Minor Cults: The Meaning of the Cults for the Church : Part 5

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 16 of 19)

There have been, beside, in the history of the Church many other movements possessing a great staying power and running in some cases for generations alongside the main current of religious development, until they finally disappeared with the changing centuries. Arguing from such historical precedents as these one might easily assume a like fate for the Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed here for there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neither failed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure.

The expectation of the Catholic Church that Protestantism will spend its force and be lost again in the majestic fabric of Latin Catholic Christianity as it is continued amongst us, is as far from realization today, or farther, than at any time in the last 300 years. We need to remember also that conditions change. The right of individual initiative and judgment once secured in the region of religion is not likely ever to be lost. A good many divergent movements have literally been whipped back into line or else put out in fire and blood. Nothing of that sort is likely to happen now.

No student of history should be blind to the sequence of action and reaction. A period of excessive dependence upon authority may follow a period of undue self-assertion, but it is not likely that we should ever find recreated exactly the conditions of the past or that religion can hereafter be held, as it has heretofore, in relatively well marked channels under the stress of accepted authorities. Prophecy is hazardous business but it is safe to assume that these modern religious cults and movements represent the beginnings of a freer, more diffused, less formal religious faith. The peculiar cults themselves may reach their term but the temper which produced them is likely to continue and with other groupings of forces produce something in the future which will at least be their parallel.

The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the Scientific Organization of Psycho-therapy

As far as the fortunes of the distinctive cults themselves go, one's conclusions may be less tentative. For the most part the foundations upon which they are built are not big enough to carry an ample and secure structure. They have been made possible not only by marked limitations in historic religion itself, but also by contemporaneous tempers which, one may sincerely hope, are self-limiting, and this is said not through undue prejudice against the cults themselves, but simply because one is loath to believe that the want of critical faculty which has made some of these cults possible will not in the end yield to experience and a really sounder education.

Since, moreover, some of them - and Christian Science, preeminently - depend upon faith and mental healing, whatever helps us to a clearer understanding of the nature and limits of psycho-therapy will greatly affect their future. All faith healing cults have heretofore depended very greatly upon the atmosphere of mystery with which they have been able to surround themselves. The fact that they have been able to secure results with no very clear understanding of the way in which the results have been secured has invested them with awe and wonder, so essential to every religion.

But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws, develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all this is extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. For this reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faith and mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just now strongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all.

The intimate association of religion and healing has, on the whole, been good neither for religion nor health. Of course, this statement will probably be sharply challenged but it is maintained in the face of possible challenge. As far as religion goes it has withdrawn the interest of the religious, therefore influenced, from the normal expressions of the religious life to border-land regions; it has stressed the exceptional rather than the sweep of law, and the occult rather than the luminously reasonable. Where it has failed in individual cases, as it is bound to fail, it has left those therefore disillusioned without any sound basis for their faith and generally has driven them away from religion altogether. It has tempted religious teachers to win a hearing by signs and wonders. Even the Founder of the Christian religion grew weary of this, as the records show plainly enough, in that He saw His true work to be thereby not helped but hindered, and if this be true of the Founder it is by so much the more true of His followers.

On the scientific side this temper has hindered honest thinking, laborious investigation and that specialization which is absolutely necessary to the furtherance of any great division of human effort. Medicine made little progress until it got itself free of the Church. Specifically the average minister is neither by training nor temperament fitted for healing work and those laymen who have assumed that office have generally been wanting in balance and self-restraint.

This is not to deny the reality of a power not ourselves making for health and well-being generally, or the power of faith, or the efficacy of prayer. Least of all is God, upon this understanding, to be shut out of life. But the power not ourselves which makes for faith and healing is best known through laborious investigation, the discovery of methods and obedience to ascertained law. When we have clearly come to see the nature of psycho-therapy, the occult authority of healing cults will in the end yield to this understanding and the cults themselves be greatly weakened or displaced.

One must recognize, on the other hand, the staying power of any well-established religious system. Through nurture and those profound conservatisms which hold more tenaciously in the region of religion than anywhere else, it is possible to continue from generation to generation the unreasonable or the positively untrue, and this holds in the Church as well as outside it. None the less, the most coherent systems must reckon with their own weaknesses. Christian Science may have before it a long period of solid going or even marked growth, but its philosophy will at last yield to the vaster sweep of a truer philosophic thought. Its interpretations of historic Christianity will come up again and again for examination until their fallacies become apparent and its force as a system of psycho-therapy will be modified by simpler and more reasonable applications of the same power.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company