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

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of ’religion’, this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect.

Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá’ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives.

Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.

Wayne Hudson is Adjunct Professor at Charles Sturt University and the University of Tasmania, and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Australia.