First appearing in 1955, The Urantia Book is a mammoth tome that credits no human author. Rather, it claims to have been assembled by extraterrestrial entities, or “Revelators,” with ostentatious names such as Perfector of Wisdom, Number, Divine Counselor, and One Without Name, and channeled by one unidentified human. The 2097-page volume gives a fantastically convoluted and obscure account of cosmology, anthropology, theology, and history. Yet, in this opacity lies much of its fascination. Students of the book claim that they have received an esoteric dispensation that eludes the masses. Because of the book’s sheer bulk, it supplies endless details on cosmology, theology, and anthropol­ogy not mentioned in other religious scriptures. Herein lies its putative superiority. Under the leadership of the Urantia Foundation in Chicago, the book has gone through 11 printings in the United States, with translations in Spanish and Finnish appearing in 1993. Work is being done on Russian and Dutch editions, and there are plans for other languages as well. My search of the Internet yielded several home pages dedicated to spreading the gospel according to The Urantia Book. 

The relatively small number of Urantia devotees, despite their idiosyn­cratic beliefs, are not to be considered cultists in a pejorative sociological sense. Unlike other groups with similar teachings, it does not have an authoritarian structure of leadership, nor do its followers typically engage in high-pressure proselytizing. The main appeal is intellectual. Religious activities are largely based on studying The Urantia Book. Despite these qualifications, the book itself leaves much to be desired as a suitable object of religious instruction and veneration.

To attempt to fathom The Urantia Book, one must descend into a dark and foreboding labyrinth of quirky terminology, pseudoscientific pronouncements, and revisionist ideas about Jesus. In barest outline, the book informs us that God is a “Trinity of Trinities,” that humans are “unfallen” beings who have a divine spark within them (called a “Thought Adjuster”), that they can become fused with God through evolutionary development, and that Jesus’ death on the cross did not atone for human sin against God. To summarize, it is a kind of space age Gnosticism claiming to update orthodox Christianity.

Gardner notes that one of the book’s more objectionable anthropological claims is that the black (or “indigo”) race was the most inferior; although it claims that these people “have exactly the same standing before the celestial power as any other earthly race.” Gardner observes that this “is exactly what southerners in the United States, including their ministers, used to say about the African American slaves.” This revelation will certainly fail to endear potential converts who are African or African American.

Gardner’s well-researched conclusion is that The Urantia Book lacks any supernatural credibility. Its contents can be explained on the basis of purely terrestrial authors; its scientific claims were either common knowledge at the time or plain wrong; and it contains numerous plagiarisms (even stealing from Bertrand Russell). Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery is the most exhaustive critique of the movement yet published. It will help readers to understand many patterns of deception found in many other new religious groups as well.