Cults and New Religions

A Brief History

Douglas E. Cowan, David G. Bromley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118723500
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Fondamentalismo e sette religiose

This unparalleled introduction to cults and new religious movements has been completely up-dated and expanded to reflect the latest developments; each chapter reviews the origins, leaders, beliefs, rituals and practices of a NRM, highlighting the specific controversies surrounding each group.

• A fully updated, revised and expanded edition of an unparalleled introduction to cults and new religious movements
• Profiles a number of the most visible, significant, and controversial new religious movements, presenting each group's history, doctrines, rituals, leadership, and organization
• Offers a discussion of the major controversies in which new religious movements have been involved, using each profiled group to illustrate the nature of one of those controversies
• Covers debates including what constitutes an authentic religion, the validity of claims of brainwashing techniques, the implications of experimentation with unconventional sexual practices, and the deeply rooted cultural fears that cults engender
• New sections include methods of studying new religions in each chapter as well as presentations on 'groups to watch'

Chapter 1
Cults and New Religions: A Primer

It should be clear from the brief sampling on the previous pages that the debate over what constitutes a “cult” or “new religious movement” is often highly contested and emotionally charged. For some, new religions epitomize all that is dangerous and deviant in the compass of religious belief and practice. For others, they represent fascinating glimpses into the way human beings organize their lives to construct religious meaning and give shape to religious experience. Such differences, however, are only exacerbated by the different agendas that motivate various interest groups.

On the one hand, some groups proactively challenge the legitimacy of new religious movements, seeking to convince adherents to abandon their new religious commitments. Exemplified by the first quote opposite, evangelical countercult apologists such as Bob Larson (1989: 19) consider new religions suspect simply because they either deviate or are altogether different from their own understanding of Christianity. Indeed, new religions are often treated with skepticism when their principal beliefs differ from those of the dominant religious tradition in a particular society. As historian of religions J. Gordon Melton points out, though, this dynamic varies considerably from country to country. “For example,” he writes, “in the United States the United Methodist Church is one of the dominant religious bodies. In Greece, the government cited it as being a destructive cult” (Melton 2004: 79). Thus, what appears as a cult in one context may be one of the most prevalent religious traditions in another. Secular anticult activism, on the other hand, is motivated not by theological conflict or differences in doctrinal belief, but by civil libertarian concerns for the psychological welfare of new religious adherents. Often informed by an ideology that accuses new religions of such nefarious practices as “brainwashing” and “thought control,” this is illustrated by the second quote opposite (West and Langone 1986: 119–120). For both of these countermovements, however, the same set of salient issues are involved: How do we show that cults are dangerous? How do we warn people against them? And, most importantly, how do we get people to leave them behind? (For detailed histories of the evangelical countercult and secular anticult movements, as well as comparisons between them, see Shupe and Bromley 1980; Cowan 2003a.)

Most people, however, have little direct knowledge of new religious movements. While a relative few may know someone who joined a group colloquially regarded as a “cult,” in reality most people get the majority of their information about new or controversial religions through the media. And, though there are occasional exceptions, “cult” has become little more than a convenient, if largely inaccurate and always pejorative, shorthand for a religious group that must be presented as odd or dangerous for the purposes of an emerging news story. Indeed, news media tend to pay attention to new religions only when something drastic has taken place – the mass suicide of Peoples Temple in Guyana in 1978 (Hall 2004); the BATF/FBI siege of the Branch Davidian residence in 1993 (Tabor and Gallagher 1995; Thibodeau 1999); the 1995 and 1997 murder/suicides in Switzerland and Canada of members of the Order of the Solar Temple (Mayer 1999); the 1997 suicides of the Heaven’s Gate “Away Team” (Wessinger 2000: 229–252); other preparations for the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it by groups such as the Church Universal and Triumphant (Whitsel 2003); raids by a variety of official agencies on groups such as the Twelve Tribes and the Children of God/The Family (Palmer 1999; Chancellor 2000; Bainbridge 2002); or the 2000 murder/suicides of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in rural Uganda (Mayer 2001). Since media representation of virtually any topic is governed first by the principle of negativity – which, in popular terms, means “if it bleeds, it leads” – the only information people generally have of new religious movements occurs in the context of what sociologist James Beckford calls the “threatening, strange, exploitative, oppressive and provocative” (1994: 143). Because of this, though the vast majority of new religious movements never cross the threshold of a “dramatic dénouement” (Bromley 2002), many are caught up in this kind of negative characterization.

Each of these definitions, however, presents its own set of problems. Arguing, as members of the evangelical countercult often do, that any religious group other than their own is by definition a cult demonstrates little more than the theological hubris by which many exclusivist religious traditions are marked. Indeed, even in the United States, a number of well-known fundamentalist Christian groups could easily be caught in the net cast by the evangelical countercult’s definition. Relying on a variety of “thought control” or “brainwashing” metaphors to explain why people join new religions, the secular anticult often contends that cults display a stereotypical set of negative organizational characteristics and practices. The International Cultic Studies Association – which was formerly known as the American Family Foundation, one of the largest of the secular anticult groups that emerged in the 1970s – has listed 15 characteristics it believes are often found in suspect groups. Among other things, these “cultic groups” have a “polarized us-versus-them mentality”; they use “mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) to excess”; they are “preoccupied with making money” and “with bringing in new members”; and active “members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities” (Lalich and Langone 2006). Scholars have challenged the usefulness of this kind of checklist on three principal grounds: (i) there is no indication how many of these “characteristics” must be present in order for a group to be considered “cultic”; (ii) it does not adequately define what constitutes “excessive” or “inordinate” devotion, practice, or behavior, nor does it demonstrate that these are by definition harmful; and (iii) it does not satisfactorily discriminate between those very few religious groups which may actually be dangerous and the vast panoply of other religious and social groups that display similar characteristics but pose little or no threat to either their members or society at large. Finally, given that new religious movements are almost always presented in the media through the lens of controversy, two major problems emerge. First, with little or no countervailing information readily available, media reporting comes to represent the cultural stock of knowledge about those groups. However biased and inaccurate, those reports become the foundation for “common knowledge about cults.” Second, because a significant part of “what makes an event news is its ability to galvanize public attention quickly and unambiguously” (Cowan and Hadden 2004: 75), the negative portrayals of one new religious movement are often quickly, easily, and once again inaccurately generalized to describe all new religions. What the media represents as the case with one group is very often presented as the case for all.

Conversely, scholars of new religious movements have long countered that many of the groups that are labeled “cults” often closely resemble a variety of conventional organizations in which these same characteristics are accepted as legitimate or necessary: communes and intentional communities, convents, monasteries, and other high-commitment religious societies, multilevel marketing organizations, and armed forces training and elite combat units, to name just a few (cf. Bromley 1998). This confusion has led members of the secular anticult movement to qualify its usage rather dramatically. Margaret Singer, for example, one of the principal movement intellectuals behind the secular anticult, once wrote: “I have had to point out why the United States Marine Corps is not a cult so many times that I carry a list to lectures and court appearances” (Singer, with Lalich 1995: 98). If this is the case, then it is not so much a problem with the audiences to which Singer spoke, but a fundamental weakness in the anticult definition she employed. More recent statements of the secular anticult movement have acknowledged the weakness of its earlier positions and moved closer to the formulations of scholars of new religions (Giambalvo, Kropveld, and Langone 2013).

Unlike the evangelical countercult, the secular anticult, or the mainstream media, most social scientists and religious studies scholars are interested in understanding new religions in their social, cultural, and historical contexts. Where do they come from? Why do they emerge at particular times and in specific places? How do they develop, and what contributes to their evolution, success, and, not infrequently, their decline? Rather than convince adherents to change their allegiances, these scholars want to understand the processes of recruitment and defection, of experimentation and maturation, and of affiliation and disaffiliation. Why do people join and why do they leave? Are new religious movements, in fact, as dangerous as they are often portrayed in the mass media? When social scientists address these kinds of issues, the important distinction is that their statements are the conclusions rather than the premises of their work.

Over the past few decades and in a variety of ways, social scientists have tried to rehabilitate the term “cult” for scholarly and analytic purposes. These attempts, however, have met with only limited success, and in common usage the word still carries unrelentingly negative connotations. Failing that, a number of alternatives have been suggested. While “new religions” or “new religious movements” (NRMs) have become the most common, others include “alternative religious movements,” “emergent religions,” “controversial new religions,” and “marginal (or peripheral) religious movements.” None of these is ideal, either. When has a group been around long enough to stop being considered “new”? To what is it “alternative”? What about groups that are both new and alternative, but relatively uncontroversial? And what does it mean to be “marginal” – is that merely a function of group size, or does it involve a more distinctive social stigma? While “emergent religions” seems to address some of these issues, many new religions pass largely unnoticed in society, and this begs the question whether they can be said to have really “emerged” at all. There is no perfect answer.

All these differences and questions notwithstanding, though, it is important to remember throughout this book that members of the groups we discuss never consider themselves part of a “cult.” A few new religions, such as the Raëlians, will admit to being a “cult,” but in doing so they are actively redefining the term to strip it of its negative connotations. While adherents of some groups are content to be regarded as members of a new religion, others, such as practitioners of Transcendental Meditation (TM), contend that theirs is not a religious movement at all. Members of the Church of Scientology, on the other hand, insist that theirs is a bona fide religion, despite widespread media and countermovement criticism that it is not. Still others, such as Unificationists, Branch Davidians, or members of the Children of God/The Family, are clear that their faith is not new at all, that they are in fact devout Christians and full members of the largest single religious group on the planet.

In this book, we take the position that members of new religions want (and ought) to be taken as seriously as any other religious believer. Any preconceived notions that new religious adherents are brainwashed, spiritually deceived, or mentally ill are not only problematic from an empirical standpoint, but erect significant barriers to understanding these fascinating social movements more fully. This is why we believe that recognizing new religions as sincere (if occasionally problematic) attempts to come to terms with what adherents regard as the most important issues in life is a far more productive endeavor than simply dismissing them as theological imposters, attacking them as social deviants, or capitalizing on them only when they appear newsworthy.

The Range of New Religious Movements

However we define new religions or new religious movements, they remain an important if somewhat elusive set of social entities and organizations. As sociologist of religion Lorne Dawson points out, not only are they “intrinsically interesting,” their beliefs and practices often “unusual or even fantastic” (2006: 179). More than that, they have the potential to reveal significant things about the societies in which they emerge, occasionally flourish, and not infrequently decline. More than a generation ago, Christian minister Jan Karel van Baalen called cults “the unpaid bills of the church” (1960: 420). Although he meant this in the most negative possible terms – that new religious movements were appearing as a result of something the Christian church was not doing, or was doing incorrectly – his comment speaks to the larger issue of new religious emergence in late modern society. What kind of societies allow for the appearance of new religions? How does the response of a particular society to new religions in its midst affect the growth and development of those groups? How has the presence of new religious movements changed the shape or direction of a society, and vice versa? These are some of the questions we address in the following chapters.

New religions have appeared throughout history. In one sense, every religious tradition was “new” or “alternative” at some point in time and some place on the globe. For example, there was a time when Christianity did not exist in any form, and when it did emerge as a self-aware social organization, it was treated with much the same fear and skepticism as many new religions today. Moreover, though it had been the dominant social and religious power in Europe for more than a millennium, by the time it was brought to North America by zealous Catholic missionaries, Christianity could hardly have appeared anything but new, alternative, and more than a little dangerous to the indigenous peoples on whom it was eventually forced.

In the United States, new religions have been produced for hundreds of years, and the number of groups we know about continues to expand. According to Melton, there are approximately 2500 different religious groups in the United States, about half of those what he terms “non-conventional” (1998a: 9). Further, the number of new groups is now growing by about two hundred each decade. Among other things, this makes the United States one of the most religiously diverse countries both in the world and throughout history. The vast majority of these “nonconventional” groups are very small, and most pass with little or no notice in society. A few, however, have generated controversy in ways that far exceed their relatively small size.

Although alternative, sectarian religious movements such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a variety of Spiritualist and New Thought movements have been around in the United States since the nineteenth century, 1965 marked the advent of exceptional growth in new religions. One of the most common explanations for the emergence of this broad array of NRMs in the 1960s and 1970s was the social and cultural ferment characterized by countercultural rebellion among young people, the civil rights movement and the deep wounds in American society it revealed, the Vietnam War and popular opposition to it, and the Watergate scandal and the weakening of public confidence in the government it provoked. In this view of events, the period was characterized by a profound crisis of meaning and identity, and new religions became the conveyors of alternative meaning structures and new identities. In this, they are popular successors to the countercultural movements of the 1960s (Glock and Bellah 1976). With the relaxation in 1965 of American statutes limiting immigration from a number of Asian countries, this growth was particularly true of groups claiming some kind of Eastern religious origin. As people looked away from their various Western heritages, many “turned East” (Cox 1977), hoping for a more meaningful religious experience.

Contrary to the rather simplistic and reductionist ways in which they are often presented by the evangelical countercult, the secular anticult, and the media, new religions are extraordinarily diverse, theologically, behaviorally, and sociologically complex, and most either emerge or are formed from a broad range of source traditions. Some, such as the Unification Church, the Branch Davidians, and the Children of God/The Family have set themselves apart from their parent tradition – in this case Christianity – by virtue of their particular sectarian teachings and practices. Other NRMs are not “religious” in what we might loosely call a traditional sense. The Church of Scientology, for example, combines contemporary forms of technological innovation, psychotherapy, and health management techniques, as well as economic enterprise and global organization in ways that oft...