Discussion Group Report

"Religion didn't begin to wither away during the twentieth century, as some academic experts had prophesied. Far from it," says Toby Lester in his article, "Oh, Gods!" in the February 2002, Atlantic Monthly. "And the new century will probably explode--in both intensity and variety. New religions are springing up everywhere. Old ones are mutating with Darwinian restlessness. And the big 'problem religion' of the 21st century may not be the one you think."

"The assumption is that advances in the rational understanding of the world will inevitably diminish the influence of that last, vexing sphere of irrationality in human culture, religion." But the world today is as awash in religious novelty, flux, and dynamism as it has ever been--and religious change is likely to intensify in the coming decades. The spectacular emergence of militant Islamist movements during the 20th century is only a first indication of how quickly, and with what profound implications, change can occur. We usually think of a few clashing civilizations as made up primarily of a few well-delineated, static religious blocks: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. That's dangerously simplistic, assuming a stability that is completely at odds with reality. New religions are born all the time, and old ones transform themselves dramatically. Schism, evolution, death, and rebirth are the norm--and not just for cults. Today hundreds of widely divergent forms of Christianity are practiced around the world." Islam, usually referred to as monolithic, has more than 50 million members of the Naqshabandiya order of Sufi Islam and 20 million members of schismatic groups. Buddhism is a vast family of more than 200 religious bodies. Major strands of Hinduism were profoundly reshaped in the 19th century, revealing strong Western and Christian influences.

History bears out the continuing changes in religion. Early Christianity was deemed pathetic by the religious establishment. Islam, initially a faith of a band of little-known desert Arabs, astonished the world with its rapid spread. Protestantism started out as a note of protest nailed to a door. In 1871 Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed Mormonism as nothing more than an "afterclap of Puritanism." Until the 1940's Pentecostalists were often dismissed as "holy rollers," but today there may be more than a billion people affiliated with the movement. After World War II so many new religious movements grew up in Japan that local scholars had to distinguish between "new religions" and "new new religions." One Western writer referred to the time as "the rush hour of the gods." What is now dismissed as a fundamentalist sect, a fanatical cult, or a mushy New Age fad could become the next big thing.

The only serious reference work in existence that attempts both to survey and to analyze the present religious make-up of the entire world is the World Christian Encyclopedia. Its mover and long-time editor, David B. Barrett, recently observed that 9,900 religions have been identified in the world and that this number is increasing by two or three new religions every day. "It's massive, it's complex, and it's continual...new religious movements (long derided and persecuted as cults) are not just a curiosity,...they are a very serious subject."

The study of new religious movements (NRM's) has become a growth industry. NRM scholars examine such matters as how new movements arise; what internal dynamics are at work as the movements evolve; how they spread and grow; how societies react to them; and how and why they move toward the mainstream. NRM scholars played a key role in de-fanging the influential anti-cult movement in the U.S. in the 1970's and 1980's, which engaged in the illegal practice of kidnapping and "deprogramming" members of new religious movements. Since Waco, the Heaven's Gate and Solar Temple suicides, and the subway poisonings in Tokyo by Aum Shinrikyo, NRM scholars are regularly consulted by the FBI, Scotland Yard and other law-enforcement agencies to avoid future tragedies. They are currently battling the anti-cult legislation in France, passed last year for the "repression of cultic movements which undermine human rights and fundamental freedoms." The law was rooted in a blacklist targeting 173 movements, including the Center for Gnostic Studies, Hare Krishnas, some evangelical Protestant groups, practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Rosicrucians, Scientologists, Wiccans, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Even the Vatican hired NRM's as advisors to help them meet the challenges posed by neo-religious, quasi-religious and pseudo-religious groups. The surprisingly liberal report of the advisors, not referring to NRM's as "cults" or "sects," suggested that these movements had something to teach the church about how to make its missionary activity more dynamic.

The one significant religious fact of our time is the failure of religion to wither away on schedule. Why? British sociologist Colin Campbell suggests an answer. It is to examine what happens on the religious fringe, where new movements are born. Maybe the very processes of secularization which have brought about the "cutting back" of the established forms of religion have allowed "harder varieties" to flourish. The groups that generally grab all the attention--Moonies, Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, Wiccans--amount to a tiny and not particularly significant proportion of what's out there. Here are some samples: 1. The Ahmadis, a messianic Muslim sect based in Pakistan, with perhaps 8 million members in 70 countries. Mirza Gulam Ahmad, a Moslem, proclaimed, "Almighty God has, at the beginning of this 14th century (in the Islamic calendar) appointed me from Himself for the revival and support of the true faith of Islam, who must, under divine command be obeyed by all Muslims." Members are considered heretics by most Moslems and are accordingly persecuted. They say Jesus escaped from the cross and made his way to India, where he died at the age of 120; 2. The Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, a prosperous ascetic meditation movement based in India with a half-million members, mostly women. The group was founded by Dada Lekh Raj, a Hindu diamond merchant who in the 1930's experienced a series of powerful visions revealing "The mysterious entity of God and explaining the process of world transformation." It was rooted in a desire to give self-determination and self-esteem to Indian women. Members wear white, abstain from meat and sex, and are committed to social-welfare projects. They believe in an eternal, karmic scheme of time involving recurring 1,250 year cycles through a Golden Age (perfection), a Silver Age (incipient degeneration), a Copper Age (decadence ascendant) and an Iron Age (rampant violence, greed and lust--our present stage); 3. Cao Dai, a syncretistic religion based in Vietnam, established in 1926, with more than three million members in 50 countries. It combines the teachings of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism and builds on elements of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Geniism. It has a pantheon of divine beings, including the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Qnan am, Ly Thai Bach, Quan Than De Quan, and Jesus Christ. Its three saints are Sun Yat-sen, the Vietnamese poet Trang Trinh, and Victor Hugo. The movement gained more adherents in its first year of existence than Catholic missionaries had attracted during the church's previous 300 years in Vietnam. Four other examples given by Lester of new religions were the Raelians (Canada, Europe and Japan), Soka Gakkai International (Japan), the Toronto Blessing and Umbanda (Brazil). In order to save space, I won't describe these except to point out that the last one has 20 million members and was founded in the 1920's. It leaves the LDS Church, founded in 1830 and vaunted for its rapid growth, in the dust with only 11 million members.

Lester used to expect that people he would find in cults would be strange and mysterious, but experience has shown him that they demonstrate an essential blandness. They are no more or less eccentric, interesting, or threatening than people he rides with every morning on the London underground. They are very ordinary people. New religious movements are not as exotic as they are made out to be, or as they themselves would make themselves out to be.

What have the NRM scholars learned? Lester says several ideas recur again and again. "In an environment of religious freedom, NRMs emerge constantly and are the primary agents of religious change. They tend to respond quickly and directly to the evolving spiritual demands of the times, they are the 'midwives of changing sensibilities.' They exist at a high level of tension with society, but they nevertheless represent social and spiritual reconfigurations that are already under way, they almost never emerge out of thin air. Their views can rapidly change from being considered deviant to being considered orthodox. The people who join NRMs tend to be young, well-educated, and relatively affluent. They also tend to have been born into an established religious order but to profess a lack of religious belief prior to joining. They are drawn to new religious movements primarily for social reasons rather than theological ones--usually because of the participation of friends or family members... This last phenomenon is profoundly symptomatic because the fact is that almost all new religious movements fail."

Sociologist Rodney Stark is one of few people who have tried to develop specific ideas about what makes religious movements succeed. He summarizes his thoughts, "The main thing you've got to recognize is that success is really about relationships and not about faith. People form relationships and only then come to embrace a religion. It doesn't come the other way around, it's something you can only learn by going out and watching people convert to new movements. We would never, ever, have figured that out in the library. You can never find that sort of thing out after the fact--because after the fact people do think it's about faith. And they're not lying, they're just projecting backwards.

"Something else, give people things to do. The folks in the Vineyard are geniuses at that. The Mormons are great at giving people things to do too, they not only tithe money, but they also tithe time. They do an enormous amount of social services for one another, all of which builds community bonds. It also gives you this incredible sense of security--I'm going to be okay when I'm in a position of need; there are going to be people to look out for me...And if you want to build commitment, send your kids out on missions when they're nineteen! Go out and save the world for two years! Even if you don't get a single convert, it's worth it in terms of the bonds you develop.

"You've also got to have a serious conception of God and the supernatural to succeed. Just having some 'essence of goodness,' like the Tao isn't going to do it...even...in Asian countries. They hang a whole collection of supernatural beings around these essences. So to succeed you do best by starting with a very active God who's virtuous and makes demands, because people have a tendency to value religions on the basis of cost."

Stark's rational choice theory of religion proposes that in an environment of religious freedom people choose to develop and maintain their religious beliefs in accordance with the laws of a "religious economy." The essence of the idea is this: people act rationally in choosing their religion. If they are believers, they make a constant cost-benefit analysis, consciously or unconsciously, about what form of religion to practice. Religious beliefs and practices make up the product that is on sale in the market, and current and potential followers are the consumers. In a free-market religious economy there is a healthy abundance of choice, which leads naturally to vigorous competition and efficient supply (new and old religious movements). The more competition there is, the higher the level of consumption. This would explain the paradox that the United States is one of the most religious countries in the world but also one of the strongest enforcers of a separation of Church and State.

Stark argues that all social science is based on the idea that human behavior is essentially explainable, and it therefore makes no sense to exclude a major and apparently constant behavior like religion-building from what should be studied scientifically. The sources of religious experience may be mysterious, irrational, and highly personal, but religion itself is not. It is a social rather than a psychological phenomenon, and absent conditions of active repression, it unfolds according to observable rules of group behavior.

Religious institutions often go to pot, but religion doesn't. Early Christianity was a rational choice for converts because its emphasis on helping the needy "prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations."

"What new religious movements will come to light in the 21st century? Who knows?" asks Lester.

African NRMs have been successful," says Rosalind I. J. Hackett, "because they help people survive...People forget how critical that is." The course of missionary activity is now moving from South to North. African, Asian and Latin American missionaries are establishing themselves in Europe and North America. The present rate of growth of the new Christian movements and their geographical range suggest they will become a major social and political force in the coming century.

Phillip Jenkins makes a prediction, "I think that the big 'problem cult' of the 21st century will be Christianity."