29. Church-Sect—cult (original) (raw)
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A Sign of the Types: A Critical Reflection on the Church-Sect Typology
Perichoresis
Religion comes in many shapes and sizes, and the classification of religious movements may help scholars understand how these groups form, develop and change. One of the most common tools used in the sociology of religion to do so is the church-sect typology, which is rooted in the basic idea that religious movements can be placed along a continuum according to their degree of congruence with mainstream society. This article provides an overview of how this kind of thinking developed, in order to show how the church-sect typology has been widely accepted and built upon, as well as being heavily criticised by other sociologists. The first part consists of a survey of early versions of the typology, contains different methods of classifying religious movements and provides further explanations where necessary, especially where the term ‘cult’ is concerned. The next section is focused on the many criticisms of the church-sect typology as a whole, after which some possible solutions are...
Culture and Religion 16:4 (2015) 345-371. Scholars have long worried over the fact that the categories of religion that they bring to their scholarship imperfectly match folk classifications of the “same” religion. The more precisely we attempt to define a religion, the more the target seems to elude our grasp. Here I argue that by looking at religions through the lens of genre theory we can make more sense of both the ambiguities of classifications as well as the apparent uniformity assumed by scholars and practitioners at any given moment. Categories are nouns. The tack taken by a genre theory is to think of genres in a verbal sense as being performed (or not) by producers and distinguished (or not) by critics. When the emphasis shifts to actions and decisions made by individuals, we begin to address the variations and fluctuations that could not be accounted for when religious classes were understood as either objectively or analytically given. Moreover, when religious categories are simply taken as given, we have no way to talk about the origin of new categories (i.e., of new religions). Emphasizing the verbal aspect of producing and of criticizing, allows us to explain the origins of religions as the efforts of producers and critics working in tandem.
Sects, Cults, and New Religions. Introduction to Volume 3: Academy, Modernity, Society, and Culture
Sects, Cults, and New Religions, 4 volume reprint set, Vol. 3, pp. 1-7., 2014
This third volume presents research on new religious movements with particular regards to how they are approached within the academy, how they are situated within modernity and its attendant secularising tendencies, and their relationship to the normative cultures of which they are a part. Rather than focusing upon the particulars of any given new religion, this volume rather highlights the contexts within which new religions are understood and interpreted, be they intellectual, historical, or socio-cultural. In drawing together this research, this volume provides an overview of key issues that arise at the intersection of new religious behaviours with other, non-religious, domains.
Sects, Cults, and New Religious Movements: An Introduction
Sect, Cults, and New Religions, 4 volume reprint set, Vol. 1, pp. 1-11. , 2014
The guiding principles for this four-volume collection of reprinted articles and chapters are straightforward and were reached by consensus among the editors. First, in addition to those classics that are rightly known and respected, we have sought to also include studies of an equal standard that have been neglected or have otherwise failed to reach the deserved broad audience, usually as a result of initial publication in obscure journals or small print-run edited volumes and conference proceedings. Second, we have aimed for a balance between the usual emphasis upon either a broad theoretical orientation, or conversely, a bias towards case studies, with an equal and complementary focus on both. Third, we have selected works that are representative of the academic study of new religious movements (NRMs), with a range of methodological approaches being included, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and psychology. Thus, we hope that the methodological rigour of the content is matched by the empirical richness of the panoply of new religions examined.
Defining Religions In and Out of Existence: From the Ranters to the Church of the SubGenius
Religion, Art and Performance & The Cutting Edge (BASR), The Open University (Milton Keynes Campus), 3-5 September 2014
Taxonomies in the scientific study of religion tend to be problematic, in that they are used to determine what is and is not ‘religion’. Yet Jonathan Z. Smith has encouraged the development of ‘alternative taxonomic strategies, particularly those that do not take some modified form of essentialism as their model’ (1996: 393), arguing that ‘[s]cholarly labor is a disciplined exaggeration in the direction of knowledge; taxonomy is a valuable tool in achieving that very distortion” (1996: 403). The Church of the SubGenius (COSG), founded in 1979, is often derided as a parody religion: its guru J. R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs is deemed ‘precisely worthless’, and members mocked as a ‘sophomoric priesthood’ (Mann 1995). A major factor affecting such assessments is the lewd, humorous, and blasphemous nature of COSG teachings, which appears inimical to ‘real’ religion. I have elsewhere noted that the Ranters, a seventeenth century English antinomian group, provide a useful comparison to the COSG (Cusack 2010). The Ranters shocked the Christian establishment with their rejection of all authority: church, scripture, and political. The notorious Laurence Clarksonon (1615-1667), the ‘Captain of the Rant’, claimed that ‘that a believer is free from all traditional restraints, that sin is a product only of the imagination, and that private ownership of property is wrong’. Heretical discourses such as this were ‘ranted’ in public, the group used nudity and sexual acts as social protests, they were radically anti-materialist, and deemed to be a threat to the social order (Smith 1983). It would thus seem that COSG has a legitimate pedigree in the history of Western religion, one that stresses anarchic protest, sensual indulgence and innate divinity in opposition to the traditional Christian virtues of obedience, chastity and the acknowledgement of humanity’s sinful nature (Cusack 2010: 106-107). A direct genealogy that connects COSG to the Ranters is not proposed, yet the exercise of comparing the two justifies Smith’s assessment of taxonomy as a definitional tool facilitating a move in the direction of knowledge.
Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 33
2023
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