Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America
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Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America

Robert Ellwood, Harry Partin

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eBook - ePub

Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America

Robert Ellwood, Harry Partin

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This text explores the major new or unconventional religions and spiritual movements in America that exist outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781315507231
Subtopic
Religione
Edition
2

I


THE SEVERAL MEANINGS OF “CULT”

A PROBLEMATIC TERM

The common use of the word “cult” for new religious movements within our own society has entailed certain problems of understanding. This is, first, because the term is capable of several different definitions, and, second, because (like comparable racist labels) it automatically evokes prepackaged stereotypes and emotional reactions, both usually negative. (No one calls his or her own religious group a cult; this is inevitably a name given a group by an outsider.) Our purpose in this discussion will be to attempt to sort out these meanings and, in the process, endeavor to advance authentic comprehension of the movements behind the word.
First let us look at the dictionary. All standard lexicons agree that the word has several different meanings which, though centering around the original significance of cultus, worship, its Latin source, have varying emotional and value-laden overtones that could lead to trouble if misapplied. First, it simply means worship in a more or less neutral sense, generally with reference to the worship of a particular object within a larger system, as in speaking of “the cult of Osiris” or “the cult of the Sacred Heart.” Second, the same use can be extended to secular objects, as in “the cult of Napoleon.” Third, the same meaning can be extended further to imply an excessive or unbalanced devotion or “craze” for anything, as in “the cult of disco dancing” or “the cult of success.”
Then relative to religious groups, the word can mean (1) any set of people bound together by devotion to a particular sacred person, object, or ideology, and (2) any religion considered false, unorthodox, or spurious. Not seldom one of these two religious group meanings is linked up with one of the word’s broader meanings, to suggest that a religion regarded as spurious is also both faddish and fanatical; or, if a more positive connotation is desired, that what some consider a cult is simply indulging a preference for a certain cultus or worship no less legitimate than any other.
Turning to more extensive writing by students and sociologists of religion on the sort of groups commonly designated cults, we find the same bifurcation. Some have proposed a neutral meaning for the term focused around certain sociological and psychological characteristics. Others attach to the term features they obviously expect the reader to regard negatively. We are unaware of any attempt to give the word “cult” positive significance in connection with modern religious movements, unless it be the first edition of the present book, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, which described the groups under consideration as cults in a sociological sense, yet displayed, we believe, a degree of empathy with their spiritual quest that went beyond mere academic open-mindedness.1 (We would today look more critically at a few of the groups in this book, and, as will be seen, now find it difficult to use the word “cult” in any scholarly sense.)
On the neutral sociological side, J. Milton Yinger, in Religion, Society, and the Individual, describes the cult as a withdrawal group whose traits include small size, a search for “mystical experience,” lack of strong organizational structure, charismatic leadership, a sharp break in religious (not social) terms with society, and concern almost wholly with the problems of individuals rather than the social order. It is, he says, a “religious mutant.”2 In this book, written before the spiritual explosion of the 1960s and the style of “cults” which devolved from it, it is clear that the author has largely in mind groups of the spiritualist, theosophical, or “New Thought” type. He unquestionably gives an accurate picture of some such entities, for there has been no lack of fairly ephemeral Spiritualist churches centered around a particular medium, or “metaphysical” societies dependent upon a single illuminator. They drew people, often of middle or upper class, who did not care to break with society as a whole, but whose inward sickness of soul led them to unconventional doctrines and a thirst for mystical experience. In Yinger’s categorization the cult contrasts with the other form of withdrawal group, the sect, which represents an intense, separatist version of the dominant religion in the society. In America, predominantly Christian, examples would be the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is typically strict, legalistic in morals, close-knit, antagonistic to society, and seeking individual perfection. In the same vein, Werner Stark, in The Sociology of Religion, goes so far as to see in the cult “the answer to some individual woe” which does not share such characteristics of the sect as “recruitment from the lower classes and revolutionary animus,” but offers a more individualized spiritual tonic appropriate to those better placed so far as the privileges of this world are concerned.3
G. K. Nelson, in Spiritualism and Society, has criticized Yinger’s use of cult, pointing out that some Spiritualist institutions, for example, have survived for many decades, and that even if individual Spiritualist churches come and go, the movement as a whole has found ways of replenishing itself.4 Indeed, one could point out that groups like the Theosophical Society or the Vedanta Societies, though often thought of in connection with the role Yinger and Stark assign the cult, have possessed fairly substantial institutional structures since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, most sociological definitions give inadequate attention to the intellectual and experimental continuities in cults over generations. Most partake of a monistic and mentalist worldview which, though lately infused with Eastern correlates, can be traced back through Transcendentalism to Neoplatonism, and which has long served as an alternative to orthodox Judaism and Christianity in Europe and the Americas. This common basic worldview has more than theoretical significance; it helps to explain what many field observers have noted, a “floating” cult population which tends to go from one such group to another,5 and it also helps explain the persistent appearance of such groups over centuries even as specific entities come and go.
However, while it is easy to criticize definitions like those of Yinger and Stark, particularly in light of the 1960s groups and their development, the positive aid they give must be noted. It is true that a high proportion of the young people who entered groups like the Hare Krishnas and the Unification Church, like the sixties “counter-culture” generally, were of middle- and upper-class background—a fact which had not a little to do with the immense controversy they engendered. It is true that they centered around charismatic leaders, offered above all a subjective “high,” were relatively small in size, and though some advertised vague idealistic prescriptions for society as a whole were no doubt entered essentially because of personal problems or needs. What those definitions missed was that, at least for the sixties-and-after crowd, the personal problem frequently embraced a need for a tight social structure. Far from possessing a lack of strong organizational structure, these groups, as tightly-knit as any communalistic withdrawal sect, flaunted it to excess in the eyes of critics. Yinger saw trouble with succession of leadership as a further trait of the cult; while some of the newer highly organized cults have had a rocky road in this respect, a group like the Hare Krishnas has managed now to establish a second generation of leadership. Yinger has a category which he calls the “established sect,” which includes groups like the Quakers which, while possessing sectarian characteristics, persevere generation after generation. As we have seen, this has really been the case with some “cults” since the last century; now, with some other examples like the Hare Krishnas and probably the Unification Church before us, perhaps (given his typologies) an “established cult” type should also be recognized.
Other definitions of cult—old and new—have placed heavier stress on such portions of the dictionary definitions as zealotry or focus on a particular person or idea. The social psychologist Hadley Cantril called it “a deviant organized action, generally rather restricted and temporary, in which the individual zealously devotes himself to some leader or ideal.”6 E. L. Quarantelli and Dennis Wenger made it “a diffuse group exhibiting inward innovative behavior that both differentiates and makes for conformity among group members and is supported by religious belief, or an ideology.”7 Andrew J. Pavlos moved toward what may be called a dynamic definition, emphasizing social dynamics within the group and between it and outside society, in pointing to three characteristics of the cult: (1) a leader who formulates group dogmas and isolates members from others who would support their former beliefs; (2) members who become dependent on the group for meeting their needs; and (3) the group identified by the community as deviant.8 These definitions clearly put the finger on some features of modern cults to which critics and others have alluded: isolation from the larger community and particularly from data which might be disconfirmative; conformity within the group; dependence on a powerful leader; and tension between the cult and the community which is, in fact, a significant shaper of both its experience and any outside perception of it. At the same time, these definitions are idealizing insofar as any of these criteria are only imperfectly met in reality. The fact that nearly all joiners of cults later leave them voluntarily, some 75 percent within a year, indicates that any attempt on their part to establish conformity and exclude outside information meets with very limited success.9
Other commentators have given special heed to the heterodoxy part of the standard definitions. J. Gordon Melton and Robert L. Moore, in The Cult Experience, speak of a cult as “a religious group that presents a distinctly alternative pattern for doing religion and adhering to a faith perspective other than that dominant in the culture.10 This statement has the advantage of making clear that the key variable in determining what is labelled—inevitably by outsiders—a cult is deviance from what is conventional in that society in “doing religion,” a phrase which unquestionably refers not only to doctrine, but also to the practices and sociology of the group. Thus, standard Christian churches could be, and have been, looked upon in much the way “dangerous cults” are in our society in a firmly Muslim or Buddhist land.
This definition in itself, however, is incomplete insofar as it does not present the internal characteristics which have usually been associated with the word by sociologists and others. Many of these seem virtually imperative for a group in the position of adhering to a distinctly alternative religious pattern than that of its environing society, especially when the group does not have the external institutional support of, say, a mission church in India or a Vedanta Society connected to the Ramakrishna Mission in America. An emphasis on internal conformity, high level of commitment, strong authoritative and charismatic leadership, ability to induce powerful subjective experience and to solve personal problems, and legitimating linkage with an alternative occult or exotic tradition, are all likely to be necessary for such a group to counter the natural pull of the dominant tradition. For the alternative group to sustain itself, its authority and felt rewards must be potent enough to resist the pressure of family, community, and cultural ties, together with the instinctive desire most people feel for social approval. Usually this requirement entails that its leader be possessed of both appropriate credentials and highly sensed charisma, that it is effective in producing inner experiences the adherent believes are spiritually authentic and beneficial, and that it creates a closely-bonded surrogate family, community, and even culture.
Both the heterodoxy and the internal characteristics criteria are generally stated by writers on cults whose stance toward them is frankly negative. Ronald Enroth, in The Lure of the Cults, speaks of a cult as “a deviation from orthodoxy” and, in the eyes of this conservative Christian sociologist, that is the beginning of the other disturbing features he finds in them.11 Another conservative Christian writer, William J. Petersen, in Those Curious New Cults in the 80s, says, “We think of a cult as a deviation from orthodox religion” (whether that religion is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or whatever) on questions central to the religion.12 Like Melton and Moore, he therefore makes relation to the dominant religion an essential criterion. (But equating the dominant with the orthodox or authentic version of the religion is something which, at least in theory, evangelical theologians would not necessarily do.) He then proceeds to cite certain characteristics of cults which, though clearly tendentious and related to his critical position, in their own way take account of some internal features we have noted. The cult, he says, (1) has a recent founder or prophet; (2) has an authority beside the Bible; (3) is authoritarian, encouraging dependency on the part of members; (4) is separatist and secretive; (5) frequently employs a degree of deception; and (6) seems loving yet employs fear. While critics of “anticult” rhetoric have pointed out that such tactics are not unknown, in effect if not in principle, among churches and preachers of more orthodox persuasion, one does get a picture of a group marked by the sort of drives toward internal conformity and exaltation of the leader’s charisma we have suggested was necessary for a deviant body. Carroll Stoner and Jo Anne Parke, in All God’s Children, a book which though not informed by a conservative Christian animus ends up with about the same negative image of cults as those in that genre, list as among the characteristics of the cult a living leader who is the sole judge of members and has absolute authority over their lives, an exclusive social system which separates members from the outside world, and unwholesome psychological practices which induce ego-destruction and thought-control.13

A DEFINITION OF “CULT”

We must now proceed to the task of evolving our own definition of cult, working from current usage but attempting to resolve remaining ambiguities. We must observe at the outset that there is no “right” or “wrong” definition per se for a word of this sort; what we must consider is the greater or less heuristic value of definitions. That is, we must reflect on what definition (a) is most useful in pointing to a significant set of phenomena, and (b) best stimulates interest in it and indicates important areas of future study in the characteristics it isolates as salient and crucial to the definition. What way of talking about cult makes visible and clearly delimited a distinct order of religious groups, separating them from the church, the denomination, the monastery, and the rest? If, in fact, we are ...

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