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BY BOB YOUNG
From the Dec. 23, 1997, issue:
It's a Wednesday noon in Lake Oswego, and I'm sitting across the table from the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. Between bites of a cheeseburger slathered with French's mustard, St. Paul—who currently inhabits the body of a local businessman—tells me about how he walked down the dusty roads of Bethany with Jesus 2,000 years ago.
The waiters at Stanford's restaurant call him Nick as they refill his lemonade. I'm not sure what to call 61-year-old millionaire Nick Bunick as he explains to me that he's regularly visited by 7-foot-tall angels.
Bunick's story may seem hard to swallow, but many Americans are eating it up with the same hearty appetite Bunick shows for his cheeseburger. Letters pour into his office and Web site from adoring fans every day. Two weeks ago Bunick was profiled on the TV magazine show American Journal and flew to Los Angeles (by plane) to speak to a convention of cable-TV executives. Earlier this year, he received a $1 million deal from Pocket Books for the rights to his story. His book, The Messengers (written with Julia Ingram and G.W. Hardin), has already sold 200,000 copies.
Although it's outlandish, Bunick's story isn't much stranger than that of a virgin giving birth to the son of God. Bunick is also a new breed of New Age guy. No prissy preacher or sissy space cadet, he's a former gridiron star from the mean streets of Chelsea, Mass.—where the alphabet, as the joke goes, is "fuckin' A, fuckin' B, fuckin' C"—and he doesn't seem too concerned about whether or not you believe his story.
Street-smart and barrel-chested, the former home builder and high-tech entrepreneur says he wants to be the "bridge between the New Age and mainstream America." He might have the right stuff to pull it off: He's a macho figure in a field heretofore dominated by women; he's found in the Apostle Paul what seems to be the ideal messenger to reach aging boomers seeking a convenient theology; and he's offering them a liberal message that boils down to peace, love, and a toll-free line to your inner God.
Bunick also happens to be in the right place to start a groundswell. There's something about the wet, dark expanse of the Pacific Northwest that makes it a Garden of Eden for non-traditional religion. "God picked up America and all the nuts rolled to the West Coast," jokes Rodney Stark, author of The Rise of Christianity and perhaps America's preeminent scholar on the sociology of religion.
There's one small obstacle in Bunick's path. The very thing that makes his don't-worry-be-happy message so appealing is also likely to make it short-lived. "When you don't make any demands, and people are free to believe anything, you can't have much of an organization," says Stark, a University of Washington professor. "That's why an awful lot of New Age groups don't amount to more than a vague, short-lived discussion group."
Perhaps, Bunick smiles. But it will be one fun ride.
Religion may be the balm of the oppressed, but not in America. As The New York Times recently reported, Americans earning more than $75,000 a year are more likely to have attended a religious service in the previous week than those earning less than $15,000.
Nick Bunick's followers are no exceptions. Larry Marcy, 36, is a professional research specialist who develops and evaluates achievement tests for Portland Public Schools. It was on his way to work one morning while stuck in commuter traffic that Marcy first became aware of Bunick, when he saw a billboard promoting Bunick's book The Messengers. Then, Marcy says, a friend urged him to get the book with the Nicole Kidman look-alike angel on the cover.
Marcy forked over $16 for The Messengers at Powell's one Saturday and cracked it open at 10:30 that night. At 5 in the morning, he was still enraptured. "As I read it, in places that didn't seem to warrant it," Marcy says, "I was overwhelmed and started crying. I was deeply moved by it."
Marcy drove up to Seattle a week later and paid $25 to hear Bunick speak at the Washington State Convention Center. Again, Marcy says, he felt "a great presence of love and further confirmation that things are changing and we can create a wonderful, positive, loving society."
A lapsed Baptist who grew up in Salem, Marcy says he found Bunick inspiring. "The message is very positive, uplifting and encouraging," he says. "It's a message of self-empowerment."
Marcy struggles to explain Bunick's appeal to a skeptic. "It's easy to think love and positive change needs to produce these big 'wow' kind of activities like, 'I'm gonna save these starving people.' But it can also be something as simple as giving someone a heartfelt smile as you pass by them."
But isn't believing in such a spirituality—that all you have to do is smile to eliminate world hunger—a little too easy?
"It seems easy," he replies. "But try driving through downtown at rush hour and having someone cut you off. It is and if's not."
For a number of other Bunick believers, confirmation comes in the number "444," which Bunick says is a sign from God.
For instance, "Todd" shared this with the "444 Club" on Bunick's Web site: "The day after I read the book…I looked at my check and it said $444.1 realized it's time to believe."
Vivian Franck in South Portland, Maine, says that after reading The Messengers, she awoke and glanced at her clock. "And of course," she says, "it was 4:44!"
Even Bunick's editor at Pocket Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) claims to have had a 444 experience. Senior editor Jane Cavolina says she was a skeptic until this summer, when her 14-year-old cat Rocky woke her up on three successive mornings at 4:44.
News reporter Diana Jordan of Portland's KXL radio goes one step further. Not only did Jordan finish reading The Messengers at 4:44 pm, but she says that when she first met Bunick she saw "an inexplicably bright light and energy field around him."
Bunick told her it was his angel. "I'm not sure I totally believe that," she says. "But what else could it be?"
Others claim to have actually seen angels. Atira Hatton is a self-described clairvoyant who saw Bunick speak in Seattle. She also saw, she says, 10-foot angels fill the room. At the end of Bunick's Seattle symposium, Hatton says she witnessed angels walking through each of the 1,000 people in attendance.
Stark says such stories are flimsy evidence. "Once you believe something, confirmation is everywhere," the sociologist says. "After all, the clock strikes 4:44 twice every day."
Bunick smiles beatifically in response. He's quick to stress that there are three possible explanations for the story about his reincarnation: he's deluded; he's fabricating it; or if s true.
"It is a true story," he insists. But he adds that it doesn't so much matter if if s literally true or not. What's really important is the message of love, compassion and truth.
"My goal in one sentence," he says, "is to help people understand their relationship with God and enhance their own spirituality. That's it. It's not me that's important. It's the message."
Bunick's being a little too modest. There's more to his success than a message of peace and love—that's nothing new. He happens to be delivering the message at a most opportune time, from a most opportune place.
It was back in 1977—the year Bunick ran unsuccessfully for Congress with the slogan "Pick Nick"—that he visited a Portland psychic named Duane Berry. Budnick says it was his first encounter with mysticism, and he wasn't quite prepared to believe Berry's revelation. "He told me," Bunick says, "I walked with the Master 2,000 years ago."
Ten years later, another psychic, Laurie McQuary, exclaimed when she met Bunick, "Oh my God, you knew Jesus!" But Bunick remained reticent. The son of immigrant Russian Jews, Bunick grew up just across the Mystic River from Boston, in a poor city that packed 48 liquor-selling establishments into its 1.8 square miles. He got out of the ghetto by winning a football scholarship to the University of Florida (where he wore the number 44), and he kept running—all the way to the West Coast, where he started a business building custom homes, including a riverfront A-frame house for his buddy Bill Walton. Today, from his Kruse Way office in Lake Oswego, Bunick looks out the window at Westlake Village, a 285-acre housing site he developed.
In the 1980s, Bunick became a millionaire in a second field, co-founding a high-tech Wilsonville company called In Focus that made him another $8 million when he had sold his stock in 1995.
Bunick worked hard to build his credibility and didn't want to sacrifice it—not even for God. "I thought I would be ridiculed," he says, if he went public with his I-met-Jesus story.
But he was compelled to "come out of the closet," he says, in 1995 after two things happened. First, he met Julia Ingram, a Portland hypnotherapist, who steered him through past lives to a time 2,000 years ago when he claimed to be a man called Saul of Tarsus, later known as the Apostle Paul. Second, he was visited by angels who assured him he was a messenger of God.
It was time to stop worrying about what his fellow Blazer season-ticket holders would think of him, Bunick concluded.
So he wrote a book in which he stressed that Jesus' original gospel of peace, love, compassion and tolerance were distorted by medieval church leaders intent on enslaving people.
"The messages of love became messages of fear," Bunick says in his rapid diction. "The message of compassion was changed to guilt, the messages of brotherly love and tolerance have been distorted into teachings of prejudice that polarized people."
Bunick heaps special scorn on the Bible's Book of Revelation and its scary prophecies of bottomless pits, killer locusts and scorpions that torment people until they wish they were dead. "Revelation is bullshit," he says.
Given the staying power of bestselling spiritual books like "The Celestine Prophecy" (145 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list) and the popularity of New Age gurus such as Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra, who draw crowds like rock stars, Bunick's story soon attracted Pocket Books.
It wasn't all serendipity, though. Before he signed a two-book, seven figure deal with Pocket Books, Bunick published The Messengers himself and launched it strategically in just two markets—Portland and Seattle.
"I believe the Pacific Northwest could be one of the focal points of a non-traditional relationship with God," Bunick explains. "We're freer thinkers…on the leading edge of social issues like assisted suicide and medical marijuana."
Backed by a $160,000 ad blitz—including the billboards that caught Marcy's eye—The Messengers quickly sold 20,000 copies in the two cities and was Barnes & Noble's top seller in the Portland area for a while.
It would never have happened in the Bible Belt, says Richard Howorth, vice president of the American Booksellers Association. Howorth says Bunick's story wouldn't pass the straight-face test in Oxford, Miss., where Howorth has owned a bookstore for 18 years.
"Here in the Bible Belt, someone like [Bunick] would have a hard time gaining credibility," he says. "If a person went into the little cafe next door where a lot of older men and merchants gather for coffee, pronouncing views like that, they would be laughed out."
But it's no surprise to experts like Stark that The Messengers was gobbled up in Seattle and Portland. "Of course people are more receptive in the Northwest," Stark says: People here are more individualistic and less connected to traditional religions than they are in the Bible Belt and the Midwest.
"Out here we move every five minutes," Stark says, "so organized religion is weak. When organized religion is weak, novelty flourishes."
That's not to say that Oregonians are less spiritual. It's true that church membership in the Northwest is about half as high as in the rest of America, Stark says. But "people here are fundamentally religious, they just don't go to church. That's why the West Coast is a wide-open market."
Bunick's success nationwide is no surprise, either. America remains one of the most spiritual countries in the world, Stark says. Although only 60 percent of Americans attend church, three out of four believe in life after death, and only 2 percent say they never pray.
Our religious tastes are changing, however. Today, many Americans are inclined to shop for spirituality as if they were buying a new pair of gloves. Consumers in the spiritual marketplace are looking for a smooth, easy fit—and not a lot of demands on their time.
"People are real busy, and high-demand religious organizations take a lot of time and money and personal sacrifice," says Ben Johnson, a University of Oregon religious studies and sociology professor. "A lot of baby boomers are looking to see what they can appropriate from others."
By borrowing a little bit here, a little bit there, boomers are able to craft their own hybrid spirituality— preferably one that's upbeat and doesn't involve sin, suffering and sulfurous eternities.
"People are searching for something positive to believe in," says University of Oregon sociology professor Marion Goldman. "And the more vague and less disprovable the message, the more attractive it is, because they can project their own dreams and fantasies onto it."
They're also looking for spirituality that gives them a direct channel to a deity.
"People are looking for a direct contact with a benevolent, personal God," says Gerry Breshears, a professor of religion at Western Seminary in Portland. "They want to talk to God and they want to get on his schedule. If truth be known, they want him to get on their schedule."
Sure it's self-centered, but what's the harm in it?
"My biggest fear about the New Age spiritualities is that they feed into the individualism and me-ism that I see as a big danger in our society," Breshears says.
Goldman fears a more subtle form of me-ism. "The real issue is the way a personal deity has become more important to Americans," she explains. "The search for very individual solutions allows people to be customers rather than participants. One of the strengths of more traditional religions is that they draw people in and give them community."
Bunick says he's building a different kind of community. He claims that his nonprofit corporation, The Great Tomorrow, will one day feed hungry children all over the world with revenues gleaned from oil and resort development deals brokered with Third
World countries.
Johnson views such plans with suspicion. He notes that test founder Werner Erhard, a former car salesman, also talked a lot about solving world hunger and even won a 1988 Mahatma Gandhi humanitarian award for his campaign. But in the end, Johnson notes, Erhard did "nothing but talk about visualizing an end to world hunger." (The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that out of $7 million Erhard raised, only $200,000 actually went to hunger relief.)
Goldman and Stark say that Bunick probably won't be around long enough to do much good—or harm.
"One thing we can predict is that this will be a transitory, short-lived fad," Goldman says. "Because faiths that survive are the ones that ask people to give of themselves and require use of the word 'sacrifice.' The rise of Christian conservative churches is related to the fact they ask people to give time and money and commitment."
Bunick agrees that he might be gone tomorrow. But not for the reasons cited by the so-called experts. Bunco's new book—100 pages of which he showed WW— makes some mind-boggling predictions.
The most startling is his claim that there will be a "shift in the earth's vibrational plane" that will produce a sort of kinder, gentler apocalypse. As a result of this vibrational shift, spiritually advanced people will wake up one day to find that they have moved to a new dimension where there's no war or hunger, while some of their less-enlightened spouses and children will have been left behind. "Not to be punished," Bunick stresses, but rather to improve their karma.
It won't be that hard to make the cut, he adds. All you have to do is follow the three laws of God: universal love, universal compassion, and walking in truth. That's it. No suffering, no sacrifice, no material loss is required.
"God wants you to enjoy the journey," he explains.