Building Religions 12: New Religious Movements

Building Religions 12: New Religious Movements

Whether you're writing about a secretive order pursuing occult mysteries, the disciples of a modern-day prophet, or a utopian quest to found New Jerusalem on Mars, you have to ask yourself what kinds of forces can work to usher in a new form of religion. There's an abundance of literature out there on new religious movements, whether cataloguing their varieties or exploring their social and historical causes, and I'm not going to try to present a complete summary of the scholarship. Instead, I'd like to offer a short list of possible reasons for a religion to come into being.

Revelation: This option, and many of those given below, would go along with the rise of a charismatic leader of the kind described in my last post. Someone appears in the community, claiming to have a new message from divine authority. In nearly every case, this revelation expands upon an existing religious framework, drawing its language and mythos from the original while introducing new features. Messages that primarily confirm the established religion might simply be incorporated without actually generating a clearly separate religious movement, but those that present radical challenges or claim to answer longstanding concerns could cause a split from the main body. Christianity in general is an example of this, and more recently, the emergence of Mormonism. In neither case, it's worth noting, did the new religion replace the old one; followers may only believe that the parent religion is incomplete in the face of the newest revelation.

A subset of this kind of movement is one that offers secret teachings or has access to sources (scriptures, interpretations, practices) beyond those available to the majority of the religion's adherents. Such a group's existence may be common knowledge -- an elite mystical order, for example -- or they may only reveal themselves to a select few. The latter would include the groups that turn up in countless religious conspiracy novels, concealing the location of the Holy Grail or some suitably grandiose plot for world domination.

Reformation: A reformation movement is only possible in a religion that has both a history of adaptation over time and a preserved original source. Reformers, dissatisfied with the present state of their community, look back to that original in order to find the purest form of the religion. In Weber's terms, it can be an attempt to recapture some proximity to a charismatic founder in an age when that sense of charisma has been lost, but there's nothing that guarantees that the earliest version of a religion is any purer, any better, than later ones. Even if they do manage to establish a reformed community, these movements are still subject to history and the changes that it brings, making further reformations almost inevitable.

Revitalization: For some people, reformation isn't enough. A revitalization movement can appear when a society's values are under assault: in the face of rapid social, technological, or environmental changes; conquest and subsequent oppression; or a perceived erosion of culture, the community as a whole works to create a more stable religious identity. This kind of movement may include elements of the previous two types, but the important part is that it be widespread. The purpose is a thorough reinvention of the culture, with new goals and new values that may be markedly different from those it held in the past.

A variation on this, usually smaller in scope but with a similar purpose, would be the deliberate reintroduction of an abandoned religion when the current form no longer seems to serve the needs of the people. (To quote Christopher Lee talking about the Christian God in The Wicker Man, "Had his chance and in modern parlance, blew it.") The new religion need not even be an authentic resurrection of the old one, so long as it offers a link to the past and to the sense of cultural identity that goes with it.

Syncretism: The word syncretism has a sort of political baggage that makes me reluctant to use it, but it's still better known than the alternatives. A syncretistic movement draws on multiple religious traditions in order to create a new one. It can be the result of cultural contact and the exchange of ideas, whether that contact is peaceful or violent. A colonized society might adopt the religion of its colonizers, for example, while keeping some of their own rituals and beliefs. Another way to think of it is as creolization -- developing a religion that, like creole language, lays the vocabulary of one culture over the grammar of another.

Where you draw the boundary between ordinary religious development and syncretism can be a little unclear. The only way to be able to say for certain that a movement is syncretic is if you have some pure form of religion against which to compare it, and that's not something that's easily found. Every religion incorporates or has incorporated ideas from elsewhere, unless it's part of a society that's both completely homogenous and completely isolated.

So where can you use these? All of them are good in situations where you want to emphasize rapid changes going on in society. New religions appear to help people address those changes, to help them find their place in a world that's grown harder for them to imagine. They all have the potential to spark conflict between religious factions, which can either be the focus of your writing or simply a background element in a setting filled with greater unrest. In each case, introducing these movements can be ways of telling your readers that something is happening in the world, something that's making people uneasy with their lives.