c. 1996 Religion News Service

ALACHUA, Fla. (RNS)-At 44, David Jakupko is a successful real estate agent specializing in”country homes and large properties.”He drives a late-model Jeep Cherokee and lives with his wife and two children in a five-bedroom house complete with a swimming pool and six wooded acres.

A self-described”social conservative”who reads Forbes magazine and belongs to the local chamber of commerce, Jakupko, born in Wilkes Barre, Pa., into a Roman Catholic family, appears to have always lived entirely within the American mainstream.

In fact, he has a decidedly non-mainstream past, just as he has another name.

Jakupko-also known as Kirtiraja Dasa-is a Hare Krishna, a member of the transplanted Hindu sect that this year marks the 30th anniversary of its establishment in America by then 69-year-old A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, an Indian guru known to his followers as Srila Prabhupada.

On July 11, 1966, Prabhupada officially registered the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), as the group is formally called, in the state of New York-and the controversial and often-ridiculed Hare Krishna movement was officially launched.”My continued devotion to Hare Krishna grounds me and allows me to keep materialism in perspective,”said Jakupko, who became a Hare Krishna at age 18 and still attends daily worship services that begin at 4:30 a.m. at the sect’s Alachua temple.”My family and I have been blessed.” More than any other group, ISKCON epitomized the 1960s enchantment with Eastern religions and became known-critics would say notorious-for its shaven-headed devotees who spent much of their time chanting ecstatically on street corners and selling religious texts at airports.

Three decades later, devotees still chant in public and sell books. Both practices are integral to their belief that praying to the Hindu deity Krishna-whom they consider”the supreme personality”of God-is the world’s best hope for individual enlightenment and societal salvation.

However, ISKCON has changed dramatically in the past several years.

Devotees say the changes are a sign that they and their movement have matured and that ISKCON has survived a tumultuous past and is now a permanent part of America’s religious mosaic.

Academic observers say the changes were forced upon ISKCON by scandal and the ensuing loss of many of its most dedicated members, who in the United States numbered no more than about 10,000 converts at the movement’s height in the mid-1970s. They also say the changes are typical of what any radically different religious movement is likely to undergo as it seeks to establish itself in a new-and often hostile-environment.”The kind of early evangelistic fervor you saw in the Hare Krishna movement back in the `60s and `70s was required for the formation of a religious movement,”said Larry D. Shinn, president of Berea College in Berea, Ky., and a specialist in South Asian religions with a longtime interest in ISKCON.”Then comes accommodation with the culture. That’s what you’re seeing in the movement today.” Prabhupada taught an austere and demanding religion-detractors called it a cult-that stressed commitment to living in a temple setting as a celibate monk. Women were considered spiritually inferior to men, and marriage was viewed as being fit only for those men and women who couldn’t cut it as a monk.

Yet today, Hare Krishna is a largely congregational-based movement of married lay followers, many of whom visit a Hare Krishna temple only for Sunday afternoon programs, if that. Women, for the first time, are beginning to assume leadership roles.

During ISKCON’s early years devotees lived communally, worked for the movement and were supported by its once considerable income. Between 1974 and 1978, the movement’s gross income from hardcover book sales alone topped $13 million, according to E. Burke Rochford Jr., a sociology and anthropology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont who has followed ISKCON for more than two decades.

Today, about 1,000 devotees live in Hare Krishna’s two dozen American temple compounds, according to movement officials, while thousands more-there are no reliable figures on the number of current devotees-live in the larger community, forced to earn a living in a society they once rejected as spiritually empty and overly materialistic.

Perhaps nowhere are the changes in the movement more evident than in Alachua, a rural community about 16 miles from Gainesville in north-central Florida. Here, amid the cattle ranches and ubiquitous Baptist churches, an ISKCON community of about 500 adults and children is flourishing.

The community’s centerpiece is a 120-acre, sect-owned farm that houses a temple, school, several businesses and verdant fields in which cattle- venerated by Hindus-graze to their hearts’ content to the end of their natural days.

The farm is home to a few monks and a small number of unmarried devotees and families. The vast majority of the local Hare Krishnas live away from the farm in the surrounding county. They hold jobs, raise families and practice their adopted faith to varying degrees. Jakupko, for example, learned the real estate business he is now so successful at by buying movement property in the former Soviet Union, Poland and elsewhere.

Local politicians have even begun to court the Hare Krishna vote, although most devotees-still dropouts at heart-consider voting spiritually pointless.”Everyone’s free to come and go as they want today,”said Krishna Bhajan Dasa, a British-born devotee who now teaches at the movement’s Alachua day school, where boys and girls are taught separately starting at age 10.”There’s no pressure to do what you are told as there was 20 years ago. We’ve become another religious movement.” The community’s most prominent member is undoubtedly Alfred Ford-also known as Ambarish Dasa-the great-grandson of automobile pioneer Henry Ford and a Hare Krishna for more than 20 years.”My first commitment is to the philosophy of Hare Krishna,”said Ford, who like most devotees today does not shave his head and wears western-style clothing when not in a temple setting. He is currently building a home on a 200-acre spread in Alachua, where he will raise pecans and continue his fund-raising activities on behalf of the movement.

Prabhupada is said to have arrived in the United States-New York City, specifically-knowing no one and with just $7. By the time he died in 1977, however, he had established a movement that spread across six continents. ISKCON established its own temples and schools, Indian-style vegetarian restaurants and publishing companies. It sponsored street festivals on Hindu holidays and free-food programs on college campuses.

On the University of Florida campus in Gainesville, Hare Krishnas have been feeding students, professors, the homeless and others since 1972.

Prabhupada’s followers were a mix of 1960s counter-cultural types. Some were serious spiritual seekers, said Rochford, who found their religious yearnings were not satisfied by the faith of their birth.

Far more, he added, were young dropouts into drugs and the hippie scene.”I was certainly a hippie,”recalled Chaturatma Dasa, a 23-year Hare Krishna member from St. Louis whose right wrist is adorned with a Sanskrit tattoo reading”May the Lord fulfill my desires to serve him.””I had no place to live and no money when I showed up at temple and moved right in. It saved me.” J. Gordon Melton, who heads the Center for the Study of American Religions at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said Prabhupada was one of the”few”Indian gurus who have come to the United States”who had nothing negative personally associated with him.” However, after Prabhupada’s death came the deluge. ISKCON became awash in political infighting for control of the movement. Seemingly endless scandals involving drugs, sex, weapons and even murder erupted. Anti-cult organizations said the movement brainwashed its members. ISKCON’s book sales plummeted-destroying its economic base.”When we became devotees we thought everything would be roses for the rest of our lives,”said Lakmimoni Dasi, a devotee since 1969 who is now headmistress of the Alachua Hare Krishna secondary school for girls.”Everything that happened just shows how much baggage we brought with us into the movement.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

New Vrindaban, the movement’s showplace temple in West Virginia, spawned some of the worst troubles.

Prosecutors contended that New Vrindaban raked in millions for nonexistent charities and broke copyright and trademark laws on items it sold. They also said the community’s religious authority-the former Keith Ham-ordered the killings of two former devotees who spread rumors that he was a homosexual and pedophile.

Ham recently pleaded guilty to mail fraud and racketeering, but escaped conviction on the murder charges. He awaits sentencing and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Another former Hare Krishna, Thomas Drescher, was convicted of both murders and is serving two life sentences. New Vrindaban also paid a $100,000 fine.

Steven J. Gelberg, a Hare Krishna for 17 years until he quit the group in 1987, blamed the movement’s problems on an”end-justifies-the-means”ethos that he said then defined ISKCON.”Tricking, deceiving and cajoling disillusioned souls to financially subsidize and otherwise subsidize ISKCON represent(ed) a `higher’ morality,”he wrote in a 1993 letter explaining his departure.

Gelberg, who represented ISKCON in academic circles and now lives in Boston, said the movement’s prohibition of all sex other than to conceive children within marriage and its”disregard for the individual”also contributed to its problems.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Hare Krishna devotees today freely acknowledge ISKCON’s past failings-including the sexual and emotional abuse of children sent to movement boarding schools in India and elsewhere. Those schools have largely been replaced by community day schools, such as the one in Alachua.

Devotees generally attribute the failings to their naivete and missionary zeal.”The needs of the movement came before the children,”said Pranada Dasi, who became a Hare Krishna in 1975 at age 17 in Los Angeles.

Her 18-year-old son, who grew up in the movement, has no interest in Hare Krishna-a not uncommon occurrence among the”second generation,”as those raised as Hare Krishnas are called.”A lot of the second generation is very hostile to the movement,”said Rochford.”They resent having grown up in the movement and feel they were (deprived) of personal relationships by the impersonal nature of the teachings.” Still, he said,”some second-generation types are drifting back”as they get older, start their own families and”the idea of having a faith becomes more important. They’re no different than Catholics and others in this regard.” (STORY CAN END HERE)

ISKCON today claims some two dozen city temples and rural communities, such as Alachua, around the United States, with Los Angeles serving as its North American headquarters.

Its world headquarters are now in Mayapur, India, and whatever growth the movement is experiencing today is taking place mostly in such places as Africa and the former Soviet Union.

Anuttama Dasa, ISKCON’s North American communications director based in Potomac, Md., said that as many as 75,000 individuals-counting both converts and Indian Hindus living in the United States-regularly visit Hare Krishna temples. Worldwide, he said, perhaps 1 million people-the majority of them Indian Hindus for whom Hare Krishna is an accepted tradition within Hinduism-have some association with ISKCON. However, outside observers tend to regard such figures as inflated, and even Anuttama Dasa admits his figures are far from precise.

Regardless of the actual numbers, said Berea College’s Shinn, the movement appears to have outlived the `60s.”Hare Krishna is now seen as both a fully authentic movement within Hinduism and an established religious movement in America,”he said.”Because of its Indian-ness, it serves Indian Hindus very well, including those in the U.S.”But for non-Indian Americans it will always be marginal. It’s just too odd for most Americans.”

MJP END RIFKIN