New Religious Movements

Challenge and Response

Jamie Cresswell, Bryan Wilson, Jamie Cresswell, Bryan Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134636969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

New Religious Movements: Challenge & Response is the most comprehensive, wide-ranging study on the global impact of new religions.
* New religions discussed include Hare Krishna, Sikh Dharma, The Unification Church, The Church of Scientology, The Jesus People and Wicca.
* Focuses on the rise of new religious movements in Italy, Brazil, United States, Germany and Britain. * The contributors are among the most respected and reputable experts in the field.

Summary of Chapter 1

New Religious Movements (NRMs) are today a world-wide phenomenon, but the current wave of such movements, which became visible in the West after the Second World War, differs from the vast majority of previous waves in that the movements arise not only within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but also from other traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Shintoism, and Paganism) and from more recent philosophies or ideologies, such as psychoanalysis and science fiction. While concentrating on the situation in Europe, North America, and Australasia, Professor Barker does not ignore the growth of NRMs in Africa, Japan, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the traditionally Christian countries of the former Soviet Union. She brings out the extraordinary variety of these movements, and indicates that while some contemporary movements manifest some of the characteristics typical of earlier new religions, the fact that many of them now have a second- or even a third-generation membership has led to some dilution of their original ‘sectarian’ character. She indicates that the statistical significance of new movements is not as great as their social and cultural significance, and that much of their significance lies in society’s reaction to them. It is precisely this consequence for social and cultural institutions which other authors explore in subsequent chapters.

1 New Religious Movements

Their incidence and significance

Eileen Barker

Introduction

The subject of the incidence and significance of New Religious Movements is enormous, and the necessity to select a few points from the many that could be raised is but an invitation to anticipate at a superficial level what others will be exploring in far greater depth. I can hope to do no more than raise some of the more obvious (though sometimes forgotten) questions that relate to the challenge of the movements and to the responses to which their presence has given rise.

Statistical significance

Despite the fact that there is a surprisingly large number of NRMs peppering the free world at the present time, and that a considerable number of persons have been affected by the movements, the real significance of new religions in modern society is not a statistical significance. Certainly, there is no indication that I have come across in the West which suggests that any one movement is showing signs of becoming a major religious tradition during the life of its first-, second- or even third-generation members. This argument is less forceful in Japan, where it has been estimated that between 10 and 20 per cent of the population are followers of one or other NRM,¹ and where a movement such as Soka Gakkai claims several million followers – but even its impressive growth seems to have reached a plateau, at least at the present time – and it should be remembered that at least 80 per cent of the population are not followers of any NRM.

How many NRMs are there now?

The short answer is that we do not know with much accuracy what the incidence of new religions is. A somewhat longer answer starts with the simple truth that, of course, it all depends on what is meant by an NRM. Do we include each and every New Age group or do we lump them together as a single ‘movement’? Do we include movements within mainstream traditions (Opus Dei, Folkalore, the House Church movement – each House Church)? What about the African Independent Churches? What about the United Reform Church? Are the ‘self-religions’ or Human Potential groups really new religious movements? How new is new? What about Subud, Vedanta or possibly Jehovah’s Witnesses which is the first ‘sect’ that comes to mind in a country such as Italy when the phrase New Religious Movement is mentioned? Might we include even the anti-cult movement – sections of it certainly exhibit several of the characteristics that ‘anti-cultists’ themselves attribute to ‘cults’?

Definitions of movements

There is, of course, no ‘right’ answer. Definitions are more or less useful, not more or less true. The definition from which I personally start – for purely pragmatic reasons – is that an NRM is new in so far as it has become visible in its present form since the Second World War, and that it is religious in so far as it offers not merely narrow theological statements about the existence and nature of supernatural beings, but that it proposes answers to at least some of the other kinds of ultimate questions that have traditionally been addressed by mainstream religions, questions such as: Is there a God? Who am I? How might I find direction, meaning and purpose in life? Is there life after death? Is there more to human beings than their physical bodies and immediate interactions with others?

Numbers of movements

INFORM has over 2,600 different groups on its computer, the majority (but not all) of which might be called NRMs.² Given that there must be a good many groups about which we have not heard, it would not be unreasonable to assume that, including schisms but not branches of the same group under different names, there could be over 2,000 discrete groups in Europe. Gordon Melton, who uses a much narrower definition, which excludes the human potential groups, can provide some information on nearly 1,000 groups in America.³ Shimazono says that scholarly estimates of the number of NRMs in Japan vary from 800 to a few thousand.⁴ Several years ago, Harold Turner estimated that there were 10,000 new religions with 12 million or more adherents in among the tribal peoples of the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific.⁵ He would include the African Independent Churches, but untold numbers of new religions may be found in India; several hundreds exist in South America, Australia and New Zealand and in places such as the West Indies, Korea and the Philippines.

In short, while clearly dependent on the definition used, the number of NRMs according to my broad definition is likely to be in the order of four figures (two or more thousand) in the West and five figures (probably somewhere in the lower tens of thousands) world-wide.

How many members?

Attempting to assess the incidence of the movements seems like child’s play when one turns to questions concerning membership numbers. Many of the movements do not count, keep secret or distort (usually upwards) their membership figures. We know that some NRMs have only a handful of members – a score or less – while others have hundreds or thousands, with a few (but only a very few with any credibility) claiming millions.

Definitions of membership

There is, moreover, a vast range of levels of membership: there are totally committed members who (like monks or nuns) devote their lives to their movement, living as a community and working full time for it; there are associate members (similar to congregational members), who may come to a centre on a weekly basis for worship or a course; and there are sympathisers (or ‘nominal’ members) who may be in general agreement with an NRM’s beliefs and practices, but whose lives are not very widely or deeply affected by their somewhat peripheral affiliation. While for some purposes it is only committed members who are counted, at other times or in different movements, one can find included even those who have done little more than sign a piece of paper saying that they are in general sympathy with some of the movement’s beliefs.

Double-counting

Further confusion may arise as the result of double-counting. It is not impossible – indeed, as one moves toward the New Age end of the NRM spectrum, it is quite common – for individuals to have overlapping memberships, happily hopping from one ‘self-religion’ to another. It would not be impossible for committed seekers in California, Amsterdam or Highgate to spend twenty minutes in Transcendental Meditation each morning before embarking on their Tai Chi, then going on to attend a channelling session on Monday, to meet with their Co-counsellor on Tuesday, have an Alexander lesson on Wednesday, watch an Osho video on Thursday and participate in a Forum Seminar throughout the weekend. Two months later one might find them chanting ‘Hare Krishna’, ‘Om Shanti’ or, perhaps, ‘Nam Myoho Renge Kyo’.

Turnover

There is, furthermore, the complication of high turnover rates. Both the movements and their opponents tend to play down this characteristic of many of the better-known NRMs. On the one hand, few new religions are eager to publicise the fact that a sizeable number of their members have found the movement wanting; on the other hand, anti-cultists who are eager to defend ‘the brainwashing thesis’ do not wish to publicise the fact that the ‘victims’ not only can, but do, of their own free will, leave those very NRMs that are accused of employing irresistible and irreversible techniques of mind control.⁶

So far as our present interests are concerned, this means that it is frequently the number of people who have passed through a movement, rather than the current membership, that is counted. Being familiar with the phrase ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic’, we should not be surprised that the Church of Scientology considers all those who have ever done one of their courses to be a Scientologist, and counts them as such even if they have not been in touch with the movement for years – even, presumably, if they are among the movement’s most vitriolic opponents.

And it cannot be denied that there is no way in which I, having done the course (albeit for purposes of research), cannot be an est graduate – or, rather, a Forum graduate. (In that sense – and, let me insist, in that sense only – the anti-cultists who, as a result of my participant observation, accuse me of being ‘numbered’ among cult members are, doubtless, correct.)

The cultural milieu

A further point that ought to be raised so far as incidence is concerned, but which, at the same time, propels us towards the ‘significance’ part of my remit, is something about which Colin Campbell has written extensively: the cultic milieu.⁷

One of the features of modern society which sociologists of religion, such as Durkheim, Weber and Wilson, have frequently pointed out is that organised religion no longer has the kind of hold over social institutions that it has enjoyed in earlier periods. Religion has become increasingly a leisure pursuit that may be ‘privatised’, ‘individualised’ or even, to borrow Luckmann’s term, ‘invisible’. Mainstream religious organisations have suffered significant losses of membership in most of Europe and, according to some, though not all, commentators, in the United States. Anyone who has made but the most cursory of enquiries about people’s religious positions in Western society will be all too familiar with the sentiment: ‘You don’t have to go to church to be a good Christian.’

Concomitantly, in place of a relatively homogeneous, coherent, and more or less shared culture, we have witnessed the growth of religious pluralism, interwoven with numerous social changes such as increased social and geographical mobility, universal franchise, universal education and the break-up of a traditional occupational structure, traditional values and authority structures – all of which can contribute to a dissatisfaction with, or at least a second look at, the beliefs and practices that might otherwise have been passed on by parents or others in roles of authority – thus creating a potential ‘demand’ (in the economic sense) for alternative ways of satisfying spiritual and religious requirements.

On the ‘supply’ side, although it should be remembered that most of the traditional Churches still supply more people with their religion than does any NRM, we have expanding missionary activity and escalating migration – a factor that Melton has repeatedly pointed to is the relaxing of the US immigration laws in 1965, which allowed a number of gurus to enter the United States and thus promote the growth of religions with Eastern origins. And, of course, there has been the development of a mass media (supplemented by all manner of electronic, satellite and Internet devices) swelling the variety of (broadly defined) religious resources that have become available to any one individual participating in the cultural milieu. All sorts of ideas are out there. And many of these ideas originate from, are carried by, and/or are reinforced by New Religious Movements.

This is particularly obvious with a number of New Age ideas such as person-centred spirituality and/or the potential of individual development. And, while fifty years ago none but...