New Religions in Global Perspective
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
New Religions in Global Perspective New Religions in Global Perspective is a fresh in-depth account of new religious movements, and of new forms of spirituality from a global vantage point. Ranging from North America and Europe to Japan, Latin America, South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, this book provides students with a complete introduction to NRMs such as Falun Gong, Aum Shinrikyo, the Brahma Kumaris movement, the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood, Sufism, the Engaged Buddhist and Neo-Hindu movements, Messianic Judaism, and African diaspora movements including Rastafarianism. Peter Clarke explores the innovative character of new religious movements, charting their cultural significance and global impact, and how various religious traditions are shaping, rather than displacing, each other’s understanding of notions such as transcendence and faith, good and evil, of the meaning, purpose and function of religion, and of religious belonging. In addition to exploring the responses of governments, churches, the media and general public to new religious movements, Clarke examines the reactions to older, increasingly influential religions, such as Buddhism and Islam, in new geographical and cultural contexts. Taking into account the degree of continuity between old and new religions, each chapter contains not only an account of the rise of the NRMs and new forms of spirituality in a particular region, but also an overview of change in the regions’ mainstream religions. Peter Clarke is Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion at King’s College, University of London, and a professorial member of the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford. Among his publications are (with Peter Byrne) Religion Defined and Explained (1993) and Japanese New Religions: In Global Perspective (ed.) (2000). He is the founding editor and present co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Religion. New Religions in Global Perspective A study of religious change in the modern world Peter B.Clarke LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2006 Peter B.Clarke All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-50833-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-59877-6 (OEB Format) ISBN10:0-415-25747-6 (hbk) ISBN10:0-415-25748-4 (pbk) ISBN13:9-78-0-415-25747-3 (hbk) ISBN13:9-78-0-415-25748-0 (pbk) Contents Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiii 1 PART I Global perspective, New Age and society’s response 1 New Religious Movements (NRMs): a global perspective 3 2 The New Age Movement (NAM): alternative or mainstream? 22 3 Accounting for hostility to NRMs 38 62 PART II New religions in the West 4 Europe 64 5 North America 94 6 Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia (New Guinea) 123 142 PART III New religions: North Africa and the Middle East, and Africa, south of the Sahara 7 North Africa and the Middle East 144 8 Africa, south of the Sahara 162 181 PART IV NRMs in South and Central America and the Caribbean 9 South and Central America and the Caribbean 183 205 PART V New religions of South, Southeast and East Asia 10 South Asia (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) 207 11 Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia) 234 12 East Asia (1): Japanese NRMs 256 13 East Asia (2): NRMs in China, Taiwan and Korea 276 304 PART VI Conclusion 14 Future trends 306 General bibliography 313 Index 316 Acknowledgements I am most grateful to my family and friends who have been, as always, helpful and patient, and to all those colleagues in the sociology and other branches of the study of religion whose research and writings on this and related topics I have greatly benefited from reading. My own research has taken me to Africa, mainland Europe, North and South America (Brazil), Japan and other parts of Asia. Many, many people have been most generous with their time and to all of them I am extremely grateful. I am also very greateful to Kofuku no Kagaku (Institute of Research in Human Happiness) for generously funding a three-year research project (1994–97) on Japanese New Religions Abroad, which I co-ordinated from the Centre for New Religions at King’s College London and which created for me many opportunities to extend my fieldwork on New Religions in Asia, Europe and North and South America. Finally, but by no means last, I want to sincerely thank all my research students—a global cohort themselves—from whose research findings and insights I have benefited greatly in the course of supervising their dissertations. A selection of these is given in Chapter 3 without, of course, intending to suggest that these are necessarily of a higher quality than those not mentioned. Whatever misunderstandings of interpretation or fact there may be are mine alone. Peter Clarke Oxford, April 2005 Introduction The significance for the future of religion generally and the social impact of New Religious Movements (NRMs) and New Spirituality Movements (NSMs) (Shimazono, 2004) appear strikingly different when seen from a global rather than a country by country or regional standpoint. This is not to suggest that the latter are not important vantage points but simply that the impact of the phenomenon, to be fully appreciated, needs also to be seen for what it is, a religious reformation on a worldwide scale, and as such can only be fully understood in the context of global society. Without this perspective it will continue to be dismissed as marginal and superficial and its relevance to our understanding of the religious history of the modern world largely ignored. The numbers of those involved in new religions and new types of spirituality movements are difficult to assess, not simply because of lack of good quality statistical data, but also because the meaning of the terms ‘membership’ and ‘belonging’ are not always clearly defined. However, reasonable estimates suggest that considerable numbers of NRMs, to confine the discussion to them, are now global religions in their own right, with a following that has to be counted in millions and one that outnumbers that of many branches of the so-called mainstream religions. Looked at globally, modern NRMs (since NRMs are the main but not the exclusive concern of this volume, I will mostly use this label except when explicitly referring to an NSM) reflect the variety of modernities of which modernity itself is composed. They provide in each case new foundations for being religious, introducing new beliefs and practices, often by reshaping and transforming the purposes of old ones, and act as catalysts for change within the older religions. This includes not only change in beliefs and practice but also change at the epistemological level. For example, by influencing the way faith based on divine sources of revelation, as traditionally understood in the monotheistic traditions, comes to be replaced by knowledge derived from experience and experimentation, and notions of sin by that of ignorance, and ideas on paradise as a future state of bliss by the concept of self-realization in the here and now. Also evident is change in the function and purpose of religion. Such core notions as liberation (moksha) and enlightenment (nirvana) are increasingly being interpreted as a means to an end, the end being the profound transformation of society rather than as individual goals. NRMs and NSMs challenge us to question not only the meaning of such concepts as faith and the purpose of religion but also most of what we traditionally take for granted about religion, including our understanding of the concept itself. They ask important questions about the future of standard, congregational religion, questions to which others (Shimazono, 2004; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Stark et al., 2005) have already tried to respond, and to which I attempt a reply at the end of this volume. It is made clear throughout this volume, beginning with the opening chapter, that religious change is constituted differently in different religious and cultural contexts. In certain Asian cultures a development such as that of Engaged Buddhism or Engaged Hinduism can represent as profound an innovation for adherents of those religions as any major doctrinal ‘deviation’ in, for example, Christianity. Religious innovations serve different functions and are attributed to different causes in different cultural settings. In the West most interest has been shown in the inner-directed, subjective type of spirituality as a means to personal growth in a world that has seen the privatization of religion reach an advanced stage. In large parts of the Buddhist world and elsewhere the purposes and objectives are more informed by communal, societal concerns, although the individual dimension is increasingly important, especially in the major urban conglomerations, as the success of Falun Gong and similar movements in China in the 1990s indicates. This study provides the opportunity to discuss reasons as to why the response to NRMs has been usually hostile, and such issues as why and how governments seek to control and shape religion in the modern world, the impact of NRMs on the secularization process, and, with the increase in Oriental spirituality in the West, the Easternization of the Western mind thesis.