WAYNE’S WORLD by Alex Hannaford
(first published in Bizarre Magazine, 2003)
When I heard about a community in the far north of New Mexico, hidden away, miles from the nearest town, surrounded by mountains and a beautiful lake; where they grow their own vegetables and the kids are home-schooled; where there is no crime, no violence, pride or selfishness and everybody smiles, I thought - there’s got to be a catch.
And indeed there is.
The leader of the community calls himself Michael the Archangel, claims to be the Messiah, has taken various women away from their husbands and has ‘consummated’ the relationships. Oh, and they all believe the world is about to end. To top it off the FBI are also worried they’re contemplating suicide.
Michael the Archangel’s real name is Wayne Bent - not the most Biblical-sounding name - and he was born in Southern California in 1941. He was a pastor with the Seventh Day Adventist Church in California before breaking away in the early ‘80s to form his own denomination which he called The Lord Our Righteousness. The group became more and more detached from the outside world and eventually bought a ranch in Idaho where they lived for over 10 years. In 2000 Wayne received a ‘message’ that the group should relocate to an area called Travesser Park in the far north eastern tip of New Mexico. That’s where he changed his name to Michael Travesser – or Michael the Archangel - and revealed he was the Second Coming of Christ.
That’s about as much as I knew before I planned a trip up to meet the Messiah in the mountains and find out more.
I decide to give the local Sheriff’s department a call before making the long drive. “I thought it would be unwise to go up there without checking with you first,” I tell the woman on the other end of the line.
“We’ve had no problems with them at all,” she says. “As far as we know they’re a peaceful people. We did have someone from outside their community contact us saying they were worried there would be a suicide attempt and we’ve been up there a few times but there’s no cause for concern.”
“So they don’t have guns up there or anything like that?” I ask.
“Well, I didn’t say that, but as far as we know they’re peaceful.”
I decide to call Albuquerque FBI to check out the suicide claims. An answer-phone tells me to leave “a message or a detailed confession” after the tone. I opt for the former and wait but never receive a call back.
The cult live 40 miles from Clayton, New Mexico, the nearest town, close to the border with the Texas panhandle. While my friend negotiated the 660 mile drive from Austin, Texas, where I live, to Clayton, I took the opportunity to catch up on a bit of light reading in the passenger seat: The Cult Experience; Cults - Faith, Healing and Coercion and Cults in America - Programmed for Paradise.
In Clayton, a sporting goods shop, auto repair garage and Pizza Hut rub shoulders with the Wild Horse Steakhouse and the Shrine of the Testament Art Gallery of Biblical History. Albeit slightly geographically off, this is close enough to the Bible Belt to be grouped in with it. Here the Bible is inerrant; evolution is a swear word, and people believe that their lives are totally controlled by a God we should all fear.
The Hi Ho Café welcomes visitors at the town’s ’city limits’. After downing a second re-fill of fresh coffee I ask the waitress whether she’s heard of the ‘group of religious people’, as I tactfully put it, 40 miles to the north. “Sure have,” she says, fixing me with a suspicious look. “The kids from the town have nothing else to do so they go up there and drive onto their land. They get pretty annoyed. We don’t see them in Clayton very often. They’re pretty quiet.”
Even the small tourist information office - with a staff of one - is nonchalant about the group. “Haven’t heard much about them, tell the truth,” the old lady tells me as she pulls several flyers from a rack. “But you should look around Clayton - the hotel down the road was built in the late 1800s.”
I decide to nip in to the local Baptist church to see what the pastor thinks of this religious community on his doorstep. I push open the door to the church downtown but it’s empty. I call out from a side door but there’s no reply. Eventually an elderly woman who introduces herself as Isabel, appears. She tells me the religious group ‘keep themselves to themselves’ and says they’re harmless as far as she knows.
She isn’t aware that their leader claims to be the Messiah.
“Really?” she says, sounding shocked. “Well I just think that’s very, very sad.”
Before I make the 40 mile journey north I decide to check with the local police station. An officer with bleached blonde hair smiles at me from behind glass at the counter. Her response is slightly worrying: “I wouldn’t go up there, but that’s just me. If I were you I’d phone the State police - they have more dealings with them than we do - we just look after the town.”
Officer Collins from the New Mexico State Police Department tells me they’re ‘co-operative and friendly’. “We’ve had reports they’re planning a mass suicide but they’re denying this,“ he says. “Other officers have been up there as well and they’ve always been cordial.”
So it is with a slight sense of relief but also a vague feeling of trepidation that I drive up to meet the Messiah.
After 10 miles driving up highway 370 towards the lake, the road turns to dirt. Strong City, the name given to the cult after a website it used to publish, is 40 miles from Clayton. Vast tracts of land and sprawling farms frame the road and you realise just how vast this empty continent really is. There’s an overwhelming sense of solitude.
Further up the road the land becomes more scenic, hilly, and scattered with trees and bushes. The sun beats down over the high desert and as I reach the 34 mile marker I notice an unmistakeable bullet hole piercing the green metal. Just three miles to go and I wonder whether it’s a good idea. Thankfully there’s a small house just a mile away from the compound, but as I motor past I see that it’s dilapidated and vacant. Suddenly, framed by mountains, the road swoops down into a beautiful valley, and I arrive at a metal gate.
Four women smile at me from inside a small, red car which is on its way out of the compound. I ask where I can find Jeff Bent, Wayne‘s son, as he has agreed to show me round.
“His is the fourth trailer on the right,” the car’s driver says. “He’s expecting you.”
Jeff Bent is a tall, neatly dressed man, with a tidy beard and a warm smile. He invites me into the Recreational Vehicle – or RV - that he shares with his wife, Christiana, and offers me a drink which I politely refuse. There is nothing remarkable about the trailer, save for a small painting fixed to the wall in between two windows. “Ah, that’s the Father’s hand cupping the Messiah and his mother,” he says noticing my interest.
“We have about 70 people up here,” Jeff explains. “A few were my father’s parishioners when he was a Seventh Day Adventist minister in Southern California but most joined after that.”
While still a member of the Adventist Church, Wayne launched what he called the Life Support Seminars - a series of religious workshops to help his followers find God. After his wife left him, he left the Adventist ministry and began working full time on his seminars. In 1990 he took a group of his followers up to a 320 acre ranch they had bought in Idaho and lived there until he was ‘called’ to move to New Mexico. Jeff says the reason they moved was because “a dark, angry element made it feel less and less like home,” although he won’t elaborate.
“Some people moved there to get out of the city and concentrate on their spiritual growth,” Jeff explains.
“My father invited some of the people that had lived with us in Idaho to the new land in New Mexico and every week in the Spring of 2000 a different family would arrive.
“Society isn’t friendly towards people that believe in God and want to live His will at any cost. There are a lot of dangers and violence in society. We couldn’t live within that system so this was created out of necessity.”
I ask whether he considers his group a ‘cult’.
“We don’t dispute the word cult - it’s okay to use it, it’s not offensive. It is just short for culture. We are a different culture and our religion is based on the Bible. People call themselves Christian but they just fit it in their life when it’s convenient. We don’t. We live it.
“We had seen God speaking through Wayne before, but in July 2000 he was given the work of Messiah. He took our failings and special needs onto his shoulders.”
I ask how and why Jeff believes his biological father is the son of God. “I asked God,” he replies, matter-of-factly. “The only thing inside me having trouble with this was my pride and natural ego.
“His character changed dramatically,” he says. “There was definitely a different person there and it wasn’t something that somebody could fake. My dad’s never needed a following. He said ‘don’t take my word for it - ask God’ and we did.”
One of the things that distinguishes this cult is an event Wayne terms ‘the consummation’. Telling the group it was a test of their faith and that it was God’s instructions, two married women – who he called ‘the witnesses’, ‘gave’ themselves to him in late 2000 and he had sex with both of them over a 21 day period, apparently with the full blessing of their husbands.
“It was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to deal with,” Jeff admits, “but I’ve been very close to my father and trusted him. We got a revelation from God to believe even though we didn’t understand and it brought us into a new world of being married to God and our divorce from the old world. Christ said things that were mind-blowing in his day, and he was killed for it.”
The group believes it has now reached the end of days, or the ‘midst of the week’ as Jeff quotes the scriptures. “We have no plans,” he says. “After Christ was killed, Jerusalem was destroyed, and Jerusalem represents the world today. There are enormous pressures on planet earth right now - currency pressures, war; the world is in a state of flux and life as we know it will end. So we just follow our instructions day by day.”
Jeff’s wife Christiana is a pretty woman and enters the RV barefoot, wearing a long dress (as do all the women here after Wayne told them to dress modestly a few years ago) “I was just finishing college when I decided to give my heart to the Lord,” she says. “My brother had come into contact with someone in the group and that’s how I got involved. I’ve always seen the truth in this movement, especially with my father-in-law. He is a cord that has been let down from heaven.”
I ask if she feels she’s missing out on life outside Strong City. “Missing out?” she says. “What would I want with the garbage out there. This is night and day - that’s what Messiah has given me.”
Christiana’s mother and father live in Oregon and are ‘not practising Christians'. “They believe in TV and fighting with one another and they don’t believe in Messiah,” she says. “I love my family but they don’t want what I have.”
Christiana is a massage therapist by trade but says she hasn’t worked for a while. “I’ve spent a lot of time alone lately, laying on my bed, going on hikes, being with the Father - I felt like I wanted more of Him.”
“We put a high premium on being alone with God,” Jeff interjects. “People are free to do what they want here - there’s no regimentation, no nine to five. People can get away from the pressures of life outside like money. Here you can have quality time and God provides.”
“It just falls out of heaven,” Christiana says. “Only the other day I found a $50 note under a cushion. It’s super sweet to watch God provide.”
Wayne Bent aka Michael Travesser, enters the small brick building next to his RV which serves as his office, and sits down on a comfortable chair next to me. He’s cordial, if a little guarded, and offers me a drink which I politely refuse. He has thick, grey, neatly-combed hair, a beard (as do all the men) and moustache, and cuts a frail figure in his baggy, draw-string trousers, check-shirt and house slippers. He looks as far removed from the Messiah as one could possibly imagine.
“Messiah just means anointed,” he says, I assume in an attempt to play down his importance. “I was used as a signpost.
“The people here are not forced, coerced or brainwashed. They just love to be here. I haven’t urged people to come here. If someone wanted to leave I would let them and would help them out financially. I don’t think they’re here because of some weakness as the FBI insinuated.
“The alternative,” he says, “is the world you live in, where three-year-olds are put in front of the TV and shown horror movies, are addicted to Prozac or Ritalin. Our children, by contrast, are clean and free to do whatever they like. They forge friendships with other children here and are happy. Why would I want our children to join the marines to learn to blow people up - that sickens me.
“It sounds idyllic here because it is. If we just told everyone it’s free and lovely here, come and join us, we’d have 10,000 people instead of 70. But as there’s someone here that says he’s Messiah, people outside are afraid.”
I tell Wayne that it does indeed look idyllic on the surface but that the ‘consummation’ – whereby he took two of the wives away from their husbands – could be seen as disturbing.
“The consummation was something that was totally out of character for me,” he says. “It was something I’d never thought of before. I know how it looks - cult leader takes over a couple of wives, talks them into it - but it was a miraculous event. Your world would look at it differently. I’ve never felt guilty about it but I have felt a sensitivity towards the husbands that were married to these women before.”
Asked whether he is still engaging in a physical relationship with the two ‘witnesses’, Wayne nods his head. “Yes. It is still a physical union.”
Interestingly he now insists that his ‘work as Messiah’ is over. “I’m trying to tell [my followers] to let it go that I’ve been the Messiah and concentrate on the Father. Don’t ask Wayne what to do,” he says, “ask Father.
“I don’t feel the driving force that I have for the past three and a half years. It left me on April 19th which is the midst of the week.”
The ‘midst of the week’, Wayne says, is otherwise known as the ‘end of days’.
I still am who I am but that phase of the work has passed and we’re into the second phase: the end of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day,” he says. “The end of the world in ours.”
The end of the world, he informs me, is manifesting itself largely in the US-led ’war on terror’.
Most of his followers seem to think the end is imminent. Wayne simply says: “In Jesus’ day the crucifixion happened 37 years after it was prophesised, so we just don’t know. If I told them something would happen on a certain day and it didn’t, of course they would lose faith in me.
“I find myself watching and waiting. I realise we’re in some very serious moments right now. It’s getting more intense. We expect to be translated from the earth.”
Despite speculation and questioning by the FBI, State police and the local sheriff, Wayne insists they are not contemplating suicide. “Often people in cults commit suicide,” he says, “but if a leader responsible for people is leading them into death almost on purpose - that’s not the way I would go.”
Jonathan Thompson is one of the men who ‘gave’ his wife, Anaiah, to Wayne. Our meeting is conducted in his RV whilst his 11 year-old daughter, Victoria, plays outside.
“My wife and I were married in 1986 and we were looking for a deeper spiritual experience,” he says. “We heard about Wayne’s message and it was what our hearts had been wanting - so we just followed and since then it’s been a perfect experience.”
As for the consummation Jonathan simply says: “I knew it was right because I saw Father in it.”
He says Wayne outlined his ‘message’ at a meeting with the group one morning. “I realised I wasn’t dealing with a man,” Jonathan says. “It was the spirit of God. While it didn’t make me ecstatic - I was losing a wife and a mother to my little daughter - I didn’t question it. And I still don’t. I was just in a human marriage with all its flaws and failings. I know how it looks to the outside world but when you follow the voice you don’t look back with that mindset.”
He says his little girl, Victoria, dealt with the consummation well because it was a “divine arrangement”. Her mother, he says, still has a spiritual influence in her life.
Asked what sort of life his daughter has up at Strong City, Jonathan says she occupies herself ‘as any little nine year old would … by playing outside or working in the garden.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like having a childhood now on the outside. If I went back to normal society it would be spiritual suicide,” he says.
Everyone I speak to seems to have a stock, almost robotic answer to some of my questions. They all claim to be ‘married to the church’, all had been given a ‘message’ to join, and most have given up on their ‘earthly marriage’ with their partner. They also all seem to have the same glazed look in their eyes. I wonder whether this is just Jeff and his wife, but Jonathan has it too, and two women – Shecanaiah and Amanah Travesser. Everyone, it seems, except Wayne.
Shecanaiah says the morning after Wayne announced he was the Messiah, she went to greet him as he walked past her RV. “I knew immediately he wasn’t the same man,” she says. “I went out to spend time alone with the heavenly father and he made it clear that this was the second coming of Christ.”
Amanah says that the end of the world is predicted in Revelation. “We’re now at the end of where we can see what’s been revealed.”
I wonder what sort of lives the children lead up at Strong City. Wayne says they are free to leave whenever they want but most have family here, but even if they didn’t, it seems they have been indoctrinated into believing that everything in the outside world is pure evil so they are mentally prevented from leaving.
One 17-year-old girl who calls herself Adora Travesser, has followed Wayne Bent since she was three years old when her mother and father joined the cult.
One of four siblings, all with different fathers, Adora says she wouldn’t like to do the things that other 17-year-olds would do. “I just work in the garden, spend time with my friends or pray. I really want to be here. I can see what the world outside is like and I’m not missing anything - movies are violent anyway.”
She says she has liked boys in the past but has never had a boyfriend. A typical day involves walking around the 300 acres of land at Strong City, talking to her mum and ‘fixing’ her sister’s hair. Her father left the cult around the time Wayne announced he was the Messiah and she hasn’t even spoken to him in over a year.
Driving away from Strong City I pull out a phone number from my bag. I had contacted an ex-member of the cult via the internet some days before my trip and I thought now was an appropriate time to call.
Tim Bowman joined when the group were based in Idaho. He says he was aware of religious cults but initially found Wayne to be “another man, like me, who loved God. He didn’t even call himself the spiritual leader of he church,” he says. “He used to say if you follow me you’re a fool. Just follow God.
“But later things began to change,” he explains. “We used to take it in turns to give sermons but eventually it was just Wayne. Then people began saying Wayne was like Moses and Wayne started calling himself the prophet.
“I met my wife, Catherine, in that church and we were thinking about leaving but when they relocated to New Mexico we decided to give it a chance.
“It was wonderful up there,” he says, “but one afternoon, not too long after we arrived, Wayne gave us a ‘message’. He said ‘there are no more prophets in the land for I am Messiah’.
I was so shocked, I skipped a beat, but a man next to me said he had known it all along. It was obvious these people had been worshipping Wayne from the beginning. I tried my best to show them this was wrong.
“He said the only husband we have is Christ and that’s when wives started leaving their husbands. I told Wayne he had gone over the edge and he told me to get off the property that day. My wife stayed.
“These people have put all their chips into this man; given him their hearts and minds. They don’t question him because if they do he’ll say they’re not one of his flock.
“They want to go to heaven so badly they’ll do anything to get there - even believe lies if it promises them eternal life. Cathy wrote me a letter saying Wayne did her thinking for her now – she said he was her mind.
“I honestly don’t think Wayne ever wanted to be worshipped,” Tim says, “but if you’ve got 100 people bowing at your feet, calling you God, you can understand how it happened. He’s a controller; it’s his way or no way.
“When I was there Wayne always had his hand, metaphorically, on the hilt of a sword in case you said the wrong thing and he’d cut your head off. He would often make us feel stupid. I wanted to be his friend but he wasn’t approachable. If you said something he didn’t like he was on top of you; he would destroy your confidence and make you feel like you didn’t really know God.”
This echoes a couple of things Jonathan and Jeff had told me earlier that day. “I’ve had my pride dealt with and that was exactly what I needed. It hasn’t been a bed of roses,” Jeff had said. “Life is very easy in some ways but like fire in others,” Jonathan had told me. “Father deals with our characters and frees us from that.”
Tim says he knew Wayne was going to end up sleeping with the women up at Strong City. “I just didn’t know how many,” he says. And it isn’t just the FBI who are worried about the possibility of suicide. “It’s just possible they’ll take communion again and that’s something that worries me,” he says. “They don’t take communion anymore but I think Wayne would do anything – maybe poison them without their knowledge.”
As for his life now, Tim says he finds it difficult to hold down a job and often feels like he’s floating – something that has been reported many times by ex-cult members. “Truthfully,” he tells me, “the whole thing made me feel like committing suicide. This is a cult in the classic sense of the word.”
And he isn’t the only one who has left. Adora’s biological father left and Seth, son of one of the ‘witnesses’ left just after the consummation.
Whilst the people at Strong City wait for the end of the world, Wayne's followers walk the land and use the internet 'religiously' (everyone is connected by a broadband link). Tim says they believe this was prophesised in the Bible. “Cast the net – that’s where it came from,” he says. “The internet is bringing people in to the fold.”
I pull into a gas station and strike up a conversation with Jonelle, the large Hispanic girl behind the counter. She tells me members of the cult regularly come into her shop. “They’re not supposed to,” she laughs, “but they buy lottery tickets, soda and candy.
“My mum works in the bank in Clayton,” she says, almost with a whisper, “and she asked one of the women recently if she was interested in opening an account. She just looked at my mum and said it wasn’t worth it - apparently they’re leaving the earth very shortly.”