July—August, 2011 (Vol. 26, No. 9-10)

In India, 35 of the top 50 domestic tourist destinations are religious sites.

At the ISSR conference, Kiran A. Shinde (University of New England, Australia) presented a paper on economic opportunities in religious tourism showing how different types of religious devotions and different organizational structures result in various levels of impact upon local communities. According to World Tourism Organization 2010 statistics, there are 600 million national and international trips for religious purposes every year. In the case of India, estimates are 170 million annually.

But pilgrimage is no longer what it used to be: the idea of pilgrimage as detachment from the world is changing, with the practice getting classier as expatriate Indians come back to India primarily for religious reasons, yet stay at luxury camps and resorts rather than in ashrams.Pilgrimage does not only involve visiting places, Shinde observed, but also performing rituals, for which religious specialists (priests, etc.) must be hired. This has a large impact on the economy of a place, but it functions in very different ways from one place to another. Shinde made comparisons between three pilgrimage places, all located in Maharashtra, in order to illustrate the difference.

In Tuljapur, with three million annual visitors, it is necessary to rely on priests’ support for performing ceremonies, and most people are accommodated in pilgrimage hostels managed by priests; some 5,000 families are in religious occupations. Strong socio-spatial connections between devotees and religious specialists are maintained over generations (members of a family always go to priests of the same lineage).In Shegaon, with some six million yearly visitors, seeing (darshan) the local saint’s tomb is what matters to pilgrims: there are not elaborate rituals, but rather the reading and recitation of the saint’s biography.

A trust manages the place and its social institutions, with some 2,000 employees, and people do not stay for more than one night (the trust provides hundreds of rooms and dining facilities). The trust has developed a religious theme park five kilometers away from the main temple. There are 60 shops in the temple premises, all owned by the trust. There is limited engagement with town development and the local community. However, the town participates by providing services (transportation, hotels, eateries).

In Shirdi, with ten million visitors per year, people come to see the statue of the saint in the temple and to submit fervent requests, for which no religious specialists are needed. More than 2,300 people are employed by the temple. A trust provides 22,000 beds in three locations and feeds 20,000 visitors daily. There are 1,200 shops in the temple district. The trust management is leading the market development of the site.

An “experimental Buddhism” marks a growing number of temples in Japan, as priests seek to adapt their organizations to changes in society, while often bypassing their denominations in the process, according to an article in the Journal of Global Buddhism (Vol. 12, 2011).

John Nelson writes that it is widely recognized that the traditional Buddhist temple system, where generations of “parishioners” supported temples’ upkeep, has been destabilized. Even if temples continue to conduct business-as-usual in conducting funerals, memorial services and the sale of graveyard plots, increasing individualism and globalization are likely to put into question even such nominal devotions and obligations.

To make matters worse, there is a disinclination among priests to seek new converts and members, mainly due to the religious disaffection still remaining from the Aum Shinrikyo incident in 1995 (and over fear of being labeled a “cult”).But Nelson notes that alongside such consumerism and indifference there is a pattern of innovation, where priests “sidestep the restrictions of denomination and doctrine to use religious traditions selectively and strategically.”

Examples of such innovations include the creation of outreach programs for individuals isolated from meaningful human contact and suicide prevention programs, restoring transparency to temple finances, and establishing hospices for the elderly and shelters for victims of domestic violence. In some cases, NGOs and cultural organizations will partner with temples to better serve their communities.

These innovations have reached denominational headquarters; in the case of the Jodoshu (or Pure Land Buddhist) headquarters in Kyoto, administrators have championed such programs as a way to foster a new model of temples playing a role as community centers.

(Journal of Global Buddhism, http://www.globalbuddhism.org)

A fledgling pro-life movement in Russia is borrowing strategies from its American counterpart, as well as creating strange bedfellows between Russian Orthodox and evangelical believers, reports Sophia Kishkovsky in the New York Times (June 9).

The article reports that Russian activists have adopted the English term “pro-life” as their own and American-style pickets of abortion clinics are “becoming a staple of the movement in Russia.” Kishkovsky adds that the campaign is “heavily influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church …. The church, increasingly vocal on social issues under Patriarch Kirill I, draws on widespread fears that Russians may become an ethnic minority in their own vast country.” Orthodox dioceses recently rallied together demonstrators to mark International Children’s Day by handing out anti-abortion literature.

The church involvement in the issue has been supported by wealthy and influential patrons seeking to promote patriotic and religious values, such as Russia’s first lady, Svetlana Medvedeva, and Sanctity of Motherhood, a foundation started by the wife of the head of Russia’s railroads. Activists are trying to pass an amendment that would make it more difficult to get an abortion in a country where the practice has often served as a form of birth control. The anti-abortion movement is small enough so that there has not been an outcry from the weakly organized women’s groups, writes Kishkovsky.

But the movement has created unusual coalitions, such as with the Rockford, Illinois-based World Congress of Families. Larry Jacobs, president of the congress, organized a U.S. tour for Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion, who has been in the forefront of encouraging a “strategic alliance” with evangelicals and Roman Catholics on pro-life and other moral issues. Kishkovsky adds that the “anti-abortion oratory familiar in the United States has found fertile ground in Russia. Graphic Web sites, posters and leaflets are supplemented with sweeping references to Russian history.”

In accounting for current state of new religious movements (NRMs) in Britain, George Chryssides notes that the growing globalization of these groups tends to make national developments or even leadership less important.

In a paper presented at the CESNUR conference in Taipei, Taiwan, Chryssides says that growing internationalization of NRMs in Britain could be seen in the name change of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order to Trirantna, because it is no longer exclusively Western. He adds that the deaths of founder-leaders have made little difference to their organizations, which would contradict classical sociological theory that sees the loss of a charismatic leader as drastically challenging a new religion.

In all cases, the leaders’ advancing years have caused them to have relinquished an active role in their organizations’ running. There is also a decline in conversions to new religions, as well as “much less aggressive proselytizing.” The latter trend may be due to recruitment efforts moving online (for instance, one can now take Scientology’s free personality test online). Chryssides writes that while there are a few “new new religions” in Britain, their numbers are not large; the groups he lists that started between 1994 and 2009 are notable for their Christian orientation, which tends to make them go unnoticed by NRM scholars.

Several are independent Protestant groups, while others are schismatic groups from the Church of England (and one from the Church of Scotland) collectively known as the “continuing movement.” Among the most unusual is the Open Episcopal Church (OEC), which, unlike the continuing churches, is liberal rather than traditionalist. But because of the OEC’s radically inclusivist stance, it has attracted disaffected conservatives and liberals from the Church of England, which has caused ongoing conflict in the body. The OEC runs a unique hybrid cyber-service that allows worshippers to order consecrated hosts through the mail and then go online to select an appropriate Mass in which to partake of the sacrament.

Catholic conservatives in the U.S. are engaged in an attempt to spread their views among potentially sympathetic circles across Europe, assessing that the situation there is more critical than in America, said Blandine Chélini-Pont (University Aix-Marseille III) at the ISSR conference in Aix-en-Provence.

Chélini-Pont describes conservative Catholicism as the ideological source of today’s American conservatism. What its members oppose primarily is “statism,” to which they oppose an ideal of moral capitalism, seen as a return to authentic Catholic social doctrine. Described as “antimodern democrats,” they are opposed to public secularism, but do not support the idea of a confessional state either.According to Chélini-Pont’s observations, they are now attempting to propagate their ideas in Europe through conservative (or even sometimes Christian Democratic) circles: Europe thus becomes a missionary field.

In order to do so, bridges can be found in some aspects of the thought of John Paul II, such as the ideal of a Christian Europe and the rejection of a “culture of death.” Chélini-Pont paid special attention to two cases: those she describes as “Catholics first,” and “Burkeans” (named after Edmund Burke). As a representative of the first category, she cites the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; regarding the second, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is the most influential actor.

The “Catholics first” networks in Europe started from Poland and spread to Slovakia; there are also members in Italy, gravitating around the Tocqueville-Acton Center. The Burkeans bring together sympathetic groups in Europe through the Center for European Renewal, with study centers under different names in several European countries.

While a number of observers claim that Scientology’s membership has stagnated in several European countries, a different view comes from the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

According to the 2010 security report of the Ministry of Interior of the state, Scientology has registered a strong increase in the area, both in members and in activities, over the past few years, partly due to its use of new media. While the total estimated number of members (600 in North Rhine-Westphalia, and between 5,000 and 6,000 in Germany) is not very high, the trend itself, as well as the use of new media tools, deserves attention. For years, state security agencies in Germany have been allowed to monitor Scientology due to some aspects of its teaching considered as potentially incompatible with the country’s constitutional values.

This means that they publish results of their monitoring in their yearly reports. The 2010 report for North Rhine-Westphalia indicates that Scientology is recruiting new members, but no longer primarily through street propaganda. The Internet, and more particularly YouTube, Twitter and social networks such as Facebook, are said to have become primary tools of propagation.

One example is a Scientology-sponsored YouTube channel on human rights; young people looking for resources in order to write a paper find the video clips attractive and informative, conceived specifically for them. A link leads to a website from which additional material can be ordered. Similarly, material against drugs can be obtained from other Scientology-sponsored websites for school use. The report claims that this is ultimately a way to draw the interest of new, young people to Scientology.

Making friends on Facebook is reported to be another tactic used by movement members in order to find new prospects: Facebook alone has some 12 million members in Germany, and social networks are virtual spaces where young people spend much time—and share personal information. Besides this, the Internet is also used in more classical ways for improving Scientology’s image through PR campaigns, such as “Meet a Scientologist,” launched in 2010.

In a similar way, any online article critical of Scientology will receive many comments offering a counterview, actually written by Scientologists acting upon instructions by the church, conveying the impression that a majority in society has a positive view of the group.

(Verfassungsschutzbericht des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen über das Jahr 2010, Düsseldorf, 2011; the report (in German only) can also be downloaded from: http://www.mik.nrw.de/verfassungsschutz/publikationen/berichte.html?eID=pub&f=146&s=0bfa96)

A controversy about the place for atheists in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been spreading throughout the recovery organization, according to The Fix (June 14), a newsletter reporting on America’s drug and rehab culture.

The controversy started when two AA meetings that cater to atheists and agnostics were expelled from Toronto’s official directory. The meetings in question had adapted their own version of the 12 Steps, leaving out the part about the higher power. The incident raised a furor in AA circles around the world, bringing up questions about how monolithic its culture should be throughout the various meetings. The two meetings were more agnostic in orientation rather than atheist, but their removal of the AA clause to seek help from “God as we understand him” led some members from several “God-focused AAs” to report the agnostic “sects” to the organization’s administration.

Although the leadership responded that a belief in God is not a requirement for membership, the effort to oust the agnostic groups gained the support of 30 groups (among 200) in Toronto. The ousting ignited protests from other AA members who had similar experiences of their “freethinker” or agnostic groups being excluded. An anonymously authored “White Paper on Non-Believers” was circulated last year among various representatives that criticized the “sobriety without God” camp in AA. But the newsletter adds that agnostic and God-based AA groups in New York, San Francisco and Chicago have long coexisted. Writer Jesse Beach speculates that the decline in membership in AA (a 5.6 percent drop from 2000 to 2008) may be leading to the need for a scapegoat.

(The Fix, http://www.thefix.com)

Megachurches are setting up multi-site campuses that are crossing state lines and, in the process, facing criticism that they are establishing churches as franchises, reports Christianity Today (July).

A recent trend among megachurches is to extend “their brand of church to new communities,” often featuring live music and sermons piped in from the main campus, while satellite campuses established by megachurches within the same area tend to operate as “high qual-ity overflow rooms,” drawing people familiar with the style and teachings of the main congregation. The long-distance campuses are more like church plants, ministering to people who may not know anything about the sponsoring megachurch.

But local church planters may feel threatened by this method. As one church planter said about the Seattle megachurch Mars Hill planting a satellite in Portland, Oregon: “… it’s a bit like reading the notice that Walmart is coming and you are the mom and pop store.” Other prominent churches starting long-distance satellite campuses include LifeChurch.tv based in Edmund, Oklahoma, which has 14 campuses in five states, and Sea-coast Church in South Carolina, which has 13 congregations in three states.

(Christianity Today, 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream, IL 60188)

A dissenting movement has mushroomed in the Baha’i religion thanks to the Internet and the way it  disseminates “reformist” proposals, according to Bei Dawei of Hsuan Chaung University in Taiwan.

In a paper presented at a June conference in Taiwan organized by CESNUR, a research center on new religious movements, Dawei noted that the Baha’i crackdown on the first wave of dissent in the 1990s, taking place in an Internet forum, resulted in the resignation and shunning of several prominent members, including historian and blogger Juan Cole. Although the Baha’i are known for their teachings on world unity and interreligious tolerance, dissenters have targeted the religion’s strong leadership that tends to view those who question its decisions as “covenant breakers” who deserve to be expelled and shunned by members.

In recent years, the leadership has to a degree softened its strictures against dissent, for instance, discarding the practice of shunning and calling such expulsion of members “disenrollment.”Dissent continues over Baha’i teachings on homosexuality and the exclusion of women from the highest level of leadership, known as the Universal House of Justice. Since many dissenters are scholars, there are also clashes over revisionist views and research on Baha’i texts and history.

The continuing conflict has led to a growing number of “disenrolled” and marginal Baha’is existing on the fringes of the movement. The growth of new Internet forums and blogs and even offshoots, with one leader writing a new Baha’i sacred text, is also leading to a more pluralistic situation. A major example of this is the recent formation of a Baha’i subgroup within Unitarian-Universalism (UU), which is not to be confused with the Unitarian Baha’i Federation.

Whether mainstream Baha’is classify these groups as “covenant breakers” who must be shunned or as “dissident or apostate coalitions operating within an interfaith context (since there are Jewish, Pagan and Christian subgroups within the UU) … remains to be seen,” concludes Dawei.

A fast-growing and influential network of technological thinkers and groups borrow concepts from religion and spirituality while often seeing themselves in competition with traditional faiths, according to Abou Farman of the City University of New York.

At a Columbia University conference on spirituality in late May attended by RW, Farman presented a paper on what he called “informatic futurists,” a network of transhumanists who believe that humans can transcend their limits through technology; artificial intelligence enthusiasts; and “singularitarians” who believe that a computerized “super-intelligence” will replace the human mind. These different groups hold to the worldview that the universe is constituted by and through information and that the use of information technology can be a way of “surpassing the limitations of biology and ushering in the next stage in evolution.” These groups and movements have their background in the technology boom of the 1990s in Silicon Valley.

Although informatic futurists are usually secularists and naturalists, some proponents promote what could be called a “secular spirituality.” Teresem, a Florida-based group dedicated to achieving immortality through nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and its founder, Martine Rothblatt, use language that is “spiritual even New Age—the reach for authenticity and origins, the revelation, the projection of unity and inclusiveness, the appeals to energy and immortality,” Farman said. Rothblatt disavows supernatural explanations, yet uses spiritual language to buttress her idea that technology has a definite direction and purpose. Some do not see an inevitable conflict between transhumanism and religion.

In 2009 the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pistoia in Italy held a week-long seminar on the subject, which drew both transhumanist support and criticism. More typically, informatic futurists seek to compete with and eventually overturn traditional religious institutions. William Sims Bainbridge, a prominent sociologist of religion and pioneer of this movement, has argued for the need for “really aggressive, attractive space religions … meeting the emotional needs of different segments of our population, driving traditional religions and retrograde cults from the field.” Such ideas have been taken up by Giulio Prisco, an Italian transhumanist activist and former physicist, who established the Order of Cosmic Engineers.

The goal of the order is to “permeate our universe with benign intelligence, building and spreading it from inner space to outer space and beyond.” Farman says that the informatic futurists are gaining influence in mainstream society. In his position at the National Science Foundation, Bainbridge has organized a government-sponsored conference on the “convergence” or unification of nanotechnology, biotechnology, informatics and cognitive science. Singularity thinkers have found a welcome at the U.S. space agency, NASA.

A recent NASA publication attempts to link socio-biological views of cultural evolution to physics and astronomy, arguing for the need for a “cosmic consciousness.” Farman cites the publication as claiming that the cosmos is “intertwined with human destiny … impinging on (and arguably essential to) questions normally reserved for religion and philosophy.” The informatic futurist challenge may change the relationship between religion and secularism: “secular humanism and religion will find each other closer than ever before as the informatic cosmologists try and move away from both gods and humans, as well as from the earth itself.”

Anti-Islamic sentiment has recently crossed the line from being confined to a largely apolitical and conservative Christian subculture to gaining a more active place in Republican politics and the conservative media, according to the libertarian magazine Reason (August/September).

The magazine reports that the recent spate of campaigns against the building of mosques and efforts to enact legislation against the establishment of Islamic Sharia law reveal a marked change in the conservative political climate. Taking a cue from President George Bush, after 9/11 anti-Islamic views were generally muted in conservative political circles, with the exception of many evangelical and charismatic Christians who focused on theological concerns. Cathy Young writes that at first, the controversy over plans to open a mosque near the World Trade Center did not ignite a strong response from conservatives; it was only after conservative blogger/activist Pamela Geller launched the “Stop the 911 Mosque” campaign last year that these views were circulated and popularized through such media as Fox News.

While opposition to building the mosque was found among a wide spectrum of New Yorkers and Americans, similar campaigns against mosques have grown throughout the U.S. In campaigns against the establishment of mosques, there is often the claim that the mosque in question is receiving foreign funds from terrorists or is different from other congregations, since “Islam is a political movement,” according to California Tea Party activist Diana Serafin. The opposition to Islam’s alleged political designs is more clearly seen in the drive to pass bills banning the use of Islamic religious laws in state courts.

Efforts to pass these bills have taken place in 20 states, including Oklahoma, Missouri, Alaska and other states with small Muslim populations. Young writes that such activism is often based on “a lot of skewed and garbled facts—and issues by no means unique to Muslims or Islam.” She adds that other religious groups have been accommodated by the government; Sharia courts are “analogous to existing Jewish religious courts or within-community conflict resolutions among Mormons or the Amish.” Anti-Islamic activ-ists respond that such accommodation is different for Muslims, since they say “radicals” want to Islamize the U.S.The Jewish online newspaper Forward.com (July 12) reports that David Yerushalmi, a Brooklyn lawyer affiliated with Lubavitch Hasidic Judaism, has been the architect behind the anti-Sharia bills.

He offers legislators a template that claims to sidestep constitutional objections to singling out Islam by avoiding explicit mention of it (although some bills have still mentioned religious terms). In Yerushalmi’s writings, he portrays Islam as an inherent threat to the West because of its goal of world rule via a caliphate that will impose Sharia law on all its subjects. Yerushalmi’s new project is a study of some 100 mosques in the U.S. that attempts to show a correlation between adherence to Sharia law and support for “violent jihad.” The study, which is published in the current issue of the Middle East Quarterly, has been strongly criticized by liberal organizations, but seized upon by conservative publications.

(An equally bitter conflict is taking shape between conservatives and liberals over the influence of these anti-Islamist activists from the U.S. in the recent Norway attacks; the accused killer had cited some of these writings in his manifesto; see the previous article.)(Reason, 3415 Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 400, Los Ang

Following the July 22 attacks in Norway and first analyses of the writings of accused killer Anders Breivik, a discussion has started regarding his religious beliefs and whether such labels as “fundamentalist” and “Christian terrorist” apply to his actions.

While the media and some scholars described him as a “Christian terrorist,” other scholars dispute suggestions that religion played a key role in his actions. Besides the issues of scholarly definitions that are at stake, the debate and public reactions in various circles also show how the attribution of epithets such as “Christian” or “Islamic” to terrorist activities gives rise to heated discussions. The very first statements by Norwegian police once the identity of the presumed terrorist was established described him as a “fundamentalist Christian,” a label that spread throughout the media; some later used the expression “radical Christian extremist.” And indeed, on his (English) Facebook profile, Breivik had listed himself as “Christian” and “Conservative.”

He was a member of the Norwegian Lutheran Church. Chip Berlet called him a “soldier in the Christian Right culture wars,” while pointing to some intellectual sources of Breivik’s critique of “cultural Marxism” (Talk to Action, July 23). He continued by stating that Breivik’s core thesis was “white Christian nationalism versus multiculturalism” (Talk to Action, July 25). A leading scholar on issues of religiously linked violence, Mark Juergensmeyer, compared the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, with Breivik (the Norwegian actually mentioned McVeigh in a manifesto he distributed electronically just before the attacks), adding: “both were Christian terrorists” (Religion Dispatches, July 24).

Juergensmeyer interpreted Breivik’s actions as a reflection of “a cosmic war, a battle for Christendom.” While Juergensmeyer agrees that Breivik was much more interested in politics than religious scriptures, he suggests that, in the same way that Bin Laden can be called a “Muslim terrorist,” Breivik can qualify as his Christian counterpart.After an intensive preliminary study of Breivik’s writings, European scholars Massimo Introvigne (CESNUR, Italy) and Jean-François Mayer (Religioscope, Switzerland) emphasized to European media that Breivik could not be called a “Christian fundamentalist” by all accepted definitions of the term. Besides being a Freemason, Breivik described himself as “moderately religious” and conveyed a cultural attachment to Christianity as part of the European identity and as a tool for supporting political goals (CESNUR, July 25).

He advocated a monocultural Christian Europe, but one in which the church (after the reincorporation of Protestantism within the Catholic Church) would have no political influence. He wrote that “Christian atheists” were welcome to join the battle and of the importance of science taking an “undisputed precedence over biblical teachings.” In his diary last June he reported that he had “prayed for the first time in a very long time.” Moreover, he disputed the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura (by scripture alone), writing that it would lead to “incipient subjectivism,” Julie Ingersoll noted (Religion Dispatches, July 25).

While being a “cultural Christian,” Breivik thus cannot fit the profile of a Christian fundamentalist, and evidence shows that he was guided more by political than religious beliefs. While he claimed to be a member of a new order of Templar Knights, he used the Templar primarily as a symbol of a new crusade against Islam. Breivik had not been a member of a political party for several years, but he appeared to have drawn much of his inspiration and arguments from a transnational Euro-American network of independent bloggers and authors critical of Islam. Websites such as Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch or Brussels Journal have taken a defensive stance since the attacks, distancing themselves from violence, while sometimes claiming that Breivik’s actions might also have been the result of Europe ignoring concerns about Muslim immigration into the continent.

A debate around the criticism of Islam is likely to unfold after the July 22 events. Meanwhile, Mayer has observed that Breivik in some ways mimetically reacted to jihadist threats, adopting a vocabulary such as “martyrdom operation” for describing his own actions and leaving behind pictures of himself not unlike those of suicide bombers . . .

(Terrorisme.net, July 25) | (Talk to Action, http://www.talk2action.org; Religion Dispatches, http://www.religiondispatches.org; CESNUR, http://www.cesnur.org; Terrorisme.net, http://www.terrorisme.net; Religioscope, www.religion.info)