America’s UFO Religion: Ben Zeller and the Heaven’s Gate discourse (Pt. 3)
Though Zeller has appeared in numerous documentaries on Heaven's Gate, his views on the group's history and beliefs differ from many other writers on the topic.
After studying the Heaven’s Gate religion for than a decade, Benjamin Zeller published America’s UFO Religion (NYU Press, 2014), in which he set out to consolidate his academic research on the topic into an accessible monograph. While some of the ideas fleshed out in his book he had explored in prior papers, America’s UFO Religion unifies Zeller’s research in support of a central, though not uncontroversial, thesis: that the Heaven’s Gate religion was itself a microcosm of American religious faith.
Heaven’s Gate was American religion wrought small, a social barometer that revealed the religious climate at the turn of twenty-first century America. [. . .] Like many Americans, they believed in UFOs, extraterrestrials, and superhuman intelligence. They merely fused those beliefs with their religious ones. Heaven’s Gate was, in this sense, a UFO religion. But it was a particular kind. It was America’s UFO religion (Zeller, 2014: Afterword)
A microcosm, in this context, is a group whose beliefs and practices reflect the central aspects of the broader culture it emerged from. In arguing for such a view, I think that Zeller had two goals – first, to tie the comparatively obscure topic of Heaven’s Gate into something more accessible and relatable; second, to present the Heaven’s Gate religion not as an anomaly, but rather, as an emblematic expression of American religious culture. In the final essay in this series (forthcoming), I will return to consider the merits of this argument more closely, along with an examination of the structure of America’s UFO Religion. For now, I will turn my attention to the various receptions Zeller’s book has received and the role his work has played in shaping the discourse around Heaven’s Gate — starting with the ‘cult-o-mentary’ sphere.
Following the publication of America's UFO Religion, Zeller joined the cast of commentators one is guaranteed to hear from in media coverage of Heaven’s Gate. Along with sociologists and anti-cult activists such as Janja Lalich, Steven Hassan, and Reza Aslan, Zeller has appeared in several major documentaries about the movement produced in the last few years, including HBOs The Cult of Cults (2020), ABCs The Cult Next Door (2022), and Netflix's How to Be a Cult Leader (2023). But a few important things have set Zeller apart from other guests on such programs — and I don't just mean his trademark bowtie.
The ‘C’ Word
In the first place, Zeller does not describe the Heaven’s Gate movement as a ‘cult’, despite the fact that this remains the dominant discourse surrounding the topic. Nor does he subscribe to any of the various ‘brainwashing’ theories so often advanced as explanations for the movement’s shocking actions. From an analytic standpoint, Zeller finds these terms to be unhelpful.
I don’t have an operating definition of the word cult, because I don’t use it as an analytic term. I prefer “new religious movement” or “high demand religion” or “sectarian group,” depending on the context. The way people tend to use the word “cult” it doesn’t have any particular meaning . . . other than a pejorative label for things you don’t like or think are weird or wrong (Zeller, 2023).
Even though attempts have been made to sketch more objective ways of distinguishing ‘cults’ from ‘legitimate’ religious movements, these are often undercut by vague, subjective, or normatively-laden criteria, or else simply fail to skirt the trap of circularity. Although religious studies scholars hadn’t always avoided the “C” word, today it is virtually impossible to use the term ‘cult’ without the normative baggage it carries. Of course, if one’s goal is to disparage and discredit a certain group — or at the very least, dissuade others from joining them — then the use of normative language presents fewer problems.
This, however, is precisely what distinguishes Zeller’s work from that of a so-called “cult expert”, and more broadly, academic inquiry from anti-cult activism. The latter is driven by a particular, ideologically-laden concern (e.g., with the harm a certain group is thought to cause), and geared towards achieving a particular result (e.g., the reduction of membership in such a group) — an end which justifies the means employed to achieve it. Explanations which could hinder such a goal are prima facie inadmissible, regardless of whether they are more conceptually coherent or better-supported by evidence than one’s own. Thus, to orient one’s research in reference to an ideological end converts the search for truth into a potential obstacle. But the moment truth becomes obstructive, as opposed to the object of our inquiry, we have stepped outside the confines of serious, scholarly work.
The question of brainwashing
A second point on which Zeller has tended to diverge from others who have written on the Heaven’s Gate religion is his reluctance to adopt the all-too-common theory that the followers of this movement were ‘brainwashed’. As he explains:
If you believe someone is brainwash[ed], you assume they are neither rational nor reliable. From [this] perspective, nothing a member of Heaven’s Gate said could be trusted. That’s one reason that mainstream social sciences reject brainwashing [as] unscientific, since it is fundamentally circular and unfalsifiable. One of the standard models of science is that it is based on falsifiable theories. Something unfalsifiable may be true, but it isn’t science. (ibid., 2023).
Here, Zeller has highlighted two particularly damning contradictions in the brainwashing narrative. On the one hand, anti-cultists strive to protect people from dangerous, false beliefs, and to restore adherents to a sense of self-determination. However laudable this cause may be, it is undermined at once by appealing to a pernicious form of circular thinking — what we may call an “epistemic defense mechanism”. The irony of this cannot be overstated, given that such rhetorical sleights-of-hand are often used by the very groups with which an anti-cultist would be most concerned.
The notion of an epistemic defense mechanism (EDM) was first articulated by the philosophers Maarten Boudry and Johan Braeckman. As they explain in their 2011 paper “Immunizing Strategies and Epistemic Defense Mechanisms”:
An immunizing strategy is an argument brought forward in support of a belief system, though independent from that belief system, which makes it more or less invulnerable to rational argumentation and/or empirical evidence. By contrast, an epistemic defense mechanism is define as a structural feature of a belief system which has the same effect of deflecting arguments and evidence. [There is] a remarkable recurrence of immunizing strategies and epistemic defense mechanisms in pseudoscience and other belief systems
In a later paper, co-authored by Maarten Boudry and Felip Buekens, the definition of an EDM is drilled down to something comparatively easier to digest:
. . . a theory-internal rationale for fending off criticisms
In other words, an EDM is something built into a belief system (or an analytic framework) which serves the purpose of invalidating criticism by way of a convenient, though ultimately circular, explanation. Brainwashing is a perfect example of this — since brainwashing is necessarily covert, anyone accused of being brainwashed cannot possibly defend themselves against such an accusation. (E.g., ‘So, you don’t think you’ve been brainwashed, eh? That only goes to show how well the brainwashing worked!’).
Zeller is exactly right to call this an unfalsifiable claim – it is neither one which can be proven, nor disproven. Objections to the accusation that one has been brainwashed are, by definition and design, impossible to raise without the very same objection being used as evidence for the claim. But this is precisely what renders the concept unintelligible, and useful only for rhetorical purposes.
Ironically, so are some of the beliefs espoused by Heaven’s Gate — those who disbelieved in the teachings of Applewhite and Nettles had simply not been given the requisite ‘deposit of information from the Next Level’. Obviously, the explanatory power of this theory rests upon the very claim in dispute (i.e., that there is, in fact, a “Next Level” from which Applewhite and Nettles had descended). But this is not at all different from explaining the beliefs and behaviors of a religious group in terms of brainwashing — both notions are entirely unfalsifiable, and both ultimately serve the purpose of dismissing criticism.
The second contradiction Zeller highlights is more subtle, but just as concerning.
If you believe someone is brainwash[ed], you assume they are neither rational nor reliable. From [this] perspective, nothing a member of Heaven’s Gate said could be trusted (Zeller, 2023)
Plenty of lip service is paid to the notion that these individuals were rational (in fact, this is a point impressed upon by anti-cultists themselves, including those who do subscribe to the brainwashing narrative). Well-intentioned this attitude may be, but it simply does not cohere at all with labeling someone as ‘brainwashed’ since, as Zeller points out, labeling someone in this way precludes perceiving them as ‘rational’. These two attitudes are fundamentally incompatible. Insisting that we treat the followers of Heaven’s Gate with dignity, while attributing their faith to mere manipulation, anti-cultists end up speaking out of both of ends of their mouths.
What makes a work ‘academic’ has less to do with the credentials of the author than it does with the methods they employ and the aims they set out to achieve. New religious scholarship is rigorous, cautious, and invites critique. Zeller’s work, while not at all immune to criticism, is a good example of new religious scholarship, as opposed to anti-cultist activism. It should not surprise us that Zeller has been labeled an ‘apologist’ by certain anti-cultists (an accusation which has been levied at plenty of other new religious scholars before — myself included!) After all, Zeller’s efforts to present Heaven’s Gate as “American religion wrought small”, as “a social barometer that revealed the religious climate at the turn of twenty-first century America”, undermines a crucial aim of anti-cultism — namely, that of casting such a group as an anomaly. Zeller, by contrast, looks at Heaven’s Gate as having been in many ways emblematic of our own culture.
With that said, there are certain criticisms which have been raised in response to Zeller’s work which are well worth looking into, and which have received very little attention in scholarship on Heaven’s Gate — in particular, criticisms from believers in the very movement Zeller has spent much of his career writing about. In the next essay in this series, my aim will be to answer the following question: How has Zeller’s work on Heaven’s Gate been received beyond the halls of academia, and outside of the cult-o-mentary bubble?
As we will see, much like the question of why the members of Heaven’s Gate wore Nike Decades, the answer to that question will depend on who you ask.