Ambassador College: A Failed Experiment
As illustrated by the treatment of 1-Ws on the Big Sandy campus
By Neotherm
If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.
C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
On a winter day in the early Seventies, an extraordinary and unexpected personal transformation was inaugurated in my life. I stepped onto the Ambassador College (AC), Big Sandy campus to begin alternative service in lieu of being inducted into some branch of the U.S. military during the Viet Nam War. The Worldwide Church of God (WCG) proscribed participation in the military for its members and most men drafted were granted conscientious objectors status and classified 1-W. AC sponsored a work program for men classified as 1-W by the Draft Board.
From the first interaction I had with an AC official, something began to happen that I did not expect: I began to change. I discovered that I had a far different place in the scheme of things than I thought. It was a transformation I could never have predicted. It was not sought after, but came perforce. Some surreal process gripped my life and I began to lose my status as a member and participant and became, gradually and surely, an outsider.
I had just graduated from a Midwestern university with a technical degree. I had not been a member of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) long and all I knew of AC was the adulatory descriptions that I had heard in the local congregation and on the World Tomorrow radio broadcast. When I was accepted to work on the AC Campus, it was very exciting. In the weeks before I left for AC, I recall church members approaching me and commenting that I was going to go to the “Kingdom of God”. My own view was that I was young, educated, dedicated to God and I was falling into the kind embrace of one of God’s foremost institutions on earth. So I was expecting something quite different from what I encountered.
Amidst all the brightness and optimism in my local congregation, one dark chord sounded. An AC student from my congregation found out that I was going to Big Sandy for the 1-W program. By phone he told me that Les McCullough, the President of AC Big Sandy, did not like 1-Ws. He advised me to keep as "low a profile" as possible and never ask for anything. He said "just do your work and keep to yourself. When your little work program is over, leave." But the darkness of this statement was lost on me at the time. I had no context in which to evaluate this strange message.
When I arrived at AC, I was caught off guard. I became an outsider. I became persona non grata. The transformation took place so precipitately and forcefully there was little time to process it psychologically. But, on reflection, at the same time, I became someone who had a new vantage point. When one stands outside the pale, when one is on the other side of the boundary, when one ceases to be a part of something but is yet present, the status of being an observer is implemented. Further, another part of this metamorphosis is that though I was physically present as an observer, the same marginalization led to my being invisible within the AC community. In the parlance used at AC, I was a 1-W, a de-personalizing label. So I found myself, by some strange and unanticipated process, rendered an outsider, observing but invisible.
So I am writing some of what I observed while working on the Big Sandy campus for those two years in the early Seventies as an invisible employee. And these observations, in retrospect, have led me to understand that AC was a failed mission as defined by its own standards. I will start at the beginning, with my first encounter with an AC official, and then provide some anecdotal evidence in the middle. At the end, I will make some observations. I will keep the anecdotal middle spare because the theme established at the beginning carries, like a true thread, throughout the entire experience. If more evidences were added to this account, the middle would just become a gross and inordinate accumulation of the same kind of dreary thing over and over. And it would involve yet more people and places and events little known and best forgotten.
To begin with, as a population, 1-Ws were generally dedicated and zealous church youth. They were willing to go against the grain of society in order to abide by WCG belief concerning military service. They did so at the risk of going to prison. Some did go to prison but most were permitted to do alternative service. This set of circumstances alone exposed them to challenges most WCG members never had to deal with. Most of the 1-Ws I knew at AC had college degrees, either from Ambassador College or some secular college or university. Most of these idealistic young men felt fortunate to get a job at AC Big Sandy on the 1-W program.
So, on a mild East Texas winter day, I drove out to the neatly and rigorously maintained AC campus to meet with the AC official who had hired me and with whom I had communicated by letter. I had no reason to expect that this meeting would be anything but pleasant. This was my first contact ever with someone at Ambassador College. It was, after all, The Kingdom of God, as lay members had told me. I probably spent 20 minutes with the official, a session that was marked with anger, belligerence and contempt on his part throughout. I found the anger inexplicable and surprising. I seemed to have committed some offense but I didn’t know what it was. During this session he informed me:
1) I was barely accepted into the 1-W program at AC because Les McCullough did not like my personal appearance.
2) If I dated an AC girl, I would be fired with prejudice and would go to prison. (Emphasized several times with detailed instruction about what I was supposed to do if I "got in trouble" with an AC girl.)
3) I could date AC graduates but he could not understand why an AC graduate would want to date someone like me.
4) He told me that there was nothing at AC for me but hard, back breaking work.
5) Overall he treated me like I was some kind of criminal – some base and vile person.
This surprising session, of unpleasant tenor, was conducted by someone I had never met before and who did not know me. And my transformation into an outsider had started abruptly, a violent sea change.
The next day, my first day on the job, I was instructed to set up chairs for an assembly in the Imperial Gym basketball court. A blonde, skinny teenager was in the gym shooting baskets and became very angry when my work interfered with his solitary play. He approached me with an angry face and said: “You are not an AC student and I don’t have to do anything you tell me.” At that point, I had said nothing to him. I just patiently tried to work around his activity. As I continued to try to set up the chairs, this teenager, an Imperial Student, would dribble by and pretend to throw the ball into my face as I carried a couple of folding chairs in each hand, unable to protect my face but needing to get the job done quickly. Ironically, this was the son of the official who delivered the first day’s introduction to me. (I found out later that it was not unusual for some Imperial students to flex their nascent authoritarian muscles by trying to order 1-Ws around. They had to cut their teeth somewhere. In one case, the daughter of one of the prominent Big Sandy families brusquely ordered me to move a large and heavy cabinet containing band equipment so that there would be more room for a student party. Only by my appeal to regular AC staff was this demanding request avoided.)
Fast forward a few months. A minister flies into the AC Big Sandy Airport with two daughters who are AC students. I was nearby cleaning the hanger floor and the minister approaches me and says he must go to a meeting and he asks me to take his daughters to their dorms. I am expected to get the luggage out of the minister’s fleet car and put it in my car. No help is offered by the minister or his daughters. That is servants work after all. The daughters are aloof, arrogant and rebuff any attempts at simple conversation on the ride over. When I arrive at the dorm of one of the girls she gets out of the car and silently walks in, head held high. I dutifully get her luggage out of the car and carry it up to the dorm after her like a porter. The girl never says thank you or acknowledges my presence. I set the suitcase down and leave. I do not mind helping someone. I do mind being treated like chattel. (She is now the wife of one of the current regional directors in the WCG and my last contact with her (1993) indicated that had not changed.)
An example of systematic depersonalization and marginalization: Another 1-W and I were sent to an evangelist’s house on Faculty Row to do some cleaning. We were given work instructions by the evangelist’s wife. While this was happening, one of the evangelist’s daughters and her teenaged girl friends, also from Faculty Row, came into the kitchen and began preparing brunch. They were all in filmy sleep wear. Body contours and more were unavoidably visible but they did not acknowledge us or display any modesty. The mother showed no discomfort with this situation. After all, we were not really persons, just robotic, asexual servants.
Again, some 1-Ws walk into a restaurant in Longview after a Holy Day. There are some AC students already there. They see the 1-Ws and point and laugh at them in public. What must the people in the restaurant have concluded about AC students? They were “a light” to the surrounding community, or so it was preached.
In another case, an AC coed becomes engaged to a former 1-W. When one of the “leading men” in the senior class (now a prominent United Church of God (UCG) minister) hears of it, he displays open disgust, witnessed by several of us. She continues to be a student but she is dropped from student mailing lists and ostracized.
I was working in the Redwood Building and it was about 11:00 PM. There was a student in a classroom with a girl and they were working on an assignment. He had written some notes on the chalkboard. Buck Hammer, Head of Buildings and Grounds, gave us strict instructions to eject all students by 11:00 PM. So I asked him and the girl to leave. He refused and went into an angry rant about how I was a 1-W and could not get into AC and that I was envious of the students and that was the only reason why I was kicking him and the girl out. I don’t remember ever exchanging more than a few words with this student before this event. Then he went back to his chalkboard and continued his work. I had to persist to get him to leave. I reported this to a regular staff member and the next day the student approached me and gave me an insincere and grudging apology. Thereafter, he referred to me by a name that was a derivative of the term Neanderthal Man. This name calling was not done in a comic way but in a contemptuous way.
I once asked a student (now a minister in the WCG) if he knew what a 1-W was. Surprisingly, the student had no idea that being a 1-W had to do with standing up for your religious convictions in opposition to military service. The student thought that the 1-W program was a government sponsored program for people who were unfit and incompetent and elsewhere unemployable. He reacted with great surprise when I told him what a 1-W actually was and why I was working at AC. How many other students thought that the 1-W program was a social rehabilitation program? What does this say about how the 1-W program was presented to them? What does this say about their level of curiosity, their “outgoing concern” about other people?
During the Feast of Tabernacles, the kitchen in the Big Sandy Field House is frenetic. A 1-W is sent back to mop the floor. He mops it but it is walked on by kitchen personnel while it is still wet, leaving dirty water everywhere to dry to a film. There is no time to let the floor dry properly. His boss walks into the kitchen and without inquiring into the circumstances, decides to fire the 1-W. This very likely will result in the 1-W going to prison. (Typically, Draft Boards take such firings as an indication of insincerity of belief. The threat of prison was a principle means of oppressing the men in the 1-W program at AC.) The boss knows the cruel outcome but it is only through the earnest entreaty of a regular employee that the 1-W is spared. I witnessed this. This during that joyful time called the Feast of Tabernacles when all are supposed to be thinking about the “Wonderful World Tomorrow”, a time of the flourishing of love.
A young man, a friend of mine, who had been a 1-W, became somewhat disaffected with the WCG after leaving the program. He was killed in an automobile accident shortly after finishing the 1-W program. Some people from his church area who knew his parents well brought him up in a discussion one evening. I told them of the kind of treatment he received on the 1-W program. They responded with shock and surprise and assured me that his parents knew nothing of this treatment. It was typical for 1-Ws to attempt to relate their treatment to people in local churches and discover that they were not believed and condemned for having a “bad attitude.” Consequently, many 1-Ws did not discuss their working conditions with lay members.
While all 1-Ws underwent a process of disillusionment at AC, this fell on some more heavily than others. I knew a 1-W who was younger than most of us and he had a reputation of being a difficult to manage employee. He transferred from another department to the department I was in near the end of his two year tenure. I tried to make him feel welcome but he soon seemed to have conflicts with crew leaders. One day I was in the Library in the Redwood Building standing at the circulation desk and encountered his former boss from the other department. I asked him about this 1-W and what he related startled me. He said that the 1-W, several months back, had worked with a man who was from a prominent Big Sandy family and who was an AC staff employee. They went out on a job and in the course of a conversation the staff member told the 1-W that Garner Ted Armstrong had had sexual relations with many female AC students. This was devastating to the 1-W. His former boss told me further that when the 1-W got back to the building where the crew was housed, he was so angry and upset that he was shaking. He said that the 1-W sat in a chair and shook for some time and the 1-W had never really recovered from this experience. This was well before Garner Ted Armstrong’s behavior became known to the media and the lay membership of the WCG. So, of course, I did not believe the story about Garner Ted Armstrong but it certainly seemed plausible that this conversation involving the staff member and the 1-W had happened out as recounted. The 1-W finished his difficult and turbulent period of service and left. Some claimed that he had a “bad attitude”. But I believe he stumbled into something dark and horrific one lonely East Texas evening and was wounded by it. There was a problem, but the problem was not his, even though there seemed to be a conspiracy to make it appear that way.
This could go on. The cases are many. I could probably catalog twenty more similar events that I know of or have witnessed. The anecdotes related here, support the conclusion that if AC was an experiment in forming community based on Biblical principles, it was a failure. These facts document that Armstrongism was and is an oppressive class system and if you are on the ocean bottom, the downward pressure will be enormous, this in spite of all the self-righteous lip service given to the Philadelphian Era as the “church of brotherly love.” Most 1-Ws I knew were invisible on the AC campus. They were non-entities. They existed at the margin. Most 1-Ws I knew had no AC students as friends, knew no faculty members, knew no ministers. They came to AC without identities, worked without identities and left without identities.
1-Ws did, however, have a great utility in the AC universe. Imagine that you are an AC student. You have been told that you are special, chosen and far above the Great Unwashed in the church. To underpin this, the guy who is cleaning out your restroom or mowing your lawn is a graduate with a technical degree from a major University (a school that most AC students would be unlikely to be admitted to). You can imagine the message. “This is what all those people from universities and colleges “in the world” are good for. They clean out our restrooms and mow our lawns.”
This is pretty heady stuff for a student who is constantly being fed the idea that he or she is a man or woman of great destiny and special to God – a student at God’s only college. It was excellent training in looking down on lay members no matter what their accomplishments.
At this point, I will take some time to answer a few objections certain to be raised about my assertion that AC failed in its mission.
1. If AC was so horrid in your view, why didn’t you just leave?
I was a card-carrying Armstrongite. I was a True Believer. My feeling was that this was the one and only true church and that if it was flawed, God would fix that in the future. I continued to be an Armstrongite for another 22 years after my 1-W experience, until I came to see the error or Armstrongism. (God never did bother to fix this system and you will find the same hierarchical, class system among Armstrongite groups today.)
2. Things could have been worse. You could have gone to Viet Nam.
Circumstances could always have been worse for me. But that is not the point of this essay. This is a characterization of how I and others were actually treated and whether or not that comports with the claim that AC was God’s college, implementing God’s values.
3. I know 1-Ws who had a wonderful time and AC and never complained like you.
There was differential treatment among 1-Ws, just as there was differential treatment of AC students. Well connected 1-Ws or students were given better treatment and more advantages that the others. Some 1-Ws were AC graduates. Some had been undergraduates. They were accorded better treatment and had fewer complaints.
4. But this work was done in lieu of military service. The administration, faculty and staff of AC had every right to make your life difficult so that it would parallel service in Viet Nam.
I am not contending that AC should have been a comfortable sinecure for 1-Ws. It should have involved solid work but with no loss of human dignity. In fact, there was no organized, consistent approach to the treatment of 1-Ws. Nobody ever stood up and said that we were going to have to work hard but that everyone appreciated and respected our dedication. That would have helped. Instead the mean and base treatment we received was case by case. This treatment was not a policy but rather the product of a system called Armstrongism and how it caused people to behave towards others, especially others who were below them in the AC hierarchy.
If AC personnel felt that was a patriotic responsibility incumbent on them to make1-Ws suffer experiences similar to military personnel at war in Viet Nam, why then were some 1-Ws with good connections given cushy assignments?
5. But in Viet Nam you could have gotten killed. At Big Sandy, people just treated you badly.
In my mind at that time, I could have lost my spiritual life if I had become intransigently bitter at the treatment we received. So not just physical death but eternal death was at stake. Worse than Viet Nam.
6. But why were you held in such low regard? This seems gratuitous.
Sociological studies have indicated that people like to rationalize what they do. The theory of cognitive dissonance would indicate that people do not like to gratuitously mistreat others. Principally, this is because people like to think of themselves as being good, just and fair. So the behavior of mistreating others is rationalized by claiming that the objects of mistreatment are somehow deserving of the mistreatment. Hence, 1-Ws were thought of as worthless and naturally occupied the lowest rung in the AC hierarchy.
But in relating the anecdotes above, I have failed to really communicate what it was like for a 1-W on the AC Big Sandy campus. The atmosphere there was surcharged with a kind of vague malevolence that is hard to capture precisely in words. East Texas is hot, humid and dank. Everywhere is the smell of mold and decaying vegetation. The sun sets early on the Big Sandy campus because of a tall, dense stand of trees to the west that obscures the setting sun. On cool autumn days, when the sun would set, it was as if a blanket of melancholy had fallen over the countryside. The atmosphere was thick and pollen laden and at times hard to breathe. The surrounding dark forests and the tangled, clutching underbrush were a home to snakes and other vermin. But the overwhelming feeling was not that there was only a baleful geography to struggle with but that there was something terribly wrong spiritually. There was something there that watched with a patient, silent, evil smirk. This passage from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness captures some of this mood of menace. Marlow is looking out on the African shore and observes to his companions: “…this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention…When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality – the reality, I tell you – fades. The inner truth is hidden, luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks…”
I once wrote, after exiting Armstrongism, that to me Ambassador College (and Armstrongism in general) was like a certain genre of Hollywood gothic horror movie – like “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Wicker Man” or some of the Star Trek episodes. The protagonist enters some small tight-knit, remote community and the good townspeople seem to be happy and smiling and unctuously benevolent and he is taken in by it. (“Just look at the smiling faces in our college yearbook!!”) He notices some small but unsettling oddities in this community but overall these people seem to be a good lot. And then late one night he is awakened by strange, eerie, distant chanting and he slips out into the mist and moonlight to see where it is coming from. To his horror and fascination, he discovers these people, who seemed so good on the surface, are congregated naked in the darkness swaying around a bonfire worshipping something noisome. He realizes his life is in jeopardy but by some entrancing spell, some fascination with dark and unmentionable things, he cannot make himself flee and succumbs.
On a cold and damp winter day, at the end of my two year period of service, I walked off the Big Sandy campus. I was just as much an outsider, an unknown, at the end as I was at the beginning. During my time there, no faculty member, administrator, minister or student ever asked me anything about myself. None of these people knew where I came from, what my education background was, what my aspirations might be or anything about my personal life. A few 1-Ws knew a little about my background. I worked with other people every day who pointedly had no interest in me but yet smilingly advocated the concept of “outgoing concern.” I knew that this sham “outgoing concern” always operated within the limits prescribed by the unassailable and class-bound hierarchy of Ambassador College.
A side note: Before I left I was asked by an AC graduate who was working in Dallas what I had learned from my 1-W experience. At that time I had not really processed what had happened to me and was slow to give him an articulate response. So he supplied me with a conclusion: “No matter what happens in the WCG, you will never again be shocked.” That was not quite true. After all I was still a True Believer and was optimistic about the future. So subsequent events did shock me, but not nearly as much as they might have. At about the same time, another AC graduate, who had been a ministerial assistant, and I were having a conversation about the possibility of AC getting accredited. He made an interesting comment. He said that AC Big Sandy would never be accredited because it could not live up to the spiritual objectives outlined in the College Catalog. It was not a matter of courses, professors and facilities but it was a matter of spiritual failure and that this would be easily visible to the accrediting officials.
After the 1-W Program, I was a loyal WCG member for another 22 years. My 1-W experiences were something that I archived away. But occasionally something would stir all these memories. Most often the evocative event was encountering a faculty member, administrator or student from AC who had been contemporary with me. It is interesting that typically when I encountered such people, they still treated me like a 1-W – a sort of non-person. It was as if I had been put in a certain place in the hierarchy at AC and that this was a permanent and irrevocable decision. So to many people who know of me, I will always be a 1-W.
Nobody will be able to document a formal policy that would underpin what I have written here. The mistreatment of 1-Ws cannot be blamed directly on the Ambassador College Big Sandy Administration and the WCG ministry of that time. I would imagine that their attitude towards 1-Ws, if they had one at all, was one of indifference. But their culpability is to be found in the creation and nurturing of a system that produced these behaviors naturally. This was the natural outcome of Armstrongism and in this outcome can be seen the failure of the Ambassador College experiment.
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