The Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe

Lot and His Daughters (John Smith, ca 1720) -- a depiction of the Bible's most famous incestuous coupling

During the early 1990s, in a downtown Los Angeles retirement complex, a former United Church of Christ minister carried on a lonely battle against the ultimate sexual taboo.

Carl York Schmidt, founder and bishop of the four-member Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe, believed he could overturn what he saw as humanity's woeful ignorance and super­stition about kinship sexual relations.  Himself a married heterosexual, Schmidt claimed that both Scriptural and scientific evidence supported his contention that incest is harmless.

And he thought that the world was ready for his controversial message.  A Harvard Divinity School graduate and former minister in the United Church of Christ, the 80-year old Bishop Schmidt told the author he'd operated openly for many years, conversing with total strangers about his Church.

Said Schmidt, "I was surprised to find a Spanish man in the senior complex I live in -- a college-educated man, I think -- who, when I mentioned that incest does no harm, said, 'Of course not!  Anybody who does any reading in this should know it'. 

"I was in the hospital the other day, and I happened to show somebody my calling card, and she said, 'Well, that's interesting. It is true that there's no harm in incest, certainly in most cases.'"

Why was he so optimistic?  For one thing, he had already lived to see one supposedly universal and timeless sexual taboo lose most of its power.

Originally his ministry worked to legitimize homosexuality alone, back when same-sex relations were still looked on with the same kind of revulsion and horror reserved for same-family relations these days.

A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Schmidt had taken a doctorate of Theology from Harvard University, and had gone on to teach at Nashville’s Lipscomb University, and serve at the pulpit of the United Church of Christ. When the US entered World War II, the 30 year-old Schmidt preached against the conflict in the name of non-violence, and refused to join the military, or support its efforts.

Around this time, he began to doubt the truth of the Christian faith in which he’d been raised. As he said later, “I have studied the Bible carefully. My sober conclusions are that it was written by several people over many years and there is no God….I was a strong Christian and I was baptized when I was 14 years old. I have read the New Testament 37 times and Old Testament three times besides Bible studies. My reasons for discounting God are many.”

Schmidt pointed to the inconsistencies of Scripture, and the seemingly uncaring – if not sadistic – acts of the Biblical God, and maintained that the Good Book was exclusively the product of men. No Divine Being could possibly be behind such a mass of contradictions, cruelties, and absurdities, he maintained.

Yet Schmidt was still a trained minister who felt a call to preach – even if his message was essentially Godless and humanistic. In the 1950s, the only American organization with Christian credentials that could accommodate such a perspective was the Unitarian Universalist Church, and Schmidt moved to Los Angeles and took the local UU Church’s pulpit. 

A landmark to the Southland’s leftist/alternative community that hosted a never-ending parade of activists and heretics through its portals, the First UU Church was graced during Schmidt's tenure by a young, talented, male organist who was beloved by one and all. That organist was Bob Hull, cofounder of the Mattachine Society, an organization that discretely advocated for gay rights in the closeted pre-Stonewall era.

Disenchanted with the Unitarians, whom he believed “had (not only) lost faith in God but…had lost faith in humanity too,” Reverend Schmidt left Los Angeles for several years, and resumed his UCC ministry, albeit as a somewhat-closeted unbeliever. When he returned for a visit in 1971, he found out that Hull had committed suicide over an unrequited love affair.  It turned out that the young Hull had been in love with another young man, who'd gone and married a woman. 

This startled the Reverend.  He wasn't naïve – he knew about the games boys played with each other in adolescence.  But he was astounded that those feelings could persist into adulthood, and create such shame and pain that people could kill themselves when their desires were frustrated. 

Returning to his UCC ministry in Denver, Colorado, Schmidt asked a high-ranking "conference minister" if the homosexual sex act was contrary to Christian teachings.  Schmidt was stunned when his superior told him that being gay was acceptable under UCC doctrine, and that he might well profit by setting up a ministry to reach gays with the Christian message of love and tolerance.

Intrigued by this possibility, Schmidt studied the Bible for references to homosexuality.  Though the Old Testament had numerous condemnations of same-sex relations (particularly in Leviticus), only one passage in the New Testament -- Romans 1:26 -- seemed to look askance on the practice.  Reading the Four Gospels, and noting how often Jesus Christ's teachings seemed to supersede or reverse Moses', Schmidt decided that gay sex acts -- like non-kosher foods and other Pentateuchal peccadillos -- were really forbidden only to the Jews.  The New Testament made them okay for Christians.

While studying Genesis, Schmidt began to realize that an even bigger taboo was presented in a much different light than he'd suspected.  Researching the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and finding that the townspeople's "strange sin" was mistreatment of visitors rather than homosexual intercourse, Schmidt began to wonder about Lot and his daughters.  Here was a clear-cut instance of a real no-no -- incest -- being practiced under Jehovah's seeming approval.  Granted, Lot's daughters had gotten Dad drunk and seduced him, but no condemnation occurred.  What was going on?

Reading further, Schmidt found incest in the lives of some of the Bible's greatest figures.  In Genesis 20:12, Abraham married his half-sister Sarah, and instead of being damned by Jehovah like so many other Old Testament characters, went on to found the Jewish tribal-nation.  Later on, another product of an incestuous marriage was none other than Moses, whose father Amram married his aunt.

Even the story of Adam and Eve implied kinship coupling. If Eve was the mother of all living, where did Cain and Seth's wives come from? 

Schmidt felt he was onto something big, and expanded his ministry to include people in incestuous relationships.  Of course he realized such couplings were illegal, and made it clear that he did not advocate breaking the law.  But he felt that the laws against the practice were no different than the laws against "sodomy": statutes grounded in ignorance of true Biblical content, as well as in 19th Century Victorian anti-sex pseudoscience, and the general prejudice against "the different" of any society. 

Schmidt joined the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Church as an associate member, hoping to learn from their practices how to form a pro-homosexual ministry.  But the onetime Unitarian was dismayed by what he saw as an attempt to structure theology around same-sex relations.  He felt that religious convictions were a private decision, and that his mission was concerned more about people's behavior than their beliefs.

Exploring Denver's ecclesiastical options, Schmidt fell in with Mark Harding's Catholic Life Church.  An independent "Old Catholic" bishop with a checkered, controversial career, Harding accepted Schmidt's pro-homosexual cause and took him on as an assistant, but tensions between the two men eventually produced a falling-out and dissociation. 

Rev. Carl York Schmidt (r), around the time he founded Denver's Homosexual Church of the Universe

Soon, Schmidt formed his own group – allegedly with the blessing and support of the United Christian Church.  He named it "The Homosexual Church of the Universe”, and worked to legitimize Christian homosexuality throughout the 1970s in Colorado.

In a state still notorious for anti-gay sentiment, Schmidt found his ministry both rewarding and highly controversial.  He claimed to have received over 60,000 phone calls during his nine-year Denver tenure; the sheer volume of interest made him wonder if the famous Kinseyan "ten percent" figure was, if anything, a gross underestimate of society's gay presence.  He was on numerous radio and TV talk shows as well, parrying attacks by Fundamentalist Christians both behind the mike and over the phone lines.

Schmidt also found himself at the center of an embarrassing sex scandal. In January 1972 he was arrested, and accused of fellating two underage Denver boys, one of whom was a mere fourteen years old. Although he didn’t admit his guilt, the sexagenarian divinity defended intergenerational sex as “healthy” in The Advocate, the gay-oriented newspaper that reported on the case. When the case came to trial, Schmidt pleaded nolo contendere, and got a suspended sentence and $300 fine.

Schmidt returned to Los Angeles in 1982.  While teaching at Los Angeles City College, he slowly shifted the group's emphasis to incest, since he realized that homosexuality had become far more acceptable in American society since he'd started his ministry eleven years earlier.  Though the AIDS crisis had caused some backlash, Schmidt believed that gays and lesbians had more than enough large, powerful groups working on their behalf. 

So he began to concentrate on demythifying incest, as he had homosexuality, and renamed his ministry “The Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe”.  Schmidt was careful to explain that he defined "incest" as marriage between closely-related, consenting adults. He had only pity and scorn for child molesters and rapists. 

As he put it, "Coitus by force is rape, but it's still coitus. Like both kinship marriage and molestation, the same act of incest takes place, but they're two different things."  (So much have the two been confused that Schmidt had considered changing his church's name to "The Church of Kinship Marriage," to avoid "incest"'s child-exploitation connotations.)

The Los Angeles incest ministry had been much more low-profile than the Denver homosexuality mission.  For one thing, close-kin sexual relations were far more controversial.  "There are many, many people who agree with us," Schmidt said, "but they don't dare show their faces to the public.  They'd be accused of being incestuous; there'd be calls for investigations, bad publicity, etc., so they just don't dare." 

But Schmidt never acted as if he had anything to hide.  He was aboveboard and public in promoting the Church, insisting that he has never advocated actually committing incest, a felony in most states.  The Church's phone number was even listed in the Los Angeles phone book's Yellow Pages!

One regular on the Church hotline was an anonymous non-member who gleefully spun tales of a long-standing affair with own his mother.  Schmidt didn't know the man's identity, nor did he want to.  If he did, he would have been legally obliged to turn him in to the police as a felon.  All he could do for such callers was to suggest legal alternatives, such as moving to countries where kinship marriage was not punished as severely, if at all.

Church services were held on Sundays at Schmidt's downtown apartment.  Usually there were only one or two attendees present. Meetings included a communion ritual with water -- the "universal element" -- instead of wine, and the singing of a pro-gay hymn that Schmidt composed to the tune of "America the Beautiful": "For love of man for man/All thee we rise and stand...." 

Even though his ministry languished in obscurity, Bishop Schmidt felt that the times would eventually catch up with his controversial ideas, and that kinship marriage would be regarded as the same kind of legitimate and -- possibly even mainstream-church approved -- lifestyle option that homosexuality had become. The octogenarian Bishop believed that California, the West's traditional launching pad for leading-edge ideas, was an ideal place to de-demonize the ultimate sexual taboo, and maintained his lonely mission through his eighties.

Like so many other liberal Christian ministers, Schmidt incorporated teachings from other faiths into his Church.  He favored Buddhism, possibly the only major world faith that didn't specifically condemn incest.  Bishop Schmidt advocated Buddhist-style meditation, citing the faith's almost complete lack of crusades, witch-hunts or jihads as a natural result of the inner peace the practice produced.

Schmidt as Buddhist monk Nashville Samitha, circa 2000.

True to his convictions, Schmidt eventually took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, joining North Hollywood's Sarathchandra Buddhist Center as a monk sometime in the early 1990s. He took on the monastic name Nashville Samitha, as a tribute to both his birthplace and his original surname, which had often been Anglicized as Smith.  

Venerable Schmidt/Samitha spent the rest of his life at the Center, passing into the Void on June 7, 2005 at the age of 94. He left nothing save for his earthly remains, which he donated to the USC Medical School, and a legacy as the onetime primate of one of the strangest religious sects to ever grace California.

Sources/Links
Bishop Carl York Schmidt, interview with the author, Los Angeles, 1991

Jayawardhana, Walter. "Buddhist Monk Turned Former Christian Minister [sic] Passed Away in North Hollywood." LankaWeb.com, n.d.

Hughes, David. "Profile: Wallace de Ortega Maxey." The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Religious Archives Network, 9/11/2013.

The Universal Life Church

Universal Life Church founder Kirby J. Hensley
at the Church's headquarters in Modesto, California

Modesto, California is probably one of the last places anyone would expect to host a religious revolution.

The smog-shrouded, agrarian Central Valley city, famed mostly as the setting of former resident George Lucas’ movie American Graffiti, and for boasting America’s highest rate of auto thefts, doesn’t exactly lend itself to images of divine revelation or spiritual rebellion. There is no great Castle Church upon whose door a potential Martin Luther could nail a litany of protests. None of the low, brushy hills surrounding the town look as if they could yield ancient golden plates of secret teachings to a would-be Joseph Smith Jr.

Yet this unlikely setting for religious upheaval was the home of an equally implausible spiritual leader, church founder and self-confessed “con man” named Kirby J. Hensley. A balding, jug-eared Appalachian transplant, the unlettered and plain-spoken former Pentecostal preacher created the Universal Life Church – a sect which may have revolutionized the concept of ministry, and religious belief itself, more than any other group in modern Western history.

For the last half-century, the Universal Life Church has granted legal, legitimate ministerial credentials to all who ask, for free. No specific beliefs are required of its clergy – Church ministers profess creeds ranging from fundamentalist Christianity, to neo-Paganism, to outright atheism, to idiosyncratic and unclassifiable faiths. Too, the ULC has helped its ministers establish local parishes under its jurisdictions with zero doctrinal requirements and little oversight, and has granted countless thousands of honorary Doctorates of Divinity and other titles to donors.

At this writing, the ULC has ordained over twenty million people, making it by far the largest sect to emerge from California. It’s also one of the most controversial, largely because the ULC’s free-ordination policy allows anybody to claim a legal ministerial title without training or education, but with its status and perks – including setting up tax-exempt ministries, many of which bear little resemblance to traditional “churches.” This last activity has kept the ULC in the courts for decades, fighting for its status as a legitimate religious group and a tax-exempt organization – a situation that continues to this day.

When the Universal Life Church first appeared in 1962, founder Kirby J. Hensley was already fifty years old, and had logged a rich array of spiritual and secular experience. Born on July 23, 1911 in Low Gap, North Carolina, Hensley and his six siblings were raised in a two-room log cabin. From an early age Hensley was hard-headed and temperamental; he had little patience with school, and dropped out before learning to read and write. At fourteen he ran away from Low Gap, and drifted across Twenties America as a hobo, riding freight trains.

Kirby J. Hensley, circa 1970. 

During this period, Hensley somehow got ordained as a Baptist preacher and took up street-corner evangelizing. But his homiletic style was a bit too wild for the straitlaced denomination – years later, he joked that he preached his first sermon “under the influence of the Spirit – White Lightning”! Hensley found Pentecostalism and its informal, emotive style much more to his liking, and affiliated with the Pentecostal Church of God.

In 1930 Hensley settled in Bakersfield, California, where he married and had two daughters. He worked as a farmer and carpenter, invested in real estate, and built two churches for the Church of God. Around this time, he also hired a woman to read the entire Bible to him, and committed the Good Book to his preliterate memory. From then on, Hensley claimed, he could recite all of the New Testament and much of the Old verbatim. (In later years, he would listen continuously to tape-recorded renditions of the King James Bible.)

When Hensley’s marriage fell apart, he went on a soul-searching journey that ended with a near-fatal car crash, and a visit to a mysterious woman who told him to forget the past, and forge on to a new future. He returned to his childhood home in Low Gap, and met and married Lida Gouge, who would be his wife for the next 48 years. The newlyweds then relocated to Detroit, Michigan.

Although Hensley tried to settle down in his new life, the preaching bug still rode him. One night a Pentecostal pastor and his flock frog-marched Hensley out of a meeting when he preached that the Old Testament heroes and heroines were fallible mortals whose Biblical misadventures could teach much about human nature. Although the pastor later apologized and invited the maverick preacher to join his church, Hensley refused, perhaps sensing that his Gospel wasn’t quite ready for the orthodox-Christian prime time.

Hensley & his wife of 48 years, Lida Gouge

But Hensley wasn’t alone among American Pentecostals. Strange currents were sweeping through the American movement in the 1950s, chief among them the so-called “Latter Rain Revival.” One faction of the Revival emphasized an optimistic eschatological theology called “The Reconciliation and Restitution of All Things”, where universal salvation of humanity and the Kingdom of God would shortly be established on Earth. More radical elements within the movement also promoted allegorical interpretations of Scripture, where Heaven and Hell were seen as states of consciousness rather than actual places, and where “the Second Coming of Christ” was a metaphysical and individualized gnosis, rather than a literal and historic event. Some even explored Eastern spiritual teachings.

Still, none of the heterodox Pentecostals were more radical than Hensley. In 1959 he moved to Modesto, California, built a chapel in his garage, and hung the sign, “Church”, outside it. When curious passersby asked what kind of “church” it was, Hensley would ask them what kind of church they sought, and always answered their specifications with, “Well, you’ve come to the right place.”

Many thought differently when they actually attended his services. In his garage, Hensley preached a down-home, no-punches-pulled form of metaphysical Universalism, often opening his homilies by cursing God, and then proclaiming that the Deity would still love him despite his disrespect. “I wouldn’t serve a God who wouldn’t take a good cussin’ ever’ once in awhile!” he’d chuckle.

But that was just the beginning. In his best Southern Appalachian corn-pone patois, Hensley would ask his flock, “Do you know who God is?” After a short pause, he’d bellow, “I am God! There ain’t no God up there in the sky!” He’d then point to each of the dozen or congregants and yell, “You are God! And you are God!” And then: “Life is God! Your life is God!” Taking aim at the central point of the Christian faith, he thundered, “As for salvation…No one will ever be saved, but no one was ever lost!”

And what of the Resurrection? “Honey forget it – there ain’t gonna be any! There ain’t no dead people in the graveyard. An eternal spirit can’t die. Why, those spirits done come back as me and you!”

Reincarnation, Pantheism, denial of Salvation and Resurrection – it was clear that Hensley had strayed far off the Christian reservation. One ex-Evangelical minister, Lewis Ashmore, caught his act at a fellowship meeting in Visalia, California, and intrigued by Hensley’s radical teachings, teamed up with the heterodox preacher. A writer and lecturer on metaphysical subjects, Ashmore told Hensley that he too was burned out by both mainstream Christianity and the traditional ministry, and that the world needed a new approach to spreading the nonsectarian vision of life and freedom they shared.

Was it possible, they wondered, to found a church that would literally be “a priesthood of all believers,” that would ordain all its members as Ministers, no matter their age, sex, race, creed, education, or station in life? After all, a Baptist sect had ordained Hensley back when he was an illiterate, drunken, teenaged drifter. Surely if he was considered ministerial material by one of Protestantism’s primary denominations, anyone could qualify as a cleric. So Hensley and Ashmore decided to start a new church that would ordain anyone who requested, and allow its ministers to preach the Truth as each of them saw it.

Hensley had taken to calling his ministry the “Life Church,” and Ashmore suggested they add the title “Universal” to stress their radical-inclusion ethic – “everyone can relate to it.” With nothing but the name, the two headed to Sacramento to incorporate the church, only to be told they needed proper incorporation papers. Undaunted, the two photocopied a Baptist church’s California incorporation papers, whited out all references to the Baptists, filled in “Universal Life Church” in the newly-blank spaces, and submitted the results to the State on May 2, 1962. And thus, the Universal Life Church was in business, with Hensley as its Minister of Congregation, President and Chair – titles he held for the rest of his life.

The Church’s first order of business was publicity. Ashmore took out classified ads in FATE, a long-established American digest of metaphysical and occult doings, with the words, “Become a Minister. We will ordain you without question. Without price and for life.” People who answered the call received a document affirming that they were now Ministers of the Universal Life Church, as well as a Church newsletter with this statement on its back page: 

The Universal Life Church has no doctrine or creed of its own, but acts only as a mediator between many varied groups. It does not invoke or bind its fellowshipping ministers in any way. It does advocate the freedom of the individual to believe, express, and teach his own revelation. It is the vision of the Universal Life Church to work toward the unification of the Brotherhood of Man and to bring people everywhere into a spirit of understanding and fellowship. 

Later this doctrine was boiled down to the simplest and vaguest statement of purpose imaginable: 

The Universal Life Church believes only in that which is right…and every person has the right to decide what is right for himself.

Often the Church wouldn’t even bother with this minimalist creed, and merely stated its beliefs could be summed up in three short words: “Do What’s Right.”

When zoning laws nixed his garage chapel, Hensley moved ULC services to a former Baptist church at 601 Third Street in Modesto. There, he preached his idiosyncratic gospel for the next thirty-seven years, along with guest ministers, or anyone who wanted to speak during informal sharing periods. Services would often be accompanied by music, not all of it sacred – Hensley once claimed that two favorite “hymns” at the church were “The Old Grey Mare, She Ain’t What She Used to Be,” and “Yellow Rose of Texas.” 

ULC Ordination certificates, cards, and other ephemera

The Church’s growth was slow but steady during this period. The FATE ad brought in between 150 and 200 new members each month, most of them practitioners of unorthodox spiritual paths who lacked the time, money and/or theological purity to be admitted to traditional divinity schools. By 1969, the ULC had ordained over 15,000 ministers for free, with no questions asked about their beliefs, or lack thereof (one early “celebrity” Hensley ordained was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the outspoken atheist whose activism got prayer banned from American public schools in 1963.)

Hensley spent most of the Sixties building the ULC ministry infrastructure, and flirting with national politics. Twice he ran for President of the United States under the banner of the Universal Party, a political group that claimed contact with extraterrestrial beings, and advocated world brotherhood and interplanetary peace. Along with these ideas, Hensley’s platform advocated the abolition of the income tax and the Electoral College, and a system of reward incentives for law-abiding that matched the punishments for law-breaking. Although his biography claimed that Hensley obtained three million votes in these campaigns, official records show he finished with a mere 19 votes nationwide in the 1964 Presidential race, and a paltry 142 in the 1968 contest. In 1970 he struck out on his own with the People’s Peace and Prosperity Party, but despite his ambitions to remake America with his ideas, it never got off the ground.

1964 button promoting Hensley as a US Presidential Candidate.
He got nineteen (19) votes nationwide that year.

During this period, Hensley kept his day job as a carpenter, and paid for ULC printing, postage and travel costs out of his own pocket. To raise money and create an organizational structure, he came up with the Church Charter system, where for a filing fee and annual dues, ULC ministers could organize their own local, self-named congregations under the mother church’s corporate authority.

This innovation took the Church into new and potentially troublesome territory. As it was, the mail-order ministry empowered anyone with a postage-stamp to get ordained, and not only claim the title “Minister,” but also discharge the historical duties of the clergy: perform baptisms, weddings and funerals; visit prison inmates; and even get discounts on travel and other costs. If a ULC Minister could find two co-signers, maintain minimal records, and kick over the requisite fees to Modesto, he or she could also establish a local ULC Church, and (in theory) get a tax exemption on any expenditure that could be passed off as church expenses. Soon, hundreds of local ULC branches, representing faiths ranging from Evangelical Christianity to psychedelic-drug cultism, began to appear on the American spiritual landscape, most little more than “house churches” comprised of ULC ministers and a handful of followers.

Hensley also created the Universal Life Church Honorary Doctorate. For a $20 donation, the ULC would grant any of its ministers the title of Doctor of Divinity, allowing the holder to title him/herself “Reverend Doctor,” and use the honorific in any way they saw fit.

By 1969, the mass media started to notice the Universal Life Church’s thousands of mail-order ministers, its little empire of living-room churches, its 20-buck Doctorates, and (most of all) the fiery eccentric who led the sect. When the San Francisco Examiner published a story about the ULC and Hensley, a national news wire picked it up, and the story got reprinted in papers all over the country, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal also took notice, and profiled Hensley and the ULC in a front-page human-interest piece. The publicity proved a gold mine for the Church: it now ordained as many as 3,000 ministers every month, and up to $20,000 a day poured into ULC coffers.

Predictably, the sudden influx of members and money brought legal trouble to the mail-order ministry. On San Francisco’s talk-radio KGO, Hensley debated the State Assistant Attorney General on the legality and propriety of ULC ministries, doctorates and affiliate churches. Days later, the Santa Clara County District Attorney charged the ULC with illegally issuing honorary degrees without educational accreditation. Smelling a set-up, Hensley fought back in court, and the matter was eventually resolved in the Church’s favor.

ULC co-founder Lewis Ashmore's biography of Hensley 

To keep the revenue stream flowing during the California troubles, the ULC reincorporated in Arizona, and continued to mail out its $20 honorary doctorates from the Grand Canyon State. When Arizona officials got word of the move, they swore out a warrant for Hensley’s arrest, and then busted him when he visited Phoenix. After a few hours’ in jail, however, the State dropped charges against the Modesto maverick, and the Arizona operation continued unabated.

There was also trouble from the Internal Revenue Service. That most feared of Federal fiduciary agencies hit the ULC for $10,000 in back taxes, and also raided the Modesto headquarters in search of incriminating paperwork. When Hensley traveled to Washington D.C. to complain, tax officials there told him that the ULC was “not a legitimate church,” and therefore not qualified for the religious tax exemption. The cantankerous preacher vowed  vengeance, and began a five-year court battle that concluded in 1974 when a US District Court judge ruled for the Church, and forced the IRS to not only refund the $10k, but also pay court costs.

Hensley was embraced -- sometimes literally --
by many Sixties hippies and counterculturalists

Hensley’s quarrels with the government, as well as his radical ideas and his freedom-seeking message, made the 57 year-old preacher an unlikely hero to the Sixties youth counterculture. On March 20, 1969, the suit-clad, bespectacled, balding Hensley spoke at a Sonoma State College “Rites of Spring” student festival, telling the attendees that, “All we ask of our ministers is that they be themselves. Become what you want and go out and tell the world what you are. The Universal Life Church believes in the reality of people, in individuals, not just numbers….And Heaven…Heaven is when you have what you want, and Hell is when you don’t have it!” 

The undergrads ate it all up, especially when he lifted his hands to the sky and pronounced everyone on the entire Sonoma State campus a Universal Life Church minister. For his efforts, the students strew flowers in Hensley’s path, crowned him with a garland, and pronounced him, “The Modesto Messiah.”

Months later, Hensley performed even bigger mass ordinations at San Francisco State College, as well as at the venerable Stanford University. Behind the novelty of the instant ordinations were practical considerations; the Vietnam War was at its peak, and many young men attempted to get the coveted 4-D ministerial draft exemption with their ULC credentials. Although Hensley had personally intervened for one young ULC minister who’d been called up, and claimed that hundreds of his clergy had gotten out of military service, he cautioned potential conscription-evaders: show the draft board hard evidence that you have a serious, full-time ministry if you want to avoid sloshing through rice paddies for Uncle Sam.

Hensley and the ULC further bolstered their countercultural credentials when they sponsored one of the hippie era’s greatest rock festivals. Up in Moscow, Idaho, “The Church of the Rock”, a ULC group formed by local rock-concert organizers, asked state officials to rent Farragut State Park for a weekend “Church Picnic”. The state initially granted them use of the large lakeside park, but balked when they realized that the “Picnic” would much more resemble the Woodstock Festival than an Evangelical weenie-roast. Perhaps fearing bad PR and Hensley’s litigious reputation, the Governor cited First Amendment protections for religious groups, and gave the gathering a green light, meanwhile putting Idaho State Police and National Guard on call to quell any Altamont-esque atrocities.

ULC Picnic Flyer, with (possibly unauthorized) art by R. Crumb

Held over July 4th weekend in 1971, The Universal Life Church Picnic was the Idaho Panhandle’s first and biggest rock festival. During its three-day duration, over 40,000 attendees listened and danced to two dozen different bands, camped in tents and teepees, drank oceans of cheap beer and sweet wine, distributed and ingested all manner of illegal chemicals, skinny-dipped in Lake Pend Oreille, copulated in the open air, and in general brought Sixties Dionysian hedonism to a backwoods region that had never seen The Woodstock Nation in action. Hensley’s biographer would claim that Santana, Grand Funk Railroad, and Iron Butterfly played the Picnic, although the only “name” act proven to have mounted the homemade stage there was eccentric street-singer and ULC minister Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, who brought down the house with an a cappella rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

Hensley (center, seated) doles out ministerial credentials to
attendees at the ULC Picnic

At the center of the festivities was the Modesto Messiah himself. Ensconced in a travel-trailer, Hensley handed out free Idaho potatoes to hungry hippies, ordained thousands of new ministers, and even performed nuptials for two young Canadian women in what might have been the first lesbian wedding in modern history. When it was all over, the Picnic boasted zero deaths, virtually no incidents of crime or violence, good feelings from the locals, and cleaner grounds then when the Boy Scouts had used the park for an earlier jamboree. Hensley’s positive views of human freedom, the youth culture, and the Church’s mission to bless human life and gatherings of all kinds, were vindicated.

Part of the ULC Picnic crowd

By the 1970s, the ULC had grown far beyond hippiedom and the American metaphysical/spiritual underground. With ministers now numbering in the millions, the Church counted among its ranks not only ordinary folk following their self-defined calls to ministry, but also such celebrities as Johnny Carson, Betty Ford, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Mae West, and scores of other A-Listers. When Playboy founder/publisher Hugh Hefner interviewed Hensley for a proposed film, the sexagenarian preacher ordained not only Hef, but everyone else on the set.

Hensley also added new titles for the mail-order diplomas. For a seven-dollar donation, a ULC Minister could purchase documents that dubbed the holder a Priest, Bishop, Rabbi, Guru, Prophet, or scores of other religious titles from every imaginable tradition (although even Kirby Hensley didn’t quite have the nerve to grant the title Pope). For another $20, the ULC would grant honorary Doctorates of Divinity, Metaphysics, Religious Humanities, Religious Science, Motivation, Universal Life, or Immortality. And the Church even offered correspondence education, running a paralegal “Common Law Course” as well as a Masters’ Degree in Religion program that was approved by the International Accrediting Organization – which happened to be, conveniently enough, the ULC’s in-house accrediting agency.

Perhaps Hensley’s greatest exposure to a mass audience came on September 26, 1976. That evening, Morley Safer interviewed the Modesto Messiah on the 60 Minutes national news-magazine show. During the segment, Hensley cheerfully called himself “a con man…When I give a fellow an Honorary Doctor of Divinity, it’s just a little piece of paper. And it ain’t worth anything….” He also excoriated organized religion: “I think that they’re all wrong, and that they’re all wet…I think they cause more grief and hell upon this earth than anybody else….” And he discussed the ULC’s tax-exemption controversies with similar aplomb and irreverence, a far more colorful and sympathetic figure than the strait-laced IRS official who countered his claims on camera. Years later, Safer recalled Hensley as “a lovable scoundrel that I think everyone really likes…He was a wonderful character.”

Hensley also got to throw raffish philosophical curveballs on The Donahue Show, where millions of TV viewers saw the iconoclastic minister declare to the host, “Jesus Christ was the worst man who ever lived on this planet, and Richard Nixon was the best.” When the studio audience and the host gasped in shock, Hensley quickly explained: the world wasted 2,000 years waiting for the Messiah, killed him when he appeared, and have since wasted another two millennia anticipating his return; whereas Richard Nixon so perfectly symbolized the human rot and corruption that cried out for a mass revolution in consciousness.

Just days after these broadcasts, the ULC made national headlines again – this time, in the political arena. Residents of the town of Hardenburgh, New York, an impoverished Catskills village whose land was being bought up by untaxed nonprofit organizations, were being dunned to make up the lost revenue. Faced with paying up to two-thirds of their subsistence-level incomes on school, town and county taxes, the town’s farmers, loggers and shopkeepers turned to George McClain, a 41 year-old ULC Bishop from the nearby town of Liberty. In a ceremony at a cocktail lounge, McClain ordained most of the town’s property owners, who then quickly filed for religious tax-exemption with the county. One report said that by 1977, 236 of the town’s 239 property holders had gotten religion with the ULC, saving their homes and land from liens.

This, and other shenanigans by ULC ministers, once again prompted an attack by the IRS. In 1984, the Feds canceled the Church’s tax-exempt status for the years 1978 through 1981, saying that the ULC’s expenditures during that period didn’t qualify as truly “religious” transactions. Eventually the ULC settled with the revenuers for $1.5 million, and sold its portfolio of rental properties to cover the bill. But the IRS wasn’t quite finished yet: they also pulled tax-exempt privileges from about 3,000 ULC local congregations, saying they were “paper churches” that did no active pastoral work.

Along with the blatant tax-dodgers, some of the ULC’s most embarrassing ministers were the ones that walked on all fours. Over the years, various animal lovers and practical jokers have ordained their pet dogs, cats, and other beasts as ULC ministers, proudly displaying Church certificates that designated their Rover and Fluffy as clergy-critters. The ULC officially restricts its ministry to Homo sapiens, but any entity with a “human-sounding” first and last name and a legitimate address can probably obtain credentials, albeit illegitimately. (One ULC-ordained pet, a Miniature Schnauzer by the name of “The Reverend Tyker,” has an Internet-based ministry where he performs “pet weddings” of dubious legal validity.)

In 1991, Hensley turned 80, and produced his Magnum opus: The Holy Bible for the 21^st Century.  The product of over sixty years’ of Bible study and theological rumination, the book was based on the preacher’s belief that “not one verse of Scripture…will take you beyond the 20th Century,” and that a new spiritual guidebook was needed for the rapidly-changing modern world.

The ULC's Bible. Like Christian Scripture, it was
assembled from a wide variety of sources.

To that end, Hensley and his ULC associates, like the Council of Nicea had sixteen centuries earlier, compiled a variety of lectures, anecdotes, meditations, epistles, and ephemera into the closest thing the ULC has to an “official” doctrine beyond Do What’s Right. Materials ranged from inspirational writings, to a Genesis exegesis titled “Did Eve Have Sex With an Animal?” to an excerpt from William Gayley Simpson’s White-supremacist tirade, Which Way Western Man? In the main, though, it featured Hensley’s rambling discourses about the Bible, Christianity, God, Jesus and religion in general, all marked with his usual heterodox and even blasphemous takes on the same. Kirby Hensley was not one to waltz gracefully into old age, or embrace a deathbed conversion.

The end for the Modesto Messiah came on March 19, 1999, at 87 years of age. Upon his death, his widow Lida took over leadership of the Church, and held it until her own passing in 2006. Currently, Hensley’s son Andre heads the ULC.

In a 2009 story about the ULC, Modesto Bee reporter Sue Nowicki brought readers up to date on the hometown phenomenon that had made Modesto synonymous with universal ordination. In the piece, Andre Hensley revealed that the ULC’s many court battles had drained its coffers; the man who headed a 20 million-member organization admitted that he lived on a Church salary of $36,000 a year, and couldn’t pay the ULC’s eight employees any more than the minimum wage. Still, the ULC boasted over 15,000 active congregations, many of which had more than 100 members. And it still ordained as many as 10,000 ministers every month.

Many of the new ministers joined the ULC via the Internet. In yet another innovation, the Church became the first organized religious group to ordain its clergy online, accepting applications for the ministry via its official Web site. As always, the credentials were free and for life.

The Modesto ULC's current main Web page

The online ordinations caused yet another round of legal headaches, as both the Church and the government struggled to incorporate new communications technology into the affairs of God and State. In Universal Life Church vs. the State of Utah, the ULC fought the Beehive State over the legality of nuptials performed by an Internet-ordained cleric. The case was ruled in the Church’s favor, as was a similar one in Pennsylvania – the latest in a long line of skirmishes with State governments over whether ULC ministers’ weddings would be recognized in their jurisdictions. (To this day, the ULC provides ministers a guide to the 50 States’ ever-changing legal intricacies concerning weddings.)

The Internet also spurred an organizational disaster that remains unsolved to this day in the Church. As unlikely and ironic as it might seem for such an anarchic, ultra-liberal sect, the ULC experienced two major schisms.

The first breakaway happened in August 2006, when a large, Seattle-based ULC congregation split from the Modesto Mother Church. Known as the Monastery, the congregation was headed by “Brother Martin” (aka George Freeman), who ran a Seattle mission to homosexual youth and other social outcasts that featured disco-dancing ceremonies, “sacramental” booze, baptisms in private hot tubs, and the kind of party-time atmosphere that would have delighted rock-festival veteran Hensley. Eventually the police shut down Brother Martin’s operation, and he claimed persecution, taking his case to both the courts and the media at any opportunity.

Main Web page of "The Monastery", the ULC's Seattle-based faction

When the Monastery left the Modesto ULC, it took along ownership of the ulc.org domain – until then, the first point of Internet contact for the Church. The Seattle faction began to represent itself as THE true heir of Hensley’s legacy, much as every Christian schism in history has justified itself as the custodian of orthodoxy. To this day, Web searches inevitably list the ULC Monastery first on searches for “Universal Life Church” – a situation that’s caused both great confusion for seekers of free ordination, and losses of revenue and membership for the Mother Church. The two factions have continuously traded charges and countercharges online and in the courts, with no chance of an easy solution in sight.

Seattle ULC "Monastery" leader George "Brother Martin" Freeman

The one thing that unites the Modesto and Seattle ULCs is their scorn for a third faction: Michael Cauley’s Universal Life Church. In 2010 Cauley, a moderator with the ULC Ministers Network, was accused of sexually harassing Church members, and carrying on Internet-based vendettas against critics. A Florida-based Evangelical minister with a past every bit as checkered as Hensley’s, Cauley resigned his position that year, and claimed that in 1962 Hensley had deliberately adopted the name of the second-century Christian Church, “The Universal Life Church,” to promulgate his blasphemous doctrines and confuse the faithful. He then formed his own ULC with a ministerial corps restricted to professing Christians. The schismatic minister also claimed to possess something Hensley had never attained: a legitimate Apostolic Succession that allowed him to rightly claim the title of Catholic Bishop, and ordain other Catholic (but not Roman) Bishops and Priests. Like the Monastery, the Florida ULC is active as of this writing.

Bishop Michael Cauley, leader of the ULC's Florida-based Christian schism

Still, for all the schisms and legal troubles, one aspect of the ULC has persisted unchanged to the present day. On any Sunday morning in Modesto, one can still climb the steps of the little church at 601 Third Street, open the door, and join with a dozen-odd others in prayer and fellowship, the same as they have for a half-century.

During each service, the worshippers share Scripture readings, inspirational prose and poems, and songs, while their children play up on the pulpit-free platform. A table at the head of the pews serves as an altar; upon it is always a spray of flowers and a photograph of the Modesto Messiah – the man whose mission to freely ordain millions was as far-reaching as it was controversial, and whose influence on the American spiritual scene will be felt as long as mail-order ministers retain the same First-Amendment protection to practice their faiths as any “legitimate” church or cleric.

Sources/Notes

www.ulc.org (the Modesto/Hensley ULC)

www.themonastery.org (the Seattle "Monastery" faction)

www.ulcnetwork.com (the Floridian Christian ULC faction)

Ashmore, Lewis The Modesto Messiah. Modesto, CA: Universal Press, 1977.

Nowicki, Sue. "Universal Life Goes On." Modesto Bee, 3/6/2009
Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religion - Eighth Edition. Edited by J. Gordon Melton. Detroit: Gale, 2009.
The Holy Bible for the 21st Century. Edited by Kirby J. Hensley. Modesto, CA: ULC Printing Dept, 1991.
Jacobs, Patrick. "'Idaho's Woodstock' at Farragut Not Remembered for the Music." Idaho Spokesman-Review, 3/22/2009.
Eichhorn, Dennis P. The Legend of Wild Man Fischer. Portland, OR: Top Shelf Productions, 2004.