Marion S. Goldman

Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram: The Role of Shared Values in the Creation of a Community

Preface Prologue 1. The Oregon colony at peak development 2. Manufacturing and marketing a new religion in India 3. Organizational forms for exporting the Rajneesh movement 4. Transplanting the Poona colony to Eastern Oregon 5. Political and institutional overextension 6. Desperation defenses of Rajneeshpuram 7. Aftermath and what it might all mean? Notes Bibliography Index.

Enduring Affiliation and Gender Doctrine for Shiloh Sisters and Rajneesh Sannyasins

Enduring membership in communal new religions may have lasting effects when long-term members exit because of partial or complete movement disintegration. Data from two distinctly different groups of women, 20 former members of the 1970s Shiloh Youth Revival Centers and 20 former residents of the 1980s communal city of Rajneeshpuram, suggest that extended membership fundamentally redirects womens priorities. The women from each group changed the courses of their lives because they conserved the gender doctrine articulated within their movements, for more than a decade after their departures. Gender doctrine involves patterned definitions of femininity and masculinity embedded in every religions overall doctrine. It delimits gender differences, the nature of deity(ies), the division of labor, interpersonal bonds, sexuality, and procreation.

Reconsidering Virtuosity Religious Innovation and Spiritual Privilege

Spiritual virtuosity is an important but neglected concept for theoretical and empirical scholarship about movements for religious and social change. Weber focused primarily on ascetic spiritual virtuosi who sought to transcend the world. We suggest that when virtuosi enter the larger society and become leaders in movements to democratize access to sanctification, their influence can be dramatic. By approaching virtuosity as a social form and focusing on activist virtuosi, we are able to consider virtuosi’s individual attributes, their collective relationships, and the social contexts that shape the success or failure of their movements. We advance our argument with the help of case studies of two very different virtuosi-led movements: the central European Reformation and the American Human Potential Movement.

Review: Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture, by Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2009. 234 pp.

way to an assertive secularist state. And, though he divides the secular states into the dichotomous categories of assertive and passive, he is well aware of the fine distinctions and variations that exist. The most significant shortfall of the book might be viewed by some as a strong point: his research did little to challenge civilizational and rational choice theories. Rather than taking the reader beyond civilizational and rational choice theories, as he proposed, he often relied heavily on these explanations and found many areas where the various arguments were complementary. The historical arguments, in particular, often relied on structural, institutional, and human agency arguments rather than ideological explanations. The author concludes a chapter on the United States by noting that ideology ‘‘trumped’’ other explanations, specifying that the ‘‘struggle between the anticlerical and conservatives in France was primarily ideological’’ (pp. 99, 158). But his evidence for these bold statements was far more modest. Despite these minor quibbles, Kuru has produced an impressive body of research. He has shown effectively that ideology can shape preferences and frame debates. Moreover, he has illustrated the wide variation in secular states and the ideologies they promote. In short, Kuru’s Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion helps us understand both the origins and consequences of the variety of secular states and the policies that result.

24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780700616336:

Sally Gallagher examines the complicated daily lives of adults in evangelical Protestant families, using both qualitative and quantitative data to add to sociological debates about gender roles and ideologies among contemporary American evangelicals. Her work demonstrates the ways in which history, community, and individual experiences produce multifaceted responses to societal gender arrangements as they intersect with religious belief systems. Gallagher gathered her data as part of a larger 1996 study sponsored by the Pew Memorial Trust. She utilized telephone interviews from a national random sample of religiously committed Protestant adults, face to face interviews drawn from the larger sample, and observation of congregations, along with a wealth of documentary and historical materials. She argues that evangelicals have a cultural toolkit that they apply selectively to their everyday lives, while recognizing its foundational importance. Dichotomization of liberal and conservative ideologies and life styles and simplified concepts like “culture wars” fail to capture evangelicals’ complicated negotiations of gender roles within and outside the family. Gallagher adds to our understanding of that complexity as she describes women and men’s flexible responses to the realities of dual career families, shared childrearing, and myriad other challenges of family life in the late twentieth century. One of the strongest parts of the book deals with the slippery issue of mutual submission within the family. Contemporary evangelicals’ submission to God’s plan involves husbands’ and wives’ mutual deference and joint responsibilities for childrearing and domestic work. However, while evangelical men strive to be affectionate fathers and supportive husbands, they and their wives still define men as family leaders. Moreover, most of the men in Gallagher’s study view their key familial role as that of primary wage earner, rather than supportive spouse or caregiver. For the most part, evangelical masculinity revolves around responsible headship and leadership, rather than equality or role reversal within the family. In most evangelical families, both spouses must constantly balance respectful partnership with the constraints of hierarchical relationships proscribed by evangelical Protestantism. Contemporary evangelical writers such as James Dobson to Bill McCartney provide guidance with these issues. Both women and men read them and other writers who share their faith, as they work to make sense of the complexities of contemporary family life. Another strength of Gallagher’s work is her clear differentiation among twentieth century Mainline Protestant, Pentecostal, and evangelical Protestant histories and traditions. She also notes the diversity among evangelicals themselves. Although most subscribe to mutual submission and men’s leadership, they articulate and act on those beliefs in many different ways. An interesting and important part of Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life is Gallagher’s Appendix C, in which she contrasts key Biblical interpretations offered by essentialist evangelicals with those supplied by Biblical feminists. For example, some essentialists interpret the creation and fall described in Genesis in terms of men having been fashioned first and inevitably standing above women in God’s design. In contrast, Biblical feminists cite Genesis as indicating that God created women and men to be equally moral, creative, and capable of stewardship. These contrasting scriptural interpretations illuminate both interpretative struggles among evangelicals and also the daily quandaries faced by husbands and wives in evangelical families. Future research building on Gallagher’s book might consider how evangelical teenagers and children come to terms with the ways in which their family faith and religious practice generate tensions in their lives away from their faith communities. How do traditional evangelical definitions of gender mesh with the everyday experiences of youth in nonreligious contexts like public schools? Other studies might examine how evangeli-