Beyond Religion and the Secular: Creative Spiritual Movements and their Relevance to Political, Social and Cultural Reform

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of ‘religion’, this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been more creative – redeveloping older resources, often in unexpected ways – than one might expect. Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá’ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Latter-Day Saints, two controversial American churches. Most of these six movements have counterintuitive features that would lead secular Western intellectuals, basing themselves on Enlightenment thinking, to dismiss them as irrelevant and inconsequential. However, this book reveals how these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in social, scientific, educational and cultural initiatives. Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the discussion in a new direction, considering the utopian intentionality that such cultural productions reveal.