Product Description

A hundred years ago, the writer and philosopher William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, a seminal work that has inspired generations of scholars and eccentrics alike. James’s book argues that the religious spirit in man is best understood through the study of its most extreme forms. Varieties was a watershed effort: a bestselling portrait of history’s pluralism and a defense of the spiritual quest, in all its guises, against the era’s increasingly secular sentiments.
Today, with all the old tensions between skeptics and believers still in place, J. C. Hallman pays homage to James’s exploration of offbeat religious movements. But where James relied on the testimony and biographies of prophets and mystics, Hallman travels directly to some of America’s newest and most unusual religions, trekking from Druid circles in the mossy hills of northern California to the gleaming mother church of Scientology, from lurid satanic cellars in undisclosed locations to a professional-wrestling ministry in the fundamentalist heart of Texas. Along the way, he participates in a variety of rites and reports on a broad spectrum of beliefs. Eventually Hallman adopts James as his patron saint, spiritual adviser, and intellectual companion on the journey that will culminate in the creation of this book, a compelling combination of adventure and biography, spotted with hair-raising predicaments and rife with poignant portraits of unforgettable characters, including William James himself.
The Devil Is a Gentleman maps the spiritual contours of modern American pluralism and examines the life and legacy of one of its most profound architects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #553797 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-16
• Released on: 2006-05-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Booklist
The U.S. is a religiously complex country. No surprise, that. What many will find surprising, though, is the sheer number of marginal religions the nation contains. Taking William James, author of the seminal classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, as his muse, Hallman travels to some very strange places, indeed, from Southern California and the Heaven's Gate community, where Christian scripture, metaphysical teachings, and UFO lore commingled and flared up in banner-headline tragedy, to Northern California and some latter-day Druids. He also visits Christian wrestlers, Satanists, Scientologists, Wiccans, Orthodox Christian monks, and, for a change of pace, atheists ("Michigan, he asserts, "was a big state for Atheists"). In the epilogue, he discusses James' ongoing influence on major figures including sociologist Emile Durkheim, anthropologist Mircea Eliade, and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Never patronizing or condescending, Hallman presents the material through a reporter's eye, offering balanced and compassionate portraits of the persons and movements he describes. Combining journalism, history, and personal anecdotes, he conducts an insightful journey into the hearts and souls of America's spiritual fringe. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
J. C. Hallman, a graduate of the Iowa and Johns Hopkins writing programs, has published fiction and nonfiction in GQ and other national magazines. His first book, The Chess Artist, was published to wide acclaim. Hallman is currently a writer in residence at Sweet Briar College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Infinite

Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible--but yet their life! Their life! It is normal! It is happy! It is an answer to the question!

--William James

The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music

converged on by ambulance sirens

and they understand everything.

They're on your side. They forgive you.

--Denis Johnson

1. Applewhite

I coasted my rental over Lake Hodges, on I-15 toward Del Dios Highway. The hills of California wriggled and waved like crumpled bedsheets. This was homecoming for me. I grew up on the messy suburban folds. The January warmth and the chaparral minimalism outside the car were offset by nostalgia, the scrutiny of personal faith attendant to voyages home.

When I was a boy, Lake Hodges had appeared overnight. The lake had dried long before I was born but the bridge had always been there, an anachronistic hulk, spanning a divot where cows roamed. One winter it rained for a month and there was the lake, proof that Noah had been right. I crossed the span and the road doubled back to follow the shoreline, pretty curves connecting the dry inland burb of Escondido to the coastal paradise of Del Mar. Del Dios Highway means "God's Highway." The twisting road jutted from steep canyon walls above the lake. Palatial estates rode the crest of the hills.

I left Del Dios well before the coast, turning in toward a residential neighborhood that ranked among the richest in the nation. I stopped the car to jot a note. I smelled the air outside for the first time since the airport and thought: shampoo. It was eucalyptus--that's how long I'd been gone. California, a state-sized mecca for new religious movements, was that place where plants didn't have leaves. Instead they had fronds, silver dollars, feather dusters, spines, the juicy tubules of ice plant, the thick gnarls of cacti.

I was looking for a house where thirty-nine adults had killed themselves in the name of seeking. The incident was five years old now, and I found that all my maps were wrong. The names of the nearby streets had been changed in the wake of the event. And that wasn't all. The house where the seekers took their poison had been razed. I learned all this by fumbling about, knocking on expensive doors and lying about my credentials as a journalist. I triangulated from a few sets of vague directions and found myself on a sloping street with four driveways climbing away from a dead end. Each had an automatic gate and an intercom system. One of the driveways appeared abandoned, covered with pine needles blown into curvy drifts like sand. Everything was quiet. I jumped the gate and ascended.

If California was a draw for new religious movements, then San Diego, for some reason, drew UFO groups. I'd come home to visit two such groups, each founded by an unlikely couple. One was now a ghost; the other had just experienced the failure of the prophecy that had fueled their existence for twenty-seven years.

This was still early in my study of religion--in fact, it was my first step, taken on a whim--but even so it had a Jamesian goal. If you know nothing else about the thinking of William James on religion, you might still know of James's categories of the healthy-minded folk and the sick souls. The healthy-minded type were the world's optimists, cheerful almost to a fault, and the sick souls were the pessimists, the cynical intellectual brooders. That's about what I knew of James when I first went back to California--from a mostly forgotten course in psychology--but even with just that scrap of knowledge I'd had the thought that the two UFO groups I was there to visit might neatly express James's most basic human bifurcation.

Details on the first group were hard to come by. Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles had been drawn together in the early seventies by mutual interest in pop metaphysics. Applewhite had checked into a Texas hospital where Nettles was employed as a nurse. She quickly became his Nightingale. The relationship was immaculate--Applewhite was a homosexual secure in his closet--and the belief they came to shape together combined Christian scripture, metaphysical teachings, and UFO lore.

The couple quickly turned prophet, pitching themselves as seers of a Revelation model. They took new names: Guinea and Pig, Bo and Peep, Ti and Do, or just The Two. Their first success at recruitment came in 1975 in Los Angeles. Twenty-four people abandoned their lives to fall in behind the message. An even more successful event followed in Waldport, Oregon. The earliest teachings of the group described the familiar Human Level of experience, and told of a cloud that was actually a spaceship that would take them all to the Next Level. Recruitment efforts continued through 1975 with meetings throughout the Midwest. Then they hit a snag. Two men from Oregon infiltrated the group in an attempt to find a friend who had vanished. The Two feared it was an assassination attempt, and vanished themselves.

The group struggled without them. They lost members as often as they attracted them and split into weak factions spread thin through the country. The Two reappeared in 1976, and gathered the hundred members who remained to initiate what sociologists have since called the group's "camping phase." Now the emphasis shifted toward deindividualization. Members wore uniforms and were assigned a variety of tasks, such as "fuel preparation" (cooking) and "brain exercises" (jigsaw puzzles). They were also encouraged to deny their sexuality (a number of members eventually underwent voluntary castration like early Christian ascetics). Nettles died around 1985. The camping phase continued until the early nineties, when Applewhite inherited $300,000. The group changed direction again, renting suburban homes and taking mainstream jobs. In 1994, they ran a full-page advertisement in USA Today announcing that civilization was about to be recycled. They rented a large home in Rancho Santa Fe and went high-tech, starting a webpage design company called Higher Source. The company's own webpage was called Heaven's Gate.

The Hale-Bopp comet, streaking past Earth in 1997, offered Applewhite the opportunity to claim that his spaceship-cloud had arrived. The Heaven's Gate website announced that a shadow in the wake of the comet was the ship that would carry them to the Next Level. The group had been heavily studied by sociologists in the seventies and eighties, but by the mid-nineties it had been years since anyone had paid any attention to them. It would take an anonymous phone call to the police to reveal that late in March 1997, the group had arranged their ascension to the comet by mixing phenobarbital with either applesauce or pudding and washing it down with vodka. The members were all dressed identically, and some had recorded video farewells. Each was found with five dollars and several quarters in one pocket.

Heaven's Gate was precisely the kind of group that William James's detractors have cited to criticize the voluntaristic system that James crafted to finagle his combination of belief and cynicism. But the criticism isn't fair. Not even James was willing to wipe away what he called the "wrong side of religion's account." Fanaticism, he said, was loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme, and to the charge "that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial." The problem, as James saw it, was fanaticism's conception of God. Extreme loyalty to a despotic deity lent itself to atrocity. "But as soon as the God is represented as less content on his own honor and glory," James said, "[fanaticism] ceases to be a danger." Better gods make for better religions.

But no one really knew what the Heaven's Gate followers' conception of God was in their final days, and in a world where James has mostly been set aside, the best choice seemed to be to forget the whole thing. The names of the streets in Rancho Santa Fe were changed to confuse pilgrims who would try to commune with land whose only memory was fear and latent guilt. And the house's owner bulldozed the place just in case it could remember, too.

Better to play it safe, I agreed, as I huffed up the driveway's incline past birds-of-paradise sheathed in violent weeds and flowering trees struggling for bloom. The estate sat near the top of one of those crimped California sheets, the steep grades made accessible with numerous sets of concrete stairs. Only the foundation of the house remained, a life-sized concrete blueprint spattered with weeds making a go of it in the cracks. A tennis court covered the flat at the peak of the hill, and only this and a brick gazebo had been left untouched. A swimming pool and a jacuzzi yawned empty and trapped lizards. Just before the suicides, the only contact Heaven's Gate adherents had with the outside world was a yard sale they held just before the spaceship was due to arrive. The members struck outsiders as colorless and robotic, but Applewhite himself was said to be lively, talkative, even friendly. Sociologists tend to dismiss brainwashing as the explanation for events like Heaven's Gate. It's too easy--like imagining that a haunted house can be exorcised with heavy machinery, or that history amounts to street signs. Besides, high rates of turnover suggested that membership in Heaven's Gate was entirely voluntary. As crazy as the movement seemed, there was something about the world that made it seem wackier than Applewhite's hybrid of beliefs.

I lingered for a time inside the foundation as a lonely trespasser, looking out acro...

Customer Reviews

The Devil Is a Gentleman is a MUST!
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!

Despite the title, more academic than anarchic
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.

More Biography Than Exploration
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.