Holy, Holy Rollers!

I recently finished an outstanding book that shed light on so many lurking suspicions I've amassed over the years regarding religion, cults, religious cults—don't ask me why I'm being redundant here, any one of these terms should suffice.

The book is called "Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon's Love Cult" and its authors T. McCracken and Robert B. Blodgett relay (in obsessively-researched detail) the story of the rise and fall of the Holy Roller cult that emerged in Corvallis, Oregon around 1903—spawning mayhem in the decade to follow.

Led by the well-endowed, jesus-wannabe Edmund Creffield—or "Joshua" as his flock knew him—the Holy Rollers spent much of their early days rolling around on the floor of their church in a crazed state of worship. Joshua had told them that he was a prophet and that they were God's Anointed; he had "received instruction from on high" to lead them to where the restoration of all things would take place, at which point the world would be as it was when God first created it.

But in the meantime, this meant a whole lot of rolling around and begging for forgiveness. And so, exhaustive prayer services were held sometimes lasting 24 hours, 12 hours if it was a short service. God's Anointed were encouraged to shun their spiritually impure family members and burn all their "vain" possessions (which I believe included some chickens, a dog and a cat...).

Making use of the convenient device of divine revelation, Creffield would soon convince his flock that God no longer wanted them to wear clothes (though they were to continue to spend much time on the floor together) and that they were only to eat food that he himself had blessed. This way they would "know cold" and "know hunger" but also remain weak and dizzy from all that rolling.

Creffield's method of breaking down and rebuilding his subjects was an incremental process, but the key was keeping everyone convinced that he was in direct communication with God. Any dissent among his followers was fiercely rooted out, and the accused were banished from his church with the promise that God would smite them.

The particulars of these cult-leader/cult-cog dynamics were of imminent interest to me in reading this book. I've always maintained a loose sketch in my mind of how one individual, or a group of individuals, may have managed to pull off an extaordinary hoax (such as, say, Christianity) but to have the inner-workings of a failed Christian off-shoot such as the Holy Rollers, rigorously profiled and thereby exposed... well, it only served to fan the flames of my imagination and lend greater plausibility to such a senario.

More than anything though, this book contains great story telling—and in so far as it does, every effort has been made to make an already sensational story, as sensational as possible.

Highly Recommended » Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon's Love Cult

What about you, oh loyal readership. Does anybody have any arm-chair ideas on how any of the world religions came about? Half-baked? Quarter-baked? Purely to satasfy my curiousity...