WN01-07

New Religions as Global Cultures, by Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe (Westview Press, 1997)
— an Apologia reflection

In their new book, New Religions as Global Cultures, Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe disapprove of what they call the "Great Anti-Cult Crusade" and argue that many cults are just misunderstood. The book blames several well-known evangelical apologists in part for this. The majority of the book, however, encourages an understanding of "contemporary religions from an interdisciplinary and global perspective."

Hexham and Poewe have a secular academic background in the social sciences and religious studies which may be unfamiliar to many readers of evangelical literature about cults. As I've come to see it, criticism of cults originates mostly from three main camps, which can be classified as anti-cult, countercult, and secular.

The anti-cult classification consists of a grass-roots cross-section of the population. Of the three camps, it relies more heavily on the testimony of ex-cult members to understand cultic systems. The leadership of the anti-cult movement has most commonly utilized a behavioral sciences perspective and frequently takes a psychological approach to cultism. The popular press tends to speak with an anti-cult voice in its reporting. Observers of the anti-cult movement often get the impression that religious freedom issues go unheeded and that the eventual elimination of cultic systems is a common goal. Critics often do not make a distinction and include the countercult movement as part of the anti-cult camp. This distinction is not widely recognized among the secular or anti-cult groups.

The countercult movement has been shaped by a diverse number of evangelical apologists. The countercult camp accepts the validity of evangelistic organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ and Jews for Jesus, but the anti-cult camp tends to object to any religious group which encourages radical change in people's lifestyle ("snapping"). The countercult camp emphasizes strong opposition to cultic theology, but at the personal level believes rejecting the religious freedom of another is sin.

The secular camp consists predominantly of academics who come from a sociological religious studies perspective. The secular crowd tends to look down its nose at the other two groups for what it considers a lack of scholarship. The secular camp disagrees strongly with the anti-cult movement by generally rejecting the existence of what is understood to be brainwashing or mind control.

Identifying themselves as evangelicals, the Hexham and Poewe represent a unique position in debate between the countercult, anti-cult, and secular camps. They write from the perspective of the secular camp, yet they should be in a position to understand the countercult movement better than many of their peers because of their evangelical sympathies. This then is partially behind the following brief dispute that arose between Irving Hexham and Doug Groothuis on Apologia's AR-talk online discussion group. (To date Groothuis is the only person I know of responding to this book.)

Rich Poll
June 30, 1997

AR-talk Discussion Thread

First exchange of three between Groothuis and Hexham

Second exchange of three between Groothuis and Hexham

Third exchange of three between Groothuis and Hexham

(Apologies for any errors editing line breaks in the above -- RP)

POSTSCRIPT (July 30, 1997)

Another way to understand the divisions described above is as follows: