I. INTRODUCTION AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

At the time of his death in Pasadena, California in January, 1986, Herbert W. Armstrong,  founder and Pastor-General of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG), could lay claim to having built one of the largest religious media organizations in the world. The World Tomorrow television program could be seen on 300 stations while The Plain Truth magazine circulation—both of which grew out of Armstrong’s media efforts in Depression-ravaged 1933-1934-- stood at nearly 8,000,00. “By 1985, the year before Armstrong’s death, Arbitron ranked the Word Tomorrow as the number one religious program in the United States—accessible to 98.8% of the American population.” 1

            These were extraordinary efforts considering that membership in the WCG at its peak had never exceeded 127,000 people and that Armstrong himself had been consistently evaluated as unorthodox and even heretical by the Christian mainstream. “I think Herbert Armstrong was an evil man, egotistical beyond belief, “ William Martin of Rice University told a National Public Radio audience on 17 August 1986, the day after Armstrong’s death. An Anglican rector told the writer in 1998: “Herbert Armstrong reminded me of a Renaissance Pope.” To religious watchdog Walter Martin in the 1965, 1977 editions of The Kingdom of the Cults, the Armstrong movement was “gaining momentum throughout the world,” a facet of Herbert Armstrong’s “tremendous zeal, tireless energy, writing, speaking, and promotional ability.” 2

Such mixed reviews could be multiplied endlessly. The point is that the WCG Armstrong founded was a significant and growing part of the North American and world religious landscape from the 1950s through to the 1980s. Nevertheless, the accusation of a man “egotistical beyond belief” invites the attention of development psychologists, especially in regard to religious founders. This paper attempts a psychohistory of Herbert Armstrong by fusing the insights of Erik Erikson and his Eight Stages of Life model with James W. Fowler’s Six Stages of Faith hypothesis as informed by the critiques of James E. Loder. Loder’s five-step transformational model of human development will be supplemented with insights from H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. Daniel Levinson and other sources will also be cited along with comments from Americans and popular journals to round out the Armstrong impact. That impact remains an important religious story to this day. Herbert Armstrong left himself wide open to the charge of narcissistic egocentricity by his repeated claim that his particular version of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God had not been preached for 1900 years but had begun afresh with him in the 1930s. Other key developmental indices were his gradual acceptance of the title “apostle” attached to him by some of his supporters and his flirting with the idea of being an “end-time Elijah,” especially in his later years. 3

Yet, in spite of definite “maverick” theological ideas, Herbert Armstrong was an American phenomenon, a Horatio Alger figure in the field of religion, a free-wheeling entrepreneur and innovator, a man one critic once tentatively compared to Dwight L. Moody. Contemporaries who heaped honors upon Herbert Armstrong included King Leopold of Belgium, King Hussein of Jordan, the State of Israel and the brother of Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Armstrong climaxed his remarkable life in his adopted city of Pasadena, California by building a $12,00,000 concert hall—the Ambassador Auditorium, opened in 1974. This ornate structure hosted artists such as Luciano Pavarotti and Valdimir Horowitz. In the last year of his life, in 1985, the Ambassador College campus became a venue for the state visit of the Queen of Thailand to the United States. The Queen was another Armstrong acquaintance from his relentless worldwide travels.

Herbert Armstrong was thus a man of many parts, an innovator in applying effective advertising and marketing techniques to the field of popular evangelism, especially in post-World War Two America. In the words of a fair-minded critic, Professor Joseph Hopkins of Westminster College, in 1974: “[T]he Armstrong Empire has already written one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of American religion.” 4 Thanks to Herbert Armstrong’s prodigious writings across seven decades it is possible to examine his psychological development through the eight stages outlined by Erikson. Armstrong’s full-fledged two-volume autobiography (1986, 1987) runs to 1305 pages. This fulfills Bruce Mazlish’s dictum in Varieties of Pscycho-History that the subject studied be one of importance, that there be “sufficient written materials,” and that the subject himself be “psychologically aware.” This paper also incorporates important reminiscences by competent professionals who interacted with Armstrong throughout the years of his highest achievement, years which began in earnest with the founding of the Ambassador College campus in 1947 (interestingly, the same month and year Fuller Seminary opened—October, 1947).  

 

ENDNOTES