A Cult Too Frequent.

Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 294pp. $27.50 (cloth).

With this book Philip Jenkins adds significantly to the literature on new religions and religious innovation in American history, a subject that thirty years ago was not a respectable one to study. In this analysis of a cult/anti-cult dynamic that has deep roots in the past, Jenkins does three things especially well. He demonstrates that the term "cult," which has evolved particularly since the 1960s as an unrelenting, enterlain-no-analysis pejorative, is grounded in "a prefabricated script some centuries in the making"--a script that is not only religious, but cultural and political. He provides historical detail and analysis of scandals involving new religions since the nineteenth century to sustain his thesis. And he confirms from the long view of history what contemporary sociologists have suggested as well: that multiple forms of religious and spiritual innovation are a persisting part of American history and culture.

It is not always easy, says Jenkins, to distinguish what society will be able to absorb as falling within acceptable conventions of religious belief and behavior and what it will reject as symptoms of dangerous excess and cultural malaise. He argues that age, race, and gender are often significant factors -- that periodic cult scares usually follow periods of high population growth and worries about the "vulnerable young." They are related, as well, he says, to white fears of Asian and African-influenced religious and social-boundary crossings and to changing views of gender roles and sexual conduct. In other words, the cult problem is socially constructed. Jenkins does not deny that new religions are indeed capable of coercive recruiting or of engaging in criminal or dangerous acts. He suggests, rather, that public concern about cults tends to be fostered not so much by rational interpretations of particular situations as by certain kinds of fears, tensions, and prejudices.

The central chapters of Mystics and Messiahs -- two through ten -- survey a variety of so-called cult incidents at different periods in American religious history. Stereotypes of religious fanaticism and authoritarian leaders appear in church writings and popular media early in the nineteenth century. They persist through the present time. Of particular interest are some of Jenkins's comparative data. He points out that the first literature to attack "cults" did so in terms of Christian heresy. By the mid-1920s, according to Jenkins, there had emerged "a powerful secular critique of the unorthodox religious movements, variously charging that cults were authoritarian, exploitative, sexually predatory, antifamily, and downright fraudulent, as well as personally destructive to the health and sanity of cult members" (121). Whether aimed at Roman Catholics, Mormons, Spiritualists, and Theosophists in the nineteenth century or Moonies, Hare Krishnas, Scientologists, and New Agers at the end of the twentieth, the content and tone of anti-cult rhetoric has remained similar.

Another way of putting Jenkins's thesis is to say that Americans have never developed a historical consciousness when it comes to new religions, a sense that in one form or another they are always with us. Widespread and intense fear of new religions appears to be cyclical and, as Jenkins puts it, surprising each time it reemerges. The focus of these fears in a particular time period -- heresy at one moment, destruction of families at another, etc. -- gives us numerous keys to tensions in society. Jenkins's call is not for abandonment of the effort to interpret either the contributions or the dangerously excessive traits of any given group but for historical perspective. New religions, for the most part, have never been as large or as dangerous as public fears have suggested over the course of two centuries. Many have anticipated some of the major theological shifts of the present moment.

Readers who are not familiar with the major literature on new religions will want to stay alert for occasional inaccuracies in the text (for example, the first Re Imagining conference in Minneapolis in 1993 was sponsored by the Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Minnesota Councils of Churches, not by the United Methodists and the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.) and in the footnotes (Robert L. Moore instead of R. Laurence Moore). Overall, though, Jenkins's argument about the cyclical nature of cult scares and the persisting similarity of accusations against new religious groups are well substantiated, and his perspective is constructively provocative.

Mary Farrell Bednarowski teaches at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.