Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [55]
So, if Robinson was not profiting at quite the level detractors suggested, what drove him? Did the man derided as a “doctor of Bunk” believe in his own message? There is good reason to conclude that he did. The sheer volume of Robinson’s writing—a mixture of unmitigated passion and arguments over fine points of theology—suggests a figure motivated by deep conviction. In his twenty-three books and thousands of pamphlets, flyers, and articles, Robinson was constantly on the lookout for new ways to verify his ideas, searching for ever-sharper means of codifying his system.
Robinson was unafraid of showing emotion. He wept openly in front of visitors to his Moscow home while playing them his favorite gospel hymns on his personal pipe organ. He argued intensely about the shortcomings of the mainline faiths, one night debating a living room filled with ministers to a standstill for a full three hours. Among the most moving testaments to Robinson’s convictions came from his son, Alfred, an Ivy League student and Navy bomber pilot in World War II. Journalist Marcus Bach remembered their encounter:
I met Alfred, Robinson’s son, after his graduation from Stanford. When he told me he was joining his father in the Psychiana movement, I asked him if he would be using the affirmations in his own work. “I was brought up on them.” He smiled. “One of my earliest recollections is that of my father taking me for a walk in the woods.” He went on intently: “When we reached a secluded spot Father would stop and say, ‘Let’s be still. Listen! You can hear the presence of the Almighty.’ Often when he was alone he would shout in a loud voice, ‘I believe in the Power of the Living God!’ ”
The critics were wrong, at least on this count: Robinson really did seem to believe in his ideas. And his way of thought went beyond Psychiana theology alone. At a time when Hitler’s blitzkrieg threatened to engulf the world, Robinson—in a short-lived collaboration with Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes—displayed a deeply felt and even prophetic instinct for religious tolerance and plurality. It would become the New Thought movement’s finest hour.
American Spiritual Awakening
There is one known surviving photograph from an event now forgotten in the annals of American religion. It shows two men—Ernest Holmes seated on the left, Frank Robinson seated on the right—smiling gently at each other across the stage of the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. A packed crowd of 3,500 looks on. While not visible from the photograph, a banner draped across the stage proclaims Robinson’s key aphorism: I Believe in the Power of the Living God. The year was 1941, and the two spiritual teachers were rallying the faithful for a series of five meetings that Robinson called the “American Spiritual Awakening.”
It was a kind of spiritual booster rally before America’s entry into World War II. But the resulting program turned into something more: an affirmation of the universality of all religious beliefs and national backgrounds, moving one columnist for the West Coast African–American newspaper The Neighborhood News to write: “If it does for you what it has done for me, you would not take a hundred dollars for attending this meeting.”
Looking back on a moment in history when ethnic hatreds and fascist ideology were plunging nations into war—and many American churches remained segregated—the message of plurality that pervades the surviving transcripts of the Robinson–Holmes mission seems pioneering. Ernest Holmes opened the first meeting on Sunday, September 21, 1941, leaving no mistake as to his feelings for his cospeaker:
Dr. Robinson calls his work “Psychiana,” which means bringing Spiritual Power to the world. I happen to belong to a movement