religious economy (pp. 5-6)
Our studies of religious movements are based on an effort to test empirically our deductive theory of religion. Our basic theory leads us to a definition that attempts to isolate the fundamental features of how religion serves human needs. We shall sketch the logical chain by which our definition arises, and we gave a more formal statement in one of our technical essays (Stark and Bainbridge, 1980).
We begin with a mundane axiom about human behavior: Humans seek what they perceive to be rewards and try to avoid what they perceive to be costs. In various forms, this is one of the oldest and still most central propositions about human behavior. It is the starting point for micro-economics, learning psychology, and sociological theories (Homans, 1950, 1961). However, when we inspect more closely this human tendency to seek rewards, we see two important points:
compensators (pp. 6-7)
Noting the strong desires for rewards that are available to many, as well as those that seem not to be directly available to anyone, we can recognize another characteristic human action: the creation and exchange of compensators. People may experience rewards, but they can only have faith in compensators. A compensator is the belief that a reward will be obtained in the distant future or in some other context which cannot be immediately verified.
We do not use the word compensator in any pejorative sense. By it we simply mean to recognize that, when highly desired rewards seem unavailable through direct means, persons tend to develop explanations about how they can gain this reward later or elsewhere. Compensators are a form of IOU. They promise that, in return for value surrendered now, the desired rewards will be obtained eventually. Often people must make regular payments to keep a compensator valid, which makes it possible to bind them to long-term involvement in an organization that serves as a source of compensators. Put another way, humans will often exchange rewards of considerable value over a long period of time in return for compensators in the hope that a reward of immense value will be forthcoming in return.
Compensators are by no means exclusively, or even primarily, religious in nature. They are generated and exchanged throughout the range of human institutions. When a radical political movement instructs followers to work for the revolution now, in return for material rewards later, compensators have been exchanged for rewards. The party receives direct rewards; the followers receive an IOU. Or a compensator is exchanged for a reward when people have their bodies frozen in a cryogenic vault until science discovers how to cure their disease to overcome the aging process. Similarly, when a parent tells a child, "Be good; work hard; one day you will be rich and famous," a compensator-reward exchange is proposed.
religion (p. 5)
How can we distinguish between religions and other ideological systems? In our judgment, the answer was correctly given by the 19th-century founders of the social scientific study of religion, those men whom Durkheim attempted to bury: religions involve some conception of a supernatural being, world, or force, and the notion that the supernatural is active, that events and conditions here on earth are influenced by the supernatural. Or, as Sir James Frazer (1922:58) put it, "religion consists of two elements ... a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them."
(pp. 7-8)
Although in our more technical essays we are able to derive this line of reasoning from our theory, surely the point can stand on its own merit: Some common human desires are so beyond direct, this-worldly satisfaction that only the gods can provide them. This simple point has profound implications.
So long as humans intensely seek certain rewards of great magnitude that remain unavailable through direct actions, they will be able to obtain credible compensators only from sources predicated on the supernatural. In this market, no purely naturalistic ideologies can compete. Systems of thought that reject the supernatural lack all means to credibly promise such rewards as eternal life in any fashion. Similarly, naturalistic philosophies can argue that statements such as "What is the meaning of life?" or "What is the purpose of the universe?" are meaningless utterances. But they cannot provide answers to these questions in the terms in which they are asked.
This profound difference in compensator-generating capacity is why we have chosen to define religions as human organizations primarily engaged in providing general compensators based on supernatural assumptions.
sect (p. 23)
Benton Johnson (1963:542; cf. 1957, 1971) ... settled on a single attribute to classify religious groups: "A church is a religious group that accepts the social environment in which it exists. A sect is a religious group that rejects the social environment in which it exists."
[Since a "cult" also rejects its social environment (to some degree), the authors restrict Johnson's foregoing definition to designate a schismatic group only. Continuing on p.25:]
Because sects are schismatic groups, they present themselves to the world as something old. They left the parent body not to form a new faith but to reestablish the old one, from which the parent body had "drifted" (usually by becoming more churchlike). Sects claim to be the authentic, purged, refurbished version of the faith from which they split. Luther, for example, did not claim to be leading a new church, but the true church, free of worldly encrustations.
cult (p. 25)
Cults, with the exception to be noted, do not have a prior tie with another established religious body in the society in question. The cult may represent an alien (external) religion, or it may have originated in the host society, but through innovation, not fission.
Whether domestic or imported, the cult is something new vis-a-vis the other religious bodies of the society in question. If domestic -- regardless of how much of the common religious culture it retains -- the cult adds to that culture a new revelation or insight justifying the claim that it is new, "more advanced". Imported cults often have little common culture with existing faiths; they may be old in some other society, but they are new and different in the importing society.
tension (p. 23)
Johnson postulated a continuum representing the degree to which a religious group is in a state of tension with its surrounding sociocultural environment. The ideal sect falls at one pole, where the surrounding tension is so great that sect members are hunted fugitives. The ideal church anchors the other end of the continuum and virtually is the sociocultural environment -- the two are so merged that it is impossible to postulate a basis for tension. Johnson's ideal types [...] are ideal in precisely the same way that ideal gases and frictionless states are ideal. They identify a clear axis of variation and its end points.
cult types: audience cult, client cult, and cult movement (p. 26)
Three degrees of organization (or lack of organization) characterize cults. The most diffuse and least organized kind is an audience cult. Sometimes some members of this audience actually may gather to hear a lecture. But there are virtually no aspects of formal organization to these activities, and membership remains at most a consumer activity. Indeed, cult audiences often do not gather physically but consume cult doctrines entirely through magazines, books, newspapers, radio, and television. [Later, the authors cite UFO groups as an example.]
More organized than audience cults are what can be characterized as client cults. Here the relationship between those promulgating cult doctrine and those partaking of it most closely resembles the relationship between consultant and client. Considerable organization may be found among those offering the cult service, but clients remain little organized. Furthermore, no successful effort is made to weld the clients into a social movement. Indeed, client involvement is so partial that clients often retain an active commitment to another religious movement or institution.
Cult movements can be distinguished from other religious movements only in terms of the distinctions between cults and sects previously developed. We address only cult movements in our subsequent theory, but the less organized types currently are more common and need to be described so they will not be confused with the full-fledged cult movement. [Scientology is described as having evolved from a client cult to a cult movement.]
In their chapter on Scientology, the authors define magic as "mental and symbolic exercises undertaken to accomplish the impossible." They discuss the relation of of magic to science and religion on pp. 30-33:
Put into our conceptual language, magic deals in relatively specific compensators, and religion always includes the most general compensators. This characteristic of magic has two extremely important implications for understanding religious movements and makes it possible to distinguish cult movements from other cult phenomena.
First, because magic deals in specific compensators, it often becomes subject to empirical verification. This means that magic is chronically vulnerable to disproof. Claims that a particular spell will cure warts or repel bullets can be falsified by direct tests. This makes magic a risky exchange commodity and accounts for the rapid turnover among popular magicians.
In Part V, we suggest that the inclusion of magic in the traditional teachings of the major world religions made them extremely vulnerable to attacks by science over the past several centuries and that this has resulted in considerable secularization of these faiths. But we also pay considerable attention in those chapters to the fact that it is only magic, not religion, that is vulnerable to scientific test. The most general compensators, based on supernatural assumptions, are forever secure from scientific assessment. It is this feature of religion that leads us to conclude in chapters 19 through 22 that, although particular religions, perhaps those of greatest prominence, may go into eclipse, religion will continue.
The empirical vulnerability of magic also helps us identify the line between magic and science. Here we fully agree with Max Weber (1963:2), who distinguished magic from science on the basis of the results of empirical testing: "Only we, judging from the standpoint of our modern views of nature, can distinguish objectively in such behavior those attributes of causality which are `correct' from those which are `fallacious,' and then designate the fallacious attributions of causation as irrational, and the corresponding acts as `magic'." Magic flourishes when humans lack effective and economical means for such testing. Indeed, it can be said that we developed science by learning how to evaluate specific explanations offered by magic. That is, science is an efficient procedure for evaluating explanations.
We have not identified magic with supernaturally based compensators. Often magic does invoke supernatural assumptions, as when ritual magicians attempt to call up devils to do their bidding. However, the supernatural is often not clearly implicated in magic. Thus, magicians may attempt to overcome natural law -- in effect, to perform miracles -- without relying on supernatural agents or clear supernatural assumptions to accomplish such wonders. Indeed, magical properties often are thought to inhere in a particular substance -- love potions or Laetrile "work" because of their inherent magical qualities. Some people believe they can cause pain by sticking pins in a Voodoo doll, and, as Richard Kieckhefer (1976:6) notes:
For most processes that they employ, people have some vague (and perhaps incorrect) notion of the mechanism involved, or else they assume that they could ascertain this mechanism if they so endeavored, or they take it on faith that someone understands the link between cause and effect. But the man who mutilates his enemy's representation cannot make any of these claims. He may believe that the magical act works, but he cannot explain how.
Similarly, people often will believe in their own or others' magical powers without necessarily explaining these powers by reference to supernatural agents. Psychics, fortune-tellers, water dowsers (water witches), and even astrologers often claim inexplicable gifts, but many do not attribute these to supernatural sources. By excluding clear supernatural assumptions from our definition of magic and focusing instead on claims to circumvent natural laws, we leave room in our definition of magic for many folk practices and "superstitions" as well as for present-day pseudosciences, which also often lack clearly supernatural assumptions. This is important later in the book because it permits us to see the conditions under which such "secular" magics do turn toward supernatural assumptions or even evolve into fully developed religions. It also makes it possible to see that religious organizations may impute supernatural assumptions to magical practices that, in fact, do not clearly make such assumptions. For example, as we see in Chapter 5, Christianity often has interpreted folk magic as performed by the devil, even though its practitioners did not believe this. Whether or not they assume the supernatural, these magics can be identified as compensators (and thus as magic) in the manner suggested by Weber and by Kieckhefer, that is, by empirical falsification of their claims. They constitute magic rather than incorrect efforts at science because they are offered without regard for their demonstrable falsity. Thus, we reserve the term magic for compensators that are offered as correct explanations without regard for empirical evaluations and that, when evaluated, are found wanting.
The second important implication of the fact that magic deals only in specific compensators is that magic lacks the exchange characteristics needed to sustain organizations (cf. Fortune, 1932; Evans-Pritchard, 1937). The most general compensators often require individuals to engage in a lifelong commitment in order to maintain the value of these compensators, but specific compensators can sustain only short-term commitments. In our formal theory, we are able to deduce these differences between magic and religion as follows:
- Magicians cannot require others to engage in long-term stable patterns of exchange.
- In the absence of long-term, stable patterns of exchange, an organization composed of magicians and a committed laity cannot be sustained.
- Magicians will serve individual clients, not lead an organization.
In the case of religions, however, all these "cannots" become "cans." Religious leaders can create stable organizations because the most general compensators do require long-term, stable patterns of exchange. The Christian, Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, Mormon, or Moonie who lapses from his or her religious obligations risks losing those vast rewards promised by the general compensators of his or her faith.
Table of Contents (of the book)
The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation, by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Part I: The Religious Economy -- 39
Part II: Sect Movements -- 97
Part III: Cults -- 169
Part IV: Recruitment -- 305
Part V: Sources of Religious Movements -- 427
Bibliography -- 531
Index -- 559
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