Visioning New and Minority Religions: Projecting the Future ed. by Eugene V. Gallagher (review)

Currently in its second, if not its third, generation of scholarship, the study of new religious movements has entered a period of self-reflection—a sort of taking stock—to consider the landscape over which it has traveled and what new paths it might now forge. A self-reflective question naturally arises: What does the future hold for the study of new religions when those religions typically billed as new are the same old religions that were studied thirty or forty years ago? What is new about Scientology? What is new about Heaven’s Gate or Soka Gakkai? Indeed, what is new about the Mormons, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Peoples Temple, or even The Family International (except its constant name changes)? At what point does the study of new religions simply become the study of religion? Interestingly, to examine the study of new religions is to observe how subdisciplines emerge, define their areas of inquiry, create and refine specialized terminology, defend their turf, denounce critics and academic interlopers, train a second generation of researchers, and honor the passing of its trailblazing pioneers.

Visioning New and Minority Religions, the second volume in the INFORM series edited by Eugene Gallagher, exemplifies in the best way possible this exercise in “taking stock.” His query is twofold: What is the future of the study of new religions, and what is the future of the new religions being investigated? In response, this book features fourteen essays divided in two parts: seven essays loosely following what I would call a “looking backward/looking ahead” theme and seven essays covering specific new religions (Paganism, Soka Gakkai, LDS, Christian Science, the Diamond Way) or new avenues of spiritual exploration (pop culture and the internet).

After a brief introduction by Eugene Gallagher, Part One begins with a chapter on “The Changing Scene” by Eileen Barker. Here Barker offers her thoughts on what the future might hold for the study of new religious movements. Her interests, however, are not so much in prognostication as in how researchers might consider the internal factors and external influences that “predictably” push and pull new religions, which are almost, by definition, first generation movements. In the next chapter, Stephen Gregg and George Chryssides seek to move research on apostate testimony beyond static insider/outsider analysis, noting that this dichotomy rarely applies to individuals whose habitual movements in and out of new religious movements make them career apostates. Their aim is to set the discourse within the larger context of religious narratives themselves. In so doing Gregg and Chryssides attempt to take analysis beyond the binary of sacred and profane and into a larger landscape of religious meaning.

Connecting nicely with this approach, the chapter by Steven Sutcliffe on seekership activities presents readers with a generational “rethink” of earlier models that regard seekers as spiritually unsettled, if not deviant, persons. Updating Colin Campbell’s cultic milieu concept with Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to focus on the terrain of seeker and the religion(s) sought, Sutcliffe sets these as constituent parts of a “multipolar field” of spiritual pursuit. This shift in research from leader to follower seems connected to the rise of the internet, and hence the chapter by Beth Singler. What becomes of Weberian charisma, Singler asks, in the apparent non-hierarchical structure of the virtual world of religion? In the four case studies that she offers, Singler tries to show how charisma still operates online, less as a leader/follower dynamic, however, and more what she terms “spiritual memetic rhetorical transmission” (70–71), that is, mass connectivity through online memes.

Almost standing alone in Part One, Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist’s chapter on leader fraud and deception reminds us that religion—new or old—cannot always be taken as synonymous with virtue. Seekers can sometimes fall prey to spurious claims and abuses, as noted in the specific cases of The Teacher and Mohan Singh, both sexual...