Emotion and New Religious Movements

Well this week was a bit of a challenge.  As promised, I had to ask myself repeatedly “Just how does this fit in with my research?”  since trying to incorporate the study of emotion into policy decisions and law would be like trying to drive a round peg through a square hole.  I did, however, see some connections between the study of emotion and the study of how fringe movements separate themselves from society, that I can now cling to.  I found myself especially interested in Corrigan’s description of the dichotomy between the universality of emotion and the societal framework in which it operates.   Anything that is universally recognizable but socially malleable is a very useful tool for groups wanting to distance themselves from normative society.   Emotion is a universal language, but it is a language so regulated that any deviation from the norm becomes suspect.  Searching the internet, it becomes evident quickly that fringe groups and new religious movements play off emotion as a means to distance both themselves and their members.

St. John’s Episcopal Church

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VukgewIuN8

(you will get the point after 20 seconds or so)

Snake Handlers in West Virginia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUdc5h10zTo&feature=related

 

I think whoever originally came up with all the WASP stereotypes must have visited St. John's Episcopal Church.  The service, to an outsider, is rather bland and robotic.  I’m sure many of the people in the video are emotional about their religion, but like many groups in North America and Europe regulate emotion to the private sphere.  The second video has, well, snakes and dancing and is the sort of display that the people at St. John’s would probably find rather disconcerting.  It wouldn’t just be the dancing about brandishing poisonous vipers that would disturb them, but the apparent bliss and emotion involved (many groups weep while holding the snake).  The communal emotion the snake handlers bring into their service, like most Pentecostals,  is a part of their theology, their ritual, and their identity.  Emotion is one way in which they differentiate themselves socially from ‘the norm’. The snake handlers just decided to up the ante a little on their Pentecostal cousins by adding arsenic.  A similar phenomenon could be seen in the article about ritual weeping in Kabbalah.  The mystics of Safed were differentiating themselves from the rabbinical norm through both their theology and their rituals, and weeping was a part of both.

Louis Theroux (honestly, if you ever have an hour to kill watch this entire documentary.  It’s great.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0R1BgZsYlI
(Watch from around 7:50 on)

A new religious movement (NRM) has to find ways to ‘break’ their recruits ‘fixed-faces’, and using ‘unconventional’ displays of emotion is  an effective means distance itself away from the dominate society in order to attract the disaffected.  The majority of new members in NRMs within North America/Europe are middle class, educated twenty somethings from protestant or catholic traditions, and groups tend to attract these young people by offering the opposite of the ‘mainstream’; an emotive, communal experience.  Taboo emotions are especially powerful, as the guru in the above video taps into with his anger mediation, or the Children of God (I think they are the Family now..its hard to keep track) tap into with their rather liberal take on love.  Distancing from the emotional norms has the same effect as dressing differently or shaving your heads (such as in the Hare Krishna), and is a powerful means of both incorporating people within a group and distancing them from others outside.  The anti-cult movement uses emotion as well.  It portrays NRM members as either fanatically emotional or robotically detached, both clear signs of ‘brainwashing’.  For example, in an episode of Southpark Stan’s anti-Mormon rant at the end of “all about Mormons” begins with “Why do you guys have to be so happy all the time?!”.  For the inverse, in the ‘Joy of Sect’ episode of the Simpsons the family gets involved with the ‘movementarians’ and become automatons only capable of praising their illustrious ‘Leader’.  Both excessive emotion and lack of emotion are seen as deviant in our relatively repressed mainstream culture.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d6/5F23.jpg/200px-5F23.jpg

The writings above are simply me musing on what emotion could do.  Emotion is an interesting social tool, and in that way can be used to analyze how organizations construct themselves.   This week’s reading surprised me, since I wasn’t expecting the study of emotion to be so diverse.  I thought I was going to be reading a rehashing of our look at ritual studies last week, so it was a nice reading works on sophistic rhetoric and kabalahistic theology.