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Some people claim to have a spiritual authority that permits them to teach of spiritual matters to others. I think that some people do indeed have this authority, by virtue of their experience and education in such matters and the authenticity of their character, while others are charlatans. People in general are spiritually invested, with only 16% of the global population religiously unaffiliated1 and an unknown percentage of that subset invested spiritually without being affiliated with a religion. Our beliefs shape our actions and even our identities (as I described in “Belief and Identity”), and religious leaders often are not subject to institutions of accountability other than God (which would be sufficient if they always claimed that authority legitimately). That means that those who successfully claim authority in religious and spiritual matters can obtain power over great swaths of humanity. It is unrealistic to assume that the unscrupulous would ignore such an opportunity and leave the matter only to the authentically qualified, so, both those who can legitimately claim such authority and those who cannot will vie for that authority and the power it conveys.
It’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to seek for some more experienced voice regarding spiritual matters, or regarding any matter. We learn from those who have gone before us, and with good reason. None of us would have survived into adulthood if we didn’t learn from the more experienced to some degree. But just as those who end up in the role of “parent” do not always have a legitimate claim to that title — the biology may be there , or not, but either way there are those who have that title who do not live up to the responsibilities it entails — religious leaders don’t always have our best interests in mind. It is certainly possible to be led astray by those who do not seek the furtherment of ourselves but rather only their own.
I’ve mentioned before that my Buddhist lineage is tied, in part, to the Shambhala tradition of Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan refugee who studied at Oxford and later founded a secular American Buddhist tradition that he called Shambhala Buddhism, which combined Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and the Western philosophical tradition. He was a brilliant teacher and, by all accounts, a rabid drunk and womanizer who often had sexual relationships with his students.
It doesn’t seem to necessarily be one or the other with regard to spiritual teachers, in terms of whether they can claim any legitimate spiritual authority or whether they’re appropriating that power to their own ends. One of my Zen teachers described Trungpa by saying that “the purest waters of the dharma can flow from the rustiest pipe, and Chögyam Trungpa was a very rusty pipe.” I’m not sure that “rusty pipe” quite covers it, because, as his successor, Trungpa appointed Ösel Tendzin, who, for three years, maintained sexual relationships with his students without informing them that he had contracted HIV. And Trungpa’s son, Sakyong Mipham, who had taken over leadership of Shambhala International, was forced to resign after claims of sexual misconduct were substantiated by a third party investigation2. And yet, from Trungpa’s lineage we have teachers such as Pema Chödrön, a wise and kind person, I believe, who has been a source of endless inspiration for me and many others. I have three books by Trungpa himself in my library, and one by Sakyong Mipham, all pointedly insightful and revelatory and at times manifestly Satanic in terms of setting a path towards forging religion for oneself. But that isn’t sufficient to let them off the hook.
I’m not the first to approach this territory. John Oliver did a segment on his show about abuses by megachurch televangelists who used the prosperity doctrine to milk the wealth of the poor. Certainly enough of them have been involved in sexual scandals as well, in defiance of their vows and avowals of “family values.” There is, for example, the whole Catholic Church to consider, the religion so big it has its own sovereign city-state, apparently just big enough to remain consistently unaccountable for the buggery of thousands of children.
One of the underlying issues here is that it’s much easier to claim spiritual authority than it is to claim authority in more earthly matters, and at the same time, spiritual authority has a much greater potential effect on our beliefs and actions, than, for example, authority in physics. It’s easy enough to test and verify whether someone is an authority in matters of physics, and while knowledge in that area can be very useful, as well as very interesting, knowing the gravitational constant is not likely to change our lives in a dramatic way or cause us to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do. But historically, there have been many people who claim some spiritual authority — a secret knowledge or a directive from God, perhaps — which cannot be so easily verified and likely cannot be verified at all, and who have used that authority to convince others to die for a cause, for example. We see this with Islamic religious leaders who radicalize the spiritually vulnerable and then send them out to martyr themselves in deadly explosions.
This list of spiritual teachers who have abused their positions is extensive. In addition to big names like Osho and David Koresh, there are countless leaders in smaller positions, such as priests of small parishes, who are using the inherent authority of their positions to control or exploit people, or to further their own agendas. But by none of this do I mean to imply that spiritual teachers aren’t potentially very valuable sources of insight and growth. I learned a great deal under the two Zen teachers under which I studied, and I don’t think that either of them had any intention of using their positions for their own gain or the exploitation of others. Neither of them asked me to take anything that they said on faith, but rather insisted that I discover the truth of what they were saying for myself. I think that that is a key indicator of the value of a potential teacher, spiritual or otherwise: when we allow ourselves to take things on faith — and by faith I mean here not what Kierkegaard and Tillich talked about but rather what Tillich called idolatrous faith: belief in things for which there is a low degree of evidence — we lose two things. First, assuming that the thing we’re being asked to believe is actually true, we miss out on a deeper understanding of the matter based on reason and evidence; and second, we lose the ability to discern the true from the false in general. If faith is accepted as a justification for any particular thing, then it works just as well as a justification for anything at all. If one were to have reasons for having faith in one thing and reasons for not having faith in another thing, then both things would cease to be matters of faith at all, by the definition we’ve established for the word “faith.”
Trungpa himself wrote on the subject of gurus and spiritual teachers in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973). This is a book that I hold in generally very high regard — it’s a pointed look at the nature of personal spirituality that has served as a major inspiration for my own spiritual work — but this chapter, examined in the context of Trungpa’s life, is quite problematic. He has some good advice on the subject: a guru should be less a master than what Trungpa calls a “spiritual friend” with whom there can be an equal meeting of minds. But he also describes stories drawn from the historical lineage of Tibetan Buddhism in which teachers were quite abusive towards their students, and indicates that this is all part of the process. Though he is ostensibly being metaphorical, he describes the relationship with one’s guru as a love affair and speaks of surrendering to them and being spiritually naked before them. “The guru is the only person in the world who exists, alive and vibrant,” Trungpa writes of one stage of the teacher-student relationship. “The very meaning of your life depends on him. If you die, you die for him. If you live, you survive for him and are insignificant.”
In 1975, at a meditation retreat, Trungpa disrobed and ordered everyone else to do the same. When one couple refused, he had his guards — and a religious leader with a militia is already a huge red flag — strip them by force. Given these events, Trungpa’s words take on an especially ominous character.
I remember when I was 12, watching the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas play out on television. The Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination, which emphasizes the immanent second-coming of Christ, and the Branch Davidians were even more apocalyptic, predicting the end times in the very near future. At the time, the sect resided in a compound in Waco under the control of Vernon Howell, who called himself David Koresh after King David and the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great (“Koresh” being Hebrew for “Cyrus”). He had proclaimed himself a kind of religious prophet and taken several of the compound’s women, some as young as twelve, as “wives,” claiming that he had been charged by God to create a new lineage of rulers. Along with the possible illegal stockpiling of weapons, this led to an investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and a subsequent attempt by that agency to serve a search warrant on the compound, which initiated a standoff that lasted for 51 days and resulted in the destruction of the compound and the deaths of 4 ATF agents and 76 Branch Davidians. Fortunately, the children living in the compound had been released early on in the siege.
The way that the siege was handled by the ATF was problematic; given the Branch Davidians’ apocalyptic views, the attack was seen as a confirmation of their beliefs, and this led to a rapid escalation of the conflict. But that’s a subject for another time. More relevant to the topic at hand is David Koresh himself, and those like him, who transcend merely being unscrupulous spiritual teachers and become something even more dangerous. In common parlance we refer to such personalities as “cult leaders,” but this term and the word “cult” itself are problematic and imprecise. I prefer the more precise term “charismatic leaders of new religious movements.” “New religious movement” is a more precise and descriptive and less loaded term than “cult,” and a charismatic leader is one whose leadership is predicated on the force of their personality rather than on physical force, legal authority, or merit. There have been many such charismatic leaders in recent history, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo, and Jim Jones of the People’s Temple being a few particularly notable examples.
I don’t accept charisma as a valid source of authority, but regardless, it’s important to keep in mind that not all charismatic leaders are as problematic as Koresh. I recently did a story on Joel Osteen and his podcast, and I think he qualifies as a charismatic leader as well, though a mostly innocuous one, relatively speaking. So there’s a spectrum of charismatic leadership at work here.
Steven Hassan, author of Combating Mind Control (1988) and founding director of the Freedom of Mind Research Center, has created a system of metrics that he calls the BITE model in order to evaluate the activities of charismatic religious leaders and new religious movements in general. BITE stands for “Behavior control,” “Information control,” “Thought control,” and “Emotional control,” and the elaboration of these four practices “describe the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people3.” Those religious leaders who practice this level of control over their disciples are rare but nevertheless capable of causing destruction on a massive scale. The mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978, for example, resulted in 918 deaths. And while he doesn’t fit the traditional model of the charismatic religious leader, Osama bin Laden was nevertheless a religious leader who inspired and directed the September 11th attacks on the United States that killed thousands and led to two incredibly destructive wars. The BITE model is useful not only for evaluating religion, but for identifying charismatic demagogues in other aspects of society as well. Here’s a very strong and obvious hint: apply the BITE model to your favorite political leaders and see what turns up.
Few claim any spiritual authority in Satanism, and that’s probably just as well given our religion’s inherent anti-authoritarian bent. Looking back to my own spiritual education prior to my donning of the Petrine Cross, neither of my Zen teachers were at all abusive or enigmatic. Both had said to me, at different times, that their teachings amounted to nothing more than “selling water by the river.” They were consistently kind and humble and never asked anything of me by way of compensation, and I never got the sense that I was somehow missing out on greater teachings by not being beaten, humiliated, or exploited. And I never saw any of their other students treated any differently. The stories of my first teacher’s own spiritual education at a Zen temple in Japan conveyed something a great deal more austere and rigorous, but never abusive or exploitative. Given this, I can’t accept the notion that any sort of brutality or exploitation would be at all necessary to spiritual learning. Those who claim otherwise are very likely abusing, or claiming unjustly, their spiritual authority.
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