I found this book extremely interesting to explain the popularity of

Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity in an age in which

religions seem to be on the way out.
While it seems natural to think that science is slowly eroding the
appeal of religion, this book (as well as Daniel Bell's "The
Winding Passage" of 1980) shows that we live in an age that lends
itself to the establishment of new religions. They don't deny the
process of secularization but they show that it comes with two
parallel processes, one of religious revival and one of religious
innovation. The total amount of religion remains the same. The
book defines religions as organizations primarily engaged in
providing general compensators based on supernatural
assumptions. The "supernatural" need not be a god: Buddhism, for
example, doesn't have a god. There are at least three dimensions to
the religious world: the otherworldly, that offers intangible
rewards to the poor, the worldly, that offers tangible rewards to the
powerful, and the universal that binds together both the powerful
and the powerless. The universal often succumbs to the inevitable
tension between the worldly and the otherworldly, and that's the
source of new sects. Churches become increasingly worldly and
eventually those who can only aspire to the unworldly dimension
(the poor who don't benefit in this world) are attracted to a new
sect that pledges to restore the unworldly dimension. The
difference between church and sect is that a church accepts the
social order while the sect rejects it. Sects are schismatic groups,
groups founded by a leader who used to be a member of another
religious organization. Sects are religious from the start. Cults
grow independently of existing religious organizations; i.e. cults
introduce novel compensators. Stark and Bainbridge argue that too
little attention has been devoted to cults which are instead a major
factor in the emergence of new religions. In 1985 Stark and
Bainbridge found that 75% of all cults were born after 1950.
There are different theories on why individuals invent new cults:
mental illness, business plan (or sexual privileges) or just group
interaction (the "subcultural" movements, like gangs and like the
Peoples Temple of Jim Jones).
The book shows that religious innovation is rampant in the
Western states, from Alaska down to California, where church
membership is very low. Nonetheless, all the main cults that you
can name were founded on the East Coast: the Church of New
Jerusalem, followers of the Swedish medium Emanuel
Swedenborg, formed in 1817 in Boston; in 1849 the three sisters
Leah, Maggie and Kate Fox launched the fad of seances (i.e.
spiritualism) near New York (Walt Whitman, socialists and
utopian communes adopted spiritualism at the turn of the century);
Christian Science (the Church of Christ Scientist), founded in
1879 by Mary Baker Eddy , who was a student of Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby in Maine, who was in turn a student of
Mesmerism (Franz Mesmer); Theosophy, founded by in 1875 in
New York by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky; the Ancient and
Mystical Order of the Rosae Crucis, a Rosicrucian secret society
modeled after the Freemasons founded in 1915 in New York by
Harvey Spencer Lewis and May Banks-Stacy; Scientology,
founded in New Jersey in 1954 by Ron Hubbard. The 1893 world
parliament of religion in Chicago imported several cults in the
USA, notably Baha'i. The following year Thornton Chase,
originally a Colorado Swedenborgian, became the first
Bah ' convert in the Western world. Originally, the West Coast
ruled only in the field of UFO cults. By the 1980s Christian
Science's leading state was California, followed by Oregon and
Washington, Theosophy's leading state was Washington followed
by California, Baha'i's leading state was again California
(Thornton Chase had moved to Los Angeles in 1909) followed by
Oregon. And one of the largest new religions in the world,
transcendental meditation, started out in California (in 1965 when
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded the Students' International
Meditation Society in Los Angeles, followed in 1966 by the Hari
Krishna movement founded in New York by A. C. Bhaktivedanta
Swami Prabhupada). Many of the psychedelic movements born in
California mutated into religious movements. Timothy Leary
founded "exo-psychology" and Richard Alpert became a Hindu
guru, Baba Ram Dass.
Trivia: a 1926 census showed that most cult members were
women, and, in fact, women had founded several of these
successful cults.
Magic is something altogether different. Magic is a substitute for
science and has to compete with science, as Bronislaw
Malinowski showed in Magic, Science and Religion" (1948).
Magic is typically left outside churches: a priest would not read
the palm of the devout or attempt to cure an illness. Priests and
magicians belong to different spheres. When religions, under
pressure by their members, incorporate magic, they lend
themselves to the most powerful attack by science: science can
prove them false. You cannot prove that Allah does not exist, but
you can easily prove that levitation is a scam.
No religious organization can sustainably market itself to all the
members of society because it runs into contradictions that
eventually lead to the creation of new sects. The history of
Christianity is a history of schisms precisely because it tried to be
"universal" and persecuted all other supernatural practices, from
magic (witch hunts) to heresy (persecution). The Catholic church
tried to institutionalize sects with the establishment of monastic
orders.
Writing a decade before the World-wide Web was born (and two
decades before Facebook was born), Stark and Bainbridge show
that religion is a social rather than individual phenomenon. Human
societies have become so large that a new religious movement
needs to grow very rapidly in order to establish themselves before
they die out and that seems possible only if the new movement
can exploit an existing social network. Social networks play a
fundamental role in recruitment to cults, sects and religions.
Religious movements offer otherworldly "compensators" to their
followers but also worldly compensators, and the social bonds
constitute a major one. On the other hand, the search for meaning
(the "theological" aspect) is far less important. Sociologists have
traditionally overrated the human propensity to theological and
philosophical thinking. They have "overintellectualized"
humankind. Most people are far less influenced by "meaning
systems" than by what their social network does. In order to
achieve exponential growth, the new religious movement must
succeed with mainstream society, not only fringe elements.
Historically, new religious movements spread first among the
educated elite. This seems hard to believe because the educated
elite tends to be less religious than the less educated masses, i.e.
more secularized, but Stark and Bainbridge show that
secularization is precisely the condition required for religious
innovation. People who already belong to a religious movement
are unlikely to shift to another one. For example, 19th century
spiritualism spread initially among socialists and intellectuals who
were not religious at all. Stark and Bainbridge point out the
"overrepresentation" of Jews in modern cult movements and they
explain it as a consequence of the rapid secularization of Judaism.
Note: Ray Kurzweil was born to secular Jewish parents.
Given the appeal of "religious innovation" to the secularized elite,
and the fact that science has not solved the fundamental problems
of humanity (the meaning of life and eternal life), Stark and
Bainbridge easily predict that "religious innovations will have
significant influence in the coming years". Secularization is the
primary engine of sect and cult formation.
It is precisely the success of science in explaining so much of what
past religions claimed as supernatural that has created a tension
between the individual's visceral will to live forever and the
acquired knowledge that the supernatual cannot help. It is
precisely the success of science in demolishing the traditional
religions that is creating the need for a new religion. This new
religion needs to be more "scientific". Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
claimed that transcendental meditation was a scientific method for
personal improvement. Psychoanalysis has been presented as
scientific ever since Freud.
There aren't many precedents to this book. Emile Durkheim's "The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" (1915) was the pillar of
sociological studies on religion. James Frazier's "The Golden
Bough" (1922) was the pillar of anthropological and ethnographic
studies on religion. Bronislaw Malinowski's "Magic, Science and
Religion and Other Essays" (1948) is the classic on magic.
Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millennium" (1961) is the
classic on revolutionary messiahs. Bryan Wilson's "Magic and the
Millennium" (1975) is a classic study on the dynamics of cults,
sects and churches.
TM, , Copyright 2016 Piero Scaruffi