Researching New Religious Movements

Responses and Redefinitions

Elisabeth Arweck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415277556
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134472468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

New religious movements such as the Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses and Hare Krishnas are now well established in mainstream cultural consciousness. But responses to these 'cult' groups still tend to be overwhelmingly negative, characterized by the furious reactions that they evoke from majority interests. Modern societies need to learn how best to respond to such movements, and how to interpret their benefits and dangers.
Researching New Religious Movements provides a cutting-edge analysis of the controversy around new religions in America and Europe today. Drawing on original fieldwork, it explores the battles between the recruiting factions of groups like the Moonies, and the anti-cult movements and Church societies that have mobilized to oppose these. It considers academic and media interventions on both sides, placing special emphasis on the problems of objectivity inherent in the language of 'sects', 'abduction' and 'brainwashing'. Ideal for students, researchers and professionals, this provocative and much-needed book takes the debate over new religious movements to a newly sophisticated level.

1
What this book is about

Minority or non-mainstream religions and religious groups keep appearing in the limelight of the media’s attention, usually in connection with a ‘scandalous’ affair of some kind or seemingly incomprehensible ‘bizarre’ or ‘lunatic’ behaviour. Recent events which have made the headlines include the suicide of Ricky Rodriguez, a former member of the Children of God (now The Family). A ‘product’ of ‘flirty fishing’, Rodriguez—nicknamed ‘Davidito’, the young ‘prophet’—was the son of David Berg’s consort Maria and had been held up as an exemplar for child rearing in the group, destined to be the future leader. Before committing suicide Rodriguez recorded a somewhat theatrical indictment against his upbringing on video and then killed Angela Smith, his erstwhile nanny, as a dramatic act of revenge. The incident had wider implications, leading to the examination of the connection between Family Care Foundation, a charitable organization, and The Family International. Another recent ‘story’ is that of Tim Guest who grew up in the Rajneesh (Osho) movement, the experience of which he recounts in My Life in Orange (2004) as well as in international newspaper articles. The violence of the Jonestown tragedy of 1978, the demise of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in the Waco compound in 1993, the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo or Aum Supreme Truth (now Aleph) in 1995, the voluntary death of the Heaven’s Gate members in 1997, and the deaths of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in 2000 remain live issues, thanks to continuous media coverage. With regular reports about such dramatic and sensational ‘stories’ in the press as well as the fictional dramatization of some of these in feature-length films and novels, the ‘man and woman in the street’ are reminded of the subject of ‘cults’ again and again and attracted to reading about and watching ‘weird’ and ‘outlandish’ occurrences unfolding, only to have all the stereotypical perceptions about such groups continually reinforced and confirmed. ‘Cults’ and any (religious) group or community that might fit the category provide media-effective material, especially when there is a connection with stars or ‘famous’ personalities, such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise’s membership of Scientology; often, they present volatile combinations of the very ingredients in which the media are interested: religion, money, sexual misdemeanour, children, exploitation, ‘bizarre’ rituals, exotic locations, and so on.

Looking at media coverage over the years, we can chart the progression and expansion of the ‘cult’ category: the ‘cults’ of the 1960s and 1970s (such as the Children of God/The Family, Rajneeshism/Osho movement, Scientology, the Unification Church or ‘Moonies’, ISKCON, etc.) have been kept alive by issues which arise from the maturation of these movements, including the second generation of members and former members raising their voices, issues of succession (once charismatic leaders have died), movements adapting their teachings, especially in cases where millennial/ apocalyptic predictions have failed to materialize, as, for example, in the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT), and surviving members and/or family members holding annual memorial events, as, for example, in the case of the Jonestown tragedy, or the media reminding the public of recurring anniversaries. In the case of groups, such as the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo, legal issues and other processes are ongoing, ranging from property rights to trials, restriction orders on existing members, and compensation of victims.

However, the media have also seized moral panics over issues, such as the ‘satanic ritual abuse’, a strand of the ‘cult scare’ which reported of subversive satanic activities and large-scale satanic conspiracy (see Richardson, Best and Bromley, 1991; La Fontaine, 1994), involving a fusion of satanism with witchcraft and child abuse. This theme has resurfaced recently with Pentecostal practices being related to exorcism and reports of violence against children occurring in the process of exorcizing demons. The death of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who suffered cruel abuse and neglect by her aunt and her aunt’s partner, has been connected with such practices. The couple visited the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Finsbury Park in London at least once with Victoria (BBC Newsnight, March 2005). Sexual abuse allegations also surfaced in ‘cults’, such as The Family and ISKCON (Hare Krishna movement), and extended to more ‘mainstream’ religious groups (e.g. Buddhist groups) culminating in the controversy about false memory syndrome. In the early 1990s, authorities in Spain, Argentina, France, and Australia organized raids on communes of The Family, removing hundreds of children and, in some cases, arresting the adults.

In addition, ‘older’ groups, which one might consider the ‘new religious movements’ of the nineteenth century, such as Mormonism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are often lumped into the ‘cult’ category. The abduction and subsequent liberation of Elizabeth Smart in 2002, together with the later trial of her abductors and the fictionalization of her ‘story’, have received a great deal of media attention, as have polygamous Mormon groups. Any religious or ideological group which appears to be out of the ordinary or causing a public stir runs the risk of being portrayed as a ‘cult’, including groups like Falun Gong, Colonia Dignidad, and the Kabballah Centre (in the news because of the membership of celebrities, such as Madonna), and groupings within the mainstream churches, ‘cults within the Church’, such as the Nine O’Clock service (Howard, 1996), the Engelwerk (Angels’ Work), and Opus Dei, with suspicions about the last having been revived with the appointment of the current Minister for Education in the UK, Ruth Kelly, who is a lay member.

The turn of the millennium provided another opportunity to highlight ‘wayward’ groups and movements whose teachings include apocalyptic and millennial ideas, but this was quickly superseded by the dramatic events of 9/11 and the emerging debate about sectarian Islamic groups waging ‘holy war’ against the West. While the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York showed unprecedented levels of violence ostensibly motivated by religious conviction, it added a new dimension to the debate about violent religion and especially violent ‘cults’, a theme which had also played some part in the trial of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, a white supremacist, who had detonated a truck bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. The events of 9/11 have had a major impact on the way the ‘cult’ category is used in the media, as political motives are bound in tightly with religious beliefs which are depicted in media-typical fashion, namely with minimal differentiation and stereotypical categories.

Interestingly, the expansion of the ‘cult’ category has also found its way into the academic/social scientific study of ‘new religious movements’, with some papers and articles drawing parallels between ‘cults’ and Al-Qaeda (see e.g. Melton, 2003; 2004:238–239; Introvigne, 2004; Lucas and Robbins, 2004). However, the expansion of the ‘cult’ category entails a muddying of this very category, thus adding further confusion and lack of clarity to a concept which is already contested and controverted—a point which this volume argues.

Readers of this book looking for a compendium of groups and movements which the media and some social scientists variously subsume under the ‘cult’ heading will look in vain. This volume is not about individual groups or movements and their particular developments, even if these are the ‘stories’ which attract the media, the public, and the academic community as well as those who fund their research. Readers who are looking for up-to-date accounts between the covers of this book will therefore be disappointed, because what this book is about is to show the processes involved in bringing about the constellation of the ‘players’ in this field—the movements themselves, the media, the parents, the ‘anti-cult’ movement, the churches, and the academic community. This book provides the tools for ‘reading’ these (ostensibly) disparate media ‘stories’ and gaining an understanding of the various strands of ‘discourses’ that have evolved since ‘cults’ became topical in the late 1960s and early 1970s and how these strands have interacted and influenced one another over time. The fact that, historically, certain groups tended to be the main stimuli to these processes—for example, the Unification Church coming to be viewed as the cult par excellence—explains why they appear in the text disproportionately.

In essence, this volume offers three new things: first, no other work has looked at the history and development of ‘anti-cult’ groups and the response of the mainstream churches to these new movements as systematically as it is done here. Second, no other work has attempted to draw as in-depth a comparison of the ‘anti-cult movement’ (ACM) and the churches between the UK and Germany, a comparison which illustrates at the same time the wider context of the Anglo-Saxon countries and Continental Europe and highlights the cultural and historical factors which have been at work to shape the respective (and very different) responses. This comparison demonstrates that the American model is not the only one and that cultural and historical differences matter. These differences continue to matter, both on a national and international level. At the national level, the presence of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, in the UK or the US causes no major political problems and only raises legal issues in connection with their refusal to have blood transfusions. However, in Germany, the position of the Jehovah’s Witnesses vis-à-vis the State during the Third Reich continues to be a matter of public debate and their application for legal recognition as a ‘body under public law’ (Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts), a legal status which is not automatically bestowed on religious organizations, has required the German courts to take into account political and legal considerations and has been exercising them for over a decade. The most recent court decision on 24 March 2005 resulted from the Land of Berlin rejecting the compromise proposed by the fifth Senate of the Upper Administrative Court (Oberverwaltungsgericht) of Berlin. Before the recent decision in March, it was anticipated that whichever side lost the case could appeal to the highest tribunal, the federal administrative court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht). However, the court ruled not only that the Jehovah’s Witnesses should be granted the status of ‘body under public law’ in Berlin, but also that the Land of Berlin should not be given leave to appeal against this verdict. This status grants religious organizations a number of rights, among them raising taxes, establishing charitable organizations, and providing religious education in state schools. The implications are currently under discussion, with the director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research into Totalitarianism at the University of Dresden, Professor Gerhard Besier, commenting on the case in Die Welt (26 March 2005). Professor Besier is a voice which had raised contention in connection with Scientology after he had published critically on Germany’s ‘sect hysteria’ and the ‘faith envy’ of the two main churches and spoke passionately about Scientology’s ‘battle for tolerance and religious pluralism’ at the opening of its European headquarters in Brussels in September 2003. Thus, despite an ostensible settlement by the court, the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses continues to reverberate in German juridical and political life. They may now seek to gain similar recognition in other Länder.

At the international level, Scientology is a case in point. Again, Scientology does not raise any major political issues in the US or the UK, but it does in Germany where its ‘anti-constitutional objectives’ have placed it (since 1997) under observation from the federal office of Verfassungsschutz (a decision upheld by the court in 2004, after an appeal by Scientology, but the Upper Administrative Court of the Land of Saarland ruled in late April 2005 that Scientology should not be observed by the Verfassungsschutz of this Land) and where Scientology members cannot (easily) hold public office. From an American point of view, the way Germany treats Scientology and its members is perceived to be in contravention of the bill of human rights—hence the censure in the US Department of State’s annual Human Rights Reports (see e.g. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/) and representations by high-ranking US politicians on behalf of Scientology. Other examples where cultural and historical factors have proved to matter include the occasion when Tom Cruise, while co-hosting a Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo in late 2004 with Oprah Winfrey, used the platform to plug Scientology, and instances when Scientology volunteer ministers have offered their ‘Assists’ as part of relief efforts around the world, ranging from earthquakes to the Oklahoma City bombing, ‘Ground Zero’, the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the hurricane-struck areas of Florida, the floods in eastern Germany in 2002, and most recently, Tsunami affected areas. New religious movements (NRMs) operate on the international level like global organizations and businesses, but as Jim Beckford has pointed out in his Cult Controversies (1985), the way in which they insert themselves into the respective host societies depends on the particular modus operandi available to them, given particular cultural and historical circumstances. Further, a number of NRMs have formed, sometimes in conjunction with religious leaders and human rights advocates, pan-European and transnational associations to combat ‘religious discrimination’ and other ‘human rights violations’, for example, the ‘European Foundation for Human Rights and Tolerance’ which was formed in March 2005 and hosted by Scientology’s European headquarters.

Third, this book does not accord unique privilege to the voice of the academics/social scientists in this field of study or the academic discourse and does not consider the body of academic knowledge as automatically standing above the body of knowledge which the other contenders in the debate have accumulated. For this reason, academics working in this field may find this book unsatisfactory or in disagreement with their own positions, because it seeks to show that academics/social scientists/sociologists of religion are similar to the other interest groups involved in the debate of NRMs in that they, too, have brought different sets of agendas into play. These are partly related to pressures to which the academic community itself has been subjected, such as obtaining funding, raising institutional profiles, and the need to produce publications, arising partly from the desire to build personal reputations, and partly from the particular stances which academics have adopted with regard to new religious movements, some of which are driven by personal motives. Some or all of this has induced some academics to go where the current news story is and thus ‘jump on a bandwagon’, such as linking NRMs and Al-Qaeda and related groups. Such factors are of particular pertinence with regard to the comparison of the academic communities in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in Germany, with the influence of the former on the latter having a significant impact on the relationship between the academic community on the one hand and the churches and the ACM on the other hand.

This book accordingly seeks to provide a map of the discourses which the different interested parties have developed since the inception of the debate and to show the processes and interactions between these various parties, as they have shaped and moulded the respective standpoints over time. This volume is thus a piece of intellectual history, which is why its intention is not to bring the reader up to date with recent developments, but to elucidate where it all originated and to delineate the ground rules on which the interactions have come to operate. The book’s concern is therefore to convey a sense of the generic nature of the processes involved (which are replicated again and again) and the uniqueness of the cultural context from which the generic forms arise. Hence the differences in approaches and responses in Germany, as compared to the UK and as compared to the US.

Issues regarding ‘cults’ or new religious movements become even more complicated when human rights issues are invoked in global or pan-European structures and when different national legal structures clash with one another, as happens, for example, in the case of the US and Germany. The overriding principle of the First Amendment in the US collides with Germany’s overriding commitment not to tolerate any conditions which may harbour fascist tendencies and Germany’s concomitant sense of obligation towards eternal vigilance. Thus, international and transnational links may be in tension with local and national situations.

There is a running theme in the ‘story’ of the discourses, which is the way in which academics have found themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum to the ACM (and also the churches) and the way in which the ACM has felt ‘let down’ by the academics. The reason for this has been the difference between their respective purposes and approaches, with the perspective of the ACM located within a paradigm largely shaped by psychology and the perspective of the academics located within a paradigm shaped by social science and the sociology of religion. The disparity between the two has led to very different ways of tackling the topic and formulating research questions, while at the same time spurring modification of their respective positions, as the various parties involved sought to conduct some dialogue with one another, to the point of having found areas where sections of the ACM and the academic community converge.

In the light of earlier remarks about the way the academic discourse is treated in this volume, I therefore do not start with a ready-made tool kit from the sociology of religion, because, when I embarked on my research journey, I found that it could not be taken for granted. Thus, I could not start with definitions of the concepts of ‘cult’, ‘sect’ or ‘new religious movement’, nor could I come to any definitive judgement about which term was the ‘right’ one to use. However, I have come to a pragmatic judgement about the use of the terms, settling for ‘new religious movement’ as the least ‘contaminated’, albeit not an entirely ‘objective’ term. Similarly, theories about recruitment to NRMs and processes inside the different groups have all been all up for question and are thus not treated as unassailable ‘objective’ knowledge. To a considerable extent, this problem arises from issues concerning the ethics of academic investigation, which involves the various discourses which have been formulated and is intimately bound up with the seriousness and integrity which individual academics have ascribed to ‘rules’ of ethical conduct in research.

The book reflects the notion of process in two senses: first, it records the processes by which knowledge is acquired and the pitfalls which revealed themselves to me as a relatively inexperienced researcher in this field with regard to what could or could not be said. Therefore, the book does not start with the ‘findings’ at which my investigation arrived, but takes the reader on the very research journey on which I embarked. This involved careful examination of available sources before drawing any conclusions. It also involved careful disentangling of parallel strands and then interweaving them in the respective accounts. Second, it was the processes in the field that my research tried to uncover in order to show how the discourses emerged and how they re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. What This Book Is About
• 2. Milestones In a Research Itinerary
• 3. Institutions and Institutional Knowledge
• 4. Sketching In the Cultural Background
• 5. The ‘Anti-Cult’ Movement’s Response
• 6. The Response of the Mainstream Churches
• 7. Conclusions
• New Religious Movements In Global – Perspective
• New Religions and the Nazis
• New Religious Movements In the 21st – Century: Legal, Political and Social – Challenges In Global Perspective