Saving the Earth: The History of a Middle-Class Millenarian Movement

University of California Press

Research into the phenomenon of "new religious movements" has become a major focus of attention for social scientists over the last twenty years. Sociologists in particular, but also historians and anthropologists, have been attracted to the unique quality of these groups—that of being both inside and outside the dominant culture.1 Although, on the one hand, new religions are an expression of social trends and therefore a barometer of cultural values, on the other, by rejecting the established churches they place themselves beyond borders of mainstream society and its values. The emergence of new religions challenges traditional religions and thereby provides scholars with a special opportunity to examine the dynamics of religious belief and practice. So many new movements have emerged that scholarship about them has resulted in a body of work daunting in size and scope.2

Since new religious groups generally either do not keep archives or have been unwilling to make the papers they do have available to scholars, virtually all students of contemporary religious movements have been forced to obtain their data from interviews and/or participant-observation. These studies are, therefore, necessarily limited in their longitudinal analysis both of the leaders' lives and of the history of the movements. Confined to a several-year period at most, they tend to ignore change over time in favor of a detailed synchronic analysis of the groups as they exist during the period of field investigation.3 As a result, the new religions are frequently perceived as static entities whose various qualities allow them to be fit into specific categories such as church or sect, charismatic or democratic, eastern or western, and so forth. As

useful as such ahistorical categorization may be, it obscures the fact that religions are dynamic institutions that evolve over time in response to changes both in their external environment and in their internal relations. Due to our access to an unprecedented amount of historical documentation, this study can attempt to break through this fixed view of religious movements. We will specifically show how the complex mix of personalities, institutional needs, and social conditions interacted across time to move a religious group through several standard categories.

The grand tradition of pigeonholing religions into ideal types began, of course, with Max Weber, who first spoke of a church-sect dichotomy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . His ideas were developed by his student, Ernst Troeltsch, according to whom sects were smaller groups that stood apart from society at large in their radical attempts to live the pure Christian message. Churches, in contrast, were integrated into society, took a much more conservative, that is, tolerant, view of living and implementing the Christian message, and, unlike the sects, were allied with the upper classes.4 The Weber-Troeltsch model suffers from two major weaknesses. First, it is static, making no allowance for change; second, it is very difficult to apply beyond the European society from which the model was generated.

The problem of stasis was addressed by H. Richard Niebuhr, who suggested that sects almost always evolved into more churchlike denominations as the children of the founders softened the radical ideas of their parents.5 In addition to adding a dynamic component to the description of religions, Niebuhr's approach was also more clearly compatible with a religiously heterogeneous society like that found in the United States. Yet that very heterogeneity seemed to beg for a set of new definitions that would enable scholars to categorize the wider variety of vendors in the American religious marketplace. Unfortunately, the number of suggested categories has grown to be almost as varied as the number of religions they have attempted to define.6

Although most of the more recent typologies acknowledge the possibility—even likelihood—of change, they still posit distinct categories into or out of which groups could move if and when they changed. This rather punctuated approach was effectively challenged in 1963 by sociologist Benton Johnson, who suggested that there is a continuum from church to sect in which churches are those religious groups that accept the status quo and sects are those that reject it.7 The most obvious difficulty in the Johnson scheme is that of measuring just how much a religious group is rejecting or is being rejected by the dominant society.

That issue has recently been addressed in two closely related ways. First, in their book The Future of Religion, Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge have suggested that a group's location on the church-sect continuum can be determined by measuring the amount of "tension" that members feel vis-à-vis the broadly accepted secular values of society.8 At one end of the spectrum are members of sects who experience high tension because they believe and behave in ways that are at odds with mainstream society, thus setting up a system of mutual rejection. Church members, by comparison, hold essentially the same values as the majority and suffer little if any tension. By asking group members specific questions about their attitudes toward society at-large, Stark and Bainbridge locate groups along a church-sect continuum.9

Stark and Bainbridge call one section of their book "The Religious Economy," and the image is an excellent one, even though they themselves do not use an economic model to describe the relationship of religion and society. A second work by economist Laurence Iannaccone, however, does. Avoiding discrete Procrustean categories and stressing the fluidity of a church-sect continuum, Iannaccone suggests that a group's position on the continuum can best be established by measuring an individual's "cost" of membership. Following Gary S. Becker's approach to analyzing nonmarket behavior, Iannaccone sees the individual's decision for or against membership in a religious group as an "economic" choice. In this sense "economic" does not simply refer to monetary exchange, but is used in a broader sense to refer to all limited resources that could include, in addition to time and money, psychic and physical effort, social reputation, and the like. He assumes that the individual will spend these resources in a way that will bring the greatest personal satisfaction. Because mainline churches have values and behavior expectations compatible with society at large, there is relatively little personal cost in being a member. Sects, however, depart dramatically from general social values; therefore joining a sect can be very "expensive."10

Obviously Stark and Bainbridge's "tension" and Iannaccone's "cost" are two ways of saying (and measuring) the same thing. They both assume, as have almost all scholars from the time of Weber, that churches are of society and sects are outside it. The major difference between the two is that Stark and Bainbridge limit their measurements of tension to what might roughly be called "psychic" items whereas Iannaccone's model includes all costs. Thus, the more the adherence to a religious group's values produces tension, the higher the cost of mem-

bership and the farther toward the sect...