Sharman concluded this catalog of treasures by assuring his audience, "I would not overdraw this picture for anything; it would be blasphemy."^[38] Sharman did not claim that the committed person would exhibit perfect conduct—such perfection was unattainable. He did, however, believe that although perfect behavior was impossible, perfect attitude was not, and the religious person could do no less.

Sharman sometimes used the word transformation to describe the process of commitment. In doing so he came very close to describing what would usually be called a conversion experience, although he and his followers carefully avoided that term. Referring to the process as "purgation" in a statement that probably dates from the mid-1940s, Sharman said that the term did "not necessarily refer to religious conversion" (although that possibility apparently remained open). It was, he said, "merely the effect of opening the windows of one's moral life and allowing the freshening breezes of an exacting morality to sweep away the cobwebs."^[39] Just how the act of commitment differed from conversion remained somewhat obscure in Sharman's writings, but he passed on to the Rathbuns the understanding that a specific decision had to be made before a person could be truly religious. People who made the kind of decision Sharman advocated would be willing to undergo not only discomfort but even torture and death before they would ever again put their will ahead of God's. Sharman told his students that one must be willing to "face the worst possible thing that one can conceive and then ask: would I go thru that for the right? If there is no hesitation, then one is ready to make the commitment." The committed person would face crucifixion just as Jesus did. The committed person would place God's will ahead of the marriage vow, ahead of the family, and ahead of material wealth.^[40] This uncompromising expectation that truly religious people would totally subjugate themselves to the will of God, even at some great personal sacrifice, would continue as one of the core values in the movement as it evolved in the Rathbun era.

When it came to applying the idea of commitment to the outside world, Sharman was even less forthcoming than his usually reticent norm. He appears to have avoided most political and social issues on the grounds that transformation of the individual was a necessary precondition to social change. Despite his business background, Sharman seems to have been sympathetic to social reform (certainly many, if not most of his students were). One of his students quotes him as saying, "A Christian has got to be a social radical," and although he warned his students not to confuse society with the Kingdom of God, a social- gospel position was evident when he said, "religion has been the genetic force in the most significant social progress."^[41]

The only systematic exposition of Sharman's views on the relationship between religion and politics appeared in a brief memo he wrote in November 1936. The circumstances that prompted this position paper are obscure, but it is clear that Sharman did not want his ideas on the subject disseminated. The memo was marked "STRICTLY PRIVATE —Neither to be printed nor any copy made."^[42] In the paper Sharman sought to define the appropriate role of the "Christian Left," among whom he obviously counted himself.

According to Sharman, the first function of the Christian left was to "rediscover and recreate Christianity as a determining force in the contemporary world." Then, switching from the third to the first person, he said, "we have to work at a level that is above the political and social through inclusion of it." Sharman explicitly rejected the idea that his work was political in any way: "If we identify our task with the political one . . . then we should cut religion out entirely, and join in the most direct political effort in an effective political fashion."^[43]

Having divorced religion from politics, Sharman said that his own and his followers' task was "the religious criticism of religion," that could "only be done through our own religious experience." This meant they had to fight against "nearly all modern religion," because it was based on the belief in "another world and immortality," and therefore had its central reference point "outside this world of contemporary existence." It also meant, however, they had to fight against the denial of all religion. Sharman distinguished between "European religions" and true Christianity. The latter presumably was the religion that grew out of the scientific study of the Records, whereas the former was an accumulation of historical accretions having little to do with Jesus. Thus Sharman was attempting to extricate himself from what he perceived to be the Marxist error of throwing out the baby of true Christianity with the bathwater of "European religion." He admitted that the Marxists were right in rejecting religion based on "another world and immortality." If that were all religion involved, then he believed that he and his group would have no reason for existing and that they might as well "accept atheism and join the communist party." But of course, he believed that the Marxist criticism was not fully correct, and that his role in the Christian left was to tease out true Christianity from the obscuring myths that had grown up around it—"To rediscover Christ and the revelation of truth in him in our own contemporary communal experience."^[44]

It seems clear that Sharman was not insensitive to the social implications of his work. He simply did not perceive his role as furthering the efforts of political reform, although he presumably had no objection to others doing so. Whatever objections he may have had to Marxism were apparently based less on its political goals than on its opposition to all religion, and he found the "left wing" label congenial enough to apply it to himself, even if only in the religious sphere. Emilia Rathbun remembers that her exposure to Sharman caused her to begin thinking about political issues and spurred her, at least briefly, to think of herself as a socialist. Although her flirtation with the political left was fleeting, she said she never understood how anyone could go through a Sharman seminar and remain a Republican.^[45] Although Sharman never defined the relationship between personal transformation and social action, many of his students took it upon themselves to apply their new values in the social sphere. Sharman, however, never encouraged such action and always believed that personal transformation was the first priority. Although they were a bit more willing than Sharman to address social problems directly, the Rathbuns shared his reluctance to become politically involved.

Inheriting the Sharman Tradition

In 1933 Sharman left his position at Pendle Hill and "retired" to Carmel, California. He nevertheless continued to lead Records seminars for another ten years. The center for much of his work in this last period of his active career was Camp Minnesing. Sharman first leased this rural retreat in Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park from the Canadian National Railroad in 1925 after spending two summers at nearby Bon Echo. He later purchased it and held seminars there every summer until 1945.^[46] Lack of paved roads in the park meant that seminar participants had to come by railroad and a ten-mile canoe trip before they reached the seven cedar-log lodges and seven cabins that made up the compound.^[47] It was a place, explained Sharman, where nothing was "seen or heard of railways, automobiles, telephones or radios for the period of the Seminar."^[48] Afternoons in this rustic setting were set aside for unstructured recreation, but mornings were devoted to the intensive study of the Records. It was there that he conducted his six-week "Jesus as Teacher" summer seminars, and it was there that the plans were laid—or perhaps waylaid—to continue Sharman's work when he finally gave up his active participation.

Over the years Sharman had retained his close ties to the Student Christian Movement of Canada, and the SCM sponsored the summer seminars until 1933. For both the summer seminars at Minnesing and winter meetings at various college locations, Sharman did most of the organizing, picked up most of the expenses, and led the Records study groups by himself. On several occasions he thought about formalizing his efforts and in 1923 actually drew up a plan for a Records study fraternity to be called Theta Pi Theta.^[49] Although the fraternity never materialized, Sharman did adopt the Greek letter designation Alpha Psi Zeta to refer to the faculty members in Canada and the United States who worked with him in conducting Records seminars. Planned in 1923 and incorporated in 1928, Alpha Psi Zeta was not a fraternity. Sharman called it a "foundation," but it wasn't that either, at least when he first began using the term in the 1920s. Besides not being a foundation, Alpha Psi Zeta was "not an organization, not a society open or secret, not a movement, not a fellowship, not a body of people with a set of beliefs." It was, said Sharman, "a group of college and university faculty members who are interested in the unfettered and thorough study, the adequate understanding, and the sound evaluation of Jesus of Nazareth within the academic community."^[50] Continuing his penchant for Greek, and confusing nomenclature even more, Sharman used the first and last letters of Jesus' Greek name, Iota Sigma, to refer to the seminars themselves.

Despite all the appearances of organization, Sharman shied away from establishing any formal structure that would further his work. He clearly felt great ambivalence toward the issue of organization. He once told Harry Rathbun, "All you need to do to kill anything is organize it. Then it will roll on long after it is dead."^[51] Nevertheless, there were several isolated instances of organized efforts to spread the Sharman method. Seminar participants were always encouraged to organize their own Records study groups at their home institutions, and for three years, from 1931 to 1933, the Alpha Psi Zeta Foundation did encourage two women to start new groups at colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area. These two women, Elizabeth Boyden and Frances Warneke, were the people who introduced Emilia Rathbun to the Sharman method.^[52] Other Sharman disciples maintained an informal network, but with the exception of a brief unsuccessful experiment at the very end of his career, Sharman never tried to extend his mission beyond his own efforts.^[53]

Although Sharman never formalized his activity, his students were eager to preserve the tradition, so in the summer of 1944 a group of veteran "Minnesingers" drew up tentative plans to create a permanent organization that would carry on Sharman's work. They concluded that although it was sympathetic to their purpose, the SCM was not going to sponsor Records seminars and that if they wanted to further the cause they would have to do so with their own local units.^[54] They adopted the name Alpha Psi Zeta Foundation that Sharman had been using since the 1920s and appointed a "Central Group" to continue developing plans through the winter.^[55] As was his wont, Sharman remained aloof from the organizational discussions, in his own words, contributing "not even the extreme minimum of nothing." Nevertheless he was plainly pleased at the direction the group took, saying to them, "you have not only my approval but my commendation in the strongest possible terms."^[56]

Despite adoption of a name and the creation of an administrative body, the group was still caught in the same bind that had trapped Sharman a decade before: they wanted to have the benefits of organization without actually becoming an organization. One member of the Central Group, Glenn Olds, articulated this ambivalence when he wrote that the foundation was not an institution. If it were, he said, he would be against it, presumably because he, like most of the others, did not want to set up a group that would appear to compete with the YMCA, the Student Christian Movement, or any other preexisting Christian organization, or that might even become a sect that would compete with mainline churches. He nevertheless described what, by almost any standard, was in fact a formal organizational structure involving material, method, leadership, participation, and membership.^[57] Although it would be an open, nonexclusive kind of group whose only purpose would be to conduct seminars in the Sharman tradition, it would necessarily be a structured association with all of the bureaucracy attendant on such a venture.^[58]

Most of Alpha Psi Zeta Foundation's Central Group met during the 1944 Christmas holiday and composed a draft letter describing the new direction and calling on seminar alumni to join the newly constituted foundation. The announcement was written by Sharman disciple Earl Willmott who had agreed to be in charge of the central office. In the draft, Willmott delightedly explained that Sharman had done nothing to promote the group, patiently trusting "the living vitality of the Word to work in us and others until a demand was felt."^[59] Yet when the group presented its idea to Sharman he was so pleased that he gave them Camp Minnesing, saying "If you will use it for this one purpose; the study of the memorabilia about Jesus, the Camp is yours."^[60] Although it appeared that the work of Henry B. Sharman had finally found an institutionalized means to perpetuate itself, it was never to be.

Four days after he mailed the draft to the others in the Central Group, Willmott received a telegram from Harry Rathbun informing the Central Group that Sharman would neither lead the 1945 summer seminar nor give the group his mailing list. Instead, according to Rathbun, Sharman was giving his "wholehearted cooperation" to a "more courageous and revolutionary program . . . based upon and requiring the total commitment central in the religion of Jesus." Rathbun asked the Central Group to give him and Emilia authorization to continue planning with Sharman for a "program of acting large and imaginative enough to meet the demands of the crisis of our time."^[61]

The reaction of the Central Group was one of consternation and confusion. Willmott feared that Sharman was planning to make commitment a precondition for membership to the foundation and that, worried Willmott, would make it a sect. Others were concerned that Sharman had reached a dramatic conclusion on his own, ignoring the group process that had been so fruitful in the past. Finally, it was pointed out that the language of the telegram implied that the foundation could change the world. One critic commented that he had been working on what he could do for himself and he did not consider himself a great evangelist with a vision of transforming the world. "I don't see myself a John R. Mott, and I don't think the rest of us are John R. Motts either," he said.^[62]

But the formidable model of evangelist John R. Mott did not scare the Rathbuns or their supporters. One of them conceded, "I realize none of us are John R. Motts," but, he continued, "neither was the John R. Mott we know until he launched forth to do the impossible ."^[63] They too were ready to do the impossible and become John R. Motts in the process. In a letter to Willmott, Harry reported Emilia's reaction to the draft letter plans for the new foundation: "That won't do! It won't work. There's nothing in that program to build a fire under people. If we think we've got the answer to the absolutely critical need of these times, we've got to get out and sell it to people in such a way as to set them on fire."^[64]

The project the Rathbuns had in mind was ambitious beyond anything previously envisioned by Sharman or his followers, presaging both the style and content of the Creative Initiative movement. First, Willmott was correct in his assumption that commitment was to be a precondition of membership. Harry and Emilia suggested that the group "invite promising people to come to Minnesing the coming summer on the basis of their unqualified adoption of the way of life taught by Jesus."^[65] Second, the Rathbuns were not interested in merely helping individuals achieve personal understanding. They also believed that they had an opportunity for a "large-scale program of 'selling' to the world the religion which can save it."^[66] Here then, for the first time, is a clear expression of the sectarian messianic impulse in the Rathbuns' work. They perceived the world in crisis and they believed that they knew what needed to be done to save it.

To the charge that a precondition of commitment would be exclusionary, Ralph Odom, one of the Rathbun allies, countered that "this is not to 'exclude' anyone—it is to invite all to meet the conditions of mature religion." As though to concede the solipsistic nature of his own argument, however, he then went on to wonder "if perhaps we ought not be less fearful of being termed 'a sect.' " Like Emilia and Harry, Odom was unembarrassed by the profound religious implications of his position. He believed they had "a truth too significant to place in the old wine skins of customary organizational technique and procedure." Indeed, he believed that the times were ripe for a "new denomination, a new religion (1900 years old) with real vitality in a pagan world in which most of organised religion is dead ."^[67] Although it would be thirty years before the Rathbuns would proclaim themselves members of a new religion, the seeds were already germinating in 1945.

In language that would become typical of the Rathbuns' uncompromising demand for complete dedication to the cause, Harry wrote, "Perhaps such a renewed and revitalized commitment to the will of God may mean for most of us who are members of the Central Group the giving up of our present jobs for a year—maybe permanently—and making this our sole job—for the year and perhaps the rest of our lives." Harry said that he was willing to ask for a leave of absence for the following year and he challenged the rest of the group to do likewise. "Are we serious about it?" he asked. "Are we really willing to sell all? Do we truly believe we have the answer to a desperately sick world's troubles?" The questions were obviously rhetorical. The answer was, "If we do, must we not face these implications and lay plans on a vastly greater scale than those we were thinking of as our first steps?"^[68]

Dryden Phelps, another member of the Central Group, came toCalifornia on personal business in early 1945 and had a chance to talk directly with the Rathbuns and Sharman. His report to the group makes it clear that Harry and Emilia, not Sharman, were the originators of the new plan. Emilia foresaw a community "on a communistic basis of religiously wholly committed people who have literally 'sold all' " and moved to a place where they could live and train others who in turn would go out into the world to spread the Sharman message and technique. She even suggested that this new community might be located near Trabuco in Southern California where Gerald Heard, a religious philosopher with whom both Rathbuns had studied in the mid-1930s and early 1940s, had his center.^[69] Trabuco College, where followers of Heard lived and learned to practice his religious ideas, became something of a model for the Rathbuns, and they would refer to it constantly in their planning discussions.

Citing that bible of the social gospel movement, Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis, Phelps attacked the basic premise of the Rathbuns' plan. He recalled that for two thousand years the finest minds of Christianity had withdrawn from the world to form elite communities, thus removing themselves from the very environment where they were most needed. Rather than try to provide a "solution by example," Phelps advocated bringing "the impact of Jesus to others through the seminar method, AND CONCURRENTLY to cooperate with men and women of good will and intelligence the world over to discover the generic causes of world chaos, and cooperate with them to eliminate those causes by the creation of a cooperative, noncompetitive society."^[70] Phelps's references to a "cooperative, noncompetitive society" reflected his distinctly left-wing social gospel perspective. It was his belief that the reconstruction of society could not wait until large numbers of people had become committed to the religion of Jesus. Rather those with religious motivation had to cooperate with others motivated by economics and politics to work for a better world. Only in a new and decent society, he wrote, was it possible that "the Kingdom of God will have some chance of growth and survival."^[71]

At a philosophical level, therefore, the group was split by the classic division between those who were homocentric, believing social reality derived from the ideas of individuals, and those who were sociocentric, believing that socioeconomic reality gave rise to individual beliefs. People with a homocentric outlook focus on the individual. For some, the homocentric focus is so narrow that it excludes the world beyond the single person. For others such an individualized focus is a way of influ- encing the collective whole. Sociocentrics approach the issue from the other end. They see the individual as more of a product than a component. For them it is not the collective sum of individuals who make up the social whole, but rather it is the ecology of the socioeconomic culture that molds the individual.

Within the context of religion, the homocentric-sociocentric split produces two very different sets of attitudes and activities. Religious homocentrics tend to be exclusive, believing that God's will can only be affected by those who have a special understanding, knowledge, or insight. At its purest, religious homocentrism holds individual salvation as the sole purpose of belief and regards the social implications of personal belief as irrelevant. Slightly less extreme are those religious homocentrics who do want to change society and believe the way to do so is by converting individuals to a new set of beliefs that lead to a new way of life. For them social change is the cumulative result of a large number of individual changes. They do not seek to force people to alter their behavior through the coercion of legal force, but rather to convert the individual to right thought and belief with the confidence that a good society will inevitably follow.

Sociocentric religious reformers, by contrast, see their role as getting out among and cooperating with others who share their goals, if not necessarily their values. They tend to place much greater stress on political action and advocate political solutions to social problems. Sociocentric reformers with a strong religious motivation adhere to what in America has come to be called the social gospel. Moving out into the world beyond the church, social gospelers seek to bring about change (reform or revolutionary) that will implement their idea of a just society. Individual conversion is still seen as a desirable goal, but not as a necessary precondition for genuine change. Indeed, a change in social conditions is frequently viewed as an important prerequisite for any change in the individual. Liberated from the oppression, corruption, and exploitation of the preexisting society, individual human beings would be free to realize their creative and spiritual potential.

The concept of religious community had a strong influence on the Rathbuns' position in the homocentric-sociocentric dichotomy. They always perceived themselves as part of a community of believers distinct from the rest of society, and they frequently talked of a physically discrete community as well. Homocentrics are much more likely than sociocentrics to separate themselves into a community of believers. Be- cause their core value does not emphasize changing the world at large, they sacrifice little by withdrawing from it.

Homocentrics who divorce themselves more or less completely from the outside world when they move into communities, like the Shakers or the Amish, create an isolated society where they can live in an environment of mutual support with little regard for what might be going on in the rest of the world. Other communal homocentrics, like the Mormons and many political communitarians, use their community either as a base for missionary activity or as an example that they hope others will follow.

The Rathbuns fell into this last category. They hoped to establish a base in which believers could "live the life" nurtured by others who share their values. But it would not be a cloistered existence. The Rathbuns' projected community would be a school where people could learn about their beliefs and the techniques to be used to spread the word to others. It would be a place where believers could find practical as well as spiritual support, and from which they could venture into the outside world to spread the message. Unlike "pure" homocentrics who wish only to be left alone to lead a religious life, the Rathbuns always felt a compelling obligation to get as many people as possible to see the future of humankind as they saw it. Their homocentric approach was based on the ideal of saving the earth by awakening people to the dangers that faced them and getting them to change their religious values.

There were actually three factions in the Central Group. The most conservative were the pure homocentrics who had close ties to the mainline churches and felt that Sharman's work should be aimed solely at the individual, taking no position at all on broader social issues. The other two factions both believed they should work to create the Kingdom of God on earth. The sociocentrics, led by Willmott and Phelps, thought the good society could be created through political action with the help of converted people. The Rathbuns also wanted to create the good society, but their method was a synthesis of the first two positions. Like the pure homocentrics they wanted to concentrate their effort on converting individuals, but, like the sociocentrics, they hoped their actions would lead to major changes in society.

Thus the stage was set for a confrontation at Camp Minnesing in the summer of 1945 when, as it turned out, the debate was greatly complicated by the issue of communism. For Minnesingers, communism was inevitably linked with China because many of them had close personal ties with that country. Emilia's sister Elena had married Felix Greene, the sympathetic chronicler of the Chinese Communist revolution.^[72] Sharman's wife, Abbie, had been born in Hangchow where her parents were missionaries. The Sharmans visited China in 1922 as the Canadian delegates of the SCM to the World Student Christian Federation Meeting in Beijing, and there the president of Yenching University, an old SVM colleague, invited Sharman to join the faculty. Sharman was a visiting professor of history in the Department of Religion from 1926 to 1929.^[73] Finally, both Earl Willmott and Dryden Phelps had been missionaries in China before the war and would return at the war's end.

Their personal experience in China, and their objection to Marxist atheism, made both Sharmans unsympathetic to the Chinese Communist revolution, but the same was not true for Willmott and Phelps. The two younger men had taught together at West China University, an interdenominational school in Chengdu where Willmott had introduced Phelps to the Sharman approach. The two of them subsequently held Records seminars using Sharman's books, which they had translated into Chinese. Harry described Phelps as "an attractive, dynamic, powerful man" whom Sharman saw as his "St. Paul" and as the son he never had.^[74] Perhaps because he himself was so assiduously nonpolitical, or perhaps because he did not want to see that the man to whom he was closest was a political radical, Sharman does not appear to have realized that his two disciples were sympathetic to the Communist revolution in China until the issue was brought to a head by others.^[75]

The Confrontation at "Minnesing'45"

Rather than launching a new organization to promote Records seminars as originally planned, "Minnesing'45" turned into a confrontation between two groups with very different visions of the future of Sharman's work. Although they are brief, the minutes of these meetings vividly depict the clash between the Rathbuns' goal of a community of believers with selective entry and the Phelps-Willmott group's desire for a more open and decentralized structure.

At the very first meeting of the summer, the Rathbuns suggested that they expand beyond the academy to target people through churches and youth groups. Harry and Emilia had begun to doubt the receptiveness of students, whom they viewed as being even more conservative than their parents and infested "with the same germ of intellectual smugness which is deadly with the faculty."^[76] Furthermore, students and faculty would be less likely to move into the separate community that they envisioned. Once more those worried about the Rathbun approach raised the caution that the group not become a cult. They did not want an organization that one had to become a member of. They believed that the group's only purpose was to promote the study of Jesus. The issue was joined again on the second day when "long, and at points heated" discussions took place on the question of who should be allowed into the foundation. The Phelps-Willmott faction, on the one hand, argued that the group "should be open to all who affirmed their intention to participate in the work of the F[oundation] for its specific purpose." The Rathbuns and their allies, on the other hand, "felt there should be definite restriction—preferably to those who affirmed their commitment to God."^[77]

By the second week of argument tempers were frayed, goodwill had evaporated, and Camp Minnesing was a hotbed of rumors. Much of the actual debate focused on the peripheral issue of whether or not to have a full-time paid secretary. Earl Willmott was the existing secretary, so arguing over the position allowed the factions to use it as a symbolic way to address the deeper issues of inclusive versus exclusive membership and communism. Unable to reach any agreement, the feuding factions finally called a conference between Sharman and a select group of senior people. There, the pseudo-issue of organization was put aside and the real issue of communism finally broke into the open. Willmott accused the Rathbuns and their supporters of spreading a story that quoted Phelps as saying, "Earl and I lead Records groups to open students minds so that they will be ready for communism."^[78] Phelps denied ever having used these words. Sharman, however, rejected the demurer saying that, whatever his exact words, Phelps had given a lot of people the impression that he agreed with the gist of the statement. Sharman said that he had received "floods of letters" from Canada's Maritime Provinces after a trip there by Willmott asking if the foundation "was interested in Jesus or in communism."^[79]

Willmott and Phelps responded with a defense of their belief that religion could not be isolated from the social situation. They then counterattacked by charging that Emilia had said she would "wreck the foundation" if she did not get her way. Emilia, who had been the major source of the accusations against Willmott and Phelps, did not deny their charge, but explained that she had meant to act only if Phelps tried to use the group to spread communism.^[80] Unpleasantness reigned and "for some time aspersions and recriminations were flying back and forth. There were many slurs and slams about fallible memories." Attempts to steer the course of discussion back to the administrative issue again foundered on the Communist issue. Harry Rathbun finally admitted that he was as much opposed to Earl Willmott as he was to the idea of a central secretary, and Willmott admitted that he had "spoken of the Chinese Communists with approbation" but still denied he had ever advocated communism.^[81]

Finally, after six weeks of bickering, Sharman stepped in to put an end to the debate. He called off the Records seminar that he had been leading during the hours when people were not engaged in the political battle and roundly chastised everybody for the unseemly display of wrangling. The angry and dispirited leader was so appalled at "the willingness to impugn, to charge, to repeat, to go to others and report suspicions, sheer suspicions, of plots, maneuvering, politics," that he declared himself sapped of the will to carry on. Instead of holding additional Records meetings Sharman ordered the members of the group to go off by themselves and think about how they had contributed to the rancorous confrontation.^[82]

Because the group was unable, or unwilling, to resolve the underlying conflict between the homocentric, community-oriented position of the Rathbuns, and the sociocentric, Communist-tainted position of Phelps and Willmott, the confrontation finally played itself out on the incidental question of organization. Although he appears to have had the support of a majority of the younger people, opposition from the Rathbuns and other senior people forced Willmott to tender his resignation both as secretary and as a member of the Central Group. The secretary job then went to Harry Rathbun. With Sharman already living in Carmel, close to the Rathbuns' Palo Alto home, Harry's new prominence in the group assured that the line of succession would pass to him (and Emilia) and not to the social activists.^[83]

As secretary, Harry Rathbun did not assume the kind of aggressive role that either Phelps or Willmott would have. They were, after all, trained and experienced missionaries who had both the drive and the ability to organize. Indeed, despite their unhappy experience at Minnesing, Phelps and Willmott continued to be active in promoting Records study, even meeting with others (not including the Rathbuns) to put together a "Leaders' Handbook."^[84] But, because they returned to China, Sharman's work remained only loosely organized and, although Sharman himself was increasingly pleased by the Records study that Harry was leading in Palo Alto, no serious attempts were made to maintain any regular contact among the many Records study groups in the United States and Canada.^[85] Without centralized leadership and with no institutional structure, whatever coherence there had been to Sharman's work evaporated.

The work in China effectively ended a few years after the Communist victory in 1949. Dryden Phelps remained in the People's Republic of China until 1952 when he was recalled by the American Baptist Foreign Missions Board for writing a public letter that called the Chinese Communist revolution "the most profoundly religious Christian experience I have ever been through."^[86] Like Phelps, Willmott was one of a group of missionaries (all influenced by the Sharman method) who were invited to stay on in China by the Communist government.^[87] When Willmott finally left with the last of the western missionaries in 1952, he crossed the border wearing a blue cotton peasant suit and had his picture taken giving the clenched-fist Communist salute.^[88]

Records study groups in at least eight other nations besides the United States and Canada continued for some time after World War II. Sharman protégés were active in a number of Canadian colleges through the 1960s, and "in the United States there were centers of Records study in the east associated with the Quaker facility at Pendle Hill.^[89] In California, Elizabeth B. Howes, one of the women who originally introduced the Rathbuns to Sharman, continued to run Records seminars through her Guild for Psychological Studies.^[90] But it was Harry and Emilia Rathbun's work that was destined to grow into an entirely new nationwide movement.

Harry and Emilia

Over a period of sixteen years, from 1946 to 1962, the Rathbuns slowly changed their movement from a Bible study group in the Sharman tradition to a de facto religious sect. The transition took place because Harry and Emilia Rathbun wished to create a permanent organization for which Sharman's work was a poor model. Assiduously nonsectarian, Sharman had rejected any kind of institutionalization for his movement. The Rathbuns, however, had a different vision. Rather than a stage through which people passed, they saw their movement as a permanent affiliation. In order to keep people in the organization they had to find a new source of members other than students, all of whom moved on after they graduated. Adults, by contrast, had roots in the community and could be counted on for more than a few years, but only if they could be kept involved. New courses were developed to provide members with a continuing variety of experiences, and new support systems emerged to give the participants the psychological and practical assistance necessary for continued participation.

Partially by design and partially by force of circumstances, the Rathbuns developed a structured social environment for group members. Their approach, like Sharman's, was still basically homocentric, but a permanent religious community emerged to support the individual transformations. The Rathbun group began to develop its own ideology that varied significantly from mainstream social and religious thought. It sought the primary loyalty of its members, weakening their ties to the churches; it developed its own organizational structure with a leadership of people who were perceived as spiritually advanced; and, most important, it began to provide participants with programs that compensated for the social and psychological cost incurred when they joined a group that held nontraditional beliefs.

Despite some significant differences in their leadership styles, there were a number of remarkable parallels in the lives of Harry Rathbun and Henry B. Sharman. Both were trained in the sciences. Both had brief careers in business and labor arbitration, and both ultimately saw themselves as teachers whose calling it was to spread the understanding of Jesus in the academy. Both also had very strong and independent wives who gave them a great deal of support in their missions. Emilia Rathbun, however, was much more an active partner to Harry than Abbie Lyon Sharman had been to Henry Sharman. And in the long run Emilia's role proved to be even more decisive than Harry's, for it was she who gave Sequoia Seminar the spiritual leadership that changed it from a group study of religion into a self-proclaimed new religion.

Harry Rathbun's ancestors had settled in Rhode Island in the colonial period and over the course of the next five generations moved steadily westward to Ohio, Iowa, South Dakota (where Harry was born), and California (where his children Juana Beth and Richard were born). At the time of his birth Harry's parents lived in Mitchell in the Dakota Territory, where his father owned a grocery.^[91] He had identical twin brothers nine years older than he and a sister four years younger. Harry remembers being a timid child, somewhat intimidated by his older brothers who were both rather troublesome, a fact that Harry believes accounts for the nine-year gap between their birth and his. Indeed, his shyness was acute. He would never recite his elocution pieces for family guests and, when a Sunday school teacher assigned him a part in the Christmas play, he refused to go back for six months. Despite the Christmas play trauma, Sunday school proved to be of great importance to Harry's spiritual development. Although neither of his parents was a regular churchgoer, they sent him to Methodist Sunday school and reared him with what Harry called "a strict Protestant ethic." Harry never questioned the basic validity of the values taught by the Methodist church—continuing to adhere, for example, to the non-drinking pledge he had signed as a youth even after he left the church.^[92]

When he was thirteen, a favorite Sunday school teacher invited a group of young men to join the church formally. Although he would have been too shy to make a public profession of faith on his own, in the security of the group he joined the church at the Easter service. The collective nature of the act did not diminish its importance to Harry. He understood his action as a public commitment to the idea that he would do his best to do what was right. He feared, however, that this might oblige him to be a minister or a missionary, and he was not at all sure how, given his shyness, he could be either. But he reasoned that God would not ask him to be anything that God had not equipped him to do.^[93]

Harry understood his new religious commitment to mean that he had to take his school work more seriously, which he did. But this too raised a serious problem. In his small-town high school the bright and hard-working young man quickly moved to the head of his class, and as early as his freshman year he realized that if he continued to do well he would graduate as the class valedictorian. For four years he lived in constant dread of the day when he would have to get up before the commencement audience and speak, all alone, in public.^[94]

The feared day finally arrived, and Harry had carefully prepared an address inspired by the antiwar ideas of Stanford University president David Starr Jordan. The young scholar was somewhat nonplussed when the principal speaker, who preceded him, also chose peace as his topic. Nevertheless, he forged ahead with his memorized speech explaining that war was the result of selfishness and suggesting that international disputes be settled through arbitration enforced by a body of international police. It was an unduly optimistic talk, coming just three years before the outbreak of the First World War, but the ideas of peace, rational settlement of disputes, and the necessity of worldwide cooperation were already present in the mind of the seventeen-year-old youth.^[95]

After Harry's graduation his father decided to retire and move to Los Angeles, where the family lived for several months. Following the footsteps of an older brother who had gone to MIT, Harry wanted to become an engineer. He had seen the introduction of the first telephone and the first electric light into his hometown and reasoned that engineers would be in high demand as this new technology continued to grow. His father had to return to South Dakota to finish up some business, and Harry persuaded him to move the family to San Jose so that he could attend Stanford University and live at home with his mother and sister while his father was gone. Stanford was only twenty years old and still tuition-free when Harry presented himself to the director of admissions one morning in September of 1912. On the strength of his high school record and a flowery letter of recommendation from his principal, he was admitted to the class of 1916 that same afternoon.^[96]

He received his degree in mechanical engineering (electrical engineering was not yet a separate discipline) and spent the war years working for the Federal Telegraph Company designing high-power transmitters for the navy. Because the firm designated him as "essential" he was exempt from the draft—and subject to a certain amount of social opprobrium as a "slacker." Despite the antiwar sentiments of his valedictory he supported the conflict and was proud of his civilian role in the war effort. Even though the movement he founded eventually became Beyond War, an organization opposing all violent conflict, Harry was never a pacifist. He supported both World Wars, although there is some indication that he was influenced by Emilia's antiwar sentiments just before America's entry into World War II.^[97]

Although he went back to Stanford after the war to get his engineer's degree (a postgraduate degree), he had serious doubts about his abilities in this field. He was not very good with his hands and always did poorly in machine shop and in other direct applications of theoretical knowledge. He was spared the need to test his skills in the field when he was offered an administrative position with the Colin B. Kennedy Company, a new San Francisco firm that was manufacturing radio receivers. He stayed with the Kennedy Company until it folded in 1926, moving with it to St. Louis and working variously as treasurer, general manager, and vice-president. When the owners liquidated the firm in the face of the new RCA patent pool, Harry decided to pursue his interest in the interaction of business and the law and, putting aside his engineering skills, he took his profits from the sale of the firm and returned to Stanford to enter law school.^[98]

By the time he graduated from law school in 1929, Harry Rathbun was thirty-three years old and ready to start an entirely new life. But before he could launch his legal career he was offered a position on the Stanford faculty. A popular business law professor had quit to go into private practice, and the dean asked Harry if he would take over the position for a year while they conducted a full search. He did, and on the strength of his business experience was appointed to the position full time in 1930. Although he passed the California Bar, Harry never practiced law and spent his entire professional career until his retirement in 1959 on the faculty of the Stanford Law School.^[99]

The courses that Harry taught were all intended for undergraduates and graduate business students. He never taught a regular course to law students except during summer school and during the World War II teacher shortage. He called his courses, "an approach to law for the layman."^[100] Harry's scholarly accomplishments were modest. He had one contract to do a textbook on business law but abandoned that project when he and the publisher could not agree on the content. Then as now, being a good teacher was only part of what was expected from university professors. Harry was denied raises for focusing on Jesus when the university thought he should have been doing scholarly research. One year, when both of his deans (law and business) asked the acting president to give him a long-delayed raise, the president responded, "No, not while Rathbun is wasting so much time on religion."^[101] His lack of scholarly activity meant that he was constantly passed over for merit pay increases, and he eventually resigned himself to the fact that he would never make as much as his more widely published colleagues. Like many other popular but low-paid faculty members he periodically fed his resentment by figuring out how much more the university was making from the tuition in his large classes than it was paying him.^[102]

Yet what Harry lacked in scholarly accomplishments, he more than made up for in teaching success. By all reports he was a gifted and widely loved teacher both in the classroom and in his religious work. He had a deep and genuine commitment to the well-being of his students. He and Emilia constantly had students to their home for coffee and dinner, and even after Harry's retirement the Rathbuns were among the first faculty couples to occupy faculty quarters in the Stanford fraternity clusters in 1962.^[103] Their children, who both attended Stanford, commented later how surprised they were to have never once been invited to a faculty home during their undergraduate years, wrongly assuming that all professors were as generous with their hospitality as their parents had been.^[104]

Reading the Stanford Daily one day toward the end of the spring term in 1937, Harry came across a column in which the student author complained, "We who are about to graduate are not individuals living our lives as we should have taught ourselves to live. We are stereotyped forms cast in the shape of that outworn likeness of a sacrosanct individual called the American college student." Harry was struck by the despair of the column, by the hopelessness of a student who after four years of a Stanford education could write, "I'm not looking forward to June. Personally I'm scared to death."^[105] Mulling over the implications of the column, Harry decided not to give his planned final lecture in Business Law that day, but instead to address himself to the column. It was, he admitted, a sermon in which he told the class that the meaning of life was up to them. Just as nobody else could eat their breakfasts for them, nobody else could save their souls for them. He told them they had to find the meaning of life for themselves, and that by finding their destinies they would be saving their souls. The class gave him a standing ovation that continued for the whole time it took him to walk out of the classroom, across the inner quad, and to his office in the law school. That began a tradition that lasted for twenty-five years during which Harry ended every course with the same talk. The lecture was so popular that students brought their friends and it had to be moved from the regular classroom to a large auditorium.^[106]

In 1950, at the invitation of Life magazine, the student government named Harry one of two "great teachers" on the Stanford campus. In his final year of teaching in 1959, the administration moved his class to the seventeen-hundred-seat Memorial Auditorium, and when he retired they retired his business law course along with him.^[107]

Harry's inspirational teaching was not limited to the academic classroom. Alumni of his Jesus as Teacher seminars are virtually unanimous in remembering him as an outstanding teacher and group leader. Unlike the stiff and forbidding Henry B. Sharman, Harry Rathbun was much more approachable and inspired love as well as respect. Writing to Sharman, a 1946 seminar participant called Harry "one of the finest teachers that is or has ever been our privilege to study under."^[108]

Harry's religious journey had begun with his Methodist Sunday school experience. Although he adhered to his childhood precepts of morality thoughout his life, he had increasing problems with creedal theology. The first seeds of doubt had been sown in high school when he studied comparative religion and realized that other people believed as fervently as he that their religions were as true as his, and he wondered how one could know who was right. As an undergraduate at Stanford he attended the San Jose Methodist church but found that he was caught in a trap of his own honesty. At age thirteen, upon joining the church, he had pledged to be truthful. Yet each church service started out with a recitation of the Apostle's Creed, certain parts of which he did not believe. Thus by attending church and reciting the creed he was lying. Although it was not the proximate cause of his leaving the church, Harry remembers going to a lecture by Abdul Baha, the leader of the Bahai faith. This man's honesty impressed him and made him think that he, himself, was not being honest in his own religion. Eventually he left the church, not to repudiate his religious beliefs but to live up to them.^[109]

Between the time that he left the church as an undergraduate and the time he met Emilia, Harry was not active in any social or religious activities. His energies were completely devoted to his business career, his study of law, and finally to preparing and teaching classes. But all of that would change when he met Emilia Lindeman. Emilia would become the major influence in Harry's life. It was she who encouraged Harry to become involved in religion again, and there, as in his classroom teaching, he found success and satisfaction. Near the end of his life, Harry wrote, "Thank God for Emilia who has been my teacher, but whom I have resisted, who has taken the brunt of my hostility, but has persisted in the job of helping me save my soul!"^[110]

Emilia Lindeman was born in the Mexican city of Colima in 1906. Her father had been born and raised in North Carolina and had gone to Mexico as a young civil engineer to work on the construction of Mexican ports and railroads. Emilia's maternal grandfather was a low-level German diplomat whose family connections had enabled him to go to Mexico rather than to prison when he refused to join the army. He married a Mexican woman of mixed Indian and Spanish background, purchased large tracts of land, and ran a series of haciendas where he raised cattle, sugar cane, and coffee.^[111]

Emilia and her three younger sisters grew up bilingual and somewhat bicultural, although Emilia thinks of her early years as being primarily upper-class Mexican. The family had no single home but moved from hacienda to hacienda as her grandfather supervised his holdings and her father traveled to the location of his latest engineering project. She remembers her grandfather as lord of the manor, a benevolent despot who provided his Indian workers with schools, medical care, and periodic fiestas where she was exposed to the colorful folk culture that expressed itself in her dress and surroundings for the rest of her life. Her experience as the pampered granddaughter of a grandee left her with a strong sense of noblesse oblige.^[112] On the one hand, Emilia was always very sure of her own high social status. Her powerful self-confidence and finely developed social skills made her extremely popular and socially successful throughout her life. On the other hand, she was imbued with a sense of concern and sympathy for those less fortunate and, because she was so sure of her own place in life, she had no reservations about reaching out and helping others of lower status.

Neither her grandfather, who had converted to Catholicism in order to marry her grandmother, nor her parents were religious. Although they supported churches and priests for the workers and attended services on holidays, the family viewed the Catholic church of Mexico as practically pagan and inappropriate for people of high rank. Emilia does remember being fascinated by the mysterious ritual and ceremony of the mass, as well as the powerful religious symbols of the crucified Christ that were so prevalent in Mexican churches. Although they may not have had any immediate religious significance for her, these church rituals would later express themselves as she (and her daughter, Juana) worked out the details of her own religious vision.^[113]

Until the time she was sixteen, Emilia was educated by American tutors who stressed the traditional women's accomplishments of art and music. These skills, and a love of literature that she inherited from her father, were her major intellectual accomplishments. Neither background nor education disposed her toward systematic, analytic thinking. She thought of herself as an intuitively creative person who worked better with people than with ideas.^[114]

Several times during her childhood Emilia had fled to Los Angeles with her mother and sisters to escape political unrest in the aftermath of the 1910 revolution. In 1922, when she was sixteen years old, her father decided that she was being "raised like a savage" and had to be sent to the United States to get an American high school education. She spent two years attending San Jose High School while living with relatives of her father. Then in 1924 her mother moved to San Jose and she trans- ferred to the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, but even there she managed to avoid taking any courses in religion. After graduation Emilia enrolled at San Jose State College with the intention of becoming a teacher.^[115]

In the meantime, her family's circumstances had taken a definite turn for the worse. After her grandparents' deaths, her parents relinquished all claims of the family estate rather than risk confrontation with and alienation from other relatives. Her father joined her mother in San Jose, but with the onset of the Depression, he could not find employment as an engineer and eventually had to go to work on the WPA. After her father died, Emilia herself dropped out of school for a year to help earn money to support her mother and sisters.^[116]

When she entered college, Emilia was even less involved in organized religious activities than Harry had been. She was very active socially, however, joining the YWCA at San Jose State, an important center of women's activities. Emilia remembers the "Y" of the late 1920s as being concerned less with religion than with social justice. Their great interest in the plight of the poor, especially blacks and migrant workers, was especially congenial to Emilia, with her family tradition of concern for the poor. Equally attractive was the Y's interest in campus social activity. Situated in the center of rural Santa Clara County, San Jose State attracted large numbers of women from the fruit farms that were the area's major industry. The more sophisticated Y girls took on the obligation of introducing their country cousins to the ways of the city, instructing them in proper dress, etiquette, and other social graces.^[117] Emilia's college experiences teaching other women how to look and act set a pattern that would continue through her work in Creative Initiative.

The YWCA was so removed from the ordinary religious concerns of Christian life that when the group's leader, Dorothy Phillips, came back from a Sharman seminar and began talking about Jesus, the other women were mildly shocked. But Emilia was intrigued. She had become good friends with Phillips and made it her business to meet Sharman at the annual YMCA-YWCA conferences that were held each year at the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove, near Sharman's retirement home in Carmel. Emilia admits that while she was impressed with Sharman as an individual, his rigorous intellectual approach to the gospels did not excite her. Nevertheless, she was increasingly attracted to a more serious study of religion, which blossomed into a full commitment when she finally attended her first Jesus as Teacher summer seminar in 1934.^[118]

By that time, Emilia was married to Harry and had had her first child. Emilia had met Harry at a Stanford faculty party where she had been invited to entertain. Her work in the YWCA had introduced her to a number of Stanford faculty wives who would invite her and her sisters to perform at their parties. In fact, the Lindeman sisters had organized a semiprofessional group, "Las Tapatias," that performed Mexican folk songs around the Bay Area in the early 1930s.^[119] At one particular party in 1931, she spotted Harry leaning against the mantle and said to herself, "that is the man I am going to marry." Discovering that he was a law professor who had a background in engineering, she invited him home to meet her father, who quickly realized that he was not the true object of the visit and left. Harry admits to having been a bit overwhelmed by this "aggressive female," who was not at all awed either by his professional position or by the fact that he was twelve years her senior. They met in February, were engaged in April, and married in August.^[120]

By 1934, although happily married and the proud mother of an eighteen-month-old daughter, Emilia felt dissatisfied. She had given up any thought of teaching when she married (in 1934, wives of employed men did not work) and found the prospect of a life of endless faculty wives' teas a dreary one. She had previously thought about going to Minnesing, but six weeks and a six-thousand-mile roundtrip made that impossible for a young wife and mother. Then, two women who had been active disciples of Sharman started their own summer seminar in California, and the full experience of the Sharman technique became available to Emilia.^[121]

Becoming Sharman Disciples

The two women responsible for starting the Sharman seminar in California, Frances Warnecke and Elizabeth Boyden, had met while both were undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. Warnecke had been introduced to Sharman at a YWCA Asilomar conference in 1929 and had attended a seminar at Minnesing the same year. She introduced Boyden to the Sharman method and the two of them spent several years promoting Records study in the Bay Area with money that Boyden had inherited after the death of her Parents in a car accident. Much of their work was focused on Stanford, and there they inevitably met Emilia Rathbun who had also moved into the Sharman orbit.^[122]

Warnecke, Boyden, and the Rathbuns were soon working together on the Stanford campus recruiting students and faculty for the summer seminars at Minnesing, even though neither of the Rathbuns had ever attended one. Thus, when Emilia attended the Warnecke-Boyden seminar in the summer of 1934, she had already been active in Records work for a number of years. By her own admission, however, she had never really understood the points they were trying to make, and her involvement lacked genuine commitment.^[123]

Perhaps because she had achieved the goals of her early adult life, a husband, a child, and social position, and found that she needed something more, the Records seminar proved to be a major turning point in her religious life. Sharman had always insisted that all people had to discover the truth for themselves, and that is what Emilia did that summer in the California redwoods. The seminar's focus on the first great commandment of Jesus, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all you mind," and its demand for complete obedience to God, provided Emilia with the purpose that was missing in her life. She felt that up to that moment she had always gotten her own way. She had been able to manipulate her parents, her teachers, and her friends to get what she wanted. Now she realized that God wanted her to stop working for herself and to start working for him. She believed that he was a God "who demanded all or nothing" and "a God that would demand everything, was the right God" for her.^[124]

She took the great Christian paradox, "Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it," to mean that she must give up her social activities and devote her life one hundred percent to God. Upon returning home she resigned from the various clubs in which she was active, went down to the local Baptist church, and asked the pastor if he would let her lead a gospel study group among the church women. He agreed, and Emilia launched a career of work among the churches that would last for more than a quarter of a century. Lacking the academic credentials of Sharman and Harry, Emilia saw other wives and mothers as her natural constituency, and she appears to have been the first Sharman disciple to move beyond the academy in her work. Emilia worked at a series of churches in the Palo Alto area, frequently asking the pastors for the names of women who sent their children to Sunday school but did not themselves attend church. She would take these "dumpers" (because they dumped their kids on Sunday) into a study group and, according to Emilia, turned many of them into the most active people in their churches.^[125]

While working in the churches beginning in the late 1930s, Emilia first encountered the situation in which her instinctively powerful style ("charismatic" would not be too strong a word) intruded on what she perceived to be the appropriate role of the religious leader. Unlike Sharman, Emilia did not have a naturally reticent personality. She was a performer who enjoyed the limelight and had spent most of her life successfully seeking to become the center of attention. She discovered in the church groups that many of the women were attributing their spiritual growth not to the study of the gospels but to the leadership of Emilia Rathbun.^[126] She did not want her study groups to become personality cults centered around her, and she arranged to share the limelight by having certain women help her in the study sessions and then calling in ill to force them to take over the whole burden of leading a meeting.^[127] Emilia's conviction that when she surrendered herself to the will of God she also surrendered the right to be the center of attention may not have led to a life of self-conscious effacement, but her belief in submission and the model of Sharman did restrain what might otherwise have been an overwhelming temptation to become the charismatic prophet of a personality-centered cult.

While Emilia was spreading the method-according-to-Sharman to women through the churches, Harry was also becoming increasingly involved in Sharman's work. Harry had been attracted to Sharman's method because it made sense to him "as a lawyer and as a scientist." The press of university business prevented him, however, from attending any of the longer seminars, including the one that Emilia went to in the summer of 1934. He could only take time to drive her up to the site and stay for the first day. Warnecke and Boyden were so pleased to have a member of the Stanford faculty there that they violated one of the basic rules of the seminar and told him he could return any time. The initial session was an eye-opener for Harry. For the first time since he had left the Methodist church as an undergraduate, he perceived the possibility of reconciling his beliefs with the teachings of Jesus. He was able to return for the last nine days of the four-week seminar and found the experience as important to him as it was to Emilia. Unlike his wife, Harry did not feel compelled to change his life style, but he did discover that the supernatural aspects of religious faith that had made him uncomfortable were subject to rational explanation, and that Jesus regarded as a teacher could point the way to finding God.^[128]

As a result of his experience at the California summer seminar, Harry felt moved to begin leading Records study groups through the Stanford Methodist student organization. In the following year, 1935, he and Emilia attended their first summer seminar with Sharman at Camp Minnesing. For approximately the next ten years the Rathbuns actively engaged in a religious life that centered on teaching Records study in the Palo Alto area, recruiting participants for the summer seminars in Canada, and helping in the work of the California seminar that continued to be run by Elizabeth Boyden after she and Frances Warnecke parted company. In the immediate postwar period Harry was particularly successful with students, many of whom were ex-GI's looking for answers to questions raised by their war experience.^[129] During the 1950s however, the Rathbuns' attention turned increasingly away from students and toward adults in the community at large.

The Rathbuns' assumption of leadership positions within the Sharman movement occurred rather quickly after their initial exposure to Records study. The year after attending their first Records seminar run by Elizabeth Boyden they were listed as contact people for the 1935 California seminar and by 1936, immediately after their first seminar with Sharman, Harry's Stanford office had become the mailing address for the Minnesing seminars as well.^[130] Then in 1941 Harry got his first opportunity to lead a seminar on his own. Fred Howes, a Sharman disciple from Canada who had been leading a summer seminar in New Mexico was unable to leave the country because of the war. Harry was recruited to substitute for Howes and repeated his role the next year.^[131]

Sequoia Seminar: The Rathbuns on their own

When, for personal reasons that will be discussed in chapter 3, Elizabeth Boyden was read out of the Sharman movement and went on to found her own Records study group, California was left without an "authorized" summer seminar. The highly motivated could still go to Canada to study with Sharman, but when the Minnesing seminars ended in the acrimony of 1945, the Rathbuns moved to fill the seminar vacuum by establishing their own summer program. Dubbed "Sequoia Seminar," the new summer Records program did not really replace Minnesing as a fountainhead of Sharman-style Records study but did become the largest and most active of the twenty-five or so Records study groups that existed after the 1945 breakup.^[132]

The first Sequoia Seminar was held in July of 1946 in a rented fishing lodge on the Klamath River on the northern California coast. This isolated site proved inconvenient, and for the next four years the summer seminar moved to the conference center at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, closer to the Bay Area and to Henry Sharman, who occasionally attended sessions.^[133] The Rathbuns' dream, however, was to have a place of their own, their own West Coast Camp Minnesing.

In October of 1945, just after the Minnesing breakup, Harry and Emilia met with a group of men in their Palo Alto home and outlined a plan to establish a permanent center for Sharman's work. Harry's notes for the meeting make it clear that he envisioned a hybrid of Sharman's Camp Minnesing and a teaching-living religious center like Gerald Heard's Trabuco College. Unlike the restricted academic focus that Sharman preferred, Harry wanted to recruit widely among other professionals, such as doctors, psychiatrists, clergy, teachers, and managers. Somewhat incongruously, he also hoped to recruit members from Alcoholics Anonymous. A fellow Methodist Sunday school teacher and member of his Records study group was an AA member and had attended the first Sequoia Seminar. This man had persuaded Harry to speak to AA meetings about the religious meaning of the Alcoholics Anonymous message. Since Alcoholics Anonymous had its origins in the religious fellowship of the Oxford Group (in which Emilia was active for several years before the war), it was easy enough for Harry to speak to the significant parallels between their work and the ideas of AA.^[134]

The purpose of Harry's proposed center would be to teach "the way" to financially and educationally privileged people. Since the teaching process would involve meetings, conferences, and summer seminars, Harry wanted a center situated on a large secluded site with good views and basic improvements. Thus far he was merely envisioning a Minnesing-like retreat. But he went on to speculate that the center might grow into a partially self-supporting community growing its own food and running its own handicraft shops. Workers could go out from this center to serve and teach in the world, and return to it for support and rejuvenation.^[135] It was in fact the same plan that had caused so much confusion among Sharman's followers the previous year. The Rathbuns were serious enough about this idea to approach philanthropists for donations to get the project started.^[136]

Funds were not forthcoming, however, and after a few years the Rathbuns had given up their dream of a permanent home for the Sequoia Seminar. Writing to Sharman in 1948, Emilia told him,"We are through with the experiment of buying property. God doesn't want it as all attempts have failed. I see now that it would greatly handicap our freedom in teaching the pure truth because we might fall into all sorts of errors stemming from the need for finances to keep property up." In an afterthought Emilia expressed her wonder at the way God worked. "In time," she said, "He shows us the error of our ways if we are sensitive to read his signs and not too proud to admit our mistakes."^[137] The comment was ironic because in the same letter she reported the death of Irving Hellman, one of the most active students in the Records study. Although Emilia did not know it at the time, Hellman had made Sequoia Seminar the beneficiary of his ten thousand dollar GI life insurance policy. Emilia subsequently interpreted the windfall of the Hellman inheritance as divine beneficence, signaling that land should be acquired, even though at the time she was writing to Sharman she also confidently stated that God wanted exactly the opposite.^[138]

When the Rathbuns, who had always been close to the Quakers, heard that the American Friends Service Committee had been given 50 acres of land in Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Harry proposed that Sequoia Seminar develop the land jointly with the Friends. In exchange for the money from the Hellman legacy, the Friends gave Sequoia Seminar the right to use certain portions of the Ben Lomond land. The funds were used to buy materials for three buildings that were erected with volunteer labor. The Quakers used the kitchen for their interracial boys' camp, and Sequoia Seminar used it for their meetings. Each group provided its own sleeping and meeting facilities.^[139] Through the purchase of adjoining property and the construction of additional meeting lodges and sleeping cabins over the next twenty years, the Ben Lomond camp grew to 233 acres with several meeting lodges and numerous sleeping cabins, a large central kitchen, and a caretaker's cottage, but it never did become a permanent residence and refuge for followers of the Sharman method. In this sense, Ben Lomond was always more a Camp Minnesing than a Trabuco College.

The Rathbuns' vision of an actual camp for their community of believers was not completely fulfilled by a duplicate of Camp Minnesing, because their sense of mission differed considerably from that of Henry B. Sharman. Yet it would take the Rathbuns sixteen years before they reached the logical conclusion of their religious philosophy.

During this time they experimented with both the form and content of their group,) emerging finally as a distinct sect whose members were willing, at least among themselves, to speak of their own "New Religion." The process of transformation from lay Bible study group to religious sect was both the cause and effect of tension with the established churches through whom they worked.

Functioning as a Proto-Sect

Sharman's Records study groups had been distinct from, but completely consonant with, the churches, and so there was very little cost to the people who participated in them. When Harry and Emilia picked up the program in 1946 they initially continued the original pattern. Over the next fifteen years, however, Sequoia Seminar underwent a series of changes that made it demand greater and greater commitment from its members, and so in turn it had to provide them with increased measures of support. By the end of the decade the group had moved so far from its original social context (the mainline churches) that it had become a competitor with them for the limited social, economic, and psychological resources of participants. It had become what could be called a proto-sect.

The story of the first fifteen years of Sequoia Seminar is the story of the drift away from the norms of the churches and even further away from the norms of secular society. Accompanying this movement were the changes that the economic model would predict. First, as Sequoia Seminar became more highly structured, both organizationally and ideologically, it became increasingly intolerant of those who were less than fully committed. Second, unlike churches, whose beliefs are relatively flexible in response to changing social values, the philosophical foundations established by the Rathbuns in the late 1930s remained essentially intact and became even more fixed, increasing the tension between members and society. Third, Sequoia Seminar provided increasing services for its members to compensate them for the growing costs of belonging and, at the same time, made increasing demands on the members to give to the group. Finally, the group's initial appeal was to women, a marginal social category that had fewer opportunities in society at large and therefore experienced less cost in joining the movement.

Following the tradition established by Henry B. Sharman, theRathbuns preferred not to think of Sequoia Seminar as an organization during its formative years. They sought to work with the churches and were careful to assure potential participants that they posed no threat to established religious groups. The very first announcement for the Sequoia Seminar in 1946 stated, "Those who are sponsoring this seminar are not connected with any institution or organization in common."^[140] As late as 1959 and 1960 the group's annual report was still insisting that Sequoia Seminar was making "a conscious effort to avoid institutionalization and development of a systematic ideology." The very fact that Sequoia Seminar was issuing an annual report belied the claim that it was not an organization, a paradox admitted by the report itself when it pointed out that they owned property, held meetings, conducted seminars, and, they might have added, had a budget of almost twenty thousand dollars a year. Nevertheless, the report noted that the group had "no officers, no elections, no voting on decisions; we, as a group, have no denominational preference; we advocate no creeds or dogmas, nor do we purport to have 'the' answer to man's religious problems."^[141]

Despite continued protestations of noncompetition through the 1950s, Sequoia Seminar people became increasingly concerned with the growth of their own movement and wanted to be sure that they could carve a role for themselves within the churches with which they were affiliated. They ruled out "authoritarian" churches, churches whose doctrines and creeds were incompatible with their beliefs (although they still claimed to have no established dogma of their own) and churches that already had a heavy schedule of study groups and prayer meetings (although they did not want to identify themselves with stagnating churches either).^[142]

Sequoia Seminar simultaneously wanted to work within the churches and transcend them. It wanted to be a distinct entity with its own membership while not competing with the traditional churches. There were models for such a group. Sharman had done it, so had the Y's and laymen's movements like Frank Buchman's Oxford Group. The great potential for conflict between the churches and Sequoia Seminar grew, nevertheless, as the latter organization slowly evolved a bureaucratic structure. To the extent that potential members had a finite amount of time and money that they were willing to invest in their religious life, what they gave to one group they would have to take from the other. As long as Sequoia Seminar was running its study groups within the churches, and as long as its own operating budget remained modest, the conflict was minimal. Between 1946, when it held its first summer seminar, and around 1955, Sequoia Seminar and the churches appear to have had the kind of symbiotic relationship envisioned by Sharman.

After 1955, however, Sequoia Seminar entered a phase of organizational development that led to it becoming a proto-sect. Members were expressing more individual identification with the organization, while the religious life of the group was becoming more highly structured through the creation of a nascent bureaucracy. Increasingly the study groups and courses demanded more time and effort from participants, and Sequoia Seminar had to grapple with the issues of recruiting participants and new leaders. There appear to be a number of reasons for the change. First, Sharman had died in 1953 at the age of eighty-eight, removing his restraining influence. Second, Harry was nearing the end of his career at Stanford and probably envisioned being able to spend more time on the group. Finally, and most important, Sequoia Seminar had completed the first buildings on the Ben Lomond property giving it the sense of permanence and institutional identity that it had previously lacked. The organization had put down roots in its own real estate and was looking for a direction in which to grow.

Some of these new themes were expressed at a conference of leaders in 1955. They rejected Sharman's willingness to leave the leadership of study groups in the hands of relatively untrained people and concluded that "the leader must be 'on the spot' and actually lead." Even more significantly, the leadership seminar took the unprecedented step of actually downgrading the scholarly approach advocated by Sharman. "Sharman's approach was somewhat intellectual and aloof," they noted. Then they went on to stress the strong collective orientation that so clearly differentiated Sequoia Seminar from Camp Minnesing: "We feel it is necessary to live the life in the group—to practice love in the group situation."^[143] This stress on community indicates how far the group had drifted from the principles that had motivated Sharman. Although Sharman's books and the Jesus as Teacher seminars would remain the intellectual heart and soul of the movement, the group was now self-consciously aware that it had evolved to a new stage of development in which it had to forge an identity of its own. In conformity to the Rathbuns' interest in group solidarity, this new identity would be much more communal in nature than anything that had taken place during the Sharman era. The lure of collective commitment was very strong, and although the movement never withdrew into itself to the point of becoming what is commonly called a "cult," Harry felt comfortable telling movement members that "the age of the rugged individualist is past. Some societies are given over to collectives. We prefer to stress community. Each of us considers himself expendable for others."^[144]

Organization and Membership of Sequoia Seminar

On the day before Christmas, 1955, Sequoia Seminar published a formal statement of its new organization and operating principles. This was part of a general restructuring of the way the group was administered that had been going on for several years and included the formation of a new legal entity, the Sequoia Seminar Foundation.^[145] The new formal organization consisted of a planning commmittee and four operating committees. Those whose lack of commitment did not yet qualify them for the planning committee (which chose its own members) could serve on one of the four operating committees: administration, public relations, property, and personnel.^[146] Ever cautious of the possibility of conflict between themselves and the churches with whom they worked, the planning committee members carefully warned that work on the operating committees should not divert people who were "already productively engaged in creative activities such as church work." For those, however, who were not so engaged, the committee meetings themselves were supposed to be one of the ways in which people "would live the life in the group." Indeed, "live the life," a phrase of Emilia's that became standard Creative Initiative terminology, meant to behave in a way dedicated to the will of God and the principles of Jesus as interpreted by the group.^[147]

The organizational plan of 1955 continued to serve Sequoia Seminar through the transition period that culminated in 1962. This seven-year period was one in which the leadership of the movement gained experience in running a large organization with the many complications that came from trying to coordinate the efforts of volunteer group leaders, study group participants, and the development of permanent facilities at Ben Lomond. By 1956, when the group initiated a newsletter, there were hundreds of Sequoia Seminar alumni, mostly in the Bay Area, in addition to the participants in local study groups run by graduates of leadership training programs offered at Ben Lomond.^[148] The new organizational structure was far from perfect and not without its critics.

Perhaps in response to a new member who charged the leadership with being an oligarchy and called for more democratic participation, there was a move toward decentralization in 1959.^[149]

It became increasingly clear through this period that the original Sharman vision of work within the academic community was too constraining for a group that wished to grow but could attract people only from a geographically limited area. Although Harry continued to recruit actively on the Stanford campus, the specific reference to students was dropped from Sequoia Seminar announcements. Roll books indicate that during the first few years of Sequoia Seminar more than half and as many as three-quarters of those attending were active students; most of the others were recent graduates. By 1955, the year of the structural reorganization, less than one-tenth of those attending the summer seminar were students.^[150]

Harry and Emilia did not have Sharman's broad international base from which to draw participants. Their source of students was Stanford University, and Stanford did not have a large enough student population to provide the numbers needed to make Ben Lomond practical. By actively recruiting participants from the larger community, the Rathbuns were able to attract sufficient numbers of people to run the kind of weekend and summer seminars for which they had bought Ben Lomond. As long as the university had been the major source of participants, however, the Rathbuns did not have to worry about the "quality" of those they attracted—the university admissions office and faculty selection committees did that for them. But as they increasingly looked beyond the academy for members, they had to make a more conscious effort to maintain the highly educated, upper-middle-class image that marked the group since the Sharman era. Internal recruiting documents emphasized that they were looking for "people with mature minds—leaders, thinkers, doers," and that recruiters hould "concentrate on professional people."^[151]

This switch from students to the general population was to have an unforeseen effect; the proportion of men to women fell dramatically. During the first three years of Sequoia Seminar the numbers of men and women attending were roughly equal, with a slight preponderance of men. After 1953 the ratio was almost always 60 percent or more women. The actual proportion of women in discussion groups held during the year was probably even higher since there was a tendency for couples to attend the two-week summer seminars together.^[152] On at least one occasion in 1957, Harry held a special dinner for the "hus- bands and friends" of the women discussion group participants with an eye to setting up all-male groups if there were sufficient interest. There is no indication that there was.^[153] Concomitantly, as larger numbers of more mature women attended meetings, the need for child care became acute. In 1951 one of the summer seminars made special arrangements for child care so both husbands and wives could attend sessions and, throughout the 1950s, many couples participated in ad hoc exchanges of children. The child care program eventually grew into a summer camp run for the first time in 1961.^[154] Unlike college students whose personal needs were met by their schools, married people needed specific support like child care if they were to participate, and by providing that support Sequoia Seminar took further steps toward establishing a sectlike institutionalized support system.

Financially, Sequoia Seminar was always a rather modest operation. Some of the disaffected members of the old Camp Minnesing Central Group have hinted darkly that the Rathbuns' inherited a substantial amount from the Sharman estate. Money was in fact left to the Alpha Psi Zeta Foundation of which Harry was secretary and one of the trustees. He was also the executor of the Sharman estate, which may account for the implication of ill-gotten gains.^[155] But Sharman's will specifically prohibited the money from being spent on the acquisition of property, limited its use to promoting gospel study among university people, and required that it be spent within fifteen years of his death. Thus, there was very little Harry could have done to use it to develop the Sequoia Seminar.^[156] By the time of Abbie Lyon Sharman's death in 1955, no more than $25,000 remained in the estate, and most of it seems to have been spent in support of the several Jesus as Teacher study groups still functioning in the United States and Canada at that time.^[157]

Like much else connected with the seminar before 1955, accounting procedures were rather casual. There are no account books among the Rathbun papers, and only simplified financial statements were issued. Scattered references to money indicate that the thirty-five dollar fee for the seminars just about covered all expenses. Since there were no employees, and the Rathbuns never took a penny for their time and services, overall costs were minimal. The expense of constructing additional buildings at Ben Lomond with volunteer labor was met through contributions from members and an occasional bank loan.^[158] The first complete balance sheet, put out in 1955, indicates that the group actually lost a bit more than five hundred dollars on their seminars. Their general operating costs were a modest seven hundred

dollars and, with an income of about ten thousand dollars made up mostly of contributions, they were actually able to save money against future expenses. Hence by no stretch of the imagination was Sequoia Seminar a big budget operation. In 1955 the group's net worth, including the property and buildings at Ben Lomond, was $43,450.^[159] This pattern remained relatively stable for the period up through 1962. Seminars paid for themselves, total contributions ranged from seven to eleven thousand dollars a year, and expenses—principally continued expansion of the Ben Lomond camp—kept the cash on hand quite low.^[160]

Although donations and expenses remained stable throughout the 1950s, participation grew appreciably during most of the decade. No records are available for 1946, the year of the first seminar, but 59 people attended the two held in 1947. In 1953, after the move to Ben Lomond, Sequoia Seminar offered five seminars and the number of participants jumped to 86. Those figures steadily grew until 1959 when 217 people attended seminars at Ben Lomond, but after that the numbers dropped by more than a quarter to around 160.^[161]

The membership problem caught the group in a dilemma. They wanted to expand, yet at the same time they wanted to admit only those people who were serious in their desire to explore the gospels and open themselves to the possibility of living a new life.^[162] Seminar leaders also needed to tread cautiously in asking for funds from new members since they were still working within the churches and money that went to Sequoia Seminar might well be money taken from the churches. If local ministers believed they were losing money to Sequoia Seminar, they could have easily cut the group off from its major source of participants. Besides having to worry about the sincerity of members and possible conflict with the churches, Sequoia Seminar was not prepared to move beyond a very narrow geographic focus. The Palo Alto organization gave encouragement to Records study groups in other areas, including Boise, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but expected that they would "become completely independent and self-sufficient, including providing their own leadership."^[163] During the peak year of this period, 1959, about five hundred people in the Bay Area were actively involved in local study groups and/or in the summer seminars.^[164]

By the end of the decade the strain of ambivalence was showing more clearly. Special meetings were held about ways to attract new people, while at the same time the annual report admitted that "numerical growth does not necessarily indicate that anything of real significance is taking place."^[165] Much of the growth, moreover, had taken place in so-called continuation seminars designed for people who had already attended the basic Jesus as Teacher seminar. Whereas only 20 more people attended basic seminars in 1959 than in 1955, attendance in continuation seminars had almost quadrupled from 33 to 121.^[166] This was one more sign that Sequoia Seminar was becoming more sectlike in both its form and function. It was evolving into a place of continuing spiritual fellowship where people could find a coherent religious philosophy and support for transforming their lives.