New Religions in Global Perspective

Religious Change in the Modern World

Peter B. Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134517053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Peter B. Clarke's in-depth account explores the innovative character of new religious movements and new forms of spirituality from a global vantage point. Ranging from North America and Europe to Japan, Latin America, South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, it is the perfect introduction to NRMs such as Falun Gong, Aum Shirikyo, the Brahma Kumaris, the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood, Sufism, the Engaged Buddhist and Engaged Hindi movements, Messianic Judaism and Rastafarianism.

Charting the cultural significance and global impact of NRMs, he discusses the ways in which various religious traditions are shaping, rather than displacing, each other's understanding of notions such as transcendence and faith, good and evil, of the meaning, purpose and function of religion, and of religious belonging. He then examines the responses of governments, churches, the media and general public to new religious movements, as well as the reaction to older, increasingly influential religions, such as Buddhism and Islam, in new geographical and cultural contexts. Taking into account the degree of continuity between old and new religions, each chapter contains not only an account of the rise of the NRMs and new forms of spirituality in a particular region, but also an overview of change in the regions' mainstream religions.

Part I

---

Global perspective, New Age and society’s response

---

Chapter 1

---

New Religious Movements (NRMs)

A global perspective

---

While the perspective on the phenomenon of New Religious Movements (NRMs) taken in this volume is global, the framework of discussion is religious change in a broad sense and includes change in the so-called older, mainstream religions. This should enable a better appreciation of the innovative character of NRMs or, which amounts to much the same thing, the degree of continuity between old and new religion. Criteria of innovation vary between religions and cultures, being centred more on doctrine in certain contexts and on changes in the performance and purposes of ritual and in orientation to the world in others.

A global perspective can shed much light on aspects of NRMs that might otherwise remain obscure, including their significance and impact. Such a vantage point also reveals the myriad forms, of what Robertson (1992) called ‘glocalization’, that NRMs have taken as they have attempted to embed themselves in different cultures. Also more clearly evident from this viewpoint are the different criteria of religious change and innovation adopted across the world, which have a bearing on why a particular movement is considered new. This standpoint too makes comparison possible in relation to the underlying reasons for, the variation in impact, and the different styles of NRMs in different parts of the world. Although I use the term ‘NRMs’, I also wish to apply what has been said to the new kinds of spirituality that have arisen, such as subjective spirituality in the West and applied and engaged spirituality in the Middle East, the East and elsewhere.

Working from a global perspective, it comes as no surprise to discover that subjective spirituality appeals more widely the more economically advanced society is, and applied and/or engaged spirituality in the form of engaged Buddhism (Queen and King, 1996), which closely resembles ‘Protestant Buddhism’ (Gombrich and Obeyesekere, 1988), engaged Hinduism (see Chapter 10), engaged Neo-Pentecostalism (Martin, 1990), or socially oriented Sufism, Islamic mysticism, and daw ‘a or Islamic missionary activity (see Chapter 7), where material conditions are less favourable. Where engaged spirituality exists in more economically advanced societies it is usually of a different kind to that found in the developing world. For example, an important part of the agenda of Engaged Buddhism in the United States is gender equality, which, although not absent, does not figure highly on the list of priorities of Engaged Buddhism in Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and elsewhere. Globalization is, however, partially offsetting the differences in the kinds of religious innovations that now appeal to North and South, East and West.

All of these engaged forms of religion and spirituality are about world transformation as self-transformation. They are based on the principle that to engage socially is not sufficient in itself. It is open to anyone to perform social service. However, when motivated by spiritual and religious belief or principles the result is the betterment both of the self and of society. Engaged Buddhism explains it this way. The showing of compassion in this world leads to the realization of one’s Buddha nature, and helps toward the realization of the truth of the interconnectedness of all living things, of all sentient life.

It also becomes evident from a global vantage point how vast and varied is the range of spiritual resources and technologies that are now being drawn upon in every part of the world, and how this development is not only changing the content of belief systems but also creating a new cognitive approach to spiritual truth, a new way of knowing, described in a later section of this chapter, which gives a new meaning to faith, and a new understanding of the purpose of spiritual development. Many of those seekers who embrace this new spirituality are beginning to form a new class that neither belongs nor believes, in the sense that these terms are traditionally understood, at least in the West. This development correlates with new emphasis found everywhere on the role of lay actors in deciding their religious future. Indeed, there is a mood among these actors that the time has come to take back control once again of their religious heritage, which had been taken away by hierarchical religion. I will return to this issue later in this chapter.

The global perspective reveals not only the new forms of religious knowing but also the multiple meanings and understanding of the term ‘new’, and the new ways of religious belonging. Even where affiliation to one faith only is still considered important, doctrinal tenets are increasingly seen as matters of personal opinion. The emphasis is more on praxis.

There is no single highway or route across the world that is favoured by NRMs. They exist everywhere and move in all kinds of unexpected directions. Several Japanese NRMs, including Sekai Kyusei Kyo (Church of World Messianity), have arrived in parts of Africa, including Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, via the furthest point west of Japan, Brazil. The Brazilian NRM Santo Daime has travelled with Brazilian-Japanese migrant workers to Japan. Movements such as Subud have spread from Indonesia to Australia to Europe, others from Tibet to South Africa, others from India to Mauritius and the West Indies and yet others from the West Africa to Europe and the United States.

Older religions moreover have shed much more of their regional, geographical character and assumed a more universalistic image. The possibility of multiple belonging becomes much more likely as religions come to reshape each other. This reshaping is not, of course, a new development. One of the most effective globalizing forces, the Christian missionaries, has been involved in this process for many centuries. Kamstra (1994) gives an example of this in relation to Japan. He shows how a Japanese form of monotheism found in Shinto and Japanese Buddhism, and in many of the shin shukyo or new religions, including Tenrikyo (Religion of Heavenly Wisdom), and taken up by more than one third of the country’s population, owes much to the preaching of the Jesuits and the influence of the Kakure-Kirishitan or Hidden Christians. At the same time, as Mullins (1998) shows, Christianity in Japan has undergone considerable domestication, as have both Christianity and Islam in Africa (Chapter 8). And in Europe, under the impact of Oriental religions, the New Age Movement (NAM), and NRMs of various kinds, for many being a Christian means something quite different from fifty years ago.

This process of shaping the local religion and being reshaped by it (a process previously referred to as glocalization) is also evident in contemporary Japanese NRMs both at home and overseas. In Japan itself, NRMs such as Kofuku no Kagaku (Institute for Research in Human Happiness) connect at several points with the European esoteric tradition, in particular Hermeticism and Theosophy (see Chapter 5), and after transforming their content, integrate them into their cosmology. Overseas, Japanese NRMs, as they attempt to adapt to cultures strikingly different from the ones in which they originated, have been highly reflexive in their relations with local religions. In Brazil this has meant integrating some of the rituals and beliefs of Brazilian Christianity, Spiritism and African Brazilian religions (see Chapters 9 and 12) (Clarke, 2000). Other examples of ‘glocalization’ include Zen Buddhism in the United States (Melton and Jones, 1994) and Yoga, particularly in the form of Modern Yoga (De Michealis, 2003)(see Chapter 4), which has undergone a process of secularization in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

But it is rare to find that one belief system has totally transformed another. For example, while Oriental religions have influenced the traditional Western idea of God, replacing the notion of a personal God with that of God as soul, many in the West proceed to gloss over the essential point that receives emphasis in the classical Indian yoga tradition that the soul of God is different from that of humans in not being affected by matter or nature.

Not all of the yoga performed in the West is secular Modern Yoga. What some in the West, and doubtless elsewhere, intend by taking up yoga as a spiritual discipline is to become God, but that has not been historically the goal. On the contrary, traditionally the aim has been to become like God not to participate in God. Furthermore, even those Westerners who retain this classical understanding of God are liable to introduce an element of worship into their practice, forgetting that there is no devotion to God in the classical Christian sense of the term. The reason being is that God is seen as the divine exemplar of all human souls, and this makes contemplation of God useful rather than an act of worship.

Other examples of ‘glocalization’ and/or domestication include the reformulation of Zen in the United States by adepts including the composer John Cage (b. 1912). D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), to whom Cage was greatly indebted, encouraged such reformulation by decontextualizing Zen and defining it as a universal form of heightening religious consciousness that could be found in any philosophy.

The process of ‘glocalization’ extends much wider than a few concepts or practices such as Yoga and Zen and includes the reformulation of core notions of Oriental systems of thought. As Anthony and Ecker (1987) point out:

Since Eastern systems tend to see collective social reality as an illusion … salvation therefore involves the transcendence of society’s moral rules, the socially conditioned notions of good and evil. But this Eastern idea of salvation tends to be interpreted from the standpoint of an ‘American-utilitarian-individualist mentality’.

A global perspective, thus, sheds light on how various religious traditions are shaping, rather than displacing, each other’s understanding of notions such as transcendence and faith, good and evil, of the meaning, purpose and functions of religion, of religious belonging and of attitudes toward, and methods of, disseminating religious beliefs. This perspective also sheds light on the different criteria of religious innovation that exist from one culture and religious tradition to another, although globalization is making for greater uniformity of outlook on this question (see Chapters 11 and 13). Broadly speaking, while the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions attach more importance to orthodoxy than orthopraxy, it is the converse in the case of the Oriental religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Daoism.

Since it is seen as stimulating so much in the way of religious change, this seems an appropriate point to discuss briefly Robertson’s (1992) idea of globalization itself as a new form of religion and/or spirituality.

Globalization as a new form of religion and/or spirituality

Robertson (1992) suggests that there is a religious dimension to globalization, understood subjectively in the sense that the issues it raises are fundamentally important questions about self-identity and the meaning of being human, both of which are increasingly considered not from the perspective of particular religions but in the wider framework of a shared humanity. This is one way of attempting to explain the global character of the NRMs’ phenomenon: by considering them as part of this quest for a sense of self-identity and self-understanding and as part of the project of constructing a global self for a global world. Their rise can also be related to the process of constructing global standards in ethics and human rights, as social relations increasingly take on a supraterritorial dimension through the proliferation of transnational bodies, and as the concern for what is happening to the planet ecologically and in terms of its bio-diversity widens and deepens. Moreover, in an endeavour to build consensus among people, certain NRMs also engage in developing commonly shared concepts of the transcendent (Clarke, 2005).

The widespread concern with the meaning and purpose of being human, with the interdependency of all things, with global ethics, and with common concepts, forms the traditional subject matter of the theology and philosophy of religion. Thus, when seen from this angle, the angle from which Robertson views it, religion in the contemporary world, including new religion, becomes part of the process of subjective globalization.

How significant a part is open to question. It is possible, if looked at from a single regional or geographical perspective only, to dismiss NRMs as marginal and inconsequential in terms of their impact on the shaping of religion in the modern world. However, not only are NRMs global in the sense of being a feature of virtually every society in the world but many are themselves, while others are becoming, global religions in their own right, and as such are major contributors, as we have already pointed out, to the shaping of the form and content of the religion and particularly of the spirituality of the modern world. Among the global NRMs is the Japanese NRM Soka Gakkai (Value Creation Society), which exists in every continent and in many countries in each continent. Another example of this kind of transnationalism, this time from Taiwan, is the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (Huang, 2005) (see also Chapter 13), whose vision of itself as a global movement is symbolized by the use of images of Shakyamuni Buddha overlooking the globe and the ritual of placing candles and lights on a world map, indicating that its teachings are being carried across the globe by its lay missionaries.

The growing demand for spirituality

The option for spirituality over religion and the stress on the need for a spirituality that pulls together, as it were, the world of the human and the divine, and that is relevant and self-empowering, are, clearly, developments promoted by the NAM (see Chapter 2), Indian-derived NRMs (Chapter 10) and the Self-religions and/or the Religions of the True Self, terms which are explained in more detail below.

Such spirituality, which turns doctrinal tenets into matters of personal opinion, is seen by the Catholic Church, some of the more theologically conservative Protestant churches, Islam and also some branches of Buddhism, to constitute a serious threat to ‘authentic’ religion. Official Catholicism and certain Buddhist communities have been particularly critical of the form and content of the new spirituality as it is found in the NAM (see Chapter 2). This official criticism notwithstanding, the influence of the NAM has penetrated most mainstream religions, and several of the so-called Traditional Religions, for whom it has become one of the principal means of their globalization (see Chapter 6).

While there is a growing interest in spirituality, often at the expense of established religion as traditionally practised, the nature and purposes of the former varies considerably within any one society and from one socio-economic and cultural context to another. Looking at the situation from West to East, one kind of spirituality that is increasingly sought after in the former context is the previously mentioned inner-directed or internally focused spirituality that gives rise to what, building on Heelas’ (1991) concept of Self-religion, I prefer to describe as Religions of the True ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Global perspective, New Age and society's response
• Part II New religions in the West
• Part III New religions North Africa and the Middle East, and Africa, south of the Sahara
• Part IV NRMs in South and Central America and the Caribbean
• Part V New religions of South, Southeast and East Asia
• Part VI Conclusion
• General bibliography
• Index