James R. Lewis

Handbook of New Age

The Handbook of New Age is a comprehensive survey of alternative spiritualities: their history, their global impact, their cultural influence and how they are understood by scholars. Chapters by many of the leading scholars of the movement give the latest analysis of contemporary spiritual trends, and present up-to-date observations of the interaction between the New Age movement and many different fields of knowledge and research.

Education, Irreligion, and Non-religion: Evidence from Select Anglophone Census Data

Abstract A number of different studies carried out in the twentieth century demonstrated a correlation between higher education and loss of religious belief. However, recent research seems to indicate that contemporary social changes have undermined this previously solid connection: it appears that the irreligious—especially the non-religious who do not self-identify as members of any religion—are no longer substantially more educated than the religious. The decline in higher education represents an important component of an emerging consensus that, in effect, ‘normalizes’ the non-religious. In the present study, this imputed characteristic is challenged by an examination of education data from the national censuses of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Controversial new religions

This book complements Lewiss Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. The former provides an overview of the state of the field. This volume collects papers on those specific New Religious Movements (NRMs) that have generated the most scholarly attention. With few exceptions, these organizations are also the controversial groups that have attracted the attention of the mass media, often because they have been involved in, or accused of, violent or anti-social activities. Among the movements to be profiled are such groups as the Branch Davidians, Heavens Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, Solar Temple, Scientology, Falun Gong and many more. The book will function as a reference for scholars, as a text for courses in NRMs, and will also appeal to non-specialists including reporters, law enforcement, public policy makers, and others.

Excavating Tradition: Alternative Archaeologies as Legitimation Strategies

Abstract For the most part, religiously-motivated actors become interested in archaeological findings when these findings appear to support their religious assumptions, though a small but notable minority seek clues to the ideologies and practices of their presumptive religious ancestors in the archaeological record. This involvement in archaeology can vary tremendously in depth, from trained LDS archaeologists seeking support for The Book of Mormon at Mesoamerican excavation sites, to casual references about Atlantis by ordinary participants in New Age spiritual groups. In many cases, religious appeals to the authority of archaeology to support a specific issue become inextricably bound up with appeals to the authority of tradition, in part because archaeology is brought to bear on past events that are already a part of a given tradition’s sacred narratives.

Odd gods : new religions & the cult controversy

Lewis analyses the characteristics of truly dangerous groups compared to those of the merely unusual but innocuous, and he discusses what people find attractive about membership in minority religions, as well as community suspicions and media hype that lead to misunderstandings. The bulk of the book is devoted to a broad-based survey of unusual religious groups. Included are minority religious sects stemming from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh tradition, as well as unrelated groups such as the Moonies, Wiccans, Satanists, Spiritualists, Channellers, Scientologists, the Heavens Gate cult, a host of New Age and UFO groups, and many others. This is the definitive sourcebook for understanding and researching the crazy-quilt landscape of free religious expression in America.

Images of traditional African religions in surveys of world religions

[Genuine] knowledge of another culture is possible [but] the student must feel that he or she is answerable to and in uncoercive contact with the culture and the people being studied. [In the past], most of what the West knew about the non-Western world it knew in the framework of colonialism; the European scholar therefore approached his subject from a general position of dominance, and what he said about this subject was said with little reference to what anyone but other European scholars had said.

The Youth-Crisis Model of Conversion: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed?

Initially formulated in the 1970s when large numbers of former counterculturists were joining alternative religions, the youth-crisis model of conversion posited that new recruits were predominantly young people whose involvement could be explained as a function of their youth (e.g., as an adolescent developmental crisis). The present study presents statistics on recruits to seven different contemporary new religions that fundamentally challenge this item of conventional wisdom. Six out of seven data sets also embody a striking pattern of gradually increasing age across time for new converts. In addition to uncovering the growing age-at-recruitment pattern — which I designate the E-correlation — I argue that: (1) With the exception of efforts to understand true youth movements such as Internet Satanism, attempts to interpret conversions to contemporary emergent religions as being a function of the imputed youthfulness of recruits is no longer in touch with the reality on the ground. (2) The persistence of the characterization of converts as youthful reflects a failure to build a strong empirical base for such generalizations. Instead, we have relied upon quantitative work carried out over a quarter of a century ago for much of what passes as conventional wisdom in the study of recruitment to alternative religions.

Technological Exorcism, Body Thetans, and Scientology’s Secret Mythology

When applying the category of “mythology” to a contemporary new religious group like the Church of Scientology (CoS), one has to choose from among several different categories of narratives which could be regarded as mythological. If we set aside the body of tales surrounding L. Ron Hubbard, CoS’s founder (which could arguably be classified as mythology), one of Scientology’s key stories is the so-called Xenu narrative (also referred to as the OT-III teachings). Although this story is only revealed after one has tread the “Bridge” for some time, it is arguably a foundational myth, which sets the Scientology enterprise into a cosmological framework. While the present article will focus on the Xenu story, it also discusses Hubbard’s self-mythologizing, including his “discovery” of Incident Two (the Xenu narrative) as a hero myth.

Scientology: Sect, Science, or Scam?

The present piece surveys different discussions of “religion” — especially in the legal realm — which have had a bearing on Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard adopted the religion label for practical reasons; in his mind, Scientology was a science, not a religion. However, it is clear that Scientology actually is a religion — at least in the sense of functioning as a religion in the lives of participants — parading as science; instead of, as Hubbard thought, a science parading as religion. This becomes particularly clear upon examination of individuals participating in the so-called “Free Zone” (ex-CoS members who continue to identify as Scientologists), for whom Scientology remains their primary religious identity.

American images of Punjabi immigrants in the early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article explores and contextualizes the formation of anti-South Asian sentiment in the history of anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Asian, nativist movements in the United States during the early twentieth century. Through an investigation of the activities and written documentation of the Asian Exclusionary League, as well as Congressional proceedings and popular periodicals, it seeks to understand the terms in which wider anti-Asian sentiments were shaped during this period, the influences that shaped them, and the impact these articulations of racism had on South Asian, specifically Sikh, communities in the United States during the first several decades of the twentieth century.