In 1977, in the months after the Indian guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada died, a former surfer and yoga teacher from Hawaii named Chris Butler quietly walked away from the Hare Krishna movement and founded his own outfit, the Science of Identity Foundation. Within a few years it was being described by former members as a closed religious community whose families homeschooled their children, sent some of them to Foundation-run boarding schools in the Philippines, and — unusually for a Hare Krishna offshoot — encouraged its devotees to enter American electoral politics under their legal names.
The most famous child of that community is Tulsi Gabbard, who until June 2026 served as the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
The story of how a small breakaway sect in Hawaii ended up adjacent to the leadership of 18 American intelligence agencies starts not in Washington but on a beach in Honolulu in 1971, with a meeting between a young surfer and yoga teacher and a 75-year-old Bengali monk who had arrived in New York six years earlier with the equivalent of about seven U.S. dollars in his pocket.
The Bengali monk who arrived in 1965
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada landed in New York Harbor in September 1965, in his late sixties, carrying a trunk of Sanskrit translations and almost no money. He began chanting in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. A year later, in 1966, he formally founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishnas. The movement caught the countercultural updraft of the late sixties — saffron robes, shaved heads, mantras outside airports — and by the early seventies had spread to Hawaii.
That is where, in 1971, Bhaktivedanta met Chris Butler. Butler was 23, a college dropout who had drifted into surfing and yoga teaching and had already assembled a small following of his own. According to a TRT World profile of Butler, the two men struck a deal: Butler would hand his disciples over to the older monk and accept formal initiation. In return he received a Sanskrit name — Siddhaswarupananda, “a spiritual form full of bliss” — and recognition as an initiated teacher within the growing Hare Krishna fold.
The arrangement did not sit easily. Bhaktivedanta insisted on the orthodox package: shaved heads, robes, celibacy outside marriage, monastic discipline. Butler resisted almost all of it.
The 1977 break
Through the mid-1970s, Butler kept drifting from Hare Krishna orthodoxy. He married, which Bhaktivedanta tolerated but disliked. He instructed his Hawaiian followers that they did not need to shave their heads or wear robes, and he kept teaching yoga in a style his guru considered unorthodox. As Business Insider reconstructed the split, Bhaktivedanta repeatedly rebuked Butler for his teaching methods, and the two men were on poor terms by the time the older guru died in November 1977.
Within months of Bhaktivedanta’s death, Butler formally launched the Science of Identity Foundation in Hawaii. He kept the Sanskrit honorifics — by then he was styling himself Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa — but cut the institutional cord to the international Hare Krishna movement.
The Foundation took an unusual shape from the start. Butler insisted, and still insists, that it is not a religious organisation. It has no formal hierarchy, no membership rolls, no public roster of clergy. It is, he has said, a “resource.” The Colorado Times Recorder summary of the breakaway’s history notes that Butler “denounced” — and was denounced by — the parent ISKCON organisation, and that the new group quickly developed its own internal culture: vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol and extramarital sex, homeschooling, and a deep personal devotion to Butler himself.
Former members put it more bluntly. Several have told reporters that within the Foundation, Butler was treated as “God’s voice on earth,” and that questioning him was understood as a kind of spiritual self-destruction.
An offshoot that wanted into politics
What separated Butler’s group from most religious offshoots of the era was its appetite for electoral politics.
Hare Krishna devotees in the 1970s were famous for chanting in airports and selling books at street corners. They were not famous for running for state legislature. Butler took a different route. As early as 1976, a slate of candidates tied to his followers ran for local and federal office in Hawaii under a new party called Independents for Godly Government, presenting themselves as conservative-minded reformers while explicitly denying any religious affiliation. The vehicle was small, but the instruction was clear: devotees were expected not to retreat from civic life but to step into it, under their own names, on conventional ballots.
Two of those early adherents were Mike and Carol Gabbard, who had joined the Foundation in the 1970s. They became, by multiple accounts, early leaders within the group. They founded an organisation called Stop Promoting Homosexuality and the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, which campaigned successfully for a 1998 Hawaii constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage. Mike Gabbard would later be elected to the Honolulu City Council and then to the Hawaii State Senate.
Their second daughter, born in American Samoa in 1981, was named after tulasi, the Sanskrit word for the holy basil plant held sacred to Krishna in the Vaishnava tradition.
What the breakaway taught its children
The Science of Identity Foundation’s internal culture has been described in remarkably consistent terms across two decades of reporting. Children of devotees were homeschooled or sent to Foundation-affiliated schools, including campuses the group ran in the Philippines. Tulsi Gabbard attended one of those Philippine schools as a teenager, and met her first husband through the Foundation’s social world.
Butler’s teaching mixed Gaudiya Vaishnavism — the 500-year-old Krishna-devotional tradition that Bhaktivedanta had carried to America — with a personal political theology that hardened over the 1980s and 1990s. Talking Points Memo’s interviews with former followers describe a recording in which Butler condemned gay people in vicious terms, and note that his taped lectures have been widely described as Islamophobic. Other ex-members have described a community in which children prostrated before the guru’s photograph and adults sought his guidance on marriage, careers, and, eventually, candidacies.
Butler himself has remained almost completely invisible in public life. He gives no interviews. There are no recent verified photographs in wide circulation. He runs a YouTube channel of mantras and yoga lectures and is said to live in seclusion in Hawaii or, by some accounts, in Southeast Asia. His most extended public-facing statement of identity came in a rare quote to The New Yorker in 2017: “I’m not a Hindu, I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not a Muslim. I’m an eternal spirit soul.”
The political pipeline
The pattern that emerged from Hawaii in the 1990s and 2000s was striking for any small religious group, let alone a breakaway sect. Devotees and the children of devotees began appearing on ballots — for school boards, for the state legislature, eventually for Congress — without identifying their Foundation affiliation on campaign materials. The group’s name did not appear. The candidates ran as conventional Hawaii politicians.
Tulsi Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii State Legislature in 2002 at age 21, briefly the youngest woman ever elected to a U.S. state legislature. She enlisted in the Hawaii Army National Guard, deployed to Iraq, returned, won a Honolulu City Council seat, and in 2012 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives at age 31. She became, as contemporary coverage of her swearing-in noted, the first Hindu member of Congress and the first voting member born in American Samoa, taking her oath on the Bhagavad Gita.
She did not discuss the Science of Identity Foundation in any detail during those campaigns. When journalists asked, she described Butler as her “guru dev,” or spiritual teacher, and characterised the rest as a private matter. She has consistently denied that the Foundation is a cult, has described her upbringing in it as positive, and has said she “never heard” Butler say anything hateful about anyone.
From Hawaii to Langley
The political arc accelerated. Gabbard ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. She left the Democratic Party in October 2022, registered as an independent, joined the Republican Party in 2024, campaigned for Donald Trump, and in early 2025 was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, the office created after September 11 to coordinate the work of the CIA, NSA, DIA and 15 other intelligence agencies — a portfolio with a budget that has run close to $75 billion in recent years.
That tenure proved brief. On May 22, 2026, Gabbard announced she would resign as Director of National Intelligence, after her husband, Abraham Williams, was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer. President Trump named Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director, and Gabbard’s time atop the intelligence community ended in June 2026.
That tenure had already drawn an unusual category of opposition. Former members of the Science of Identity Foundation wrote to senators on the Intelligence Committee urging them to examine her ties to Butler. New York Magazine’s long 2019 profile of her childhood had already laid out the texture of that upbringing in detail; by 2024 and 2025 the question had moved from magazine feature to Senate correspondence.
In June 2026, a year-long Washington Post investigation by reporter Jon Swaine, drawing on more than 25,000 pages of internal documents, examined what it described as decades of guidance flowing from Butler to Gabbard’s political operation. Gabbard’s office called the reporting “a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry.” The Science of Identity Foundation has denied being a cult. Both reject the central allegations.
Most religious breakaways from the 1970s either disappeared, dissolved into other movements, or became insular communities that left public life alone. The Science of Identity Foundation did something different. Its exact size has always been hard to pin down, but its footprint has stayed modest — communities in Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, by most accounts — even as it built a quiet pipeline into Hawaiian state politics and, eventually, into Washington.
The instruction to enter politics under one’s own legal name, without surfacing the Foundation connection, is what made the pipeline hard to see from outside. A candidate carrying a Sanskrit honorific and a saffron robe attracts immediate scrutiny. A candidate named Mike Gabbard or Tulsi Gabbard, running on traffic and education and veterans’ affairs, does not.
The orthodoxy Butler walked away from in 1977 was about how to look — shaved head, robes, mantras chanted in public. The version he built kept the inner devotion and dropped the outer markers. That single design choice — drop the costume, keep the discipline — is most of what separates the Science of Identity Foundation from every other 1970s Krishna-derived group still in existence.
Bhaktivedanta died in Vrindavan, India, in November 1977. By the end of that same year, in Honolulu, the surfer he had initiated six years earlier had filed paperwork for his own foundation and begun teaching his own version of the path. Forty-nine years later, the most prominent child of that foundation had risen to oversee American intelligence.
The same year Butler split, Voyager 1 left Cape Canaveral. As earlier Space Daily coverage of the era’s space milestones traced, 1977 sits in memory as a year of cosmic ambition. It was also, in a quiet Honolulu office, the founding year of one of the strangest political pipelines in modern American history — a pipeline whose author has not given a press interview in roughly half a century, and whose most senior alumna, until her resignation in June 2026, held the clearances to read almost anything the United States knows.
