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A selection of papers dealing principally with the role of charismatic leadership in new religious movements. Robert Balch, in his study of 'Bo and Peep' (Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles) a middle-aged couple who claimed to be the two witnesses of Revelation, is concerned to show the effects of lifestyle collapse on the genesis of messianic impulses. Comparisons are made with reactive schizophrenia, generated by the rapid collapse of the sufferer's social and subjective worlds leading to reality collapse, and with shamanism and religious conversion. Herff's collapse led to his meeting with Bonnie and his transition from an amused spectator of her esoteric group, to its messianic leader.
Werner Erhart, founder of EST also came upon his 'solution' in a sudden vision, while out driving. Erhart used his charismatic authority to build a totally 'this worldly' ideology based, it would appear, on the usages of high pressure salesmanship. Ray Wallis himself shows how the charismatic authority of 'Moses' David Berg, leader of the Children of God, later known as the Family of Love, allowed him to divert his originally moralistic Bible-fundamentalist sect into an antinomian cult in which the dictates of the leader are always contradictory and changing, and in which female members were obliged to offer sexual favours to recruit new members.
David Taylor in a study of a local group of the Unification Church describes techniques of recruitment. and rejects easy analysts in terms of 'brainwashing'. Peter Smith's contribution on the millenarian origins of the Baha'i faith contains much which illuminates the present situation in Iran, where a traditional milieu of the holy man who is in contact with the hidden Imam (and may even be the Imam) holds sway.
If cultic leaders obtain their revelation when their personal reality is under strain, then much the same may happen to societies under the strain of encounter with alien cultures, such as mid-nineteenth century Iran, or Melanesia, home of the Madang, creators of the Cargo Cults discussed by Peter Lawrence. Lawrence relates both Madang cargoism and medieval European chiliasm to different concepts of time: cyclic and ahistoric to the Madang, linear and historic to the Europeans.
As with most symposia there are the problems of differing treatments and some lack of continuity. It is rather a pity that some of the authors of the pieces on American cults did not give as much exposition of background as Smith did on Baha'i. Thus Balch in his study of Bo and Peep did not note that the cult was launched at a time of major public interest in ufology in the USA, which contributed greatly to its success.
However, the stress on the relationship between individual psychology and sociology is good, avoiding reductionism to either stream. The psychology of one group is, however, neglected - that of the ubiquitous 'participant observers' themselves. Do they feel no response to the beliefs of those with whom they must be pretty closely involved? Are they never converted, repelled, amused, or at least given serious cause to doubt their own perceptions? And if not, is that not perhaps a cause for concern in itself?
- Peter Rogerson, Magonia 20, August 1985.
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