Intrepreting New Religious Movements - Spring 2006
A common aspect of all revitalization movements is their connection to the spiritual dimension of life. In fact, outside the West such movements often are responses to colonialism or to the paternalism sometimes associated with Christian missions. One of the themes of modernity in its present globalized form is the naming of the secular and its separation from the spiritual side of life. Resistance often takes the form of asserting the unity of life, including recovering local control of expressions of spirituality.
New Religious Movements theory arose in the 1970s from culture-change studies in anthropology and an initiative for the study of primal religions in the discipline of religious studies. A parallel development called New Social Movements theory arose at the same time. (More about this in the next issue of Revitalization.)
A benchmark for these theories is Ralph Linton’s 1943 article, “Nativistic Movements.” Linton organized current thinking about movements that reacted against the destructive effects of colonialism. However, he tended to focus only on movements that sought to restore pre-colonial a golden age. Anthony Wallace (1956) broadened the discussion, arguing that all revitalization movements follow a similar pattern (see Rynkiewich 2005).The study of “cargo cults” in Melanesia contributed to the growth of New Religious Movement theory. Earlier studies had fallen back on claims that the “natives” were “child-like” or were “crazy” because they could not handle rapid culture change. However in 1964 Peter Lawrence in Road Belong Cargo argued that cargo movements (he dropped the pejorative “cult”) were rational when analyzed from within the participants’ worldview (Lawrence 1964). Vittorio Lanternari (1963) maintained that these movements were attempts to escape oppression by positing a world turned upside down, while Peter Worsley (1968) described them as early political organizations resisting colonialism.
The field of New Religious Movements however was established primarily by the work of Harold Turner in Africa. Formerly a pastor in New Zealand, Turner went to Nigeria where he researched and wrote an ethnographic description of a significant new religious movement, The Church of the Lord (Aladura) (Turner 1967; see Hitchen 2002).From this intensive study Turner developed a comparative framework for studying what he called NERMS (New Religious Movements in Primal Societies). His critical observation was that wherever Christian missionaries worked, a variety of indigenous movements emerged that combined Christian beliefs and practices with indigenous ones. Missionaries often dismissed such movements as syncretistic, but we have come to see that Western Christianity, and in fact all churches, are syncretistic to one degree or another. Where syncretism gives way to authentic contextualization (or vice versa) is, of course, the question of the day.
Turner established the Religious Studies Department at the University of Leicester, England, and began collecting extensive information on new movements (Turner 1977–1993). Later he moved to the University of Aberdeen to work with Andrew Walls. Broadening his scope beyond Africa, Turner spent time in America collecting information on Native American movements and even traveled to Papua New Guinea to the Melanesian Institute (where I worked for five years) to initiate its three-volume work on new religious movements in Melanesia. His paper in the first volume shows his emerging classification: Neo-primal, Synthetist, Hebraist and Independent Churches. By the 1990s, new religious movements in primal societies were recognized alongside the standard categories of comparative religion (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity), as seen in the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion (Jones 2005).Now numerous dissertations and research projects are devoted to the study of New Religious Movements (see Wilson 1999; Clarke, 2005). Turner’s phenomenological perspective has brought to light the diversity of religious beliefs and practices in today’s world.
-Michael Rynkiewich
References Cited:
Clarke, Peter B., ed.
2005 Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements. London: Routledge.
Flannery, Wendy, ed.
1983a Religious Movements in Melanesia Today (1). Point Series No. 2. Goroka: The Melanesian Institute.
1983b Religious Movements in Melanesia Today (2). Goroka: The Melanesian Institute.
1984 Religious Movements in Melanesia (3). Goroka: The Melanesian Institute.
Hitchen, John
2002 “Celebrating a Fruitful Life: Harold W. Turner – 13 January 1911 – 5 May 2002.” New Slant 27 (April). On the website DeepSight: An Initiative for Religion and Cultures, http://www.overstayer.com/john.flett/assets/HWT_Hitchen.pdf.
Jones, Lindsay, ed.
2005 Encyclopedia of Religion. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA.
Lanternari, Vittorio
1963 The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. New York: Knopf.
Lawrence, Peter
1964 Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press.
Linton, Ralph
1943 “Nativistic Movements.” American Anthropologist 45:230–40.
Rynkiewich, Michael A.
2005 “What is Revitalization?” Revitalization 12:1-2 (Fall):2.
Turner, Harold W.
1967 African Independent Church. Vol. 1, History of an African Independent Church: The Church of the Lord (Aladura); Vol. 2, African Independent Church: The Life and Faith of the Church of the Lord (Aladura). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
1977–1993 Bibliography of New Religious Movements in Primal Societies, Vols. 1–6. New York: Macmillan.
1983 “New Religious Movements in Primal Societies,” in Flannery 1983:2–3.
Wallace, Anthony F. C.
1956 “Revitalization Movements: Some Theoretical Considerations for their Comparative Study.” American Anthropologist 58:264–81.
Wilson, Bryan, ed.
1999 New Religious Movements. London: Routledge.
Worsley, Peter
1968 The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken.
