In writing any account of someone else's religious beliefs and practices, any author must find himself between two poles: what members of the religion wish to tell, and what the public wishes to know. Nowhere are these polarities more distant than in the field of new religions. The public wishes to know about "recruitment", "brainwashing", and fundraising within the Unification Church, while the authors discussion with UC members elicited far more material on their own inner spiritual life. After consideration the author has concluded that a common meeting ground is simply not possible, and that any book, including this one, has to be a compromise. Just as any mainstream Christian would be irritated by an inquirer's relentless pursuit of questions relating to the precise ingredients of the eucharistic wine, it is understandable that UC members should feel that the author has given too much attention to the more obviously external manifestations of their faith in some of their ceremonies.
However, while recognising the importance of the insider's definition, the author still believes that it is important to answer many of the commonly asked outsider's questions too, and it is simply not possible to speak of sets of internal religious experiences which the author does not share. If those Unificationists who were willing to discuss their beliefs with the author hoped that they might be able to endorse this book's contents, then they may be disappointed: the account which they wanted can, the author believes, only be written by themselves. In normal circumstances a phenomenological account of a religion is relatively problem free. The author reads, listens, observes, and writes as far as possible without imposing his or her own value judgments. In the area of new religious movements, however, it seems that no neutral ground is possible. Even using the phrase "new religious movement" is a conscious choice which involves rejecting terms like "cult", "sect" or "fringe group", terms which some commentators would claim to be more suitable substitutes for what they regard as euphemism.
In this book, however, the author decided as far as possible to present the Unification Church (although not uncritically) in terms which would at least be recognisable by its members, in accordance with the normal canons of scholarship or unless, of course, what the author saw clearly differed from what they explained to me.
- ISBN10 0333538366
- ISBN13 9780333538364
- Publish Date March 1991
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 May 1995
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 272
- Language English