Krishna Venta and the WKFL Fountain of the World

Krishna Venta (nee Francis Pencovic), founder of WKFL Fountain of the World

The Guru was a long-haired, bearded, strangely charismatic ex-con who had declared himself the Messiah.

The Guru’s disciples were lost people seeking meaning and purpose in their lives. They followed him into the mountains above Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, where they lived communally in a sandstone-pitted canyon, grew their hair long, walked around in bare feet, and subsisted on a simple diet.

The Guru taught his followers that modern American society was hopelessly corrupt and doomed to extinction. There would be a terrible war between Whites and Blacks, he said, which would destroy the nation. But he knew of a secret place in the desert where he and his flock could escape to, and wait out the cataclysm. Then they would emerge and create a new civilization.

The Guru had big dreams. Although he was a Holy Man, he also sought fame and money. But his attempts to break into media stardom bore little fruit – he was just a little too weird to win mass acceptance, even in Southern California. So he retreated to his little flock, where his acolytes – especially the women – read his word as law, and dutifully followed his commands.

And then, suddenly, it all exploded, in a firestorm of violence that claimed ten lives and sent shockwaves throughout the Southland. “California cults” would never be seen with the same innocent bemusement as before.

The Guru’s name was Krishna Venta, and his cult, the WKFL Fountain of the World, met its bloody apocalypse in 1958 – over a decade before a far more famous bearded, ex-con, self-proclaimed Messiah would terrorize the Southland.

Not much is known about the early life of the man who would later call himself Krishna Venta. Public records show that he was born Francis Herman Pencovic in San Francisco, on March 29, 1911, to Russian-Jewish immigrant Albert Pencovic and his wife, former Utahn Maude Busenbach. After graduating high school in Elko, Nevada, the young Pencovic spent his young adulthood roaming across Depression-era America, working at odd jobs. Marrying in 1937, Pencovic fathered two children, but divorced in 1944, and then spent a short stint in the Army.

Pencovic also acquired a considerable criminal record. Between 1930 and 1942, he was arrested for crimes ranging from burglary, to petty larceny, to violations of the Mann act, in cities from Miami to Little Rock to Los Angeles. In 1941 he was busted for writing threatening letters to President Roosevelt; one year after that, he did a nine-month jail stretch at Santa Paula for passing bad checks. Later, he added a one-month stay at the California State Mental Hospital to his checkered personal history.

Around 1946, the peripatetic Pencovic began showing the first signs of incipient guru-dom. After spending some time in Salt Lake City, where he met his second wife, Ruth, he became fascinated by the Mormon religion, especially its doctrine regarding the “Melchizedek Priesthood” – the ancient order that Latter-Day Saints scripture said had originated with Adam, been conferred on the great Biblical patriarchs, and been restored in modern times by Joseph Smith. Pencovic started telling anyone who would listen that he had received the Melchizedek ordination through a being called “Christ Everlasting,” and now hosted this being in his body.

This entity, he would later say in his talks and writings, first arrived on Earth about 100,000 years ago, along with 24 rocket ships filled with refugees from the Planet Euphrates. These were the original human beings, migrating from their doomed planet under the leadership of “Ademus,” the original “Christ.” Ademus established the Order of Melchizedek – the divine plan for the human race in its new home, which would exist so long as its doctrine was kept pure and applied selflessly. He granted Adam, his most loyal follower, this priesthood, and married him to his own daughter Eve. The pair became the first humans living under this sacred rule.

Of course, any reading of Genesis reveals how well that arrangement worked. Nevertheless, the Order of Melchizedek was reestablished first with Enoch, and then again with Methuseleh, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Elijah. Each time the Order either died with the man who held it, or degenerated into corruption and misuse.

Pencovic said that the man called Jesus became the apotheosis of the Order – the Christ fully realized in human form. But his most important teachings were suppressed by the Romans for three centuries, until Jesus appeared to the Emperor Constantine and authorized him to revive the Order, taking care that the ancient doctrines would be preserved in their entirety. The Order lasted in the West until the Fourth Crusade of 1199, when marauding Crusader armies sacked the Constantinople library and destroyed documents containing the key Melchizedek teachings.

In India, the Christ appeared in the form of Krishna, and tried to set up the Order there, but the East was too insular to properly transmit the doctrines to the rest of the world. Centuries later, the Christ appeared in America to both Abraham Lincoln and Joseph Smith, inspiring them respectively to end slavery, and reestablish the Melchizedek Order through the Mormon priesthood. Sadly, both men were killed before they could fully accomplish their missions, and their successors once again perverted and distorted the sacred charges.

Portrait of Krishna Venta by Ruben Lackstrom

 And now, in postwar America, the Christ had returned once more to revive the Order. He was hosted in the body of Francis Pencovic, who now called himself Krishna Venta, in emulation of the Christ’s Eastern persona. Tall, blue-eyed, and aquiline-faced, Krishna grew his hair and beard out to fully embody his Messianic image, and began to walk barefoot in all weather while clad in a simple robe.

Krishna Venta warned listeners that humanity faced a terrible cataclysm. The Gog and Magog of modern worldly materialism – the Capitalist West and Communist East – were playing a deadly game of chicken with nuclear warheads, he said. And America, which had too long oppressed its peoples of color, would soon be consumed in a Soviet-instigated and –aided race war. The nation, and civilization itself, were doomed.

Krishna’s mission was to gather 144,000 followers – the number of elect mentioned in the Book of Revelation – by 1965, and lead them to a secret desert valley where they would wait out the tumultuous events of the coming years. When the dust settled, they would emerge from hiding, and found a new civilization that adhered strictly to the ancient Melchizedek code.

In 1948, Krishna Venta formed the WKFL Fountain of the World to organize the small group of followers he’d acquired. The group’s initials stood for Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love, and it proffered a simple set of goals to guide its members in their daily lives:

1. To forget the outside world.  (Jealousy, greed, superstition, hatred, condemnation, etc., are of the world, and are not to be brought in or to manifest in the W.K.F.L. Fountain of the World.)
2. To become familiar with the inside workings of one’s self.  (Know thyself, and become a good care-taker of this physical body or temple in which you express and over which you are the care-taker.)
3. To become unified with one another spiritually, mentally, and physically.  (Get along with one another.  Have a purpose in life.)
4. To forget self.  (Do good for goodness’ sake and forget selfish desires.)
5. To create a desire within one’s self toward higher spiritual equality.  (As good as you are, try to be better.)
6. To obtain wisdom.  (Search for Truth.  Keep an open mind.)
7. To search for understanding in all things.
8. To face problems without thought of escape.
9. To become absorbed in love toward all things, seen and unseen, and so fulfill the laws of God.  (An inevitable result of fully living the preceding rules.)
10. To let the Spirit descend upon you.  (Let the Spirit of Good be the light that guides your life.)
11. To become teachers, not in the world, but in the Fountain, that all men who come out of the world shall find comfort in our midst.  (The greatest reward available to man in mortality is Peace of Mind.)

The entrance to the WKFL compound in Box Canyon

The Foundation settled on a 23-acre plot in Box Canyon, a brushy, sandstone-crested glen in the Santa Susana Mountains, 25 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. At first, they lived in tents and huts, but eventually built a small colony of buildings to house the sect’s brothers and sisters.

Visitors were always welcome at the Fountain, and were allowed to stay for three days. Potential members spent three months on the property as probationers; if they were approved for full membership, they turned over their worldly goods to the sect, donned robes as their daily costume, gave up footwear, and vowed not to cut their hair (or in the men’s cases, their beards) until peace was established on earth, and all peoples lived in harmony.

Wedding of WKFL members "Brother Alan" and "Sister Barbara".

 Although marriages were recognized and performed by the group, they were “spiritual” in nature, and nuptial ceremonies were only celebrated on Krishna Venta’s birthday – March 29^th. Married couples and singles alike remained chaste, the sexes lived in segregated quarters, and children were raised communally. And as with so many other California cults, they followed a mostly-vegetarian diet, even though they raised goats and sheep on the land.

Krishna Venta’s followers quickly gained a reputation in Southern California as dedicated – if odd-looking – humanitarians.  When brush fires broke out in the dry, windswept mountains, the robed, barefoot, bearded and long-haired WKFL Brothers battled the flames alongside professional firefighters. When a Standard Airlines C-46 crashed in the hills above Simi Valley on July 12, 1949, Krishna and his people helped carry out dozens of charred corpses from the wreckage, and tended to the survivors. The Brothers and Sisters also provided aid and shelter to disaster victims and battered women, and ran a food bank and a rehab center on the Fountain grounds.

Brothers and Sisters of the WKFL

 The good works earned Krishna Venta and the Fountain tons of sympathetic press. Look Magazine did a four-page spread on the group, titled “California’s Offbeat Religions: We Love You,” which featured photos of Foundation stalwart “Bishop Mary” performing an improvisational dance, and a picture  of Krishna and his followers holding candles in the dark, their faces eerily shadowed. Other newspapers and magazines focused on the group’s firefighting efforts, or on the odd fact that during them, Krishna often slept in his station wagon alongside a nubile Sister (he explained that he did this to regain strength and body warmth after the hard, dangerous work). But none of the stories failed to mention the cultists’ robes, long hair and beards – the hippie era was still many years away, and the sheer weirdness of the Fountain folks’ appearance made great copy in the era of crew-cuts and grey flannel suits.

New York Times ad for a series of Krishna Venta lectures
in Manhattan during October 1954.

Krishna himself lapped up the publicity, but wasn’t always around to enjoy it. He spent much of his ten-year reign as Fountain leader on the road, spreading his teachings and seeking converts. On a trip to Europe in 1949, he tried to meet with both Pope Paul XII and King George VI of England – although rebuffed both times, a British newsreel caught the bearded, be-robed guru chatting with Bobbies outside Buckingham Palace, and strolling through Hyde Park with wife Ruth and some bemused English commoners. When he returned to L.A. from the junket, Krishna greeted the assembled press at the airport with the words, “I may as well say it. I am Christ! I am the new Messiah.”

Krishna Venta, "crucified" by his followers.

Several years later, Krishna Venta and five Fountain members turned heads in the U.S. Senate when they sat in on the Joe McCarthy-Army hearings. (The guru disliked the Wisconsin senator, and believed that he was one of the “three Joes [that] have been causing all the trouble” in the world, the others being Joe Stalin and Tojo.)  Krishna also outraged Southern California’s orthodox religious leaders when he performed an Easter Passion play where, clad in a loincloth and dripping fake blood, he hung from an improvised cross atop a hill near the Fountain as an amplified recording of Jesus’ last words echoed through the canyon.  And he further scandalized the spiritual world when he traveled to Las Vegas, had his picture taken with famed gambler Nick the Greek, and then dropped nearly $3,000 at the craps tables.

Krishna Venta’s most embarrassing public episode came in 1956. That year, he was arrested and jailed in Oakland for non-payment of child support; apparently, he hadn’t sent his fist wife a dime since his stint in the Army twelve years earlier, and had ignored her many entreaties for money, claiming that his role as Barefoot Holy Man made him exempt from such worldly trivialities as court orders. After the arrest, his followers dutifully picketed the jail, holding signs that said that the deified deadbeat-dad was being “Persecuted for lifelong devotion to God.” Eventually the case went to the State Supreme Court, which ruled against him in Pencovic v. Pencovic (1955) -- now considered a definitive precedent in cases where spouses attempt to evade child support or alimony by joining religious sects.

WKFL members demonstrate during Krishna Venta's imprisonment

Despite the loads of publicity – positive and otherwise – Krishna Venta enjoyed, the Fountain never attracted very many disciples. Krishna tried to exploit pre-statehood Alaska’s homesteading laws by establishing a satellite settlement in the bush country near Homer, but it never grew to more than 120 residents. The Box Canyon community itself boasted fewer than 60 full-time occupants, including children. Ultimately, the Fountain followers’ strange appearance, Spartan lifestyle, and dedication to an eccentric and maverick Messiah were just too extreme for all but the most selfless seekers. Southern California hosted plenty of far less demanding sects and cults, and most prospective disciples sought enlightenment elsewhere.

By late 1958, big trouble was brewing in Box Canyon. Two Fountain members – Peter Kamenoff, AKA Brother Elzibah, and Ralph Muller, AKA Brother Jeroham – were seriously disgruntled with Krishna Venta. So much so, that on December 8^th, they met in Los Angeles with James H. Mulvey, an investigator for the California District Attorney. The two cultists told Mulvey that their guru was misappropriating Fountain funds, gambling in Las Vegas with the life savings his dedicated followers had entrusted to him. They also said he was also practicing medicine without a license, and endangering the lives of cult members with quack treatments. And they claimed he was carrying on illicit affairs with Fountain women, including their own wives and several underage girls.

WKFL suicide bomber Peter "Brother Elzibah" Kamenoff

 Kamenoff and Muller told Mulvey that they wanted the D.A. to help them get their wives and funds out of Krishna Venta’s clutches. To that end, they volunteered to try to get a confession of wrongdoing from the cult leader. Mulvey told the two that the State was actively investigating Krishna, and would welcome any additional evidence they could gather. When Kamenoff and Muller closed the meeting by saying Krishna needed to be “eliminated” for his crimes, Mulvey figured the men were planning to give the guru an earful about his doings, and then ease him out of Fountain leadership with the aid of the State.

But the investigator had badly misjudged the men’s impatience with the legal system, and their rage at Krishna Venta. The next night, Kamenoff and Muller made a two-hour audio tape listing the cult leader’s crimes, and swearing vengeance against him. Although the tape and the transcript mysteriously disappeared from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s archives years ago, one ominous passage by Ralph Muller from near the end of the recording survives:

 Dear God, give us this night freedom or death...within the next three or four hours we will get into the pickup truck, drive to Box Canyon, see Krishna...and demand a right adjustment be made...We have dedicated our lives to this mission and whatever may come, this may be our last night in the world.

On the morning of December 10^th, 1958, Kamenoff and Muller drove into Box Canyon, parked on the Fountain grounds, and demanded to see Krishna Venta. When the guru emerged from the cult’s administration building and confronted his accusers, Muller produced a flight bag containing twenty sticks of dynamite, and detonated the charge.

Aftermath of the WKFL suicide-bombing. Ten people,
including the two bombers and Krishna Venta, lost their lives.

 The blast leveled the two-story building with a report that could be heard twenty miles away. Krishna Venta, the two bombers, and seven other people were killed instantly in the explosion, which also touched off a fire that burned 150 acres of brush. The same firemen and emergency volunteers whom the Fountain people had previously helped with firefighting now converged on the canyon, tasked with the grim duties of dousing the flames, aiding the wounded, comforting the terrified survivors, and recovering pieces of the shattered corpses.

The bombing made the cover of the Los Angeles Times.

 For weeks afterwards, rumors persisted that another victim’s corpse had been misidentified as Krishna’s, and that the guru had escaped the blast, and was hiding in the hills, waiting to return to lead his flock. But the Box Canyon Messiah neither returned to the Fountain, nor rose from the dead in emulation of the Christ he claimed to be. The Brothers and Sisters of the Fountain laid their leader to rest in North Hollywood’s Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, and returned to their work as a spiritual community.

Since Krishna had been absent so often from the settlements, his followers were used to running the Fountain without him. But without his leadership, or his flair for publicity, the Fountain spent the next two decades slowly fading into obscurity, and then oblivion. By the mid-1970s, both the Box Canyon and Homer settlements had been abandoned, and the Brothers and Sisters had moved on to new lives.

Three Fountain members who escaped Box Canyon’s gelignite Gotterdammerung weren’t so lucky when they hooked up years later with another self-proclaimed Savior. Perhaps seeking to rekindle the sense of community and purpose they had with Krishna Venta, Erma Winfrey, a septuagenarian cook, and David and Gladys Smith, a married couple, followed the Reverend Jim Jones down to Guyana, and then perished along with over 900 other Peoples Temple members in the grisly mass suicide of November 1978. Tragically, the Smiths’ five children also died during Jonestown’s “White Night”.

Today, virtually the only trace of Krishna’s spiritual influence that still exists is in the so-called Earth’s Order of Melchizedek (EOOM). EOOM is an obscure sect founded in 1972 by Matia Lorion Melchizedek, a Fountain member who attempted to take over the Box Canyon settlement in the wake of Krishna’s death. Although Matia himself passed on several years ago, the group seems to still exist – at least in cyberspace – and promulgates Krishna’s teachings about the Melchizedek Order, along with study of the Urantia Book and other esoteric writings.

The WKFL compound as it appears today. Note the surviving inscribed gate.

 As for the Box Canyon property, it recently hosted yet another claimant to the Melchizedek Heritage: the “Dominion of Melchizedek”, a curious entity that has claimed to be at once a sovereign nation and a religious order, and has been continually accused of running international financial scams and citizenship frauds. Years earlier, the land was occupied for a time by American Indian Movement radicals, two of whom were put on trial for murdering a cab driver (they were eventually acquitted).

But the most famous Fountain resident of all was, like Krishna himself, a long-haired, bearded ex-con, who spent three days at the compound in 1968 with a handful of his own acolytes. His name was Charles Manson, and he would write himself into California-cult history in far bigger and bolder letters than Krishna and his devotees ever did.

Sources/Links

My Search for Krishna Venta (Blog by KV/WKFL researcher Shawn Sutherland)

WKFL Fountain of the World Official Website (Maintained by author Jon Layne Fisher, who grew up on the Box Canyon compound and survived the 1958 bombing)
Earth's Order of Melchizedek (EOOM) (Spiritual claimant to Krishna Venta's legacy)

Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions -- Eighth Edition. Detroit: Gale, 2008.
Mathison, Richard. Faiths, Cults, and Sects of America. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960

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.