Sects, Cults and Religious Movements: [Introduction]Author(s): Theodore E. Long and Jeffrey K. HaddenSource: Sociological Analysis, Vol. 40, No. 4, Sects, Cults and Religious Movements (Winter,1979), pp. 280-282Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3709957 .

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Sects, Cults and Religious Movements For the second time in as many years, an entire issue of Sociological Analysis is being

devoted to sects, cults and religious movements. This special attention to the study of new religions reflects the remarkable scholarly interest in these phenomena among sociologists of religion. That great fascination of ours is all the more striking in view of its virtual absence only a decade ago when SA devoted two issues to assessing developments in our field during the 1960s and to forecasting its likely directions for the 1970s. A brief review of those contrasting emphases is instructive for appreciating the social and intellectual significance of the scholarship presented here.

The interests and concerns expressed in that 1970 symposium reflected three major developments of the 1960s. By far the most significant was an unprecedented outpouring of empirical research on religion, pivoting around the pioneering work of Charles Y. Glock. In collaboration with a number of graduate students, Glock defined an agenda of significant empirical issues and systematically examined them through careful measure- ment and detailed analysis. Second, clearly in reaction to the first, scholars developed a concern for integrating this empirical knowledge with classical theory in the sociology of religion. At the same time, a small group of scholars outside the emerging empirical wing of the discipline were producing creative theoretical work informed by the classics but directed toward the distinctive historical dilemmas of religion in the modern -and modernizing-world. Most prominent among the developers of this third trend were Peter Berger and Robert Bellah.

Looking back, it is difficult to find anything in that symposium to suggest that the study of new religions would become an important agenda for sociologists-or for society-in the 1970s. Indeed, much of the literature assessed there pointed to the declining importance of religion itself in secular society. Luckmann had seen that religion was becoming "invisible," Stark and Glock had foreseen a "post-Christian era," and Bellah sought to discover a basis for meaning "beyond belief." In the context of religion's presumed demise, sects and cults held little interest for sociologists of religion, and what little was written about them emphasized their deviance rather than their religiosity. More important than sects and cults were questions of religion's future without its traditional functions and society's functioning without religious legitimation.

While sociologists were preoccupied with those problems, however, the youth counter- culture of the late 1960s became infatuated with the possibility of new consciousness through religion. The counterculture itself barely survived the sixties, but the plethora of new religions - and old ones rediscovered - spawned in its wake made a substantial impact on religion and society alike. As the sects and cults of the seventies penetrated conventional life, they rejuvenated religious consciousness throughout society. And as they clashed with established institutions, they brought religion once more to center stage as a public issue of political, legal and economic significance.

The unexpected return of religion to social prominence may have caught us somewhat off guard, but we did not waste any time getting in on the action. In 1971 Glock and Bellah, a seemingly odd couple, teamed up to direct a series of student investigations of "the new religious consciousness" emerging from the counterculture. By then, several young scholars were already at work studying cults and sects in other locations. As this work came to fruition-and as the new religions made more headlines-new waves of scholars entered the field, producing a steady increase in published material on these movements. And the Jonestown tragedies seem to have sparked a new round of research among yet another cohort of investigators. At the present time, the literature on new religions constitutes perhaps the single largest corpus of scholarship in the sociology of religion.

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SECTS, CULTS AND RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 281

So rapid and sweeping was our conversion to these new concerns that it rendered our scholarship, old and new, suspect as mere fad or fashion, lacking sustained social or intellectual significance. It is clear that both our earlier preoccupations and our current fascinations arose in response to the social fortunes of religion, and the papers collected here are unabashedly concerned with current social issues surrounding new religions. At the same time, however, they also move the study of those movements beyond social and intellectual fashion to issues of enduring theoretical and political significance for the relation of religion and society. In so doing, they not only bear the fruit of a decade's worth of ethnographic investigations and theoretical musings on sects and cults, but they also testify to the continuing importance and utility of those developments which preoccupied scholars in the 1960s.

The two articles by Bainbridge and Stark exemplify a number of these trends. In collaboration with Glock, Rodney Stark helped define the important empirical develop- ments of the 1960s. For most of this decade he has pursued interests outside the sociology of religion, but stimulated by William Bainbridge's provocative work on cults, he has now returned to the fold. As an earlier seminal essay on "Religion in 5-D" had done, their stimulating conception of churches, sects and cults published in JSSR (June, 1979) heralded a program of theoretically grounded empirical research. Their lead article here ("Cult Formation: Three Compatible Models") provides a major theoretical anchor for that program. Building on the principle of exchanging compensators outlined in the JSSR article, Bainbridge and Stark use the rapidly accumulating ethnographic literature on cults to outline three conceptually integrated models of cult formation. While most interpreta- tions of cult development rely on a psychopathology model, Bainbridge and Stark also find evidence to support what they call the entrepreneurial and subcultural-evolutionary models, each of which they sketch here for the first time. Those additions locate the origins of cults in the normal contingencies of social life, and taken together with the psychopathology model, provide a much stronger basis for understanding the genesis of new religions. Their second contribution, coauthored with Daniel Doyle ("Cults of America: A Recon- naissance in Space and Time") is the first comprehensive ecological analysis of the geographical distribution and temporal development of cults in twentieth-century America. That pioneering empirical analysis relies on the equally original data set amassed by J. Gordon Melton in his recently published Encyclopedia of American Religions.

During the 1970s, Roland Robertson has emerged as one of the foremost theorists in the sociology of religion. His work is distinguished especially for its combination of a sensitive cultivation of the classics with incisive analyses of modern culture and politics to address major issues in the relation of religion and society. Here ("Religious Movements and Modern Societies") he again follows the strategy in a critical reflection on conventional approaches to the study of new religions built around the issues of church and sect. His review of the classic formulations of the church-sect problem (by Hegel, Weber and Troeltsch) and their appropriation in modern scholarship lays the groundwork for a subtle critique and reformulation of both. Locating the center of the church-sect problem in the general relationship of individual and society, Robertson suggests that cultic phenomena express the modern breakdown of distinctions between sacred and secular, public and private, and society and the state, which previously organized the relation of the individual and society. The significance of cults, both analytic and political, arises from their efforts both to exploit and to redefine the changing meaning of these cultural organizing principles. While that conclusion implies that our work has often been more a symptom of the problem than an analysis of it, it also reveals a path toward genuine analysis that is also politically relevant.

The tragedy at Jonestown, Guyana, in November, 1978, triggered reams of journalistic commentary about cults in general and the People's Temple in particular. At the regional

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282 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

and national meetings of our professional societies in 1979, sociologists added their share of comment and speculation, most of which was not much more illuminating than the initial press coverage of the mass suicides. Doyle Paul Johnson's contribution to this issue ("Dilemmas of Charismatic Leadership") is a notable exception. Beginning with the classic Weberian proposition that charismatic leadership is inherently precarious, Johnson develops a conceptual scheme to describe how leaders may deal with this problem. He then uses this model to outline an ex postfacto interpretation of the unfolding history of the Rev. Jim Jones and his People's Temple. Johnson's framework permits us to understand the Jonestown tragedy as a "natural" outcome of a long series of contingencies rather than as a bizarre psychopathological episode, an interpretation prominent in press coverage. And he stimulates us to reconsider our theoretical assumptions about charismatic leadership.

There are few examples of social science investigators successfully gaining entree to two groups in conflict. David Bromley and Anson Shupe managed to accomplish this feat in a recently completed study of the Unification Church and its adversaries. Just off the press, "Moonies" in America is described by John Lofland, veteran Moon watcher, as "the single most comprehensive, in-depth and objective source of facts on Sun Myung Moon and his movement." In a forthcoming companion volume, The New Vigilantes, Shupe and Bromley report on their companion investigation of the anticult movement. The paper published here ("The Moonies and the Anti-cultists") uses a resource mobilization approach to show how the anti-cult movement arose out of the family and religion in response to the threat of "world-transformation," and how it was shaped by the distinctive resources and limitations of those formative institutions. That analysis foreshadows Shupe and Bromley's second monograph, and we hope it will stimulate many readers to pick up the first, on which this paper builds.

In his paper on cults and moral accountability ("The Pursuit of Innocence") Frederick Bird reconsiders a classic issue in contemporary context. We have traditionally assumed that religious commitment binds people more strongly to the moral order, but Bird shows that cult religion today tends to reduce the individual sense of moral accountability. From the point of initiation, which is Bird's focus here, new religions impress upon the convert a relation to the sacred, a structure of authority and a moral model which diminishes the sense of accountability, though in slightly different ways depending on the type of group. This unlikely pattern, he suggests, arises from the modern dilemma of moral accountability organized by the persistent demands of institutional norms in an era which glorifies personal liberation from those norms. By showing that the historical context of religion shapes its moral relevance in unanticipated ways, he calls us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions.

Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" is one of the most celebrated papers of modern social science. The lessons of this classic paper are many, but none is more important than the role of observers' taken-for-granted values in determining how we understand culture and society. Paralleling the Miner paper in style and form, the final paper by David Bromley and Anson Shupe ("The Tnevnoc Cult") sends us a powerful message about the role of our common stock of cultural values in understanding contemporary "new religions." Their essay should prompt reflection on the extent to which our fascination with "cults" has been shaped by society's concerns rather than analytic ones.

Even as they consolidate past traditions and much of the past decade's work on new religions, these papers transcend both and point the way to productive lines of inquiry for the 1980s. We are pleased to highlight them in this special issue, and we hope they will stimulate you as much as they have us.

THEODORE E. LONG JEFFREY K. HADDEN

Guest Editors

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