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Book Reviews Numen 57 (2010) 251–263 brill.nl/nu Book Reviews Sacred Schisms: How Religions Divide. Edited by James R. Lewis and Sarah M. Lewis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 338 pp., with 5 figures and Index. ISBN 978-0-521-88147-0. Sacred Schisms: How Religions Divide defines its scope in terms of offering the “first book-length study of religious schisms as a general phenomenon”. It comprises some theoretical discussion (Introduction and Part 1 Theoretical Overview), and thirteen case studies of schisms in different traditions and settings. These case studies are grouped under the headings “Survey of Schisms in Selected Traditions” (Part 2), “Christian Traditions” (Part 3), “Western Esoteric Traditions” (Part 4), and “Non-Western/Postcolonial Tra- ditions” (Part 5). They range widely from theosophy to Japanese new reli- gious movements, and across time from Catholic Christianity during the Roman Empire to the recent history of Transcendental Meditation in North America. The editors, James Lewis and Sarah Lewis, note in their Introduction that, although the use of the term “schism” is not confined to religious phenom- ena, it is most commonly found in religious contexts. Their definition of “schism” centres on the breakaway of groups, as distinct from the movements of individuals, typically from a larger organisation to create new organisa- tions. They recognise that, because of the negative connotations of conflict attached to “schism”, this is a term breakaway groups are unlikely to adopt when characterising themselves. As Roger Finke and Christopher Scheitle caution later in the volume (12), there is a danger that the manifest drama of a schism may distract attention from its latent causes. Taking the example of a schism within a small Baptist church in North Carolina, triggered on the surface by a dispute over ice cream socials on Sundays, James Lewis and Sarah Lewis stress the need to examine the sometimes less obvious and often far more complex causes of religious schism. Having alluded to “the general poverty of current ‘schism theory’ ” (2), they propose a preliminary typology of schisms based on different explanatory factors, including personal ambi- tion, doctrinal disagreements, and ethnic and national differences (2f.). The major responsibility for developing a theoretical component in the volume, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156852710X487619 252 Book Reviews / Numen 57 (2010) 251–263 however, falls to Finke and Scheitle, the authors of the first chapter, which constitutes Part 1 of the book. Finke and Scheitle utilise organisational and religious economy theories to address limitations they identify in H. Richard Niebuhr’s work on schism, which “was the first to inject theoretical life to the process of schism forma- tion” (11). This highlights a challenge facing the volume’s contributors, given that their aim is to offer a treatment of “religious schisms as a general phe- nomenon”; namely, the extent to which earlier theory has been developed largely with reference to institutionalised forms of Christianity in Western Europe and North America. Rather than following Niebuhr’s reliance on explanations based on class interests, Finke and Scheitle emphasise the need to derive explanations of schism from a variety of historical and structural forces. In seeking factors that promote or deter schisms, they examine the religious market and ecological spaces, including the role of state regulation in, for example, nineteenth-century America and post-World War II Japan. Such regulation, as Murphy Pizza (259) points out, has continued to lead some movements to resort to schism as a tactic when negotiating matters relating to legal status. Acknowledging the importance of analyses of differ- ences between church and sect in theoretical understandings of schisms, Finke and Scheitle favour as their starting point a model that treats church and sect as organisations on a continuum, rather than emphasising their dif- ferences through typological analysis. Shifting the focus from the religious groups to the demand that underlies their diversity, Finke and Scheitle incor- porate research suggesting that the distribution of individuals’ preferences for more intense forms of religion approximate to a bell-shaped curve in which the majority are attracted to moderate and conservative “religious niches”. It is the ever-present diversity of demand that creates distinctive “religious niches”, which, Finke and Scheitle argue, are central to understanding the origins of schisms (16), as, for example, when niches are “stretched” and increasing heterogeneity leads to conflict. Authors of the individual case studies introduce a variety of theoretical analyses in the course of their arguments. Several refer to Max Weber’s theory of institutionalisation, coupled with Thomas O’Dea’s “paradoxes of institu- tionalisation” (Ron Geaves, 59f.; George Chryssides, 110f.; David Bromley and Rachel Bobbitt, 219), and Olav Hammer (200) draws on Colin Camp- bell’s concept of the “cultic milieu”, as does Jesper Aagaard Petersen (219– 222) in his examination of definitions of “cult” and “sect”. Yet, the authors of the case studies do not appear to take a collective responsibility for explicitly testing and developing the theoretical elements of the early sections of the volume. Only Murphy Pizza (251) refers directly to the theoretical issues .
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