ABSTRACT
With the suicides of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate sect in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the world confronted the enigma of yet another seemingly outlandish religious group. The more we learned about it, the stranger it appeared. Stories of ritualized death, castrations, and expectations of rescue operations by alien beings in spacecraft stretched the limits of our understanding. Even by the grotesque standards of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown and the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate seemed bizarre. But simply characterizing the group that way, I suggest, is both too easy and potentially hazardous. Tempting though it may be, we should not make Heaven’s Gate so strange, so exotic that we lose sight of the ways the group’s beliefs and practices are not that far removed from those adhered to by many “mainstream” Americans. As a student of religion, I believe that, at the very least, it might enhance the level of public debate if people acknowledged that some of their own beliefs and practices could appear strange to others.
