I recently watched a documentary on the Heaven’s Gate cult of early 90’s infamy. The cult’s founder, Marshall Applewhite, was the son of a Presbyterian minister and was on his way to the life of clergy as well. Applewhite was charismatic, musically gifted, and a closeted homosexual. Early in his married adulthood, his first attempt at coming out to his family erupted in his face. His sense of estrangement and disconnect from reality heightened until he met a nurse, Bonnie Nettles. Nettles informed him of their “past lives” together and they bonded over a fusion of Christianity and New Age Ufology. Nettles then cut her hair short to look like Applewhite’s and while Applewhite changed his name to “Do”, Nettles changed hers to “Ti”. They began recruiting other folks who joined their vision of attaining such an elevated state of purity that they would ascend to heaven without dying. Increased uniformity followed. All members had their hair cut to look like Do. They began mirroring the speech patterns of Do. Their clothing became asexual. All the aforementioned behavior patterns are not only typical markers of cultic but serve as indicators of homocentric thinking, in which love and imitation of self pervade every external manifestation.

The story tragically ends in a mass suicide. Eventually, the followers of Do dressed themselves in “space suits” and New Balance sneakers and prepared for their ascension. Sole love of self is always fruitless. It is a non-creative force. There can be no progeny, no maturity, and no semblance of godliness. God loves other, Creator-creation, and made us to love the other as well: neighbors-enemies, husbands-wives. 

The death cult danger does not just lurk in the imaginations of societal outliers. The death cults derived from “homo-brain” lie in seed form in all of us. Christians must all be wary of the fleshy desire to give in to our own forms of “homo-brain”. The human impulse is to find “same”. We want to love a mirror. This desire is particularly easy to appease in the present-day church climate. With our church bodies no longer being established according to geographic proximity, but rather ideology, the search for a church usually stems from a desire for a good match. That match, however, is often a pseudonym for a non-othered pairing. This does not have to mean that we are seeking to be “entertained”, but rather that our theological, philosophical, ethical, or aesthetic sensibilities are most readily satisfied. While there is nothing wrong with feeling at home in a theological tradition; Wesleyan, Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed, Episcopal, Roman Catholic, etc., it gets weird when you don’t foster love outside that tradition. 

It is easy to make distinctives look like barriers to fellowship. “Well, they speak in tongues and if they're not careful they could really damage the reputation of us more reasonable Christians.” Or, “If you emphasize the responsibility of man in his response to the gospel, I’m not even sure you really even understand the gospel.” This is where the fundamentalism always feeds in on itself. It believes itself to be making a logical deduction from differences and thusly proving that anything and everything is a first order issue and thusly protecting itself from the other. This is why this sort of fundamentalism inevitably dies alone. This is the rot in the evangelical death cults. The homo-brain is so resistant to finding what is lovely in something different that it will continue to look for mirrors. We must resist the urge to make unity contingent on uniformity. 

I was reading the Orthodox Church in America’s booklet on ecumenical proceedings. Essentially, their ecumenical strategy is to make everyone Eastern Orthodox. But as sure as homosexuality will never produce children, this monochromatic ecumenism will never produce catholicity. 

Here are a few ways in which we can guard against our patterns turning in on themselves. Who do you listen to outside of your tradition? Outside of evangelicalism? Have you cultivated an honor and respect for clergy that you don’t agree with? If you love Jesus, you will love His girl. His girl is different from Him and is glorified in the distinction. As a pastor I have to be ever vigilant over my urges to shape my circles into echo chambers. I have strong temptations to hole up in my ecclesiastical ghetto. If we want life giving church bodies, we must be in communion with brethren that are not like us and embrace them as brethren. 

The theologians and pastors who have produced the deepest insights and richest treasures for me are those who are enthusiastically catholic (who pull from the broad church). They are men that love their tradition well and thusly love other traditions well, without fear of the other. Isolation from the broader body of the church is suicide. I love high church liturgy, and so, I need to allow the Spirit to shatter any homo-brain that would seek out a high-church echo chamber. I must rejoice in the evangelistic fervor of my Pentecostal brethren, in the humble piety of a saint skeptical of prayer books, the hymns of Johnny Cash, the great cloud of witnesses from every sect, tradition, and nation.

Every stream of Christendom that has given in to the Heaven’s Gate-styled homo-brain is in danger of becoming a death cult. The main line churches that fly the rainbow flags as a middle finger to orthodoxy, the fundamentalist Baptists that can’t hold a joint prayer service, the reformed ministers that sneer at emotion in worship: these are all fast tracks to extinction. This isn’t just an issue of demographic decline in these groups, but a full throttled quenching of the Spirit. These are folks who are in danger of hermetically sealing themselves off in their tribal space suits in an attempting to remain the “pure people of God”. We must pursue the other-oriented love of God. The love of other. The love of the bridegroom and the bride. Who else in your county, outside of your tradition, is marked by the Name of the Triune God? What Christians do you believe to be on the margins? Start a movement toward those people.