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They've never probed what they mean by God: providence, cosmos, destiny, Jesus, whatever. What's striking is how unchanged the response has been from 1939-40 to 1990. The way you construct it, their responses can remain the same; but you're saying they have a different code underneath, they're changing underneath. I'm not sure about that. I'd like to question that a little bit. The other thing is, one can talk about a Church of Sweden, a Church of England, and a Church of Denmark, but in the United States there is no "official" church. Our religious institutions are decentralized, nonestablished; we would call them "deregulated" churches and synagogues. As a result, everybody involved is sort of an entrepreneur, and there are excesses, of course. We have Jimmy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, but also we have a vital voluntary system. It's very voluntary here, which is not true in Sweden, Denmark, England, or even in Italy or Poland. Perhaps this plays a role. If you have an establishment and people are obviously in rebellion against the establishment, they're going to run away from it. When the system is nonestablished and voluntary, it may have more vitality to it. The third point I want to probe is, where does ethnicity come into this? I'm thinking particularly of Jews and Catholics who may be far away from the synagogue and the church-they don't go to Mass, they don't go to Sabbath services, they don't keep kosher, they don't go to Confession, they don't do novenas-but if you ask them what they are, they would say, "Oh, I'm a Catholic, I'm a Jew. I feel it. I feel very comfortable with it. I wouldn't be anything else but a Roman Catholic or a Jew-that's who I am." This seems to be lacking in the population you're discussing. I mean, how can you be ethnically a Hindu or a Buddhist if you're not raised in India or Asia? Ethnicity here in the West is mostly Christian or Jewish. Even in the part of the United States where I grew up-the South-and I'm speaking here of white Christians, being a Southern Baptist was an ethnic thing. People would no more think of being a Hindu or a Buddhist-why, of course, they're Southern Baptist! What kind of Southern Baptist is something else, but they're Southern Baptist, that's who they are. So if there is a religious change, where do ethnic factors come in, such as food, language, humor, a sense of belonging to a people, shared destiny? That's a big package that I don't think Americans give up very easily-at least the polls have shown that they don't really change. Aagaard: This surprising stability is present in Europe as well. We have only had European statistical research in the last 10 years. We had a survey in 1981 and one in 1991, and the surveys confirm this. There's a worldwide institutional stability in the religious statistics from 1900 through 1990 in that the same percentages of people belong to the various religions in an external, superficial way. For example, let's take Christianity: We have the same one third of the population as we had around the year 1900. But if you take a hard look, you'll see that the change is enormous because what has been lost in the northern hemisphere has been gained in the southern hemisphere. The losses in the North have been compensated by forward movement in the so-called Third World. The mission outreach of the church has compensated for the losses at home. So such statistics are very stable superficially, but when you look at them, there are very many changes under the surface. Now to your three points: the possible lack of change in religious affiliation, the contrast between established and nonestablished churches, and ethnicity. Those points belong very close together. I think that established churches suffer even less change. Obviously, there will be more institutional change here in the United States than in Denmark, where 90% belong to the same church. In the United States, there is a change in the Pentecostal churches, in the Assemblies of God. They're really changing but within the same framework, so to speak, so that there is a movement from one group to another. Then, of course, there's an extra problem about Americans becoming Hindus. How could this happen? Well, it only happens because of a deep internal change. I'm going to go into more detail about it by mentioning the so-called "pizza effect," which I think is very important. You all believe that the pizza is an Italian dish or Sicilian dish, and even the Italians and Sicilians believe this. But, of course, this is only partially true because the original pizza was a poor man's bread-tough, hard bread to break your teeth on. When the Sicilian laborers went to the United States because they couldn't be fed in their own country, and they gradually started earning money and could afford to put on that hard bread their anchovies and tomatoes and cheese and whatnot, the enriched pizza came into existence. But now comes the point: When they went to visit their mothers back in Sicily, they went into the kitchens and proved their success by producing the enriched pizza there as well. And it became a great success and gradually they came out of the poverty of the 19th century and the enriched pizza became a national dish in Italy and Sicily. Well, exactly the same has happened, for instance, to yoga. Yoga is really tough, it's for breaking your teeth; it's not at all for a better life. It's for getting out of life. But when it was brought to the United States, it became the enriched yoga, which serves exactly the opposite purposes. It's now meant to create a quality of life. All the seriousness has gone out of it. And as we turn to India, it has become a real success there, too. Also, many Indians believe that this enriched yoga is the real yoga, which, of course, it is not. The same has happened to reincarnation. In India, reincarnation, or past-life experiences, is part of the concept of hell: To be able to remember your past lives, that's a hellish thing no one would like because it haunts you. It makes you mad to remember past lives. The idea that you are surviving not just for 17 or 18 times-that could be quite funny-but that you're being reborn millions of times! You will never get out, you will never be liberated. That is hell on earth! When this idea came to the West, it was enriched and made into a sort of richer- lives, many-lives entertainment. The circus goes on again and again and again, and this notion was brought back to India and became quite popular there. So that in Hinduism itself there is a sort of dual understanding: For some, yoga and reincarnation is hell on earth; for others, it is paradise. Eckstein: It sounds more like the white-bread effect, a food that is traditionally associated with substantial nourishment for people, but has now become a kind of fluff, bland and tasteless, that provides nothing for anyone, a semblance of its former self. Aagaard: But it's even worse, I think. For example, Scientology is a typical expression of this. Here we have a religion that externally behaves as though it is a church, but internally maintains that it is Buddhism. But a Buddhism with a God and a soul is not a Buddhism. It's a caricature of Buddhism, nothing to do with Buddhism at all. When you look closely at it, you find that it's occultism mixed up with a caricature of Buddhism and a caricature of a church. That sort of religiosity is really the most horrible threat against genuine religion. It can compromise religion in the next generation to the point that no one will touch it. Langone: Your thesis is very interesting, if I understand what you're getting at. What you seem to be saying is that the essence of religion is what some psychologists might call the "schemata," the cognitive maps that underlie our thinking, that which we don't think about when we use the coding, as you call it, the symbols. Different religions have different maps, different coding systems, and in a culture there is some consistency and integration between the manifestations or the actual content of the religion and the coding. They're tied together. But when you have a confrontation of religious systems, you can have a subtle and unconscious change going on because the words or concepts on the manifested level are imbued with a different kind of meaning, which changes the coding. Thus, when we confront the East, it influences us by affecting such notions as the purpose of life or the idea of reincarnation. Actually, I think it has most affected us through the meanings attributed to mystical life experiences. Thinking back to the sixties, many Americans, particularly young Americans, had experiences with hallucinogenic drugs which they were not able to describe in their traditional religious terms. The East provided a language for them. But this then has a subtle effect on the coding. The reverse occurs also, as you describe, with the East. Yoga gets transformed: It had one meaning prior to the confrontation with the West; now it has another meaning. This results in a change in the coding system. I also wish to address another issue, the issue of pluralism. In the United States, I think we have the illusion that pluralism means we can embrace everyone, that all creeds can exist in this society without conflict. I've maintained in some of my writings, which have been stimulated by studying cult phenomena, that genuine pluralism is not that mushy. There are rules to pluralism. There are boundaries to pluralism. I think that what you're advancing suggests that what we call pluralism is in fact a religion that has within it various strands-Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism- but nonetheless has a common coding system, what you have called the "Atlantic Paradigm," and that pluralism is not the doctrine that says we can embrace everyone. Aagaard: That's right. I think that was a very good analysis because it's obvious that in this breaking down of the pattern of codes that constitutes a culture and a religion at the same time, that when this pattern loses its meaning, as in this fantastic "pizza effect," which is hitting and killing the validity and serenity of the Oriental religions, then what is the result? Complete bewilderment! I do believe that the real tragedy of the influence of the Eastern religions on our young people is not the fact of Eastern religion, which is meaningful in itself, but that it is not any longer really Eastern religion. It's a mishmash that creates confusion, and it's the confusion that breaks our young people. I have seen it so often in India: People sitting there in the ashrams-they're totally out of their minds! They cannot move, they cannot make any decision because their frame of reference has gone. They don't know any longer what's up, what's down, what's good, what's bad. Their codes are ruined. The problem is not that they have become Hindus! Langone: There was a Gallup Poll of American teenagers about a year or so ago, and I was shocked to see that approximately one third of American teenagers who identify as Christians say they believe in reincarnation, which is totally antithetical to Christianity. Aagaard: And of course they don't believe in reincarnation in any sense like Hindus or Buddhists but in this mishmash understanding, which is meaningless. They cannot cope with this and it will gradually break them down. Identity is created by some sort of cohesion, some sort of pattern, so that you can refer from one stage in your life to the next. If you cannot do this, you're a psychological invalid. You are stopped in your growth. You are crippled mentally. That's the problem. Eckstein: I'm a little concerned about what is being used in this discussion as a criterion for meaningfulness. It sounds like the criterion is something like what is traditional. What I'm hearing is that traditional religions in their pure or systematic states are in fact genuine cosmologies and purveyors of meaning, and then you get these changes that come about as a result of all of this interaction and you wind up with a kind of mishmash that doesn't provide meaning. Yet, we've got all these people running into them in one form or another, and it seems to me that we need to get a little bit clearer as to how you differentiate between a meaningful cosmology and what you call a mishmash. Aagaard: Well, you've got the point, that's obvious. The problem is how to describe it. I believe that I respect religions that are consistent because people can live lives in them. They can live lives as Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims, where they have a consistent frame of reference. Of course, they may be too consistent and become fanatic or fundamentalist so that they are not able to register other possibilities. Obviously, that's happening at the same time as a reaction against ambiguities. Fundamentalism is not orthodoxy. It is anti-liberalism with a bad conscience. Luther was not a fundamentalist; neither were the Church Fathers. They were bound to the text and to the coding of the text. Of course, they were traditionalists, you could say; but modern fundamentalists are not-they cannot be because they are believing or operating as a protest against the dissolving of all meaning. They're going back to a meaning in order to get out of this bewilderment. It happens in all religions today, and it's a process that I think can only be countered if you really understand why they do it and what drives this desperate and aggressive return to the past. For example, I do believe that reincarnation is a possible explanation that can give meaning to lives. It's not a meaning I would like to live under, but there is a meaningfulness in both Hindu and Buddhist concepts of reincarnation. But I don't think there is any meaning in the modern New Age talk of reincarnation. It's inconsistent, it's ambiguous, and it takes people from bewilderment to bewilderment. So, my criterion is not a Christian criterion because I'm saying, for example, it's possible to live a life on the basis of reincarnation. My criterion is one of consistency. Rosedale: Is there a method by which you discriminate, other than by inconsistency, between an "ersatz" religion, a destructive cult, and a bona fide religion? What is it you use in approaching a group to determine whether it falls within or outside of an acceptable penumbra? Aagaard: Well, again, I may repeat myself. I found it very easy to go to a Hindu ashram and a Buddhist ashram and to conferences with Hindus and Buddhists because the dialogue is meaningful. We have dialogue as we do here: We try to get onto the same line and we communicate. But to communicate with a New Ager is in fact impossible because of the lack of consistency. I get desperate when I talk to people who are not on this line and who do not understand that there is a line, that there's a logic in the discussion. They disconnect but don't feel that they are disconnecting because they're not connected to anything in the first place. They're using words as clich‚s. Clich‚s are just floating around in the air and it doesn't impress them at all if you can prove that a sentence is linguistic or historical nonsense. Everything they say is nonsense. Language has become a prostitute. Langone: I think your response brings us to the heart of the disagreement between secular and religious views toward cults. Your focus on the meaning systems, if you want to use that phrase, of the different groups will cause you to become distressed if you have a conversation with Shirley MacLaine; whereas from the secular/pluralist standpoint, so long as Shirley MacLaine is not violating the ethical rules that enable all these diverse groups to live together, she will be tolerated and accepted. [Ed. note: In the discussion Ms. MacLaine, because of her controversial New Age writings, became a shorthand symbol for New Age "flakiness."] You may disagree with her, she may be considered weird, wacko, strange, but she's not a threat to the pluralistic system. However, if a Shirley MacLaine type, let's say a channeler, begins to develop a following, with people paying money, and she wants to keep the money flowing so she has to keep them coming ... if she starts developing a channeling cult where she uses interpretations that induce dependency in the followers so that they keep paying money, where she undermines their self-esteem in the name of love and self-advancement, so that she and her followers become a bona fide cult, as we conceive of it, then she becomes a threat to pluralism because there's a violation of the ethical rules. That's where, in a sense, our alarm bells go off and we say, "Now it's time to be concerned." Your alarm bell, on the other hand, seems to go off... Aagaard: Earlier! Langone: When they start talking stupid. Aagaard: You're absolutely right. I think this is a very good analysis. Nieburg: This is one of the issues in dealing with adolescents who claim to be satanically involved. When you really begin talking with them, you find out that what they're saying makes no sense, they have no idea what the ideologies are all about. We get very angry and what we tell them basically is that if you want to believe in this, go home and read, then come back and we'll talk about it, but don't tell me that you believe in it because when we question you, you don't know what you're talking about. Aagaard: I will confirm what both of you are saying. In the approach that we developed, the alarm goes off exactly as early as it must for a psychologist. A person who is consulting a psychologist and who has done nothing wrong but who feels that something is wrong in his or her life because things don't work any longer and is living a constant nightmare where the subconscious is overwhelming conscious life, and he or she is no longer in control and able to identify what is what ... a long time before this person ends up in a breakdown or commits an aggressive act or a crime, it's possible to register that something is really going to hell here and this person needs help. If I might put a critical question in a positive way regarding the approach that is typical for the American Family Foundation and for the Cult Awareness Network as far as I understand them, isn't it necessary to have this first chapter, "awareness," in order to really deal with the second chapter, "results"? The presuppositions are there a long time before the conclusion is drawn. Rosedale: That's a very interesting point and a very challenging one. Where does the person hit the trip wire that first involves them in an analysis that he or she has a problem? Your description of what you do indicates that the trip wire is hit when the person reaches a level of dissatisfaction or disorientation. Here, around the table, some of us hit the trip wire not when a person is spiritually dissatisfied, but rather when a person is involved in a criminal or an antisocial act, which brings them into a system that then deals with them not by responding on a religious level to their set of beliefs but rather by dealing with the offensive behavior. Aagaard: But I am not pretending that we are adopting a more sophisticated line. I would rather say that we are adopting a very elemental line. All of you who have practical experiences in this regard will be familiar with that telephone call from a parent saying, "Peter has changed. He's speaking in a completely different way. His language has changed. We hardly understand him any longer." That is enough for intervention. Because that proves that now things have started. The second stage is that he also changes his body language. It comes very quickly. His language has changed, his body language has changed, and everyone can see that he's looking out of his eyes in a completely different way. He's walking in a different way. That personality change which is taking place, in my experience, starts with a change of language, verbal language, goes on to a change of body language, and ends up with a change of actions. Therefore, I think it's necessary to get in as soon as the parents say this. It's typical that when the parents' call comes in and I ask them, "Do you think he has gone into some sort of cult?" and they respond by saying, "Yes, but we don't know what it is." "You must find out," I say, "that's the first thing. Find out what has caused it." Unless we know the cause, we cannot give any advice on how to deal with it. Then, the deciphering or decoding of that new reality starts gradually, and that's how we end up with, possibly, an intervention. Nieburg: The proper question to ask is, "What is this family all about?" My question is, why has Peter done it now, why not six years ago, why not six years from now? Why at this point in time? A lot of the families I know-and again, my own personal area is adolescent Satanism-are religious families who consider themselves to be healthy religious families. Yet, we find that the key is that the one variable that weighs out is the ritualistic practice of the family. How ritualizing is this family? We're beginning to see that it's not so much what the kids think, but how they practice what that mumbo-jumbo's all about, or how they perceive it. And I'm wondering if we're not victimizing victims in a sense by putting all the onus on the identifying person as opposed to saying that this person is part of a system. I'm a cognitive therapist, so the whole concept of schemata makes a lot of sense to me. You have a belief system which then leads to thought, to cognition, which then leads to feeling or affect, which then leads to behavior. And the question is, where do you jump in? When do you start? Aagaard: I think that it varies a lot. It's my experience that this happening is more often than not pure accident. He has been hooked by Scientology. He could have been hooked any time, and anyone else could have been hooked, but he's hooked, and just the fact of being hooked changes his life totally. I'm not, according to my 15 years of experience, able to say any longer that some persons are more apt to be hooked than others. I think all can be hooked. Nieburg: So you don't think it's related to vulnerability? Aagaard: Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I think it's a vulnerability we all have in periods. It's not a sick situation by necessity, it's a natural situation that you can be hooked. After all, everyone faces life problems. It's natural to, for example, be cheated on by a lover or to fail an examination or to be depressed about this and that. There need not be a sick family life at all. Debold: We're dealing with such complexity here. I see the validity of looking at the family situation, but three or four years ago a Lutheran minister from Denmark, I believe, who spent half a year in India trying to rescue young Europeans told us that there were 750,000 of them wandering around India. And I asked him, "Why were they going there? Were they simply turned off to Western civilization, were they looking for a new mysticism, or was it drugs?" He suggested that perhaps it was all of those. Well, I think that I want to generalize a little bit more than just from a psychological perspective. It seems to me from the study of religion that it's a matter of life and death. I think if you're looking at India, all through its history and not just at the present time, it's always had the concept of Maya, illusion, and the concept of reincarnation. It seems to me that all the youth at the present time are interested in the concept of a world that seems illusory-we live with so many labels and so much superficiality-that maybe they're hungry for something more, and maybe they're turning to India to look for an answer: Is the world really all illusion, what's really real? Dr. Aagaard was talking about the search for meaning before, about how we look at death. It seems to me both ends, life and death, are decisive. When youth move to Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, it reflects the existential atmosphere of the time. The youth are so existentialist and they exhibit a certain practical atheism-they believe that each is his or her own savior. No one needs any other savior. And beyond all of this, Dr. Aagaard's presentation interests me because we all share an enthusiasm for treating this as a religious question, and we have to all get together. We're looking at Europe and the vacuum that has been created by the present revolutions, and we somehow or other are looking to religions to solve the cosmology problem. In 1955, Gordon Allport, the psychologist at Harvard, noted that there were 4 doctorates conferred in philosophy as against 450 in psychology. I have a feeling that maybe that reflects the fact that there is no more cosmology, that we are all concerned with self and with an insight into our own psychology. There is a great responsibility for religious people to address this problem. Nieburg: The State of West Virginia just called me and a number of other people regarding a class action suit in 40 states right now to remove a program called "Quest," which is based on Abraham Maslow's theories. They want to extirpate it because they feel that Maslow said things like "Be humanistic with kids." There's a whole group of parents and educators now, supported by some very high-level people, who want to remove all of this and go back to structure, go back and take away the humanism. It's fascinating. I just got the material this week. Allport and Maslow were colleagues of a sort, and this is, I think, a witch-hunt to remove Maslow's influence from the curriculum, and Allport's going to follow. It's just a question of when. I'm not sure what this all means, but something is starting. Langone: I think what you're talking about is one of the symptoms of the cultural disorientation that's going on, and Father Debold had been alluding to one of its causes. I think William James's notion of live hypotheses and dead hypotheses has some relevance here. Live hypotheses are those that are worth considering, they're worth some thought. Dead hypotheses are ideas that you just dismiss, they're dead and you don't even think about them. I think that as a result of the cultural disorientation that's occurred in the past few decades, as a result of the kind of religious change as opposed to religious conversion that we have been discussing, many aspects of traditional religions became dead hypotheses to people growing up. I came of age in the sixties, and my religion of birth was a dead hypothesis when I entered college. Catholicism was not something that I reached for to get meaning when I encountered new experiences, and I think that was true for a lot of young people at that time. The drug phenomenon was, I think, especially important in contributing to the turning East because the normal kinds of quasi-mystical experiences that adolescents often have were potentiated and became more frequent, so that adolescents now had these very compelling experiences that indicated that there's some kind of transcendent dimension. You're 19 years old, your religion of birth is a dead hypothesis, you don't even resurrect it to try to understand what's happening to you. You look around and what you get is what's being marketed most effectively. This was the Eastern view. I think in the sixties it was kind of a holdover from the Beatnik era. The Beat poets were Zen Buddhists. What they were doing was actually much more sophisticated than what was in the air in the sixties; and what's in the air today is even more wacky than what was in the air in the sixties. You just latch onto it. I think this is one of the things that bring about the cultural change that you alluded to. It will ring alarm bells in families. And this returns us to the question about what to do about the parent whose son is responding to these compelling experiences by joining a cult instead of talking to his local rabbi or priest or minister. My response is that Dr. Aagaard put his finger on an apparent inconsistency in our position, which Rabbi Rudin has so nicely summarized as an emphasis on the deed rather than the creed. On the social level, where we have to live within that pluralistic sphere, we focus on the deed not the creed. We don't want to start criticizing Shirley MacLaine socially just because we may think she's weird. We would get involved only when she's doing things that violate the ethical consensus. However, as a parent or a relative or a friend, when you see someone acting strangely or talking strangely, your alarm bells go off and you want to do something. On the individual level, one often feels compelled to address the belief system-you can't just focus on the deed. If you just focus on the manipulation, you probably wouldn't be effective. For example, exit counselings will probably address inconsistencies in the Hare Krishna doctrine, in order to jump-start the mind, to get the person thinking. Eckstein: I'm not so sure that goes quite far enough. I'm also not sure that the proposal to differentiate between good cosmologies and bad cosmologies or real cosmologies and ersatz cosmologies, based on consistency, will hold up-although I would like to think it's possible. If in fact it is possible, then it seems to me that saying we don't wish to hold Shirley MacLaine responsible in a social context for being inconsistent is to take pluralism precisely too far because what we would like to be able to say is that the one thing we all need to share in order to guarantee pluralism is a commitment to some kind of rational dialogue in the public sphere. If Shirley MacLaine is going to be a good citizen and she's going to be able to contribute to the public interest, to the body politic, to society, which is supposedly the responsibility of everybody in a democracy ... if she's going to vote in accordance with what she perceives are the rational needs of the community, then it would seem to me that her exhibiting linguistic behavior that is inconsistent in the manner that Dr. Aagaard is suggesting would be sufficient for alarm bells to go off. Not that I'm interested in calling in the thought police! But it would seem to me that some kind of bell should go off at that point, and that is what lies behind much of the increased emphasis within the educational community on trying to get students to understand that there is a logic to thinking, trying to talk about critical thinking as a means by which students can evaluate the difference between garbage and rational thought. Langone: I agree with you completely, except the people who ought to address Shirley MacLaine's irrationality are the educators and the clergy and not the cult watch organizations. Rosedale: Right, because you're lumping two different groups together and you're making it too easy. You're lumping what may be a New Age airhead with a potentially destructive totalistic group. If, for example, you were talking about a fundamentalist group that was arming its members for a revolt against the United States government and depriving the people who participated in it of food, sleep, and independence of thought, you wouldn't spend so much time talking about at what point you were going to intervene or whether or not you had a pluralistically acceptable group. You would go back to what Dr. Aagaard said: "Oh, I can smell the rotten part of that group. I know what it is when they have lost their respect for human freedom. I know what it is when they start to abuse their members. And I no longer have to extend a degree of tolerance without limits simply because I live in a pluralistic society." You can't just lump all of the deviants together and say they all require equal tolerance. Rudin: Because Marcia Rudin and I probably coined the phrase in the United States that we're interested in the deed not the creed, I'll give you a little background. That was done very deliberately. To use a bad analogy from warfare, the question was, when do you send up the interceptor planes? Johannes, you're prepared to send them up pretty early, and we're prepared to send them up a little later, when we begin to see actions. The reason is that in the United States if we'd gotten to the cults in the late seventies and early eighties on the creeds of these groups- arguing about whether Reverend Moon is the Messiah, whether L. Ron Hubbard is whatever he is supposed to be, whether Victor Wierwille from The Way or the Maharaj Ji is what he is-that would not have worked here because it would have been seen as simply a case of interreligious battling over how many angels are on the head of a pin. Americans generally say that if you say it's a church or a religion, it's benign and it's good. So, it's Moon and it's Cardinal O'Connor and it's Rabbi Soloveitchik and it's all the same. It doesn't make any difference. The reason we were able to make whatever advances we made was because we didn't battle with them on the creed, we left that alone. We took a stand, we came in on the deed, where it starts smelling and where the actions begin to attack families and individuals and everything else familiar to the people around this table. I'm convinced that if we had started out saying no, Reverend Moon is not the Messiah, it wouldn't have gotten us very far. There were people that were doing that, but I didn't want to do it because that would have tied us up and we would have been dismissed by the general American public as a bunch of weirdos. There would have been the suggestion that you have both Martin Luther and the Pope, and Henry VIII started his church, and that's fine, and its all religious nonsense anyway, and it doesn't matter. We still hear that. Eckstein: But, you see, that's why I'm worried about this criterion of consistency because it seems to me that part of the problem here, and I think Rabbi Rudin expressed it well, is that it's going to seem as though you're arguing that those guys are all mixed up, whereas you come out of a traditional religious perspective, one that is consistent and coherent, one that provides a cosmology. You're going to be faced with having to justify that claim, and the question is, can you in fact justify it in a way that will make it stick? Rudin: You might be able to justify it, but you burn up a lot of time and energy doing it when you've got a lot of other things going on with what I call the actions or the deeds. Langone: I think it's because pluralism, as we define it in this country, is based on the assumption that we must not publicly examine our assumptions, that we must have a tacit agreement not to go into our assumptions. Therefore, we can't really define meaningfulness and consistency. It's as though we have a phobia about even talking about it, at least publicly; in the privacy of your own closet you can do it. Eckstein: But Dr. Aagaard is a gentleman who thinks he's perfectly capable of being consistent. Halperin: Well, I think that what Rabbi Rudin was talking about before is that in the American tradition there is no single group that is controlling, and that this tradition is one in which all groups have agreed not to control other people and their expression. Therefore, by focusing on totalitarianism, the early anticult movement was able to make much more of an impact than by examining the doctrines. I think that the only way doctrines per se can be examined is when they can be shown to be a rationalization for power, as is the case in many groups. Rudin: But wouldn't you agree that we were taken seriously as a countercult movement precisely because we were able to document the egregious, the outrageous, the horrendous, the destructive deeds? We never took them on regarding the questions of creed. Maybe it's time to reconsider that, but I'm very wary of it. Halperin: Mark Twain once pointed out that there were two native American religions, Mormonism and Christian Science, both of which people could have some significant questions about. But the fact of the matter is that you can't attack groups on the basis of theology; you can deal with groups when they prevent a child from getting the appropriate medical care or when, for example, they endorse and sponsor plural marriage. Debold: Yes, even in our civil religion we do draw lines. For example, we get mad at the Mormons who want polygamy, and if the Christian Scientists or the Jehovah's Witnesses won't allow a transfusion, we step in. Even with civil religion we do make some laws and boundaries. However, one of the statements made earlier concerns me more than anything else, and that is the question of the meaning of language. If we're interested in finding meaning, then we should point out that this present revolution of symbols destroys our appreciation of the meaning of words so that there is no possible human communication left anymore. And that's why it's really difficult for us to wrestle with New Age religion- because we can't define it. It's running all over the place. It won't stand still for us to pin it down. It's one thing here and another thing there. It waves such a broad umbrella. But words have to mean something! Rosedale: Well, it is interesting to remember that Dr. Aagaard comes from the Dialog Center, which focuses on the importance of words and language and communication. Rudin: Returning to the question of creed versus deed, the creed is the engine that creates the deed. But it's tough, wouldn't you agree, to devote our energies to such a varied battleground? I have no doubt that the creed leads to the deed, of course, so perhaps it's time to reexamine this question. Langone: But it's also a question of who's responsible for what tasks. What we've got is a countercult organization that has to exist in the world that is. And the world that is in this country says that if you focus on the creed, you are not going to be listened to except in a narrow community. Dr. Aagaard's presentation, however, challenges pluralism as we currently conceive of it. Aagaard: Again, I want to underline that I'm not here to convert you to the creed perspective, taking away from the deed perspective. You have your identity. What I'm interested in is, of course, that you find out about our identity because our two identities need one another. I'm sure that because of what in a very nasty way I'll call your First Amendment neurosis, you have to think like you do. You are bound by that funny sort of First Amendment thinking. It is totally foreign to us, simply not in our blood. When I came over here for the first time about 10 years ago, I was lecturing in seminaries all over this country, and again and again, after my very polite and not-at-all aggressive presentation, I was told that this would be impossible here in the United States. It's against the Constitution to critique other people's religions. Rosedale: I have to respond because I'm a lawyer. I have a different view of this issue. First of all, the First Amendment, in addition to freedom of religion, provides for freedom of speech. Second... Aagaard: I'm not speaking about the Constitution but about the First Amendment neurosis. Rosedale: Neurotics will always find a reason to justify their neuroses, and the First Amendment is as good as any other. But when you talk about you and us, bear in mind that what we have here is a multifaceted group and that the countercult movement in the United States is a truly interdisciplinary movement. We pointed out yesterday at the Interfaith Conference that one could look around the table and see the divergen- cies. Again, today, look around the table and see the different views that we have, with each of us playing a different role. For example, when someone comes to me in my role as a lawyer and discusses the legal problems related to intervening as a parent, it is incumbent upon me to point out the differences between the legal remedy and the violation for a moral reason of what the parent perceives to be an unjust law, and the parents' willingness to take on the moral responsibility for violating such a law. Then, when somebody goes and talks to a religious counselor about the problems involving a belief system, the response he gets comes from a different perspective than when Herb Nieburg gets someone referred to him through the criminal system who has violated a law through a series of ritualistic practices. Again, that is a different problem from when a parent comes and talks about a custody problem, for example, when there is a division in a family between a cult member and a non-cult member, and the child is caught between these two. Maybe it's because I am a lawyer that it's very easy for me to focus on the fact that situations take on different perspectives and require different responses. In this country, the countercult movement, insofar as I have been involved in it, has focused on the necessity for a multidisciplinary approach. It has focused on the need for one approach in a school in a secular environment, another approach in remediation on a psychological or a psychiatric level, another approach for a religious counselor. These are different parts of a total picture. What you've brought to us is a need not to abandon and forget the part that stresses the bankruptcy of the ersatz religion from a creed point of view. Dowhower: I'm a Lutheran minister. Most of my work is with clergy and youth groups and church constituency. In that situation, depending upon the audience, I'm able to deal with both the creed and the deed. What you should do, I think, depends on the audience you're encountering. When I deal with Navy chaplains at the War College for a couple of days every year at Newport, because they've got First Amendment neurosis, I've got to talk more deed language. Dealing with college students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Campus, I talk deed language because they reflect the culture that makes my criticism-if it's of the creed-particularly suspect since I'm a professional religionist. I think we simply have to adjust on that continuum depending on the audience and the assumed standards of credibility. Langone: But we're adapting to the situation, we're doing our job when we do what you describe. Underlying all of this, however, is a fault line on a cultural level which, in this pluralistic culture, we intentionally avoid confronting because there's a fear of genuine dialogue regarding these fundamental questions. We just avoid it totally, and I think that's the challenge you're bringing to us. Nieburg: I've been in this field probably a far shorter period of time than most of you. I'm a newcomer. This kind of thing today, and the work that the American Family Foundation does and the Cult Awareness Network does is what fills my void. People accuse me of going to my cult meetings, and, in an attempt to find out, they ask me about the characteristics of these meetings. This is so helpful-it's good for me to hear diversity. Somebody mentioned critical thinking. I teach at Jewish Theological Seminary and one of the things we teach is critical thinking. Students don't know what that is. They think critical thinking means you make fun of someone else! We say, no, no, no! Our discussion today is so helpful to me as I try to understand the whys and wherefores of what's going on. I'm not sure there are necessarily whys and wherefores. I go back to phenomenology and I think also that the deed versus creed discussion is really a suggestion not to forget phenomenology as a discipline. Let's look at what's really happening, and instead of labeling it, let's describe it, let's tear it apart, let's look at it. The advertisement should be, "We do it the old-fashioned way-we study it." I think that's why this kind of stuff is so helpful, and I just wanted to share this with you. I could read it, but I need to see it also. Aagaard: I really appreciate this sharing. I've got some very good formulations now in my box here that I can use when I return home. May I propose that when we say creed, we in fact mean language. A creed is a language, and the neglect of the creed in favor of the deed may be necessary, I think, in your context. It's only possible to do this, however, if you constantly recognize that it's necessary but not really ideal because you cannot get away from the steering function of the language. As you speak, so you think. We all know it doesn't start by thinking which is then converted into language. It starts by being taught a language, and from that language we learn how to think. Therefore, it's so important to learn more languages because we learn to think much better. Language is not just a matter of communication, it's really a matter of thinking. When, for example, people learn the Scientology language and start expressing themselves in it, their soul is changing all the time. There's a Scientology soul, just as there's a Hindu soul, a Buddhist soul, a Christian soul, and a Jewish soul. Now, I distinguish between "being in good faith" and being a good faith to have. They're two different things. Judaism is definitely a good faith, and you can, as a Jew, obviously be in good faith. Scientology, in my opinion, is not a good faith to have, nor are most Scientologists in good faith when they have this non-good faith. Why is it not a good faith? Not just from my standpoint as a Christian-although there is that-but it's possible as a religionist, as a religious student, to point out that this mishmash destroys all sorts of rational thinking. And here I come back to the criterion of consistency. This is a criterion that can unite all people of goodwill. By goodwill, of course, I again underline that it is expressed by people who want to exercise their critical abilities, their reason. We can unite in critiquing this mishmash by which Scientology is selling and spoiling people's souls. They're not just recruiting people-we all know they are manipulating people by that sort of language which stops the critical thinking of the disciple. It doesn't promote it. All good religions promote critical thinking. Fundamentalism in all camps is a very big problem for us because it also blocks critical thinking. Therefore, fundamentalism inevitably is drawn into our area of concern, even if we, as Christians, have a lot of trouble with our fundamentalists because they cannot see why they are included together with Scientology. They are not so included in general, of course, but they are on this point: that they stop critical thinking by developing a language that is anticritical, antirational, and therefore makes people more foolish than they really are. Debold: I'd like to add a footnote to what you're saying here about words and meaning. We've used the word cosmology several times today without alluding to the fact that it really can be ambiguous. From the scientific point of view, I remember the first Russian astronauts radioing down from space that there were no angels up there! Cosmos means something scientifically. But also, once in a while, we all use the word metaphorically, and from that point of view, you're joining philosophy and theology. In a sense, when you talk about cosmology, you're thinking of the whole religious-scientific embrace of the world of meaning. And so, I found something rather useful, I think, to inject at this point: Among college students I've found a great deal of confusion about the relation between faith and reason. An awful lot of my students feel that faith is a blind leap somehow or other, that they can excuse themselves from having to be rational. This question goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, the relationship between faith and reason, followed by the modern scientific breakthrough; but students today have to almost be forced not to be afraid of a question. They mustn't be afraid of questioning, and they mustn't be afraid to bring reason to bear on their religious commitments. Of course, there are no angels up there in space. It's not an evil thing to deny that, but I'm concerned about the young people's ignorance of the relation between faith and reason, leaving them vulnerable to the first joker who comes down the road with a silly message. Aagaard: We all know that we are now harvesting what Descartes was sowing. He split the world and our understanding of it; after Descartes, no cosmology was possible except in an external, natural, scientific way. But in the beginning cosmology was not that. It was not the objective processes; it was the interpretation of everything that is. If you dig down into New Age thinking, you will notice the heart of the matter is a revival of old elemental cosmology. The elements have come back as a language of meaning. And when you just see it, you will notice it again and again; it is simply there as the structure of understanding nowadays. When you have a cosmology built on and expressing the elements, then, by definition, you have a religious cosmology and not just a scientific cosmology. Scientific cosmology changes every 10 years-science is never the same. It's part of its whole development that you cannot believe in science. Cosmological elemental interpretation doesn't change; it doesn't stand absolutely unchanged; rather it keeps together all the elements in a culture. It's very important if you want to understand Hinduism and Buddhism and the differences between them, and this is often very subtle: The difference is found exactly in the interpretation of the elements. In the same way, if you want to understand St. Thomas and the whole Dionysian influence on St. Thomas, it is found in the interpretation of the elements. That's the red thread if you really want to go into it. Now, the elements have been out in Christianity, in Judaism, not in the Kabbalah, of course. In the Kabbalah, the elements play an enormous role all the time. But in these modern Protestant versions of religion, the elements have been lost because soteriology (doctrine of salvation), in an individual way, has become the center. It's the salvation of my soul by God that matters. But that's a real degradation of soteriology. Soteriology is meant to be the salvation of the world! Therefore, it has to express itself in cosmological terms. If not, it degenerates into a mystery religion. So everything is at stake in this process of understanding the creeds. I don't envy you your deed orientation, but what keeps me going is my creed orientation. If I only had to deal with those deeds, those horrible, idiotic, foolish deeds, I would have run away screaming a long time ago. I'm engaging in a really interesting and fascinating reinterpretation of my own faith and I am meeting with a lot of fine people over here, not least from the Jewish tradition, which really means that we can contribute to creating the alternative. The churches cannot find the alternative to the New Age, honestly, because you can only find it if you are close to it, breathe the same air, have the same inspiration, and have the same feelings in the fingers-only then can we develop and create an alternative. I see our work here as a final vote for the church to come back to reality, because this loose-going soteriology without cosmology is not food for a cat, for a man, or for a whole culture. I do think that the New Age challenges us to come back to a genuine, religiously experienced world. We've lost it, and that's why our young people are running away. They may say that they're going away from this or that, but they don't know unless you talk with them and find out and have a dialogue sitting together with them. What is really at stake is the lack of meaning, always. Always, the lack of telos. There's no aim, and, of course, if you have no aim, you cannot get up in the morning. If there's no goal for life, you cannot survive-even a horse or dog dies if you take away meaning. Experimentally, you can take away meaning from an animal and it will die; even more so for human beings. We have created laboratories for killing people because we have no meaning. The churches and religions as such have no meaning; they love inconsistency. They call it, "We believe because it's absurd." What absurdity! You couldn't believe it if it's absurd. So that's part of the game, that the deeds are only understandable from the creeds, our acts are only understandable from our language. When, for example, I confront Scientologists with the 11 criminals who were convicted because of their deeds, they're not impressed. They say that's a private matter, it's not Scientology. Only when I can prove that these deeds were the logical consequence of the creed of Scientology, only when I can prove that all the murders that are associated with Hare Krishna are the consequence of the Krishnas' interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, does it come home. They're told in Bhagavad Gita to kill. Bhagavad Gita is a book that instructs people that it doesn't matter if you kill because you can't kill: You kill the bodies but the souls will go on anyhow. Rudin: I don't have a problem with this. I think there should be a multiple strategy. I don't think we're in contradiction at all because I don't think anybody in the countercult movement ever for a moment considered any of the creeds credible. The doubt was about how to find the energy. There are so many of them, which is why it takes all kinds of strategies. What you're proposing is, of course, much more difficult because then we're engaging them in the perennial battle of Christianity and Judaism versus the Divine Light Mission or Church Universal and Triumphant. That's a different strategy for different people. I still think that we were successful in getting launched because we were able to appeal to the general American public. But now we have other issues. We always thought-I guess we were wrong-that the counselors, rabbis, and ministers were able to deal with the questions of creed, and it really wasn't for us in the public realm to get into that. As for the First Amendment, I agree with Herb Rosedale about that. It's not neurotic. It has not only disestablished religion but- remember the second part of it, which most Americans forget-it's also the free exercise of religion. So we're free to debate and argue and go out and seek converts and run our campaigns and do anything we want. It doesn't mean that we're forbidden to do this; on the contrary, we're encouraged. It's a double thing in the First Amendment. I have no problems with the multiple strategies. Everything takes multiple strategies. You're suggesting a very important strategy: to get down and wrestle with them on these questions because they're not going to be impressed that the IRS, the FBI, or the federal judiciary system found these 11 people guilty of some crime. In their eyes, those are not criminal acts they've committed; those 11 were doing what they were supposed to be doing. Nieburg: One of the questions that has arisen in my mind is that the Cult Awareness Network says we're not going to challenge the credal elements, we're going to look at the deeds; and I'm wondering, are we becoming specialists? Are there groups that are going to specifically be targeted and empowered to do creed work? Are there groups that are going to be targeted to do just the deed work? Who picks up the overlap when you have a Venn diagram? The Cult Awareness Network repeats the point about not challenging the creed at every meeting I've been to, and I've accepted it, but now I'm questioning it. Why are we not challenging the religious nature of it? Why do we say to groups of people that we are not going to talk with your group here today about the religious aspects, we're going to talk about what people do? I have a concern about this because I do not want to be dishonest about it. The discussion today in my mind has solidified something that I've felt uncomfortable with but have not been able to identify, and I'm identifying it now. Halperin: I think that Dr. Aagaard has pointed out a very important issue, which is that creed involves theological matters as well as the matter of ratiocination, the matter of thinking. For example, after yesterday's meetings I went to speak to some people at Lenox Hill, with the idea that eventually we can set up an inpatient service there, which would be of use to us. In any event, they mentioned that they had been at a meeting where Brother Julius was invited to talk by a group of religious leaders in Westchester County. Julius rambled on for 90 minutes, making no sense at all, and these religious leaders just simply listened to him and did not on any level challenge the fact that he was making no sense at all! Scientology has a theological system about Thetans which is one thing, but the most important issue is that as you get lost in their acronyms of Sea Org, this-org, that-org, it's impossible to make head or tail of it and not to lose your rational self in this particular labyrinth. This, I think, is something that can be attacked: the extent to which the group promotes an inability to think, let alone critically, because the verbiage is used as empty wordage to promote a type of glaze, if you will. That is something that can be talked about, and for that matter I think that mental health professionals who are interested in the way people think are particularly open to this. Nieburg: I have an even bigger problem. Dealing with adolescents who are satanically involved is really a piece of cake. It's typically the acting- out, oppositional, defiant kid, and we all know what to do about that. But when I get a call on the phone from a man or a woman who says, "I got your name and I've been ritually abused since I'm 3 years old. I have these memories of these terrible horrible things..." I am now thrown into cognitive dissonance. I now have to work for years to find out what this person means by that. Are we dealing with the psychiatric, the theologic, the sociologic, all of the biopsychosocial, or all of the above? Many people have no overt memories. They say, "I think I experienced this. I left this group I went to the other day, and, you know, now I know I'm an incest survivor." Now we have to question them about it, and it's sort of oxymoronic because as we begin to question, the person says, "Don't you trust me? Don't you believe me? You're doing the same thing everybody else does. You're doing what my priest did." I think we're thrown into our own disbelief and I'm really uncomfortable with that dissonance. And yet, what do we do? I treat them as though they are survivors-until I have reason to believe they're not-because they believe they are. Their belief system is that they are; therefore, I have to deal with that cognitive set and see where it's coming from and what the schemata are. But I'm aging rapidly doing this. Speaker unidentified: No one here would say that if it hadn't been for the concentration camps, Nazism would have been okay. We have to start examining belief systems because they motivate what people do and how they do it. Aagaard: The Nazi concentration camps are the event in our lives, and anyone who thinks about religion apart from that experience is wrong. Everything was there as creed in Hitler's book Mein Kampf-all stated. We could have acted. Because we waited until it was transformed into deed, we were too late. Rosedale: There are a couple of other areas that are becoming problems now, coming to the fore, that focus on some of the issues we've been talking about today. First of all, there is the example of the young child who has grown up in a cult environment for the first x years of its life and now one of the parents splits and wants to take the child out. We at the American Family Foundation are first focusing on the questions that arise with respect to counseling the parents and dealing with the child. The second area comes from your talking about an American ethos, an American kind of pattern, and a European one. Cults are becoming increasingly international. We have students who come here from Europe and who are dropped into an American milieu, where their reaction to cult solicitation may be different. The protections they have to be afforded and the manner of treating the problem may be different, just as you have the converse, as you recognized, with Americans traveling through the East, respecting the manner in which you extend either the deterrent education here or the remediation there. These are all new issues, so that we can't simply isolate this with your coming over here and saying, "I want to find out what you're doing, and then we will talk about what we are doing," as if these are two separate spheres. These spheres and the problems we're talking about are significantly overlapping and are growing and becoming even more complex. Aagaard: That's right, but that doesn't exclude the fact that we have the same job and it's still the same problem. We may from our different presuppositions solve the problem or work on our problem in different ways, which somehow supplement one another. That's what I'm hoping for, for example, in relation to Eastern Europe. Rudin: Again, I don't want to be misunderstood. I think it's a division of labor, but I would warn people particularly in an American milieu that once we get into the belief systems and start challenging them, that's necessarily a full-time occupation. It's going to take a lot of energy and a lot of time to hold together a multiracial, multireligious coalition, which is what we've had to up until now. Because we want to get our message to the general American public about the evil of cults and their bankruptcy. We may want to reexamine our position on the deed-versus-creed issue and create a division of labor to include credal confrontation. You're right, never any doubt that from the creed comes the deed. Again, my analogy: When do you send up the interceptor airplanes? As early as possible, a little further down? Where do you attack things? I have no problem about questioning the creeds, but be aware that once you get into it, it's a full- time occupation. It demands a lot of energy, a lot of background, and I'm not convinced that you're going to confront the creed that early. I'm sometimes more comfortable debating them in the public arena on the deed or on the criminal issues, where they're much more vulnerable. I think I know the American public: They'll say, "Yeah, you don't believe in what so-and-so says, but they're entitled to their beliefs, aren't they?" That's the argument you get. If we say, "Yes, they're entitled to their beliefs, but they're not entitled to an uncritical reception of their beliefs because they're wrong," the answer you get will be, "Well, how do you know they're wrong?" And then we start into that game, and Americans generally say, "Well, if they want to believe Mr. Moon is the messiah they're entitled to that-why isn't he the messiah if Americans want to believe that?" Aagaard: Honestly, I think that this is, if I may come at this as a real European, not acceptable. It may be necessary because of the potentiali- ties, the manpower, the money, and all that, but it is not acceptable as long as it's not admitted that this is a very important battle that someone has to pick up. It should be a cause of theological faculties, theological colleges, philosophical colleges, psychologists proving that anyone who kills the language is the worst criminal because after killing the language, all other killing comes logically. In killing the language, which is a matter of creed, lack of consistency is the first crime. And this has to be pointed out as the first crime. Eckstein: It's also a false issue because to that response, "Isn't everyone entitled to their beliefs?" the answer is, "Of course, but that's not the question." We're asking a different question. We're not asking a question about entitlement, we're asking a question about whether or not beliefs make sense. It's a perfectly legitimate question to ask in any context, including a First Amendment context. Rudin: But once you start on that, you're put into the ghetto of the theological faculties, and people say that's what they get paid for and that's interesting, that's nice, that's arcane. I'm being very candid. Of course they're in chapter 11, they're bankrupt, of course they are an ersatz religion. I have no problem with that, but be careful that devoting energy and time does not deflect from other things that we're doing. It's a real question of priority-just be aware of it. And, of course, when you start engaging them on the credal level, then most Americans will say these are two equals sort of battling out in the ring. They'll say, "Well, isn't that nice? Judaism is battling the Unification Church. Lutheranism is battling the Hare Krishnas. They're both about 15 rounds, they're both about the same weight. We'll step back and watch it. Isn't this nice? Isn't that exactly what religions always do? They always do that and they end up with the Thirty Years War or they end up with Protestants killing Catholics." And Americans stand back while the destruction goes on and the families are disrupted and all the legal and criminal things go on. So I'm just saying, be aware. It sounds intellectually exactly right, but it's a division of priority and resources. Rosedale: But, Jim, let me ask a simple question to respond to that. Let's take an example of a custody case. In this case, the husband is a cult member and the wife is in a traditional religion, and now you are asked to come in and testify as an expert witness. Are you free in that context to comment on the negative aspects of the creed? Rudin: But is a judge going to decide that case on whether Presbyterian- ism is a superior faith commitment to Scientology or the Unification Church? The judge is going to look at other factors, but he or she is not going to say the Christian, Protestant, Presbyterian creed is superior to or more consistent than the other. Rosedale: Well, superior is one thing, but more consistent, I'm not so sure that the court would not judge. Recently I read a long opinion that awarded custody against someone who was a member of the Worldwide Church of God. What the judge did was to go through the entire litany of what this was going to cost the child and what it was going to cost the relationship, what participation in this set of beliefs would mean to a family structure. Maybe that's halfway between, maybe it participates in a little of this and a little of that, but to ignore it and try to wash it out is wrong. I think the people around this table have been involved in those kinds of disputes and recognize that they can't shield themselves from discussing the creeds. Halperin: However, I think that what you always have to do at least in the custody situation is point out the confusion that a child is going to experience when confronted with two radically divergent cosmologies or pictures of the world. Being exposed to one which is so eccentric is so confusing to a child; and since it is a custody matter, it is legitimate to deal with the issue of consistency in terms of the fact that the child has the right to fit into the broader world as opposed to the very narrow world of the Worldwide Church of God, let's say. Nieburg: There's an even more interesting case. You're called as an expert witness by a family member when the child is in the home of a mother and father who are both Scientologists, for example. And the family member, an aunt or uncle or somebody, brings the case to court saying they don't think this kid is in a nurturing, healthy environment. Now you're called in to judge that. We know about all this stuff, we know about the creed and the deed, here's a kid who's 6 years old, let's do something now. As Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the mind that's prepared." Rosedale: I recall a case exactly like that in which I received a call about a foster family who belonged to a very, very cultic group. The family had taken the child and was imbuing the child with the beliefs and practices of the group, and the agency now thought it had made a big mistake and wanted to retrieve the child from that home. That's exactly the illustration that you give. Do you have situations similar to that in Europe? The custody problem where people talk about what's good for the child and where people go and testify on that? Aagaard: Especially in relation to Jehovah's Witnesses. We have a series of cases now because the Jehovah's Witnesses, in Scandinavia at any rate, are in a very serious crisis. They are still gaining people in through the front door, but many more leave through the back door. First of all, this has created the typical situation in which the father leaves-it's a Jehovah's Witness family and he has had enough. The mother sticks to it, and then the fight is about where the children are to be left. Our argument is again a cautious argument, a halfway argument in order to make the judges see. We say that we are not asking the judge to decide whether Jehovah's Witnesses is a bona fide religion, but that we are asking him to take maximum concern for the child's possibility of dealing with both parents. If you give the child to the mother, she will be under orders not to let the child communicate with the father because he has left and he's a satanic person. But if you give the child to the father, the child will have the possibility of dealing with both mother and father. That's a sort of reasonable argument. I would like, of course, honestly to say that I think that sooner or later we will have to teach the judges and lawyers that they have to take a stand, they can't get away from it. You would obviously claim in front of a judge that if it were a Nazi family from which one of the partners broke away, the judge ought to take a stand and say that Nazism is not a milieu for a child to grow up in. But time is not right for this yet in our context, though I'm thinking we must keep that horizon open because we are getting into such devilish sorts of degenerating human relationships. Langone: The irony in this country is that the advocates of the pseudo- pluralism that holds us together because it's unexamined think that people who are really outside of genuine pluralism are in it. These people standing outside of pluralism use the language of pluralism to gain control. These are the propaganda lines, so that when you address issues of creed, issues of rationality and the belief systems, the loudest noises are going to come from those who really aren't functioning within that genuinely pluralistic whole. They're outside but they're pretending to be inside, and this is where the propaganda machines come in. The public relations machinery kicks in and creates that phobia of addressing issues of belief. For example, when you're in front of a group of mental health professionals, the attitude often is, "My God, it would be un-American to begin to question the soundness of a religious belief!" We just don't talk about that. Aagaard: I have referred to the fact that in terms of membership, the new religious movements are not that big, and our anti-anticult people always point out that we have overestimated and are dramatizing the situation, and that it's not at all that important. This new type of religion, of course, is a private religion, first of all. It's an individualistic religion, which really subsists on books and pamphlets, on communications, without people coming together. This phenomenon is not unknown in my own church, where 90% of the population are members officially, but only 2% or 3% go regularly to church. Yet, it would be very foolish to maintain, as a lot of people do, that therefore the church does not exist. That's not true. That's just individual religion, which relates by radio and television and, not the least, reading. We are publishing an enormous amount of Christian literature. We cannot compete with the New Agers, and yet at least 10 times as much is published about Christianity now as compared to years ago, because this faith situation, this belief situation which currently exists, does not presuppose membership or coming together. Clark: I would say that a majority of the families we get are like this, people who do not go regularly to church or synagogue, the majority of those people are that way. Dr. Aagaard was bringing up the issue of the European situation, where maybe 2% go to church. I know in the United States the percentage of people who attend church or synagogue regularly is probably a lot higher, but a lot of the referral calls we get would lead us to say that the average people who call us are not church or synagogue goers, so the people we're hearing from make up that kind of constituency. Aagaard: This is a situation that makes religious statistics nearly impossible to compile accurately. Our fingertip sensations are probably much more reliable than the statistical establishment-they can't catch the changes. Rudin: What I mentioned earlier regarding the Gallup Poll is relevant here. I think our fingertips would tell us that Americans still have pretty much the same religious identities as they did 50 years ago. I think where you've been helpful, Johannes, is in showing us that underneath there's a tidal wave going on. Call it coding or paradigm or model, it's not just individuals, there's a whole language change taking place. And that's more ominous than when people answer to a Gallup pollster by saying, "I'm a Presbyterian, my father's a Presbyterian, my grandfather's a Presbyterian." After all, they may not be the same kind of Presbyterian they were 50 years ago, they may have different underlying assumptions-so that the labels may be the same, but the bottles are different. The other thing, and it's important not to underestimate it, is illustrated by the following: I used to work with Saul Alinsky, who was a community organizer in Chicago, and he always taught us that if you could get 2% of the population-that's all you need-totally committed to a particular idea and really motivated, that 2% can often move enough people to move the society or the community. You don't need 98%, but you have to have that hard-core 2%. So, if you can move 2% to New Age or totalistic groups or whatever, that's a lot of people, that's a very powerful force! The numbers are not so significant. Aagaard: I always refer to our experiences during the occupation because I think that was a model case. During the German occupation, we had, let's say, 1% of the population, later a little more, 2% or 3%, who were definitely and actively against the Germans. Then, we had one- half percent who were definitely in favor of the Germans. Then we had the large group in between who had no standpoint. They engaged in some wishful thinking because they were not against the Allied forces, nor were they merely for them. They were mainly against the Germans, but not actively so. But the two extreme groups who hated one another were influencing those people, and it's the same in religious matters. Really, the influence from both sides varies and depends on a lot of not very tangible factors. This is where the influence of language comes in. Language is an underestimated factor. I'm a specialist, of course, but I still think it's funny that I don't need more than two minutes of listening to a person to easily decipher that person's religion, as well as which subdivision within the religion. When language is so clear, then, obviously, it has an enormous influence on the soul of that person. Debold: Jim used the word paradigm before, which reminded me of the fact that for almost 20 years in the realm of science the concept of paradigm change has been discussed a great deal, but some scientists get very nervous and don't want to talk about paradigm change. In the same way, in the realm of religion there have been conferences like one organized in Europe by Hans Kng, where some of the exchange of ideas was exciting, but an awful lot of Christians get very nervous when you begin to talk about paradigm change. If they're not willing to talk about it, they're not going to face up to the reality of the problem. Aagaard: I have suggested that religion has always been associated with water and that fact has created some basic paradigms for religions. All the religions came about connected with big rivers-the Nile, the Tigris, the Indus, the Ganges, the Yellow River-they all produced religions. Later on, oceans came in. For a long time, oceans were separating because they were too big; but rather quickly when the means of communication were developed, oceans got the same paradigmatic role as rivers. The obvious example is the Mediterranean, with Rome in the middle, which created the Roman Catholic paradigm that became so determinant for the whole medieval period of Western civilization and, of course, is still functioning. It's not finished, it's the core of the pattern of Roman Catholicism, pre-Vatican II. The next step is the Atlantic paradigm, which became mainly but not exclusively a Protestant paradigm, coming into being as a mixture of English Continental and Northern Continental churches. Religiosity from the new world, which meant that which came into being in the new world, was not just a repetition of something in Europe. It was a new version, a new pattern, and a new paradigm-and that created modern man. The Atlantic paradigm created everything regarding our liberties and what we stand for regarding justice, which is now spreading all over the world and becoming a more or less natural ideology. But now it's an exciting thing that we are entering into the Pacific paradigm, where the religions of Asia, especially Buddhism, come in. This paradigm is being created as a sort of dialogue between the eastern part of Asia with all the metropolises and those on the west coast of the United States. It is interesting in this regard that eastern Asia is no longer really comprised of nation-states but of a string of metropolises connected to those in the western United States, and this "metropolis republic" is coming into being with Hawaii as the center. That's where we are now. We who are living in Denmark, we are living in the backwaters because the real thing is happening in this area of Pacific culture, the Pacific paradigm which is not yet realized. For purposes of brevity, my last point is that each paradigm creates its own heresies. It is very important to understand a heresy, and in order to understand it, you have to see in what context it came about. What is it a heresy in relation to? The Atlantic heresies are the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, going up to the Moonies and, in a way, also the Children of God. Now we're in the situation where we must legitimately enter into a dialogue with Buddhism to see what sort of paradigm may come about. I maintain that it's Buddhism, not Hinduism, but that's another point. The point is whether Christianity and Buddhism together can really develop a genuine new paradigm, which will have its own heresies. We see those heresies in parts of the new religious movements. And this paradigm sees the old ones follow because they're not out. The Atlantic paradigm is still very important and the Mediterranean paradigm is still very important, but I suggest that the Atlantic paradigm then hit back into the Mediterranean paradigm in Vatican II, and in many ways this is a result of a fusion between the Mediterranean paradigm and the Atlantic paradigm. Something like that may possibly happen later with a third Vatican council when the Pacific paradigm is influencing what has been the post-Vatican period. There's only one possibility from my viewpoint, and that is to develop this in a responsible way in which a renewed Roman Catholic Church takes the lead in this "hurrying up slowly." Debold: I'd like to ask a question before time runs out. I have an idea I'd like to test on you and have you tell me I'm wrong. I have a feeling that there's a spectrum, and New Age is at one end of the spectrum and the thing that I'm largely occupied with, the shepherding-discipleship movement, is at the other end of the spectrum. New Age, where words don't really mean very much, and all the wild ideas and experimentation on the one hand, and the shepherding-discipleship movement, which is so conservative and trying to save something of the past, on the other? Aagaard: The shepherding-discipleship movement, I feel, may be very similar to the guru function, so therefore I wouldn't see this as two ends or two extremes; they're more or less the same. I would say rather that fundamentalism is a desperate attempt to get back to some sort of meaningful frame of reference because the frame of reference has been dissolved. Debold: Yes, but isn't it going in the other direction from New Age? Clark: Well, fundamentalism would fight the New Age, literally. It would be opposed to it and see it as an enemy and fight against it. Langone: There is a similarity in that the New Age is unabashedly irrational. The shepherding groups are irrational and really don't care about meanings, but they co-opt the words and then reframe them, so that what's really going on is the same thing that's going on in a New Age cult, which is control. You have a double agenda, and the overt meaning is not the true meaning. That's partly why I think the Christian churches have so much trouble with the fringe Christian groups, because they talk in what appears to be the right language. Clark: I would say that the New Age is sort of anti-orthodox in its attitude toward creed, whereas the fundamentalists are very pro-orthodox and defenders of the faith as they see it. Shepherding sees themselves as restorers, though. They're trying to bring back... Langone: But they're still basically antirational. Dowhower: And that's part of our American civil religious tradition-the antirationalism. That's why Dr. Aagaard's rational approach runs so counter to religious sentiment and piety-I'm not going to glorify it by calling it thought-because of the alien nature of an informed, rational, cognitive approach to the nature of religious experience and thinking. They're both antirational, and so is the American tradition. Rudin: We are victims or products-it depends on your point of view-of the Dwight Eisenhower syndrome. He said, "I don't care what you believe as long as you believe something." Protestant, Catholic, anything, even watered down to the lowest common denominator-it wasn't even a denominator, it was just water, a different kind of water. We have paid the price for that. I know I just finished making my speech glorifying the First Amendment, but you're right that the other side of the coin is that we've just watered everything down and Eisenhower contributed to it. Lyndon Johnson, too. Remember when he was President? He hopped around to every church. Presidents do set an example of sorts, so that's the victimization that we suffer from; and every time I start battling on creed, the response is, "Well, you're just saying that because you're a rabbi," or "You're just saying that because you're a Lutheran minister and you have a vested interest in defending the faith, but it doesn't really matter does it?" And when I was a chaplain in the Air Force, I had a commander who used a toothpaste analogy. He was a colonel, and he said, "Your job as chaplain is to dispense religion like we dispense toothpaste." So that's the trivialization we have to deal with and it's very serious. Dowhower: Michael, I've got a question. David, maybe you can help me with it also. In the whole issue that we were wrestling with this morning, the creed and deed tension, where did our late European brother Haack fall in that matter? [Ed. note: refers to Pastor Friedrich "Fritz" Haack, former Commissioner of Apologetics of the Lutheran Church of Bavaria and a prolific cult critic.] Aagaard: Oh, he's with me. Definitely. Dowhower: But his position was in apologetics. So it would seem to me that he would want to approach the credal issue. Aagaard: Absolutely. But he was at the same time a pastor who was struggling as chairman for the parents' organizations and the issues he had to deal with involved the traumatic and demonic part of the whole thing. There was some very heavy pressure on him, so he was never detached from it. Dowhower: When you say the demonic was a heavy pressure on him, can you amplify that a little? Aagaard: Those of us who are living on the front lines, who are being harassed by telephone and personal abuse and slander and anonymous letters, we know what it's all about. No one could convince us that this is just about matters of principle, conceptual things; it's blood and sweat! Dowhower: And powers and principalities! Rosedale: One of the things discussed in Paris was the providing of experts and speakers from the United States for European groups to the degree that was desirable-providing psychologists, psychiatrists, people who could speak to parents and others there on issues from the American experience. [Ed. note: refers to international meeting of representatives from countercult organizations that was organized by AFF in 1990.] The problem and the issue on which it foundered was money. The belief was that perhaps there were governmentally funded organizations in Europe that would underwrite some of this exchange of dialogue. Are there any in existence that would provide a basis for that? Aagaard: It was first of all in relation to the Eastern European situation, wasn't it? I think that the French and the Spanish and similar groups have some ideas about being able in principle to finance their international activities as parents' organizations. But I think that is out of the question. I don't think it will happen. If they made sort of a surprise attempt, they might get it through, but it would soon be cast out again. So, I'm not much hopeful for that, but I believe that the funding for Eastern Europe will be possible when we have a real international organization. Now we have a series of magazines and seminars for pastors and teachers and youth groups because we have more than one hundred ex- volunteers who have been in Asia and who have been doing the job. They are excellent personnel to put into a minibus and go on a real tour from church club to church club in Eastern Europe and tell about what the world is like. We'd also like to enlist some of the best of these people to take a tour as volunteers and that would help, of course, to bring people back who would then have the "feeling in their fingers." Of course, there are more possibilities. There is so much less to build on in Eastern Europe. They are so much more down on their knees than we had expected. We've been hearing so much about the church groups leading the opposition against the Communist governments and that's true. But they're very small groups and they are more engaged in their congregations than we are in ours, but again their horizons are extremely small. There's not much to build on; so from the beginning we'll have to put much more in than we get out. The load is much heavier than I expected. They're not even eager. Of course, how could I expect any activity to solve a problem they don't see? All those people coming in are exciting people and the Eastern Europeans don't notice how foolish they are or how dangerous they are. They represent the interesting new world. Our churches have taken 20, 30 years to develop a consciousness about the problems. I'm afraid the Eastern Europeans will take just as long. Of course, it will mainly be a European project and the big money will come from the European community, but again the problem in its entirety is not a European problem. Certainly, we see how thousands of young Russians are being brought into your country by the Moonies, so you are in it, too. It will be very interesting to see the reaction now that you've got this sort of providential student coming here as a reminder that it's within your walls as well. That could be a starter as you try to deal with these thousands of youngsters who are seduced into coming here and are living under circumstances that are absolutely irresponsible. Rosedale: It is difficult to do that in an environment where there is active cooperation between the Unification Church and the authorities. Aagaard: Yes, but that also should be exposed. How could we tell about it before we knew it? These people should be enlisted not as dropouts but as returning resource people. Clark: Well, I think there are two things there. You have a clear view of what it is from one side. I'm looking at it from the Soviets' position, where a guy like this wants to stay here, he doesn't want to go back. I mean, morally and ethically, you're appealing to the higher ground regarding what should be done, but how does the individual feel about that? You know the responsibility the person would bear, so to speak. That's an individual issue. Rosedale: Think of how hard it would be for us to counsel him to go back. Clark: And their attitude to authority, to their own government is different from the attitude we have here. They think it's risky. Aagaard: Okay, he's a young man and not too strong. But it's his moral obligation when he has experienced something so dangerous going on. His leaders may not know anything. Rosedale: It's a difficult problem. I know that a number of us, for example, have counseled people who have come out of a group, and then they talk about the obligation to go back and to get a friend out or to help a relative out, to do something like that. What do you do in situations like that? Do you encourage them and talk about moral obligations? Clark: I think, for one thing, they have to sort those issues out for themselves. In terms of self-determination, we're very strong ethically not to make that decision for them. We just inform them about it. But the thing that hits me regarding exit counseling, in what you're bringing up, Herb, is that they have to take care of their own needs before they take on the responsibility of others. They can only be as strong to the next person as they have strength within themselves. So, we feel it's extremely important that they have time to heal and get strength before they take on responsibility for other people. And it is true, classically, that when people come out, one of the first things that hits them is their friends and the people still in the group, and wanting to do something for them. But what I have found with those ex-members who do that right away is that it's like after surgery, they're putting pressure on their stitches before the wound is healed. What often happens is that they get overwhelmed, and it can become a fragmenting, dysfunctional problem for them, and in some cases it can create a relapse. They may go back to the group because they get all caught up in the emotions of what's going on. Aagaard: I think that is sometimes the case, but there are also cases in which such a person, perhaps a stronger personality, wants to get out. We let one of our people go with him into the Scientology shop and then they can run through and say, "Now shut up, come and follow me. I have something to tell you that you didn't know." Clark: I think from a family perspective that gives them the jitters. They're very nervous about that sort of thing. Langone: Your disagreement is really illusory because you're not saying that everyone is the same. It's an individual case. Sometimes you may have someone who's just come out who wants to get active and is able to do that and can handle it. I don't think you're saying as a generalization that no one ever should. Clark: Oh, no, but not only that. What we do is educate them, we don't determine for them. These are the options, these are the possible ramifications, this is what our experience shows us. We broaden the dimensions of the discussion so that they're more in touch with the wider issues that are involved. Aagaard: I normally say that you are not out until all those you have brought in are also out. They are a part of your job. If not to be done tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. It's part of your obligation, you can't forget about them. Langone: As a mental health professional, that makes me cringe. Aagaard: Well, I think it's a moral obligation. Langone: I think I have a moral obligation not to push someone to a moral decision in that situation. Push is the operative word here. Aagaard: Inspire! Langone: But if you're saying what I hear you saying, that your belief, which you communicate to them, is that you are not out until everyone is out, there's an element of push there. Aagaard: Oh, you misunderstood me, only those whom they have brought in, they do not have a responsibility for everybody. Langone: Even that, though-because psychologically they may be incapable of dealing with that. Aagaard: Yes, today, but not tomorrow. Langone: Yes, but to say it is their obligation even tomorrow is to put a burden on them that now they must perform. That is what many of them are trying to recover from in the cult-the placing of unrealistic expectations on them that they can't live up to and feeling like failures. Now they're coming out, they're finally feeling a little liberated, and then they get this expectation put on them that they have to go save the people they brought in. Eckstein: Is that a medical judgment that you make on a case by case basis or is it instead a principle that you follow because somehow you feel like there isn't such an ethical obligation? Langone: I would say it's a judgment on a case-by-case basis. I would not say you never ask. Eckstein: Certainly, you wouldn't disagree that in a case where someone feels that it would be medically dangerous or disadvantageous to someone recently released from a cult situation to take such an active role that that person should cool it for a while, would you? Aagaard: You see, I'm only confirming that I believe that each of them knows that this is true. That when they have brought friends into such a mess, they have a duty to repair it, so to speak. I'm not saying they're going to do it now, and they're not going to do it alone. As I say, in a few cases it might be possible to rush back and take their friends out just by telling them to come along and informing them about what they know, but it's a long process. But honestly, again, it may be because we operate on a Christian basis that we try to inspire them to see that we have to undo what we have done wrong, again not alone, but in the long run and together with that sort of party who has just helped them out. They have a loyalty to fulfill. Until they have done it, they will not be free persons. Langone: To the extent that the population you're dealing with shares that conviction in their bones, you are merely stating what is unstated for them, so in a sense it would be less risky in my view from a psychological standpoint. But in this culture, not everyone is going to share that sense of moral obligation. You may argue that on a deeper level everyone does, but as a helper you have to recognize your own limitations, and there's a certain arrogance in presuming to know what is going on in the depths of another person's soul and what he really believes is his moral obligation. There's a certain self-restraint that I think is called for, maybe more in this culture because we have such diversity: We may have a kid raised in a secular household who's coming out of a cult, we may have various shades of Christianity or Judaism, and the moral obligation that person may feel might be different from what your population tends to feel. Even within your population, I still think there would be a decision on a case- by-case basis because some people are psychologically... Aagaard: Sure, but I remember, for instance, in Santa Barbara I interviewed two former leaders of Transcendental Meditation. I said to them, the consequences of your dealing with this problem of having spent so many years in TM are not reaching their conclusion until you have assisted in getting out those whom you brought in. They responded by saying that they couldn't care less, that's their problem. Why shouldn't I tell them that they are still under the spell of TM? This lack of responsibility is exactly what TM is all about. If you want to become a free person, then you must take responsibility. Langone: This is really interesting because this is the deed versus the creed brought down to the individual level and manifested in the differences in the approach. Eckstein: But the example you just gave is not the example of someone who is medically compromised. It is rather the example of someone who still hasn't got the message. Aagaard: These were people who did not have the career they wanted. They stepped out. They were still totally TM-dominated. And then you have to kick them. Langone: But, see, it is quite possible that these people may not have had that moral sense before they went into TM. Aagaard: Well, then, it's high time they get it. Eckstein: A duty is a duty-you either have it or you don't. Clark: There are two issues here. There is the issue of recognition and also the issue of responsibility that he's talking about. One person can recognize something, he doesn't necessarily take responsibility for what he recognizes; but if he doesn't see it at all-and I think that's a very important issue he's raising-then there's a deficiency going on that needs to be recognized for what it is. If people fail to take responsibility, then I think it gets back to what Mike was talking about. Do you leave them alone because that's the choice they've made, or do you do what Johannes said and deal with their moral deficiency? Dowhower: Johannes and I come from the same pastoral care mentality, and I'm watching also how my mentality runs into yours, Michael-the kind of cultural mind-set of mental health professional versus the soul care person who has as part of his teaching responsibility being the Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1993, page 138 ================================================================= If this is a copyrighted work, you are acknowledging by receipt of this document from FACTNet that on the basis of reasonable investigation, you have not been to obtain a copy elsewhere at a fair price, and that you are and will abide by the following copyright warning. WARNING CONCERNING COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS: The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photo copies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified by law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. 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