THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS
Benjamin Zablocki
It’s not always easy to separate birth from death in
the study of new religious movements.
One aspect of this difficulty is captured well in T.S. Eliot’s poem
about the three kings who were led by a star to journey to
.
. . were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We
had evidence and no doubt. I had seen
birth and death,
But
had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We
returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But
no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I
should be glad of another death.
In planning this paper, my original intention was simply to
report some demographic facts about a database that I have been building. These facts have to do with the beginnings
and endings of 100 new religious movements (nrms) of the 19th and 20th
centuries and the births and deaths of their charismatic leaders. But as my research progressed, my attention
kept on being drawn to the moment when a religion’s charismatic founder dies. There is a sense in which, if the religion
manages to survive this trauma, only then is the new religious movement is born
as a real religion as opposed to a mere cultic fellowship. This fascination with the interconnection
between personal death and institutional birth in turn led me to an interest in
crises of succession in the early decades of a religion’s history. By such turns, the original topic of this
paper partially slipped away from me and perhaps the paper should now be titled
“The Birth and Adolescence of New Religious Movements.” But I’ve kept the old title as indicative of
my longer range ambitions for this project.
And in the closing pages of this paper, I do manage to say a few things
about the deaths of new religious movements in earnest of the fuller treatment
I want to give this topic in the future.
All religions, except perhaps the
very earliest and most primitive, begin as new religious movements. That is, they begin as movements based on
spiritual innovation usually in a state of high oppositional tension with prevailing religious
practices. Often, they are begun by
charismatic religious entrepreneurs. In
Western history, the earliest nrm of which we have records is the monotheistic
sun god cult of the Egyptians Akhenaten and Nefertiti begun in 1353 BC. This cult was not able to survive the deaths
of its charismatic founders and Egyptian society quickly reverted to its
traditional polytheistic religion.
Tolerant co-existence of both of these religions within the same society
was not a possibility in ancient
The kinds of new religious movements
that I am interested in are thus comparatively recent phenomena requiring the
sort of religious pluralism that began to emerge in
. . . no person within the said Colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinions in matters of religion, that do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said Colony; but that all . . . may from time to time, and in all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments . . . not using this liberty to licentiousness and profaneness, nor to the civil injury or outward disturbance of others. (Ahlstrom 1972, 170)
In
. . . all who swore, or
affirmed, the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary, rejected the
jurisdiction of the pope, transubstantiation, the Mass, and the invocation of
the Virgin and saints . . . were granted freedom of worship. It was a personal toleration, not a territorial
adjustment as in
These important 17th
century cultural innovations laid the foundation for the gradual evolution of
full religious pluralism in
For these
historic reasons, I have taken the 200 year period from 1800 to 2000 as my
historical frame within which to look at new religious movements.[3] I began with a base of 41 contemporary nrms
that I knew well through my own direct experience either as an ethnographer or
as an interviewer or both. To this I
added and additional 59 religious movements for which my research involved
primarily examination of secondary documents, although in a few cases, I also
interviewed current or former members.
This has given me a data base of 100 new religious movements to work
with whose starting dates range from 1805 to 1988. This data base is still highly dominated by
North American nrms although I have begun to include religious movements from
other nations as well. My plan is to
eventually expand this data base further to approximately triple its current
size and to include many more nrms from continents other than
On the following pages, I present, in tabular form, the 100
new religious movements in the current data base. In each case the starting date for the nrm is
given and, if the movement no longer exists, the ending date as well. Only nrms that were founded by a charismatic
leader were considered for inclusion in this data base. In each case the name of the leader is given
along with birth year and year of death where applicable.[4]
DESCRIPTIONS
OF THE 100 GROUPS AND CHARISMATIC LEADERS
Before going on to discuss the groups in this table, something should be said about the criteria for inclusion and what larger population these 100 groups are meant to represent. I have already mentioned that religious movements founded earlier than 1800 were excluded from consideration as were any whose founding and ending dates could not be determined. Also excluded were any whose founding was not associated with a charismatic leader who could be identified by name and whose dates of birth and death were known. Only nrms with names[5] and public identities[6] were included. In addition, I made a rather arbitrary decision to include only religious movements whose membership was open to both males and females. This criterion excluded certain Wicca groups and other interesting nrms from consideration. I’m not sure I can defend this decision except by noting that I often found it difficult to find objective criteria for distinguishing single-sex religious movements from monastic orders and the latter are an entirely different kettle of fish with respect to the issues I am trying to look at. Admittedly, I stretched this somewhat arbitrary inclusion criterion in one instance in which the nrm was made up of a male charismatic leader all of whose followers were women.
In addition to deliberate selection criteria, there are
also known sampling biases in this database.
Ideally, I would have liked to draw a representative sample of all co-ed
charismatic nrms with public identities that have had start dates within the
last two centuries. In fact, this
selection of 100 nrms is biased in under representing the more ephemeral
movements especially among the 19th century cases. I have tried to compensate for this bias to
some degree by being particularly zealous in tracking down information about
short-lived groups in both centuries. Although
I have had some success in this compensation, it can’t come close to balancing
out the many highly ephemeral groups that must have been overlooked. A somewhat less irreparable, but no less
serious source of bias in this selection is geographical. The greatest share of these
100 nrms are located in the
An examination of Table 1 indicates
that most new religious movements do not survive much longer than a single
generation. Looking only at those nrms
that were started in the 19th century,[8] we see
that half survived only 37 years or less.
If nrm disintegration were a random phenomenon with any group having a
certain constant probability of disintegrating in any year, we would expect to
find half of those remaining after 37 years to be gone within another 37
years. In other words, we would then say
that 37 years is the half life of a new religious movement. Instead we find that more than half of those
remaining in existence after the first 37 years survive for more than a
century. From this we can conclude that
nrm survival is not random. One
possibility is that certain creeds, or certain types of organization, or
certain kinds of charismatic leaders impart to their religious movements a
differential ability to survive. Another
possibility is that all groups start out with more or less equal likelihood of
survival but, the longer an nrm survives, the greater its chances of continuing
to survive. We cannot distinguish
between these two hypotheses with this database. Simply by coincidence, of the 100 nrms in the
data base, exactly half have disintegrated and half are still in existence.
Turning our attention to the
charismatic leaders, the first thing that jumps out at us is that they are
overwhelmingly (94%) male. Even among
the six groups that were not founded by male charismatic leaders, three were
founded by male-female partners and in two of the additional three there was a
charismatic male figure in the background.
A majority of the leaders (58%) are White Americans which reflects
nothing more than the current selection bias of the database. About one fifth are
of Asian background, a majority of these from
Founding a new religious movement,
however, is a young man’s game. As Table
2 indicates, the majority of our leaders were between 25 and 39 years of age
when they founded their movements.
However, there is a great variance within the range. The youngest was 13 when he founded his
movement (as “the teenage guru”) and the oldest was 69. That one’s thirties is prime time for gaining
a charismatic religious following fits with what we know of the founders of the
major world religions at least in the West.
As far as it is possible to discern, Moses[9] and
Jesus were both around this age when their movements took shape. Muhammad was
probably a little older, in his very late 30s or early 40s. The historical dating is inexact but we know
that he was about 50 years old at the time of the Hijrah.
Finally, with respect to
demographics, we may observe that there is no particular pattern in our data as
to the sequencing of the death of the leader and the disintegration of the
movement. Among the 50 cases for which
such comparisons are possible, the leader died before the nrm disintegrated in
19 of the cases and in the same year in eight of the cases. In the remaining 23 cases, the leader was
still alive when the religious movement disintegrated.
The raw statistical facts that
emerge from this data base, of course, don’t begin to exhaust the richness of
the material. Each of the nrms is worthy
of a full length monograph and many have been the subjects of several
such. Each of the charismatic leaders is
worthy of a book length biography and several have been subjects of such
treatment. Just to give a bit of a sense
of the enormous variation that is packed into the rubric of “charismatic
leader” let me briefly describe two examples.
Meher Baba, whose picture is featured on the cover page of this paper was born in
I am 34 years old.
I have done everything there is to do.
I have been a maitre d’ in a fine restaurant and a
used car salesman. I have peddled
phony jewelry and flown people to
Today, Baranco’s nrm is still thriving although he, himself, is serving a prison sentence for the possession and sale of narcotics.
My interest, however is not to
describe specific nrms, or specific charismatic leaders, but to attempt to find
patterns that cut across many of these groups and their leaders and to develop
explanations at a middling level of generality to account for these
patterns.
DEFINITIONS AND METHODS OF PROCEDURE
What is this entity of which I have identified 100 specimens for our consideration? I have been calling them new religious movements but each of the three words in this label is problematic and requires further specification. First, what is so “new” about these new religious movements? Genuinely new religious ideas and practices are not all that common. Often we find that the ideas and practices that comprise a particular religious movement are new only in a combinatoric sense. Beliefs, rituals, structures borrowed from many older sources may thus comprise a new religion only in the sense that they have never before been combined before in this particular way. Of course, all religions combine new ideas and practices with others borrowed from older traditions. But, in some new religious movements, it may be hard to identify any specific elements that are genuinely new (Hexham and Poewe 1997). Moreover, sometimes we do not find even combinatoric originality and a movement turns out to be new only in the sense of “new to you.” In other words, in our global culture it is not uncommon for a charismatic entrepreneur from, say, India, to bring an existing religious movement relatively intact to the West where it is experienced by its devotees as entirely new to their experience and sensibilities.
Second, the term “religious” is not
as straightforward as it might at first appear.
There is probably no reasonably concise definition of religion that
would apply to all 100 groups on the list.
Certainly not all of them believe in a god or gods. Some nrms shade off in the direction of
psychological or self-help movements. Is
Alcoholics Anonymous a religious movement?
I have not included it or est or Silva Mind
Control although some would argue that these groups are held together through a
religious or spiritual faith. On the
other hand, some groups on the list seem to have a largely therapeutic
agenda. I have not employed any rigid
rule of inclusion but have generally looked for at least some involvement of
the movement with a supernatural world, or supernatural beings, or supernatural
processes in order to include it.
Third, in what sense are religions “social movements?” I think that in their early stages, most of
them are, but that the major world religions come to outgrow this
classification. This is an important
distinction. It should be clear that I
am dealing in this paper with relatively simple early-stage religions. Of
course, I am not making a claim to be able to distinguish among religions
according to the simplicity or complexity of their theologies, practices, or
teachings. Such judgments are not within
the scope of sociology. But I do find it
useful to distinguish a religion that is coterminous with a single religious
organization (simple) from one in which there are multiple and possibly
overlapping organizational affiliations within the entire faith community
(complex). There is no value judgment
here but simply a statement about structural complexity. One simplifying assumption that this allows
us to make is that a simple religion is structured in such a way that the terms
“religion” and “religious organization” can be used synonymously. Although this assumption works well and is
quite helpful in studying nrms, it becomes increasingly questionable as we
attempt to apply the approach to older more complex religions.
And what about the term
charismatic. For most
purposes, we may employ the classical Weberian (1947 : 328) definition of charisma as a condition of “devotion to
the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an
individual person, of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by
him.” Elsewhere (Zablocki 1980a), however, I have argued that charisma is better
understood as a relational property than as an individual property and that its
dynamics can only be understood in terms of the reciprocal effects that leaders
and followers have on one another. As we
shall see, some of the events, particularly in the early years of a new
religious movement can best be understood by keeping in mind the relational
nature of charismatic authority.
What I am trying to
do in this research project is to employ a method of exploration of deep
analogies among large numbers of cases of the same socio-cultural entity. My goal is to steer a way on this narrow path
between the miasma of historicism on the one hand and the excessive
“gridification” of multivariate analysis on the other. I am attempting to generalize through the
abstraction of patterns or syndromes found repeatedly across a number of cases
although perhaps never in exactly the same form twice.
In addition, I’m trying to tease out
linkages among different levels of analysis—macro, meso, and micro. The meso micro linkages are perhaps clear in
my concern with the interplay between the short life of a charismatic leader
and the (potentially) long life of a religion.
But these interactions are also dependent upon the influence of the
macro level as well. Charismatic leaders
do not appear in a vacuum nor do religious movements. Both are the products, in part, of larger
social and cultural trends.
Macro linkages are the least developed so far in my
research. Although I do not ignore the
importance of (for example) government authorities and economic forces, I deal
with them as externalities.[10] As externalities, they may constrain but do
not themselves have a major role in shaping religious
beliefs and practices. Although there is
no reason in principle why this approach would not be able to incorporate such
linkages, the simple version of the approach that I have outlined here more or
less assumes that religions exist in a semi-vacuum in which the only
significant others are rival religions and the temptations of the secular world
competing for the same “customers.”
With regard to these “customers,” another assumption that
limits the applicability of my current approach is an assumption of
psychological homogeneity among consumers of religion. We know that some people, in Freud’s (1953) terms, are “not religiously talented” and that others
are not happy unless religion is occupying the place of central importance in
their lives, whereas most of us fall somewhere in-between these two
extremes. This limitation is not so
important as long as we are dealing, as I am, with aggregates of highly
committed religious seekers and true believers.
But variation in the religious saliency would need to be considered more
fully before this approach could pretend to be useful in understanding the
religious choices of entire populations.
Using the approach outlined above, I would like to use the remainder of this paper to briefly touch on four themes that emerge for me out of an examination of the 100 stories contained in my database and which also, I believe, resonate in interesting ways with what we know about some of our well-established world religions. These themes are the following: (1) the sense of urgency and recurring crisis that mark the relationship between a religious fellowship and its charismatic founder during the founder’s lifetime; (2) the phenomenon of the “charismatic second”, in which the death of the charismatic founder frequently gives rise to a crisis of succession in which a different type of charismatic leader emerges; (3) the struggle for control of the “means of authentication” that determines a religion’s fate (or at least its power structure) as the charismatic legacy of its founder recedes into collective memory; and (4) the prolonged and boring deaths of many religious movements, particularly those that have overly routinized their charismatic legacies.
URGENCY AND APOCOLYPSE: THE
CHARISMATIC ATTEMPT TO CONTROL TIME
Time tends to flow choppily in many
religious movements during the early years when the leader is still alive. There are many short urgent spurts of crisis
that punctuate longer intervals in which nothing much seems to happen and time
moves slowly. In Jewish historical
tradition, the curious juxtaposition of the story of the unleavened bread
followed by the forty years in the wilderness perfectly captures this “hurry up
and wait” mode of religious being-in-the-world.
Among the 100 nrms we are investigating, this is reflected in an
observation frequently made by participants in these groups that “the days feel
long but the years feel short.”[11] A good sociological treatment of the
phenomenon of urgency has yet to be written but I think it is impossible to
understand many aspects of religions in their early years without appreciating
the important role that urgency plays.
I would argue that this urgency
stems in large part from the conscious or unconscious collective realization of
how soon death is going to rob the young religious movement of its leader. And when the followers forget, the leader may
be quick to remind them. Note, for
example, the famous rebuke that Jesus gave his disciples when they chastised a
woman for paying attention to Jesus instead of ministering to the poor: “For ye
have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always (Matthew 26:11). In a more sinister way, this can be seen in
the way Jim Jones, in the weeks before the mass suicide, continually harangued his flock
for causing his aches and pains and driving him to an early grave by their
shortcomings.
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939) argued that religion’s dirty little secret was its
desire to murder its leader and be free of him.
As evidence for this, he presents the historically unlikely hypothesis that
the Israelites killed Moses and hid the body before hightailing it into the
Promised Land. Judging by the stories of
the 100 groups in the database, I find this hypothesis highly unlikely. In no case among the 100 was a charismatic
leader killed by his followers. If
anything, the followers have more to fear from the leader, as violent crimes
against disciples and mass suicides are not entirely unknown. Sometimes of course, these events do wind up
taking the leader down along with his people.
It seems to me that the dirty little
secret of early religion with respect to its leader is not a death wish but a
sex wish. How did Freud miss that? Documented and/or alleged cases of sexual
intercourse between followers and leaders of new religious movements are found
in a significant majority of our 100 cases.
This seems to be true in the celibate groups as well as those that
believed in monogamous or plural marriage.
It seems to have been true of male as well as female followers including
many with no pre-conversion history of homosexual orientation. And it was as true among the 19th
century nrms as among those of the more permissive 20th
century. The most common term of
reproach used to characterize leaders of 19th century new religious
movements, by their enemies and critics, was “whoremonger.”
The sense I get is that the
motivation for much of this urgent illicit sexuality is not so much erotic
attraction but severe chronic separation anxiety. The followers are desperate to keep some
tangible connection to the leader, to preserve something of him inside
them. The danger of this urgency for the
nrm can be extremely great regardless of whether or not it is manifested
sexually. The danger is that this
urgency can easily set the stage for an impossibly escalating set of demands
between leader and followers in which each side continues to up the ante in a
way that can only lead to an apocalyptic denouement. Such apocalyptic endings are, unfortunately,
far from unknown among nrms.
Such danger may be an intrinsic
characteristic of charismatic social movements. The exercise of charisma
produces not only loyalty and enthusiasm but expectations as well. A fundamental problem posed by charismatic
authority is charisma’s tendency to create cycles of reciprocally escalating
demands between the leader and the leader’s agents that result, for the
collectivity, in a positive feedback loop which must, sooner or later, spin out
of control unless the charisma becomes routinized or the agents made
deployable.
Coleman has suggested that charisma
can be explained as a rational response to the free rider problem (Coleman 1990). If all the
members of a collectivity can somehow agree to transfer authority over their
own actions to
a leader who will make decisions on behalf of the group, there can be a vast
increase in “social capital” allowing the collectivity to perform actions
beyond the sum of the abilities of the aggregate of individuals. It is possible to see how the maintenance of
even a very costly structure for perpetuating charismatic influence can
therefore be rational for a collectivity in its pursuit of ambitious collective
goals requiring many willing hands.
However, charismatic compliance is never or rarely in the interest of a
reasonably competent individual conceived as a simple hedonic actor. As Coleman points out (Coleman 1990, 75ff) what is puzzling about charismatic influence is why a
rational actor would ever submit to it.
An individual's control over his own
actions is inalienable. The compliance
of an agent can be revoked at any moment, however long the history of
fidelity. This is illustrated well in
the old joke about The Lone Ranger and Tonto who suddenly one day find
themselves completely surrounded by ten thousand Indians on the warpath.
Neither sees any way of escape. The Lone
Ranger turns to his faithful companion and says, “Well, Tonto, it looks like
we're really trapped this time.” Tonto smiles back at his friend and says, “What do you mean we, kemo sabe?” For a charismatic collectivity to have any
degree of stability over time, it must find a way to create agents that are not
merely enthusiastic and committed but deployable as well. Otherwise, a rational individual will retain
authority over his or her own decision making while taking a free ride on the
charismatic investments of all the other members. This will eventually create for the group
second-order and higher free rider problems.
In the short run, this problem can
be staved off by a continuing cycle of crises and triumphs. But the point made by Weber (Weber 1947, 362) about the need for charismatic authority to be
continually proved thrusts two ways. If
the charismatic leader can never rest on his laurels in legitimating his
authority, neither can the leader's agent be trusted to remain loyal through
yet another crisis, just because he or she has been trustworthy in the
past. The charismatic leader must appear to be capable of
accomplishing extraordinary deeds.
Otherwise, there is no basis for the heavy claims that charismatic
influence makes on its agents. But one
of the things that makes such accomplishments possible is the trustworthiness
of the leader’s agents. This trustworthy corps of agents allows the
leader to accomplish deeds that appear even more miraculous which, in turn,
justify even greater claims on the followers.
It is
obvious that such a system, caught in a positive feedback loop of mutually
increasing expectations of miracles and loyalty, can never attain
equilibrium. The most common way out of
this dilemma, of course, is for the charismatic authority to be
routinized. But, for those groups
wishing or needing to keep their charismatic edge (and thus their competitive
appeal in a faith marketplace whose shoppers tend to be bored by
non-charismatic religion) another way out of the loop is to find a way for the
loyalty of the agents to be guaranteed regardless of the actions of the
leader. This is possible only to the
extent that the hedonic self is transformed into one that always gives
uncritical primacy to the goals of the collectivity with no thought of the
costs to one's own person. Only
individuals who have gone through such a transformation can be trusted to
support a charismatic leader in the long run.
The need for such transformation
gives us an important clue, I believe, as to one of
the more puzzling motifs of contemporary nrms—the repeated pattern of
apocalyptic confrontation with the outside world leading to collective violence
or collective suicide.
SEPARATION AND LOSS: CRISES OF
THE FIRST SUCCESSION
If
a new religious movement can avoid the trap of apocalyptic disintegration
during the charismatic founder’s lifetime, it still has to face the problem of
how to cope with his death. The
traumatic nature of this loss is poignantly expressed in the myths of both
Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, it
can be seen in the restriction placed by God upon Moses, “Thou shall not pass
over <into
In
Christianity, this transition is most vividly expressed in the noli me tangere moment (See Figure
1). This incident, popular among
renaissance and post-renaissance painters, refers to the resurrected Christ’s
appearance to Mary Magdalene. As she
reaches out to touch him he pulls away and says, “Touch me not; for I am not
yet ascended to my Father (John
A
big part of the problem of adjusting to the physical loss of the leader is that
the charismatic founder of a new religion, whether a potential world religion
or a small sect or cult is, for his followers, a source of ultimate authority.
Often this authority is of an antinomian quality (Adler 1972) startling the followers out of old sterile
preconceptions. This authority very often requires a break with the past, new
ways of thinking and tests of faith, leaps in the dark. Whether it is Jesus breaking the Sabbath, or
the Buddha turning away from the ascetic life, or the introduction of polygyny
to the Mormons by Joseph Smith Jr. [12], or the
introduction of plural marriage to the Oneida Community by John Humphrey Noyes (DeMaria 1978), the
charismatic founder of a new religion has often deliberately broken existing
laws and norms in order to call his disciples’ attention to the existence of a
higher law. This is fine as long as the
charismatic founder is alive. But what
happens to the religion when its founder dies?
Often, the first crisis to be faced by a new religion is the
crisis of the first succession. This is
the crisis that occurs when the charismatic founder dies. What is to become of the now bereft religion. Like most new small businesses, most new religions
do not survive the death of their charismatic founders.[13] Those that do survive must not only be able
to use the charismatic legacy to engender sufficient commitment but must also
respond to changing external conditions perhaps not foreseen by the religion’s
founder. Toth (1981) has pointed out that a surprisingly large number of
religious movements display an initial series of two great charismatic leaders
(e.g.: Moses/Joshua; Jesus,/Paul; Joseph Smith/Brigham
Young) and that the second leader’s gift is usually different from that of the
first. It is a gift for
consolidation. Sometimes there may be a
split, as with Peter and Paul, with two lesser charismatic leaders dividing the
instrumental and the expressive components of the charismatic legacy. This pattern of charismatic succession is
frequently seen among those nrms in my database that manage to survive the
death of their first leaders.
The problem that
brings about the first succession crisis is fairly straightforward. The charismatic founder of a new religion,
whether a potential world religion or a small sect or cult is, for his
followers, a source of ultimate authority. This authority very often requires a
break with the past, new ways of thinking and tests of faith, leaps in the
dark. When the leader dies, he leaves a
trust fund consisting of authentic interpretations of events, writings, and
practices. Along with this legacy is
left the problem of the management of this intangable trust and the problem of
how, bereft of the leader as the ultimate arbitor of inevitable disputes over
interpretation, the followers can avoid the twin problems of: excessive routinization (squeezing all of the
juice of the spirit from the letter of the teaching); and permanent revolution (continuation of
charismatic upheaval without the moral force and access to revealed truth that
characterize the great founder or founders of a religion.) The unique succession problem of religious
movements is that they must always remain in a state of partial routinization
always stirring the pot but never, after the beginning phase, allowing it again
to boil over. The stakes are high in
successfully finding a golden mean between the extremes of excessive
routinization and permanent revolution.
The needs of a religious movement
change as it grows and adjusts to loss of first leader. So the problem is not one of simply finding a
clone. Werner Stark (1970) discusses the problem of succession and what he calls
the role of the “Second.” He makes the
observation that new religions and religious groups are more often given their
final institutionalized forms by their second charismatic leader rather than by
their first. It is interesting to note
that, although very few of the founding charismatic leaders of the 100 nrms in
my database are women, quite a few of these “second” charismatic leaders were
women or male female couples. The
qualities demanded of leadership change.
These are qualities that Gusfield (1968) has referred to as mobilization leadership giving way
to articulation leadership and that Toth (1981) has referred to as the charisma of the outer call
giving way to the charisma of inner consolidation. Toth points out that the second leader of a
successful religious movement is also charismatic but of a very different sort
than the first leader. However, it is
this very binary division of charisma that creates what is often the first
serious crisis for religious movements.
The first succession crisis becomes the prototype for the crises of
authenticity which may be expected to recur sporadically throughout the
religion’s history.
CRISES OF AUTHENTICATION: THE QUEST
FOR DYNAMIC STABILITY
The power dimension in
religious movements is frequently overlooked but it is always there. In religions, power comes from control over
rights to distinguish authentic from inauthentic doctrine. From this perspective the study of religion
can be understood as the study of the struggle for control of the means of
authentication just as, In Marxian terms, the study of political economy can be
understood as the study of the struggle for control of the means of production.
Crises of
authentication are best understood in terms of the unique qualities of
charismatic movements, whether religious or political, that make the very
definition of authenticity a central issue.
Unlike business organizations, there is no generally agreed upon bottom
line by which religious or (revolutionary) political success can be
measured. In the absence of objective
standards of success, competing factions can easily accuse one another of idolatry, in Alan Berger’s (1986) sense, as the imprecise ascription of
ultimacy to the penultimate. It is easy
to derive multiple interpretations of intrinsically ambiguous teachings,
particularly when these are antinomian teachings. At the same time, obstacles to schismatic
fragmentation are few making it difficult to resist the temptation to subdivide
indefinitely into smaller and smaller ideologically homogeneous factions. Another way of putting this is that questions
of spirit vs letter are more important in religion than in most other social
institutions. This is particularly a
problem in religions that strive for epiphany through the transcendence of
rationality and logical distinctions.
Crises of authenticity are often found
in religious or political movements after the death of their founding fathers. The death of a charismatic founder provokes a
crisis of authenticity. The disciples or
followers remain faithful to the vision of the founder but lack clear direction
as to how to implement that vision. In
some instances, a new charismatic leader comes along immediately to provide an
institutionalized form for the vision.
In others, there is a lapse of years before this second phase
began. In some, the transition takes
place smoothly. However, in many, the
transition is accompanied by a trend toward greater concentration of authority,
sometimes taking this to totalitarian extremes.
Because of its importance in understanding religious
authority, it is important that we understand what is meant by authentication.
In his study of Protestant sectarianism, Stone (1996 :69) distinguishes authentication from authenticity as
follows:
In this context,
“authenticity” is a condition of legitimacy ascribed to a religious tradition
by its adherents; “authentication” is the activity or activities by which
members of religious groups or movements define the legitimate boundaries of
their faith communities.
“Authentication,” proper, is not to be understood as the result of these activities—the
definition of what is and what is not orthodox or legitimate. Rather, it is the process through which orthodoxy or legitimacy is determined. “Authenticity” is a claim that can only be
examined and confirmed by theological means, it is therefore beyond the range
of sociological inquiry. But, because “authentication”
is a process that can be studied independent of theological claims and
theological categories, one is better able to explore its conditions and
consequences through sociological and historical methods.
This distinction captures well the way I would like to use
these two words. However, Stone, in his
study of Protestant sectarianism focuses only on authentication in the service
of boundary definition. I use the term
in a broader sense to refer to any decisions concerning values and goals that
are made by or on behalf of the faith community to the extent that these
decisions are justified in religious terms.[14]
Authenticity is sometimes confused with legitimacy so a few
words should probably said about the distinctions that
I see between these two important overlapping concepts. Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate the
distinction is with an example drawn from Roman Catholicism. The Pope, as the head of the Catholic Church
has important powers in the realms of both legitimacy and authenticity. When the Pope expounds upon non-doctrinal
matters, he is exercising the legitimate authority of his office, and his
orders must be followed, but he is not necessarily saying anything about the
authenticity of the teachings from which his pronouncements derive. Indeed, he may later change his mind or
future Popes may over-rule him without creating a crisis of authenticity. When the Pope expounds on matters of
doctrine, he defining or interpreting matters of authenticity and at the same
time he is giving them legitimacy.
Finally, when the Pope elevates a person in the Catholic Church to
sainthood, he is making a judgment only about the authenticity of that person’s
vision not the legitimacy of that person’s authority. Legitimacy has to do with authority and
authenticity has to do with truth. In
religious life, authority and truth are usually more bound up with one another
than in other spheres of life. However,
these examples demonstrate that the two terms are not equivalent.
I have never been satisfied with Max Weber’s conceptual
treatment of the routinization of charisma.
My earlier research on religious sects and religious communes has
convinced me that the routinization of charisma is not typically the linear
devolution that Weber implies. Revivals
and renewals are commonplace among religious organizations especially in their
early decades. It is hard to think of a
young religion surviving for even for a half a century that has not had at
least one or two (Zablocki 1980b). But what is
it that is being revived or renewed during such episodes? I would argue that it is precisely the
charismatic spirit that engendered the religion initially that is renewed or
revived, although usually with diminished intensity. If this is correct, then the routinization of
charisma is much more of a cyclical and complex phenomenon than described by
Weber. All this implies that an
important aspect of the study of religions may be the study of what happens to
the charisma, particularly after the death of the religion’s founder.
On a slightly different tack, I am very interested in what
happens to religions in the modern world where they are
increasingly having to compete with one another in a faith
marketplace. This has led me to a
concern with the resources available to religions in their quest for market
niche and/or market share.[15] Since the charismatic legacy left to the
religious fellowship by its charismatic founder ranks high among these
resources, I am led once again to the same question, what happens to the
charisma. This charismatic legacy may be considered as a resource held in a
kind of fiduciary trust for the religious organization as a whole. But who are the trustees and how, if at all, are they regulated
by the religious fellowship as a whole?
In
During the first three generations of a new religion, many
are found to obey a kind of
iron law of charismatic devolution. This law says that the first generation gets
the vision and the actuality, the second generation gets the memory, and the
third generation gets the rules. A basic
assumption of the model I am presenting is that full routinization of charisma
cannot be allowed to happen if the religion is to thrive. Charisma must be tamed but not muzzled. Robert Lifton (1968) in his work on Communist China develops the concept
of Permanent Revolution as a way of thwarting the iron law of devolution. Swatos (1986) has argued that the relative success of the Calvinist
branch of Protestantism as opposed to the Lutheran branch is to be found in the
early incorporation of this notion of Permanent Revolution into the charismatic
legacy of the former but not the latter.
In
the absence of such Permanent Revolution, it is a particular temptation of
religions, as they move beyond their early stages, to commit idolatry in Alan
Berger’s (1986) sense of ascription of ultimacy to the
penultimate. The danger here is that the
sacred texts, the rituals, and the techniques of the religion may absorb the
charismatic legacy rather than the other way around. Perfectionism, apocalyptic millennialism, and
a fundamentalist insistence on the inerrency of sacred texts are three
examples of how religions have succumbed to this form of stultification.
Eventually, if a religion is to
achieve mature equilibrium, periodic revival crises must be balanced with
reasonably stable succession rules. There
cannot be a major succession crisis every time a leader dies. These succession rules can take a wide
variety of forms. We can see this by
looking at two such form within two old established
religions, Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism.
In
the Catholic Church, a key aspect of the succession rule is that the Pope does
not get to choose his successor? The
Pope clearly has a key role in the trusteeship of the Catholic Church’s
charismatic legacy. But for the first
thousand years of its existence (Walker
et al. 1985 : 273) there were no generally accepted rules to guide papal
succession. Then, the Roman synod of
1059, acting in the spirit of the Church’s previous successful attacks on lay
investure, adopted a set of clear guidelines calling for election of the new
Pope by the cardinal clergy. These
guidelines have essentially determined the course of papal successions up to
the present day. The attention of historians
has naturally been directed to the significance of this ruling for the balance
of power between religious and secular authorities. But to my mind and equally important question
is: why this particular succession rule? It seems to have served the Catholic Church
well over the centuries providing a reason for hope that minority positions
within the Church could eventually be made to prevail. How would the Church be different today if
each Pope was able to play a major role in selecting his successor?
In Tibetan Buddhism, the death of a major lama sets
off a world-wide search among young children for his reincarnate? One of the
most interesting systems of charismatic succession ever developed by any
religion is the trulku system of Tibetan Buddhism (Samuel 1993 : 283-286). This system
assures that a continuous rotation of insiders and outsiders will have an
opportunity to guard the charismatic legacy.[16] Under the trulku system, one of the chief
disciples of the old Lama may be designated his dharma heir while the old Lama
is still living. When the old Lama dies,
two things happen. One is that his
dharma heir succeeds to his position of authority. The other is that a search is instituted to
discover among the children throughout the world the one who is the old Lama’s
reincarnate or trulku. When the trulku
is found, he will be brought to the old Lama’s monastery to be trained to
eventually succeed him. But the dharma
heir is more than just a regent holding office until the trulku grows up. The dharma heir has all the authority of his
departed master and may frequently be designated a Lama himself if he proves
worthy. The only difference is that he
will not eventually have a dharma heir of his own but will pass the succession
back to his original master now reincarnated in the body of the child whom he will
help raise. This ingenious system
assures a continual succession of insiders and outsiders to the trusteeship of
the charismatic legacy. It remains to be
seen, of course, whether this system gives Tibetan Buddhism the flexible
cohesion it needs to survive and thrive in its own Diaspora.
THE LINGERING DEATH OF SOME
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS
So far we have discussed religions that are successful in
navigating the treacherous path from charismatic beginning to semi-routinized
dynamic equilibrium as well as those that go down in flames with an apocalyptic
bang. This leaves us with one additional
observed pattern to be discussed. Among
our 100 groups there are those that seem to just gradually fade away after the
deaths of their charismatic leaders.
They cannot be said, in any meaningful sense of the word, to be
successful although they may linger for additional decades or even centuries.
Harmony, the first group on the list falls into this category, as do Amana,
Christian Science, and perhaps the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Adventism is an interesting case that is marginal to this
classification and shows the difficulty of imposing unambiguous classifications
on religious movements. The ideological
traces of a religious movement may well continue to live on even after the
organizational infrastructure of the movement and the informal network
affiliations of its participants have passed away. Thus a religion that seemed dead can suddenly
spring to life again at the behest of a new charismatic leader. The complex tangled history of the
Adventists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Davidian Adventists, and Branch Davidians
exemplifies just this sort of organizational death and rebirth (Wright 1995).
A matter that needs some explanation perhaps is the relative
scarcity of graceful deaths among nrms.
Going out with either a bang or a whimper seems to be the rule. A simple acknowledgment by a religious
movement that it lacks the resources to carry on after the death of its leader
happens only occasionally. To understand
this, we need to return to the intense socialization required of charismatic
followers that we discussed earlier. We
have discussed cases in which this has led to doomsday. While that scenario is always a risk,
frequently it doesn’t happen. When the
nrm avoids apocalypse, it is still left with highly socialized group members
who experience the possibility of separation from the movement as one involving
very high subjective exit costs (Zablocki
1998). True
believers who have sacrificed everything else in life to follow a particular
religious calling will not easily accept the fact that the religion they have
been following is no more. When you add
to this the fact that religious followers, in addition to a talent for urgency,
also have a talent for waiting, the conditions for the frequently observed
“long goodbye” are easier to understand.
It is sometimes forgotten, for example, that even the members of such
apocalyptically doomed groups as Heaven’s Gate waited with excruciating
patience for many years for the flying saucers to pick them up before finally
succumbing with great urgency to their terminal charismatic crisis.
Finally,
the complex relationship between the end of a religion and the expected end of
the world deserves mention.
Pre-millennial, post-millennial, and violent apocalyptic religious
movements exist in uneasy symbiosis with prophesized ‘end times.’ The ability to set the time of ending is a
powerful tool for charismatic social control within such movements. The other side of the coin is that the need
to justify the failure of the end to come on schedule, while it usually does
not destroy (and may even strengthen) the faith of the participants (Festinger, Riechen,
and Schachter 1956), will generally provide a challenge calling for great
inventiveness to the religious movement’s leadership. These are issues I intend to explore more
fully as this project continues.