Modern Religious Cults and Movements

by Gaius Glenn Atkins

The Influence of Philosophy and the Social Situation

How far contemporaneous philosophy has affected inherited faith or supplied a basis for new religious development, is more difficult to say. Beyond debate philosophic materialism has greatly influenced the religious attitude of multitudes of people just as the reactions against it have supplied the basis for new religious movements. Pragmatism, affirming that whatever works is true, has tended to supply a philosophic justification for whatever seems to work, whether it be true or not, and it has beside tended to give us a world where little islands of understandings have taken, as it were, the place of a continuous continent of truth. The tendencies of the leaders of new cults have been to take the material which science and psychology have supplied and build them into philosophies of their own; they have not generally been able or willing to test themselves by the conclusions of more disciplined thinkers.

New Thought has undoubtedly been affected by the older idealisms—Berkeley's for example—while James and Royce have supplied congenial material. The movements are generally selective. New Thought uses James' applied psychology and possibly Royce's Absolute, but does not consistently confine itself to any one system. Philosophy also has been itself of late working in a pretty rarified region. Its problems have not been the problems of the common mind. It has been trying to find out how we know, to relate the inner and the outer world, and in general to account for things which the average man takes for granted, and in the understanding of which he is more hindered than helped by the current philosophy of the schools. It takes philosophy a good while to reach the man in the street, and even then its conclusions have to be much popularized and made specific before they mean much for him. We shall know better fifty years from now what philosophy is doing for religion and life than we know to-day. There are, however, as has been said, aspects of philosophy which religion generally is beginning to take into account.

The failure of Christianity to create for itself a distinctly Christian environment has also had much to do with dissolving old religious stabilities. Strongly felt social injustices are releasing forces of discontent and creating a fertile soil for revolutionary experiment, though it must be said that modern religious cults and movements have not gained so much from this particular form of discontent as have those movements which look toward radical social readjustment. But the whole situation has created a shaken state of public opinion. The fierceness of modern competition, industrially and economically, finally carried through to the tragic competition of a world war, has put our tempers on edge. The extremes of wealth and poverty and the baffling fluctuations in modern industry have brought the existing order into disrepute. The very great number of the socially unfit and the grievous number of social misfits, along with crime and poverty and the deposit of human sediment in our cities, not only trouble men of good will but create a human element easily misled. Such conditions as these are in such painful contrast with the ideals of the Gospel, the spirit of Christianity and even the potential productive force of modern society as to lead many to believe that something is radically wrong. Many are persuaded that Christianity as now organized and led is socially sterile; they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated itself with the new religious movement, but here at least has been a disintegrating force.

An Age of Confusion

In such ways as these, then, the accepted religious order identified with historic Catholicism and Protestantism has in the last fifty years been greatly altered. Science, Biblical criticism, psychology and philosophy, and social unrest have all had their share in making people impatient of the inherited order, or doubtful or defiant of it. We have been asked to relate our old creeds and confidences to new insights and understandings. The old answers to the questions Whence? and Whither? and Why? have been challenged by new answers; our horizons have been pushed back in every direction and a strange sense of mystery both in personality and the external order has perplexed and stimulated us. Along with all this and in no little way growing out of it, has gone impatience of discipline and an undue haste to gain the various goods of life.

Evolution misled us, to begin with. If the longing for deliverance be one of the driving forces in religious life, then the vaster scientific conclusions of the latter part of the nineteenth century offered a new definition of deliverance. It was not, after all, so much in the travail of the soul as in a serene and effortless self-commitment to a power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, that we were to be saved. We had only to push out upon tides which asked of us neither rudder nor oar, to be brought to our appointed havens. How greatly we have been disillusioned in all this and how bitterly we have been taught that life is not so much a drifting with the tide as making brave headway against it, we all know well enough to-day. Somewhere back of a vast deal in these modern religious cults and movements, is the smug optimism, now taking one form and now another, which was the misleading bequest of the nineteenth century to the twentieth.

The great scientific discoveries and their application to the mechanism of life led the nineteenth century to believe that nothing was impossible. Everything we touched became plastic beneath our touch save possibly ourselves; there seemed to be no limit to what man might do and he consequently assumed that there was no limit to what he might become. He disassociated his hopes from both his disciplines and experiences; everything seemed not only possible but easily possible. A general restlessness of temper, due in part to the breaking up of the inherited order, in part to the ferment of new ideas and in part to a general relaxing of discipline, began to manifest itself.

The demoralizing influence of migratory populations ought not to be overlooked in this connection. In all the Western nations there has been an outstanding growth of industrial city populations due to changing economic conditions. The steadying influences of old environments have been lost, the influence of the new environment is too stimulating at its best and demoralizing at its worst. Our cities are not kind to home life; too often they do not supply a proper physical setting for it. The specialization of hard driven industries takes the creative joy out of work and leads to an excess of highly commercialized pleasure. The result is the modern city worker, never living long enough in one place to create for himself a normal social environment, always anxious about his economic future, restless, too largely alternating between strenuous work and highly coloured pleasure and much open, through temperament and circumstance, to the appeal of whatever promises him a new experience or a new freedom.

The Lure of the Short Cut