Challenging Religion

James A. Beckford, James T. Richardson, James A. Beckford, James T. Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134392032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Fondamentalisme religieux et cultes

In the last half century new religious movements or cults of one sort and another have mushroomed throughout the US and Europe. Increasingly these groups have been met with attempts to monitor and control them on the part of the state, and concerns about the protection of religious 'consumers' have been set against the democratic right to religious freedom. In this collection, leading sociologists of religion from the UK, US, Western and Eastern Europe debate the political, practical and ethical issues which arise from these changes in the religious landscape.

Part I New religious movements

1
Absolutes and relatives

Two problems for new religious movements

Bryan R.Wilson

Two distinct tendencies may be readily discerned in the reaction of the settled traditional institutions of Western society to the many new religious movements that have sprung up in recent decades. Those two tendencies are evident within both religious and secular agencies—in the law courts, the media and politics as well as in the mainline churches and among the general public.¹ One of these dispositions is the re-awakening of a long-persisting disposition of intolerance which, although today officially excoriated, has been part of a stock Christian response to new religions over centuries. The second tendency is for commentators to ignore the intrinsic character of each movement, their differences one from another, and to lump them all together as if, collectively, they constituted one common genre. It might be supposed that the various authoritative resolutions promulgated since World War II by international agencies, affirming freedom for all creeds of belief, practice, teaching and proselytising, would by this time have led to the suppression of both the sentiments and the expression of intolerance in religious matters. It has not been so.²

It might also be supposed that advances in scholarship and research into minority religions would, before now, have called forth a more widely educated public, possessed of a modicum of sociological analytical insight and capable of distinguishing one from another the ideologies, ethical systems and social structural characteristics of so diverse a set of phenomena as the current wave of new religions. (That so many new religions should emerge more or less simultaneously and spontaneously may in itself be regarded, at a certain abstract level of analysis, as one historical phenomenon, but such a heuristic assumption should not lead to a hasty conclusion that all these movements, exploiting a common social circumstance, are to be seen in themselves as all of a kind.)

These two dispositions are fundamental elements in the common response to the new religions and they tend to reinforce each other. Lumping the new movements together makes it easy to extend culpability for the misdeeds of any one movement to all such movements, and so to attribute even to the least remissive sects responsibility for the most heinous offences perpetrated by any sect. Since there are plenty of sects and new movements about—and many of them new, hence with teachings that are unfamiliar—a campaign against sects in general has ready credence: all sects are culpable when any sect induces its members to break the criminal law. Thus, the collective homicidal or suicidal episodes of recent sectarian history, as perpetrated by the People’s Temple in 1978; the stand-off and shoot-out between the FBI and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in 1993; the violent deaths, soon thereafter, in 1994–5, of members of the Solar Temple, in Switzerland, France and Canada; the release of sarin gas on the Tokyo underground in 1995; and the self-congratulatory suicidal advocacy and practice of the adherents of the Heaven’s Gate scenario in San Diego in 1997 (to leave unmentioned more recent incidents of sectarian violence in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and elsewhere) become assimilated to a cumulative stereotype widely entertained in the public mind of just what sectarian religion portends and perpetrates.³ Since sectarian belief and practice led to such violence and anarchy in these cases, and since all these movements came to bloom within so short a time and in confrontation with traditional religion, so the common argument goes, may they not all be seen as manifestations of pernicious heresy, and may not heresy be seen, at bottom, as all of a kind? May not all of them, then, be undeserving of the kind of high-minded tolerance that forms the substance of international resolutions and the advocacy of general ecumenical movement in modern liberal Christianity?

The counsel of ecumenism, and the various contemporary gestures of practical cooperation between major churches, the irenic remarks of the pope, and the widespread and cultivated representation of Christianity as a religion of love (rather than of justice) overlook the powerful church tradition, endorsed by some of its most revered saints and respected theologians, that heresy must be attacked, and that only following recantation should mercy be shown to the ‘Formal’ heretics—since they shared something of the orthodox tradition but contumaciously disputed some other of its aspects, and, perhaps worse, disputed the church’s legitimate authority—who might, then, be appropriately more harshly dealt with than outright unbelievers (those designated ‘material heretics’).

From post-apostolic times onwards, many new movements, even some of those that were otherwise eclectic in belief and practice, were condemned as heretical in one form or the other. In the Middle Ages the church was absolute. It prescribed religious truth, and in this it was sustained by the secular authorities—the nascent state or the secular prince—who, from the time of the Reformation, sanctioned religious intolerance or toleration (at various dates of different groups—Lutherans, Calvinists, (Ana)baptists, Socinians, Atheists). For its part, for centuries, the church legitimised the authority of the nascent state, and used the state’s monopoly of armed force to punish heretics and dissenters. Any allegiance to or participation in the rituals and proceedings of faiths other than that one declared ‘orthodox’ threatened Christian unity. Thus there was a concerted policy, consciously or unconsciously pursued, which took for granted the assumption that such collusion was a necessity for the maintenance of social cohesion. Following Judaism, Christianity had always excluded recognition of all other deities, and required that the believer worship its one deity exclusively. Allegiance to or even acknowledgement of other gods would threaten dilution of Christian fellowship, and, were toleration accorded to other gods, that might mark the beginning of a process of return to dependence on those older sources of social identity and affiliation—ethnicity, common language and territoriality.

The distinctive and entrenched intolerance of the Christian tradition was a consequence of the particular circumstances of its social operation in its formative years. Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and there were those among its original converts who sought to keep it as such, who saw Jewish ethnicity and the inherited cultural tradition of Judaism as prerequisites for admission.⁴ But the Roman world was a world of cosmopolitan mixing, and the new religion soon attracted people of various tribes, different ethnicities and diverse linguistic stock. If such a promiscuous sect was to hold together, it needed a basis for bonding that transcended the taken-for-granted loyalty, shared identity and mutuality that characterised these biological and sociobiological foundations, which, in their very diversity, pointed up differences and enmities.⁵ Such premises may have sufficed to hold together local groups, but they were irrelevant, if not inimical, to the search for cohesion in a movement in which people of widely varied origin were coming together in common fellowship.

The chroniclers of the early church saw the problem—not for nothing is so much prominence accorded in the New Testament to the (apparently useless) miracle of speaking in tongues. When, at Pentecost, the Holy Ghost spoke to the assembled disciples in the upper room and again to the multitude, every auditor, no matter what his own language, could understand him, and then, too, they themselves, as Christians, spoke in unknown tongues.⁶ Here was the symbolism of the—purportedly spiritual—unity of the Church, transcendent above the local, geographical, ethnic and linguistic diversity of the empire in which the church recruited its following. All other claims to loyalty had to be set aside. The strong new bonding was to displace all naturalistic bonds—of blood, locality and language—as well as the cultural bonding of previous local religion or the benefits of quasi-magical client-practitioner associations. It was to bind together people who, hitherto, were of disparate social, cultural, political, tribal, national, linguistic and ethnically based loyalties in a new, over-arching allegiance, based on a supernatural relationship with deity, with a father, whose adherents were all fictive brothers and sisters.⁷ This fictive kinship, so the Christian scriptures affirmed, implied religious affections and obligations which at once discounted and eclipsed the ties of blood relationship. Blood kinsfolk were to be sacrificed and set against each other, discounted in favour of the new fictive relatives.⁸ The uncompromising attitude to relatives—the relatives, that is, of converts—is the substance of the Christian absolute. Whereas in religions based on blood relation, ethnicity or even neighbourhood, the expectations regarding salvation were that it would be communal and corporate, the salvation offered in new movements in the Christian tradition was individual salvation within a new community based on a new bonding, new obligations and new reciprocities.

This, then, represented a profound shift in the basis of obligation on which a society might be founded—a shared ideology and the mutually supportive commitment of those who believed. Voluntary belief was now claimed to possess a strength superior to that of all other bonding agents. Part of that strength was attributable to its mystical projection of a divine agency, but it was also recognised that a further part of its strength was derived from the free-will choice of the believer which, when sincere, was, paradoxically, more effectively binding than the involuntary dependence on inherited culture, language, nationality or ethnicity.⁹ Self-chosen commitment to belief amounted to the surrender of an ascribed identity and the acquisition of an achieved identity. That achievement was in itself regarded as meritorious, and something about which the writers of the New Testament so frequently indulged in self and mutual congratulation, and indeed glorification.¹⁰ We need only observe that the shift from ‘natural’ to supernatural commitment has been a characteristic of new movements and of self-styled restoration movements throughout Christian history, and that this trait is shared by the new religions of our times.

Asserting the transcendence of faith implied asserting that the Christian god was universal. Christianity not only superseded the older votive cults, ethnic and tribal gods, but it asserted that all these other deities and ritual practices were inimical to ‘truth’. Indigenous paganism, if tolerated at all, was subordinated by co-option into peripheral church practices, rituals, myths, thaumaturgy and therapies, hence the transmogrification of pagan gods into Christian saints—some being accorded special faculties to superintend particular provinces of activity or categories of people, with such associated institutions as shrines and pilgrimages. Phenomena such as the clamour, pardoners and exorcisms found a place at the fringes of Christendom, but all such pagan residues were rendered subservient to church order. Mysticism, spirit-possession, regionalism, local traditional cults, temples were frequently incorporated, and if in a sense licensed, then certainly supervised and regulated. Pre-existing religious dispositions were disciplined by a church which brooked no rivals and which claimed, almost certainly uniquely among existing religions, to possess an exclusive monopoly as an agency of salvation.

The Christian god was the god for all people, a universal god. Christianity was also monotheistic—its exclusivism rejected lesser gods and the gods of lesser peoples, but since the Christian god was projected as universal this combination provided the licence for proselytism. It was not only the best faith, it was indeed the only ‘true faith’. Its votaries were honour-bound to spread the word to all nations and peoples, and to root out whatever form of religiosity pre-existed. Their mission had the function not only of winning new converts but also of providing steady occupation for those already converted, and of reinforcing their commitment. Having to persuade others, in spite of the failure of the Second Advent prophecy, they were also engaged in repeatedly repersuading themselves. Each new convert served to strengthen the convictions of those already in the faith. ¹¹

Chance circumstance brought into unique concurrence the absolutist qualities of universalism: proselytism and exclusivistic monotheism, which together crystallised into the disposition of intolerance that for centuries justified the persecution of dissenters and the burning of heretics. All new religions including, in its early days, Christianity itself, need to justify their emergence and their mission. The properties of absolutism that were deposited with Christianity fitted exactly the claims that it was necessary for a new religion to make as its raison d'être. Many of the recently emerged contemporary new religions have inherited something of this orientation from Christianity. Even in not themselves claiming to be Christian, operating in countries in which Christianity has, for centuries, informed the general, secular culture, few of them have escaped inheriting from Christianity some influences regarding organisation, propaganda, recruitment, publishing, fund-raising or other concerns.¹²

It is typical for each of these movements to claim that it alone possesses ‘the truth’ and to demand of adherents total commitment to it. The justification for mission is to bring hitherto benighted people and peoples the truth as the movement apprehends it. Such a commission sets each movement at odds with all other religions—new movements and old. It is a sad fact that when one has occasion to tell—tell in a perfectly neutral and unevaluative way—the member of one new religion about the beliefs and practices of other movements, they are not only dismissive that anyone could take seriously such ideas and performances, but readily regard them all—people, ideas and practices—with total derision or disdain. Needless to say, this is a judgement which the sociologist does not make, and betrays an attitude of intolerance native to the new convert, but with which the sociologist himself or herself cannot possibly concur.

New movements come into being to publicise a revelation of newly perceived ‘truth’ the manifestation of which all hitherto preceding history has been edging humanity towards. The whole course of recorded history is but a precursor, a long-drawn-out preparation for the affirmation of truth which the new religion now proffers to humankind, and which contains the essentials by which each individual, and humankind as a whole, will attain salvation. The new truth is deemed to be of such radical importance that it calls for new commitment, new organisation, new shared dedication, and not only the abandonment of past commitments and associations, but their repudiation and excoriation. New religious movements arise not to conciliate but rather to confront. They set their newly evolved absolute commitment over against all other manifestations of religious practice and belief.

Yet it is clear that without the existence of other religions and of votaries of those religions, the new religious movement would lack raison d’être. Willy-nilly each new movement is defined in relation to other, pre-existing religious systems. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that, at this level and in the wider social context, the ‘absolute truth’ of each and every new movement may itself be understood as in itself relative. Without the existence of an alternative ‘truth’, what the new movement seeks ...