7.6 Case Studies

Question 1

Heaven’s Gate

NRM

Answer 1

• Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious group based near San Diego, California.
• It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985).
• On March 26, 1997, members of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, including that of Applewhite, in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe.
• They had participated in a mass suicide, a coordinated series of ritual suicides, in order to reach what they believed was an extra-terrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp.

Question 2

The People’s Temple

World rejecting NRM

Answer 2

The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, commonly shortened to Peoples Temple, was an American new religious movement which existed between 1955 and 1978.

The Temple is best known for the events of November 18, 1978, in Guyana, when 909 people died in a mass murder at its remote settlement, named “Jonestown”, as well as the murders of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his visiting delegation at the nearby Port Kaituma airstrip. The incident at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Because of the killings in Guyana, the Temple is regarded by scholars and by popular view as a destructive cult.

Question 3

ISKCON

World rejecting NRM

Answer 3

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), known colloquially as the Hare Krishna movement or Hare Krishna’s, is a Gaudiya Vaishnava religious organisation. ISKCON was founded in 1966 in New York City by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Its core beliefs are based on the Vedic scriptures, particularly the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata Purana, and the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, which has had adherents in India since the late 15th century and American and European devotees since the early 1900s.

The organization was formed to spread the practice of Bhakti yoga, the practice of love of God in which those involved (bhaktas) dedicate their thoughts and actions towards pleasing Krishna, the Supreme Lord. Its most rapid expansions in membership as of 2007[needs update] have been within India and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the ex-Soviet aligned states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Question 4

Neo-Pentecostalism and Neo charismatic movement

World accomodating NRM

Answer 4

Pentecostals have traditionally placed a high value on evangelization and missionary work. Charismatics, on the other hand, have tended to see their movement as a force for revitalization and renewal within their own church traditions.

Pentecostalism is a form of Christianity that emphasises the work of the Holy Spirit and the direct experience of the presence of God by the believer. Pentecostals believe that faith must be powerfully experiential, and not something found merely through ritual or thinking. Pentecostalism is energetic and dynamic.

Question 5

Transcendental Meditation

World Affirming NRM

Answer 5

Transcendental Meditation (TM) is a form of silent, mantra meditation advocated by the Transcendental Meditation movement. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi created the technique in India in the mid-1950s. Advocates of TM claim that the technique promotes a state of relaxed awareness, stress relief, and access to higher states of consciousness, as well as physiological benefits such as reducing the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure.

Question 6

Scientology

World Affirming NRM

Answer 6

Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices invented by American author L. Ron Hubbard, and an associated movement. It has been variously defined as a cult, a business or a new religious movement.

Scientology followers believe that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (Thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The Thetan has had innumerable past lives and it is observed in advanced (and – within the movement – secret) Scientology texts that lives preceding the Thetan’s arrival on Earth were lived in extra-terrestrial cultures. Scientology doctrine states that any Scientologist undergoing “auditing” will eventually come across and recount a common series of events. Part of these events include reference to an extra-terrestrial life-form called Xenu. The secret Scientology texts say this was a ruler of a confederation of planets 70 million years ago, who brought billions of alien beings to Earth and then killed them with thermonuclear weapons. Despite being kept secret from most followers, this forms the central mythological framework of Scientology’s ostensible soteriology – attainment of the state known as “clear”. These aspects have become the subject of popular ridicule.

Question 7

The Kendal Project

Answer 7

The leaders of the project were Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead. They studied the town of Kendal in the UK looking at both conventional and unconventional forms of religious
behaviour:

• recording church attendance
• interviewing congregations
• observing and interviewing New Age spiritual practitioners of things such as t’ai chi, reflexology and TM.

The goal was to build as full a picture as possible of ‘religious activity’, its continuities and changes, across
a number of spiritual domains. This included:

• counting everyone who attended one of Kendal’s 23 churches on a single Sunday
• counting everyone who participated in alternative forms of spiritual behaviour – a task made more difficult because this behaviour does not conform to regular weekly or monthly cycles.

While the Kendal Project shows that it is possible to accurately measure various dimensions of religiosity across different kinds of spiritual behaviour, it also demonstrates some of the difficulties and limitations:

• A study of one small (28 000 people) town in one small area of one country took two years to complete.
• The study only looked at Christian churches (no other major religions were practised in the town).
• Defining ‘alternative spiritualities’ involves grouping a variety of practices, from Wicca through TM to yoga, that may have very different spiritual significance for their practitioners. For example, yoga or t’ai chi could be seen as a lifestyle, rather than a spiritual practice.