changes after Armstrong’s death, and detailed the variety of the schismatic Churches that upheld what they believed was the Truth against, from their viewpoint, the heretical teachings of WCG’s new leaders. 4 Ethical Record, July 2013 The Emic and the Etic Approaches My research was sociological, but also strongly influenced by the phenomenological approach to religious studies promoted by the late Prof Ninian Smart of Lancaster University. He called this ‘informed empathy’ – a combination of epoché (suspension of judgement or belief) and empathy. This involves listening to what believers say about their own beliefs and practices while practising methodological agnosticism, i.e. not judging the spiritual truth of these beliefs. It means treating other people’s worldviews with respect. Whether we are sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers etc, it’s essential that we study people, individually and collectively, as they are , whatever we ourselves might think of their beliefs.