NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS: SCRIPTURES OF NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Because new religious movements often generate suspicious or hostile reactions from representatives of the status quo, substantial scholarly attention has been devoted to their processes of leadership, recruitment, and conversion, as well as to other forms of interaction between new groups and their social environments. While such encounters do shape both the public images and self-understandings of new religious movements, they are not their only religious activities.

Many new religious movements have produced substantial bodies of literature that amplify their self-definitions, establish ritual practices and moral codes, elaborate their mythic visions of humanity and the cosmos, and reconstruct history. That literature is read, heard, studied, preached, debated, interpreted, enacted, and implemented in the daily lives of members. The texts derive their authority both from the claimed experiences of founders or other influential figures within the group and from members' acceptance of the texts as particularly revelatory. When people within a group treat a religious text as central for their understandings of themselves and the world in which they live, they elevate it above other quotidian forms of communication and accord it, at least implicitly, the status of scripture. In new religious movements, as in other religious groups, texts are made into "scriptures" by the claims that are made for them, the recognition of those claims, and the uses to which the texts are put. The scriptural status of texts is always in the process of construction. Oral teaching and informal written communications may be viewed as authoritative, and through their repeated use they may move towards a more formalized status as scripture. Even texts definitively asserted to be authoritative are subject to successive re-interpretations. Since scriptures are texts that are deemed authoritative and revelatory by a specific religious community, the process of scriptural formation in new religious movements is no different than it is in more established ones. Although individual writings frequently contain assertions about their own authority, they only function as scripture when those claims are acknowledged and acted upon by those who receive and use them.

Making New Scriptures

As new religious movements strive to secure their legitimacy, defend themselves against their cultural opponents, and attract the interest of potential members, they address what they see as the religious inadequacies of their particular social environments. Because the Western concept of scripture, as embodied by the Christian Bible, has been so widely diffused throughout the world, new religious movements frequently identify the errors or limitations that they perceive in the dominant interpretations of the Bible. In their own writings they propose the necessary corrections, supplements, or replacements. Accordingly, interpretation of the Bible is often the vehicle by which new religious movements assert both their novelty and their continuity with a hallowed past. Their novelty is what makes new religious movements worth attention, but their continuity with the past is what guarantees their gravity. Similar dynamics are at work when new religious movements confront other scriptures or collections of religiously authoritative texts, such as the Qurʾān or widely revered Hindu texts like the Bhagavadgītā. Reinterpretations of familiar scriptural texts transform their meanings for new religious communities even as they leave their scriptural status intact. The specific procedures by which new interpretations are constructed, including spiritual or allegorical readings, historical contextualization, and philological commentary, are often no different than those employed by more mainstream interpreters of scriptural texts, but the meanings that they produce reinforce new groups' status as dramatic departures from parent bodies or as distinctive, freestanding inno-vations.

The production of scriptural texts within new religious movements takes two distinctive but overlapping forms. One is new readings of familiar texts. Those readings are expressed in a variety of forms, including detailed commentaries, meandering meditations, loose glosses, and direct appropriations of specific scriptural models, such as creation stories, law codes, ethical admonitions, or prayers. The second form is the production of new scriptures. Movements that directly address a scriptural heritage can produce books that aspire to the status of "new Bibles" either by supplementing or replacing the older scriptures. Other movements strive to establish the utterances or writings of a founder as supremely authoritative. In either case, the new scriptural texts codify a novel vision of what it means to be human, how to establish proper relations with other humans and the divine, and how to achieve the goals of human life.

Whatever form the writings take, they are grounded on specific claims to authority. Ever conscious of their own novelty, new religious movements take great care to lay out the experiences and insights that sanction their innovations. Founders and influential exegetes articulate the experiences that authorize their distinctive messages and establish them as trustworthy and true. Their new ways of seeing are frequently stimulated by intimate encounters with the divine but also can result from the consistent application of rational intelligence to familiar problems.

New Visions: Divine Encounters

The founders of many new religions describe dramatic, unbidden encounters with the divine. For example, on December 13, 1973, Claude Vorhilon (b. 1946), a French journalist and racecar driver, came upon what he took to be a UFO. One of its occupants soon informed Vorhilon that he had been chosen to bring to humankind the message of the extraterrestrial "Elohim," the true creators of life on earth. Vorhilon was given the name "Raël" and was charged with preparing the earth to receive emissaries from the Elohim, who would then share their incredibly advanced technology. As the name Elohim suggests, Vorhilon's encounter with the extraterrestrials led him to a dramatic rereading of the creation story in Genesis. That reinterpretation of scripture plays a crucial role in the books that have become the guiding texts of the Raëlian movement.

Similarly, on Easter morning 1936, Sun Myung Moon (1920–) experienced a vision of Jesus that led him to a thoroughgoing revision of history. Divine Principle, first published in English in 1973, and the central scriptural text of the Unificationist movement that grew out of Moon's Easter experience, provides a new account of biblical history from the creation and fall through the career of Jesus to the imminent arrival of a new messiah who will gather humanity into a single loving family in accordance with God's original wishes. More than a century earlier, in 1820 in upper New York state, a series of visions sparked the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the promulgation of a new holy book, the Book of Mormon (1830). That new Bible, it was claimed, would dispel confusion about which of the many competing Christian sects held the truth by communicating God's message with unprecedented clarity. Also, in the 1980s Elizabeth Clare Prophet (b. 1939), who succeeded her husband Mark Prophet (1918–1973) as leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, published four volumes of The Lost Teachings of Jesus (1986), which are based on over thirty years of communications from Jesus directly to both of the Prophets. The texts build on the Prophets' claim that Jesus spent substantial time in India and surrounding areas during his so-called lost years, and they align his recovered teachings with those of the Prophets' Church Universal and Triumphant.

In each of these instances a prophetic figure's direct encounter with the divine led to both the formation of a new religious movement and to the publication of new authoritative texts. The books written by Claude Vorhilon and Mark and Elizabeth Prophet correct misreadings of the biblical tradition and supplement the tradition with new material. In a fuller fashion, the texts produced by Sun Myung Moon and Joseph Smith stand on their own as authoritative documents that incorporate, repair, and advance the message of the Christian scriptures. In each instance the new texts derive their authority from their authors' extraordinary experiences. The founder and the book confirm each other's status with reference to the same divine source.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's (1896–1977) claim to authority for his Bhagavad-Gita As It Is (1968) displays an interesting variation. Although he contends that the Bhagavadgītā summarizes all of Vedic literature and that it should be the one common scripture for the entire world, Prabhupada denies that he is offering any interpretation of it. His claim to present the text without any distorting interpretation is founded on his conviction that Lord Kṛṣṇa himself speaks in the text and that a line of thirty-two teachers that culminates with Prabhupada himself has accurately preserved the true meaning of the text. Although Prabhupada's contact with the divine is thus mediated by a "disciplic succession," its authorizing power is maintained.

New Visions: Rational Systems

Texts can achieve scriptural status without appeal to such divine encounters, however. The Church of Scientology, for example, accepts the writings of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), as scripture even though he claimed no privileged intimacy with the divine. Hubbard attributed his insights instead to a deep immersion in the problems of human psychology. His first major work on the human mind, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950), relies on what Hubbard saw as rigorous, scientific study rather than any special religious inspiration. As Hubbard's system of Dianetics developed into Scientology and came to be identified explicitly as a religion, he still claimed that the processes of his "technology" for achieving mental health were universally accessible and not restricted to religious adepts. Insight, rather than inspiration, yielded the principles of Scientology.

Anton LaVey (1930–1997), founder of the Church of Satan and author of The Satanic Bible (1969), made a similar claim for the principles of his counter-religion. While avowing that the time had definitely come for a new religion that would unmask the hypocrisies of Christianity, LaVey staked no claim to a personal religious vision. Like Hubbard, LaVey credited the discovery of his system simply to the rigorous application of rational thought. With a clear-eyed appreciation of true human nature, a love of ritual and pageantry, and a flair for mockery, LaVey's Satanic Bible promulgated a gospel of self-indulgence that, he argued, anyone who dispassionately considered the facts would embrace. Although contemporary Satanism remains an amorphous conglomeration of practices, beliefs, and attitudes, LaVey's new Bible remains a touchstone for many in the broad movement. That The Satanic Bible and Hubbard's writings could still achieve scriptural status without dependence upon divine revelation emphasizes that members of a group elevate books to scriptural status by adopting them as lenses through which they view themselves, their group, and the cosmos.

New Readings: Creation

Although they cover a wide range of topics, new readings of familiar scriptural texts often focus on both the creation of human life and its ultimate end. In The Message Given to Me by Extraterrestrials (1975) and Let's Welcome Our Fathers from Space (1979), Raël asserts that the term Elohim, which has long been understood as one of the names of God, really means "those who came from the sky," a race of superior beings with advanced knowledge of genetics. The Raëlians' story of the origins of humankind transforms any previous understandings of human nature and destiny based on Genesis, replaces the Bible's linear sense of time with a perpetual cycle of creations, and lends a newfound urgency and authority to scientific activity. The Raëlians' new reading of Genesis both remakes the past and charts a new future in which Raël's prophecy will determine the fate of the planet.

In the Divine Principle of the Unificationist movement, the focus shifts from the creation of human beings to the subsequent fall. In its presentation, Adam and Eve failed to observe God's commandments to be fruitful, to multiply and fill the earth, and to subdue the earth and have dominion over it (Gn. 1:28). In a singular assertion, the Divine Principle traces that failure to Eve's adulterous relations with Satan. Eve's and Adam's failings kept them from reaching the state of perfection that God had intended for them. Subsequently, God's desire for men and women to form loving families by uniting with each other and with God has been continually undermined by the aftershocks of the Fall. God's attempts to restore the original state of humankind by raising up prophets and potential messiahs, particularly Jesus of Nazareth, has met with only limited success. The Divine Principle 's new vision of human history sets the stage for the mission of Reverend Moon, who in the last days brings a revelation that offers humankind the chance to return to an Edenic state. Indispensable both for an understanding of the course of history and the transformative mission of Reverend Moon, the Divine Principle functions as a scriptural text that provides fundamental orientation and direction for Unificationist thought and action.

Like Claude Vorhilon and Sun Myung Moon, Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) drew new meaning out of the traditional Genesis story. For Vorhilon and Moon, extraordinary interactions with superior beings inspired their new visions of the creation story, while Eddy owed her new comprehension of the meaning of Genesis to a transforming experience of spiritual healing that led her to assert the unreality of matter and the primacy of the spiritual. For Eddy, like the Raëlians, the traditional interpretations of Genesis produce only a false picture of God. Eddy views the first creation story in Genesis 1:1–2:3 as an authoritative description of how a wholly incorporeal God created, through mind alone, a universe of ideas, including immortal humans, all without the slightest taint of materiality. Correspondingly, she concludes that the material creation of Adam out of dust and the breath of God in Genesis 2:7 must be a lie. Through her interpretation, which is included in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), Eddy makes Genesis address the distinctive theological concerns of Christian Science. Other readings of the text then become part of the history of human error. Read through the lenses supplied by Eddy the Bible speaks in a new voice and proclaims an unanticipated and surprising message for a new audience. Science and Health takes its place alongside, if not above, the Bible as an authoritative text for the Christian Science community.

In the later days of the People's Temple, the Reverend Jim Jones (1931–1978) offered one of the most dramatic rereadings of Genesis in a new religious movement. As he departed further from his Protestant roots and edged closer to addiction and madness, Jones began to see the Bible as a problem to overcome. He indicted the King James Version as a Bible of slaveholders and a source of oppression rather than liberation. To counteract its influence Jones proposed a contemporary Gnostic redeemer myth in which the God of the Bible was seen to be merely a just God, with limited powers and unsavory human characteristics. Acting as a Gnostic redeemer, Jones brought his followers news of a God beyond the Bible who would teach them their true identities. In Jones's treatment, the authority of the Bible was thoroughly overturned and his own pronouncements, given in speeches and sermons but never codified in writing, took the Bible's place and functioned as scripture for the members of the People's Temple.

New Readings: The End of the World

Leaders of new religious movements have applied similar ingenuity to imagining the end of the world. For example, after experiencing an ascent into the heavens in 1985, David Koresh (1959–1993) claimed that he himself was the Lamb of God mentioned in Revelation 4 and 5 as the only one able to open a scroll sealed with seven seals. Koresh argued, like many Christian millennialists, that every book of the Bible found its fruition in Revelation and that its apocalyptic message could only be comprehended through the agency of the Lamb of God. As a result, Koresh's oral teachings, along with their distillation in his unfinished written commentary on the seven seals, became essential for his students who sought the apocalyptic meaning of scripture; Koresh's teachings had the authority, if not the form, of scripture.

Like Koresh, Asahara Shōkō (b. 1955), the founder of Aum Shinrikyō, came to identify himself as a character from the Bible, the promised "comforter" of John's gospel. As he experienced mounting opposition to his movement and as he viewed the end of the world as growing ever nearer, Asahara devoted progressively more attention to the apocalyptic visions of the book of Revelation and to his own role in the unfolding apocalypse. In his teachings, speeches, and published materials, Asahara assimilated the New Testament to the teachings of what he identified as "original Buddhism," and he constructed a synthetic scenario of the imminent end. As with Koresh, Asahara's readings of Revelation set the biblical text in a radically new interpretive frame—Asahara simultaneously appropriated Revelation as a scriptural text for his own movement and certified his own teaching as being of equal authority.

The legal responses to Aum's murderous release of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 ended Asahara's public career as a teacher and transformed the movement that he founded; the legal responses also truncated the processes of textual interpretation and production that marked Aum's brief lifespan. As with Koresh's teaching, Asahara's production of texts was limited to a relatively short period. Because new religious movements are particularly malleable in their early days, and because many quickly dissolve or fade away, the procedures by which texts achieve authoritative status for their communities are not often fully played out. When new religions achieve some institutional stability, it is easier to chart the fluctuating prestige of particular texts and interpretive strategies and to identify which texts consistently maintain authoritative or even canonical status.

New Scriptures

Some texts produced by new religious movements explicitly claim for themselves the status of scripture. One of the most provocative examples is LaVey's Satanic Bible. By presenting as a Bible his hodgepodge of historical research, dogmatic pronouncements, obscure invocations, and both playful and serious critiques of Christianity, LaVey suggests a religious dynamic that virtually any other title would not. By naming his book a "bible," LaVey identifies a target that he intends to supplant and a status to which he aspires. Although LaVey never developed supporting structures in the Church of Satan to reinforce the status of The Satanic Bible, this text remains a primary gateway into the diffuse world of contemporary Satanism.

The Holy Piby (1924), one of the texts that inspired the development of Rastafarianism in Jamaica in the early 1930s, also insists on its scriptural status. It claims to be a holy book given to the prophet Athlyi by an angel named Douglas. Following closely the model of the Christian scriptures, The Holy Piby begins with an account of a seven-day creation, moves to the divine commissioning of a prophet and lawgiver, provides historical accounts of the doings of God's chosen people, records prayers and creedal statements, and even devotes a section to recounting "the facts of the apostles." A later reprint of the text hails it as the black man's Bible. The Holy Piby was designed to be the scriptural text of the short-lived Afro Athlican Constructive Church, but it also helped foster the pervasive biblical consciousness of the Rastafarian movement.

The amorphous contemporary New Age movement and its various precursors also offer a rich trove of texts claiming scriptural authority. In the late nineteenth century, John Ballou Newbrough published a first (1882) and then a revised (1891) version of the Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors, which he claimed to have produced by angelically directed automatic typing. Oahspe offers an elaborate cosmology with descriptions of myriad gods and heavens, a history of the planet earth, revised versions of many biblical stories, ethical guidelines, and predictions about the future. The book serves as the scripture for the Faithist movement, which still claims adherents. Comparable in scope is The Urantia Book, attributed to an array of superhuman personalities and first published in 1955. Other similar works include A Course in Miracles (1975), the result of Helen Shucman's automatic writing under the reputed direction of Jesus, and the material communicated through human "channels" by various disincarnate entities, such as the teachings of Ramtha spoken by J. Z. Knight or those of Lazaris voiced by Jach Pursel.

These texts join Eddy's Science and Health, the voluminous writings of Hubbard, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints' Book of Mormon (1830), Doctrine and Covenants (1835), and Pearl of Great Price (1851) as substantial bodies of scripture that have been composed over the past two hundred years. The drive towards articulating a clear and compelling self-definition, defining an appropriate way of life, and situating individuals in historical and cosmic contexts that animates the production of texts in any religious tradition is fully shared by new religious movements. Their founders eagerly express the new visions of human life that they have achieved either through their own diligent labors or through their privileged contact with supernatural beings. The followers attracted by those new messages see in the founder's words precious insights that must be preserved, studied, and communicated to others. Through multiple discrete interactions, both founders and followers sift through their common cache of wisdom and distill from it the statements and stories that matter most; they make (and remake) scripture from both oral and written materials that, they earnestly believe, will stand the test of time. Once made, their scriptures are then continually probed by various forms of exegesis for the inexhaustible wisdom that they are held to contain.

See Also

Aum Shinrikyō; Branch Davidians; Christian Science; Church Universal and Triumphant; Eddy, Mary Baker; Hubbard, L. Ron; International Society for Krishna Consciousness; Jones, Jim; Jonestown and Peoples Temple; Koresh, David; Mormonism; New Age Movement; Prabhupada, A. C. Bhaktivedanta; Raëlians; Rastafarianism; Satanism; Scientology; Smith, Joseph; Unification Church.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

The Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City, 1920.

Anonymous. A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, Calif., 1975.

Anonymous. Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors. 2 vols. New York, 1882.

Anonymous. The Urantia Book. Chicago, 1955.

Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Boston, 1875.

Koresh, David. "The Seven Seals of the Book of Revelation." In Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America, by James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, pp. 189–203. Berkeley, 1995.

LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Bible. New York, 1969.

Lazaris (Jach Pursel). The Sacred Journey: You and Your Higher Self. Orlando, Fla., 1987,

Prabhupada, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Bhagavad-Gita As It Is. Los Angeles, 1983.

Prophet, Elizabeth Clare. The Lost Teachings of Jesus. 4 vols. Livingston, Mont., 1986.

Raël (Claude Vorhilon). The Message Given to Me by Extra-Terrestrials. Tokyo, 1986.

Ramtha (J. Z. Knight). The Ancient Schools of Wisdom: A Collection of Teachings. Yelm, Wash., 1996

Rogers, Shepherd Robert Athlyi. The Holy Piby. Chicago, 2000; reprint of 1924 edition.

Secondary Works

Barlow, Philip L. Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion. Oxford, 1991. Sets the origin, spread, and use of the Mormon scriptures within the context of broadly diffused knowledge about the Bible in the pre-Civil War United States.

Denny, Frederick M., and Rodney L. Taylor, eds. The Holy Book in Comparative Perspective. Columbia, S.C., 1985. Essays on the formation and use of holy books in various traditions, with a specific contribution on the dynamics of scriptures in the Mormon tradition.

Gallagher, Eugene V. "'Not Yours, But Ours': Transformations of the Hebrew Bible in New Religious Movements." In Sacred Text, Secular Times: The Hebrew Bible in the Modern World, edited by Leonard Jay Greenspoon and Bryan F. Le Beau, pp. 87–102. Omaha, Neb., 2000. Analysis of the appropriation of the Hebrew Bible in Christian Science, the Unification Church, and early Rastafarianism.

Givens, Terryl L. By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion. Oxford, 2002. Focuses on the Book of Mormon in the context of Joseph Smith's prophetic career and broader cultural trends, its claims to present ancient history, and its nature as a theological resource; this volume also examines the arguments of both Mormons and non-Mormons about the book's authority, coherence, and cultural impact.

Graham, William A. Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion. Cambridge, U.K., 1987. Focuses on the uses of scriptures in the lives of religious communities and employs a broadly comparative approach, though it does not directly address new religious movements.

Levering, Miriam, ed. Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective. Albany, N.Y., 1989. Includes essays by W. C. Smith and William Graham that summarize the arguments of their longer works, and offers comparative materials from Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish traditions.

Smith, Jonathan A. "Sacred Persistence: Towards a Redescription of Canon." In Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Theory and Practice, edited by William Scott Green, pp. 11–28. Missoula, Mont., 1978. Develops "canon" as a broadly useful comparative category.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis, 1993. Despite scant attention to the scriptural products of new religious movements, a comprehensive inquiry into the processes by which texts are made into and treated as "scriptural."

Stein, Stephen J. "America's Bibles: Canon, Commentary, and Community." Church History 64 (1995): 169–184. Focuses on the formation and use of scriptural texts in new religious movements in the United States, with special attention to the Book of Mormon, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and other nineteenth-century texts.

Eugene V. Gallagher (2005)