The organizers of this conference gave the title for my presentation, “The Social Challenge and Potential of New Religious Movements” to me when they invited me to participate. When I sat down to work on the paper I realized that embedded in this simple title are some heady epistemological questions. Initially, I tried to put them aside, but once identified, they wouldn’t go away. Having decided that I should tackle them head-on, I soon concluded that the epistemological questions are the very heart of the subject. I’m not sure whether this was their intent, but that is how I have elected to tackle the task.
The title camouflages two important messages. On the one hand is the acknowledgement that new religious movements do constitute a challenge. On the other hand, the title seems to want to assert that, notwithstanding this challenge, new religious movements have some potential.
These are orienting presuppositions, but the meaning of challenge and potential is by no means self-evident. If we are to avoid considerable potential for misunderstanding, it is important that we begin our inquiry by accepting the challenge of exploring the meanings of these presuppositions. What does it mean to say that a group constitutes a social challenge? And, what does it mean to say that a group has potential?
Social Challenge
The concept “challenge” has many meanings ranging from a call to engage in competition to an assertion of illegality or illegitimacy. A challenge may be seen as an opportunity on the one hand, or it may be understood as a solemn obligation to engage in combat—be it legal or physical. I think the meaning we are looking for in this context is best affirmed by the equation of challenge with problematic. If this is a helpful step, it does not complete the challenge to uncover the unspoken meaning. We must identify what we mean by saying a group constitutes a problem. In what way, or ways, is the group a problem? To whom is it a problem? What action may seem appropriate to deal with the problem?
Potential
The epistemological underpinnings of this concept are no less complex than the concept challenge. We must proceed with some caution. Potential could refer to the prospects for new religions to grow in numbers and influence in culture. In this context, potential could also be equated with the problematic. Consider, for example, that during this century the Sokka Gakkai realized its potential to exercise considerable power through the Komeito party. To many, this potential realized was a problem.
The framers of the topic for this presentation seem to be interested in addressing the question of whether, and how, new religions might contribute to the general well being of culture. Sociologically speaking, this is a question of functional utility.
One epistemological minefield here rests on the presuppositional foundation that allows for the possibility that new religions might have some positive impact on culture. Sigmund Freud, to pick one among many towering intellectual figures of the 20th century, could not conceive of the possibility that any religion, to say nothing of new religions, could contribute to the general welfare of civilization.
Toward Conceptualizing How Religious Movements Are Understood
The questions I am posing transcend the rather obvious matter that people can and do disagree as to the nature of the challenges posed by new religions, and whether or not new religions might have some positive impact on culture. The more fundamental question is how do we think about these issues? And my argument is that how we think about these matters is grounded in cognitive presuppositions that are substantially taken-for-granted and, thus, not easily subjected to reflection or analysis.
The real challenge, I want to contend, is not so much to understand new religions as it is to understand us. An inquiry into where new religions get their ideas can often be a fascinating adventure, but it is equally important that we understand where we get our ideas about religious movements. The challenge, then, is to understand how these presuppositional foundations of belief and action impact our response to new religions.
Let me begin by noting that my own presuppositions are grounded in a theory of social psychology that understands meaning to be a socially constructed product.
I want to argue that the meaning we ascribe to a group, or a set of actors who may be identified with a group, emerge from an interaction of four factors:
My task of exploring how we understand new religious movements will be organized in terms of this conceptual framework. I will use it to try and explain both how we understand new religions to be a challenge (problematic) and how we see them as possessing, or failing to possess, potential.
Objective Stimulus
Very often the objective stimulus seems to carry a meaning of its own. What I would like to do is show how an objective stimulus serves to set in motion the other three components of this model. The scenario I will use is one that many of you will recognize as a real life event that unfolded in early 1997.
On March 26 police in a Southern California community received a call about a suspected problem. They arrived on the scene, a large suburban mansion, to find a substantial number of dead bodies laid out on cots and bunk beds, all shrouded by purple blankets neatly folded in a triangular shape on the upper part of their bodies. The coroner arrived, surveyed the scene, and counted the bodies. There was no apparent evidence of violent struggle.
This was the objective stimulus. From this scant information, the nation, and quickly the world, was soon constructing an explanation of what happened.
From monitoring the police radio, the press, picked up the word that a large number of police had been deployed to a residential address. They too quickly descended in large numbers. The officer in charge of the scene, having consulted with the corner, emerged from the home to brief the press. He identified the incident as one of an apparent mass suicide involving a cult that went by the name of Higher Source. He characterized the dead as all male, ages 18-24, and described the ritualistic manner in which the bodies were laid out.
Cultural Stock of Knowledge
From this moment forward, the stock of cultural knowledge about “cults” came into play. With a trifling of facts, most of which would turn out to be wrong, the process of vilification and the construction of another cult atrocity story were quickly underway.
The morning network news programs called upon their trusted cult “experts” to add background and interpretation. The experts all readily admitted that they did not know the identity of the group. Then, as if on automatic pilot, they moved quickly into their stock spiels about the atrocities of dangerous mind-control cults. And with almost no prodding, they were willing to speculate that there might well be other branches of the group that had already committed suicide, or were preparing to do so.
As the facts in the case became known, most of what was initially reported turned out to be wrong. The group was not all males; they were male and female in roughly equal numbers. The modal age was not late teens to early twenties, but mid-40s. And, the identity of the group was not Higher Source; that was the name of their business. Essentially the only “fact” the media reported correctly was that the group had engaged in a collective suicide. And the overwhelming proportion of the content of the messages communicated by the “experts” was wrong, misleading, or irrelevant to understanding what happened and why. When the television networks began their evening news broadcasts on the Eastern Time zone, they still did not know the identity of the group.
How could this happen? Once identified as a “cult story,” reporting of the incident was largely pre-scripted according to our stock of cultural knowledge about “cults.” It begins with the unfounded assumption of law enforcement authorities that cult members are young. It then proceeds along a line of speculation about the interconnectedness of evil groups. A little later, on the talk shows, we meet the “victims” of other cults with their repertoire of atrocity tales.
The group might be a branch of survivors of the Order of the Solar Temple, a French Canadian group that committed suicide in Switzerland and Canada in 1994. And if that were not so, then possibly the Solar Temple was the source of inspiration for the tragedy. On our television screens appeared the same parade of “experts” pontificating about “mind-control” and warning us about how there are thousands of other groups seeking to seduce innocent and unsuspecting souls.
The story unfolded in a highly predicted manner because it was a story that has become part of the convention wisdom of popular culture-what I have called the stock of cultural knowledge. The mass media has done the “cult story” before in many shapes and forms, so that when a big story breaks they know how to play out the story line.
Let me offer another kind of perspective that I think may illumine how our stock of cultural knowledge frames our understanding of new religious movements.
Almost every semester for the past twenty years I have taught a course about religious movements at the University of Virginia. I begin most terms by asking students to complete a one page questionnaire which asks them to rank a list of religions on a ten point scale from very positive to very negative. Then I show them the results of this exercise from students in previous semesters.
The results of the questionnaire never change except that I add new groups from time to time—Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyo, etc. The most consistent finding is that all new religious movements are clustered on the negative end of the scale. The second enduring finding is that the more recently the group has been visible in the mass media, the more negative the rankings. A third pattern, that has been invariant over the semesters, is that older new religions have fewer negative ratings. But the negative rankings tend to be replaced by neutral rather than positive sentiments. Class discussion tends to verify the fact that the neutral ranks signify absence of knowledge.
In discussing the results, I ask students if anyone is or has ever been a member of a cult or a sect. Then I ask if anyone has a member of his or her family who is or has been a member of a cult or sect? Next, I ask if anyone has a friend who is or has been a member of a cult or sect? Then, finally, I ask if anyone has ever known, or even talked with a member of a religious movement.
Semester after semester, there are few students who have had any kind of contact with, or first hand knowledge about new religious movements. I note this fact to the students as I flip through the group rankings they have completed. Then I say something to the effect that no one in the class claims to have been a member of a religious movement, no one has a relative who is or has been a member, neither does anyone have a friend who is or has been a member or a cult or sect. Further, no one reports that they ever had a conversation with a member of a religious movement. "This is very strange,” I note. “Looking through your responses, it is evident that most of you have some very strong feelings about some of these groups. Where do these sentiments come from?”
This usually generates a pretty lively discussion. Some recall tales about rumors that circulated around their high school. Others note that they picked up stern warnings about cults at church. The large proportion concludes that most of what they think about “cults” has been formulated from stories they picked up on the mass media.
Having established that the media is the primary source of negative feelings about cults and sects, I then ask if they can think of any positive things they have learned about religious movements from the mass media. Seldom can anyone recall a story they would characterize as positive.
At one level, we can acknowledge that the mass media tends not to see good news as newsworthy. This is true, but it is only part of the story and not the conclusion to be drawn from the data.
The mass media consistently portray new religious movements in highly negative ways because this highly pejorative understanding is the very essence of the stock of cultural knowledge they bring to the story. Where does it come from? Most importantly, cultural knowledge feeds upon itself. Every new stimulus draws upon the conventional understanding of prior happenings. Popular culture, thus, is continuously constructed and reconstructed by feeding upon its own knowledge base. In the case of cult stories, the mother lode of knowledge is the tragedy that took place in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. Again, in the case of cult stories, there are persons who have strong interest in sustaining and promoting the cultural stock of knowledge.
What I have described as a cultural stock of knowledge can be sustained for a long time. So long as past incidents remain at a level of ready recall, they will be recalled and used again and again to interpret triggering events. But beyond the cultural stock of knowledge are two underlying presuppositional categories from which meaning and understanding are derived. The first I have identified as global or primal presuppositions, the second theoretical presuppositions.
Global or Primal Presuppostions
Global presuppostions are taken-for-granted ideas that are grounded in our most basic understandings of how the social order works. I use the concept primal because they represent a first line of ancient wisdom that has become so imbedded in human species that they are taken-for-granted and largely beyond our consciousness recognition. Anthropological and sociological literature have dealt with this primal orienting process at great length with a variety of concepts.
For our purposes here, I want simply to suggest that through time human cultures have created worlds of trust that are hierarchically ordered. This world of identity begins with the immediate family and extends beyond to groups with which we feel a common sense of belonging: extended family, community (gemeinschaft), faith and race.
This hierarchical world creates insiders and outsiders. Outsider is defined in many ways beginning with physical and extending to social distance. From the simplest of societies to contemporary culture, allegiance to other gods has been a mark of an outsider. People of others faith traditions have always been suspect. Some of the most brutal behavior through the ages has been committed in the name of faith against other faith traditions.
There is much more that can, and perhaps should be said here, but I think the main point I wish to convey should be clear: our negative sentiments toward faith traditions other than our own are rooted in primal presuppositions. Our “knowledge” that another person’s religion is wrong has its roots in the fact outsiders are not to be trusted—especially outsiders that owe allegiance to another god.
Theoretical Presuppostions
Theoretical presuppositions are accessible to intellectual elites. The dominant set of theoretical presuppositions for what we consider to be the modern world are anchored in science and reason as the means of insight and understanding about virtually every dimension of self and society.
As Thomas Kuhn has noted, the underlying structure of scientific paradigms change, but usually only very slowly. Nested in the scientific worldview is a view of religion, which we know as the theory of secularization. The secularization theory, in its most stridently stated form, contends that religion and science are incompatible ways of understanding the world. Freud and Marx, for example, could see no good emanating from religion and looked forward to the day when religion would cease to be a factor in human civilization.
There are many views of secularization theory. A more prominent view for more than half-a-century now is the idea that secularization is a process that gradually diminishes the role of the sacred in the social structures and public life of modern civilization. The sacred substantially disappears from the public square, surviving at the level of individual consciousness. While individuals may gather to express a commonly shared set of beliefs, the dominant views of secular culture simply overwhelm the culture and, thus, significantly diminish the impact of religion on culture.
In the modern secular world, new religious movements constitute an anomaly. Anthropology has taken the lead in explaining new religions as the products of psychopathological leaders who gathered followers who shared a view of cultural decline. New religions were tantamount to efforts for cultural renewal.
The prototypical model of cultural decline in anthropological literature in the tribal or indigenous culture that has been overwhelmed by a more powerful culture—initially European and later North American conquerors. The conceptual perspective has also been used to explain the strange behavior of underclasses. Witness, for example, LaBarre’s accounting of Appalachians turning to snake handling as a surrogate to empowerment in a world that has overwhelmed them.
Anthropological theory, at best, offers a way of thinking about the role of new religions in the context of cultural displacement. Theoretically, new religions may have contributed to revitalization of simple societies, but they are no match for modern civilization. The underlying presuppositional understanding of this anthropological literature is grounded in secularization theory.
If anthropologists at least found new religions to be interesting, sociologists substantially ignored them until the second half of this century. The attitudes of sociologists seemed to be one of utter indifference to a cultural form they viewed as diminishing in cultural significance.
Some years ago I asked Wilbert Moore, a leading modernization theorist of the third quarter of this century, to participate in a conference on the topic of new religions. He declined, but I persisted in trying to persuade him to attend.
Finally, frustrated with my persistence, he said, “Look, I’m just not interested. With all due respect to the fact that you have chosen to devote your career to the study of religion, I see new religions as nothing but residual noise.”
Moore was expressing here a quintessential paradigmatic view of modern sociology at mid-century — a unilinear view of history that posited the inevitable advancement of civilization. And as civilization advances, religion is destined to diminish.
The unmistakable implication of this theoretical orientation is that any conversation about the potential for new religions is misguided and naive.
Sociological understanding of the relationship between religion and cultures has changed dramatically during the past quarter-of-a-century. Substantially shaped by the general theory of religion developed by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, the new sociological paradigm has rejected the most basic tenants of the secularization theory.
The new paradigm views religion as a ubiquitous cultural form. Religion continuously regenerates culture, and culture is constantly regenerating religion. This happens through two primary processes. This happens in established religions through innovation, renewal and reconstruction. When this process involves schism and a breaking away from the established body, we refer to this as a sectarian movement. New religions also come into being by importation from another culture, radical innovation (as with the synthesis of two or more traditions), or by invention (most, but not all new faiths that come from this source, prefer the concept revelation).
Without new religions, old religions would experience entropy and die. This is the essential message of the new paradigm in the sociology of religion. From this perspective, to address the question of potential is not to ask whether new religions will impact culture, but how. Religions have always impacted culture and much of that influence has to be generated by religious movements.
The effects of new religious movements may not always be immediately present in culture. There may be a lag time in the dissemination of ideas, or the impact may become evident only as large numbers of a society are directly influenced by a new faith tradition.
Largely overlooked as new religions, Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism are unquestionably the two most significant Christian religious movements of the twentieth century. Their prohibition of spirits and smoking has stood against a tide of excess that we now understand to be exceedingly harmful both the individuals and society.
Methodists and Baptists substantially view these prohibitions as a matter of piety, but other new religions achieved the same results with perhaps greater effectiveness. Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses all reasoned that our human bodies are temples of God, and that one ought not to defile this precious thing the Lord hath made. Actuarial statistics point unambiguously to the conclusion that these three groups have been forerunners of the health movement that has exploded in the late twentieth century.
When we explore the relationship between faith and health, it is significant to note that every religious movement of any significance since the mid-19th century has viewed health as a serious theological matter.
I have already identified several traditions. To them we can add liberal Protestantism’s concern with the “cure of souls,” a decidedly cutting-edge mental health movement. Christian Science, the most prominent of a large number of New Thought groups, was concerned with healing and the integration of body and spirit. This tradition ministered especially to women and was a leader in breaking ground for greater participation of women in leadership roles in religion.
New Thought was also a forerunner too much of what we today know as, New Age. This is a highly diverse movement, but shares a core belief and goal of wholeness through integration of mind, body and spirit. It is, to be sure, a peculiar amalgamation of Western and Asian spiritual values, but it is unquestionably a serious movement that is likely to have enduring impact on Western culture.
Let me be clear. The potential for religion to impact culture is by no means one-sided and destined to be beneficial. As the new millennium approaches we can take note of a smattering of strange and bizarre are happenings. As the countdown moves ever closer to the year 2000, there don’t appear to be any significant groups on the scene that are poised to significantly impact the “millennial event” with apocalyptic results.
Aum Shinrikyo clearly possessed an Armageddon theology and the potential technical resources to have a catastrophic impact on human culture. But they lacked the organizational skills to pull it off. Chen Tao, a Taiwanese group that immigrated to Garland, Texas, clearly possesses a millenarian apocalyptic worldview of immense proportions, but they have managed to gather only a few dozen followers. The failure of God to appear on Channel 18 all over North America at the prophesied time will almost certainly further diminish their potential to recruit new members. Further, since they are effectively passive agents to the predicted holocaust, they could hardly be considered a dangerous group.
In American politics there is an old saying that those who live by the crystal ball are destined to eat broken glass. I offer this by way of saying that I am hesitant to speculate as to how new religions may impact culture in the early part of the new millennium. But if I may be afforded just one final observation, I would conclude that new religions are likely to be significant actors in shaping the next century.
The twentieth century, more than any other in history, has experienced unprecedented expansion of democracy and individual liberty. There are few who do not herald both these truly important advancements in human civilization. At the same time, many are beginning to ask how the goals of individual freedom are to be balanced against the collective imperatives of a civil society. This is clearly one of the great challenges for the new millennium.
The author has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia since 1972. He is also the founder of the New Religious Movements Home Page.
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~jkh8x
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