Abstract
The production of new authoritative texts, which can legitimately be identified as new scriptures or new Bibles, has been a central process in many modern new religious movements. Those religions participate in an ongoing “Scripture movement” that can be traced back to the early centuries of the Common Era in the ancient Mediterranean world. That Scripture movement was not only decisively shaped by the formation of the Christian canon in the first four centuries of the Common Era but also influenced by the development of the other canons. An array of other religious movements, among them various Gnostic groups, the Mandaeans, and the Manichees, also participated in the early efforts at scripture formation. As W. C. Smith observed, together those various religious movements helped to create the widespread expectation that a new religious movement would have to have its own new religious book.
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Notes
See Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority” and “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 24, 51, respectively. See also chapter 3, pp. 64, 79.
For an historical account of the contemporary anti-cult movement see Gordon Melton, “Critiquing Cults: An Historical Perspective,” in Eugene V. Gallagher and W. Michael Ashcraft, eds., Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in the United States, vol. I, (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), pp. 126–142.
On the term “cult,” see James T Richardson, “Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative,” in Lorne L. Dawson, ed., Cults in Context: Readings in the Study of New Religious Movements (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 29–38.
Margaret Thaler Singer, with Janja Lalich, Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1995), p. 11.
For full-length treatments of the anti-cult movement, see Anson D. Shupe and David G. Bromley, The New Vigilantes: Deprogrammers, Anti-Cultists and the New Religions (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1980)
and Anson D. Shupe and Susan E. Darnell, Agents of Discord: Deprogramming, Pseudo-Science, and the American Anticult Movement (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006).
On Christian counter-cult figures and groups, see Douglas Cowan, Bearing False Witness: An Introduction to the Christian Countercult (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); a good history of Jewish counter-cult efforts remains to be written.
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Introduction,” in American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. x.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 43.
For a definitive analysis of this issue, see Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice (London: Blackwell, 1984).
Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volume I: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (London: T & T Clark, 2004), p. 85.
For the concept of the “cultic milieu,” see Colin Campbell, “The Cult, The Cultic Milieu, and Secularization,” in Jeffrey Kaplan and Helene Lööw, eds., The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), pp. 12–25, (originally published in 1972).
For an example of this type of analysis applied to The Satanic Bible, see Eugene V. Gallagher, “Sources, Sects, and Scripture: The ‘Book of Satan’ in The Satanic Bible,” in Jesper Aagaard Petersen and Per Faxnald, eds., The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 103–122.
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© 2014 Eugene V. Gallagher
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Gallagher, E.V. (2014). Conclusion: New Religions, New Bibles. In: Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434838_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434838_12
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