Contributors
James A.Beckford is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He was President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in 1988/9, a Vice-President of the International Sociological Association from 1994 to 1998, and is currently President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion. His main publications include Religious Organization (Mouton, 1973), The Trumpet of Prophecy. A Sociological Analysis of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Blackwell, 1975), Cult Controversies. The Societal Response to New Religious Movements (Tavistock, 1985), Religion and Advanced Industrial Society (Routledge, 1989) and (with Sophie Gilliat) Religion in Prison. Equal Rites in a Multi-Faith Society (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is the editor of New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change (Sage, 1986), and coeditor of The Changing Face of Religion (Sage, 1989) and Secularization, Rationalism and Sectarianism (Oxford University Press, 1993). His current research interests are in the treatment of religious minorities in prisons and sociological theorising about religion.
Jaak Billiet, PhD in Social Sciences, is Professor in Social Methodology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is project leader of the InterUniversity Centre of Political Opinion Research (ISPO), which organises the general election surveys in Flanders (Belgium). He is a member of both the Steering Committee and the Methodological Committee of the Blueprint for a European Social Survey (ESF). His main research interests in methodology concern validity assessment, interviewer and response effects, and the modelling of measurement error in social surveys. He is also involved in longitudinal and comparative research in the domains of ethnocentrism, and political attitudes and religious involvement.
Grace Davie is a Reader in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Religion in Britain Since 1945 (Blackwell, 1994), Religion in Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Europe: The Exceptional Case (Darton Longman and Todd, 2002), and of numerous articles in the sociology of religion. She will be President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion for their 2003 meeting in Atlanta, and of the Research Committee 22 of the International Sociological Association from 2002 to 2006. She is the current Director of the Centre for European Studies in the University of Exeter.
Douglas Davies, currently Professor in the Study of Religion at Durham University’s Theology Department and previously at Nottingham University, has also been
Chairman of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group (2000–3). The University of Uppsala in Sweden conferred an honorary doctorate upon him in 1998. His academic background at Durham and Oxford lay both in the sociologyanthropology of religion and in theology, with subsequent research relating these disciplines theoretically (Anthropology and Theology, Berg, 2002; Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies, Brill, 1984) and in fieldwork and empirical studies of Mormonism (Mormon Culture of Salvation, Ashgate, 2000), death (Death, Ritual and Belief, Continuum, 2002; Reusing Old Graves, Popular British Attitudes, with Alastair Shaw, Shaw and Sons, 1995) and Anglicanism (Church and Religion in Rural England, with Charles Watkins and Michael Winter, T. and T.Clark, 1991). Along with Mathew Guest he is currently conducting research on the generation and transmission of values within Anglican bishops’ families.
N.J.Demerath III is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts in the USA. He came to Amherst in 1972 following a Harvard AB, a UC Berkeley PhD, ten years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and two years as Executive Officer of the American Sociological Association. A specialist in religion, politics, culture and sociological theory, he is the author of a dozen books, including most recently the very global Crossing the Gods: World Religions and Worldly Politics (Rutgers, 2001) and the very local Sacred Circles and Public Squares: The Multicentering of Religion in Indianapolis and America (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). He is a former President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Karel Dobbelaere is Emeritus Professor of the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain, Belgium) and of the University of Antwerp (Belgium) where he taught sociology, sociology of religion and sociological research. He is a former President of the International Society for Sociology of Religion and its current General Secretary. His main fields of interest are: religious and church involvement, pillarisation, new religious and sectarian movements, and secularisation. His most recent book is Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels (P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002).
Richard K.Fenn has been teaching the sociology of religion at Princeton Theological Seminary since 1985. His interests focus on the way in which individuals and societies imagine and construct time, especially through beliefs and ritualised practices that link the living with the dead. He has treated secularisation as a process of disenchantment in which societies increasingly forfeit their claims to transcend the passage of time, and individuals are left to their own existential devices. Recent books include Beyond Idols and Time Exposure (Oxford University Press, 2001), The Persistence of Purgatory (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and The Death of Herod (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and he edited Blackwell’s Companion for the Sociology of Religion (2000).
Phillip E.Hammond (PhD 1960, Columbia) is the D.Mackenzie Brown Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He taught in the Departments of Sociology at Yale, Wisconsin and Arizona for eighteen years before going to UCSB. He retired in July 2002. Hammond is a member of the Religious Research Association, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He served as editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion from 1978 to 1982 and as SSSR President in 1985–7. Phillip Hammond is the author of eleven books, editor of five volumes, and author of
numerous articles and chapters. His most recent books are With Liberty for All (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1998), Soka Gakkai in America (with David Machacek, Oxford University Press, 1999), and The Dynamics of Religious Organizations: The Extravasation of the Sacred and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Michael Hill began his career at the London School of Economics, first as an undergraduate—where he was awarded the Hobhouse Memorial Prize—and subsequently as a Lecturer in Sociology: one of his students was a certain former actress. A Sociology of Religion (Heinemann) and The Religious Order (Heinemann) appeared in 1973. He was appointed Professor of Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1976 and has remained there apart from a year as Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (1996–7). An edited volume, Shades of Deviance (Dunmore), appeared in 1983, and in 1995, with Lian Kwen Fee, he published The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore (Routledge), which is now required reading for trainee majors and lieutenant colonels in the Singapore armed forces. As well as numerous chapters and papers he has contributed to the recent edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Massimo Introvigne is the founder and managing director of CESNUR, the Centre for Studies on New Religions, a research and information centre on new religious movements headquartered in Torino, Italy. He has lectured and given seminars and short courses on the history and sociology of new religious movements in several universities (including the University of Turin), and is the author of thirty volumes on the subject in Italian, some of them translated into French, German, Spanish and English.
Jean La Fontaine was born and brought up in Kenya. She took a BA in social anthropology at Cambridge University. Her PhD, also from Cambridge, was based on fieldwork among the Gisu of Uganda. After spending ten years as a diplomat’s wife, during which time she completed a short study of the city of Kinshasa (then Leopoldville), she resumed a university career at Birkbeck College London, moving to the London School of Economics as Reader in 1968. She was appointed to a Chair in Social Anthropology in 1978. During this period she was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists. She took early retirement in 1983 to undertake freelance research and consultancy. In 1992 the Department of Health commissioned her to undertake a two-year study of the allegations of ritual abuse, on which her contribution to this volume is based.
Thomas Luckmann was born in Slovenia, studied in Vienna, emigrated to the USA and obtained his PhD at the New School for Social Research. From 1965 he taught at the University of Frankfurt and from 1970 until his retirement at the University of Constance. He has also taught at the Harvard Divinity School, and the universities of Wollongong, Bern, Freiburg, Ljubljana, Salzburg and Vienna. He was a Fellow at the Center of Advanced Studies for Behavioral Science in Stanford and is a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his publications are The Invisible Religion (Macmillan, 1967), Life-World and Social Realities (Ashgate, 1983), Teoría de la acción social (1996) and, with Peter Berger, The Social Construction of Reality (Allen Lane, 1967).
Meredith B.McGuire (PhD New School for Social Research) is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University. She is Past President of both the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Association for the Sociology of Religion. She is the author of Religion: The Social Context (Wadsworth, 1981; fifth edition 2002), Ritual Healing in Suburban America (Rutgers, 1988), and Pentecostal Catholics (Temple, 1981), among other works. Her current research examines US religious movements, popular religion and spirituality in a historical and cross-cultural context.
Jean-François Mayer is a historian, with specialisation in religious movements and contemporary religious developments. The author of approximately ten books—some of them translated into several languages—and many articles, he is currently a Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is also the editor of http://www.religioscope.com/, a website launched in 2002 on religious affairs in today’s world.
J.Gordon Melton is the Director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, a research facility in Santa Barbara, California, focusing attention on the study of religious groups/organisations, especially the many small and non-conventional religions. He is also a research specialist with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated from Birmingham-Southern College (BA 1964), Garrett Theological Seminary (MDiv 1968) and Northwestern University (PhD History and Literature of Religions 1975), and is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. He is the author of the Encyclopedia of American Religions (Gale, 1979; 7th edition, 2002), the standard reference work on North American religious bodies, and some thirty additional scholarly texts and reference books, and is the senior editor of five different series of books on American religions.
Nancy Nason-Clark is a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in England. Nancy is the author of The Battered Wife (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997) and No Place for Abuse (with Catherine Clark Kroeger, InterVarsity Press, 2001), as well as dozens of journal articles and chapters in scholarly books. She is editor of the international journal Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review. Nancy’s research programme examines the relationship between gender, faith and culture, and she is currently completing two books, one tentatively titled Congregations and Family Crisis and the other, Christian Survivors of Abuse. Nancy has served as President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and is President-Elect for the Religious Research Association.
James T.Richardson is Professor of Sociology and Judicial Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches sociology and directs the graduate programme in judicial studies for trial judges. He has written extensively in the sociology of religion, where he specialises in research on new religious movements and the relationships between governments and religious groups, as well as focusing on the use of social and behavioural science evidence in legal systems.
Thomas Robbins is an independent sociologist of religion. He has a PhD from the University of North Carolina. He is the author of Cults, Converts, and Charisma (Sage, 1988). He has co-edited six collections of original papers, including In Gods We Trust (Transaction, 1981, 1990), Millennium, Messiahs and Mayhem (Routledge, 1997) and Misunderstanding Cults (University of Toronto Press, 2002). He has
published numerous articles, essays and reviews in social science and religious studies journals and in edited collections.
Marat Shterin holds a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he is currently a Research Fellow. His interests include religion and social change in post-communist societies with special reference to Russia, new religious movements and other religious minorities, and religion and law from a comparative perspective. He has published extensively on these topics and is currently writing a book Gods and Prophets in Uncertain Times: Religion in Remaking of Russia, which is an analysis of social and religious change after communism and its implications for the sociological theory of religion. He was awarded the Robert McKenzie Prize for the best PhD thesis at the London School of Economics, 2001/2002.
Margit Warburg is Associate Professor in the sociology of religion at the University of Copenhagen. She is Co-Chair of the Research Network on New Religions (RENNER) and is a member of the advisory board of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs concerning religions outside the Danish Lutheran Church. Her main area of research is religious minorities. She has published widely on the Baha’i religion and has also written about East European Jewry. She has carried out fieldwork and archival studies among Baha’is in Denmark, in the United States and at the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Her general research interests are recruitment and conversion, religion and demography, religion and globalisation, and religion and the Internet. She has published around eighty-five books and articles (in English or Danish) including New Religions and New Religiosity (edited with Eileen Barker, Aarhus University Press, 1998), and I Baha’i (in Italian, Elledici, 2001).
Bryan R.Wilson is Reader Emeritus in Sociology in the University of Oxford, where he taught for over thirty years, and is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His first book, Sects and Society (Heinemann), was published in 1961, and since that time he has written or edited twenty other books, most of them in the sociology of religion, and has published numerous articles in learned journals. He has held visiting appointments in various universities, including the University of California, USA, the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, the University of Ghana and the universities of both Melbourne and Queensland, Australia. Since 1991, he has been Honorary President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religions. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.
AFF
APA
BSERP
Abbreviations
American Freedom Foundation
American Psychological Association
Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology
CCG Countercult group
CCM Cultural communal movement
CRC Christian Reformed Church
CRI
Christian Research Institute
CESNUR The Centre for Studies on New Religions
DIMPAC Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control
ECIC
EMNR
FICOTW
GARBC
European Christian Internet Conference
Evangelical Ministries to New Religions
First International Church of the Web
General Association of Regular Baptist Churches
INFORM Information Network Focus On Religious Movements
ISKCON
ISORECEA
International Society for Krishna Consciousness
International Association for the Study of Religion in Central and Eastern Europe
JPUSA Jesus People USA
LGAT
LSE
Large Group Awareness Training
London School of Economics and Political Science
MILS
NFI
NRM
Mission Interministérielle de Lutte contres les Sectes
Normed fit index
New religious movement
OED Oxford English Dictionary
RAINS Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support
RAMP Religious and Moral Pluralism
RMSEA Root-mean-square error of approximation
SCP Spiritual Counterfeits Project
ST Straits Times
UC Unification Church
Introduction
James A.Beckford and James T.Richardson
This volume is about three challenges. The first concerns the way in which religion seems to defy the best efforts of social scientists to make sense of it. For aspects of religion stretch the explanatory or interpretive power of social science to the limits. The first challenge facing the contributors to this volume, then, is to further our understanding of the social dimensions of religion—including those phenomena that may appear to be inexplicable.
The second challenge is to confront religion with the findings of social scientists. It is to raise questions about ideas and practices that may be taken for granted in some religious circles. It means asking why some features of religion are considered to be normal and why others give rise to problems. In the last resort, it involves expressing systematic doubt about the very understanding of what counts as religion. Contributors thereby present challenges to religion.
The third, and most enjoyable, challenge is to do justice to the work of Professor Eileen Barker on the occasion of her retirement from the London School of Economics. On the one hand, her scholarly achievements and her contributions to public debates about religion are so numerous that it is difficult to give them proper recognition in a single volume. On the other hand, the range of her interests defies any simple categorisation. Perhaps the best way to capture the full diversity of her contributions is to see them as a commitment to ‘the public understanding of religion’. It was entirely fitting, then, that she received the prestigious Martin Marty Award for Service in the Public Understanding of Religion in 2000. What is more, this award was made by the American Academy of Religion, the largest such body in the world.
For more than thirty years, Eileen Barker has immersed herself in difficult discussions, negotiations, courtroom testimonies, official inquiries, public seminars, mass media appearances, and the leadership of INFORM—the well-respected organisation that she founded in London to collect, assess and disseminate reliable information about religious movements. This energetic and selfless service to the cause of improving the public understanding of religion—especially controversial religious movements—has attracted widespread praise and not a little criticism. The challenge that Eileen Barker has always been willing to accept is to defend the rights of religious groups to practise their religion within the limits of law and the rights of their critics to expose evidence of illegal and harmful practices. This takes courage, commitment and competence. Eileen Barker has made unprecedented contributions to the understanding of new religions, not only in her own country but in many other parts of the world as well. A few years ago she admitted to having given more than 500 professional talks in her career, in sixty-five countries. She has also done innumerable media interviews. Eileen always treats an interview with a journalist as a ‘teaching moment’, and she has assisted many journalists in understanding new religions, thus helping them communicate more balanced treatments of NRMs (new religious movements) to the general reading and viewing public in many different
countries. She has also made presentations to a number of government bodies around the world, as they were considering special legislation to deal with the so-called ‘cult and sect problem’. It is safe to say that such efforts have contributed to the development of governmental policy concerning NRMs in quite positive ways in a number of societies, including several formerly a part of the Soviet bloc.
Eileen Barker’s scholarship is prodigious, giving impetus to feelings of awe and respect in scholars young and old alike. It is difficult to find discussion of NRMs where her work is not cited, often as the exemplary study in a given area. Her list of publications is lengthy, and we cannot begin to do justice to it here (but see the selected list at the end of this volume). She has edited or co-edited seven books and collections of articles for special issues of journals, thus helping to make scholarship from around the world more readily available to various audiences. Eileen has written two major monographs, which will be discussed below, and she has others in preparation. She has written some 200 articles in journals or chapters in books, some of which have been published or reprinted in a variety of languages, and many of which are widely cited and influential in the field. The fact that she has also been invited to review more than 300 books clearly shows that she is recognised as a major figure in the sociology of religion.
Eileen is perhaps best known for her award-winning book The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?, which won the prestigious Distinguished Book Award of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1985. The book, which grew out of Eileen’s doctoral research, was reissued a decade later, something of a rarity in sociological circles and a testament to its reception by the scholarly community. This volume is a model of sociological research, with its fine integration of quantitative and qualitative methods and its well-grounded theoretical development. The book, though not written as a textbook, is now being used in courses in the UK, the USA, Australia and several European countries. The wealth of detail about how members of the Unification Church (UC) actually live, the details of recruitment and re-socialisation processes in the UC, and the understanding of member motivations for participating in the UC movement are all significant contributions to scholarship on NRMs. This work did much to undercut the popular assumption that only ‘brainwashed’ individuals would ever consider joining such a group. Indeed, Eileen Barker’s research demonstrated that many young people were joining the UC to act out their idealism, not because they were coerced or brainwashed.
Another book that has had a major impact is New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction, which was originally published in 1989 by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, no small honour in itself. This book has been reissued five times by HMSO, with the latest being in 1995 (while another edition is in preparation). It has been translated into Italian, Dutch, Bulgarian, Russian and Polish, and parts have been translated into German and Hungarian as well, indicating its broad acceptance as an important resource. Other translations of this informative and well-written volume are being prepared even now, and we will soon see this seminal work published in Japanese, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Spanish. In this book Eileen attempts to present a balanced treatment of the entire field of NRMs, writing in a style that makes the information accessible to ordinary citizens, policy-makers and fellow scholars. She attempts to answer questions such as what the new movements are like, why and how people join them, and what happens to people who choose to participate, as well as the effects that such participation has on
families and friends. She also includes frank discussions of deprogramming and the other ways in which participants leave NRMs (which many do), as well as concerns brought about by certain types of more closed and authoritarian movements.
Several of Eileen Barker’s articles and chapters in books also bear special mention, just to present a flavour of her work. One of the best known is her presidential address to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, published in 1995 under the title, ‘The scientific study of religion? You must be joking!’ It is a penetrating discussion of the value of the scientific perspective in helping understand religion, especially controversial varieties. Eileen contrasts the scientific approach with the perspectives of a number of other interest groups, including the media, the so-called Anti-Cult Movement, the NRMs themselves, the law, and therapists. She notes the differences in interests or goals of each, the various methods used to secure information, the data selected (and rejected) for use by each, their mode of communication, and the way in which each alternative perspective relates to the sociological approach. This comparison of primary and secondary construction of reality associated with NRMs offers much insight, and has been cited and reprinted many times since its publication.
Eileen has also described the development of INFORM (Information Network Focus On Religious Movements) in several publications and presentations (see, for instance, Barker, 2001). These reports give the detail of how and why she has put so much energy into the development and maintenance of INFORM over the years. In addition, they give a feel for why INFORM has become a model viewed around the world as the best way for scholars, governments, traditional religious groups and other interested parties to work together to gather information about NRMs, and to disseminate that information to those who need it, whether they be distraught parents or policy-makers trying to decide if legislation is needed to deal with the ‘cult menace’, or even if the menace exists at all.
Eileen Barker has also written extensively about methodological and ethical issues concerning the study of controversial religious groups. Her sensitivity to these concerns is one reason why her research is viewed with such high regard by scholars everywhere. One favourite of ours (Barker 1983), perhaps because of the title (‘Supping with the devil: how long a spoon does a sociologist need?’), stresses that social scientists need to take care when doing in-depth qualitative research, but that they should not shy away from contact with group members and leaders. Eileen considers this contact essential for a full understanding of the culture of the groups. Some sociologists and others who expound on NRMs do so in a manner that mimics the cerebral hygiene of August Comte in his later years. Eileen Barker, on the other hand, is someone who has spent many an uncomfortable time gathering data in less than ideal conditions. She has been uncompromising in terms of both rigour and ethical concerns, as is shown in the quality of her research and the regard with which it is held by other scholars. Her spoon has been just long enough.
Nowhere have the expertise and sensitivities of Eileen Barker been tested more than in her extensive research and involvement in former Eastern bloc countries. She has travelled and conducted research in a number of former communist countries, becoming easily the best-known Western scholar of religion in those environs. She has also spoken before governmental bodies and testified in major court cases there, always promoting the value of solid, scientifically based research on minority religions, including NRMs. She is one of the founding members of the International Association for the Study of
Religion in Central and Eastern Europe (ISORECEA), and has helped to make this a strong body of scholars devoted to the study of religion in this region. One of her papers on religion in this part of the world (Barker 1997) was featured in the proceedings of one of the biennial conferences of the organisation (Borovik and Babinski 1997). Eileen, who has always had a knack for catchy titles, called this much-cited paper, ‘But who’s going to win? National and minority religions in post-communist society’. In this paper, which one of us (Richardson) was fortunate enough to hear delivered in person, Eileen gave a magisterial survey of the religious situation facing former communist societies, as they grappled with the influx of sometimes over-eager Western religious groups, while at the same time trying to revitalise their traditional churches and reinforce traditional cultural values. Scholars from the region were awed by her grasp of the religious situation in the post-communist world, and they responded enthusiastically to her presentation.
These brief descriptions of some of her major books and papers will give some feel for the many scholarly contributions that Eileen Barker has made to the public understanding of religion. Readers are urged to look through the selected bibliography in the appendix and sample other items in her long list of writings. They will find them always wellwritten, well-reasoned and grounded in strong empirical research. Her writings represent the best of the sociological tradition.
Although Eileen Barker’s entry to the profession of university teaching had to wait until she had pursued a first career in drama and had raised her two daugh-ters, there were early indications of the scholarly excellence that was to come. She graduated with a first class honours degree in sociology at the London School of Economics in 1970 and won the Hobhouse Memorial Prize for the best degree in sociology that year. Other honours have followed. In addition to winning the Distinguished Book Award offered by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1985, she was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy (FBA) in 1998. Moreover, in the year 2000 the Queen of England appointed her as an Officer of the British Empire (OBE), and the Queen of Denmark conferred on her an honorary doctorate of the University of Copenhagen. Her annus mirabilis concluded with the Martin Marty Award for Service in the Public Understanding of Religion.
It is a measure of the esteem in which her peers hold Eileen Barker and her scholarship that she has been elected to numerous positions of leadership in scholarly organisations. They include Chairperson of the British Sociological Association’s Study Group for the Sociology of Religion (1985–90), President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (1991–3) and President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (2001–2). She has also delivered special lectures and keynote addresses at many universities and international gatherings, and is a frequent visitor to countries in Central and Eastern Europe where the public understanding of religion is changing. Not surprisingly, her expertise and experience are in great demand in charitable foundations, voluntary organisations, editorial boards of scholarly journals, and agencies of the state that are concerned with religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities.
Another of the challenges that Eileen Barker has eagerly accepted is to take her scholarship into the university classroom. At a time when most young people in the UK are said to be uninterested in religion, she has attracted, entertained and informed generations of undergraduates, MSc students and PhD candidates at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her innovative courses on the sociology of
religion and on new religious movements, echoing her own style of intensive research, required students to visit a variety of religious groups and to reflect on their own responses to what they had learned. Some of her doctoral students have already begun to make their own mark on the sociology of religion at national and international levels.
While she was generating enthusiasm for sociological studies of religion, Eileen Barker also played a full part in the development and management of academic life. She served not only as Convenor of the LSE’s Department of Sociology from 1995 to 1998 but also as Dean of Undergraduate Studies at LSE from 1982 to 1986, Academic Governor of the LSE from 1988 to 1992 and from 1998 to 1999, and Vice-Dean of London University’s Faculty of Economics from 1986 to 1990.
Arguably the task of conceiving, animating and running INFORM has been the greatest challenge facing Eileen Barker. INFORM is the charitable organisation that she founded in 1988 with the help of some mainstream churches and the Home Office. Its objective of collecting, assessing and disseminating reliable information about religious movements was never likely to be easy or popular, but Eileen has never wavered in her determination to defend the ideal of bringing academic knowledge to bear on public debates about the freedom of religion. In the face of some stern criticism, she has constantly lavished her time and energy on training INFORM’s staff, responding to journalists’ inquiries, writing books and leaflets, organising international conferences, liaising with government departments, talking to distressed or puzzled individuals, hosting biannual seminars, raising funds and promoting INFORM’s philosophy in other countries.
If the wellspring of the energy that Eileen Barker invests in INFORM remains a mystery, it is no less puzzling that her capacity for fun, humour, companionship and sheer exuberance is seemingly inexhaustible.
The choice of chapters and the order in which they appear are a response to the challenges outlined at the beginning of this Introduction. All the chapters, grouped in four sections, aim to do three things. First, they respond to the challenges of making social scientific sense of aspects of religion that are puzzling or problematic. Second, they confront religion with the insights and findings of social scientific research. Third, they honour the work of Eileen Barker by furthering the investigation of topics that have been central to her contributions to the public understanding of religion.
We deliberately did not ask contributors to write summaries of particular fields or ‘state of the art’ syntheses. We knew that other books aspired to that type of comprehensive overview of social scientific research on religion. Instead, we urged contributors to write original chapters that would convey the ‘flavour’ of their current concern with the challenges presented by religion. All the chapters, therefore, have the character of ‘reports from the front’. They report the state of play or, in some cases, the state of hostilities in the areas of the social scientific study of religion that the contributors keep under observation for professional and scholarly reasons.
The sociology of religious movements, especially the new religious movements at the centre of so-called cult controversies, has been one of the liveliest areas of research into religion for the past four decades. Contributions to Part I range over some of the most challenging issues, showing that religious movements continue to pose problems not only to scholars, policy-makers and legislators but also to the general public. The argument of the first chapter, by Bryan Wilson, begins with the claim that tolerance towards new
religious movements has not increased since World War II and that many commentators continue to lump them together indiscriminately. The slow historical shift towards achieved, rather than ascribed, identity in the modern world has, Wilson argues, done nothing to relax the tension between the movements’ converts and their relatives. The clash between absolutes and relatives can be noisy and painful, and this is why Wilson commends disinterested social scientific research that aims to understand ‘the nature of absolutist commitment’. In a similar vein, Jay Demerath’s argument is that ‘cult-ness’ is not an aberration of certain widely despised groups but is a feature of all cultures. ‘Cults’ and cultures are both related to the sacred, he suggests, but ‘cult has moved from the core of the religious apple to a mutant growth on its external skin’; and culture has become a ‘jumble of contested meanings’.
The advent of global communication by means of the Internet has, according to JeanFrançois Mayer’s chapter, added yet another layer of complication to the relations between new religious movements and the societies in which they operate. In particular, new movements and ancient faith communities alike face a difficult challenge to control the use that their members, their ex-members, their opponents and their observers all make of the Internet. On the other hand, access to the Internet also offers valuable opportunities for religious groups to increase the ‘market share’ that they enjoy. This is why Mayer believes that the Internet will have a major impact on the future of new religious movements. This theme is also echoed in Margit Warburg’s chapter on the strategies that various minority religious groups have recently adopted for exploiting the new global opportunities for spreading their message. Her analysis emphasises the similarities between the global strategies of these movements and those of private business corporations. By contrast, Marat Shterin’s chapter indicates how the transition from communalism to individualism in post-communist Russia has generated unprecedented levels of religious diversity, competition and suspicion. In his view, the ideology and the practice of ‘scientific atheism’ in former Soviet society laid the foundations for today’s ‘epistemologically naive’ and dogmatic attitudes both within some indigenous religious movements and towards religious diversity. ‘Mutations of the Soviet legacy’ is Shterin’s term for the nationalist rejection of new religious movements and the suppression of Islamic movements. He joins other contributors to Part I by arguing for the need of social scientific research to investigate the changing dynamic between cult and culture, absolute and relative, real and virtual, local and global
The chapters in Part II deal with responses to perceptions of deviance and threat in religious organisations and with the associated questions about control over religion in a globalising world. Again, it was the growth of new religious movements in advanced industrial democracies in the 1960s that initially sparked a social scientific concern with the social construction of cultural boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ forms of religion. Thomas Robbins places these issues in the widest possible context by showing the impact of globalisation on what he calls ‘the new repression of religion’ and on the reactive radicalisation of some religious groups. For him, the political significance of religion has increased sharply in recent decades, thereby increasing the likelihood of state repression and making religious freedom more precarious. The claim that public opinion about controversial religious groups is currently being polarised is also at the centre of Massimo Introvigne’s chapter on controversies about ‘brainwashing’ in new religious movements. In a detailed analysis of disputes among psychologists and social scientists
about the validity and acceptability of the notion of brainwashing in courts of law, he shows just how bitter and personal the disputes have become.
Scholars are far from being disinterested observers of attempts to control supposedly deviant or dangerous religious movements. The integrity of their scholarship is at stake. Nowhere is this more clearly documented than in Jean La Fontaine’s chapter on the lessons that she learned from conducting high-profile investigations, commissioned by the Department of Health in Britain, into well-publicised allegations that children had been the victims of ‘satanic abuse’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Making careful distinctions between the different types of accusations of witchcraft and satanism that have surfaced at various times and places, she attaches importance to the fact that belief in ‘the existence of devil worship and witchcraft are still part of the cosmology of some Christian churches’ and that this belief underlay the movement to extirpate satanic abuse. Its activists considered La Fontaine as ‘hostile’, not only because she found no evidence to support their allegations but also because she did not accept their dogmas. She concludes that the absolute incompatibility between faith and reason made her explanation appear threatening to the movement. The influence of strongly held conservative Christian convictions is also central to what Gordon Melton calls ‘the countercult monitoring movement’. His analysis of Christian-inspired campaigns to oppose allegedly deviant strains of Christianity and new religious movements in the USA emphasises the campaigns’ long historical evolution, their complexity, their internal squabbles and their recent preoccupation with religions other than Christianity. The control of supposedly deviant developments in religion has taken a different turn in Singapore, according to Michael Hill’s chapter. He argues that agents of the Singaporean state have engineered an ‘elite-sponsored moral panic’ since the mid-1980s, deliberately raising fears about ‘crisis’ and the survival of the country, in order to control the possibility that Islamic resurgence and rapid Christian growth in different ethnic communities could have destabilising effects.
Phillip Hammond’s chapter opens Part III by tracing changes in the US Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretation of the proper relation between religion and the state. Believing that the US Constitution is a ‘religious’, not a ‘secular’, document Hammond argues that it should, by maintaining a clear separation between religion and the state, guarantee the freedom for citizens to exercise their ‘individual conscience’ as they wish. He therefore challenges the conservative tendencies of recent Supreme Court decisions to weaken the degree of separation. The following chapter, by Karel Dobbelaere and Jaak Billiet, analyses the character and extent of tolerance shown towards new and minority religious movements. Their analysis of data collected by means of interviews conducted between 1997 and 1999 with large and representative samples of people in eleven European countries highlights wide variations in attitudes towards controversial religions and practices. ‘Hesitant tolerance’ of controversial religious organisations is counterbalanced by ‘overwhelmingly negative’ attitudes towards some of these organisations’ beliefs and practices. Narrowing the focus on intolerance even further, Grace Davie’s chapter poses the particularly challenging question of why public attitudes are so critical of sectarian and cultic groups in France. She places the widespread opposition to these groups in the context of long and bitter struggles between the Catholic Church and the determinedly secular state, adding that the position of French Protestant churches is somewhat anomalous. As victims of centuries of persecution, French Protestants tend to
give a higher priority to religious freedom than to anti-cultism while nevertheless regarding ‘cults’ as competitors.
The last two chapters in this section explore the bearing of gender and empowerment on issues of religious freedom. Meredith McGuire shows how some religious movements articulate a ‘gendered self’ with a ‘spiritual self’, thereby furthering the malleability of gender identity and of the category of ‘religion’ in late modernity. Some of these movements contest dominant ideas about gender and sexuality by promoting spiritual practices to re-shape participants’ bodily experiences, including submission to authority. But McGuire argues that historical and contemporary religious movements that challenge hierarchy and dominance are more likely to foster gendered and embodied notions of self that celebrate freedom of choice, egalitarianism and holism. A similar tension between gendered notions of dominance and freedom is at the basis of Nancy Nason-Clark’s chapter that tackles the question ‘Does religion augment or thwart the healing journey of a woman victim of abuse?’ The testimony of women active in churches in eastern Canada who have also been the victims of domestic violence highlights the choice that they face between coercion and empowerment. Many women keep their abuse secret, in some cases out of fear that disclosure will jeopardise their identity as ‘religious women’, especially if the abuser is also religious. Others may feel under pressure to conceal their faith commitments from counsellors in secular agencies. Nason-Clark’s conclusion is that a combination of the language of contemporary culture and the ‘language of the spirit’ can accelerate the journey towards healing and wholeness.
The final section contains three chapters that explore some methodological and philosophical aspects of the sociological study of religion. First, Thomas Luckmann investigates the linkage between, on the one hand, each individual human being’s subjective constitution of the world through experience and, on the other, the processes whereby groups (including sociologists and anthropologists) reconstruct the meaning of the world on the basis of other people’s reports. His argument is that the subjective constitution of the world logically precedes its sociological reconstruction. Cultural variations in the location of the boundary between the human world of culture and the non-cultural world of ‘nature’ illustrate Luckmann’s argument and explain what is puzzling to us about animism and why we experience human bodies as human. Although Douglas Davies does not use Luckmann’s language of ‘phenomenological reduction’, this is in fact what his chapter on the ideal-type of wisdom achieves. Using the interpretive method of Verstehen, he builds up a logically consistent ideal-type of wisdom, distinguishing it from charisma and sainthood, in order to tease out the particular meaning that it assumes in the Anglican tradition. Davies also explores the capacity of comparative analysis in social science to challenge prevailing wisdom. It is only fitting that the last word should be left to Richard Fenn, whose chapter is a poignant and timely inquiry into the relation between the experience of cataclysms and the apocalyptic imagination. If ‘apocalypses are cataclysms that have been given meaning’, he reasons, societies facing the threat of disruption must offer ‘small doses of apocalyptic satisfactions’ without turning the world upside down. This is why he argues for the importance of communal rituals that can symbolically satisfy old grievances without permitting the dead to return with a vengeance and without inciting apocalyptic retribution. This is perhaps the ultimate challenge for religion.
It will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with Eileen Barker and her work to learn that the most difficult challenge that we, the editors, faced in organising this volume was to select a limited number of contributors from among the many in all parts of the world who would have been eager to participate. For, in addition to selecting contributions for their scholarly excellence, we sought to assemble a volume that was a balanced reflection of Eileen’s own interests and friendships. It is a matter of great sadness to us, therefore, that Jeff Hadden, who had enthusiastically agreed to join us, was not well enough to complete his chapter.
We wish to record our thanks to Roger Thorpe and Mari Shullaw, formerly senior commissioning editors at Routledge in London, for their warm support. Their help was invaluable in bringing the project to fruition, as was the assistance of James McNally and the editorial staff at Routledge and Nick YeMyint at Warwick before his untimely death on 26 January 2003.
In the name of all contributors we respectfully offer this volume to Eileen Barker with admiration and affection.
James A.Beckford
James T.Richardson
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 longpersisting 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 to provide would be neither wanted non-conceivable. It is the contradiction of claimed monopoly by another monopoly which demands that these exclusivities be seen in relative perspective. And the situation in actuality is, of course, even more complicated, since what exists is not merely the alternative of a negation of the claims of each new movement, but the availability—and hence, in a sense, the viability—of a variety of alternatives (if such an expression may be allowed), each making claim not only to pre-eminence but to sole ownership of rectitude. And all this may be advanced without suggesting that the analysis should force these manifestations into a rigorous dialectic order. It is rather that, as a consequence of plural (and incidentally diverse) expressions of absolutism, each such expression is rendered relative to the total religious context.
Not many new movements come into being in a spirit of ecumenism. The very fact that ecumenism implies tolerance, conciliation, compromise and liberality of judgement, precludes the impetus to establish a new and separated party. The ecumenical posture is implacably opposed to schism, indeed, may be presented as its very opposite. Some sects, certainly—among them three (the Plymouth Brethren the Cooneyites and the Catholic Apostolics)13 which embrace some of the most extreme sectarian traits—have, at their origin, stated their agenda to be anti-sectarian, and have claimed to be providing the ground for a coming together in unity of all parties to the Christian faith: nonetheless, in practice, each claim is heavily loaded towards their own exclusive perspective. Their ecumenical impulse, such as it is, is soon eclipsed by their uncompromising belief that only their own formulations provide true doctrine and warranted ritual
New movements tend to be enthusiastic when not fanatical and, indeed, it is difficult to work up rapturous enthusiasm for ‘the middle way’, or for compromise. Movements with tolerant, liberal, open dispositions, which express and may even encourage a certain Gleichgultigkeit, are usually old movements, with a worldly-wise leadership which has steadily abandoned any claim to a monopoly of truth. The ‘halfway covenant’ is not a goal to inspire enthusiasm among either the original parental covenanters or from those (second or subsequent) generations so willingly accommodating the world that no full covenant would find acceptance among them. The experience of the Student Christian Movement, the numerous ecumenical revival campaigns such as the Year of Evangelism, and the special days of prayer, make evident the diminished compatibility of compromise and commitment. In the nature of the case, the effective and ‘inspired’ new movement is
almost always spurred into existence by its self-interpretation as a prophetic, iconoclastic or messianic agency, sent to set aside old truths and proclaim what are offered as essentially new ones. Yet one must point out that it is this very absolutism which endangers new movements, or by which those movements endanger themselves. It is the absolutes which alienate the relatives of converts, sometimes leading them and the apostates on whose behalf they claim to act to develop their own absolutes of a negative or contrary kind.
It is not easy to abandon absolutes, nor is it easy to strike a compromise without appearing a trifle ridiculous. Two illustrations make the point, the one perhaps apocryphal and the other historically celebrated. The subtle persistence of absolutism appears in the story of two bishops, one Anglican, the other Catholic, who had been participants in an ecumenical gathering to settle some serious local church problems. By chance, the car due to pick up the Anglican bishop had broken down en route and the Catholic bishop, on learning this, offered his colleague a lift. This gesture partook of a rather more practical ecumenism than had been canvassed at the conference they had attended, or than either bishop had anticipated. So, by way of expressing thanks and ending the encounter on an emollient note, the Anglican, on alighting, made an anodyne comment of general congratulation on how well, despite their differences, they had all got on, adding, ‘After all, we all worship the same God.’ ‘We do,’ added the Catholic, quietly, ‘we do indeed—you in your way, and I in his.’
If, in this joke, which is still told with comforting reassurance of assumed superiority in the appropriate religious circles, a triumphalist absolute persists, then note the way in which, rather more seriously, ridicule attaches itself to actual historical episodes that require compromise between absolutism and toleration. The occasion was a meeting of thanksgiving, organised at Kikuyu in Kenya in 1911 to celebrate the success of an interdenominational meeting that had been called to settle the boundaries of mission territory, and so to eliminate undue competition in missionary activities. The meeting had gone well, and the different parties had met in the ecumenical spirit newly dawning in that period. As a religious occasion and in the spirit of amity engendered at the conference, the Anglican bishop presiding over the proceedings thought it appropriate that the delegates of the various denominations attending—Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, and Methodists—should join together in the most sacred of solemn Christian rituals—Holy Communion. This was an unprecedented gesture of brotherliness, embracing some who, in the eyes of others, were spiritually unqualified for participation. It proved all too much for the Anglican bishop of a neighbouring East African diocese, who was sufficiently shocked by this proceeding to complain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. What the presiding bishop had seen as a fraternal ecumenical gesture, his colleague believed to have been a flagrant concession to heresy. The Archbishop of Canterbury could not ignore the dispute, and it placed him neatly on the horns of a dilemma. Should he pronounce shared Communion to be a pollution of the cup, or was it an appropriate ecumenical gesture? As Monsignor Knox para-phrased it, the Archbishop’s verdict was ‘that while the events at Kikuyu were most pleasing in the sight of Almighty God, they must under no circumstances be allowed to occur again.’
Absolutist posturing is an easy target for humour but if we are to live at ease with the many new religions now flourishing in contemporary society which adopt an absolutist position—and as we have seen, most of them do—it behoves the rest of us to go as far as
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The best touch, perhaps, is Winter’s claim for credit as a mender of the highways, which was not without point when every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good part of the year unless it was bottomed on some remains of Roman engineering.
Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre
Et à bon droit le dey estre, Quant de la bowe face caucé Par un petit de geelé:
Master and lord I am, says he, And of good right so ought to be, Since I make causeys, safely crost, Of mud, with just a pinch of frost.
But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out-door company.
Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if ever any, confesses,
“The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, Curdles the blood to the marble bones, Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence.”
Winter was literally “the inverted year,” as Thomson called him; for such entertainments as could be had must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of Horace’s dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of that poem of Walton’s friend Cotton, which won the praise of Wordsworth:—
“Let us home, Our mortal enemy is come; Winter and all his blustering train Have made a voyage o’er the main.
. . . . .
“Fly, fly, the foe advances fast; Into our fortress let us haste. Where all the roarers of the north Can neither storm nor starve us forth
“There underground a magazine Of sovereign juice is cellared in, Liquor that will the siege maintain Should Phœbus ne’er return again
“Whilst we together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, Where, though bleak winds confine us home Our fancies round the world shall roam.”
Thomson’s view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile one, though he does justice to his grandeur.
“Thus Winter falls, A heavy gloom oppressive o’er the world, Through Nature shedding influence malign.”
He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, though more refined:—
“While without
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat Between the groaning forest and the shore Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom There studious let me sit And hold high converse with the mighty dead ”
Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, follows Thomson. With him, too, “Winter desolates the year,” and
“How pleasing wears the wintry night Spent with the old illustrious dead! While by the taper’s trembling light I seem those awful scenes to tread Where chiefs or legislators lie,” &c.
Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He had the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than many a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom it is enough to say that we are always willing to break him off in the middle with an &c., well knowing that what follows is but the coming-round again of what went before, marching in a circle with the cheap numerosity of a stage-army. In truth, it is no wonder that the short days of that cloudy northern climate should have added to winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have experienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter is alleviated by the longer daylight and the pellucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arc in the sky. The enforced seclusion of the season makes it the time for serious study and occupations that demand fixed incomes of unbroken time. This is why Milton said “that his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal,” though in his twentieth year he had written, on the return of spring,—
Fallor? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest?
Err I? or do the powers of song return To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring?
Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice the cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harz-reise im Winter gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminiscence of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of Job in nearly equal parts. In one of the singularly interesting and characteristic letters to Frau von Stein, however, written during the journey, he says: “It is beautiful indeed; the mist heaps itself together in light snow-clouds, the sun looks through, and the snow over everything gives back a feeling of gayety.” But I find in Cowper the first recognition of a general amiability in Winter. The
gentleness of his temper, and the wide charity of his sympathies, made it natural for him to find good in everything except the human heart. A dreadful creed distilled from the darkest moments of dyspeptic solitaries compelled him against his will to see in that the one evil thing made by a God whose goodness is over all his works. Cowper’s two walks in the morning and noon of a winter’s day are delightful, so long as he contrives to let himself be happy in the graciousness of the landscape. Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs dilate with the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing influence of the darkened year. In December, 1780, he writes: “At this season of the year, and in this gloomy uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement.” Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton? Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual feeling, for it is only there that poets disenthral themselves of their reserve and become fully possessed of their greatest charm,—the power of being franker than other men. In the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms his preference of the country to the city even in winter:—
“But are not wholesome airs, though unperfumed By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure From clamor, and whose very silence charms, To be preferred to smoke?... They would be, were not madness in the head And folly in the heart; were England now What England was, plain, hospitable, kind, And undebauched ”
The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous companionship of nature. This appears even more clearly in the Fourth Book:—
“O Winter, ruler of the inverted year”;
but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant it always is to track poets through the gardens of their predecessors and find out their likings by a flower snapped off here and there to garnish their own nosegays. Cowper had been reading Thomson, and “the inverted year” pleased his fancy with its suggestion of that starry wheel of the zodiac moving round through its spaces infinite. He could not help loving a handy Latinism (especially with elision beauty added), any more than Gray, any more than Wordsworth,— on the sly. But the member for Olney has the floor:—
“O Winter, ruler of the inverted year, Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled, Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, But urged by storms along its slippery way, I love thee all unlovely as thou seem’st, And dreaded as thou art! Thou hold’st the sun
A prisoner in the yet undawning east, Shortening his journey between morn and noon, And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, Down to the rosy west, but kindly still Compensating his loss with added hours
Of social converse and instructive ease, And gathering at short notice, in one group, The family dispersed, and fixing thought, Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. I crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness, And all the comforts that the lowly roof Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours Of long uninterrupted evening know.”
I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative, too,—not so flushed, not so ... highfaluting (let me dare the odious word!) as the modern style since poets have got hold of a theory that imagination is common-sense turned inside out, and not common-sense sublimed,—but wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity of a mind wholly occupied with its theme. To me Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day
wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has! How he heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening seclusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on the bridge! That horn has rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, during the consulate of the second Adams. Wordsworth strikes a deeper note; but does it not sometimes come over one (just the least in the world) that one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a flavor of W. W.? W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that—but! For my part, I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can’t look at a mountain without fancying the late laureate’s gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift’s profane version of Romanos rerum dominos into Roman nose! a rare un! dom your nose! But do I judge verses, then, by the impression made on me by the man who wrote them? Not so fast, my good friend, but, for good or evil, the character and its intellectual product are inextricably interfused.
If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in his magnificent skating-scene in the “Prelude”) has not much to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason may possibly be that in the Lake Country even the winter storms bring rain rather than snow. He was thankful for the Christmas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they “helped him through the winter.” His only hearty praise of winter is when, as Général Février, he defeats the French:—
“Humanity, delighting to behold
A fond reflection of her own decay, Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day, In hooded mantle, limping o’er the plain As though his weakness were disturbed by pain: Or, if a juster fancy should allow An undisputed symbol of command, The chosen sceptre is a withered bough Infirmly grasped within a withered hand These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn; But mighty Winter the device shall scorn.”
The Scottish poet Grahame, in his “Sabbath,” says manfully:—
“Now is the time To visit Nature in her grand attire”; and he has one little picture which no other poet has surpassed:—
“High-ridged the whirlëd drift has almost reached The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch: Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried ”
Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his winter face as long and as brightly as in central Italy, the seduction of the chimney-corner is apt to predominate in the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields and penitential woods. The very title of Whittier’s delightful “Snow-Bound” shows what he was thinking of, though he does vapor a little about digging out paths. The verses of Emerson, perfect as a Greek fragment (despite the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he has chosen for his epigraph, tell us, too, how the
“Housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis Hiems of Virgil. Catch one of them having a kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny, like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they toast their slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish of contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less friendly, especially when a tempest is blundering round the house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home to us the comfortable contrast of without and within, during a storm at night, and the passage is highly characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always has an undertone of bourgeois:—
“How touching, when, at midnight, sweep Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, To hear, and sink again to sleep!”
J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish their bright fancies by publication, always insists on a snow-storm as essential to the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the game, implies winter, and would doubtless have added tempest, if it could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also, into the small hours, there is nothing like that sense of safety against having your evening laid waste, which Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney, making your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against the pane with a sound more soothing than silence. Emerson, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail on the head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of the “tumultuous privacy.”
But I would exchange this, and give something to boot, for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur of a north-northeast snow-storm, and getting a strong draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first furrows through its sandy drifts. I love those
“Noontide twilights which snow makes With tempest of the blinding flakes ”
If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs of your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in white; but you must have plenty of north in your gale if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During the great storm of two winters ago, the most robustious periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floundered a couple of miles through the whispering night, and brought home that feeling of expansion we have after being in good company. “Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend; for he saith to the snow, ‘Be thou on the earth.’ ”
There is admirable snow scenery in Judd’s “Margaret,” but some one has confiscated my copy of that admirable book, and, perhaps, Homer’s picture of a snow-storm is the best yet in its large simplicity:—
“And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows, The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents, Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place, But floods, that fair snow’s tender flakes, as their own brood, embrace.”
Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with him, comes nearer Homer than anybody else. There is nothing in the original of that fair snow’s tender flakes, but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their heads the Psalmist’s tender phrase, “He giveth his snow like wool,” for which also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of “dissolving fleeces,” and Cowper of a “fleecy mantle.” But David is nobly simple, while Pope is simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must have prettiness, Martial would have supplied them with it in his
Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum,
which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thessalonica calls snow ὓὂωρ ἒρίωὂες, woolly water, which a poor old French poet, Godeau, has amplified into this:—
Lorsque la froidure inhumaine
De leur verd ornement depouille les forêts
Sous une neige épaisse il couvre les guérets, Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine.
In this, as in Pope’s version of the passage in Homer, there is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blinding drift of words. But, on the whole, if one would know what snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up what the poets have said about it, but to look at the sweet miracle itself.
The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of Spring. In a gray December day, when, as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let fall doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snow-drops and anemones that harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and now only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon’s eastern edge, those “blue clouds” from forth which Shakespeare says that Mars “doth pluck the masoned turrets.” Sometimes also, when the sun is low, you will see a single cloud trailing a
flurry of snow along the southern hills in a wavering fringe of purple. And when at last the real snow-storm comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look on it that no other of the seasons can rival,—compared with which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar.
And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next morning after such confusion of the elements? Night has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every wound of the landscape is healed; whatever was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite; what was unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would have said, Nature had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it. If the Virgin (Nôtre Dame de la neige) were to come back, here is an earth that would not bruise her foot nor stain it. It is
“The fanned snow
That’s bolted by the northern blasts twice o’er,”
Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds,
packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if every one of them had been swept by that inspired thumb of Phidias’s journeyman!
Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the aerial deluge has left plain marks of its course; and in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with outlines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an infinitely thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have to drink when the state does her whole duty as a moral reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail you will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find that you have more neighbors and night visitors than you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat; here a dog has looked in on you like an amateur watchman to see if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the mealy treachery. And look! before you were
