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Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements

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Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements New Religious Movements (NRMs) can involve vast numbers of followers and in many cases are radically changing the way people understand and practice religion and spirituality. Moreover, they are having a profound impact on the form and content of mainstream religion. The Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements provides uniquely global coverage of the phenomenon, with entries on over three-hundred movements from almost every country worldwide. Coverage includes movements that derive from the major religions of the world as well as neo-traditional movements, which are often overlooked in the study of NRMs. In addition to the coverage of particular movements there are also entries on broad classifications and themes, and key topics, thinkers and ideas—the New Age Movement, Neo-Paganism, gender and NRMs, cyberspace religions, the Anti-Cult Movement, Swedenborg, Jung, de Chardin, Lovelock, Gurdjieff, al-Banna, Qutb. The marked global approach and comprehensiveness of the encyclopedia enable an appreciation of the innovative energy of NRMs, of their extraordinary diversity, and the often surprising ways in which they can propagate geographically. A most ambitious publication of its sort, the Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements is a major addition to the reference literature for students and researchers in the field of religious studies and the social sciences. Entries are cross-referenced, many with short bibliographies for further reading. There is a full index. Peter B.Clarke is Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion at King’s College, University of London, UK and Professorial Member, Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK. His latest book is New Religious Movements in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2006). Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements Edited by Peter B.Clarke LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and 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 Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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 0-203-48433-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-59897-0 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN10:0-415-26707-2 (Print Edition) ISBN13:9-78-0-415-26707-6 (Print Edition) Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of T&F Informa plc. Contents Introduction vi How to Use this Encyclopedia xvii Consultant Editors xix List of Contributors xx List of Entries xxv Entries A to Z 1 Index 719 Introduction New Religions as a global phenomenon The apparent ease with which New Religious Movements (henceforth: NRMs) are ‘invented’ can be attributed in part to the increasingly global character of the contemporary world, which has witnessed the disembedding from their original cultural context and the wider circulation of religious beliefs and practices of every kind. This process of globalization has occasioned a shift in religions from geographically and culturally specific ‘facts’, that is from their being associated with one particular geographical and cultural zone such as the Middle East, Asia, the West, or Africa, to being a reality everywhere. Increasingly since the 1960s, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism have come to be seen less and less as exotic appendages to the religious culture of Western society, while the beliefs and practices associated with these religions, including the belief in reincarnation, the notion of God as impersonal, and the practices of yoga and vipassana or insight meditation are shared by a sizeable minority of the population of Western Europe, many of whom continue to identify themselves as Christians (Lambert 2004). Associated with this change, albeit less easily measured, are changes in spirituality, which include in the West a greater interest in an inner-directed kind of spirituality and in Asia in socially engaged spirituality. Although the confluence, of historically unprecedented proportions, of religious systems and spiritualities has contributed, along with other processes that include modernization, urbanization, new developments in science and technology, economic migration, and legal changes such as the repeal of the Asian Exclusion Act in the United States in 1965, to make the phenomenon of NRMs a global one, there is, none the less, much variation in the structure, content, size, and in the goals of these religions and in their orientation towards the wider society. Thus, while vast numbers of NRMs have either become or are in the process of becoming global religions, they manifest different characteristics in different parts of the world due to the process of domestication or to use Robertson’s (1994) term ‘glocalization’. This accounts for why Japanese NRMs develop a somewhat different reality in Brazil compared to Japan. In Brazil they display many more Catholic features, are more inclusive in terms of membership, and their ceremonies and rituals bear a close resemblance to those of Catholicism. It is not possible even in an Encyclopedia to convey all the variation and variety of the NRMs that now exist. However, what can be done and has been attempted here, is to provide examples of the various kinds of NRMs that have arisen in different parts of the world in order to show how truly universal the phenomenon is, although the temptation to postulate a single general causal explanation for this widespread phenomenon, such as rapid social change is resisted. I will return briefly to this point later. This Encyclopedia in addition to providing basic data on numerous NRMs from every continent also intends to offer the reader an idea of the direction taken by NRMs, which are often depicted as flowing directly from West to East, starting in the United States. In reality the flow resembles more a global labyrinth than a straight highway. Elsewhere (Clarke 2000) I wrote of reverse globalization in the case of Japanese NRMs to offset the widespread impression given at the time that everything had been moving from West to East. Even this was an oversimplification, movement is in all directions. For example, several Japanese NRMs including Sekai Kyûsei Kyô (Church of World Messianity) have arrived in parts of Africa including Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and via the furthest point West of Japan, Brazil. By way of contrast the Brazilian NRM the Santo Daime movement has travelled with Brazilian-Japanese migrant workers to Japan. The pathways taken by NRMs are endless, as are the interactions. These include the interactions of Korean spiritual beings and African spirits in the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, the dynamic interaction of Rastafarian (see Rastafarian movement) and Maori religious worldviews, of African-Brazilian and Amerindian spiritual concepts and practices, and of the New Age Movement (NAM) with most forms of spirituality including various kinds of Islamic Sufism or mysticism and Native American religion. Through the NAM spiritualities of all kinds have been carried from one part of the world to many others. A feature of the contemporary religious environment is the ground being gained globally by what I have described above as inner-directed spirituality, much of which is based on the premise that the Self is the source of the supernatural. This kind of spirituality takes different forms and includes the use of various techniques such as the physical exercises of t’ai chi and yoga, which are designed to enable the practitioner to access and release the spiritual force that rests within the deepest layers of the self and apply it to the existential and emotional, and even material, areas of life. With this kind of spirituality comes a preference for a transpersonal understanding of transcendence over a theistic one, for experience over reason in spiritual matters and for knowing over believing, since logically experiencing the divine dispenses with the need for faith. Although privatized and inner-directed, this form of spirituality, which is gaining ground in the West and contrasts with the previously mentioned socially engaged spirituality movements found in predominantly Buddhist countries, is not unconcerned with the condition of the world. Rather it holds to the view that self-transformation is the sine qua non of that social transformation which is anxiously awaited, an anxiety evident in the fundamental importance that countless NRMs give to the millenarian idea. Even those NRMs that derive from traditions where this belief is only adhered to in a weak sense, such as Buddhism, are, at least at the outset, passionately millenarian (see Millenarianism). While millenarianism is also a feature of almost all the NRMs that have been involved in violence, it must be stressed that it cannot be assumed that this belief predisposes a group to violent action. Many millenarian movements are pacific and among these are the Rastafarian movement, the Mahdiyyat movement and Sekai Kyûsei Kyô. Being gripped by this belief in the imminent advent of the millennium as they are suggests that NRMs might best be understood if interpreted as ideologies of social transformation. This seems preferable to trying to understand them by classifying them according to their response to the world as ‘world-denying’, ‘world-indifferent’, and ‘world-affirming’ movements (Wallis 1984).
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