Until last fall, lean, gray-templed Garner Ted Armstrong was the quintessential religious soft-sell artist. His program called The World Tomorrow was carried on some 400 radio and 99 TV stations. His slick, free monthly called The Plain Truth went to 2,100,000 subscribers. To the millions of Americans who followed him, Garner Ted dispensed glib solutions to such problems as drugs, crime, broken marriages and delinquent children—all implicitly in the name of the Worldwide Church of God. This is a stern, bizarre sect founded in 1934 as the Radio Church of God by Garner Ted's father Herbert W. Armstrong, a Quaker-born ad salesman turned preacher, and still ruled by the elder Armstrong from headquarters in Pasadena, Calif. Garner Ted, 42, was the heir apparent not only to the W.C.G. but also to a church-run institution called Ambassador College: three campuses (in Pasadena; Big Sandy, Texas; and St. Albans, England) where the buildings are expensive and the tuition cheap, the boys' sideburns high and the girls' skirts low.
Then, last October, Garner Ted was suddenly relieved of duties as executive vice president of the church and vice chancellor of Ambassador College. Later his name was expunged from the masthead of The Plain Truth. His radio programs were replaced by ten-year-old tapes made by his father.
Bonds of Satan. At first, Herbert told W.C.G. members that Garner Ted was simply taking a long overdue leave of absence. Then, in February, the inner church membership—about 75,000 people—heard a letter from Pasadena so secret that their ministers were ordered to burn it after reading. Its message: Garner Ted was "in the bonds of Satan." At the end of April, the senior Armstrong made a more public statement to the broader church membership—the "coworker" category, which includes such sympathizers as Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer—explaining that Garner Ted had confessed to some kind of transgression against "God, against his church and his apostle, against the wife God gave me in my youth, against all my closest friends."
What sort of transgression? TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton posed the question to Herbert Armstrong in a rare interview last week. "Look up I Timothy, Chapter 3, first five or six verses," replied Armstrong, "and Titus, Chapter 1, verse 6." Both passages make two points in common: that a bishop or church elder must be faithful to his wife and rule strictly over believing children. Had handsome Garner Ted succumbed to an old and common temptation? His father was cryptic: "The fault was spiritual, not moral."
In the heterodox, rigidly disciplined Christianity of the Worldwide Church of God, that could mean anything. In Herbert Armstrong's theology, unknown to much of his public, the British and the Americans are among the ten lost Hebrew tribes, destined to fight —and succumb to—a renewed Holy Roman Empire probably led by Germany. Then a Chinese-Russian alliance will fight the battle of Armageddon with the victor. At first, Herbert Armstrong predicted the beginning of the end for the late 1930s. The most recent Apocalypse was due on Jan. 7, 1972.