53 Introduction
Peter Clarke
There are no gospels which are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.1
While some would undoubtedly question the first part of the above quotation from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, recent history has put the second part beyond all doubt.
Over four hundred ‘new’ religions have emerged in Britain alone since 1945 and many of these and others are to be found in the rest of Western Europe. The figure is very much higher for North America,2 and post-war Japan3 has also witnessed, as have parts of sub-Saharan Africa4 from the 1890s, what amounts to a thriving industry in new religions. Although we have no reliable statistics, the clientele of postSecond World War new religions must be estimated in millions rather than thousands. Although it can be argued that the religions covered in this section, or at least some of them, are not new in a ‘cultural’ and ‘theological’ sense,5 as used in this introduction the term new is employed chronologically to refer to all those religions that have established themselves in Western Europe, North America andjapan since 1945, and in Africa over a somewhat longer time-span. It is worth pointing out here that the new religions that are known about and documented may constitute only the tip of the iceberg; below the surface there would appear to be a large mass of new religions which has neither been located nor measured with any precision. We can mention in this context the phenomenon of neo-pagan, esoteric and related movements. It is also worth mentioning that a number of new religions have burst upon the scene, flourished for a time and died, but in some cases not before having profoundly influenced the behaviour, thinking and general lifestyle of many thousands of people, and also the legal system in a number of societies, a notable and recent example being the Rajneesh movement discussed in one of the contributions to this section of the volume.6New religions in the West and Japan derive from many different cultures and can vary enormously in terms of content, ritual, attitudes towards the older, albeit themselves once new religions, and towards one another and the wider society.
They have also posed a great many questions for that wider society and the mainstream religions, in particular Christianity, obliging the former, for instance, to re-examine, and in certain instances to refine and develop among other things its legal concepts and definition of religion, and the latter to focus more of its attention on the mystical dimension of its tradition. Further, students of religion, including sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, theologians and historians, have also been pressed by the phenomenal growth in recent times of new religions to examine and improve their techniques of research, and reappraise some of their long held conceptual creations and notions about, for example, the meaning, nature and purpose of religion, the nature and method of interpretation of religious discourse, the mechanics of religious conversion, the question of religious freedom and tolerance, the process of secularisation and the character of modern society (both themes are treated in Bryan Wilson’s contribution to this section on secularisation), the principle of and meaning of the term membership and the social location, nature and limits of charismatic authority. Numerous attempts have also been made to explain the rise and impact of new religions and the response of the wider society to this phenomenon and these are issues addressed by some of the contributors in this section of the volume and elsewhere.7There is also the equally interesting question as to why some movements succeed while others fail, a question to which several of the contributions in this section attempt to provide an answer, pointing to, among other things, the process of rationalisation that is proceeding apace in modern society, leaving little room for that charismatic authority, precarious in itself, on which a number of the new religions are based. Of course, in this context success and failure are relative terms. However, if we limit the criterion here to no more than staying power or length of survival they would appear to have much to do not only with charismatic authority and the forces of rationalisation but also with the overall composition, size, structure and organisation of a particular movement, its methods of recruitment and evangelisation, the relevance of its message, its financial circumstances, the image it conveys of itself to the outside world, the response it meets with from the wider society, including the kind of media coverage it receives, the character and structure of that wider society, where and how the movement decides to insert itself and the extent to which it can in travelling to new areas assimilate to the local culture in which it finds itself without loss of purpose or identity.8
Rather than examining the foregoing questions in any detail here we can consider briefly some of the conceptions and stepping-stones to ‘salvation’ mapped out by some of the new religions and common in one form or another to many.
There is first of all strong opposition to the rational, intellectual approach to religious truth. The mind, it is claimed, obstructs the quest for such truth and must, therefore, be controlled, some movements going so far as to encourage the complete abandonment of intellectual activity. In advocating this approach and at the same time criticising what they refer to as ‘arid intellectualism’ new religions would appear to be mistaken about the position of the student of religion and in particular the philosopher of religion who, far from maintaining that belief in God, however defined and understood, arises by irresistible logic either from a scientific investigation of the ‘sources’ or the world, holds almost as an axiom that such a belief can be achieved only by means of a much more complex process which takes note of experience and intuition as well as reason. For the new religionist, on the other hand, the only path to and authority for ‘faith’, which, as we shall see below, can dissolve into ‘knowledge’ even in this life, is experience; an approach which can sometimes lead to the suspension of all doubt and criticism in order to allow time for the old habits of mind and ways of thinking to be cast off.A number of new religions are the creation of a charismatic leader and tend to be dominated by her/his personality and, despite at times disclaimers to the contrary, these leaders place great emphasis on the ‘virtue’ of surrender, a logical step considering their views on the limitations of the mind and/or intellect. Moreover, the relationship between master and disciple is considered to be of fundamental importance in the process of realising and perfecting the self, the primary goal of some of the more popular new religions, as the contribution to this section of the volume on the ‘Self-Religions’ makes clear. This relationship entails the absolute surrender of the disciple, for whom all other relationships, and especially those with family or friends, must become of secondary importance.
Realising and perfecting the self consists of being the cause of all one does, of determining events rather than being determined by them, of exchanging one’s status of slave to events and circumstances for that of master of all that happens. It consists of becoming a creator. Unlike Christianity, many of the new religions are persuaded of the perfectibility of human nature in the here and now and much of the theorising which predicates this is grounded in the ‘belief’ that the individual is divine, is God. Once an individual realises that he/she is divine then all things are possible. What we see here, echoing Feuerbach, is a concern not with God as other but with a God who lives in and for the individual and whose real meaning lies in a conception of man.9
Given these related ‘beliefs’ in the perfectibility of human nature and the divinity of man, and their Buddhist and Hindu derived ideas and practices, it is not surprising to find that in many new religions the idea of faith as found in Christianity, whereby in the here and now we see only in part or ‘through a glass darkly’, is replaced by that of‘knowledge’.
New religions accept that there is a distinction between faith and knowledge but insist that this need not persist throughout this life for one can come to ‘know’ fully now the ‘divine’ or ‘God’, and thus faith becomes redundant.
An emphasis on the millennium is to be found in Soka Gakkai (Value Creation Society), almost all Japanese new religions, as another of the contributions to this section shows, and in many other new movements such as the Unification Church, more popularly known as the Moonies,10 the Worldwide Church of God and the Rastafarian movement.11 This is not unexpected in the light of what has just been said about human nature, the source of the divine, faith and knowledge. Moreover, millennial- ism can serve many purposes, operating in situations of rapid social change and upheaval as an appropriate and effective ideology.12 Although there are differences in interpretation, for most new religions the millennium is close at hand and offers an escape from contemporary society and entry to a new, golden age, at times depicted as a highly spiritual realm but more often than not as a Utopia.
While others see them as attempts to grapple with the problems generated by the twin processes of rationalisation and secularisation, the new religions regard themselves, much in the same way as Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, as the instruments for the creation of a perfect order of society and as being in the forefront of the movement to regain the territory lost by religion over the past two hundred years and more since the Enlightenment. They may, however, prove to be something of a Trojan horse, quickening a process of internal secularisation rather than extending the frontiers of religion. Their more immediate aims can vary, but what is most striking is the attempt by many new movements, particularly those of Japanese origin, to enable people to cope with ordinary living, to provide solutions to ordinary everyday problems, to what Durkheim considered to be ‘profane’ matters.
Notes
1. E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (Allen & Unwin, London; Macmillan, New York, 1915), p. 428.
2. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions (Gale Research Co., Detroit, 1986); D. Choquette, New Religious Movements in the United States and Canada: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut/London, 1985).
3. H. Byron Earhart, The New Religions offapan.A Bibliography of Western Language Materials (University of Michigan Centre for Japanese Studies, Ann Arbor, 1983).
4. H.W. Turner, Religious Innovation in Africa (Boston, Mass., 1979); R.J. Hackett, ‘Spiritual Sciences in Africa’, Religion Today. A fournal of Contemporary Religions, vol. 13, no. 2 (May-Sept. 1986), pp. 8ff.
5.F. Hardy, ‘How “Indian” are the new Indian Religions’, Religion Today. A Journal of Contemporary Religions, vol. 1, nos. 2/3 (Oct.-Dec. 1984), pp. 15ff.
6. J. Thompson and P. Heelas, The Way of the Heart: The Rajneesh Movement (The Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, 1986).
7. R. Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984); 1.1. Zaretsky and M.P. Leone (eds.), Religious Movements in Contemporary America (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974); E. Barker (ed.), New Religious Movements: A Perspectivefor Understanding Society. Studies in Religion and Society (Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 1982), vol. 3; B.R. Wilson (ed.), The Social Impact of the New Religious Movements, Conference Series, no. 9 (The Unification Theological Seminary, Barrytown, New York, 1981).
8. J.A. Beckford, Cult Controversies: The Social Response to the New Religious Movements (Tavistock Publications, London, 1985); P.B. Clarke (ed.), The New Evangelists (Ethnographica Publishers Ltd, London, 1988).
9. L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans, by George Elliot (Harper & Row Publishers, London and New York, 1957), p. 281 and passim.
10. E. Barker, Becoming a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985).
11. E. Cashmore, Rastaman: The Rastafarian Movement in England (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1979); also P.B. Clarke, Black Paradise: The Rastafarian Movement (Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, 1986).
12. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Paladin, London, 1970); J. A. Beckford (ed.), New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change (Sage/Unesco, London/Paris, 1986).
The author would like to thank the British Academy for a research grant which made possible his research on new religions in Western Europe.