According to the church’s booklet 1975 in Prophecy, the world would end in 1975. A German-dominated Europe would:
. . . blast our [US] cities and industrial centers with hydrogen bombs . . . and so now God is about to punish! . . . It’s later than you think! You have been warned! . . . and I say to you on authority of God Almighty that it is absolutely sure!
The words were accompanied by illustrations that resembled horror movies or science fiction: a barren landscape with a hand sticking up from the ground; people fleeing a city where a hydrogen bomb flamed against the backdrop of the buildings; skeletal figures whose eyes popped out of their sockets; and frightened faces cowering against giant hailstones crashing from the skies.
I later learned that many of the horrors the church described were based on the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. The church itself was fashioned with a Nazi-like structure. The administrative offices in Pasadena, California, were referred to as “Headquarters,” and its hierarchy paralleled that of the military. Herbert Armstrong, the “apostle,” was akin to a general; and the counterparts to the church’s evangelists, preaching elders, local regional elders, local church elders, deacons, and members were colonels, captains, first and second lieutenants, sergeants, and privates.
This structure even extended to families. At one point, the church required children to address their parents as “Sir” and “Ma’am,” not Mom and Dad. Five-year-old children sharply and obediently said, “Yes, sir! No, ma’am!” as if they were speaking to a sergeant in boot camp. And just like in the military, you didn’t dare question authority. “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,” said the ministers, quoting the biblical verse. God who loved us was also a totalitarian dictator.
My father tried to maintain order in our chaotic household by insisting that we say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am.” My mother took to calling my father “sir” as well, and we all knew that it was a taunt of sorts, much the same as the way she snuck bits of beef tongue into the potato hash without my tongue-hating father knowing it.
As terrible as the horrors of the Great Tribulation, Jesus’s Kingdom was a fat, juicy, delicious carrot dangled in front of us. Once the Tribulation was over, as described in Matthew 24, “Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be,” then Satan would be bound for 1,000 years, unable to make mischief in the world, while Jesus ruled His Kingdom.
I prayed fervently that I would manage to get into the Kingdom. I prayed to have a converted mind, prayed for God’s Holy Spirit. I desperately feared being left behind when Jesus returned. Even though I went to church every week, even though I knelt each night at my bed and prayed, even though I tried not to be rebellious, there was no guarantee that I would get into the Kingdom.
The Kingdom, God’s harvest of souls, was exemplified in the annual harvest holiday of the Hebrew Bible, the Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot. It represented the Second Resurrection, the time when those who had died without knowing the Truth would have a chance to be saved. I did not know then or for a very long time that our holidays were Jewish holidays, and that modern-day Jews continued to celebrate them. I assumed God had created them just for the church.
My parents took us out of school to celebrate the eight-day holiday of Sukkot. My mother woke up her ten kids before dawn and bundled us into the car to drive to one of the church’s Feast sites. When we pulled onto the empty road, the stars were not yet absorbed into the still-gray sky, and I imagined that only God and my family were awake.
One year we drove to the church’s Feast site in Texas, another to Georgia, and once to the Poconos, but mostly we went closer to home, to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, staying at church-arranged hotel rentals and cabins. Just as the Israelites had not lived in permanent homes during those forty years in the desert after they escaped slavery in Egypt, we’d left our physical homes behind to remind us that they were temporal, but God’s Kingdom was forever.
In what almost amounted to a caravan, church members from around the country flooded the Feast sites with our beat-up cars. Every morning, clad in our Sabbath dresses and suits, we left our motel and drove off to attend services in the immense, aluminum-sided, unheated “tabernacle building,” where we sat from oldest to youngest on the typical hard, metal folding chairs.
Throughout the eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles, we heard sermons and sermonettes, morning and afternoon, from ministers and preaching elders and evangelists from around the country. At the top of the page of our notebooks we wrote the dates—October 8, 1968; October 17, 1970; October 15, 1973—and the titles of the sermons: “The Coming Armageddon,” or “The Plan of God,” and the name of the minister, preaching elder, or evangelist such as Mr. Waterhouse, whose legendary rambling, four-hour sermons filled me with dread.
Mr. Waterhouse had a genial southern accent, made self-deprecating jokes about his golf game, but leapt from topic to topic in a way that was difficult to follow. At the end of services, the various deacons passed around an offering basket. Down each aisle it went, and we all put in our money, some sealing it in envelopes, others laying the bills in a pile. We were incredibly proud when they tallied the money and told us the next day that we had exceeded last year’s offering.
It would be over thirty years until I discovered what Mr. Armstrong was doing with that money. The tithe that was intended to go to the needy instead went to his Rolls Royce cars, his private airplane, Swiss bank accounts, gold mines in Africa, extensive real estate, gold, silver, and much, much more.
At that time, though, it did not seem wrong to me that Mr. Armstrong was running around the world on his private jet while church members subsisted on food stamps and welfare. My own family replaced broken windows with squares of cardboard, just so we could continue to send our tithes to the church.
During those eight days of Sukkot, in the company only of other church members, I felt like I was one of the Israelites who’d left Egypt: special. To imagine that I was like the biblical Hebrews, part of a select group that God Himself had chosen, was intoxicating.
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In 1969, when I was eight years old, in preparation for the world ending, my parents sold our big house on Main Street in Huntingburg. My older siblings were in high school and had friends. The last thing they wanted was to move out to a farmhouse in the boonies of Jasper. I was starting third grade and had no clear idea how my life would change, nor did I know why we were moving. What I did know was that worldly goods were unnecessary because Jesus was soon to arrive.
Our new home was a dilapidated two-story farmhouse. Cornfields flanked the house, and behind us were woods where we played in the creek. On summer afternoons, Abby, Liz, John, Sarah, and I packed peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches on whole-wheat bread and trudged down the path, past the mulberry tree, across the swampy bottom, and into the woods, where we stayed for the day. We dug in the smelly sand alongside the creek, and made dungeons and castles and moats, placing sticks in the castles for flags and flat pieces of bark in the sides for windows. If the water was warm enough, we ran through the shallow creek, splashing and yelling and screaming, “Clear the wa-aay!”
My older brothers liked to hunt and trap, and set up traps for mink and muskrat, though the occasional raccoon was caught in them as well. Ed ignored when deer season began and ended and hunted as he wished. He even liked to tease the younger siblings by chasing us around with the skinned carcasses. The game warden was tipped off, came to the house, and found the carcasses of deer that had been hunted out of season. Ed spent several weekends in jail as a result. He was definitely the one my parents would eat.
In
