In Memoriam

Benjamin Zablocki (January 19, 1941–April 6, 2020), professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University at the time of his death, was one of the earlier scholars to study what have come to be generically known as new religious movements. Throughout his academic career, which began in the mid-1960s, Ben was particularly interested in problems posed for decision-making by a conflict between ideology and social structure, and he believed that the study of communes provided a particularly rich site for the exploration of fundamental sociological problems. His 1971 monograph, The Joyful Community,¹ arguably the work for which he will be most remembered, was a study of the Hudson Valley Bruderhof colony, Woodcrest, in which he paints a detailed picture of everyday life that is both sympathetic and critical in its approach. It has the additional merit of being eminently readable. In Alienation and Charisma (1980),² Ben was to explore in breadth what The Joyful Community had done in depth. Here, perhaps uniquely, he defined charisma as "a collective state resulting in an objective pattern of relationships in a specific collectivity that allows the selves of the participants to be fully or partially absorbed into a collective self" (10)—an approach which helped him to address a variety of problems faced by a wide range of contemporary and historical communes in America.

Ben was involved with Nova Religio from its inception. Its first issues contained a provocative two-part article,³ in which scholars who rejected the idea of "brainwashing" were berated for "blacklisting" the concept and not recognizing that its real (original) meaning lay not in describing how people joined new religions, but in highlighting methods of manipulation that raised the "exit costs" for "veteran members." From around the late 1990s, Ben was one of the few sociologists of religion whom I would meet at American Family Foundation/International Cultic Studies Association meetings. Convinced that the whole "cult/NRM scene" was divided into opposing sides, he was set on "Finding a Middle Ground in a Polarized Scholarly Arena," to quote the title of a chapter he contributed in a volume he edited with Tom Robbins: Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field (2001).⁴ Another project involved "Proposing a 'Bill of Inalienable Rights' for Intentional Communities," in which he sought to preserve both the individual's absolute right to religious practice and "the right of individuals and their families to some form of recourse when subtle methods of coercive persuasion are used that result in personal loss of autonomy."⁵

Ben was a serious scholar who believed in the power of scientific research to make the world a better place. His contributions were often controversial, but he was not a man who was afraid of challenging his peers, many of whom, myself included, will miss the stimulation of picking up the gauntlet. However acerbic his pen, he was, in face-to-face combat, a gentle, kind man.