Derks,
Frans, and Jan
M. van der Lans. 1983.
Subgroups in Divine
Light Mission Membership: A Comment on Downton
in the book Of Gods and Men: New Religious Movements in the West.
Macon edited by Eileen
Barker, GA: Mercer University Press, (1984), ISBN
0-86554-095-0 pages 303-308
copyright ©
1983 Mercer University Press
SUBGROUPS IN DIVINE LIGHT MISSION MEMBERSHIP:
A COMMENT ON DOWNTON
by Frans Derks and Jan M. van der Lans
IN AN ARTICLE in
the 1980 winter issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, Downton presents an "evolutionary theory of
spiritual conversion and commitment." He differentiates
twenty seven steps in the conversion process and in the growth
of commitment to Divine Light Mission ideology. In this article we
do not criticize Downton's theory, although we think it problematic
to identify as many stages as he did. We only want to point out that
Downton's group of respondents differs in at least one important way
from Divine Light Mission members we have interviewed, and that this
difference has some important theoretical implications.
Although Downton does not
give exact information on his data, we may infer some
characteristics of his respondents from his theoretical model and
from data in Sacred Journeys (Downton, 1979). They may be
typified as young peoplemean age 23, range 19 to 29 years
(Downton, 1979: 229) who were disillusioned with conventional
values and religion as a result of participation in the
counterculture. The use of psychedelic drugs gave them some hints of
a spiritual reality that attracted them. Slowly they came to
identify themselves in spiritual terms. "An image of themselves
as 'spiritual seekers' became the outward feature of a new
ego ideal" (Downton, 1980: 385 386). They created a
spiritual ego ideal and self image. However, because of
their unrealistically high spiritual ideals, they became doubtful
about their capacity to realize this spiritual self without the help
of a teacher or guru.
Through contacts with
Divine Light Mission members, they heard about the movement. They
were struck by the differences between their own unsuccessful
attempts to live the spiritual life and the sense of joy, peace, and
commitment in the behavior of members. This behavior made them open
to accept the movement's problem solving perspective and
influenced them to join the movement. They did so, and at that
moment their locus of identity shifted from their ego to their
spiritual self. Because Divine Light Mission equates the spiritual
self with God and with Guru Maharaj Ji, this shift implied surrender
to the guru. They became "devotees" and increased their
investments in, and sacrifices for, the movement. Their final
sacrifice is "mortification of the ego," because it
implies a total modification of identity. It is the final stage of
surrender that results in total adherence to the movement.
Although we agree with
Downton's conception of conversion as a gradual process requiring a
continous intensification of commitment, we think that he is not
correct in treating his respondents as one uniform group.
From Downton's line of
thinking we infer that his respondents experienced a growing
disillusion with conventional values and religion through
participation in the counterculture and through the use of
psychedelic drugs. This seems to hold for all his respondents at
least, he does not state the contrary. In contrast, we were able to
distinguish two subgroups within our group of Divine Light Mission
respondents: those who joined before 1975 (n=10) and those who
joined after that date (n=9). The former fit very well with
Downton's description of the former drug consuming participant
in the counterculture. The latter do not; they were in no way
dropouts from society. On the contrary: their educational and job
careers were quite normal. Hardly any of them ever used drugs,
and most of them did not feel alienated from society. Their reasons
for joining, and in fact their whole life histories and the way
in which they became affiliated, differed considerably from those
who joined earlier. Many pre 1975 converts gave as a reason for
joining that they could not imagine themselves becoming what they
called "responsible members of society." Many post 1975
converts mentioned personal problems (for instance, loneliness), or
the impossibility of expressing their religious feelings through
participation in the existing, traditional, religious institutions.
These changes in
membership characteristics coincided with organizational and
ideological changes within the movement (which are extensively
described in Downton, 1979: 185 210). After 1975 the movement
appealed to a different kind of person, because it came to emphasize
other elements in its ideology. The pre 1975 members had joined
the movement because they had been attracted by Divine Light
Mission's Hinduistic ideology that offered them an opportunity to
legitimate their already existing rejection of the Western
utilitarian world view. However, in 1975 there was a schism within
the movement. Guru Maharaj Ji's mother did not approve of his
marriage to his American secretary and dismissed him as the
movement's leader. The American and European adherents did not
accept his dismissal and remained faithful to him. The movement
split up into an Eastern and Western branch. The Western branch
tried to smother its Hinduistic background and started to emphasize
Guru Maharaj Ji as a personification of ideology. This change in
ideology may. be illustrated by the fact that since then, Guru
Maharaj Ji's father, Shri Hans, the movement's founder, became less
important and was much less referred to in the movement's journal.
It may further be illustrated by the differences in initiation
policy before and after 1975. Before 1975 it was sufficient to have
a desperate longing for "Knowledge" (in the sense Divine
Light Mission uses this term); after 1975 one had to accept Guru
Maharaj Ji as a personal saviour in order to become a member.
Many pre 1975 members
had problems in adapting themselves to this new line of thinking,
and some of them left the movement. But many new members were
attracted. One of the characteristics of these new members is that
they had been very religious in their preadolescent years. In those
years their religiosity had been characterized by the experiential
dimension; they had felt a warm personal relation with Jesus. But
this religiosity had disappeared, partially because they had been
taught by their religion teachers at secondary school to
think in a rational way about religious matters. They lost their
capacity for religious experiences, and as a result, the Christian
religion lost its plausibility for them. In Divine Light Mission
they recognized, during "Satsang,” the
religious experiences they had had during their childhood. They came
to see Guru Maharaj Ji and their relationship with him as a source
of continuous religious experience. This made Guru Maharaj Ji much
more important for them than he had been for the pre 1975
members.
The research findings on
which we based the present comment are supported by observations
made by other researchers, to which Downton surprisingly does not
refer. This is the more surprising since Downton himself, on the
concluding pages of the final chapter of his book, states as his
expectation for the future that Divine Light Mission will no longer
recruit from the counterculture but from (1) the group of youth who
are disillusioned with conventional religion, (2) college students
who are traditionally more willing to explore the esoteric and the
novel, and (3) those who are disenchanted with other Eastern
movements.
In a reply to Nelson's
comment on his paper in the Review of Religious Research, Tom
Pilarzyk states (1979: 110):
one
indication of DLM's slow but increasing differentiation from its
youth culture origins is the present shift in its recruitment and
membership patterns. Stoner and Parke (1977) also noted this shift
in type of religious seekers that have more recently become members,
partly due to the movement's new image promoted by its leaders.
Present members do remain part of a larger metaphysical cultic
milieu but are less likely to be countercultural types.
The passage in
Stoner and Parke (1977) to which Pilarzyk refers, reads as follows:
Once Divine
Light proselytized among druggies and dropouts promising a constant
high without drugs, much as the Krishnas did. But a contemporary
premie recruit is more likely to be a student, musician, artist,
lawyer, or teacher a well educated man or woman who is, or
is destined to become, a solid member of the community (page 34;
quoted from the 1979 Penguin Books pocket edition).
Finally, Foss and
Larkin in their chapter in Harry M. Johnson's Religious Change
and Continuity (1979) say that from about 1973, Divine Light
Mission and similar groups began to attract persons who had not
participated in the counterculture. Although we do not agree with
their opinion that these later converts are characterized by their
awareness of having a "low exchange value in the sexual
marketplace," we think that the fact that Foss and Larkin also
differentiate two subgroups in Divine Light Mission membership
supports our conclusion that we should not treat Divine Light
Mission members as one uniform group as Downton did.
The findings reported in
this comment have some important theoretical implications. First of
all, they remind us of the limits of research results in this field.
Because these movements are "living" religions, they adapt
themselves to societal changes. We should not conclude too soon that
by now we know why people join Divine Light Mission or similar
movements. We may indeed know why and how people joined in the early
seventies, but recruitment and membership patterns may change over
time. Obviously explanations that try to relate the growth of these
movements to countercultural phenomena (for example, Bellah, 1976;
or Anthony and Robbins, 1974) have become less relevant to the
contemporary situation. Moreover, these results make us more
sensitive to the risks of undue generalizations: there are large
inter and intra group differences. Second, when movements
change their organizational or ideological characteristics or their
recruitment tactics, we should incorporate this in our evaluation.
The Children of God are mainly being blamed for their use of "flirty
fishing" as a deceptive proselytization method although they
already existed many years before they "invented" it (and
after the fact constructed a theological legitimation). John
Lofland's epilogue section to his revised edition of Doomsday
Cult (1977) is another good example. It may well be that
"destructive cults" evolve into highly respected churches,
or that "marginal" movements become 11
integrative" (or vice versa). Third, we formulated that
the changes in membership pattern coi . ncided with
organizational and ideological changes within Divine Light Mission.
It is very difficult to find out in which way these changes are
related. However it might be very worthwhile to look at other
movements and see if similar phenomena happened in them. This will
not only be relevant for our understanding of these movements, but
also for our theorizing on the dynamics of religious systems in
general.
REFERENCES
Anthony D., and Th.
Robbins
1974 "The Meher Baba
movement: its effect on Postadolescent Social Alienation." In
1. Zaretsky, and M. Leone, Religious movements in contemporary
America ca. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 479 511.
Bellah, R.
1976 "New Religious
Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity." In Glock, and R.
Bellah, The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: University
of California Press. 333 53.
Downton, James V. Jr.
1979 Sacred Journeys: The
Conversion of Young Americans to Divine Light Mission. New York:
Columbia University Press.
1980 "An Evolutionary
Theory of Spiritual Conversion and Commitment: The case of Divine
Light Mission." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
19:4:381 96.
Foss, Daniel A., and Ralph
W. Larkin
1979 "The Roar of
the Lemming: Youth, Post movement Groups, and the Life
Construction Crisis." In Harry M. Johnson, Religious Change
and Continuity. In Harry M. Johnson, Religious Change and
Continuity. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Lofland, John
1977 Doomsday Cult. New
York: Irvington.
Pilarzyk, Thomas
1979 "The Cultic
Resilience of the Divine Light Mission: A Reply to Nelson."
Review of Religious Research 21:1:109 12.
Stoner, Carroll, and Jo
Anne Park
1977
All God's Children. Radnor PA: Chilton Book Co.
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