Modern Religious Cults and Movements

by Gaius Glenn Atkins

It remains only to sum up in a most general way the conclusions to which this study may lead. There has been a process of criticism and appraisal throughout the whole book, but there should be room at the end for some general statements.

The writer recognizes the limitations of his method; he has studied faithfully the literature of the cults, but any religion is always a vast deal more than its literature. The history of the cults does not fully tell their story nor does any mere observation of their worship admit the observer to the inner religious life of the worshippers. Life always subdues its materials to its own ends, reproduces them in terms of its own realities; there are endless individual variations, but the outcome is massively uniform. Religion does the same thing. Its materials are faiths and obediences and persuasions of truth and expectations of happier states, but its ultimate creations are character and experience, and the results in life of widely different religions are unexpectedly similar. Both theoretically and practically the truer understanding or the finer faith and, particularly, the higher ethical standards should produce the richer life and this is actually so. But real goodness is everywhere much the same; there are calendared saints for every faith.

There is an abundant testimony in the literature of the cults to rare goodnesses and abundant devotion, and observation confirms these testimonies. Something of this is doubtless due to their environment. The Western cults themselves and the Eastern cults in the West are contained in and influenced by the whole outcome of historic Christianity and they naturally share its spirit. If the churches need to remember this as they appraise the cults, the cults need also to remember it as they appraise the churches. Multitudes of Catholics and Protestants secure from a religion which the cults think themselves either to have corrected or outgrown exactly what the cults secure—and more. Such as these trust God, keep well, go happily about their businesses and prove their faith in gracious lives. There is room for mutual respect and a working measure of give and take on both sides.

The writer is inclined to think the churches at present are more teachable than the more recent religious movements. For a long generation now the churches have been subject to searching criticism from almost every quarter. The scientist, the sociologist, the philosopher, the publicist, the discontented with things as they are and the protagonist of things as they ought to be, have all taken their turn and the Church generally, with some natural protest against being made the scapegoat for the sins of a society arrestingly reluctant to make the Church's gospel the law of its life, has taken account of its own shortcomings and sought to correct them. The cults are as yet less inclined to test themselves by that against which they have reacted. But this is beside the point. The movements we have been studying can only be fairly appraised as one follows through their outcome in life and that either in detail or entirety is impossible. But it is possible to gain from their literature a reasonable understanding of their principles and interrelations and this the writer has sought to do.

The Cults Are Aspects of the Creative Religious Consciousness of the Age

Certain conclusions are thus made evident. These movements are the creation of the religious consciousness of the time. They are aspects of the present tense of religion. Since religion is, among other things, the effective desire to enter into right relationships with the power which manifests itself in the universe there are two variants in its content; first, our changing understanding of the power itself and second, our changing uses of it. The first varies with our knowledge and insight, the second with our own changing sense of personal need. Though God be the same yesterday, to-day and forever, our understandings of Him cannot and ought not to be the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Our faith is modified by, for example, our scientific discoveries. When the firmament of Hebrew cosmogony has given way to interstellar spaces and the telescope and the spectroscope plumb the depths of the universe, resolving nebulæ into star drifts, faith is bound to reflect the change. The power which manifests itself in the universe becomes thereby a vaster power, operating through a vaster sweep of law. Our changed understandings of ourselves must be reflected in our faith and our ethical insights as well. And because there is and ought to be no end to these changing understandings, religion itself, which is one outcome of them, must be plastic and changing.

What we ask of God is equally subject to change. True enough, the old questions—Whence? Whither? and Why? are constant. As we know ourselves to be living in a world which is less than a speck in an immensity wherein the birth and death of suns are ephemeral, we may rightly distrust our own value for the vaster order. We shall, therefore, the more insistently ask Whence? and Whither? and Why? But, none the less, there is always a shifting emphasis of religious need. Our own time is manifestly more concerned about well-being in the life that now is than a happy issue in the life which is to come. Temperament also qualifies experience. The mystic seeks conscious communion with God as an end in itself; the practical temper asks the demonstration of the love of God in happy material conditions. In general, action and reaction govern this whole region. The Puritan was supremely concerned about his own salvation and the struggle consequent thereto; his descendants were chiefly interested in the extension of knowledge and the conquest of the physical order and we react against this in a new return upon ourselves and the possibilities of personality.

Now these changing understandings of the power which manifests itself in the universe on the one side and our own changing senses of need on the other, give to religion a constantly fluctuating character and what is most distinctively religious in any period must be the outcome of the combination of these two variants. What an age asks of the God whom it knows colours the whole of its religious life. These cults and movements do not wholly represent the creative religious consciousness of our time, of course; a great deal of that same creative religious consciousness has given new quality to the organizations and orthodoxies of the churches. But within the frontiers of historic Christianity it has been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than an actual adventure in the making of religion. The cults and movements have not been thus limited. They have challenged old understandings, broken away from the older organizations and taken their own line, using such material as seems proper for their purpose.

They are not wholly independent of the past; some of them have taken the immemorial speculations of the East for their point of departure though introducing therein a good many of the permissions or conclusions of modern science and something of the spirit of Christianity itself. Those taking their departure from Christianity have claimed rather to reinterpret and modernize it than to supplant it by their own creations. Yet when all this is recognized these cults and movements are particularly the creation of our own time. So accepted, they reveal strongly the persistence of religion. All these conjectures and confidences and reachings through the shadows are just a testimony that few are content to go on without some form of religion or other.

All religion has, in one phase or another, gone through much the same process. There has been for every religion a time when it took new form out of older elements, a time when the accepted religions had little enough sympathy for and understanding of what was taking place about them while those committed to new quests were exultant in the consciousness of spiritual adventure and discovery and heard the morning stars sing together for joy. What is thus begun must submit always to the testimony of time. In the end a religion is permanent as it meets the great human needs and adjusts itself to their changing phases. It is imperial and universal as it meets these needs supremely. If in addition it be capable of organization, if there be within it room for expansion, and if, on the whole, it justifies itself by the outcome of it in life and society it will persist, and if it persists through a long period of time and creates for itself literatures, dogmas and authorities, it becomes as nearly fundamental as anything can be in this world. It creates cultures, shapes civilizations, colours art, establishes ideals and fills the whole horizon of its devotees.