Modern Religious Cults and Movements

by Gaius Glenn Atkins

The churches generally shared this confidence. Catholicism and Protestantism had reached a tacit working agreement as to their spheres of influence and were even beginning to fraternize a little. The divisive force of Protestantism seemed to have spent itself. Since Alexander Campbell—dead now for a decade and a half—no Protestant sect of any importance had been established. The older denominations had achieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolution and Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversy and though these controversies were severe enough they produced no schisms in the churches themselves. A few religious leaders were urging a more thoroughgoing social interpretation and application of the teachings of Jesus; such as these were really looked upon with more suspicion than the propagandists of a liberal theology.

We see now with almost tragic clearness that, beneath the surface of the whole interrelated order of that tranquil afternoon of the Victorian epoch, there were forces in action working toward such a challenge of the accepted and inherited as cultures and civilizations are asked to meet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as they have issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancient orders and new alignments along every front of human interest. It will be the task of the historians of the future who will have the necessary material in hand to follow these immense reactions in their various fields and they will find their real point of departure not in dates but in the human attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show of being final—and were not final at all.

Just there also is the real point of departure for a study like this. We may date the rise of modern religious cults and movements from the last decades of the nineteenth century, but they are really reactions not against a time but a temper, an understanding of religion and a group of religious validations which had been built up through an immense labour of travailing generations and which toward the end of the last century were in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a thousand years (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is asked to wait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to begin, then, with a state of mind which for want of a better name I venture to call the representative orthodox religious consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century. That this consciousness is Christian is of course assumed. It is Protestant rather than Catholic, for Protestantism has supplied the larger number of followers to the newer religious movements.

To begin with, this representative religious consciousness was by no means simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the modern mind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the whole of our inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of all the contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is and that the inherited elements in it far outweigh more recent contributions. The religious mind is an equally complex and deep-rooted inheritance and can best be approached by a consideration of the bases of religion.

Certain Qualities Common to All Religions

We are but pilgrims down roads which space and time supply; we cannot account for ourselves in terms of what we know to be less than ourselves, nor can we face the shadow which falls deeply across the end of our way without dreaming, at least, of that which lies beyond. Whence? Whither? and Why? are insurgent questions; they are voices out of the depths. A very great development of intelligence was demanded before such questions really took definite shape, but they are implicit in even the most rudimentary forms of religion, nor do we outgrow them through any achievement of Science or development of Philosophy. They become thereby, if anything, more insistent. Our widening horizons of knowledge are always swept by a vaster circumference of mystery into which faith must write a meaning and beyond which faith must discern a destiny.

Religion begins, therefore, in our need so to interpret the power manifest in the universe[1] as to come into some satisfying relationship therewith. It goes on to supply an answer to the dominant questions—Whence? Whither? Why? It fulfills itself in worship and communion with what is worshipped. Such worship has addressed itself to vast ranges of objects, fulfilled itself in an almost unbelievable variety of rites. And yet in every kind of worship there has been some aspiration toward an ideal excellence and some endeavour, moreover, of those who worship to come into a real relation with what is worshipped. It would need a detailed treatment, here impossible, to back up so general a statement with the facts which prove it, but the facts are beyond dispute. It would be equally difficult to analyze the elements in human nature which lead us to seek such communion. The essential loneliness of the soul, our sense of divided and warring powers and the general emotional instability of personality without fitting objects of faith and devotion, all contribute to the incurable religiosity of human nature.

[1] I have taken as a working definition of Religion a phrase quoted by Ward Fowler in the introduction to his Gifford Lectures on "The Religious Experience of the Roman People." "Religion is the effective desire to be in right relationship to the power manifesting itself in the Universe." This is only a formula but it lends itself to vital interpretations and is a better approach to modern cults, many of which are just that endeavour, than those definitions of religion just now current which define it as a system of values or a process of evaluation.

The value which religion has for those who hold it is perhaps as largely tested by its power to give them a real sense of communion with God as by any other single thing, but this by no means exhausts the value of religion for life. All religions must, in one way or another, meet the need of the will for guidance and the need of the ethical sense for right standards. Religion has always had an ethical content, simple enough to begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things were permitted, certain things prohibited as part of a cult. These permissions and prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we may trace behind taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean an always emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamental relationship between religion and ethics. Religion from the very first felt itself to be the more august force and through its superior authority gave direction and quality to the conduct of its devotees. It was long enough before all this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon on the Mount and the latter chapters of Paul's great letters to his churches and our present system of Christian ethics, but we discover the beginning of the lordship of religion over conduct even in the most primitive cults.

We shall find as we go on that this particular aspect of religion is less marked in modern religious cults and movements than either the quest for a new understanding of God or new answers to the three great questions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God. They accept, for the most part, the generally held standards of Christian conduct, but even so, they are beginning to develop their own ethical standards and to react upon the conduct of those who hold them.