Heaven's Gate: America's UFO Cult

The Heaven’s Gate Cult, lead by Marshall Applewhite, was a movement of new age religion focusing on “evolving” to a new level of existence above humanity as a way of avoiding what Applewhite claimed was the “refurbishing of Earth”. The house depicted in the photograph was the central housing for Applewhite’s followers, and the location of their mass suicide. Applewhite follows a common tactic among cult leaders by denoting immediate urgency and, similar to David Koresh, utilizing specific aspects of the bible to further evidence his claims. He did this through a series of tapes in which he takes Christian scripture and warps it to meet his ideology.

The first of these tapes introduced his concept of leaving Earth-omitting the suicide aspect-while validating himself through claims of being the second coming of Christ. Applewhite claims that the first coming of Jesus was an interaction with the human manifestation of extraterrestrial beings representing the next level of evolution. He then moves on to claim that his biological father is a manifestation of God while Applewhite himself is the second coming of Jesus, raised by god to take an adult human form and guide those of a high enough spiritual level away from the refurbishing of Earth. Applewhite took a central and widely accepted ideology and morphed it for his agenda through “[placing] Christ (the concept) at the center of their religious understanding, and in keeping with their hermeneutics, [reading] Jesus (the person) as the prototypical extraterrestrial visitor” (Zeller, 42).  This form of manipulation is common amongst religious cults, largely due to the ease with which one can manipulate another into accepting their beliefs if they start from a place of misinterpretation (such as saying that they have simply misread the bible) as opposed to outright denying their fundamental religious beliefs.

Works Cited

Aerial View of House Rented by Heaven's Gate Cult. 1997. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822001762846

Zeller, Benjamin E. Heaven’s Gate : America’s UFO Religion. NYU Press, 2014. EBSCOhost, proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=852798&site=eds-live.