Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions; A Tribute to James R. Lewis; Kitts

Edited by

Margo Kitts [+–]

Hawai’i Pacific University

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Margo Kitts is Professor and Coordinator of religious studies and eastwest classical studies at Hawai’i Pacific University in Honolulu. She has authored 50 chapters/articles and edited or authored twelve books on religion and violence and/or ancient studies. Most recent of her books are Cambridge Companion to Religion and War (Cambridge 2023); Sacrifice: Themes, Theories, and Controversies (Cambridge 2022); Elements of Ritual and Violence (Cambridge 2018), and Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation: Religious Perspectives on Suicide (Ed. Oxford 2018). For updates see https://mkitts.netlify.app/.

This volume, dedicated to the late James Lewis, covers a wide range of topics on violence and conspiracies amongst new religious movements. James was a prodigious scholar, being the author or editor of 50 books and author or co-author of more than 128 articles and reference book entries, as well as journals focusing on religious violence. The wide variety of papers in this volume are a tribute to the wide influence James had in the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs), and especially their use of violence and manipulation in the control of their followers. He staunchly repudiated simple aspersions of “brainwashing” for members of new religious movements, as well as exaggerations of a leader’s charisma to explain mass casualty events and maintained a wide-eyed skepticism about proclaimed motives of these NRMs.

Chapter 1

Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions: A Tribute to James R. Lewis [+–] 1-13

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Hawai’i Pacific University

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Part I: Religion and Violence

2. Researching Religious Terrorism [+–] 17-26

Mark Juergensmeyer £17.50

University of California, Santa Barbara

Mark Juergensmeyer is distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and global studies and interim director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is a pioneer in global studies, focusing on global religion, religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian
religion and politics. He has published more than three hundred articles and thirty books, including the recent God at War (Oxford 2020), the awardwinning Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 4th ed, (2017), and his co-edited Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (Oxford 2018).

This chapter explores a common problem of those who research the topic of religion-related terrorism: how to enter into the mindset of religious activists, especially those committed to violent interactions. This is the challenge for anyone trying to make sense of people and groups that are different than themselves, a problem for textual and historical scholars as well as those applying contemporary social and anthropological approaches. This chapter advocates a form of epistemic worldview analysis that adopts an approach involving informative conversations. These emphasize relational knowledge—attempts to engage with a subject either directly or through textual analysis that brackets the investigator’s assumptions and allows the subject to frame the information from his or her own worldview.

3. Conspiracy Theories Across Borders [+–] 27-41

Michael Barkun £17.50

Syracuse University

Michael Barkun is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. His books include A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11. His current research interests include conspiracy theories, millennialism, and the white supremacist right.

One of the most striking characteristics of conspiracy theories is their frequently transnational character. In previous centuries, such theories most frequently revolved around either the Catholic Church, the Masonic movement, or Jews. These traditional conspiracist networks were absorbed and superseded after World War II by conspiracy theories built around schemes for international cooperation. These included the United Nations, the Bilderberg conferences, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum at Davos. All were at one time or another thought to be instrumentalities for an elite cabal seeking global hegemony. This scheme and the conspiracy theories related to it were generally referred to as the “New World Order” and appeared in both religious and secular versions. While general conceptions of a New World Order laid out plans for a takeover that destroyed sovereignty on a worldwide basis, a number of separate conspiracy theories arose at the same time that were consistent with the New World Order but were conceptually quite distinct from it. An examination of three of them is particularly instructive as a demonstration of the ability of conspiracy theories to cross borders. The three are, first, the Sovereign Citizen Movement; second, the followers of Anders Breivik; and, third, the QAnon movement. Sovereign citizens appeared in the United States as part of a highly deviant strain of legal and constitutional interpretation, according to which the state and national governments are illegitimate, a conspiracy of lawyers and judges has distorted the law, and only the individual holds legal powers. Despite its link to peculiarly American issues, sovereign citizen ideas migrated to Australia. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass casualty killer, claimed to lead an international movement but in fact had no followers at the time of his crimes. However, subsequently lone wolves in several European countries self-identified as his acolytes. Finally, the QAnon movement began as a web-based attack on the Democratic-liberal establishment and a representation of Donald Trump as a savior figure. Yet despite its American roots, it has spread as far as European and Japan.

4. Lost Cause: The Rise and Fall of a Symbolic Crusade Movement [+–] 43-58

David G. Bromley £17.50

Virginia Commonwealth University

David G. Bromley is Founder/Director of the World Religions and Spirituality Project (https://wrldrels.org) and Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. His primary interest is in the emergence, organization, and development of contemporary religious and spiritual movements. His most recent work is on Q’Anon and related conspiracy theory-based movements.

New religious groups by their very nature pose some degree of challenge to the social order within which they emerge as they involve alternative ways of imagining and organizing. The sources of contention are some combination of movement provocation and societal control imposition. In a few cases, movement-societal conflict rises to the level of violence, in which each side concludes that peaceful coexistence is impossible. While there has been considerable research on the dynamics of such conflicts, there is less understanding of how movements that have been vanquished in battle with the forces of social control re-form, reorganize, and re-establish themselves. This chapter examines the loosely-coupled Lost Cause Movement following the end of Civil War hostilities. Three primary reconstitution tactics are identified: creation of an alternative social-cultural power base, narrative accounts challenging delegitmating depictions of slavery, and restoration of legitimacy through sacralization of southern culture. These tactics proved to be remarkably successful in repositioning the Confederate states over the next century.

5. By the Cleansing Flames of Fire: Qur’an Burnings, Racialized Religion and Politized Nostalgia in Sweden [+–] 59-82

Mattias Gardell £17.50

Uppsala University

Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and researcher at the Centre for the Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism at Uppsala university, Sweden. Working with ethnographic methods and text analysis, Gardell explores the complex terrain shaped by the intersections of religion, politics, racism and violence. His fields of research include radical nationalism, esoteric fascism, Islamophobia, political Islam, human bombs, torture history, hate crime, politicized nostalgia, the entangled history of racism and religion, fascist cultural production, and white racist lone wolf tactics. His list of publications may be found athttps://www.cemfor.uu.se/about-us/researchers/publications-gardell/

This chapter focuses on the burning of the Quran and the Hebrew Bible and the relation between bibliocaust and holocaust. I will begin with the recent series of Quran burnings in Sweden and then revisit history, from the ceremonial Quran burnings in Grenada 1499 via the Nazi bonfires of 1933 back to our time and show how book burnings throughout this history have been used as a way of ridding society of the evil these books were seen as associated with and how this frequently included the people who read and cherished these books.

Part II: New Religious Movements

6. James R. Lewis and Jonestown Studies [+–] 85-98

Rebecca Moore £17.50

San Diego State University

Rebecca Moore is Emerita Professor of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently Reviews Editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, published by University of California Press. Her publications include Beyond Brainwashing: Perspectives on Cultic Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

The extensive writings of James R. Lewis provide a number of insights that illuminate studies of Peoples Temple and Jonestown. Sometimes these insights directly relate to the tragedy in which more than 900 people lost their lives, such as his analysis of the mental and physical states of those cult leaders who led their followers to death. At other times, insights come indirectly. These include Lewis’s concept of “monolithic inferences,” which features his observation that scholars, including he himself, tend to assume that everyone belonging to a new religion has the same knowledge and information as everyone else. Another, and related, example is Lewis’ insistence that scholars differentiate between religious groups, noting salient differences and similarities, rather than squeezing them into ideal types. A final, implicit insight concerns the way, or ways, in which the Jonestown tragedy has shaped the study of new religious movements. Lewis sees Jonestown as a pivotal moment in the growth of this field. I agree, but at the same time—and using Lewis’ own arguments—I argue that Jonestown is largely an anomaly, and ultimately somewhat irrelevant to the study of new religions.

7. The Charisma of David Koresh [+–] 99-126

Catherine Wessinger £17.50

Loyola University

Catherine Wessinger is the Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S.J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University New Orleans. She is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (2011). Other publications include: “The FBI’s ‘Cult War’ against the Branch Davidians” in The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11, ed. Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman (2017); “Attempting to Educate Journalists about the Role of Cult Essentialism in the Branch Davidians-Federal Agents Conflict,” in “Cult” Rhetoric in the 21st Century: Deconstructing the Study of New Religious Movements, edited by Aled Thomas and Edward Graham-Hyde (2024).

James R. Lewis has the distinction of publishing the first edited book, From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco (1994), on the conflict between the Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, and federal agents in 1993. In 2014 Lewis published a chapter titled “The Mount Carmel Holocaust: Suicide or Execution?” He argued that the FBI Hostage Rescue Team’s tank and CS gas assault on the Branch Davidians on April 19, 1993, which culminated in a fire, amounted to the execution of Branch Davidians for the deaths of four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents killed during a shootout on February 28, 1993. On the other hand, FBI agents, Justice Department attorneys, and other government representatives have argued that the deaths of seventy-six Branch Davidians of all ages in the fire were the result of a mass suicide. Based on sources accumulated during thirty years of research, Catherine Wessinger argues that there is evidence supporting both conclusions—mass suicide and massacre. She describes the social construction of the charisma of Vernon Howell/David Koresh (1959-1993), and how his narcissistic attachment to his charisma was an important factor in the interactions between FBI agents and the Branch Davidians. FBI behavioral scientists informed FBI decision-makers about Koresh’s psychopathologies and how he was likely to react to an assault, but FBI officials opted for a tank and CS gas assault that would obviously end in deaths.

Part III: Media and the Law

8. Invented Religions and the Law: Jediism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [+–] 129-147

Carole M. Cusack £17.50

University of Sydney

Carole M. Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia as well as Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). She now researches primarily in contemporary religious trends and Western esotericism. Her books include Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010) and (with Katharine Buljan)
Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan (Equinox, 2015). She edited (with Pavol Kosnáč), Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality: From Popular Culture to Religion (Routledge, 2017).

In 2018 a Dutch law student, Mienke de Wilde (Radboud University, Nijmegen) went to the highest court in the Netherlands to plead for her right to wear a colander on her head in official documents like her driver’s license. This action was taken because she is a Pastafarian. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Pastafarianism), a third millennium ‘invented religion’ was founded by Bobby Henderson in 2005 (Henderson 2006a, 33-37). De Wilde’s court case failed, and she filed an application in Strasbourg to the European Court of Human Rights, resulting in that court’s first judgement on Pastafarianism (Wolff 2021). This chapter considers invented religions (or “fiction-based religions,” ‘”hyper-real religions,” and “hypothetical religions”), examining their history, defining qualities, and legal status (Wolff 2022). Jediism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are then discussed regarding ritual garb in public and official contexts (hoods for Jedis, colanders and pirate attire for Pastafarians). I argue that the distinction between Jedis and Pastafarians and traditional religions with mandated religious attire like Sikhs and Jews is not as clear-cut as non-religious studies scholars think (Cusack 2010, 32-34).

9. Director’s Cu(l)ts, Reel Researchers: Exploring Sects in the Movies [+–] 149-180

Stefano Bigliardi,Abdelmojib Chouhbi,Mohamed Amine Ghafil,Amine Nakari,Danya Tazi Mokha,Salma Zahidi £17.50

Al Akhawayn University

Stefano Bigliardi serves as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, a liberal-arts college in Morocco that he joined in 2016. He is the author of the Cambridge University Press Islam and Science: Past, Present, and Future Debates (with Nidhal Guessoum; 2023) and New Religious Movements and Science (2023).

Abdelmojib Chouhbi, Mohamed Amine Ghafil, Amine Nakari, Danya Tazi Mokha, and Salma Zahidi are majoring in Computer Science at AUI’s School of Science and Engineering. In Fall 2022 they participated in Stefano’s undergraduate course in History of Ideas focusing on the history and beliefs of NRMs.

Stefano Bigliardi, along with his students Abdelmojib Chouhbi, Mohamed Amine Ghafil, Amine Nakari, Danya Tazi Mokha, and Salma Zahidi, surveyed and analyzed the plots, dialogues and cinematic features of twenty-two movies which represented fictional new religious movements and their investigators. Among other foci, the group explored how culture, ethnicity, and gender were exploited to fit the films into the genre of horror. All the films are interesting, but the range may be suggested by the first and last.

10. The Complicated Relationship between Xie Jiao and Cult in the PRC [+–] 181-194

Zhang Xinzhang,Xu Weiwei £17.50

Hangzhou City University

ZHANG Xinzhang is Associate Professor and Assistant Director of the Institute for Marxist Religious Studies in New Era, at Hangzhou City University, Hang Zhou, Zhejiang Province, China. His research Interests are Gnosticism, Patristics, Taoist Culture, and Marxist Religious Studies.

Hangzhou City University

XU Weiwei is a special research fellow at the Institute for Marxist Religious Studies in New Era, Hangzhou City University, Hang Zhou, Zhejiang Province, China, and expert in Chinese local folk religions and spiritual movements, religious policies, and Chinese literature.

The People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) maintains a systematic and consistent set of policies toward Xie Jiao (邪教), often mistranslated as “destructive cults.” Due to the sensitiveness of the topic and for certain other reasons, international academic scholars often lack appreciation of the concept according to PRC’s own understanding. When James R. Lewis visited Zhejiang University in 2018, he asked this author to write an objective and detailed introduction of the PRC’s own view toward Xie Jiao. China is a big country with a long history of experiences and lessons relating to this issue, so the topic is worth critical exploration. The main purpose of this chapter is to offer a critical exploration of the Chinese official viewpoint and policies. Thus, this article will analyze the logic behind the whole system in order to render this system comprehensible for western scholars. This article consists of three main parts: The first part introduces the PRC’s definition of Xie Jiao and the PRC perspective on how and why Xie Jiao may be considered destructive. The second part illustrates Falun Gong as a typical Xie Jiao, acknowledging its transformation from Qi Gong to Exceptional Function to Buddhism to apocalyptic cult. The third part is the analysis of the PRC’s treatment of Xie Jiao from the perspective of religious policy, including criteria of identification, the policy principles, and its potential difficulties.

End Matter

Index 195-203

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Reviews

James R. Lewis was a pioneer in the academic study of New Religious Movements, conspiracy theories, and their intersections with violence. Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions brings together leading scholars to explore these subjects through a rich, interdisciplinary lens, reflecting the vast impact of Lewis’s scholarship. This volume is essential for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of contemporary religious movements, their entanglement with conspiracy thinking, and the narratives driving acts of violence in today's world. A fitting tribute to a towering figure in the field.
Amarnath Amarasingam, Associate Professor, School of Religion, Queen's University

An engaging set of well-crafted essays, many by leading researchers, covering many of the dominant concerns of Jim Lewis’s prolific scholarship. The volume provides new and significant insights into the nature, study of, and societal response to, new religious movements, religiously inspired violence, and conspiracy thinking.
Lorne L. Dawson, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo, Canada

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Violence, Conspiracies, and New Religions

A Tribute to James R. Lewis

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Hawai’i Pacific University

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