Unitarian Heaven

On March 26, 1997, acting on a tip, San Diego sheriffs entered a large house on a quiet street in the suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, California, and discovered 39 bodies of members of a religious cult called Heaven’s Gate. Each corpse was dressed in black shirts, sweatpants, and new black-and-white Nike ‘Decades’ athletic shoes. The bodies were carefully laid on beds or bunks and square purple cloths had been laid on many, covering faces and chests. I remember the news videos that took viewers eerily through the house. Coroners determined that the cause of death was barbiturates and alcohol coupled with asphyxiation using plastic bags. Many of the 18 male corpses had previously undergone surgical castration in Mexico. One of the deceased was the brother of Star Trek star ‘Uhura.’

Two surviving members of the cult relate that its leaders ‘Do’ and ‘Ti’ preached that an alien spaceship was traveling in the wake of the Hale-Bopp Comet which became spectacularly visible in March 1997. ‘Ti’ having recently died, ‘Do’ taught that this spaceship was sent to harvest souls that were ready to “graduate” from their bodies on Earth. To assist in this process, the cult – including ‘Do’ – committed mass suicide.

Heaven’s Gate was a sci-fi, alien-millenarian cult with Gnostic overtones, a UFO version of the Rapture. ‘Do’ was Marshall Applewhite, a Texas native who taught music at a Houston college. He attended a Unitarian church in Houston between 1965 and 1972, the same church I attended, though I was very young at the time. I only hung out with the youth group so I don’t recall him but his background is classic Unitarian.

I knew many people like him in the Church. Some were doing macrobiotic diets that robbed them of nutrition until they broke out in sores. Other young Unitarians took drugs and permanently fried their brains, some had clear psychiatric issues like Applewhite. Some were militant vegetarians, some were cross-dressers, many were just gay. Already by this time Unitarianism had become known as “the gay church.” During his stay in Houston, Applewhite left his wife and children to adopt a gay lifestyle, which is where and when he met Bonnie Nettles. She also left a spouse and children in Houston, and the two moved to California where they launched Heaven’s Gate.

There are at least eight Unitarian Churches in the Houston area, all involved in promoting varying degrees of gayness. At least one is entirely gay. All are militantly Green Party, i.e., Communist, but vote and recruit for the Democratic Party as the next best thing, even during Sunday services which theoretically should void their tax-exempt status but somehow never does. The leadership of my church was ferociously Feminist and excluded all independent men from positions of leadership. Men’s place in every Unitarian Church is to be seen and not heard – unless they are gay. This was called “balance.” I find it interesting that between Applewhite (‘Do’) and his spiritual partner and co-preacher, Bonnie Nettles (‘Ti’), “Nettles was the brains and Applewhite was the mouth.” Applewhite acknowledged Nettles, a registered nurse when Applewhite met her, as more advanced in her spiritual progress than he, although he had degrees in philosophy and music. It is typical of Unitarians for men to defer to women, even if the man is more accomplished.

The Heaven’s Gate cult anticipated a “cleansed, rejuvenated Earth.” All Unitarians I ever met were militant environmentalists. That is the true ideological core of the Unitarian Church. They have made a cult out of Environmentalism, which in their eyes is a Great Earth Mother with African features. Unitarians worship absolutely everything about the Earth and everything that is black or African, and they despise everything traditional about the US and traditional white society.

My church had a committee devoted to encouraging divorce in every woman who visited and contemplated joining, and it would offer to support and assist the woman throughout the divorce process – women only, of course. They never assisted men in any way, men were only tolerated. I was briefly on this “welcoming committee” till I understood that they were pushing divorce as church policy, regarding men as the presumptive offender in any marital dispute.

My experience is that many female therapists send their female clients to the Unitarian Church for this reason, resulting in many young men in the Unitarian Church being without fathers. This is not an issue to most Unitarians. On the contrary, it is seen as positive, an opportunity to raise boys as male feminists uncontaminated by “the patriarchy.” However, even as a teen I noticed that it was always the boys in the youth group who lacked support and guidance, and only the boys who drifted into drugs and alcohol – and yes, I was one. Several Unitarians I knew had fathers who committed suicide – many were fatherless due to divorce.

There are almost no blacks or Hispanics in the Unitarian Church, just a few token members. Almost all the members are white or Jewish. Few blacks are crazy enough to join. Jews are free to attend synagogue on Friday and still be Unitarian on Sunday. In fact, one can attend any church at any time and not be criticized for this by Unitarians since they are always searching for new members. However a Unitarian would never get away with attending a true-blue Evangelical one like Joel Osteen’s Christian megachurch, also in Houston. Unitarians hate them most of all, as they hate everything rural or country, including country music. The guy who allegedly killed 58 country music fans in Las Vegas in 2017 and shot 200 others strikes me as a wacko Unitarian. Personally, I suspect he was a patsy like Oswald and someone else did the shooting, someone who hates country music fans as likely Trump voters.

Jim Jones, who led the People’s Temple mass suicide of 900 people in Guyana in 1978, was more apocalyptic than Unitarians. He was more Southern Baptist holy roller, which I suppose is why most of his followers were blacks. Blacks seem to be almost always Southern Baptist. Unitarians are strongest in the North, especially Boston. Still fighting the Civil War, Unitarians hate Texas, hate Houston, hate the South, hate Christianity, and especially hate Southern whites. But they idolize Southern blacks, in this case ignoring their Baptist beliefs. Few local Unitarians are Southerners. They are almost all “immigrants” to Houston from the North. They are pure New England Yankee and think they are an Abolition movement still running an underground railroad for escaped slaves. Unitarian churches sponsor active “sanctuary” assistance movements and teach ESL (English as Second Language) to a steady stream of Central Americans, both legal and illegal – they too, in my experience, are not crazy enough to join the cult. They accept the free lessons, keep to themselves, then move on without a thank-you.

Unitarians would never admit to having anything in common with Jim Jones. But they do – as Applewhite proved. Unitarians preach love and can often be identified by their “Coexist” car bumper stickers, but in fact are consumed by intense hatred which comes out in their church conversations. They never miss a chance to drop insults against “Nazis,” “white supremacists,” “Republicans raping the Earth” and any Republican President. They make a point of challenging men who display independence. If they suspect you are not like them, they can be personal and vicious. If you’re not an “insider” who tithes to the Church – as many wealthy women do – you’re likely to be ostracized and frozen out, as I was, even though I grew up in the Unitarian Church.

Applewhite apparently had several gay relationships and he was one of the first to volunteer for surgical castration. One of the many previous incarnations of Heaven’s Gate was the Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church (ASCC). To me, this makes perfect sense. In Great Earth Mother cults like the Unitarian Church, male effeminacy is a given. Masculinity is always abhorred by such matriarchal cults, which tolerate only epicene, submissive males. Unitarians tend to be highly educated and wealthy but they are the fanatical fringe of the already lunatic Diversity religion.