What Americans Really Believe

16 New Age Adherents: Well-Educated, Formerly Irreligious Elites

133 neW age adherents Well-Educated, Formerly Irreligious Elites 16 F or years, the sociology of religion was stuck with a fallacy about new religious movements—that they always arise from lower-class protest and discontent. This claim derived from Marx’ dismissal of religion as the “opium of the people ” by way of the American Protestant theologian-turned-sociologist H. Richard Niebuhr, who proposed a cyclical theory to account for the proliferation of American denominations. Echoing Marx, Niebuhr claimed that a new religious movement is always “the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor.”1 However, if a religious movement grows and becomes successful, he argued, inevitably it is taken over by the more privileged classes and soon deserts the lower classes, no longer providing them with an “opiate.” At that point the poor are driven to form a new religious movement which, if it succeeds, will in its turn be captured and transformed by the privileged. Thus, where freedom of religion exists, there will also exist an endless cycle of the formation and transformation of religious groups. This is sometimes identified as the sect-to-church cycle. It turns out that this entire thesis is simply wrong. A few movements may have been founded by the poor and dispossessed (perhaps some in the rural American South), but all of the well-known Stark Americans final.indd 133 9/9/08 10:06:34 AM 134 / New Age Adherents examples were in fact founded by the privileged. For example, although Niebuhr gave extended attention to the Methodists as an example of a proletarian religious movement, John Wesley and his colleagues did not depart from the Church of England and found Methodism because they were lower-class dissidents who wanted a faith that would compensate them for their poverty. They were themselves young men of privilege who began to assert their preference for a higher-intensity faith while at Oxford. By the same token, the prophets of the Old Testament all belonged “to the landowning nobility.”2 So did the Essenes, and contrary to tradition, early Christianity was also an elite movement.3 What seems to be the case is that religious movements usually are formed by people of privilege, especially those who inherited their status, who find that power and privilege do not satisfy spiritual concerns. Thus, for example, Buddha was a prince, and fifty-five of his first sixty converts were of the nobility as were 75 percent of the ascetic medieval Catholic saints.4 There is a second basis for the prominence of privileged people in founding and joining new religious movements: early adopters of new ideas (and technologies) always come overwhelmingly from the ranks of the privileged, those having more education and expansive social networks. This line of analysis has been successfully applied to several new religious movements.5 Historically speaking, the New Age movement represents a relatively recent set of ideas in the American religious marketplace . While some argue that its origins were in the nineteenthcentury spiritualist movement, most students of American religion identify the New Age movement as having arisen during the 1960s and attribute its formation to wealthy socialites (such as Laurence Rockefeller), many of them participants in the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California.6 The primary aspects of the New Age movement are an emphasis on personal spirituality and mystical feelings , on seeking inspiration from Eastern religions, on alternative medicine such as acupuncture and herbalism, suspicion of science, Stark Americans final.indd 134 9/9/08 10:06:34 AM Well-Educated, Formerly Irreligious Elites / 135 and the rejection of formal (rational) theology as represented by Christianity and Judaism. The New Age movement is still quite new, and it remains an unconventional belief system in the United States. Hence, it ought still to be dominated by privileged people who were adrift from the conventional faiths. Conversely, it ought not to appeal to people, privileged or not, who are committed to a conventional religious perspective. Indeed, being an active member of a congregation embeds individuals in a network of friends and family members who are apt to frown upon experimenting with new religious ideas. Whether they do depends upon the character of the religious group to which they belong. Some denominations place very little emphasis on doctrine and permit very great latitude in what members, including the clergy, may avow. It is not...