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From Hare Krishna to the Latter-Day Saints, and from Jehovah's Witnesses to the New Age, religious pluralism in North American presents evangelical Protestantism with significant challenges. Declaring newer religious groups cults, aberrant sects, and heretical religions, the Christian countercult movement has warned that these groups represent a threat to society. In ^IBearing False Witness?^R Cowan considers the Christian countercult as a whole, locating it in sociological perspective as an entity distinct from the secular anti-cult. Through his analysis, the author argues that the primary purpose of the countercult movement is to reinforce and repair the Christian worldview when it appears threatened by the advent of alternative religious traditions. This unique analysis of the Christian countercult helps explain why conservative Christian responses to competing religious movements have taken the form that they have in addition to how those responses are carried out.
Unlike the anti-cult movement, which is concerned with removing individuals from cults and returning them to their families, the Christian countercult movement, according to the author, attempts not only to remove cultists from the negative influences of the cults to which they belong, but also to insure that they will join the particular version of Christianity adhered to by the countercultists themselves. Beginning with the countercult's early history, the author provides an historical account of the movement and its present activities. Since the rise of new religious movements, the growing interest in religions imported from outside North America, and the broadening of the religious marketplace continues to grow, understanding the Christian countercult and its presence as a countervailing pressure to these increasingly socioreligious dynamics becomes ever more important.
List of contents
Foreword by Jeffrek K. Hadden
Perspectives on the Christian CountercultConfronting Cults
From Extraction to Migration: The Christian Countercult in Sociological Perspective
"For the Bible Tells Me So": Constructing the Countercult Cosmology
Definition and Counterdefinition: The Countercult as Reality-Maintenance
Typologizing the CountercultA Territory under Siege: The Early Countercult in the Twentieth Century
Demon Siege: The Countercult on the Fringe
The Siege Continues: Modern Countercult Continua
The Siege in Cyberspace and the Democratization of the Countercult
Countercult ApologeticsFrom False Worlds to True, Part 1: Other Religions According to the Countercult
From False Worlds to True, Part 2: Cults, the Occult, and the New Age Rage
The Countercult against Christianity: The Case of Rome
"Gittin' Thar Fustest with the Mostest": Antipathy, Authority, and Apologetics
Index
About the author
DOUGLAS E. COWAN is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the co-editor of
Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises.
