Introduction

America possesses a free market economy par excellence. The mechanisms of the market extend not only to goods and services, but far into the sphere of culture, affecting even the realm of religion itself.

But the market is no longer a merely local phenome­non, even if the locality extends to the 50 states. The Western world and beyond have become enmeshed in the American market. Its products are promoted internationally through the multinational corporations. The Coca-Cola drinker keeps almost the whole world company. American cul­tural products too are enthusiastically exported, from films and television soap opera in Europe, to Pentecostalism in Latin America.

Not that the traffic is all one way, of course. Ameri­cans are willing to consume indigenous products of other economies and cultures, often, indeed, willing to believe that imported brands bear a certain superior cachet; although in time the product may become tailored and adapted the better to suit American palates and sensitivities.

The internationalisation of the market—at least in the non-Communist and affluent societies—both mirrors and extends an internationalisation of experience. Idiosyncracies of local production and culture are eroded by emulation and by the rationalisation of life in the pursuit of profit, efficiency, improved living standards and universal access to basic rights and privileges.

But although in one respect greater uniformity is the result—an airport hotel is much the same in London as in Los Angeles—in another, mass production encourages product diversification, to locate a niche in the consumer ecology unsatisfied by existing suppliers, servicing a particular clientele with distinctive consumer demands. Construing religion as a commodity thus leads to asking questions about factors operating to generate the consumer demands met by the new religions which have emerged or flourished on the American scene in the post-Second World War era.

Of course, the wave of new religions which emerged into prominence, even notoriety, in America after 1945 was by no means a unique phenomenon. There had been earlier waves. Immigration to a land of greater religious toleration had been a frequent recourse for embattled sects in earlier centuries. The Doukhobors, the Shakers, the Amish and a multitude of other religious groups found America to be an environment in which they might be left alone, if not accepted, and in which large tracts of available and cultivatable land permitted the formation of a comfortable agrarian style of life. The absence of an established church, jealous of its privileges and its flock, permitted the uninhibited development of indigenous religious inno­vations, and the American ethos of individualism and pragmatism ensured that there would always be an abundance of religious innovators, and of potential adherents for new beliefs and practices locally produced or imported.

Early in the nineteenth century Mormonism was to develop, recruiting in large numbers not only in America, but also in the British Isles. Alongside it, Millerism, a millennialist doctrine of the Second Coming developed in the eastern states, giving rise in turn to the Jehovah’s Witness movement at the end of the nineteenth century. In the mid­nineteenth century, the Holiness movement was to spring from the Method­ist tradition, giving birth in turn to Pentecostalism. Spiritualism too was a mid-century innovation, an American adaptation of European-originated Swedenborgianism. Christian Science and New Thought flourished in the late nineteenth century, and the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893 gave a platform in America to Hindu thought in the form of Swami Vivekenanda and the Vedanta movement. Theosophy too, although in its early years centred in Britain and India, was founded in New York in 1875 and provided a further route for Eastern religious ideas to infiltrate American culture, spawning in turn a multitude of local heresies and adapta­tions. (An excellent source on all of these movements is B. Wilson’s Religious Sects.)