14
New Religious Movements in Primal Societies
Introduction
In the last few centuries, and notably in the twentieth, the tribal peoples of the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific have responded to their increasing interaction with the more sophisticated and powerful societies and religions by developing their own new religious movements. These usually differ at some important points from both the local tribal (here called primal) religion and the more universal religion concerned. Such movements have arisen in the interaction with Western culture and the Christian religion following the expansion of the European peoples across the world, but they also occur in relation to Hindu, Buddhist and, to a lesser extent, Islamic contacts.
Most of these religious movements possess no written sacred texts or other sources and have depended instead on a new oral tradition. This oral tradition enshrines the account of the origins of the movement, often the story of the founder’s call and early struggles. These may also have been recorded in a diary or journal, or as a written testimony, and they can then assume the status of an authoritative canon or incipient scriptures. Sometimes this material is presented as having been given in written form from heaven, or otherwise divinely revealed. The oral tradition may also include new forms of old myths, and very often a body of sacred songs and prayers that may become the basis for a printed hymn-book or liturgy, as commonly in Africa and among New Zealand Maoris. In general, however, much earlier information comes not from such primary sources but from the rather hostile accounts of outsiders – colonial government agents or soldiers, traveller and missionaries. Since the mid-twentieth century there has been an increasing flow of scholarly information from more systematic and sympathetic academic studies.
There seem to have been few if any equivalent movements among the tribal peoples of North Africa and Europe during the earlier Christian expansion into these areas. The history of these movements may be said to start with European colonial and missionary expansion into Central and South America. Probably the earliest recorded movement occurred in Guatemala in 1530, followed by others in Colombia, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, etc., up to the present day. In the sixteenth century similar movements appeared in west central Africa after the conversion of the old Kingdom of the Kongo by Portuguese missionaries. Few of these movements lasted long, and it is in North America that the first of the movements still surviving appeared: the Narragansett Indian Church in Rhode Island in the 1740s, and the Handsome Lake Religion among the Seneca from 1800. These were followed by the Peyote cult or Native American Church, which has spread over much of North America in the last 100 years and is now the main Indian example (see p. 517 above). Although the first Caribbean movement was George Liele’s Native Baptist Church in Jamaica in the 1780s, most movements – Pocomania, Revival Zion, Bedwardism, Convince, Santeria, Shango, Spiritual Baptists, Rastafarianism, etc. –were later nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments. Modern movements in black Africa trace back to Ntsikana and Makanna, Xhosa prophets at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the great proliferation of Independent churches (as most intend to be) began late in the century and has continued ever since. Similar developments occurred in the Philippines and in Oceania throughout the nineteenth century, especially among the New Zealand Maoris, as in the Pai Marire and Ringatu religions. But it is in Melanesia, and since the 1930s, that most movements have appeared – usually small, short-lived and of the cargo-cult form [6]. In Asia, the new religions of Japan are rather different phenomena, but the 200 that have appeared in Korea in the past century or more are somewhat close to the new tribal movements. Elsewhere in Asia these have occurred in Siberia, in India among the scheduled tribes interacting with Hindu or Christian traditions since the eighteenth century, and in Burma and South-East Asia among the hill tribal peoples influenced by Buddhist culture or Christian missions in the same period. Indonesian movements have appeared in the later nineteenth and the twentieth century, either in relation to Christian contacts, or with an Islamic background, but the latter shade off into Islamic mystical movements that differ from new tribal religions.
The first major scholarly study in this field was James Mooney’s on the Ghost Dance religion, in 1896 [5]; this also included substantial accounts of most other movements among Indians in the United States. Other anthropologists developed the study further, both in the Americas and in other pans of the world, giving us the common terms ‘nativistic’ [4] and ‘revitalization’ [10] for these movements, seen as acculturation phenomena, together with various systems of classification. Other human sciences have produced major studies, each in terms of its own categories. Sociologists have seen the movements as products of social change and in relation to traditional social structures; economists have been concerned with material wants, with relative deprivation, and hence with cargo cults as a search for wealth in irrational ways; political scientists have studied the effects of colonialism and spoken of ‘protest’ movements, and indeed earlier movements often did come into violent clashes with governments and were suppressed; psychologists have used the categories of neurosis and crisis, and investigated the psyche of founders and leaders; and historians have sought to place these new movements in their wider context and trace their development over the years, as well as to stress the place of the individual in the appearance and shaping of the movement. By contrast, the first major study of African movements was that of the missionary–scholar, B. G. M. Sundkler, in 1948 [7]; while using many of the above categories, he also gave attention to the religious features and the spiritual search apparent in the Zulu prophet movements he surveyed. Other scholars in the religious disciplines produced most of the major African studies until the more recent advent of the historians and social scientists [8; 9].
Since these movements are now better understood as religious developments, although necessarily conditioned by the various other factors identified above, a classification may be offered in terms of the degree of interaction between the two religious traditions concerned. Those seeking to remodel the existing primal religion with some borrowed elements may be called neo-primal; those deliberately rejecting the local and the invading traditions in favour of a new composite form drawn from both of the others may be called synthetist; in the case of those related to Christianity a third type of movement which resembles the religion of ancient Israel and stresses the Hebrew scriptures or ‘Old Testament’ may be called hebraist; those which go beyond this point in their biblical content and possess some form of Christology may be called Independent churches (see figure 14.1). Some movements, of course, overlap these analytic categories. Various names have been used – ‘millennial’ and ‘messianic’ movements, ‘prophet’, ‘syncretist’ or ‘separatist’ cults, etc. The term ‘adjustment movements’, commonly used of Melanesia, is useful, but the best working name is probably ‘new religious movements’ (i.e. in primal societies interacting with more powerful societies and their universal religions).
Figure 14.1 Varieties of religious content and intentions in new religious movement in primal societies
Basic Beliefs
Common to most movements is the belief in a new revelation specially given from the spirit world to a local founder or leader. This often occurs through a dream or a mystical experience of dying, visiting heaven and being commissioned to return to earth with a new ritual and moral code, and with divine power, especially for healing. There is usually an emphasis upon a single supreme and personal God, either as a development from a possibly remote High God in the traditional primal religion, or in replacement of the former spirits and divinities. Some of the latter may be transposed into angels or saints, or else demoted as the devil. Reliance on this supreme and powerful God usually results in rejection of the use of magic, although belief in its effectiveness when used by others may continue.
The new religion usually offers definite practical blessings, here and now, in the form of mental or physical healing, further individual revelations for guidance from the spirit world, or promises of success and prosperity, or of protection from evil forces. These blessings may be set within the wider promise of a new social or world order that is shortly to appear, perhaps through some cataclysmic event or messianic leader. This new order may introduce a paradisal era of peace, health and plenty; lost lands or a previous state of sinlessness may be recovered; oppression and humiliation at the hands of conquerors or colonial powers will cease, and the tables may even be turned with the tribal peoples in a dominant position. Such millennialism is common in some regions, as in Melanesian cargo cults, but is rarer in other regions, as in Africa where the emphasis is upon immediate practical benefits.
These promised blessings lead to a new, hopeful and confident attitude to life, as well as to a new self-respect, a sense of dignity and of identity among peoples whose morale has been undermined by the traumatic effects of interaction with the invading society. This confidence rests upon the belief in the new authoritative revelation given especially for themselves, and upon the conviction that supernatural help is to be given towards these various blessings. This help may come from God or Jesus or some other being in the spirit world, such as guardian angels, ancestors or culture heroes, or the deceased founder returning from the dead once again. Receipt of the blessings also depends upon faithful observance of the new forms of worship, perhaps upon extensive performance of the new ritual dances (as in the ‘Ghost’, i.e. ancestor, dances of Native Americans or of prayers, fastings and other disciplines, and the observance of a strict moral code.
Whereas primal religions are characteristically confined to one tribal group, the new religious movements show various degrees of a more universal outlook. The revelation and the blessings are then regarded as given for other adjacent tribes, for all of their own race, or even for the whole world including the whites, who will then depend upon the tribal people for their full salvation. Thus while Godianism, a sophisticated neo-primal religion in eastern Nigeria, promotes a single God of Africa and rejects Christianity as for whites only, another Nigerian movement calls itself ‘The Church of the Lord (Aladura) Throughout the World’, and has had the occasional white member and branches in Britain.
Two of the basic drives at work in these new religious movements are the search for meaning and the quest for spiritual power. On the one hand, confidence in the traditional primal world-view with its religious beliefs and practices has been eroded, for it cannot cope with the new inter-cultural situation or defend its adherents against the religious system and world-view of the invasive society. On the other hand, there are many for whom the new religion, in the foreign form in which it arrives, also fails to provide the necessary meaning and spiritual power for daily living in a situation of great cultural change. (See figure 14.2.) Peoples across the tribal world have therefore created new religious systems of their own, combining in various degrees something of their existing world-view and cultural forms with the new views and practices of the more powerful invasive religion. Sets of beliefs from the two systems may merely coexist somewhat incongruously; in other cases there is a creative synthesis into a new belief-system that brings meaning and power to its adherents. The new system of belief will be implied and expressed in concrete popular forms of prophecy, ritual, dance, song, story, healing, code of conduct, etc.; it is less likely to articulate the analysis used here or to take the form of theology, doctrine or creed in a Western Christian manner.
Characteristic Practices
Many movements engage in a selective and dramatic rejection of some of the old ways, in preparation for the expected new order. Cargo cultists may kill the pigs, cease gardening and even destroy the food stores in view of the imminent supernatural abundance; Siberian shamans’ drums have been burnt and Native American medicine bags thrown away. These are more extreme examples, but it is common to destroy ritual objects or shrines and especially magic paraphernalia, for the power formerly sought in this way is now derived from faith in the new God.
There are, however, substantial retentions of the old ways, especially in the continued reliance on dreams and visions as a means of revelation, and in the acceptance of trance and possession as signs of the presence of spirit power. Other traditional practices, such as acceptance of a highly authoritative ‘chiefly’ leader, purification rites, ritual uncleanness of women and polygamous marriage, may continue. A minority of movements, however, insist on monogamy, and in many areas there have been notable examples of women as founders or leaders, as with Alice Lenshina in the Lumpa Church in Zambia from 1953, Angganitha the Biak area prophetess in Irian Jaya around 1940, and Mama Chi of the Guaymi people in Panama in the 1960s. Since these women have usually been young, they represent a double revolution in societies dominated by male elders.
The new movements usually stress frequent or prolonged communal worship. The forms derive from both the old and the new religion, so that drums, dancing and reporting of dreams consort with band instruments, Bibles, hymns and preaching, imported vestments and church layouts. There is usually much congregational participation and the worshipping community is a cohesive central structure for the new movement. Newly created rites and festivals may incorporate features from both the contributing religious traditions; some of the borrowed rites receive new meanings, as when Christian baptism becomes a healing ritual or a mere badge of congregational membership. Other rites important in the invasive religion may be neglected, as with the Christian eucharist or Lord’s Supper, which tends to be rare even in fairly Christian Independent churches in Africa. Major festivals commonly focus on a new Holy City, a headquarters village or area designated or regarded as Zion, the new Jerusalem, Paradise, the Happy City, etc. Members from afar will gather here once or twice a year, perhaps at Easter, as with Zion City Moriah in the northern Transvaal where there may be 100,000 members of the Zion Christian Church. Otherwise the holy centre serves as a spiritual focus (perhaps with a mausoleum for the deceased founder), and an administrative base sometimes involved in diverse activities such as economic enterprises and educational and health services.
There is usually a new code of conduct. In a few cases this goes no further than replacement of the old code by an era of permissiveness, but more commonly there is a rigorous reforming ethic stressing love, peaceableness, sexual discipline, humanitarian practices and industriousness, and the position of women is often improved. The great majority of movements ban the use of alcohol and tobacco, even where palm wine or cereal beer have been traditional and local missions have allowed smoking and drinking. In newly developing countries, where alcohol and tobacco manufacturing are most inappropriate forms of economic development, this ascetic ethic is of considerable value.
The chief practical blessing offered by the new movements is usually mental and physical healing, for this deals with the most urgent problem of many tribal peoples, often accentuated rather than diminished by Western contacts. The central methods used are religious, such as confession, prayer, fasting, anointment with holy water or other rituals, together with the support of the believing community. Western physical treatment is usually rejected but some traditional herbal and purgative treatments may be retained. These methods have considerable efficacy within the cultural and social situation, especially for the more psychosomatic ailments, and with people for whom modern scientific medical treatment is either inaccessible or unsuitable. The tendency, however, is to accept the modern scientific treatment along with continued use of the traditional religious methods.
A more general benefit lies in the new religious communities which replace or transcend the old tribal groups and, where these are disrupted, offer a new ‘place to belong’, with new roles, especially for women and for young men. There are often many official positions with ranks, titles, uniforms and insignia. The social structure ranges from loosely associated decentralized groups such as the Native American Church or the Rastafarians to highly integrated and centralized bodies with hierarchical systems such as some of the larger African Independent churches. Either social form may span many tribal peoples within the one movement, and especially in Africa may transcend international boundaries; some Nigerian independent churches have spread around West Africa and to Britain, and the Kimbanguist Church in Zaire has many members in a number of central African countries. This expansion as a more universal faith reveals a remarkable missionary zeal once a movement breaks from its original tribal context, something that was quite unknown in the original primal ethnocentric religion. Some movements, however, remain essentially tribal, such as the great Nazarite Church of Shembe among the Zulu, and gain part of their strength from revitalization of the local culture.
In their early stages many movements have clashed with governments, often violently, and have been repressed as subversive, rebellious or harmful to their adherents. In the case of the more exotic movements, or of founders who were charlatans, this has been unavoidable, but too often the authorities have failed to appreciate the genuine religious motivations embedded in the new forms. The age-old conflict between rulers and prophets is seen again in these movements, but once they are established many settle down to an apolitical existence, concentrating on worship, pastoral functions, the spreading of the movement and any associated economic or developmental activities.
Recent Developments
The considerable amount of study given to these movements since the 1950s has assisted governments (and others) to a better understanding, although clashes are still possible. In the New Hebrides of the 1970s there was tension between the Nagriamel movement of Jimmy Stevens and the authorities, culminating in an attempted secession from the new Vanuatu state in 1980. This had to be dealt with by military means; what is not as widely known is that there was a new syncretistic Christian dimension to this movement and that this continued in a more apolitical form.
In the Philippines the potential for conflict remains, but the largest of the new movements, the Iglesia ni Cristo, has had an understanding with the government, to their mutual advantage, since the late 1960s. Similarly in South Africa some of the Independent or Zionist churches cooperated with the government in spite of the apartheid policy, and for some years in the 1970s the government even provided a theological training college for their ministers. The Kimbanguist Church in Zaire has been regarded favourably by the government, and even the much-persecuted Peyote cult or Native American Church in the US is securing religious freedom as state bans and other types of opposition are being removed. In contrast, during the 1970s there were several African countries where governments proscribed a wide range of indigenous movements, even if not always very effectively, and in Melanesia new cargo cults or revival movements that conflict with public order or welfare will continue to pose problems to government.
The great majority of movements, especially in more recent times, have arisen by interaction with the Christian tradition, and since about 1960 there has been considerable change in the attitudes of churches and missions towards them. Hostility, suspicion and ignorance are giving way to a better appreciation and a desire to cooperate with the new movements where possible. These are seen as extensive forms of grass-roots indigenization of the Christian faith, showing considerable creativity in forms of worship and styles of life, with a valuable if sometimes unorthodox evangelistic achievement, and performing a pastoral function in local cultural terms. Some of the African Independent churches have been admitted to the World Council of Churches and to national Christian councils, and in West Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, etc., various mission bodies have entered into partnership with some of the independent churches for Bible study and leadership training. Elsewhere fraternal relations may be established, as with the Ratana and Ringatu faiths in New Zealand, the Daku community in Fiji, the Hallelujah religion in Guyana, and even with the Rastafarians in Jamaica and the Peyote cult in the US.
One sign of the developing interest in these movements was the establishment in the University of Aberdeen in 1973 of a documentation centre for this subject. In 1981 this unique collection of resources, covering all continents, was transferred to the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, England, as a Study Centre for New Religious Movements in Primal Societies, and microfilmed copies of its resources were made available across the Third World. Doctoral candidates in the latter, as well as in Western countries, commonly choose one of these new movements for their research, and academic interest in many disciplines has been increasing. It is realized that many of the processes and problems of social, cultural and religious change in the developing world or among tribal peoples can fruitfully be studied through these specific and spontaneous manifestations of such changes. Development agencies, however, have not shown interest in the modernization and development potential of these new movements; this is considerable, for all such movements represent local transitions, at the grass-roots level and in varying degrees, from the old order to the new. The movements themselves also show changes in their religious content. There is a tendency for those towards the left of the four-point spectrum shown in figure 14.1 to move to the right, becoming more acculturated and identified with the religious forms and contents of the invasive religion, especially where this is the Christian tradition. Here the influence of the scriptures and the association with Western modernization contribute to this result. Examples of the opposite movement are less common, as with the hebraist movement, the Bayudaya of Uganda, which is now clearly an African Judaism whereas in the 1920s it began as a Christian movement. In general, and contrary to the interpretations of earlier observers before the 1960s, these movements function as bridges into the future rather than back to the past.
In Africa, new religious movements have been profoundly affected by influences from the United States during the 1980s. Not only have American and Western evangelists addressed huge rallies in various African countries, but crusades, using TV satellite and local radio, as well as Western-trained local evangelists, have taken place. American churches and congregations have also offered financial sponsorship to African Independent churches, and these have often been encouraged to form associations among themselves.
The major influences have come from the Pentecostalist and Faith Gospel traditions. They have tended to strengthen the prophetic and healing traditions of new religious movements in Africa, but they have also helped to marginalize them politically, since they discourage socio-political involvement and lay heavy emphasis on personal, rather than social, sin, as well as on health and wealth for the righteous. They also encourage an understanding of the Bible as a book of prophecies concerning contemporary events, and interpret them as anticipating the imminent coming of Christ.
The new religious movements also represent a massive response to the traumatic changes experienced by the tribal peoples in the twentieth century, although statistics are somewhat uncertain. The greatest proliferation has been in Africa, where there could be upwards of 10 million people in 8,000–10,000 movements, some 3,000 of them in South Africa alone, and over 500 in Ghana. Many are small and some are ephemeral, but their places are taken by others and the larger ones dating from earlier in the century are well established. The largest is the Kimbanguist Church: the 3 million adherents claimed for it may not be too inaccurate. The Iglesia ni Cristo in the Philippines may have the 1 million members it claims, and there are probably well over 500 other movements there. The Ratana and Ringatu movements in New Zealand have some 40,000 census members, about one-seventh of the Maori population. It is probably safe to say that there are between 12 million and 20 million people involved in this development across the continents, although any figure depends on how these movements are defined. What is clear is that they are extensive, still growing, and of considerable significance from religious as well as from other viewpoints [3].
Bibliography
1 BASTIDE, R., The African Religions of Brazil (tr. H. Sebba), Baltimore/London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; prev. publ. as Les Religions africaines au Brésil, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1960
2 BINNEY, J., CHAPLIN, G., and WALLACE, C., Mihaia: The Prophet Rua-Kenana and his Community at Maungapohatu, Wellington, NZ, Oxford University Press, 1979
3 HESSELGRAVE, D. J. (ed.), Dynamic Religious Movements: Case Studies of Rapidly Growing Religious Movements around the World, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Book House, 1978
4 LINTON, R., ‘Nativistic Movements’, American Anthropologist, vol. 45, no. 2, 1943, pp. 230–40
5 MOONEY, J., The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1896; abr. edn, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1965; originally formed part 2 of the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1892–3
6 STEINBAUER, F., Melanesian Cargo Cults: New Salvation Movements in the South Pacific (tr. M. Wohlwill), London, George Prior/St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1979
7 SUNDKLER, B. G. M., Bantu Prophets in South Africa, London, Lutterworth, 1948; 2nd edn London/New York, Oxford University Press/International African Institute, 1961
8 TURNER, H. W., Bibliography of New Religious Movements in Primal Societies, Boston, G. K. Hall: vol. 1, Black Africa, 1977; vol. 2, North America, 1979; vol. 3, Oceania, forthcoming
9 TURNER, H., Religious Innovation in Africa, Boston, G. K. Hall, 1980
10 WALLACE, A. F. C., ‘Revitalization Movements’, American Anthropologist, vol. 58, no. 2, 1956, pp. 264–81