New Church Leader Won’t Cut Roots

When the Rev. Peggy Bassett--senior minister of the Church of Religious Science in Huntington Beach and the new national president of the United Church of Religious Science--asked the late R. Buckminster Fuller to attend one of her services a few years ago, he replied that he had no interest in organized religion.

“Oh,” Bassett said brightly, “that’s no problem. We’re not very organized.”

Although that’s only partly true, it accounts for a great deal of the charm of both the senior minister and the Huntington Beach church itself that has built its membership from 40--when Bassett took over in 1974--to 2,700 today. And, Bassett said, “we’re still growing.” The leaders of the United Church were hardly unmindful of this when they elected Bassett as their first woman president last week.

“I had two concerns” about her selection, she said in her bright new office at the Seacliff Village Shopping Center. “Could a woman do this job, and would it take too much time from this church, which is my baby?” Challenged on the first concern, she modified it somewhat by saying, “At my age (65), do I want to put myself on the front line again, try to bring all those viewpoints together--especially when I’ll be doing it as the first woman president, a matter on which I know there was some debate among the brethren.”

But ever since she broke away from her Baptist upbringing and shocked her family by divorcing her first husband whom she had married at 19 “to find a way out,” Bassett has not been one to turn away from a challenge. So at an age when most Americans are retiring, Bassett made a decision to take on some heavy new responsibilities.

If she has doubts, her followers have none. She’s a commanding presence, a tall, stately woman with well-coiffed gray hair, remarkably gentle blue eyes and a slightly wistful expression, almost as if she’s a little surprised all this is happening to her. Yet every gesture, every word speaks eloquently of self-confidence. It’s a charming and warming combination. When pictures were being taken for this article and the photographer asked her to change her expression, she said: “I don’t want to look as if I’ve got all the answers.” But she does look as if she does--and yet, she doesn’t. It works.

She is reluctant to admit that it is the charisma of the minister as much as the message that has made her church grow so remarkably. But a study made last year of the seven largest-growing churches in Southern California underscored that point. Bassett’s church was one of those studied, and the research indicated there were four common threads in all of these successful churches: a heavy emphasis on music that set the tone of the service, a charismatic minister, a sense of community and a strong learning situation. Bassett’s church rates high on all four counts.

“From the beginning,” she said, “we said we wanted our service to be a celebration of life--and that showed up in the study as terribly important. People live such pressure-filled lives today that when they go to church, they don’t just want some theological proposition presented to them that happened 2,000 years ago that they have to figure out. They want to have an experience, to come out charged up with something in today’s world they can relate to. I’d rather attend half an hour’s fellowship than an hour’s sermon where I kept looking at my watch.

“Today, there are more women and minorities coming into the ministry, and I think there’s a whole shift going on as the ministry turns away from the traditional concept of the helper reaching out to all the people he can help. As long as we have a helper and a ‘helpee,’ we’ll always have people willing to be helped. The shift that is taking place is to show people they have the resources and power and creativity to help themselves, to take responsibility for their own lives.”

This is how Peggy Bassett has adapted the teachings of Ernest Holmes, who founded the Church of Religious Science in 1926 and whose writings are used as a basis of the church liturgy. Holmes was a New England metaphysician who settled in California and studied all of the existing philosophies and religions before coming up with his concept--which is probably most closely associated with Unity but also has some elements of Christian Science as well as traditional theology. Holmes wrote: “We believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is within man and that we experience this Kingdom to the degree that we become conscious of it.”

Religious Science allows a lot of latitude for personal choice within these parameters. Medical care, for example, is one of these choices. “If somebody believes a certain medication is going to alleviate their condition,” Bassett said, “then that’s what I want them to have. There’s as much power in a pill as in a prayer; it’s where your belief is.”

Religious Science teaches and qualifies practitioners, “but we don’t look on them as healers. We believe that a mental condition manifests itself physically and that we can be freed of the physical problem by freeing the mind of that belief. So our practitioners treat a patient to help free their mind.

“That’s also what I try to do in my ministry. If I can show them they have resources they can capitalize on, they can become self-sufficient. We don’t have to be saved from anything except ourselves--and a lot of mistaken ideas.”

Bassett didn’t come to this philosophical place until mid-life. She was born into a large family that moved from Arkansas to the Los Angeles suburb of Bell when she was 10 (“we called it Little Arkansas”). She was married at 19, divorced her husband when he returned from World War II and struck off on her own with her infant son. She worked as a waitress, a switchboard operator and a secretary until she got into real estate and property management work in New York in 1953. She returned to California eight years later and prospered in business while she was studying the Science of Mind philosophy.

For the first time, she said, she discovered that “religion doesn’t have to be based on fear and guilt.” In 1971, she married Fred Bassett, a salesman for a computer management service, and a year later decided to attend Ernest Holmes College in Los Angeles to qualify for the church ministry. Meanwhile, she assisted a Religious Science minister “who was an ex-Catholic and had a very mystical way about her. I learned from her that everybody has to find their own style and to build on that.” In 1974, Bassett was asked to fill in for an ailing minister in Huntington Beach--and never looked back.

Her humble beginnings, lack of formal education, Arkansas accent and business background have all combined to make her message easy and comfortable to assimilate, but they haven’t hidden a keen and questing mind, a growing social awareness and a genius for communication. When she was in the Soviet Union on a people-to-people program last year, she felt a strong sense of educational inadequacy during a long evening she spent in a Russian home. In an effort to bridge stereotyped thinking about the two societies, Bassett’s Russian host suggested they talk philosophically.

“I was embarrassed, because I didn’t know any Russian philosophers, so he said, ‘Then let’s talk about Emerson.’ And that became our bridge.”

In the aftermath of that trip, Bassett and her church invited 15 Soviet teen-agers to visit Huntington Beach last December. The affair left a powerful residue of good and warm feelings, and Bassett is now looking into some way of bringing a group of students next year from the People’s Republic of China.

“If only,” she said wistfully, “we could get people from many different countries to see our similarities instead of magnifying our differences. The commonality that happens then is tremendously exciting. This is especially true with the Russians, because I think they’re the most like us when we get away from our political differences. They’re warm and demonstrative, and they’re thinkers. Every home I went into had bookshelves full of classics. The Russians are intellectually alert and love to explore philosophical questions.”

This is the kind of thinking that has brought new members to Bassett’s church at the rate of about 50 a month. It forced the church to move from its tiny New England-style home in 1979 to temporary quarters in the Seacliff shopping center while a new church was to be built. But the congregation outgrew plans for the new church before construction got under way, so Bassett and her flock have remained at Seacliff, knocking out walls to contain their growing numbers. The auditorium of 950 seats, spread over three Sunday services, is already inadequate.

Buckminster Fuller--the great philosopher-inventor who made his last public appearance in Bassett’s church before his death in 1984--pleaded with her “not to put another 10 acres under asphalt,” and she is determined to honor his wishes. She said that her church has made an offer to buy the entire shopping center. “It was turned down,” Bassett said, “but we’ll put in another.” She figures she has 10 good work years left, and she doesn’t want to spend them “building a monument. I also don’t want to destroy any more of our Earth. Why would I want to spend the last productive years of my life doing that? The church is a state of consciousness anyway.”

Meanwhile, Bassett seems to be practicing what she preaches in her personal life. Her son has become a successful school psychologist in Northern California, and she has five grandchildren of whom she is enormously proud; the eldest entered college last year. Her husband has apparently dealt successfully with cancer through a combination of surgery, prayer, diet and exercise and they both stay fit by taking long walks together. Bassett’s new duties as president of the United Church will require her to meet monthly with the vice presidents of the four church districts, and four times a year with the board of trustees. (Religious Science has 172 church organizations--although every church is autonomous--and 60,000 members, mostly in the Western states). But Bassett feels that business travel will be minimal and she can delegate enough of her duties that she won’t have to neglect her own church--a matter of paramount importance to her.

“I believe,” she said firmly, “that this philosophy I talk about has opened a window onto the changes that are taking place in religion today by allowing us to accept ourselves as worthy human beings, expressing the one mind common to all man--the mind of God. Kids use drugs to avoid current reality. We’re living with a doomsday scenario, so they turn to instant gratification. What we need to do is engage their minds in affirmative directions.

“And do you know why that’s possible now? Because nothing else has worked. We’ve loaded our thinking down with a lot of beliefs about how awful we are and how little we have to look forward to in the future. We’ve tried to conquer Earth instead of participating with it. Why not start thinking about possibilities instead of problems? Isn’t it time to at least give this a whirl?”

She thought that over for a moment.

“My ministry,” she concluded, “is to turn people on to themselves. In the process, I’ve made a lot of mistakes but that doesn’t bother me. I just say I’m sorry and start over again. The only thing commensurate with the growth of this church is my own personal and spiritual growth. I take total responsibility for what happens here. I’m very convinced that what I’m saying is true because it has worked so well in my life. And I wouldn’t change one minute of it.”