Krishnas: Gurus. Karma. Murder.

➤Rated TV-14
➤Peacock

Up until recently, everything I knew about the Hare Krishna movement came from the 1980 movie Airplane! and George Harrison’s song “My Sweet Lord.” I thought this Westernized variation of Hinduism had died out by the mid-’80s, but a new three-episode documentary upended my impressions of Hare Krishnas. Krishnas: Gurus. Karma. Murder. tells the dark story of a religious movement that dropped out of the public eye but never disappeared.

The first episode provides much of the background to the Hare Krishnas, beginning with Swami Prabhupada’s arrival in America in the 1960s. The elderly guru claimed he embodied thousands of years of religious tradition, but he invented novel ways to make his message ­palatable in the West. His preaching on peace and nonmaterialism found eager audiences among the hippies.

One of Prabhupada’s earliest converts was Keith Ham, the son of a Baptist preacher. Prabhupada gave Ham a new name, “Kirtanananda,” and Ham quickly rose to the No. 2 position in the fledgling movement. Krishnaism gained popularity when Prabhupada began hanging out with the Beatles, but Ham wanted to make a name for himself in the movement.

Ham founded New Vrindaban, a spiritual center in a remote corner of West Virginia. In the early days, its inhabitants lived in poverty and squalor, but Ham turned New Vrindaban into the largest Hare Krishna community in America. In the 1970s, Ham built a stunning palace of gold to serve as a shrine for his teacher. When Prabhupada died, he named Ham one of Krishnaism’s godlike gurus tasked with ensuring the movement’s survival, and since Ham controlled New Vrindaban, many viewed him as the leader of the religion.

From the outside, Krishnaism looked like a pure and holy life, but behind Ham’s fine words about renouncing the world and living a life of peace, we see a man concerned with power. For almost three decades, he ran his fiefdom as an autocrat with bullying tactics that included physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Krishnaism’s prohibitions against drugs, alcohol, and non­marital sex were habitually broken by the members of Ham’s inner ­circle, and the great guru ran New Vrindaban like a criminal organization. Troublesome members of the community “disappeared,” and when selling flowers at the airport didn’t bring in enough money, Ham reinterpreted the doctrines of “Krishna consciousness” to allow fraud.

For a documentary with the subtitle Gurus. Karma. Murder., this series is a fairly tame addition to the true-crime genre with a relatively low body count. It addresses disturbing topics, but it doesn’t dwell on lurid details. Foul language is infrequent. Krishnas: Gurus. Karma. Murder. relies on archival footage of Ham and interviews from those who lived through his traumatic rule. (Ham died in 2011.) Tom Westfall, the West Virginia deputy sheriff who spent much of his career investigating New Vrindaban, drives much of the narrative. Former members of the movement testify to what they witnessed, and it’s surprising to see how many current adherents to Krishnaism were ­willing to address the camera.

Despite the fact that America’s Hare Krishna movement was rotten at the core, perpetrating all sorts of violence and abuses, in recent years the International Society for Krishna Consciousness has tried to rehabilitate New Vrindaban. The documentary attempts a hopeful ending, highlighting members who’ve chosen not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But this conclusion belies the lessons we learn along the way. The movement preaches the pursuit of peace and the avoidance of materialism through ecstatic singing. But we learn material attachments aren’t the real problem. Pride and lust for power are at the heart of this documentary, and Keith Ham exhibited those sins in New Vrindaban’s earliest days when he and his followers had nothing. The tragedy of New Vrindaban is exactly what Christians should expect to see because “Krishna consciousness” aims to free a wicked human heart rather than change it.