Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [50]
For all the sensation Robinson caused when he was alive, the man and his movement are found in virtually no major work of American religious history written in the last forty years. And the college town of Moscow, Idaho, where Robinson began his rise to religious fame and ran his mail-order empire, now marks his memory only on the sign of a park he donated to the county.
But Robinson’s pioneering techniques as a media evangelist—particularly his early grasp of mail-order marketing and his ability to popularize mystical ideas—touched the nation in ways that have far outlived his organization. Indeed, the success of Psychiana revealed many Americans’ hunger for practical and therapeutic religious thought during a period in which traditional congregations were shrinking. And his well-attended speaking campaigns emphasized themes of social equality and religious pluralism in an era when many American churches remained racially segregated.
This is a story of triumph gained and quickly lost at the hands of a remarkably able and remarkably flawed religious leader. Within the folds of his successes and failures lies the history of the mystical religion that once swept America.
“I Talked with God”
Robinson’s method was disarmingly simple—so much so that advertising executives doubted it could ever work. Beginning in 1928, he began taking out a series of ads in American magazines. I talked with God, they boldly proclaimed. Yes I Did—Actually and Literally … You too may experience that strange mystical power which comes from talking with God, and when you do, if there is poverty, unrest, unhappiness, ill-health or material lack in your life, well—the same Power is able to do for you what it did for me.
Twenty dollars in cash bought twenty staple-bound lessons in the power of affirmative thought, one arriving every two weeks. Within several years of his initial ad, Robinson had sold more than a half-million lesson plans. Mainstream clergy had no idea what to think. Here was a heterodox teaching sweeping the American landscape, insisting that “God Power” existed inside every man and woman and was available at each moment through the harnessing of thought. By contrast, many Americans found mainline pulpits unable to provide help or guidance during the Depression, when churchgoing continued a slide that had begun in the 1920s. The promise of Psychiana was open to all—no services, no confessionals, and no strict dogma. The sole commitment was to follow Robinson’s densely packed, exclamation-marked lesson plans—which taught that through a focused thought you could satisfy “every right desire.”
Word of mouth went Robinson’s way, as many vowed that his mind-power system helped them find new jobs, sell or buy a home, or alleviate debt. “It’s so simple and easy,” one Robinson student reported. “If it doesn’t work, you can get your money back,” another enthused. As for the Psychiana theology, “I just take what helps me,” one said.
Robinson kept up with thousands of correspondents who wrote him with personal questions or requests for prayer. Moscow’s tiny post office was flooded with letters—sometimes addressed to only Psychiana, U.S.A., or Doctor Robinson, Idaho, or even The Man Who Talked with God, Idaho. He proudly escorted journalists on tours of his Moscow headquarters, showing them correspondence from towns and cities all over America. From random mounds, he would pull letters ranging from the touching tribute of a West Virginia homemaker who reported that she had purchased a new typewriter and refrigerator—“your wonderful teaching