Role of Huffington’s Wife Becomes Hot Topic in Race : Politics: Some question activity in controversial church. She says liberal conspiracy tries to discredit her husband.

Those who have known Arianna Huffington would not be surprised at the latest tempest she has stirred up. After all, when she was 23, her first book was a slap at feminism that brought an international audience of admirers and adversaries.

Now, as husband Mike Huffington campaigns for the U.S. Senate in California, the woman who has often sought the center of attention has found herself there again.

This time Arianna Huffington is the target of accusations that her husband’s candidacy is more a product of her ideas and her quest for power than his. And if so, her critics say, they are suspicious about her background in a controversial religious group in which she once served as a minister.

The issue has captivated the national press and raised questions about when a candidate’s spouse should become a subject of public scrutiny. Time magazine’s recent headline about the Republican couple asked, “Should the Huffingtons Be Stopped?” Vanity Fair’s story in the November issue is titled, “Arianna’s Virtual Candidate.” And earlier this year, the Washington Post headline was “Her Brains, His Money.”

Last week, Arianna Huffington and her role in John-Roger’s Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness was lampooned in the “Doonesbury” comic strip.

“For the last 10 days, we have had nothing but a barrage of the press piling on my wife,” Mike Huffington fumed Thursday when the issue was raised by talk show host Larry King during his nationally televised debate with Democratic rival Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “I’m the candidate, my wife is not the candidate. My point is this, my wife’s religious beliefs are personal. Why, Dianne, are you making my wife’s religious beliefs part of this campaign, or are you?”

Feinstein--whose husband, investor Richard Blum, has sparked controversy in past campaigns--denied that she has encouraged the focus on Arianna Huffington.

But several Democratic officials, notably state party Chairman Bill Press, have been calling attention to Arianna Huffington and her religious beliefs. Huffington critics and some political observers said the scrutiny is appropriate.

“It is legitimate,” said political analyst Sherry Babitch Jeffe. “The fact is, she is an integral part of the campaign . . . (and) for a lot of the campaign, she was far more visible than the candidate.”

Arianna Huffington said she is “shocked” to be the target of such scrutiny and, particularly, the accusations. In a two-hour interview with The Times at the couple’s apartment on Los Angeles’ Westside last week, Huffington said the charges are vastly overblown by a liberal conspiracy aimed at discrediting her husband.

Huffington downplayed her role in the campaign, saying she serves as a surrogate speaker like many other political spouses, but is not a major decision maker.

She also described her role in the John-Roger church, known by its acronym MSIA, as a casual one, involving seminars about practical life questions rather than religious dogma. She said the organization is certainly not a cult.

But critics who have worked closely with Arianna Huffington challenge her account about both the campaign and the church. They say she has been a major force in both.

The Times reported Monday that five former staff members at the Huffington campaign said the candidate’s wife was so active that she was essentially acting as the campaign manager. They said eight staff members quit their jobs because of disagreements with her decision making at the Orange County headquarters.

“She is the one calling the shots and he is nothing more than her puppet,” said one former member of the Huffington campaign staff.

Former MSIA ministers told The Times that Arianna Huffington was a devoted John-Roger follower for many years. A new book by Peter McWilliams, a former MSIA follower now critical of the church, describes Huffington as an active organizer who sought new recruits.

“She embraced it like all of us,” said Rick Edelstein, who served as administrator of MSIA for five years and participated in the movement for 20 years.

Huffington, 44, a prominent socialite and author before she met her husband, said she has not participated in the organization since 1987 when she became a born-again Christian after the trauma of a miscarriage.

She said she had been on a spiritual search that included MSIA and a number of New Age adventures including est, walking on hot coals and a channeling experience with actress Shirley MacLaine. Her search is described in her latest book, released in May, called, “The Fourth Instinct, the Call of the Soul.”

“In 1987, after we lost the baby, I had a deeply religious experience . . . which made my relationship with Jesus Christ the center of my faith,” she said. “It was the end of my spiritual search. . . . I felt like I was home.”

MSIA was founded in 1971 by Roger Delano Hinkins, a former schoolteacher, who awakened from a coma in 1963 after a kidney stone operation and claimed that his body had been possessed by the spirit of John the Beloved. Hinkins--who now calls himself John-Roger--later founded the church as well as a foundation that sponsors seminars and a variety of media, education and health enterprises.

According to John-Roger’s teachings, his body “anchors” a pair of metaphysical powers called the Mystical Traveler Consciousness and the Preceptor Consciousness, said to exist on Earth only once every 25,000 years.

What has proven most controversial in the Senate campaign is the MSIA teaching that the Preceptor Consciousness is of much greater spiritual importance than Jesus Christ. Politically, it is a blasphemy that could undercut support for the GOP campaign by influential conservative Christian groups.

But Arianna Huffington said the whole issue has been distorted, especially regarding her beliefs. She said MSIA did not require a religious belief system.

“All of that stuff about the Mystical Traveler and the Preceptor Consciousness, I have no idea what it means,” she said. “I’m sure it is in some literature. (But) it has never meant anything to me. . . . I never thought I had to buy anything lock, stock and barrel because, for me, there was never a system of beliefs. I always thought of myself as a Greek Orthodox Christian.”

Mike Huffington has told reporters that while he has met John-Roger, he has never participated in MSIA and knows little of his wife’s involvement with the church. They married in 1986.

In a statement to The Times, MSIA officials sought to clarify the image of their organization portrayed in recent articles about the Senate race. “MSIA is a church that provides an authentic spiritual teaching that focuses on Soul transcendence,” the statement said. “We want to go on record that we strongly object to MSIA’s being portrayed as a cult.”

Huffington has convinced some of those most interested--such as conservative Christian leader the Rev. Lou Sheldon--that she had an authentic born-again Christian experience.

“She is not a New Ager,” said Sheldon, head of Orange County’s politically active Traditional Values Coalition. “I have sat down with her and spent plenty of time talking about her Christian beliefs in Jesus Christ. . . . And I will say, Lou Sheldon is very comfortable with his sister in the Lord, Arianna Huffington.”

But 12 former MSIA ministers interviewed by The Times, several of whom held key positions in MSIA organizations, disputed Huffington’s account.

They said the concept of the Mystical Traveler Consciousness is integral to MSIA teachings and is used at virtually every seminar. Former ministers who attended MSIA events with Huffington said it was “ridiculous” that the term Mystical Traveler would not be meaningful to someone as involved in the church as she had been.

Huffington said that she met John-Roger in 1974 when she was living in London and that in 1978 she became an MSIA minister.

“Minister sounds like something so different than certainly it was to me,” she said. “I never preached, I never performed baptisms. I mean, for me it was just an inner commitment to ministering--to making service and helping others. . . . It wasn’t something I did externally.”

Officials at MSIA said in a statement that “a minister has no ranking above or below anyone else who is involved, and there is no ranking among ministers.” An MSIA handbook provided by the organization said that years of study are required to become a minister and that many MSIA participants are ministers. It adds, “each minister determines for himself/herself what form his/her ministry takes.”

Some of the latest attention to Huffington’s role in MSIA is due to a book about the organization released this month by McWilliams, who said he left MSIA earlier this year after being treated for depression. McWilliams is listed as co-author of seven books with John-Roger, two of which reached the New York Times bestseller list. He is the target of a lawsuit by MSIA in a dispute about royalties.

McWilliams said that he has known Arianna Huffington since 1979 through MSIA and that she is the subject of a chapter in his book. The chapter includes a picture of Huffington that is described as her MSIA baptism in the River Jordan during a trip to the Middle East. Three other MSIA members who said they were along on the trip confirmed McWilliams’ account of the baptism.

Huffington, however, denied that she was ever baptized in MSIA. And she said McWilliams’ book is nothing more than sour grapes from a man who is broke and trying to make money by capitalizing on the attention given to the Senate race.

“I was never baptized for anybody else but the Greek Orthodox Church,” Arianna Huffington said. “That was another major lie of McWilliams’. . . . There’s a photograph of me in the River Jordan with two other people, (but) there are many people who went in the River Jordan. That’s much different than being baptized. . . . That doesn’t mean anything.”

MSIA officials said the organization’s policy is not to comment on individual followers. Edelstein, the former MSIA administrator, said he participated in a baptism for Arianna in a Los Angeles swimming pool.

McWilliams said he sees signs of MSIA teachings in the Huffington campaign themes, particularly the candidate’s plan to replace government welfare with volunteerism and charity.

Arianna Huffington said philanthropy in American policy is a concept that dates to the Founding Fathers and she denied that it comes from her instruction at MSIA.

“The connection between the campaign and MSIA . . . is totally laughable,” she said. “The intellectual pedigree of (Mike Huffington’s) ideas is long and very distinguished. . . . There is no religious teacher that does not talk about (charitable) service.”

But McWilliams said the idea substantially overlaps a book he co-wrote with John-Roger. “It’s not that either of the three pillars of their campaign is unique to John-Roger,” he said. “Some people think the welfare state is appalling; some people think we are in the midst of a spiritual revival with the coming millennium; some people think that if our taxes are reduced, we will all be nicer and give more. . . . But to put them all together--that’s his combination.”

McWilliams also challenges Huffington’s claim that she has left MSIA, noting that she contributed about $35,000 to a John-Roger organization between 1990 and 1992.

Huffington, who said she regards John-Roger as a friend, said she supports the educational mission of the group, Institute for Individual and World Peace, but has never given money directly to the MSIA church.

“The way you get out of cults, the way you become unprogrammed, is that you snap,” McWilliams said. “It’s not a gradual weaning. . . . You have to believe, in order to be ordained (in MSIA), that this guy is a spiritual leader higher than Jesus Christ. She accepted this when she got ordained, there’s no question about that. But the point is, you can’t just leave that easily when you realize the guy behind the curtain is the wizard and the whole thing is done by manipulation. At that point, you turn on him because he has abused you.”