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The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe

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Having taught both theology and philosophy and having been a member of a monastic community, I approached JC Hallman's The Devil Is a Gentleman with a skeptical but open mind. William James had not been one of my most favorite studies in my educational experiences. In fact, the only class I ever received anything below a "B" in was a course on James. The man for me was way to complex; way to out of touch and simply put, strange.

Once I began The Devil Is a Gentleman, things began to change as Mr. Hallman captured my heart and my mind in his wonderful combination of philosophy, biography and prose. I was caught in the rare situation of not wanting to put the book down, but needing to in order to spend time digesting all that JC was giving me! I was afraid Mr. Hallman was going to do nothing more than share the titillating side of the fringe movement in America. I was concerned from the title that Mr. Hallman would make a case for the Devil. And, I was also worried of being put to sleep with William James.

However, to my sheer joy, JC was able to give a wide variety of the fringe movement their day in the sun, while balancing fact with personal opinion. His intimate sharing of his encounters with people such as Celeste Appel at Unarius, the healer Rhiannon, Chris and AJ and the rest of the CWF, Uncle Draggi, Dwayne, and Brother Stash at New Skete all draw you into the experience of what both James and Hallman would call today's fringe. (After finishing the book, I have made contact with New Skete to schedule my own visit.)

But what was most delightful in the JC Hallman's construct was the parallel development of James' journey and Hallman's own journey. Not only do you come away with knowing both James' and Hallman on a deeper level, Hallman is able to relate James' complex philosophical and psychological concepts to life in twenty-first century America.

By the end of the book, I was wishing I was back in the classroom again, so that I could assign Hallman's book to a group of new freshman as they began their "spiritual" journey. Hallman's book would be fantastic in "quest for meaning" or "fundamentals of belief" courses. But, just with many online academies today, JC Hallman's book is your private companion as you explore and begin your own deeper journey. This book is a must for anyone who has every questioned the existence of God; the relevance of religion or their membership in institutional church. Thanks to Hallman's true gift as a writer, one is able to ask important questions while being completely comfortable in experiencing life without words!

Warning: a serious study, but for the "educated general reader" rather than theologians or those looking for earnestly subversive fringe-cult press ravings. It's admittedly a quite misleading title for this book. The phrase comes from a William James quote that if the devil is a gentleman than God is certainly no such character. But, it may set up expectations that this is a salacious prowl around the netherworld of bizarre cults and sinister devotions. (Admittedly, the Satanists alternately tongue-in-goateed cheek and in deadly intent intersect with this stereotype of tweaking taboos.) Even with them, however, Hallman labors to excavate the scholarly foundation for devil-worship and its appeal within today's society. He takes his interviews seriously but knows when to lighten up or bear down. The result's a thoughtful, sustained comparison of James' pioneering efforts to understand religion as a human construct within the context of the past American century's diversity of newer religious (and one anti-religious) sects.

The search starts with curiosity, as Hallman investigates, respectively, Uranian seekers of alien contact, revived Druids, and wrestling evangelicals. As he learns more about James' own thought, Hallman begins to ask deeper questions, from the heirs to LaVey's Church of Satan, and tests Jamesian tenets against the technocracy asserted by Scientologists. He begins to grow more wary, and perhaps restless, as he pits James' own elasticity of categories with the determinedly "anti-religious" faith community known as the American Atheists, at their national gathering. Then, moving towards a more deeply informed understanding of how beliefs shift and transform as a new self-definition of a specific religious sect emerges, he explores the progress and alteration of beliefs among neo-Pagans and Goddess worshippers in Seattle. Finally, Hallman meets both skepticism and acceptance of how a religious community must look into itself and ask hard questions if it wishes to survive without deceiving itself or distorting its credo. This emerges with the neo-pagans as they must adjust their earlier claims for pagan origins and supposed continuity in the light of recently discovered historical fact.

He finds this self-scrutiny occuring most powerfully with the Orthodox Christian monks of New Skete, living among and inspired by their best-selling dogs. Hallman, a lapsed Catholic, intersperses a biographical arc that links a critical introduction to James with his own travels at America's "religious fringe." While his lack of stimulating chat with some of these groups makes for only intermittently engaging insights, Hallman is honest about those he interviews. If his informants are limited by their robotic recital of a "sales pitch," a sound-bite, or their own mantra, Hallman separates their sought-after beliefs from their mundane, calculated, or cynical presentation. He respects those who trust him enough to speak with him, and learns to distinguish the charlatans from the sincere, no matter how outlandish their outward claims of interior revelation may be. Much of this book, in the early and middle sections, is slower going as Hallman warms up to the quest and labors to understand James' difficult concepts. It picks up the pace as it continues, reaching with the pagan and monk chapters, for me, its most rewarding insights.

Hallman writes thoughtfully and carefully, but at times there is simply too much cogitation on James, other times too much of the mundane boilerplate on the cults and their often dull spokespeople. Many of the chapters read as if moderately engaging, intellectually sophisticated articles that might appear in media like The Atlantic, Harper's, or the NY Times Magazine. This itself is not a criticism, merely an observation: the book is pitched at the serious reader with a solid education who's able to grasp theology, sociology, philosophy, and theology. But, not every term is explained with the clarity it needs; James as cited by Hallman does not always speak with the elucidation one would wish. James can waffle and baffle. Hallman can get tongue-tied in interpreting James; this is not his own fault, but it does show the complicated intellectual maneuvering of James and how challenging "Varieties" remains for readers today. Therefore, sufficient patience to re-read and cogitate their reports is needed to appreciate this narrative.

Hallman's combination of theological student and sociological adept makes his own struggle to find meaning as complicated as that of William James. You share Hallman's frustration with James' own refusal to be pinned down. You also may be bored or indifferent to more than one of the religious or irreligious Americans Hallman hovers about. Still, this is about as close as most of us will come to 'Varieties of Religious Experience' as re-examined a century later; Hallman labors to interpret James' own convoluted attempts to define what the purpose of belief is. Hallman agrees with James. Religion and belief should matter more that they work 'pragmatically' (a loaded term for James) for the individual seeker rather than as scientifically verifiable assertions.

Late in the journey, among the neo-Pagans, Hallman applies James' distinction between the "healthy souls" who are optimistic and live life without questioning the tenets they affirm and the "sick souls." Many drawn to read this book (as with I suppose Hallman, James, and myself), will find themselves in the latter category. Any belief we hold positively or negatively must be wrestled with and won through painful searching; we are not blessed with (or we have lost with our education, life experiences, or maturity) the gift of solid faith. Hallman learns that the academic and rational "old idol of hypothesis verification was its own over-belief, the way it had divvied all of us up into a babble of scientific cants and lingos, had made us fanatics blind even to our own fanaticism, unhappy and seeking, desperate to try anything that tasted like truth." (245)

America is the sick soul. How can we, he wonders, tell each other what this truth would be? Hallman, inspired by James, comes to assert: "the religion he stands by must be the one which he finds best for him, even though there are better individuals, and their religion better for them."

This book also, if in passing, finds what happens as the groups on the margins grow, bicker, and try to prosper. Hallman, weary after seeing over and over how various fringe groups struggle as they are co-opted into the mainstream, notes precisely how scripture becomes Scripture: when the teachings of the original founders are divorced from their context, and applied to circumstances that are removed from that context. This is not an inspiring transition, at least as Hallman witnesses this discourse. I leave it to you to find out which group enacts this wrench out of context!

Hallman reminds us how "cult" groups and "extreme" factions either keep splintering or survive by adapting to the monotheistic template of the West: even if they oppose it bitterly, these groups and factions are driven to take on its legal trappings (chaplains, dogtags, governmental recognition, tax-exempt status), demographic indicators (atheists asserting their same "rights" as a recognized community as do believers), and managerial attitudes (how to perpetuate the ideals and rituals after the founders depart or the original predictions fail to be fulfilled).

Even if one rejects religion, one must address "the attendant dilemma of curiosity": this, Hallman derives from James, is the definition of religion. Hallman suggests that our consciousness forces us into "the great side effect" of "metaphysical quandary." (247) The neo-Pagan chapter seems to signal Hallman's breakthrough into this humbling realization that humans must create their own religion (or anti-religion, which only confirms this humanist tendency) and, furthermore, acknowledge that they are doing so rather than receiving a revelation from above. This takes courage.

The neo-Pagans mature by similarly having to re-define themselves as their origins are de-mythologized and they find that they really are a modern invention and not some attenuated survivors from a spurious Burning Times or an untenably matriarchal Eden. The Wiccan Goddess is still real, however, "'because human energy goes into making Her real. . . . She is a metaphor because, great though she may be, She is finite, like any other concept, whereas reality is infinite.'" This Wiccan theologian that Hallman quotes sums up our modern conception of belief and our necessity for such-- despite our inability to "prove" it. (248)

In the last visit, to New Skete, the splits that bedevil the tiny monastic community show how, whether in semi-permanent daily communal fashion or in the conventions and conclaves that the previous lay groups have all constructed, the difficulty of humans getting along with each other as they seek to agree on a common path towards spiritual maturity remains.

The author builds a narrative that aligns his geographical journey with his intellectual inquiries. As he sums it up (in a remark not included in the book itself): "Really, I imagined the whole thing as an arc, beginning with curiosity, moving into interest with the wrestlers and satanists, disillusionment with the scientologists, quandary with the atheists, and then recovery with the monks and witches." I agree that the neo-Pagans and the monks emerge as most fully aware of their "religious experience" in their honesty as to their failings and advances towards spiritual maturity. Hallman enters these encounters, therefore, nearer the culmination-- but don't expect a "road to Damascus" epiphany-- of his own parallel quest for meaning. They both fit his narrative and impel his own realization of his own "variety" of the individual's religious search.

There are memorable comparisons between dogs and humans and God from James that appropriately gain elucidation at the later stages of Hallman's search. Perhaps more attuned to this section being myself a dog lover, I found that the canine-divine analogies are astonishing and merit reflection. Perhaps, like James then and the monks later speculated, we relate to the divine as dogs act towards us: fearful, awed, confused, embarassingly eager to fawn and flatter, utterly in thrall to a greater power whose intentions and actions we are both wrapped up in totally and helplessly even as dogs have no idea, literally, what we are doing with the rest of our lives when they do not directly encounter us. I fumble to understand this with my own analogy: it's like a dog having no inkling that our term for his species is God backwards; the connection if only by happy coincidence etymologically exists, but as a dog has no idea of this, so we humans literally have no inkling of how we truly fit in to a divine plan far beyond our daily powers of limited perception and constrained comprehension.

Hallman concludes his study after his visit to New Skete, going as far as he could go with James as his mentor. The "cash value," again with Hallman's analogy extending James' analysis, varies by believer, and we will not always hold dear the same beliefs as our neighbors. But, this understanding comforts Hallman within a modern "world pluralistic by accident rather than by design." (309) He starts where he ends, uncertain of his spiritual destination, but with James as his guide, he feels a bit less baffled and marginally less confused at why we have such a hard time-- at least we sick souls-- in our conflicts with our own postmodern, secularized, lack of easily attained and confidently defended belief.

The jacket copy for this book is misleading. It's not really an exploration of America's religious fringe. It's a biography of William James. (Hallman basically admits as much in the epilogue.) The chapters actually dealing with fringe religions are alternated with chapters that are pure biography. And the religion chapters themselves put a big focus on how James would have viewed the religion in question. So, basically, only about a third of the book is actually about the religions. And that leaves little space to really delve into them in detail.

So, as a biography of James, it gets high marks. But that's not what it's billed as. And that's not why I bought it. As an exploration of America's religious fringe, it's little better than looking each religion up in Wikipedia.

This book is really two books in one. The first is an account of Hallman's visits with a number of fringe religious groups. The second book is a biography of William James, the 19th century psychologist who wrote the classic work "The Varieties of Religious Experience". Though it took me a while to realize it from the text, James is considered one of the fathers of modern psychology, having written the first comprehensive textbook on the subject. He was a prolific writer and founder of a school of thought known as pragmatism. By some, he is considered a religious apologist (see "God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They are Wrong" by S.T. Joshi). He appears to have been an early proponent of a sort of functional approach to the study of religion that inspired many later great minds (such as Durkheim and Eliade). I found his 19th century literary style, at times, difficult to follow. I would have been interested in hearing much more about what James had to say rather than about his life. His book "Varieties", which inspired Hallman so much, is still in print and easy to find. There is a lot of James biography in "The Devil is a Gentleman", much much more than I was interested in reading. Though Hallman attempts to weave smoothly from one subject to the other throughout the book, the end result still seems like a shuffle of two distinct manuscripts in which the more interesting account of contemporary religious groups was used to sell the less interesting biographical work. For this reason I have given the book, as a whole, a lower rating.

Of the eight religious groups Hallman studies, I'll choose only a few for detailed comment.

After visiting the site of the Heaven's Gate incident and finding nobody who will talk about it, Hallman's adventures actually begin with the Unarians, a much more harmless UFO-based religion. His timing was remarkable . The Unarian's prophet, Uriel, had made a prediction back in 1974 that the Muons from planet Myton would land on Earth in 2001 ushering in a new age. Uriel was long gone, but the date was only a few days away and so was the their first major gathering after the failed prophecy. Hallman gives a fascinating description of the Unarian's predicament and the various ways they attempt to come to terms with it. A couple of central figures in the movement attempt to contact the aliens by a process called "channeling" to ask about the delay. No luck however. The message was garbled. It becomes clear that nobody can reproduce the process Uriel used to bring her messages. Astute readers may see parallels here with at least a couple other more familiar religions.

The Christian Wrestling Federation (CWF) was one of the more interesting sections of the book. Hallman spent quite a bit of time traveling with the group as they put on shows around the country. According to Hallman "Christian wrestlers tended to engage in the hyperhumility of conservative Christian rhetoric, which meant they took every opportunity to denigrate themselves and elevate the Precious Lord Father God, and peppered their speeches with all variety of God synonyms, which both flattered him and gave speeches a hitch step that enabled the speaker to speak in complete sentences." One of the memorable comments Hallman makes about wrestling is "Suspended disbelief is belief." By this, he refers to the ability of viewers of fictional situations to temporarily suspend disbelief. The wrestlers tried to weave a moral lesson into the wrestling itself (heros/martyrs vs. bad guys) and the session would be followed by a short sermon (sometimes given by the person who played the bad guy). Interestingly, the CWF gets a mixed reception from mainstream evangelical churches, some of whom do not want to be associated with showmanship (e.g. "we are not a show").

One of the main reasons I was attracted to this book was it's account of Satanism. My stereotyped impression of Satanism was as some kind of silly teenage activity intended to freak out parents and other authority figures. I didn't realize that there was any sizable organized religion based on the idea. I'm sure there are groups that actually worship some demonic figures, but the organization Hallman chooses to study, the Church of Satan, hardly fits that description. This particular brand of Satanism comes off sounding somewhat bland and moderate. Bizarre rituals not withstanding, there does not seem to be any sense of magic or supernatural in their philosophy. There is a nice detailed section in the book on the history of the Devil. It would have been more interesting for Hallman to visit a sect that actually practiced magic and worshipped the Devil as a living entity. An interesting quote: "In the ritual chamber you suspend disbelief, you're actually using imagination. In there, the imagination is reality, it is the truth, You leave the real world outside." (similar to the Christian Wrestlers).

Hallman groups Atheism with other religions for the same reason as does James, though there is an admitted inconsistency: "The more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal. We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi godless creeds "religions"; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers the divine," we must interpret the term "divine" very broadly as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not."

Hallman claims that most sociologists also place freethinking groups with new religious movements, but gives no references.
One wonders why, with such a broad definition, James doesn't simply drop the term "religion" and go with "social group" having "strong beliefs". Hallman never really nails down what it is about atheist belief that qualifies as "divine" or "godlike" and, in fact even admits that there is something missing from atheism. Could it be religion? Though Hallman is sometimes brutally honest about his personal impressions of all the religious people he meets, he seems to go slightly out of his way for atheists and I was initially puzzled by this until nearly the end of the chapter where he reveals his impression:

"I was troubled by the speakers at the Atheist convention, but I didn't really know why. Sometimes I wandered out of the room even as they talked. My Journey through James and religion seemed to have hit a dead end. Irreligion too, was supposed to be able to suture the sick soul, and after the roller coaster of Druids and Christian wrestlers and Satanists and Scientologists my soul was nauseous and like to vomit. But rather than a balm, irreligion seemed to offer more of the same. "

For Hallman, Atheism simply offers no comfort. There is a quite a bit of useful background on Atheism in the chapter and Hallman admits that his perceptions have changed: "Suddenly, everything I'd come to believe about Atheism had been thrown into doubt." Hallman did his homework fairly well for this group and he dispels a number of myths about Atheism. The overall impression he gives, more than anything else, is a certain sense of pity. To him, Atheism is a hopelessly unpopular ideology full of unmotivated misfits surrounded by vast and popular religious institutions that seem to actually do something for the "sick soul".

On the whole I enjoyed about half of this book and would have rated it highly had there been much less biography. William James fans will probably have a very different impression.

I almost missed this intelligent book. Idiosyncratic, learned, brave, respectful, witty, delightful. Above all, JC Hallman is one open-minded thinker, and his ability to extend respect and truly investigate "the American fringe" on the one hand, and his elucidation of William James' work and life on the other, helped me to better understand the American religious tradition. A rollicking fun and yet educational read.