Pro Tactics: Walleye: Use the Secrets of the Pros to Catch More and Bigger Walleye by Mark Martin

Pro Tactics: Walleye: Use the Secrets of the Pros to Catch More and Bigger Walleye Reviews

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  Steven H

  THE DAUGHTER OF A MODERN "PROPHET" TELLS THE "INSIDE" STORY
  
  Erin Prophet (yes, "Prophet" is the real last name of her mother and father) is the daughter of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who (with her husband Mark) broke off from Guy Ballard's "I AM" movement, and formed the Church Universal and Triumphant. During Elizabeth's marriage to Edward Francis, she began giving extreme apocalyptic "prophecies" of nuclear war, and her followers began building shelters; after the prophecies failed, the church began losing members. After having to leave her leadership position with the Church owing to Alzheimer's Disease (she was placed in full-time nursing care in 2000), Elizabeth finally died in 2009 at the age of 70. Erin was being groomed to take over the reins of the movement (including giving "dictations"/"revelations"), but ultimately rejected this role.
  
  Erin explains in the Preface to this 2009 book, "One of the reasons I have decided to write this memoir, which contains embarrassing and intimate details about myself and those I love, is because those damaging ideas continue to hold weight, both among my mother's followers and in other groups. I see our story as a cautionary tale of what happens when such ideas are taken to an extreme... I write especially for those who are attempting to follow my mother's published teachings, but also for the merely curious... This is not a story of brainwashing but rather a collusion between leaders and followers. We followers participated in and even reinforced my mother's prophecies... The story I tell here is that... [of] both leader and followers having vital reasons for not being the first to call a halt during the mad mid-winter rush to completion of the shelter project." (Pg. xiii-xiv)
  
  After her mother announced that she wanted Erin to begin training to be a messenger, she thought, "That was something she never said to any of us... And it was a surprise... I never had the ambition of being a messenger... The offer was both flattering and compelling... I imagined this might explain why I was born into the Prophet family." (Pg. 75) Of the church's followers, she writes, "They had chosen their lives and seemed content. They would point out to me that they did not have any of the associated worries of modern-day living and believed they were healthier for it... The men and women on staff loved Mother [Elizabeth] and she loved them. As she saw it, she was looking out for their long-term salvation and eventual physical comfort; short-term, they could bear a little hardship." (Pg. 126)
  
  Of the shelter project, Erin notes, "I did not see that my mother gained anything by predicting war... Building shelters would divert time and money from her own stated goals ... So it was precisely the inconvenient nature of the prophecy that convinced me it was real." (Pg. 137) After authorities discovered the church's huge cache of weapons, Erin lamented, "I felt a sense of helplessness, knowing that my mother's work... would be forever linked with armed groups like the People's Temple. It would be much more difficult to convince the world that we were not a dangerous cult." (Pg. 191) She recounts that her mother "seemed to believe ... that she had done nothing more than encourage common-sense civil defense. She was unable to admit that our altar work had damaged the lives of thousands of people." (Pg. 238)
  
  She also confesses that after her mother's last public appearance, "it had not been easy giving up the power I had felt as near co-messenger... After seven years of isolation, it was tempting to think how easy it would be to regain both power and attention. It would require only a few words... But I knew that path would destroy me, and still hoped the followers would see the impossibility of that system." (Pg. 273)
  
  This is a fascinating memoir, and will be of considerable interest to those interested in this group, as well as New Religious movements in general.