The Cult Dossier · No. 041 · Commercial / Therapy / Lgat
Mankind United
Christ's Church of the Golden Rule
1934 – 1951 · California
IV. THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Quasi-religious — utopian-commercial hybrid
Who led it
ARTHUR L. BELL, who styled himself the Voice of the Right Idea and claimed to be the spokesman for a hidden body of sixty philanthropists called the Sponsors, and for the International Institute of Universal Research and Administration.
What it worshipped and taught
No god as such. Bell taught that the Sponsors possessed suppressed technology — including a machine that could do the work of ten thousand men — and were opposed by the Hidden Rulers, a metal-and-money cabal responsible for wars and depressions. Members were promised a four-hour working day, a four-day week and eight months' annual holiday once the system arrived. Recruits paid subscriptions and later signed over their property.
Who was in it
Arthur L. Bell; the Sponsors, who were never produced; roughly 14,000 dues-paying members at peak.
How it ended, or where it stands
Litigated into collapse.
The dead
—
Of note
An almost pure example of the promised-utopia-for-subscription model, and a direct forerunner of later commercial-spiritual hybrids. Documented in Fortune magazine and in Berkeley sociologist H. T. Dohrman's California Cult (1958).
Its timeline
- 1934 Movement launched in California during the depths of the Depression.
- 1930s Grows to perhaps 14,000 members through cell meetings and mimeographed pamphlets.
- 1942 Bell and 13 associates indicted for sedition over anti-war statements; convictions later reversed.
- 1944 Reorganised as Christ's Church of the Golden Rule, holding member-donated property in trust.
- 1945–1951 Members sue for the return of assets; the church enters bankruptcy proceedings; Bell loses control and disappears from public life.