2021
Apr
19

What is the legacy of Ole Anthony?

DaAdmin Evangelicals, Uncategorized 1 comment

By Brian Birmingham

In an effort to let Ole Anthony explain himself here is an excerpt from a “Primetime Live” interview he did with Dianne Sawyer November 21, 1991. Here Anthony discusses with Sawyer the problems he sees inherently with TV ministries.

Ole Anthony: “The longing of a man’s heart is for community, for a sense of being able to lay down his life for something important. That can’t happen with a television tube.”

Diane Sawyer: “But there are people who come forward and say, ‘I got a miracle because of, what, because of the money I gave, because I watched, I did get a miracle.’”

Ole: “Did you ever see ‘The Wizard of Oz?’ Dorothy got her heart’s desire, the tin man received his heart’s desire, the lion received his heart’s desire, and the Tin Man received his heart’s desire, even though the Wizard was a charlatan. Why? The God of the Universe was already resident within them, he just had to be let out!”

Diane Sawyer: “So, what do you say to the person sitting at home, watching?”

Ole: “Let’s open your eyes, and look at the need around you. Give to that need instead of to some faraway evangelist that’s talking you into playing a heavenly lottery, or a heavenly slot machine.”

Diane Sawyer: “And they’ll get those miracles they want?”

Ole Anthony

Ole (interrupting): -They’ll get all the miracles that are promised. They’ll get a hundredfold blessing returned unto them.”

That was Ole Anthony some thirty years ago. Ole Anthony died last week at the age 82.

It has been said that no bad person has all bad qualities, and no good person has all good qualities.

Everybody, all of us, has a mixture of what can be seen as perhaps saintly and conversely diabolical attributes.

And so, it was with Ole Anthony, founder and elder of the Trinity Foundation, of Dallas, Texas.

Trinity Foundation is best known for its work in monitoring and exposing various “televangelist” ministries. In doing so, Trinity Foundation and Ole Anthony probably did some good.

However, former members of Trinity Foundation have also spoken and written of a “dark side” to Ole Anthony and the Trinity Foundation. Trinity Foundation has been described by some as a “cult”.

Ole Anthony also lied extensively about his background. He has claimed that he was (before founding Trinity Foundation in 1972) a broadcaster, a spy, a wealthy industrialist, a political strategist and candidate. In fact, he was none of those things.

Trinity Foundation has been described by former members as employing a number of cult-like, abusive practices. For example, notorious “hot seat” confrontational group encounter sessions, which broke down members’ personal boundaries and fostered an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Though this practice ended in the early 1990s.

Ole Anthony taught that everything in ones’ natural mind was an enemy of God, and that ones’ mind is actually the Antichrist. And according to Anthony unless one is living in community one cannot become free of one’s Antichrist nature.

If that is true, why then would anyone listen to Ole Anthony? After all, these ideas were all products of his own mind.

But Ole Anthony believed that he had discovered things, some spiritual truths, which other Christians had somehow missed for the last 2,000 years.

However, Ole Anthony was hardly an original thinker.

Many of the founders and leaders of controversial Bible-based groups, some called “cults,” believed that they too were totally unique and special.

Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS (Mormon) church taught that he was the latter-day prophet of “the restored Gospel.”

Gene Spriggs, founder of the so-called “Twelve Tribes” communities, taught that the Holy Spirit had been absent from the face of the Earth until he founded a truly authentic community.

Sun Myung Moon taught the same thing about his supposedly unique Unification church. Moon went so far as to claim to be the Second Coming of Christ.

There are so many examples of various Bible-based thinkers that taught, whether implicitly or explicitly, that they’d figured something out that nobody had every really understood before for 2,000 years.

Ole Anthony was yet another self-proclaimed latter-day prophet, and in many ways, not unlike Moon, Spriggs, and all the rest.

What then is the legacy of Ole Anthony?

Trinity Foundation served to highlight the excesses and frauds of various radio and TV preachers and their ministries. This served the public good.

But behind his good work, and largely unknown to the general public, Ole Anthony held an inordinate amount of power and control over the lives of his followers within the Trinity Foundation. He’d deny his disciples permission to marry. And he ruled through fear and intimidation. Anthony often punished those who would dare to question him or his authority.

Those who focus only on what Ole Anthony did through his well-publicized activities regarding unscrupulous evangelical ministries, may be unaware of the issues surrounding accountability concerning his own behavior, and the authoritarian way in which he ran Trinity Foundation.

For all of Ole Anthony’s preaching about accountability he himself was accountable to no one. And in many ways the personality-driven Trinity Foundation existed to support Anthony’s own pretentious posturing and narcissistic needs.

Note: Brian Birmingham is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Boston with a BA in Psychology and Sociology. He is a native of Dallas, Texas and was once a member of the Trinity Foundation community.

, , , ,
2021
Apr
13

Were minor children recruited into “Heaven’s Gate”?

DaAdmin Uncategorized Add you comment

By Brian Birmingham

On the evening of Monday, April 5, 2021 I had the opportunity of being able to interview, at length, a man called Sawyer. Sawyer is an original member of the notorious group that eventually came to be known as “Heaven’s Gate”.

Heaven’s Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite is remembered due to an Applewhite inspired mass suicide, which occurred in March of 1997. Thirty-nine members of the group, including its founder Applewhite, killed themselves in a supposed attempt to to ascend to a new state of being Applewhite called “The Next Level”.

The interview with Sawyer was over four and a half hours in length. Not much was discussed, that was not generally known to the public before. Sawyer remains a deeply committed follower, despite the group’s demise.

Sawyer

Sawyer spoke at length about how he met the group, his history with them, how he came to leave the group after eighteen years and everything in between.

But there is one thing about which Sawyer spoke, that as far as I know, has never been revealed to anyone before. That is, Sawyer describes certain minors, teenagers who he claims were knowingly allowed to camp with the group and according to him, were allowed “special contact” with their caregivers that remained outside of the group, in order to reassure those caregivers that their minor loved ones were safe.

Sawyer mentions one minor, that he says left foster care at the age of 16 to join the group. She left the group as an adult some years later.

Everyone else of legal age, other than the minor children, Sawyer says, was cut off from their families of origin, except for these minor children.

These children, who joined the group in the late 1970s were allowed to contact their families.

Sawyer also described how the group’s camps in the early years of its history, before they occupied a fixed residence, were designed to avoid detection and discourage surveillance. It seems that either from land or through aerial reconnaissance the group was effectively camouflaged to obscure recognition.

Marshall Applewhite

Sawyer said the Applewhite also ordered that guards be placed around the perimeter of the camp, so that the group could be easily alerted if anyone attempted approaching them. This would give them time to hide. Applewhite did not want an accurate count indicating the size of the group, to be successfully made.

I contacted another Heaven’s Gate survivor, Frank Lyford, to corroborate Sawyer’s account of minor children in Heaven’s Gate. Lyford neither confirmed nor denied what Sawyer had told me; Lyford did not reply to my message at all.

If what Sawyer said is true concerning the children, it certainly casts a new light on Applewhite and his followers. And it’s an even darker more sinister image of the group than ever before. It seems that recruiting and hiding kids, teenagers, was not a problem for Marshall Applewhite.

It seems that this part of the group’s dark history has never been exposed and revealed to the public before today.

The possibility that a doomsday suicide cult once recruited minor children is deeply disturbing.