Researching New Religious Movements

Researching New Religious Movements ‘The most important “first” that this book achieves is its bold questioning of the whole intellectual apparatus of the sociology of religion as it has been applied to the understanding of the new religious movements. I am confident that Elisabeth Arweck’s study will quickly become required reading in the sociology of new religious movements.’ Professor David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics, University of London ‘Powerful and original . it succeeds triumphantly in being at the same time an important, high-quality academic study and a book for our times.’ Professor David Marsland, Professorial Research Fellow in Sociology, University of Buckingham New religious movements such as Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Unification Church (Moonies) are now well established in mainstream cultural consciousness. However, responses to these ‘cult’ groups still tend to be overwhelmingly negative, characterized by the furious reactions that they evoke from majority interests. Modern societies need to learn how to respond to such movements and how to interpret their benefits and dangers. Researching New Religious Movements provides a fresh look at the history and development of ‘anti-cult’ groups and the response of mainstream churches to these new movements. In this unique reception study, Elisabeth Arweck traces the path of scholarship of new religious movements, exploring the development of research in this growing field. She con- siders academic and media interventions on both sides, with special emphasis on the problems of objectivity inherent in terminologies of ‘sects’, ‘cults’, and ‘brainwashing’. Ideal for students and researchers, this much- needed book takes the debate over new religious movements to a more sophisticated level. Elisabeth Arweck is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Reli- gions and Education Research Unit and CEDAR (Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research). She is an editor of the Journal of Contemporary Religion, co-author of New Religious Movements in Western Europe (1997) and co-editor of Theorizing Faith (2002). Researching New Religious Movements Responses and redefinitions Elisabeth Arweck I~ ~~o~;~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2006 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Elisabeth Arweck Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercail-No Derivatives 4.0 license. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Arweck, Elisabeth. Researching new religious movements : responses and redefinitions / Elisabeth Arweck.—1st ed. p. cm. English and German. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–415–27754–X (hardback : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–415– 27755–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–203–64237–6 (e-book) 1. Cults—Germany. 2. Religion and sociology— Germany. 3. Cults—Great Britain. 4. Religion and sociology— Great Britain. I. Title. BL980.G3A79 2005 200′.7′041—dc22 2005017222 ISBN13: 978–0–415–27754–9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–27755–6 (pbk) Contents Foreword vii Acknowledgements ix 1 What this book is about 1 2 Milestones in a research itinerary 9 3 Institutions and institutional knowledge 31 Institutions 31 Institutional knowledge 53 4 Sketching in the cultural background 75 The contours of religious cultures 75 The contours of academic cultures 90 5 The ‘anti-cult’ movement’s response 111 The ACM response in Britain: the case of FAIR 111 The ACM response in Germany: the case of Elterninitiative 156 6 The response of the mainstream churches 203 The Church of England’s response 203 The response of the Protestant Church in Germany 227 Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen (EZW) 227 Pastor Friedrich-Wilhelm Haack and Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfragen 254 The response of the Roman Catholic Church 294 vi Contents 7 Conclusions 373 Bibliography 383 Index 441 Foreword For the last decade Elisabeth Arweck has been an unobtrusive but increasingly valued presence in the international sociology of religion. She is editor, alongside Peter Clarke, of the Journal of Contemporary Religion. As a member of Peter Clarke’s research institute at King’s College, London, she accumulated an unrivalled archive of materials on New Religious Movements (NRMs) and her linguistic skills enabled her to make the bibliography on NRMs that she published jointly with Peter Clarke a genuinely European as well as Anglophone research resource for the discipline. Now in this book we see the fruits of many years of scholarship and reflection on the problems in the field of NRM studies. The book is a ‘first’ in a number of senses. It is the first systematic com- parison of the situation of NRMs in two European societies and thus adds a valuable extra dimension to a field which American sociology has pioneered. It is also the first full-length study that I am aware of which is to NRMs what musicologists call a ‘reception study’; that is, it is concerned with how the emergence of New Religious Movements from the 1960s onwards was understood and responded to by other interested parties, conducted by someone who is linguistically and culturally at home in Europe. These include the mainstream churches to which, in interestingly different ways, the British and German states passed the hot political potato that the new movements soon came to represent, a move which would have been inconceivable in the US with its strict separation of state and church. Another important interest group that was galvanised into action by the new movements was what quickly came to be popularly known as ‘the anti-cult movement’, a number of voluntary organizations, mostly made up of the concerned relatives of converts to NRMs. The experience of losing a member of the family to a communitarian religious group about which little was initially known, by a process that often seemed incomprehensible and even sinister, drew parents in particular into one or other of the ‘anti-cult’ organizations. As the book shows, some of the new religious groups were more likely than others to meet with a hostile or fearful response from the families of converts. The book examines the reasons why the concept of ‘brainwashing’ became the standard explanation the ‘anti-cult’ organizations and the viii Foreword mass media offered to explain why educated and intelligent young people were joining the new religious groups. Dr Arweck traces the changing pol- icies of the ‘anti-cult movement’ and the moves that the NRMs in turn took to counter its activities and charges. The part the mass media played in inventing the now-stereotyped popular images of these religious movements and their opponents is an integral part of the story. So, too, is the role of the academic researchers who found in the NRMs a new focus for the study of religion in a supposedly ‘secular’ era, and a topic that could constitute a lifetime’s work and the making of many a career. The tension between the academic research community and the ‘anti-cult’ organizations is a persistent thread in the weave. Perhaps the most important ‘first’ that this book achieves is its bold questioning of the whole intellectual apparatus of the Sociology of Religion as it has been applied to the understanding of the New Religious Movements. For the first time this has not been used as the source of an ‘objective’, or, at least, disinterested framework for the research but has itself been held up for interrogation as the product of a complex set of interactions with the other interested parties in what, as the story unfolds, looks more and more like a developing dance, not so much choreographed as improvised, in which all the interested parties move among shifting alliances and hostilities, until it settles into an increasingly predictable pattern. I am confident that Elisabeth Arweck’s study will quickly become required reading in the sociology of new religious movements and will move the debate on to new and important ground, not least by its reformula- tion of what is at stake in the ethics of research in this and related fields. David Martin Woking, April, 2005 Acknowledgements A book written without the help and support of others is a rarity. This book is no such rarity. I am indebted to many who have contributed in various ways, by providing information, assistance, and encouragement at different stages of this project. Mrs Bernice Martin, now Emeritus Reader in Sociology at Royal Holloway College, not only encouraged and guided this project in its initial stages by helping it germinate and grow, but also accom- panied it throughout, not least with countless invaluable acts of friendship. Peter B. Clarke, now Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at King’s College London, contributed by supervising my PhD thesis and involving me in the work of the Centre for New Religions at King’s. This experience shaped ideas and led to joint projects, such as the annotated bibliography on new religious movements and editorship of the Journal of Contemporary Religion, founded by Professor Clarke as Religion Today in the early 1980s. Practical and moral

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