reviewed by
Joseph P. Szimhart, Sept 2004
Title: Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and new religions in American history
Date: 2000 (paperback, 2001)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016
ISBN 0-19-514596-8 (Pbk.)
294 pages, $16.95 US
Religion
Title: The New Anti-Catholicism: The last acceptable prejudice
Date: 2003
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016
ISBN 0-19-515480-0
258 pages (Hardback) $27.00 US
Anti-Catholicism
According to the jacket notes of The New Anti-Catholicism, Philip Jenkins is a Professor of History and Religious Studies at the State University of Pennsylvania. Besides the two books I am about to discuss, Jenkins authored Pedophiles and Priests and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. He impresses me as a scholar very familiar with the territory of his topics. His general thesis in Mystics and Messiahs is that the cult problem is not as new as most current commentaries seem to indicate— a baby-boom phenomenon that arose during the 1960s. He spends considerable effort to establish the roots of most current new religions and cults in America as emerging from the nineteenth century. Jenkins also addresses polarization against cultic groups by organizations that he calls “anticult movements.” Jenkins traces more recent manifestations of anticult activity beginning with the period from 1910. His views reflect the standards and views of most sociologists who study new religious movements. He suggests that new and emerging religions and their leaders are always suspect within the surrounding society and by established religions. He also suggests that it is wrong to prematurely label the leader as a “rogue or maniac” (p. 26), and the groups as chronically dangerous and deceptive.
Within his academic survey approach, the author provides a nice survey of the history of many new movements and their critics starting with the first chapter “Overrun with Messiahs.” Overall, Jenkins is more concerned with public reaction to and legal interference with cults than with their odd or allegedly harmful behaviors. He ends his narrative on p.239: “It is the society that lacks cults and cult panics that has the most to fear about the state of its religious life.” Cults serve a purpose then as a barometer of the religious health of a nation. Implied in Jenkin’s book is a plea for a tolerant society, not one that makes heroes of fear mongers who would demonize all cults. He points out that estimates of how many people belong to cults are exaggerated by anticultists to be perhaps in the millions, whereas he relies on J. Gordon Melton as “the most authoritative source on the membership of cults” (P. 181) who places the number at 150,000 to 300,000. He discusses the difficulty in counting or estimating numbers often stems both from definition and perspective, not to mention the instability and fluctuating numbers in the groups themselves. Self-reporting by groups is unreliable, he says. For example the Church of Scientology may claim three million members in America in 1993 when reliable statistics put the number at 45,000 (p. 183).
In chapter three he covers “Anti-Christian Cults?” His list includes Christian Science, Theosophy, The Mighty “I AM”, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and Spiritualism. There is some overlap in his discussion depending on chapter topic. In “The First New Age” Jenkins appropriately revisits Theosophy, New Thought, and The Mighty “I AM.” In chapter five he explores some “Black Gods” that includes Father Divine, the Nation of Islam, Black Jews (sic) and American “voodoo.” In chapter six, “The Cult Racket,” Jenkins takes issue with the approach of psychiatry that he says reached “new heights in the 1930s.” Sociologists and psychologists in that era both diagnosed whole groups and many cult leaders. “Cultists, whether leaders or followers, must be sick,” Jenkins says facetiously on page 135.
One important observation made by Jenkins about the cult scares over the past 150 years, especially during the past 50 years, should intrigue the reader. In terms of social impact cults in toto have not affected nearly the numbers of Americans that the rise in mainstream evangelical churches and charismatic Christian movements has. The real story about changes in religion in America remains in the established Christian camp despite the headlines grabbed by more sensational cult stories like the Branch Davidians at Waco. Less sensational new movements, mostly very small, exist for the most part under the radar of cult/new religious movement observers anyway. I agree with Jenkins. When I lived in Santa Fe for seventeen years until 1993, I recall many small groups in that town alone that would easily fit the new religion or cult label, groups that never made it on the lists compiled by J. Gordon Morton and his colleagues. During my career as an exit counselor I fielded complaints about dozens of small groups in America that also never had a mention in the news media let alone in sociology of religions journals or books. The Santa Fe area may be unique even among spiritual seeker towns, but if it is any indication we really have no accurate idea how much or how little cult activity is going on out there, good or bad. Whatever the numbers, Jenkins intimates that the perceived impact that cult groups have on American society exceeds actual dangers.
Jenkins covers the bogus rise of the Satanism scare from the early 1970s through mid 1990s, and he credits this panic with the renewed interest in cults by the late 1980s, thus more business for the original Cult Awareness Network and other cult watch organizations. He traces the denouement of the Cult Awareness Network as a result of accusations of CAN being connected to illegal deprogramming. In the chapter “Cult Wars” Jenkins selects quotes from “anticult movement” representatives who tended to exaggerate the impact and numbers of its favorite targets (p. 199). Although he moves fast and sometimes loose through the territory, I think his overview of cults and new religious movements is a good introduction to specific players in this subculture war in American society.
However, his final chapter “Teeming with Faith” betrays a flaw and a distinction most sociologists of religion share in cult studies. In their efforts to celebrate the diversity, uniqueness, and “newness” of emerging or fringe movements there seems to be little concern over what should be done to prevent the harm or to help the victims of new experiments in religion gone awry. On the other hand Jenkins can barely contain his cynicism when expounding on the history of those who have demonstrated active concern, recovery assistance, or medical analysis. To introduce the chapter he quotes Marcus Bach (an author whose books I’ve read) who wrote in 1946: “Whenever these came along they were interpreted as holy whisperings or wild hallucinations, depending on the point of view.” And therein lies the flaw, in the equivocation that differences between anticultists and cultists are merely points of view.
In his other book, The New Anti-Catholicism, Jenkins analyzes a special religious conflict with some connections to his study about reactions to cults in society in Mystics and Messiahs. Catholicism comes as a wary guest into the predominantly Protestant matrix of American culture and government. Jenkins traces the ebb and flow of this hierarchical movement that to some critics, especially to Protestant fundamentalists, is the largest of cults. As a point of disclosure I am Roman Catholic by my Hungarian family tradition and by current practice. As a result I had a keen interest in this book by Jenkins who makes some interesting comments that flow from his previous book. His central focus appears well into the book when he states: “In modern American history, no mainstream denomination has ever been treated so consistently, so publicly, with such venom. To find parallels, we would have to look at the media response to fringe groups and cults, such as the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century, the Jehovah Witnesses of the 1940s, or the controversial cults of the 1970s” (p.134). As a Catholic white man who grew up in America, I feel I have walked seamlessly through prejudicial attitudes compared to say a Protestant Black man or a little person with dwarfism. So I read this book with some curiosity and a question. Is it true that as a Catholic I am picked on for ridicule and hate more readily than say my Jewish friends in America?
In his introductory chapter “Limits of Hatred” the author frames his point of view, prefacing that there is nothing wrong with polemic as such. “The argument of this book is not so much that Catholicism is subjected to unjust abuse, but that it is virtually the only major institution with which such liberties are still permitted” (p. 15). As an example of how some anti-Catholics regard “The Catholic Menace” in chapter two, he lists Bob Jones University of South Carolina. “The school teaches that Mormonism and Catholicism are both cults unrelated to genuine Christianity” p. 24). Furthermore, Bob Jones Jr. like many strict fundamentalists regards the Catholic Church as the Mother of Harlots, a metaphorical title given to ancient Babylon in the Book of the Revelation, that last book of the Bible. I recall that the New Age sect I once pursued, the Church Universal and Triumphant, taught the same thing! This same venom exists in a “new liberal anti-Catholicism” that emerged in the late 1970s. The author, again facetiously, remarks as follows: “Of course, bishops hate women and gays, priests molest children, and the Church supported the Holocaust: everybody knows that” (p. 209).
Jenkins supports his argument with a remarkable survey of a long list of anti-Catholic books and productions. Among them he discusses, for example, the play Sister Mary and the movies Godfather II and Stigmata. He offers F. Tupper Saussy’s book Rulers of Evil (2001) as an anti-Catholic version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a well-known 19th century forgery used by Nazis, white supremacist cults, and anti-Semitic groups as evidence that evil Jews plan to take over the world. Another anti-Catholic stereotype that the author discusses, deconstructs, and essentially dismisses regards Pope Pius XII, ruefully known among anti-Catholics as “Hitler’s Pope” (p. 193). In historical context, Jenkins argues, Pope Pius XII’s alleged “silence” about the Jews and “negotiating a concordat with the Hitler regime soon after it came to power,” can hardly be condemned. His belated protest still came before anything was said or done by “Franklin Roosevelt, the International Red Cross, King Gustaf of Sweden, and the Jewish Agency in Palestine.” Jenkins reminds us that Hitler’s regime was also anti-Christian, quoting Hitler: “You can be a Christian or a German. You cannot be both….Josef Goebbels aspired to exterminate “after the last Jew, the last priest” (p. 197). He quotes Kenneth Woodward’s review of Hitler’s Pope by Cornwell as “a classic example of what happens when an ill-equipped journalist assumes the airs of sober scholarship….Errors of fact and ignorance appear on almost every page” (p. 198).
Chapter seven covers the “Pedophile Priest Crisis” in depth. Here Jenkins is on top of his game of scholarship as he had already published Pedophiles and Priests in 1996. His argument extends into all alleged sexual indiscretions by clergy that have placed a heavy financial and image burden on contemporary Catholicism. Jenkins reminds us that many of the most damaging attacks against the Church come from liberal Catholics. He mentions critics Maureen Dowd, James Carroll, Anna Quindlen, Richard Sipe, Garry Wills, and Eugene Kennedy. Without minimizing real abuses, he argues that the actual number of abuses and threat to society does not warrant such venom, yet it exists as it has for centuries. In this regard he finds many parallels in social reaction to cults among anti-cultists. And in the area of hate crime, he finds that Catholics receive fewer protections than other groups. Despite his supporting evidence for all of this, I feel his title stretches too far in isolating Anti-Catholicism as a last acceptable prejudice. In America Republicans on one hand, and liberals one the other, could easily argue for that prize as well.
Both books are well researched, readable and contain excellent page notes. Whether you agree with the author or not at every turn, he constructs and supports his arguments clearly enough for the demanding reader.