From Manson to the Master

The indictment of Charles Manson-follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme for the attempted assassination of President Ford shows the continuing influence of Manson on certain members of his clan. But for former clan member Charles “Tex” Watson, now serving a life sentence for the 1969 Sharon Tate-LaBianca murder spree, Manson’s influence is completely ended. In May, 1975, Watson committed his life to Jesus Christ, and today he apparently is living a dramatically changed life.

In an interview at California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, Watson said, “I was once enslaved to Charles Manson, but now I am a slave to Jesus Christ. As his slave, I have really been liberated. Even these walls do not imprison me, because Christ has set me free.”

The twenty-nine-year-old, lean, clean-cut six-footer was radiant as he told of his recent experience of receiving God’s forgiveness and sensing his love. He says he now desires to serve Christ and win others to him in prison.

“Christ is all there is for me. In him I have salvation, justification, and sanctification,” said Watson. He presently serves as an acting deacon in the prison’s Protestant church and is a chapel staff worker under Chaplain Stanley McGuire.

Fellow Christians in the California Men’s Colony say that since Watson received Christ under the prison ministry of a visiting chaplain last May, his life has been decidedly different. Together with other Christian inmates, Watson regularly studies the Bible, participates in prayer sessions, and seeks to witness for Christ. Given a copy of Helter-Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s best-seller about the Manson clan murders, Watson has not taken time to read it. “I’m no longer interested in anything about Manson,” he said. “I would rather read the Bible.”

Watson openly admits his active participation in killing seven people in the Tate-LaBianca attacks, and he believes justice was meted out in his first-degree murder conviction. Sentenced to die, he awaited his fate on San Quentin’s death row until a Supreme Court decision on capital punishment saved him from death. He says that through Christ he has life for all eternity.

Watson alleges that Charles Manson is demon-possessed, and he asserts that he himself came under the same evil power when he submitted to Manson’s leadership in 1969. Manson’s intense personality and ability to assess and influence other people’s characters—especially when they were under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs—enabled him to bring his clan members to the place of willingness to obey him implicitly and even die for him.

Watson states that his first contact with the clan leader occurred when Beach Boy singer Brian Wilson introduced him to Manson after Watson had picked up the hitchhiking singer in Malibu, California. (Wilson was not available immediately for comment.) Watson soon thereafter became a member of his drug-oriented, free-sex clan that grew in number to twenty-five women and five men. (Time reports that the Manson family now consists of sixty men and women, mostly in their mid-twenties.) Together they lived in a desert commune where such drugs as LSD, mescaline, and speed were daily fare. They listened to Manson spout an apocalyptic view of history highlighted by a final black-white racial conflict. In an apparent scheme to trigger his envisioned racial war, Manson ordered Watson and four of the clan’s women to massacre the inhabitants of a house rented to movie actress Sharon Tate by Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day. While Manson stayed at the ranch, the four set forth, high on LSD, to carry out their leader’s plan.

Watson recounts that when he entered the house he kicked a man asleep on a couch in the head. The startled man, Voityck Frokowski, asked, “Who are you?” Watson says he replied, “I’m a devil and I’m here to do his work.” The butchery then began. Watson said all the while he felt as if he were “floating” and experienced no guilt during the mayhem. The following night Watson and other clan members attacked and killed the LaBiancas, with Manson present but not active in the actual killings.

Weeks later Watson fled from the clan’s ranch and flew home to Texas. But Manson’s influence remained so strong that he traveled back to California to connect with the clan leader. He could not locate him and again returned home. Soon thereafter law-enforcement officers broke the case, and Watson found himself facing a first-degree murder charge.

Trials, conviction, the death sentence, and prison life made Watson reach out for help. In May, 1975, he found the help he needed as he committed his life to Jesus Christ at a prison gospel service conducted by broadcaster “Chaplain Ray” Hoekstra. He had known a church background as a boy in the Copesville, Texas, Methodist Church. But this year, he says, at the age of twenty-nine, Christ completely changed his life. Part of the change, he adds, is a new ability to love God and man. Watson now devotes himself to the ministry he believes God has given him in prison. Hopeful that one day he may gain release, he aspires to become a Christian minister to youth.

He would like to tell “Squeaky” Fromme and other clan members of his liberating faith in Christ, but he is not sure they would be open to his witness. “The Holy Spirit alone,” he affirms, “could enable them to understand the meaning of faith in Christ.”

Chicago Crisis

Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), the group associated with the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Action, may have been sidetracked at the group’s third national workshop meeting last month. Some of the eighty participants gloomily predicted the group’s demise.

The three-day meeting was to have focused on the theological basis for social action. There were speeches, papers on historical models of Christian social action, and testimonies of personal involvement.

Feelings erupted on the second day, however, when minister Bill Bentley lashed out at the group for being too white-minded and for failing to consider a black model of social action. Bentley, pastor of a small Chicago church, is president of the National Black Evangelical Association. He enumerated other race-related grievances. A shouting match ensued between him and Ira Galloway, a Methodist pastor who formerly headed the United Methodist evangelism department.

“What can we do?” asked sociologist David Moberg. “That’s your problem,” Bentley huffed.

In a rip-roaring business session the ESA planning committee was dissolved in favor of a new one consisting of four white males (Ron Sider, Richard Mouw, John Alexander, and Rufus Jones), four white females (Evon Bacchus, Lucille Dayton, Judy Hall, and Karen Michaelson), and eight blacks. Bentley and a few others were to select the blacks.

Sitting quietly through it all was controversial editor Jim Wallis of the Post-American, one of the ESA’s early prime movers. He had announced earlier that he was quitting his leadership position because the ESA was becoming too structured and institutional. He, his paper, and his Chicago Coalition community plan to move to Washington, D. C., soon.

Several others said privately that they too planned to drop out of ESA. Some allege that Bentley is still fighting the battles of the 1960s and is trying to drag the ESA down to his level. ESA chairman Ron Sider of Messiah College hopes that “the dying brings resurrection.” Time will tell.

Love China

More than 400 persons interested in spreading the Gospel in Communist China gathered from nineteen nations last month in Manila and discussed strategy, swapped news and rumors, and exchanged samples of literature. The conference, Love China ’75, was convened by eighteen Christian organizations having a special interest in Chinese evangelism. Bible smuggler “Brother Andrew” Vander Bihl of Holland was honorary chairman.

One of the main speakers was David Aikman, Hong Kong correspondent for Time. He predicted that the Maoist regime for image-polishing reasons might soon invite a group of American evangelicals to visit the People’s Republic.

If so, they might discover what United Methodist executive Herman Will learned on a recent visit. He said he was told by a Chinese churchman that despite the breakup of institutional religion small Christian groups meet in homes, schools, and even club rooms of factories. They are wary of contacts with foreigners, however, because of the anti-foreign campaign of the violent “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. (Worship in the few remaining church buildings was ended during this period).

The churchman, a former Episcopal bishop and theological educator, told Will that although there are no formal church structures, a non-denominational fellowship is functioning, communications are developing among the various groups, and a lay ministry is emerging. The majority of Christians are thought to be elderly.

Some 13,000 missionaries and Christian workers fled or were expelled from China in 1949, and the organized church was virtually extinguished in the succeeding years.

Religion In Transit

Evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman and her former administrator, Paul Bartholomew, have settled out of court in Los Angeles for an unspecified sum. Bartholomew had sued Miss Kuhlman for $430,000, alleging breach of contract, removal of personal records without authorization, and the like (August 8 issue, page 35). Under the arrangement, neither is permitted to discuss the matter, but Bartholomew said, “There have been no apologies.”

A District of Columbia court dismissed a case brought by a Connecticut couple against Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Claiming the church had used mind-control techniques to hold their eighteen-year-old daughter Wendy against her will, Mr. and Mrs. Elton Helander had asked that she be returned to them. The judge ruled that the couple did not prove their claim. Wendy abruptly rejoined the group early this year after a deprogramming attempt by cult foe Ted Patrick apparently failed.

The Unification Church opened a seminary on a 245-acre spread it bought near Barrytown, New York, last year for $1.5 million. Fifty-seven students from ten countries signed up for the opening semester of the two-year course, which offers a Master of Religious Education (M.R.E.) degree. Four of the five faculty members have traditional-church backgrounds: Thomas Bosleeper (Union Seminary), Reformed Church in America; Warren Lewis (New York Theological Seminary), Disciples of Christ; Sebastian Matczak (Sorbonne) and Frank Elmo (Fordham), both Catholics. Boslooper is teaching biblical studies.

A recent Gallup Poll shows that 40 per cent of Americans believe it is not morally wrong for an incurably ill person to commit suicide.

In an informal survey by U. S. Catholic, 57 per cent of the respondents said they would approve the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood.

Bill Thomas, an American black who is the pastor of a French-speaking Baptist congregation in Brussels, is conducting an evangelistic campaign this month in Berlin—reportedly the first time a black has held such meetings in a German church. During the recent Eurofest ’75 he baptized two South African whites in his church, a service witnessed by nine others from Cape Town.

The Chicago-based 71,000-member Evangelical Covenant Church of America exceeded its $7.5 million expansion-fund goal, with reports not yet received from 100 of the denomination’s 532 congregations. The amount was pledged by about 20,000 members and is in addition to the $21.5 million contributed for the regular 1974 budget.

Some 350 delegates attended the biennial convention of Dignity, an organization of Catholic homosexuals devoted to creating greater acceptance of homosexuals in the church and to providing pastoral care for them. The Boston-based group has chapters in forty cities, according to Holy Cross priest Thomas Oddo, Dignity’s national secretary.

A three-member military panel ruled that Air Force sergeant Leonard P. Matlovich as an admitted homosexualis unfit to serve in the military. President Robert V. Moss of the 1.8-million-member United Church of Christ filed an affidavit in his defense. It reflected official UCC positions upholding civil liberties of homosexuals. Moss also suggested that the Bible’s “negative judgments of homosexuality” may not be meant for our time.

Melodyland, the charismatic church and seminary complex in Anaheim, California, has petitioned the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the Melodyland trademark registered in August by Motown Record Corporation in Detroit. Motown, which is using the Melodyland name on its rock and country western record lines, rejected an earlier request by the church to cease use of the name. Pastor Ralph Wilkerson says the church paid $210,000 for exclusive right to the trademark when it purchased the bankrupt Melodyland theater for $1.2 milion in 1969. Some of Motown’s records deal with themes of vulgarity and promiscuity—“diametrically opposite to [our] recordings, publications, and community activities,” declares Wilkerson.

The closing of the Cokesbury book store in New York City on October 1 ended 171 years of Methodist retail book-selling in the city. Declining sales, rising costs, and the need for an ever-increasing subsidy ($85,000 this year) were blamed. Cokesbury meanwhile opened stores in three smaller cities, bringing the number of its retail outlets to thirty.

Guru Maharaj Ji, the luxury-loving teen-age leader of the Divine Light sect, lost another disciple. Mahatma Vijayanand walked out amid a flurry of press releases. He said fifteen cars are too many for anyone, and he also objected to the motorcycles, motor-boats, plus hotel rooms, and elegant meals while “people in India are starving.” Sour grapes, suggested the guru’s press spokesman, who indicated the Mahatma was upset at being assigned to work in a Divine Light grocery store.

POETIC LICENSE

California is one of the states offering custom license plates for autos, and a number of church people are taking advantage of the offer to get their message across, according to a Religious News Service story. For example, someone displays JN 316 on his plate. Dick Mills of Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim asserts his trinitarian belief with 3N ONE. Evangelist Jim Hampton has 4 R LORD and a Santa Barbara nun displays 4 JESUS. Businessman-author George Otis signed up for BIBLE, and a Los Angeles rabbi sports TORAH.

A Presbyterian layman in Tustin exhorts HARK YE. Lutheran clergyman Quentin P. Garman of San Diego identifies himself as PASTOR, and Eoiscopal priest John Gill of North Hollywood has FATHER on his plate. REL ED may not make sense to many unless they know the car belongs to Virgie Murray, religion editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel.

Finally, there’s the plate belonging to Lutheran pastor John Sorenson of El Cajon: O MY GOD.

DEATHS

LEWIS WEBSTER JONES, 75, Episcopal lay leader, a former president of Rutgers University and of the National Conference of Christians and Jews; in Sarasota, Florida, of pneumonia.

GEORGE KETCHAM, 82, Prominent Presbyterian layman and long-time head of the nation’s biggest fund-raising organization (with many church accounts); in Pittsburgh.

OTTO PAUL KRETZMANN, 74, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod leader and former president and chancellor of Valparaiso University, America’s largest Lutheran school; in Valparaiso, Indiana.

World Scene

Leaders of the 209,000-member Evangelical (Lutheran) Church Mekane Yesus in Ethiopia rejected proposals for a missionary moratorium but affirmed that future planning should reflect the goal of “self-reliance.” Citing widespread confusion about Christian socialism, they released a statement affirming that the Gospel is God’s power that saves from eternal damnation and from exploitation and oppression for his service. It can “never be replaced by any of the ideologies invented by men throughout the centuries,” they declared.

President Idi Amin of Uganda, a Muslim, met with Pope Paul last month in a meeting described as cordial. The Pope said many gracious things about Uganda but had no direct praise for Amin, who expelled sixteen Italian Catholic missionaries in July. Amin accused the missionaries of writing nasty things about him in letters to their superiors. Having discussed earlier the dispute with Italian and Vatican officials, Amin assured the Pope that foreign missionaries would always be welcome in Uganda.

Bishop Laszlo Ravasz of Budapest, recalled from retirement to head the Hungarian Reformed Church for a brief time after the 1956 revolution, died in early August at age 92. News of his death was apparently delayed. Ravasz was harassed by both Nazi and Communist rulers for his strong stand against oppression. In retirement he produced a modern translation of the Hungarian New Testament.

Explo ’74, Campus Crusade for Christ’s evangelism training conference in Seoul last year, has done something for the Korean churches that participated, according to Crusade findings. Attendance is up. One church youth group has grown from eight to 150 who attend regularly, and a third of these attend a weekly all-night prayer meeting. Korean Crusade staffers have hosted more than 20,000 in monthly training conferences, according to Crusade sources.

During the ten-year-long New Life for All program in northern Nigeria, the Sudan United Mission-related Church of Christ in the Sudan has recorded a growth of 400 per cent. New churches since the early 1960s number 660. More than 1,100 communities have preaching centers. Constituents have trebled to 153,000, and baptized members have quadrupled to nearly 27,000.

The Salvation Army works in eighty-two countries, according to its 1975 yearbook. The Army lists nearly 17,000 active officers, publishes 114 periodicals from Australia to Zaire, and maintains numerous social rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and schools around the world. In 1973 it fed 2.6 million people at 213 food distribution centers.

University students have the highest incidence of suicide in West Germany, according to a study by a University of Heidelberg theologian.

Presbyterian theologian J. Davis McCaughey, 61, will become the first president of the proposed Uniting Church of Australia when it is launched June 2, 1976. The merger of the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in Australia is to take place on that date.

One of the latest groups to apply for membership in the World Evangelical Fellowship is the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The PCEC is composed of independent churches, nine denominations with more than 1.000 churches, service agencies, and eighteen Bible schools and colleges.

Seven denominations in Finland have 522 foreign missionaries working in fifty-one countries, according to a Finnish church report. Most of the missionaries are Lutherans (253) and Pentecostal (211).

British Methodist leaders are concerned. Membership is now 557,000, down nearly 44,000 in the last three years, and there were losses of about 50,000 in the preceding triennium.

A new hymnbook with 202 hymns in twenty-five languages is being prepared by the World Council of Churches for introduction at the WCC’s Fifth Assembly in Nairobi in November.

Christian Aid, a leading British relief agency, reports a record income of more than $9 million in its last fiscal year.

Alcoholism is on the rise in Switzerland. There are 130,000 registered alcoholics, and alcohol figures centrally in 23 per cent of all divorces and 30 per cent of male psychiatric admissions, according to a recent study. Alcohol is blamed for at least ten deaths every day in the little country.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.