Buck County Courier Times: Sunday, September 25, 1994, page A1
They Worried about witches and wackos.
So, vigilantly, Bill Park and his 20 Warriors for Christ watched over this weekend's happenings at the Philadelphia Conference on Cults, the Occult and Word-Faith in Feasterville.
"It's a cult conference -- you never know if things could get out of hand," said Parks, a retired Philadelphia police officer who kept a firm grip on his walkie-talkie and a steady eye on the door.
Actually, it was the cult conference -- billed as the biggest Christian conference on cults ever on the East Coast. It drew about 1,000 Christian counter-cultists from across the country.
Their aim: to educate and network, but most importantly, to fight the growing presence of cults nationwide.
And on Friday, they didn't have to look far to start fighting.
"Praise Bob!" Dr. K'Taden Legume strolled into the cafeteria at high noon, and everywhere, heads turned.
Maybe it was the clerical collar. Most likely it was the tattoos and black leather vest. Whatever the reason, Legume didn't care. He didn't come to cause trouble -- he wanted, simply put, to "give them a look in the ugly mirror."
"A lot of churches, they insist that they are right and all other churches are wrong," said the 30-year-old Legume, an admitted cultist from Delaware County. "In our case, we would have to say the same thing."
That case is the Church of the Subgenius. Its god: J.R. "Bob" Dobbs.
"Bob was a salesman in the 1950s," Legume explained during a break in the conference Friday. "One day, he was working on a TV set, the wiring went wrong and he was zapped. He had a vision, was seized up and taken before Jehovah One."
Jehovah One, for all those unversed in the finer points of belief in Bob, is the same Jehovah Christians believe in, except that Subgenius followers think Jehovah was an extraterrestrial.
Jehovah One gave Bob the "Sacred Prescriptures," Legume said. And what do they say?
"The message of the Prescriptures is that we're right and they're wrong," Legume said, gesturing to the nattily dressed mainstream Christian ministers eating lunch around him. "The conspiracy of normalcy took (slacking off) away from everyone, and Bob wants us all to have slack back."
It sounds silly -- and it is, Legume admitted. It spoofs much of what mainstream religions preach; Bob's wife, Connie, is known as the "Anti-Virgin," and Subgenius worshippers go to "devivals" instead of "revivals."
But the 40-year-old faith, headquartered in Texas, is serious and counts 75,000 to 100,000 members worldwide, he said.
Such numbers are what kept worried conference participants nodding their heads and shouting, "Amen!" and "Praise God!" as speakers denounced the evils of cults. The three-day conference held at the Calvary Chapel of Lower Southampton offered about 50 workshops on everything from Satanism to mind-control. "Cults are still a tremendous problem," said Bill Alnor, a Calvary Chapel staffer and president of the anti-cult Christian Outreach of Philadelphia. "We get people out of cults every day."
Bucks boasts its share of cults -- most notably, a large population of witches in the New Hope area, Alnor said. Conference-goers defined cults rather broadly to include televangelism, the Mormon Church, Islam, Scientology and non- Christian faiths.
"It's been a problem for an eternity and probably will be forever," said Pat Ryan, a Philadelphia counter-cult counselor and former member of a transcendental meditation cult in which followers believed they could fly.
"But that doesn't mean it's a lost cause -- cancer's existed forever, but we try to prevent it and help the people who have it. That's what we've got to do with cults."