"New Religious Movements"

From: Modemac <modemac@modemac.com>
Date: 22 Sep 1999 23:33:59 GMT
Organization: First Online Church of "Bob"

[ This is a repost of the following article: ]
[ From: Rob_Clark@justicemail.com (Rob Clark) ]
[ Subject: "New Religious Movements" ]
[ Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology ]
[ Message-ID: <380a5f10.105325880@localhost> ]

The phrase "New Religious Movement" has been used as a substitute for
the word "cult" by many scholars who profess a scholarly objectivity
toward the issue. I intend to examine this phrase and enumerate its
shortcomings. To do this, one first must look at the word it is
intended to replace, "cult." This word is itself a conundrum, as I
will show.

The 1913 edition of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines
"cult" in this manner:

Cult (k?lt) n .[F. culte, L. cultus care, culture, fr. colere to
cultivate. Cf. Cultus.]

1. Attentive care; homage; worship.
Every one is convinced of the reality of a better self, and of. the
cult or homage which is due to it. -Shaftesbury
2. A system of religious belief and worship.
That which was the religion of Moses is the ceremonial or cult of the
religion of Christ. --Coleridge

Webster's definition is the definition of the root word "cult" which
has in recent decades collected an astonishing baggage of definitions,
meanings and connotations. The strength and usefulness of the
Webster's dictionary is found in its strict adherence to the
denotation of a word, for one can get close to the core of a word's
meaning and thus separate it from connotations.

The Webster definition remains unaltered today, even using the
same quotations as its source.

Another dictionary, the Merriam-Webster, defines "cult" in this
manner:

Main Entry: cult
Pronunciation: 'k&lt
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: French & Latin; French culte, from Latin cultus care,
adoration, from colere to cultivate -- more at
WHEEL
Date: 1617
1 : formal religious veneration : WORSHIP
2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of
adherents
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of
adherents
4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its
promulgator <health cults>
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as
a film or book); especially : such devotion
regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : a usually small group
of people characterized by such devotion

This definition subsumes the 1913 definition, but further entries
indicate what the word "cult" connotes in standard American usage.
The word "cult" carries mountains of connotations, from the images
of slaughtered men, women and children at Jonestown, to the
impression of a movie with a small but devoted following.

The most recent cult catastrophe is now one of those impressions
which slowly alter the meaning of a word, and being fresh in the
minds of people, will probably evoke the image of thirty-nine
identical corpses identically draped in identical cloths, on rows
of identical beds, dead from identical doses of poison.

Events such as these change the meaning of a word by a gradual
process of accretion, and of wearing away of old meanings, making the
process of definition a slow process of deconstruction.

The word "cult" as used in mass society is, however, not the meaning
of the word "cult" as used by cult experts, or of the word "cult" as
used by behavioral psychologists, or of the word "cult" in religious
history. However, by comparing the 1913 Webster definition to the
more detailed Merriam-Webster definition, one can see that the
impressions of numerous scholars, as well as news media, have added
connotations to the word "cult" which do not exist in the root word.

The work of Lifton, Singer, Hassan and the others has spread
incompletely to mass society, divested of the notion of mind-control
to the extent that it is not even in the dictionary. However, the
notion of "mind-control" is almost immediately brought up in any
discussion of cults, with the concomitant fierce division of opinion
concerning the reality of the phenomenon.

The first reaction upon viewing such a shocking tableau of apparent
insanity is to dehumanize the victims and even to say that such people
deserve to die. Even an amateur cult observer will recognize this
stereotyped reaction, repeated with every cult catastrophe, as nothing
more complex than a thought-stopping technique intended to quell the
cognitive dissonance created by evidence that strongly points to the
falsehood of cherished Western delusions of free will and
self-determination.

When one asks how a cult leader can kill with words as surely as with
a weapon, one may as well ask a number of other questions as well.
How do astrologers infest every newspaper in the country like the
common cold of cult delusion? How did American leaders gull an
ignorant nation into a foolish and destructive "war on drugs" which
ignores medical facts, common sense and even the obvious empowerment
of the black market? How do gangs get people to kill and die for a
few blocks of a ravaged slum? How do world leaders convince the
population that the way to peace is to build enough weapons to destroy
the planet, then point them at each other?

Delusion and ludicrous belief systems are not a cult phenomenon, but a
phenomenon of the larger society as well, but what makes a "cult" a
"cult" and separates it from other groups? While an exhaustive
examination of this issue is beyond the scope of this essay, I propose
for the purposes of this essay to define a cult in this manner:

A cult is a group with an authoritarian structure and established,
rote methods for stopping thoughts, which centers to the exclusion of
other activities on the goals and desires of the group's leader or
leaders.

This separates cults from "normal" religions, political affiliations,
and belief systems which, although perhaps sharing many of the aspects
of a cult, do not harmfully interfere with the lives of their members.

I feel that this use of the word "cult" makes a meaningful and useful
distinction between harmless and harmful groups, that it clearly and
without ambiguity defines a phenomenon which deserves to have a word
which can be used to convey the notion of such groups.

In short, I believe after long thought and much examination of the
issue that the word "cult" is a perfectly good word, and does not need
to be replaced.

That said, I will now look at the issue of the specific substitution
of the phrase "New Religious Movement" for "cult."

The term "New" is fairly easy to analyze. It denotes recently-formed
groups, usually with leaders who are still alive. It carries to most
people an impression of "New Age" groups and other recent phenomena
such as the recent consideration given to many people of
nontraditional and non-Western belief systems, such as the rise of
Eastern mysticism among Americans. With the word "New," the phrase
implies that there is something which separates religious movements
and cults which are recent from those which have existed for some
time.

I do not believe this to be the case. Except for the improvement of
methods used in controlling members and the increasing sophistication
of public-relations techniques used to sell belief systems, I do not
believe there is anything fundamentally different between religious
movements which have formed in the last ten, twenty, or thirty years.
I do not believe that such groups have changed in the general
structures of their belief system.

Further, the word "New" appears to define a group of religious
movements as being "New" or being "Old" and creates a specific
impression concerning groups such as the Moonies, the Church of
Scientology, the Christian Coalition, the loosely-affiliated and
loosely-structured congregations of those who share Eastern religious
beliefs, new denominations of established religions, the Hare
Krishnas, and any religious movement which is "New."

The impression created is that there is something in these groups'
novelty that separates them from other groups, and further that these
groups have a shared distinction that makes it meaningful to speak of
"New Religious Movements."

I find that the word "New" not only creates a useless and meaningless
distinction between groups based on their novelty, but indeed also
destroys a useful and meaningful distinction between groups which
use destructive methods and groups which do not. Thus, the first word
of the phrase just by itself damns the phrase to uselessness and
obfuscation, by what it denotes and by what connotations it carries.

A similar use of the word "New" could be imagined in the case of
the phrase "political movements." The word "cult" captures religious,
political and other groups which use similar methods, but imagine for
a moment that there were a word similar to "cult" which carried the
same connotations toward political groups as "cult" in common usage
carries toward religious groups, and defined a set which would include
the Nazis, the Larouche organization, the Communist Party and similar
groups. Now, imagine that someone created the phrase "New Political
Movement" to avoid saying this word, in the same manner as the phrase
"New Religious Movement" is used to avoid saying "cult." This new
phrase would create a meaningless distinction, and would lump such
groups as the LaRouche organization, the ACLU, the Christian
Coalition, the Green Party, and Earth First! into a useless category.

It can be argued, however, that the word "New" does, indeed, add a
useful distinction in that it refers to the stage of development of
religious movements. However, considering that it is lumping together
cults, denominations, loosely-affiliated networks of people with
similar beliefs, and other groups which are tenuously related at best.
A loosely-affiliated group and a cult do not necessarily go through
the same stages of development, and certainly the culmination of cult
catastrophes is a result of forces within the group which existed from
its very formation. Those forces of enforced conformity, closure and
confrontation simply do not exist in any comparable way in
organizations simply based on their novelty. To pretend otherwise is
to be a fool.

The second word of the phrase is "Religious." This limits the
phrase's scope and again, destroys a functional distinction between
groups which share nearly identical methods, nearly identical
thought-stopping contradictions in their doctrines, and nearly
identical methods of recruitment and expansion. Further, it also
creates the false impression that religious belief is a defining
characteristic of a motley set of groups, a set which is also defined
by novelty, and uselessly links a set of disparate groups based on
irrelevant and arbitrary criteria.

The word "Religious" also carries connotations which cause the person
seeing it to think of many things: churches, clergy, charitable acts,
noble self-sacrifice, freedom of belief and action, the right to free
assembly, one's notion of God, hierarchies, tax-exemption, martyrdom,
persecution, holy wars, the separation of church and state being
merely a smattering of the vast quantity of impressions and beliefs
this word almost instantly evokes.

The word "Religious" almost immediately causes many people to develop
a positive impression of the set of groups to which it is applied, as
the good connotations of the word "Religious" cause good impressions
of religion in general to be transferred by proxy to anything
described as a "New Religious Movement." To describe something as a
"New Religious Movement" is to look at the phenomenon through a
stained glass window.

Once an organization is defined as "Religious," other aspects of the
organization are diminished in importance, and notions of freedom of
religion are extended to cover such movements, regardless of their
written doctrines, their documented behavior, and their methods of
recruitment and expansion. The very use of the phrase destroys
objectivity and makes a mockery of any attempt to understand the issue
based on the notion that there are "Movements" which are "Religious"
and "New," and that the modifiers "New" and "Religious" are
meaningfully distinguishing between "New" and "Old" movements and
"Religious" and "Secular" groups.

A similar phrase, which should define a useful set if the method of
generation for the phrase "New Religious Movement" creates useful
additions to the English language, would be "Old Secular Movement."
It is obvious that this phrase is ludicrous and useless, once the
impressions of religiosity are removed from a semantic analysis of the
meaningfulness of a phrase containing the word "Religion."

The words "New" and "Religious" are both useless modifiers which do
not add any understanding, and which do not define anything worth
defining.

The last word, and the core word of the phrase, is "Movement." The
word "Movement" also implies many things, and as with "New" and
"Religious" it carries positive connotations. The phrase "Movement"
is applied to any number of phenomena, from burning draft cards to
joining the ACLU to founding a group to oppose medical research on
animals. A connotation of the phrase "Movement" is of a spontaneous
decision based on knowledge that there are others sharing a belief,
and tends to create the impression of a loose coalition of individuals
acting toward a common goal.

It is obvious that a deliberate and deceptive recruitment process is
precisely the opposite of a "Movement" as the word is commonly-used.
Further, the word "Movement" when applied equally to loosely-organized
grass-roots social activism and to organizations which are based on an
authoritarian structure that quells dissent is sloppy to say the
least.

As with "New" and "Religious," the word "Movement" carries a mass of
positive impressions and implies that there is something positive and
spontaneous about being recruited into a cult, and that this process
is similar to the process by which someone takes action simultaneously
with others based on their preexisting beliefs and knowledge.

Obviously, these two processes are widely divergent, and confusing
them with each other, implies strongly that a high-pressure
recruitment by "love bombing" and modern sales techniques, a
spontaneous decision to burn a draft card in protest, and writing a
letter to one's congressman at the suggestion of others are all
basically the same thing.

This is clearly delusional, and flies in the face of reason. To
pretend that this sort of redefinition of words, creation of
obfuscating euphemisms and ignorance of fact represents "objectivity"
is to redefine "objectivity" and to insult any notions of a scientific
appraisal of issues of fact.

It is to abuse the English language, to abuse one's readers, and to
coddle dangerous delusions while masquerading as an objective
examiner. It is to falsely conflate different things, while creating
pointless and nonexistent distinctions between things which are not
different.

There is a difference between objectively examining an issue from all
sides, rejecting delusional beliefs from all parties, then presenting
the factual issues concerning a controversy with no animus toward
either side; and accepting the public statements of deceptive groups
as the truth, minimizing even the most glaring examples of wrongdoing
by a group, ignoring the group's written policies, then slapping
deceptive, obfuscatory labels on everything in sight to avoid
offending anyone with the truth.

I would place this line at the use of the phrase "New Religious
Movement" rather than "cult."

I have demonstrated that the word "cult" is a valid term to apply to
high-pressure groups, and that the word can be used accurately to
refer to a number of groups, not all of which are "New," "Religious"
or "Movements." I have further demonstrated that the category created

by the use of the word "cult" does, in fact, represent a phenomenon
deserving of a word.

I have also demonstrated that every word in the phrase "New Religious
Movement" not only fails to describe any recognizable phenomenon in a
meaningful way, but that each word, individually and in concert, takes
away meaning, destroys useful distinctions, and creates a
proliferation of false impressions. Those who use the phrase "New
Religious Movement" are more likely to dismiss any wrongdoing by
cults, to minimize the responsibility of the cult leader, and to
ignore secular aspects of "Religious" organizations which are of great
interest and importance.

The tendency to do this is rooted in the very use of the phrase.
Those who think of cults as "New Religious Movements" are defying
reality, engaging in semantic pollution, and deluding themselves and
others. The phrase insults legitimate religion while fraudulently
ascribing to cults the good aspects of "normal" religious groups,
political associations and mass movements.

I find those who will calmly and "objectively" talk about cults to be
similar to someone who watches someone being knifed to death without
doing anything but taking notes, analyzing the trajectory of the knife
and the techniques of the killer, then ignoring the moral issues of
murder and the sin involved in standing by idly, while criticizing
anyone who attempts to stop the murderer as a biased fanatic.

Rob

Copyright 1997 Robert W. Clark
Noncommercial, unaltered redistribution of this article
is permitted. All rights to commercial distribution reserved.

--
First Online Church of "Bob"
http://www.modemac.com/

Up one level
Back to document index

Original file name: "New Religious Movements"

This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.