Minority Religions and Fraud

In Good Faith

Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317095736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Analysing both fraud and religion as social constructs with different functions and meanings attributed to them, this book raises issues that are central to debates about the limits of religious toleration in diverse societies, and the possible harm (as well as benefits) that religious organisations can visit upon society and individuals. There has already been a lively debate concerning the structural context in which abuse, especially sexual abuse, can be perpetrated within religion. Contributors to the volume proceed from the premise that similar arguments about ways in which structure and power may be conducive to abuse can be made about fraud and deception. Both can contribute to abuse, yet they are often less easily demonstrated and proven, hence less easily prosecuted. With a focus on minority religions, the book offers a comparative overview of the concept of religious fraud by bringing together analyses of different types of fraud or deception (financial, bio-medical, emotional, breach of trust and consent). Contributors examine whether fraud is necessarily intentional (or whether that is in the eye of the beholder); certain structures may be more conducive to fraud; followers willingly participate in it. The volume includes some chapters focused on non-Western beliefs (Juju, Occult Economies, Dharma Lineage), which have travelled to the West and can be found in North American and European metropolitan areas.

Chapter 1 New Religions and Fraud: A Double Constructionist Approach

David G. Bromley

DOI: 10.4324/9781315595535-2

Allegations of fraud by religious groups and leaders are commonplace throughout history. Such allegations are more likely to be directed at new religious traditions and developing groups. Since new groups by their very nature challenge existing cultural and social logic and since religion offers a foundational meaning system in human groups, it is not surprising that charges of fraudulent belief or conduct occur frequently as these groups mobilize. Allegations of fraud clearly are not unique to religious groups and leaders, of course. Where new economic or political groups, for example, offer radical challenges to the existing social order, the charges rendered against them are remarkably similar. None the less, new religious groups offer particularly fertile ground for investigating the religion-fraud relationship both because they often are contested and because the controversy is contemporary and therefore can be investigated as it is occurring.

In this chapter, I address one specific, but foundational, issue: what are the characteristics of new religions, on the one hand, and conventional society, on the other hand, that lead to attributions of fraud? The premise of the argument to be developed here is that both ‘religion’ and ‘fraud’ ultimately are status claims, most broadly to legitimacy and illegitimacy, respectively. The substance of the argument to be pursued here is that (1) new religious groups by their very nature mobilize in such a way as to challenge the established social order and in a way that leaves them vulnerable to fraud allegations, and (2) established institutions by their very nature defend the logic and boundaries of that order, which often makes new religious group claims appear inauthentic and problematic from their perspective. Put another way, new religious groups challenge the existing social order because they arise in response to that order, and they are vulnerable to fraud claims because established institutions are structured so as to defend that order. As new religious groups emerge, these two sets of claims often are occurring simultaneously and stand in opposition to one another. It is this dynamic that underpins the claims-making process, and the outcome of the interactive claims-making process defines the social locations of the group and its opponents at that historical moment (Bromley and Melton 2012).

On the Concepts of Religion and Fraud

Conventional definitions of religion and fraud typically specify what are regarded as the essential characteristics of each. So, for example, definitions of religion often incorporate characteristics, such as beliefs concerning supernatural entities or powers; rituals through which adherents solemnize, enact and validate the mythic system; religious functionaries who mediate between adherents and the supernatural, and moral codes that are binding upon adherents (Wilson 1982). Definitions of fraud refer to false factual representations, knowledge of that falsity by the representer, ignorance of the falsity by the representation receiver, reliance on the representation by the receiver, and damage suffered by the receiver as a result of accepting the false representation.

While essentialist definitions may be useful for certain purposes, I propose an alternative approach that emphasizes the socially constructed qualities of both religion and fraud. From this perspective, both ‘religion’ and ‘fraud’ can be productively understood as knowledge and status claims, religion a claim about self and fraud a claim about other. Religion is one subcategory of knowledge claims. Specifically, religion is a claim to the possession of knowledge from a transcendent, sacred power source that reveals the true nature and meaning of the everyday world. This claim, if accepted, legitimates a privileged moral status for the group, since it would putatively benefit those who accept it, and reduce moral status for opponents who would denigrate or deny access to the knowledge. Fraud is a subcategory of deviance claims. Specifically, fraud is a claim of discovery of knowledge that transcends the apparent patterning of another's actions and offers insight into their essential qualities (intentionality). This claim, if accepted, supports a privileged moral status for the accuser, since it presumably offers protection and safety to others who accept the allegation, and reduces the moral status for the perpetrator, who is putatively engaged in a project of secrecy and manipulation.

It is important to emphasize that the social constructionist approach does not in any way deny that both religion and fraud possess social reality. Claims-making is not a free-floating process; there is a material base for social claims. There are ‘cultural formations’ – traditions, conventions, cultural norms, popular culture, media depictions, institutional regulations, and civil and criminal laws – that constitute historically grounded, socially actionable prescriptions and proscriptions of what constitutes religion and fraud, even if these are subject to ongoing amendment. Likewise, there are ‘social formations’ – religious, governmental, economic, occupational organizations – that represent the legitimate institutionalization in those arenas of social life, possess a stake in existing social arrangements, and operate with independent sanctioning power. These social and cultural formations create and sustain the boundary markers between religion and secular and between legitimate and illegitimate activity. Therefore, while the focus of this chapter is on contextual factors producing attributions of legitimate and illegitimate religion rather than applications of existing definitions to specific cases, both issues are equally important.

The Social Construction of Religion and Fraud

It is virtually axiomatic in social science theory on religion that religion is ‘invented’, or ‘socially constructed’ (Smith 1962, Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983, Berger 1990, Cusack 2010). The work of major theorists from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to Emile Durkheim and Peter Berger all proceed from the premise that humans create the gods rather than the reverse, even if the theories founded on this common premise move in dramatically different directions. Whether we take William James's ‘unseen order’, Joseph Campbell's ‘invisible plane behind the visible one’, or Peter Berger's socially constructed ‘sacred cosmos’ as the starting point, these formulations share in common what I term a transcendent, sacred power source (hereafter, the transcendent) as the essential feature of what scholars term ‘religion’. The social construction of the transcendent usually involves four components:

• symbolic representations of the transcendent and its relationship to the everyday world (mythic narratives);
• symbolic representations of the human source of discovery/knowledge about the transcendent (hagiographies);
• dramatic representations of the independent power of the transcendent and its connection to the everyday world (rituals); and
• social representations of the appropriate relationship to the transcendent (associational collectivities).

The social construction of religion is complicated, however, by the fact that if humans create the transcendent to ensure meaning, order and control in social life, then it must be independent of the creators. That is, the project of social construction must be ‘mystified’, so that the participation of human actors in the construction process is masked. Mainstream religions in the contemporary world that operate as denominations in an increasingly secular/rational environment manage this issue in a variety of ways, for example, by distancing the past, in which transcendent power was more active, from the present, in which it remains accessible but less deterministic of contemporary events. The composition of the sacred texts is settled and solidified, and mythic texts may come to be viewed in metaphorical rather than literal terms. Hagiographic narratives about the founders are enshrined, but as accounts of enduring wisdom and guiding principles rather than actual historical events. Ritual encounters with the transcendent are moderated and regulated, taking on the form of an aesthetic drama. Associational collectivities move away from covenantally oriented communities toward contractually oriented voluntary networks.

The need to demonstrate the reality, power and accessibility of the transcendent is an historical element common to all the world's major religious traditions, but that need is more immediate for new religious groups. Established religious traditions through history have used a variety of means to make the gods real. Early Greek history offers an instructive example of the active involvement of the priesthood in orchestrating miraculous events:

The ancients not only formulated the laws of mechanics and put them to practical use but also devised ingenious machines whose only purpose was to serve as marvels … During the Hellenistic period, mechanical marvels proliferated. We read of temple doors operated by warm air that opened automatically when a fire was lit on the altar and closed again as the flames died down. Philo of Byzantium (third century B.C.) describes in his Pneumatics siphons that allow vessels to empty and refill themselves automatically, or pour wine and water alternately. There are also washbasins worked by counterweights and pulleys, which make a bronze hand extend a pumice stone to the user, disappear when he takes it, and reappear to receive it again after enough water has flowed out of a spout to allow him to wash his hands. A major part of a treatise on mechanics by Hero of Alexandria (ca. 100 A.D.) is devoted to similar gadgets. (‘Pontus Hulten …’ n.d.)

One of the best documented cases involves Hero of Alexandria, an extraordinary creator of advanced technologies that only centuries later did scientists begin to understand (Boas 1949). Priests in Alexandria were engaged in intense competition for adherents and paid Hero well to develop ‘machines of the gods’. He invented a variety of devices that used the heat of the temple fire and steam produced from it to create moving statues, a device that dispensed holy water upon the insertion of coins, temple gates that appeared to open and close automatically, hidden metal balls that fell and produced a sound resembling thunder, and weeping statues (Fylaktou n.d). It seems clear that the priesthood used these extraordinary demonstrations to enhance their own authority and the belief by adherents in the presence and power of the gods. However, the fact that what were perceived by adherents as miraculous events are now recognized as simple, if impressive, technological feats has no impact on contemporary religious faith. Nor do active debates of the actual authorship of sacred texts or accounts of miraculous events in ancient times. The partitioning of the ‘sacred times’, the social and cultural legitimacy accorded to established religion, and the accommodation of established religion to other institutional arenas substantially insulates these religions from fraud claims.

Such is not the case for new religious groups. These groups are progressively constructing their mythic and hagiographic narratives in the moment; they are devising ritual observances and experimenting with different forms of collective associations. To connect these observations to the central argument, then, new religious groups are likely to be the target of fraud allegations both because they are challenging movements and because they are visibly constructing what is understood to possess an independence from human control. Their contestive stance and vulnerability to disconfirmation yield a steady flow of fraud allegations. Correspondingly, established institutions have formal and informal definitions of legitimate/fraudulent principles, practices and procedures for countering illegitimate conduct. The challenging nature of new religious groups renders them attractive targets for social control measures.

Endogenous Factors in Fraud Allegations

A variety of endogenous characteristics that are elemental to challenging movements, particularly during their initial period of mobilization, have the effect of predisposing movements to activities that are socially defined as fraud. Put another way, these very characteristics, which are central to movements’ identity and cohesiveness, are likely to be externally assessed as demonstrating that the group and/or its leadership are fraudulent. They also are constructed in such a way as to increase movements’ vulnerabilities to fraud allegations. The characteristics of new religious groups that trigger fraud allegations include claims of sole possession of new knowledge that is transformative in its implications, claims of extraordinary charismatic authority, ritual demonstrations of access to the transcendent, and inappropriate collective associational forms.

Mythologies

The mythic systems of new religious groups predispose them to fraud allegations in four ways:

• they directly challenge established cultural understandings;
• they are vulnerable to charges of not being original, unique discoveries but rather borrowed or stolen ideas;
• they are also vulnerable to questions of authenticity of authorship; and
• the visibility of the construction undermines claims of a transcendent source.

While such common features, ambiguities, and discrepancies are not damaging to established religions, they are to new religious groups.

Since the mythic systems of new movements are formulated in response to the established institutional order of the host society, the challenge they proffer is quite specific and direct. One of the most common claims by new movements is that established religious organizations have been compromised and corrupted beyond redemption. For example, Moses David Berg, founder of the Children of God movement, now known as The Family International, routinely referred to established churches derisively as ‘churchianity’ (Berg 1984). Claims by religious movements that they alone possess new revelations from the transcendent power source, if taken seriously, destabilize the theologies of established religions, which typically are careful to place the period of revelation in the past. Similarly, prophesies of an impending apocalypse can diminish the viability of the everyday world, thereby undermining the ability of established churches to create a stable meaning system for adherents and preserve their own spiritual authority. New religions may also use their extraordinary revelations and the lofty moral status that derives from those to place themselves above the regulation of a flawed, corrupted social order. For example, both Unificationists and Hare Krishna devotees engaged in deceptive fundraising practices that they justified on the basis that the group was engaged in a morally privileged purpose and the funds collected brought spiritual benefits to the donor, irrespective of the ‘donor's’ intent. In some cases, broader normative non-compliance is legitimated. Moses David Berg taught followers that the only law to which they were held was the ‘Law of Love’, which supplanted all other biblical laws. Jehovah's Witnesses have condemned Christianity as a tool of Satan and rejected loyalty to the state, symbolically by refusing to salute the flag and substantively by refusing military service. Rejection of the established normative order moves groups in the direction of being labelled as illegitimate religion. Established religious groups are therefore likely to assert that novel relations are ‘heresies’, that is, fraudulent doctrines.

A second issue is that the mythic systems of new religious groups that are announced as unique revelations or discoveries are never entirely new; they always draw on contemporary and historical knowledge to some degree, just as established religions have done. Indeed, a number of central components of Christian mythology, such as the virgin birth, a global flood, and a god who dies and then is reborn, pre-date the emergence of Christianity and can be found in other traditions, such as Hinduism. There is ongoing debate over the actual authorship of the sacred Christian texts that became the ‘New Testament’. Sun Myung Moon, for example, has been accused of appropriating some basic ideas from another Korean group, the Pure Water Church led by Kim Baek-moon, because some ideas were similar and Moon was in fact a member of that congregation for a time prior to establishing the Holy World Association for the Unification of World Christianity (Chryssides 2007). To the extent that common themes or ‘borrowing’ can be discerned, the claim to unique knowledge and to a special relationship with the transcendent is undermined, opening up the group to fraud claims.

Third, since sacred texts are typically assembled over an extended period of time and a number of parties contribute to the process, actual authorship is frequently contested. Hammer and Lewis (2007: 7) note that ‘The Bible is studded with historically untenable references to its own legendary origins.’ And Thomassen (2007: 141) observes that ‘Of the twenty-seven writings added to the Jewish Scriptures by the Christians in antiquity as a “New Testament,” only seven are unambiguously accepted by modern scholars as genuinely carrying the name of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 New Religions and Fraud: A Double Constructionist Approach
• 2 Minority Religions and Fraud: Preliminary Theories on Ritual Deception
• 3 Bona Fide?
• 4 Between Faith and Fraudulence? Sincerity and Sacrifice in Prosperity Christianity
• 5 Folk Healing, Authenticity and Fraud
• 6 Sex-Work and Ceremonies: The Trafficking of Young Nigerian Women into Britain
• 7 Food, Faith and Fraud in Two New Religious Movements
• 8 Miracle Makers and Money Takers: Healers, Prosperity Preachers and Fraud in Contemporary Tanzania
• 9 When Fraud is Part of a Spiritual Path: A Tibetan Lama’s Plays on Reality and Illusion
• 10 Faith Lends Substance? Trickery and Deception within Religious and Spiritual Movements
• 11 The Zen Master and Dharma Transmission: A Seductive Mythology
• Index