David Bromley – Page 35

Swedenborgianism and the Visual Arts

VISUAL ARTS TIMELINE

1688 (January 29): Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm.

1755 (July 6): John Flaxman was born in York, England.

1757 (November 28): William Blake was born in London.

1772 (March 29): Swedenborg died in London.

1783 (December 5): An organization (named “Theosophical Society” in 1784) devoted to promoting Swedenborg’s teachings was founded in London. At least seven of its first members were artists.

1789 (April): The first General Conference of the Swedenborg–inspired New Church was held in London. William Blake was among the participants.

1793: Prussian sculptor John Eckstein moved to Philadelphia and joined the local congregation of the New Church there.

1805 (June 29): Hiram Powers was born in Boston, Vermont.

1825 (May 1): George Inness was born in Newburgh, New York.

1826 (December 7): John Flaxman died in London.

1827 (August 12): William Blake died in London.

1847 (October 15): Ralph Albert Blakelock was born in New York.

1865: The Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco was built with the cooperation of several Swedenborgian artists.

1873 (June 27): Hiram Powers died in Florence, Italy.

1894 (August 3): George Inness died in Bridge of Allan, Scotland.

1902: Paul Gauguin painted the Swedenborg–inspired Contes barbares.

1909: Swedenborgian architect Daniel H. Burnham produced what became known as the 1909 Plan for the City of Chicago.

1913–1919: The Bryn Athyn Cathedral was built in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania.

1919 (August 9): Ralph Albert Blakelock died in Elizabethtown, New York.

1932: Jean Delville painted Séraphita, based on the homonymous Swedenborgian novel by Honoré de Balzac.

1949–1951: The Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, designed by architect Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright, was built.

Early 1980s–1988: Lee Bontecou lived in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania.

1985 (April): The first installation/performance in Chicago of Angels of Swedenborg, by Ping Chong took place.

2011 (March 30–April 30): Pablo Sigg exhibited in Los Angeles the installation The Swedenborg Room.

2012 (January 26): The performance/installation of La Chambre de Swedenborg at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, France took place.

VISUAL ARTS TEACHINGS/DOCTRINES

In more than 13,000 pages of his collected writings, where he discussed an immense variety of different topics, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) [Image at right] did not offer a theory of aesthetics or art. Yet, according to American art historian Joshua Charles Taylor (1917–1981), among the new forms of spirituality, in the nineteenth century “only the Swedenborgian teaching had a direct impact on art” (Dillenberger and Taylor 1972:14).

Taylor’s comment should be qualified since, in the nineteenth century, at least Rosicrucianism should be added, while Theosophy and Christian Science had their greatest impact on art in the twentieth century. There is, however, little doubt that Swedenborg had an influence on artists that can only be qualified as exceptional, the more so if we consider that the Swedenborgian movement was, and remains, comparatively small and divided into different branches. How was this possible?

In the works of several leading spiritual teachers—including Theosophy’s Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910)—there is no explicit theory of aesthetics, but there is what Jane Williams-Hogan (1942–2018), the American scholar who first researched the influence of Swedenborg on the visual arts, regarded as an implicit aesthetic philosophy (Williams-Hogan 2012, 2016). This implicit aesthetic theory can be summarized in four points.

First, Swedenborg maintained that beauty is predicated of truth (Arcana Cœlestia § 3080, 3821, 4985, 5199, and 10,540: I follow the Swedenborgian tradition of quoting Swedenborg’s works by paragraphs). This is based on a solid tradition. For Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), “pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis” (“the beauty, strictly speaking, is connected with reason as its formal cause,” Summa Theologiae, I, q.5, a.4, ad1). That “verum et bonum et pulchrum convertuntur” (“truth, goodness, and beauty converge”) was often repeated by later theologians, although neither Aquinas nor his predecessors explicitly used these words.

Second, truth for Swedenborg has two foundations, one from the Word, i.e. from divine Revelation, and the other from nature. The first human beings were able to see immediately the truth of the Revelation, and to see nature as a manifestation of the divine. Unfortunately, we have lost this ability. But we are not without hope.

Third, for Swedenborg, the tool for recovering something of the lost gaze of the ancients is the theory of correspondences. “Nothing can exist anywhere in the material world that does not have a correspondence with the spiritual world—because if it did, it would have no cause that would make it come into being and then allow it to continue in existence. Everything in the material world is an effect. The causes of all effects lie in the spiritual world, and the causes of those causes in turn (which are the purposes those causes serve) lie in a still deeper heaven” (Secrets of Heaven §5711).

Fourth, art is in itself a divine enterprise. While Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences can be applied by anybody who would care to study it to both the interpretation of the Bible and personal spiritual life, real artists are inherently equipped to perceive, and show to others, the divine causes beyond natural effects.

NOTABLE MEMBERS ARTISTS

Anshutz, Thomas (1851–1912). American painter.

Blake, William (1757–1827). English painter and poet

Blakelock, Ralph Albert (1847–1919). American painter.

Bontecou, Lee (1931–). American sculptor.

Burnham, Daniel Hudson (1846–1912). American architect.

Byse, Fanny Lee (1849–1911). Swiss sculptor and painter.

Chazal, Malcolm de (1902–1981). Mauritian painter.

Clark, Joseph (1834–1926). British painter.

Clover, Joseph (1779–1853). British painter.

Cosway, Richard (1742–1821). British portrait painter.

Cranch, Christopher Pearse (1813–1892). American painter.

Duckworth, Dennis (1911–2003). British New Church minister and painter.

Eckstein, Frederick (1787–1832). Son of John Eckstein, American sculptor.

Eckstein, John (1735–1817). German painter and sculptor.

Emes, John (1762–1810). English engraver and painter.

Flaxman, John (1755–1826). English sculptor.

Fry, Henry Lindley (1807–1895). British-American woodcarver.

Fry, William Henry (1830–1929). British-American woodcarver, son of Henry Lindley Fry.

Gailliard. Jean–Jacques (1890–1976). Belgian painter.

Gates, Adelia (1825–1912). American painter.

Giles, Howard (1876–1955). American painter.

Girard, André (1901–1968). French painter.

Hyatt, Winfred (1891–1959). Canadian stained-glass artist.

Inness, George (1825–1894). American painter.

Keith, William (1838–1911). Scottish-American painter.

Khnopff, Fernand (1858–1921). Belgian painter.

Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de (1740–1812). French-British painter.

Page, William (1811–1885). American painter.

Pitman, Benn (1822–1910). British-American wood engraver.

Porter, Bruce (1865–1953). San Francisco painter and stained-glass artist.

Powers, Hiram (1805–1873). American sculptor.

Pyle, Howard (1853–1911). American illustrator.

Pyle, Katharine (1863–1938). American illustrator, sister of Howard Pyle.

Richardson, Daniel (active 1783–1830). Irish painter.

Roeder, Elsa (1885–1914). American painter.

Sanders, John (1750–1825). English painter.

Sewall James, Alice Archer (1870–1955). American poet and painter.

Sharp, William (1749–1824). English engraver.

Sigstedt, Thorsten (1884–1963). Swedish woodcarver.

Smit, Philippe (1886–1948). Dutch painter.

Spencer, Robert Carpenter (1879–1931). American painter.

Worcester, Joseph (1836–1913). Swedenborgian minister and Arts and Craft architect and decorator.

Warren, H. Langford (1857–1917). American architect.

Yardumian, Nishan (1947–1986). American painter

MOVEMENT INFLUENCED NON–MEMBER ARTISTS

Aguéli, Ivan (1869–1917). Swedish painter.

Bergman, Oskar (1879–1963). Swedish painter.

Birgé, Jean Jacques (1952–). French multimedia artist.

Bisttram, Emil (1895–1976). Hungarian-born American painter.

Chong, Ping (1946–) Toronto–born American video and performance artist.

Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas (1875–1911). Lithuanian painter and composer.

De Morgan, Sophia (1809–1892). English author of key works on spirit paintings; produced sketches of her visions.

Delville, Jean (1867–1953). Belgian painter, primarily a Theosophist.

Ensor, James (1860–1949). Belgian painter.

Gallen-Kallela, Akseli (1865–1931). Finnish painter.

Gauguin, Paul (1848–1903). French painter.

Jonsson, Adolf (1872–1945). Swedish sculptor.

Milles, Carl (1875–1945). Swedish sculptor.

Munch, Edvard (1863–1944). Norwegian painter.

Powers, Preston (1843–1931). Son of Hiram Powers, American sculptor.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–1882). English painter.

Shawk Brooks, Caroline (1840–1913). American sculptor.

Sigg, Pablo (1974–). Mexican video artist.

Simberg, Hugo (1873–1917). Finnish painter.

Strindberg, August (1849–1912). Swedish writer and painter.

Tholander, Carl August (1835–1910) Swedish painter.

Vedder, Eliuh (1836–1923). American painter and illustrator.

Willcox Smith, Jessie (1863–1935). American illustrator.

Wyeth, Newell Conwers (1882–1945). American illustrator.

Wright, Lloyd (1890–1978). American architect, son of Frank Lloyd Wright.

INFLUENCE ON THE VISUAL ARTS

Swedenborg’s vision of art and beauty obviously appealed to artists. We can distinguish three concentric circles: those baptized into a Swedenborgian church or maintaining at any rate Swedenborgianism as a primary interest in their lives; those directly influenced by Swedenborg’s writings; and those reached by Swedenborg indirectly, i.e. through other artists or writers.

We cannot elaborate here on the third circle. A complete list should include hundreds of names. One example would be the Belgian symbolist painter Jean Delville (1867–1953). He probably did not read Swedenborg personally, but was influenced by novelists and painters interested in Swedenborg, such as Balzac (1799–1850)—in 1932, Delville painted Séraphitus-Séraphita, the perfectly androgynous being born to Swedenborgian parents in the 1834 Balzac’s novel Séraphita (see Introvigne 2014:89)— [Image at right] and Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921).

Another example is Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911). Scholars of Čiurlionis, including Genovaitė Kazokas (1924–2015), found in his works influences of Swedenborg’s theories of correspondences and of angels (although his, unlike Swedenborg’s, have wings), which possibly reached the artist through Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867; see Kazokas 2009:86).

A further example of the third circle is Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), who learned of Swedenborg during his Berlin years through Swedish writer and painter August Strindberg (1849–1912). Strindberg, who had a lifelong interest in Swedenborgianism, in turn noted that Munch’s paintings “recall the visions of Swedenborg” (Steinberg 1995:24).

Nina Kokkinen studied Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg (1873–1917) as an artist who referred explicitly to Swedenborg only once, yet was deeply influenced by Swedenborgian ideas through Finnish master Akseli Gallen–Kallela (1865–1931), who had read several of Swedenborg’s works (Kokkinen 2013).

Another example is Newell Convers Wyeth (1882–1945). Celebrated as one of America’s greatest illustrators, he recalled how Swedenborg was read to him by his teacher and mentor, Swedenborgian Howard Pyle (1853–1911); Lamouliatte 2016; Swedenborgian Church North America 2017).

Perhaps the most illustrious representative of the second circle was Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). He learned about Swedenborg by reading Balzac and Baudelaire, but studied the Swedish mystic’s texts directly, and explicitly acknowledged Swedenborg’s influence. Jane Williams-Hogan has analyzed his mature painting Contes barbares (1902) as a clear example of his use of Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences (Williams-Hogan 2016:131–32). [Image at right]

A further example of the second circle is Pre–Raphaelite British painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). In 2013, Anna Francesca Maddison demonstrated in her Ph.D. dissertation that Rossetti was part of English circles studying both Spiritualism and Swedenborg, whose influence is apparent in paintings such as Beata Beatrix (1864–1870) (Maddison 2013).

Prominent in what Addison calls the “Swedenborgian–Spiritualist” milieu of London was Sophia de Morgan (1809–1892), mother of potter William de Morgan (1839–1917), whose wife Evelyn (1855–1919), a Spiritualist, is someone referred to as the last Pre–Raphaelite painter. Sophia had a lifelong interest in Swedenborg and passed to her family her own Swedenborgian interpretation of Spiritualist phenomena (Lawton Smith 2002:43–45).

Architects of the second circle include Lloyd Wright (1890–1978), the son of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). While his more famous father had multiple esoteric interests, the younger Wright familiarized himself with Swedenborg when he designed the Swedenborgian Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, his masterpiece, built between 1949 and 1951. [Image at right]

Symbolists were often interested in Swedenborg, both in Europe and the U.S. Elihu Vedder (1836–1923) had his “Swedenborg period” in the years following the Civil War, although his enthusiasm for the Swedish mystic seems to have waned in his later years (Dillenberger 1979; Colbert 2011:159; see Vedder 1910:345).

In Sweden, artists with Swedenborgian connections included sculptors Adolf Jonsson (1872–1945) and Carl Milles (1875–1945), and painters Carl August Tholander (1835–1910), Ivan Aguéli (1869–1917: Sorgenfrei 2019), who eventually converted to Islam, and Oskar Bergman (1879–1963). Bergman also collected valuable first editions of Swedenborg but, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1892–1975) visited Sweden in 1954, he gave all these books to him, believing he was somewhat connected with Swedenborg’s prophecies (Carlsund 1940; Westman 1997).

In Belgium, several symbolist painters were interested in Swedenborg as part of their eclectic explorations of esotericism. They include James Ensor (1860–1949), who co-authored a life of Swedenborg (Gailliard and Ensor 1955), while Fernand Khnopff, who for several years attended Swedenborgian services in Brussels (Librizzi 2012), belongs to the first circle.

The latter, including artists who were affiliated with one of the Swedenborgian churches at least for a period of their lives, or regarded themselves as Swedenborgians, is not small. Among the members of the Theosophical Society, created in London in 1783 to promote Swedenborg (not to be confused with Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 in New York), at least seven were professional artists (Gabay 2005:71). One was John Flaxman (1755–1826), the most celebrated English sculptor of his time (Bayley 1884, 318–339) and one who illustrated Swedenborg’s Arcana Cœlestia (Gyllenhaal 2016, 2014).

Art historian Horst Waldemar Janson (1913–1982) claimed that, in his prolific funerary work, Flaxman was the first to depict the soul in human form, an idea that later became common but was clearly based on Swedenborg (Janson 1988). Jane Williams-Hogan analyzed the drawing Evil Spirits Thrust Down by a Little Child by Flaxman, [Image at right] intended to illustrate Arcana Cœlestia §1271 and §1272, as true to both the letter (including the image of “women wearing black peaked hats” as part of the evil spirits) and the worldview of Swedenborg (Williams-Hogan 2016:125–26).

Among the other early members of the Swedenborgian Theosophical Society were painters Richard Cosway (1742–1821), Philippe–Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), Daniel Richardson (active 1783–1830), and John Sanders (1750–1825), and engravers John Emes (1762–1810) and William Sharp (1749–1824) (Gabay 2005:71).

William Blake (1757–1827), one of the leading artists associated with Swedenborg, was a friend of both Flaxman and Sharp. Both he and his wife, Catherine Boucher (1762–1831), signed the registers of the General Conference, which convened in 1789 as a development of the early Theosophical Society, to establish a church based on Swedenborg’s writings (Gabay 2005:77).

Later, however, Blake grew disenchanted with Swedenborg, and in 1790–1793 wrote an anti–Swedenborgian satire, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Bellin and Ruhl 1985). On the other hand, Blake remained influenced by the Swedish mystic’s doctrines, including the theory of correspondences, until the very end of his life (Deck 1978; Rix 2003). [Image at right

Another early member of the General Conference was Joseph Clover (1779–1853), a British painter and the uncle of Victorian pioneer of anesthesia, Joseph T. Clover (1825–1882), also a Swedenborgian. Clover was one of the founders of the Norwich School of landscape art (Lines 2012:43).

Joseph Clark (1834–1926), a member of the Argyle Square and later Willesden Swedenborgian churches in London, was mostly well-known for his paintings of family life. However, he also represented biblical scenes. In his painting and etching Hagar and Ishmael (1860), for example, Clark interpreted the biblical story according to Arcana Cœlestia § 2661, with reference to the Spiritual Church (Galvin 2016). [Image at right]

John Eckstein (1735–1817) might have been the first American Swedenborgian artist. A well-known Prussian sculptor, he moved to Philadelphia in 1793, where he became a member of the local branch of New Church together with his son, Frederick Eckstein (1787–1832). John Eckstein also sculpted the first known bust of Swedenborg, in 1817. Eckstein Jr. was also an artist and the teacher of Hiram Powers (1805–1873), who would become the leading American neoclassical sculptor (Ambrosini and Reynolds 2007). Hiram was in turn a devoted Swedenborgian (Williams-Hogan 2012:113–15), unlike his son, Preston Powers (1843–1931), who ,had however been raised as a Swedenborgian and sculpted in 1879 another popular bust of Swedenborg (Gyllenhaal 2015:201–08).

Sculptors often took Swedenborg as a subject. They included Caroline Shawk Brooks (1840–1913), famous for her sculptures in butter (Simpson 2007), who was not a Swedenborgian, while Swedish sculptor Adolf Jonsson (1872–1945), whose bust was in Chicago’s Lincoln Park from 1924 to 1976 (when it was stolen; a copy by Magnus Persson replaced it in 2012) was a reader of Swedenborg, and Swiss Fanny Lee Byse (1849–1911), who also sculpted a bust of the Swedish mystic, was a devout Swedenborgian (Gyllenhaal 2015:208–29).

Hiram Powers spent a good part of his life in Italy and hosted the first New Church services there in his home in Florence (Bayley 1884:292–300). [Image at right] Among those in attendance was American painter William Page (1811–1885) (Lines 2004:40), who was deeply influenced by Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences, although he was also a Spiritualist (Williams-Hogan 2012:115–117; Taylor 1957).

Some Swedenborgian artists came to the United States from England. In 1851, the woodcarvers Henry Lindley Fry (1807–1895) and William Henry Fry (1830–1929), father and son, members of the New Church in Bath, England, settled in Cincinnati, and soon joined the local New Jerusalem congregation. In 1853, another member of the Bath New Church, wood engraver Benn Pitman (1822–1910), joined them in Cincinnati. Pittman and the Frys were instrumental in launching the Arts and Craft movement in the American Midwest (Trapp 1982).

Other Swedenborgian artists perpetuated the tradition of an art inspired by Swedenborg in the United Kingdom. Dennis Duckworth (1911–2003) was both a painter and a New Church minister, serving in the latter capacity for over fifty years. In fact, Duckworth was invited to join the Royal College of Arts but declined as he preferred to continue the study of Swedenborgian theology (Glencairn Museum News 2017). [Image at right] The connection between Swedenborgianism and the artistic milieus in the United Kingdom is also confirmed by the career of Ralph Nicholas Wornum (1812–1877), a member of the New Church who became Keeper of the National Gallery in London (Lines 2012:43).

A special case of a Swedenborgian artist was Adelia Gates (1825–1912). A specialized botanical painter whose drawings (now at the Smithsonian Institution) greatly helped the science of botany, Gates was a pious Swedenborgian who traveled through several continents in search of plants, always trying to spread at the same time the knowledge of Swedenborg (Silver 1920:250–56).

Perhaps America’s greatest Swedenborgian artist was George Inness (1825–1894), formally baptized in the New Church in 1868. He offered himself Swedenborgian interpretations of some of his paintings, including The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1867), which he explained through Swedenborg’s notion of spiritual rebirth (Promey 1964; Jolly 1986). [Image at right]

Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919), a member of the Swedenborgian church of East Orange, New Jersey, was rediscovered recently and hailed as the American equivalent of Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890), both for his color palette and for the fact that he spent part of his life in psychiatric institutions (Davidson 1996; Vincent 2003). [Image at right]

American painter Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) read Swedenborg with interest and regarded himself as an independent Swedenborgian. He confessed that he “could be a New Church man, were it not for the doctrine of the identity of Jesus and God” (Ohge 2014:23).

Pennsylvania impressionist and landscape painter Robert Carpenter Spencer (1879–1931) was raised as a Swedenborgian (his father founded and edited the Swedenborgian journal The New Christianity: Peterson 2004:3–4). Although later in life he was quite reserved on his religious ideas, one of his most well-known works, The Evangelist (ca. 1918–1919, now at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC) alludes affectionately to his father’s career as an itinerant Swedenborgian preacher (Peterson 2004:113–15).
[Image at right]

The construction of the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco in 1867 saw the cooperation of several Swedenborgian artists: Joseph Worcester (1836–1913), minister of that church and decorator; Bruce Porter (1865–1953), painter and stained-glass artist, and William Keith (1838–1911), a Scottish-American painter (Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco 2019; Zuber 2011).

A Canadian artist engaged in multiple Swedenborgian projects was Winfred Hyatt (1891–1959), the principal stained-glass artist for Bryn Athyn Cathedral and later Glencairn, the castle-like mansion of the wealthy Swedenborgian Pitcairn family, now a museum, in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. He also produced Nativity scenes, including one for the Eisenhower White House (Gyllenhaal and Gyllenhaal 2007). Bryn Athyn hosts the headquarters of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, which separated in 1890 from the Swedenborgian Church of North America over doctrinal disagreements. Bryn Athyn has attracted several Swedenborgian artists, and both its Cathedral (Glenn 2011) [Image at right] and Glencairn Museum host significant works of Swedenborg-inspired art.

One Swedenborgian artist attracted to Bryn Athyn was Swedish woodcarver Thorsten Sigstedt (1884–1963). Sigstedt kept a studio in Bryn Athyn and in the 1950s became well-known for his Stations of the Cross for St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Roxborough, a neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia (Glencairn Museum News 2013). He was also involved in the 1937 schism in the General Church of the New Jerusalem, which led to the foundation of The Lord’s New Church Which is Nova Hierosolyma as a separate denomination (Sigstedt 2001 [1937]).

In general, architects have not been absent among Swedenborgian artists. H. Langford Warren (1857–1917), son of a New Church clergyman, was an active Swedenborgian and designed two Swedenborgian churches. At the time of his death, he was dean of the Harvard School of Architecture and president of the Society of Arts and Crafts (Meister 2003). Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912) was for forty years a member of the Swedenborgian Church of Chicago. Hailed as “the father of urban planning,” his 1909 Plan of Chicago was influenced by Swedenborg’s idea that the structure of a city should reflect the divine order. He was also called “the father of the Chicago skyscraper.” His works include the celebrated (but now demolished) Rand McNally building (Silver 1920:247–50).

Thomas Pollock Anshutz (1851–1912: Gyllenhaal, Gladish, Holmes and Rosenquist 1988), Howard Pyle (Carter 2002), Alice Archer Sewall James (1870–1955) (Skinner 2011), and Howard Giles (1876–1955; Pasquine 2000:20–21), were Swedenborgian artists who mostly excelled as art teachers. Giles had among his students the Hungarian-American painter Emil Bisttram (1895–1976), who maintained throughout his life a serious interest in Swedenborg, although he was mostly inclined towards Theosophy and Agni Yoga (Pasquine 2000). His encaustics were intended as portals leading into an imminent New Age (Shaull, Parsons and Bottigheimer [Boettigheimer] 2013).

Howard Pyle’s pupils included Swedenborgian painter Elsa Roeder (1875–1914), the daughter of New Church minister Adolph Roeder (1857–1931) (Silver 1920, 260–261), and Jessie Willcox Smith (1863–1935), a member of Philadelphia’s New Church (Silver 1920:261) who would become a well-known American illustrator. [Image at right] Pyle also taught his younger sister Katharine Pyle (1863–1938). Katharine was herself a member of the New Church according to Ednah C. Silver (1838–1928), who incorrectly refers to her as “Margaret” (Silver 1920:261). In fact, Margaret was the name of Howard and Katharine Pyle’s mother, Margaret Churchman Painter (1828–1885), who was not a painter despite her last name.

Among the pupils of Alice James was John William Cavanaugh (1921–1985), “the 20th century’s master of hammered lead.” The artist studied at the Swedenborgian Theological School in Cambridge, although later he went through a religious crisis (Alt, Strange and Thorson 1985).

Belgian painter Jean-Jacques Gailliard (1890–1976), a student of Delville, was a member of the Swedenborgian Church and decorated its Brussels chapel in Rue Gachard, inaugurated in 1925 (Clerbois 2013). [Image at right]

Perhaps the most influential twentieth century artist of Mauritius was poet ad painter Malcom de Chazal (1902–1981). He was raised a Swedenborgian and continued to attend for several years Mauritius’ Swedenborgian Church (Hallengren 2013:23), whose founder had been his great-uncle, Joseph Antoine Edmond de Chazal (1809–1879).

In the Netherlands, painter Philippe Smit (1886–1948) became acquainted with the New Church when Theodore Pitcairn (1893–1973) commissioned him to paint several portraits of Swedenborgian ministers. He ended up being baptized in 1926, and believed that Swedenborg had solved the problems he had struggled with in his previous study of the Bible (Gyllenhaal 2014).

French painter André Girard (1901–1968) also met Pitcairn, through Swedenborgian composer Richard Yardumian (1917–1985), and came to accept Swedenborg’s writings as the “true light.” The composer’s son, Nishan Yardumian (1947–1986), studied under Girard and later taught art at the Bryn Athyn College, becoming himself a Swedenborgian painter (Gyllenhaal, Gladish, Holmes and Rosenquist 1988; Glencairn Museum News 2018). [Image at right, below]

In the early 1980s, celebrated American sculptor Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) moved to Bryn Athyn, where she remained until 1988 (Williams-Hogan 2016:132–37). She described in an interview the community as “Swedenborg–governed,” a positive feature for her since Swedenborg was “a wonderful character” (Ashton 2009). She was regarded by the New York art community as “missing in action” (Tomkins 2003) and got the definite impression that critics did not like that an avant-garde artist was so much involved in esoteric spirituality.

Swedenborg, however, remains a fascinating reference for contemporary artists, as evidenced by Angels of Swedenborg (1985) by American video and installation artist Ping Chong (Neely 1986), The Swedenborg Room installation (2011) by Mexican artist Pablo Sigg (Mousse Magazine 2011), and the 2012 multimedia show in Strasbourg La chambre de Swedenborg by French artist Jean–Jacques Birgé (Birgé 2011).

Jane Williams-Hogan reminds us, quoting art historian Abraham A. Davidson (1935–2011), that Swedenborg did not offer “aesthetic prescriptions.” But she adds that “his writings provide a radically new way of seeing reality,” which includes an “aesthetic judgment” (Williams-Hogan 2012:107–08; see Davidson 1996:131). There is no “Swedenborgian art,” just as there is no “Theosophical art” or “Catholic art.” But there were and are Swedenborgian artists, who were inspired in different way, and with different results, by Swedenborg’s worldview, particularly by his theory of correspondences, to produce an art with deep spiritual implications.

IMAGES**
** All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg, by non-Swedenborgian Swedish artist Carl Frederik von Breda (1759–1818).
Image #2: Jean Delville (1867–1953), Séraphita (1932).
Image #3: Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Contes barbares (1902).
Image #4: The Wayfarers Chapel, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, as depicted in a postcard, circa 1960.
Image #5: John Flaxman (1755–1826), Evil Spirits Thrust Down by a Little Child (date unknown).
Image #6: William Blake (1757–1827), from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).
Image #7: Joseph Clark (1834–1926), Agar and Ishmael, etching of 1862 corresponding to the painting of 1860.
Image #8: Hiram Powers (1805–1873), Proserpine (1844)
Image #9: Dennis Duckworth (1911–2003). The Pulpit—The Tedium of Perpetual Worship (ca. 1940). The painting is based on Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion § 737: in the afterlife, some religionists who believed that eternal joy will consist in hearing endless pious sermons will discover that this is in fact extremely boring.
Image #10: George Inness (1825–1894), The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1867).
Image #11: Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919), Moonlight (1885–1889).
Image #12: Robert Carpenter Spencer (1879–1931), The Evangelist (ca. 1918–1919).
Image #13: Bryn Athyn Cathedral, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania.
Image #14: Jessie Willcox Smith (1863–1935), cover for The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914).
Image #15: Jean-Jacques Gailliard (1890–1976), Mémorable Swedenborg (date unknown).
Image #16: Nishan Yardumian (1947–1986), Annunciation to the Shepherds (1977).

REFERENCES

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Publication Date:
27 September 2019

Lev Tahor

LEV TAHOR TIMELINE

1962: Shlomo Helbrans was born in Israel.

1988: Lev Tahor was founded in Israel.

2000: Shlomo Helbrans was released from prison and deported to Israel.

2000: Lev Tahor’s centre moved to Canada.

Early 2000s: Lev Tahor expanded to the United States, Canada and Britain.

2014: Lev Tahor left Canada, with some its members settling in Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico.

2017 (June): Helbrans reportedly drowned in a river in Mexico.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Lev Tahor is a Hasidic group. Its name, meaning “pure heart,” stems from Psalms (51, 12): “Create in me a pure heart, O God; and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” In its own publications, the group prefers a semi-Ashkenazi rendering of its name, Lev Tohor. (Unless otherwise indicated, this article transliterates Hebrew words according to the Modern Hebrew pronunciation.)

The founder of Lev Tahor, Shlomo Helbrans, (1962-2017) was descended from the old Sephardic family Albaranes. He was raised in an irreligious environment in a low-income neighbourhood of West Jerusalem. While attending a state secular high school, he received a research task to investigate the life of ultra-Orthodox Jews in a religious neighbourhood. He approached one of the most important communities, the Satmar Hasidim. This largest Hasidic group in the world offered Helbrans warm welcome and invited him to learn more about Judaism. It was within that group that he acquired solid grounding in Jewish religious sources.

Having embraced Haredi Judaism, Helbrans showed a talent in attracting secular Jews to it. He became a rabbi and a Torah educator, and in 1988 was employed by Arakhim, an adult education institution teaching Judaism mostly to irreligious Israelis. Successful in Judaic outreach, he started his own yeshiva and, eventually, his own Hasidic group thus becoming the Rebbe of Lev Tahor. [Image at right]

It was also from his exposure to Satmar that he acquired strong anti-Zionist views. He was influenced by the fundamental Judaic anti-Zionist treatise, Vayoel Moshe, authored by Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (1887-1979). (Cohen 2019)Teitelbaum was the spiritual leader of the Satmar Hasidim and one of the most prominent inspirational figures in Neturei Karta, which originally was a non-Hasidic Haredi group (Haredi refers to those Jews often described as Ultra-Orthodox in Western sources) that was established in 1938 and was actively opposed to Zionism).

Helbrans’ uncompromising approach to Judaic observance and faith, as well as his effective anti-Zionist propaganda brought upon him denunciations and violence, which also affected his family. In 1991, accused of maintaining contacts with Hamas and fearing the fallout of the Gulf War, he moved his yeshiva and his fledgling community to Brooklyn, New York. He continued his work there, attracting a number of Israelis who traveled to the United States to join Lev Tahor. One of his students was underage, which resulted in Helbrans being convicted of kidnapping a minor. The trial was widely covered in Israeli press, and an employee of the Israeli consulate attended the hearings, publicly denouncing the defendant. The Rebbe served a prison sentence and was deported to Israel in 2000. It remains unclear whether the accusation was founded since the boy claimed at the trial that he had run away from his abusive family. Several years later the former student, already an adult and visibly not a member of Lev Tahor, attended the wedding of one of Helbrans’ children, which puts the accusation in further doubt.

Continuing his outreach activities in Israel, Helbrans and his family found themselves surrounded by hostility from some other Hasidic groups and from Zionist militants. He received death threats, his house was stoned, head covering was repeatedly torn from his wife (A Haredi woman covers her hair and tearing the head covering from her is tantamount to insult and humiliation), and his seven-year-old son was tied to a tree and left there for several hours. After two years in Israel, Helbrans fled to Canada and sought protection there. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada declared the rabbi a refugee from Israel. In an unprecedented move, Canada’s Minister of Justice, a position occupied at the time by the well-known Zionist activist Irwin Cotler, appealed the decision, but failed to overturn it. This gave Helbrans the opportunity to rebuild and expand his community in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec, a small town about a hundred kilometers northwest of Montreal. [Image at right]

While living in Canada, Helbrans published a compendium of Judaic arguments against heresies, focusing on Zionism and the new Israeli secular identity, titled Derekh Hatsalah, Path of Rescue (Helbrans 2001), as well as a number of brochures in English, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian. He took part in anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian rallies and gave interviews to Canadian and international media, proposing to establish a “World Anti-Zionist Congress.”

As he continued to attract Israelis to Lev Tahor, Helbrans, albeit residing in Canada, became the object of public attacks in Israel, first in the media, and later in the Israeli parliament. Eventually, this pressure from Israel resulted in Helbrans being accused by Quebec authorities of child abuse and running illegal schools. In search of greater freedom of religious education and fearing an imminent removal of children from their homes, he moved a part of the community to the neighbouring province of Ontario. After a short lull, Ontario authorities followed suit of their Quebec counterparts, which forced Helbrans to flee with several families of followers to Latin America.

Reportedly, he drowned in a river in June 2017 in the Mexican state of Chiapas while doing ritual immersions on the eve of the Sabbath. The circumstances of Helbrans’ death remain murky. It was reported that the Israeli embassy attempted to take the body but was prevented from doing so. There was no autopsy performed. (“More on” 2017)

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Lev Tahor shares basic Judaic principles with other Orthodox denominations of Judaism. Since Lev Tahor was founded only at the end of the twentieth century, it could not rely on transmitted tradition but rather had to create a tradition on the basis of a variety of Hasidic and, more generally, Kabbalistic sources. Besides Satmar, two other Hasidic movements, pre-World War II Chabad and Toldoth Aharon, provided inspiration for the doctrinal foundations and behavioural framework of Lev Tahor. A particular emphasis is put on preserving purity of thought and faith, concentration during prayer, and maintaining a high degree of intentionality throughout the day. The role of the human mind is exalted as a ruler of the heart and essential for developing love and fear of God. Detailed study of Hasidic and other mystical texts, including the Rebbe’s writings, constitutes the daily routine of Lev Tahor members. As in other Haredi communities, in-depth studies and mystical meditational practices are reserved for men only. Contrary to mainstream Satmar and more in accord with Chabad and Toldoth Aharon, male members of Lev Tahor, including young unmarried boys, are encouraged to study esoteric literature under proper guidance.

Principled opposition to Zionism is another important doctrinal feature of Lev Tahor. It is grounded in the biblical postulate of divine justice: God punishes Jews for their transgressions and all calamities befalling them are meant to bring them to repent. This postulate leads to the definition of the Exile as an experience enabling repentance. Lev Tahor follows in the footsteps of classical Judaic sources, including explicit verses in the Pentateuch (Leviticus 26:27-33), affirming that the Exile is a collective punishment for transgressions committed by the Jews. Consequently, Talmudic sources attribute the loss of the Jerusalem Temple in the first century CE to misbehaviour on the part of the Jews. The only acceptable way to terminate the Exile would be to repent and to wait for the Messiah. The Messiah alone would be authorized to terminate the Exile in the context of liberation of the entire humanity from suffering. The Exile has therefore acquired theological and spiritual meaning over and above a simply military defeat by Roman legions.

The Exile is also viewed as having a positive aspect, a providential opportunity to bring holiness to the entire world by fulfilling the Judaic precepts. According to this doctrine, shared by Lev Tahor with many other ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups, the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel is considered a profanation of Judaism and a challenge to divine providence (Rabkin 2006). In addition, according to Derekh Hatsalah, the future messianic redemption is expected to have an apocalyptic nature. The physical Jerusalem is to be destroyed and replaced by a heavenly city, while the entire world might be transformed into a mystical holy land. Conversely, the other main anti-Zionist groups, Neturei Karta and Satmar, do not have definitive views on this issue.

Judaic anti-Zionist thought is usually based on the teaching of the Three Oaths. The Babylonian Talmud (Kethuboth, 111a) relates that, at the time of dispersion after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, God imposed three oaths: not to return en masse and in an organized fashion to the Land of Israel; not to rebel against the nations; and that the nations do not subjugate Israel exceedingly. Moreover, it is forbidden for the Jews to hasten the messianic redemption by force. The Talmud allows individuals to settle in the Holy Land, but there is a consensus against massive immigration. Rabbis invoke the Three Oaths as binding prohibitions, an integral part of the Judaic law, throughout the centuries (Ravitzky 1996:211–34). They assert that even if all the nations were to encourage the Jews to settle in the Land of Israel, it would still be necessary to abstain from doing so, for fear of violating these oaths. Moreover, committing yet other sins due to the stricter status of the Holy Land in Judaic law might lead to an even more cruel exile.

Kabbalah and Hasidism view exile as a broken and corrupt state of the entire universe overrun by forces of evil until the cosmic repair, which is expected to happen with the supernatural advent of the Messiah. Any attempt to exit the exile by human means would, according to this view, pointless by definition.

This religious outlook stands at the heart of Lev Tahor’s rejection of Zionism and of the Zionist state. Unlike some Haredim who softened their opposition and came to collaborate with Israeli authorities (all the while affirming their ideological rejection of Zionism), Lev Tahor, in accordance with the teachings of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar, elevates anti-Zionism to a cardinal principle of faith. Any agreement or cooperation with the Zionists, even as lip service, is considered a form of apostacy and heresy.

Lev Tahor rejects the Zionists’ claim that the state of Israel represents the Jews of the world and emphasizes the basic incompatibility of Judaism and Zionism, considering the latter to be “the real enemy of the Jews” (Hisachdus 2002:12). Such an attitude is not unique to Lev Tahor or even to Jews (Hart 2015), but this Hasidic community puts particular emphasis on combatting Zionism. In 2000-2011, Lev Tahor maintained contacts with Arab countries and welcomed political and media personalities in its compound in Sainte-Agathe. Lev Tahor reiterates its commitment to live in peace with the Palestinians under their government and, just as many other Haredi groups, believe that assuming political power before the arrival of the Messiah (which, of course, is not viewed as an earthly political event) is a dangerous and self-destructive heresy. Emphasizing purity of faith, Lev Tahor holds that the slightest deviation from the Kabbalah-based Judaic theology would bar the heretic from the World to Come, the usual Judaic reference to the Paradise.

Attempting to imitate the life in Hasidic shtetls of Eastern Europe, Lev Tahor Hasidim learn Yiddish in order to avoid everyday use of Hebrew, traditionally called “the language of holiness”. They no longer teach their children Modern Hebrew, which is the mother tongue for most of of them.

Artificial though it may be, their determination can be seen as a reaction to the no less artificial (and successful) efforts undertaken by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, born Leizer Perlman (1858-1922) when he abandoned his mother tongue, Yiddish, for the Hebrew that he “desanctified” and transformed into a vernacular. The Hasidim of Lev Tahor believe they are restoring the erstwhile sanctity of Hebrew by using it exclusively for prayer and Torah study, but insist on speaking Yiddish among themselves, or, at least, before they master Yiddish, the language of their respective non-Jewish milieu. [Image at right]

Lev Tahor publications affirm that

Zionism is leading the Jewish people and all the inhabitants of the holy Land of Israel towards catastrophe. … Zionism is complete heresy and has no basis in Judaism whatsoever. … The Zionist state will ultimately be annulled, and from all their activities in the Holy Land only terrible destruction and desolation will remain (Hisachdus 2002:4).

They maintain that the State of Israel is a danger not only for the Israeli Jews, but all the Jews around the world. Furthermore, based on traditional Judaic interpretations of Biblical prophecies and sacred oral traditions, Helbrans claims that today’s Jerusalem is destined to become desolate as the future epicenter of apocalyptic wars.

Furthermore, according to Lev Tahor, Israel has now become too dangerous a place to live, in both physical and spiritual sense since even Jews committed to fight Zionism would find it almost impossible to maintain a truly Jewish lifestyle in the Holy Land. Thus, Lev Tahor actively encourages Israeli Jews to repent for their past commitment to Zionism and to emigrate to other countries, especially Muslim ones, which he deems more fitting for the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. The author blames the Zionist ideology for triggering the Holocaust and warns that Zionist activities may lead to another catastrophe even for the most sincerely God-fearing Jews.

Lev Tahor’s doctrine proposes a peaceful dismantlement of the Zionist state rather than its transformation into a theocracy. Since the Jewish state is a heresy in itself a theocratic version of it would be, according to Lev Tahor, even worse, a fully institutionalized and misleading heresy. On the practical level, these Haredi Jews accept the idea of a secular, democratic state, which was the original demand of the PLO and is acquiring growing popularity among the Palestinians. Lev Tahor maintains the traditional approach that enjoins the Jews to live under the rule of other nations and wait for the arrival of the Messiah.

Unlike Teitelbaum’s Vayoel Moshe, a sophisticated scholarly anti-Zionist classic addressed to rabbis and advanced rabbinical students, Helbrans’ Derekh Hatsalah is written in a simple accessible style. Originally published as a thin booklet, Derekh Hatsalah’s newer editions gradually grew into a large tome (Helbrans 2001). A large part of the book is dedicated to purity of faith, prayer and repentance. The author calls the faithful to stay away as far as possible from all evil and impure influences and associations, especially the religious Zionists, who he considers arch-heretics only pretending to be Jews as a diabolic deception. These are followers of National Judaism (dati-leumi), who are committed Zionists and who, unlike the Haredim, are largely integrated in the mainstream Israeli society. He also calls the Jews to engage in public anti-Zionist meetings and protests.

In 2007, the community started publishing a series of brochures on practical meditation for internal use. In 2011, Helbrans used their content to publish his magnum opus, Ohr Hashem, God’s Light (Helbrans 2011), a large practical guide to mystical meditation. The main part of Ohr Hashem comprises about 500 pages, supplemented by the author’s own comments and followed by a detailed index. Intended to be the first of a multi-volume set, the book combines Kabbalistic dogmatic theology and philosophical insights with practical meditation techniques. The author maintains that every sincere seeker of spirituality, regardless of gender or being Jewish, is, after proper training and ascetic practice, capable of experiencing mystical union with God.

Curiously, while outlining his own meditational system, the author categorically rejects Sefer ha-Brit, a popular late eighteenth century book by Rabbi Pinchas Eliyahu Horowitz of Vilna (1765-1821), which contains a general guide on acquiring mystical experience. At the same time, Helbrans accepts the cryptic works of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707-1746), which are rejected by some other Hasidic groups. Luzzatto, a prolific Italian Kabbalist, claimed to have received his revelations from a personal angel.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Lev Tahor’s practices are largely modeled on those of other Hasidic groups, particularly of Satmar and Toldoth Aharon, which follows stricter rules of conduct and prayer than most Hasidic counterparts. Among the distinctive features are at least half-an-hour period of meditation before communal prayer, a significantly longer prayer (the weekday morning prayer may last up to three hours), which is often recited aloud, in accordance with Toldoth Aharon. Like many Haredi Jews, Lev Tahor men practice daily immersions in ritual bath (miqwe) for the sake of spiritual purification. The Rebbe has issued a number of takkanoth (decrees), which usually heighten the level of self-control, modesty and gender separation. They may also introduce fasts, all-night vigils and other ascetic practices and rituals specific to the community. These decrees are inspired by certain Judaic sources, which call for greater strictness in Judaic observance. The takkanoth form what may be considered the specific tradition and mode of behaviour of Lev Tahor.

Lev Tahor Hasidim do not rely on institutional, even the most rigorous certification of kosher products and prefer home-made food. Nor do they rely on other Hasidic communities’ ritual slaughtering of animals; they send their own members to perform kosher slaughtering. These ad hoc arrangements are not frequent, which consequently reduces the consumption of meat and poultry in the Lev Tahor community. This is in line with emphasis put by the community on healthy eating habits, including avoidance of processed and genetically modified food.

Much attention has been attracted to black capes worn by girls and women in the community. In Israel this vestmental peculiarity earned Lev Tahor the ominous nickname “Jewish Taliban.” These capes hide the form of the female body, which Lev Tahor members consider to be required by Jewish laws of modesty. Although unusual in Eastern European Ashkenazi milieu, somewhat similar garbs were until recently popular among the Jews in Muslim countries. Several women interviewed in the community, take credit for initiating this practice and for manufacturing these capes but not for the extreme gender separation enforced among Lev Tahor members. [Image at right] Unlike other Haredi groups, Lev Tahor boys are encouraged to do horticultural work, take care of vegetable gardens, and do other chores of maintaining the community grounds.

In line with most other Haredim, Lev Tahor actively encourages Israelis to refuse conscription and all other collaboration with the Zionist state. Its members spread their doctrine through lectures, brochures, leaflets and media interviews. The fact that the majority of Lev Tahor members are formerly irreligious Israelis constitutes a particular strength of the movement. They can speak the language of ordinary Israelis, are familiar with their everyday realities and find understanding with different groups of Jews, including Sephardim (several Lev Tahor members, including the Rebbe, are of Sephardic ancestry). This makes them more effective in spreading anti-Zionist ideas than, for example, Satmar, which mostly focuses on its own members. This activism constitutes an attractive feature of Lev Tahor for those who join the movement and an additional source of hostility on the part of the Zionists and the Israeli state.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Like all Hasidic groups, Lev Tahor is structured around its leader, the Rebbe, who serves as the model, the spiritual guide and the utmost authority. After the death of Shlomo Helbrans, his son Nahman assumed the leadership of Lev Tahor. It is estimated that the core group consists of a few hundred families with sympathizers around the world. The exact numbers remain unknown.

The group initially developed through recruitment among students of Arakhim, formerly non-observant Jews. A few Orthodox Jews, occasionally from other Hasidic communities, also joined the group. The core of Lev Tahor followed its leader to Canada after he was granted refugee status there. Some of its members are employed as teachers within the community, a few work outside the group; the main source of income likely consists of charitable donations from donors outside of Lev Tahor.

A number of Lev Tahor members emphasized that what had attracted them to the group was the conviction that it stands for truth, i.e. for authentic Judaism (Personal interviews, 2011). Some, including women, said that reading Derekh Hatsalah, well before meeting the Rebbe, made them realize that Lev Tahor was totally devoted to God’s will. Most mentioned the Rebbe’s openness to questions and his willingness to engage both veterans and newcomers in serious study of Judaic sources unlike, they remarked, some other rabbis who engage in brainwashing.

Almost invariably, the interviewees identified classical Judaic (Talmudic) warnings against premature, let alone armed, occupation of the Holy Land as a factor that moved them to anti-Zionism and, subsequently, to Lev Tahor. Zionist ideology and patriotism failed to satisfy those who looked for answers to their existential questions. Some who had served in the Israeli military compared Zionism to an idolatry that demands human sacrifices. A few converts to Judaism who yearned authenticity and strict submission to God also joined the community. The founder’s encyclopedic knowledge of Judaic soures made him and Lev Tahor in general attractive to inquisitive minds in search of uncompromising consistency. Focusing on asceticism, long prayers and meditation, [Image at right] Lev Tahor draws in spiritually alert Jews rather than those in search of reassuring comfort. Reportedly, every member has to sign an oath of allegiance to the Rebbe before joining the community (“More on” 2017). This practice is rather rare among Hasidic groups.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Unlike other leaders of Hasidic communities where leadership is largely dynastic, Helbrans could not claim rabbinic origins and started his group ex nihilo. (Toldoth Aharon is an earlier notable example of a non-dynastic Hasidic group, founded by Rabbi Aharon Roth in Hungary, in the 1920s.) As a consistently uncompromising newcomer to the Hasidic world, Lev Tahor and its leader faced an uphill battle to be accepted as legitimate by other Orthodox streams of Judaism. They succeeded to the extent that Lev Tahor maintains regular contact with several Hasidic groups, such as Satmar, Toldoth Aharon and Tosh.

The main challenge to Lev Tahor comes from its vocal rejection of Zionism and uniquely strict interpretation of Judaic law. This provokes enmity from the state of Israel and its supporters as well as from anti-religious relatives of Lev Tahor members. The fact that Lev Tahor attracts mostly non-observant Israeli Jews makes it appear as a major threat to mainstream Israelis on both ideological and personal levels.

Ideologically, Zionism was supposed to transform the Jews, a confessional community, into a secular national one modeled after European models of a nation. Consequently, Judaism which used to be the pillar of Jewish continuity, would acquire mostly decorative and rhetorical uses for the irreligious founders of the state of Israel. While observant Jews almost unanimously rejected Zionism as a dangerous heresy, secular Zionists used to believe that the religious Jews (or dosim, a derogatory term used by many Israelis) would be affected by the modern atmosphere of the Zionist state, abandon “their old ways” and join its secular Jewish majority. Even though there is some dropout from among the Haredim, their number continues to grow, largely due to their higher fertility rate.

When secular Israeli Jews join the Haredi camp this often causes distress in their families. Many parents and grandparents cannot comprehend how a modern educated son or daughter would embrace antiquated values, strict discipline and secluded lifestyle. They see their children as victims of sects, cults and other sinister entities. This is particularly true of the Ashkenazi descendants of the founders of Israel who shed religious observance and actively fomented a new secular identity. According to the Israeli historian Noah Efron: the secular majority, has a deep fear of the Haredim:

Several friends and colleagues have independently told me about nightmares in which they are captured and held by Haredim and, in some instances, tortured. … More importantly, there is a feeling that one is never safe, that no matter how rationally children are raised, they may ultimately be lured into the Haredi camp.” (Efron 1991:16, 18–19).

Personal fears combine with the ideological antagonism to the Haredim to produce the hostility experienced by Lev Tahor.

This hostility fed into an apparent campaign conducted by Israeli authorities with cooperation of the public and the media. According to his own recorded testimony, an agent of Israeli secret services infiltrated the community. However, within a few months the agent became impressed by Lev Tahor and authentically joined it, eventually becoming a second in command in the community. [Image at right] In view of the attention Israel’s security agencies paid to the community, the campaign likely began when the community was domiciled in Israel in the late 1980s.

The campaign was initially focused on Lev Tahor’s opposition to Zionism, but shifted the focus to the treatment of children in the community, which downplayed the political aspect of the campaign. Israeli authorities concluded that denunciations of Lev Tahor’s rejection of the state of Israel was becoming counter-productive as it provided the rationale for considering Lev Tahor members who fled to Canada as political refugees.

Israeli television programmes termed Lev Tahor “a dangerous cult” and alleged it was plotting to murder all non-observant Jews in Israel (a majority of the country’s population). Ominous warnings were sounded: “Lev Tahor sits in Canada but its long claws spread to Israel.”

Several former members of Lev Tahor termed it a cult and accused it of child abuse, physical violence and marriages forced on underage children. However, according to a legal advisor of Israel’s foreign ministry “for seven months the Canadian Community Social Services checked the community and found no evidence of abuse or torture“ (Forte 2014). The fact that the agencies had to make the raids several times reflects an ongoing disagreement as to whether these accusations were actually founded. An experienced medical doctor who inspected over sixty Lev Tahor families in Sainte-Agathe as well as nurses who visited newborn babies and their mothers in their homes found no sign of parental neglect or abuse (Alamenciak 2014; Dumais 2015:16).

Throughout the tribulations of Lev Tahor in Canada, Guatemala and Mexico none of the allegations has been proven in court. However, they are featured as facts in Israeli, Canadian and international media (Kroth 2016). The combined efforts of Israeli authorities, the media, the irreligious parents of Lev Tahor members as well as Zionist circles in Canada and elsewhere resulted in widespread demonization of the community.

One case illustrates the internationalization of the campaign against Lev Tahor. In October 2011, two young Israeli women who, with the consent of their parents, wanted to spend Jewish holidays with Lev Tahor, were apprehended upon arrival in Montreal and prevented from going to Sainte-Agathe. Canadian authorities were acting on behalf of Israel alleging the underage women were going to be married at Lev Tahor. At the request of the women’s distant relatives, Israel had issued a ban on the women’s travel abroad, but was too late to prevent them from leaving the country. Canadian authorities complied with the Israeli move and sent the two women back to Israel against their will. This case embodies the conflict many members of Lev Tahor were thrust into: irreligious grandparents and other relatives would go over the head of the parents who embraced religion in order to place restrictions on the grandchildren (“The Legal Battle” 2011).

Hearings were held in the Israeli parliament in 2013, at which disgruntled parents voiced alarm about their adult children who had joined Lev Tahor. Israeli parliamentarians suggested an Israeli air raid, à la Entebbe, on Sainte-Agathe, Quebec, in order to remove the children from Lev Tahor. Demonstrations were held in front of the Canadian Embassy in Tel-Aviv in 2013 to protest the presence of Lev Tahor in Canada. Israeli authorities, aided by pro-Israel circles in Montreal, put pressure on Canadian and Quebec counterparts (Infokatot), and Quebec child protection agencies repeatedly raided the community, in search of signs of abuse and neglect of children. The authorities’ approach was qualified as “an aggressive child-protection investigation” (Woods May 14, 2014).

The Israeli Vice-Consul had discussed the objectives of the intervention with agents of Quebec child protection agencies. According to a Quebec government report, the allegations against Lev Tahor had come almost exclusively from Israel: Israeli lawyers and police showered Quebec and Canadian authorities with denunciations of “unacceptable educational methods” at Lev Tahor (Dumais 2015: 6, 8, 10, 12, 17).

In May 2013, a married couple with six children, enjoined by the courts not to leave Israel, tried to escape via Jordan in order to join Lev Tahor in Canada. They were stopped and returned to Israel. There had been a restraining order issued against their children, even though the court had not deprived the parents of their parental rights. These legal actions were undertaken by extended family members over the objections of the parents of the children (Charedi 2013).

Concerns about the quality of the education provided by Lev Tahor should be seen in the context of long-standing problems detected in most Haredi schools in Montreal, which fail to fulfill the curricular requirements of the Quebec Ministry of Education. Typically, like other conservative religious communities, Haredim shield their children from external influences and avoid teaching subjects (such as comparative religion, the theory of evolution or sexual education) that are at variance with their understanding of Jewish morality or beliefs. Teenage boys, at Lev Tahor and elsewhere, are often taught religious subjects to the exclusion of much of the general curriculum. [Image at right] However, it was only in the case of Lev Tahor that child protection agencies demanded to remove children from the parental homes.

Fearing that fourteen of their children might be apprehended, Lev Tahor parents with underage children fled Quebec for Chatham, Ontario, which has less stringent controls over the quality of alternative education. Helbrans would later join them in Chatham. At the same time, in November 2013, Canadian authorities issued secret orders preventing Canadian-born Lev Tahor children from leaving Canada, orders that legal experts found “heavy-handed and shocking” (Alamenciak and Woods 2014). An Ontario judge ruled that the court transcripts related to Lev Tahor were to remain secret (Gillis 2016) .

When Ontario authorities threatened to enforce the decisions of Quebec child protection agencies and remove children from their homes, the Hasidim of Lev Tahor fled to Guatemala. (The Jerusalem Post wrongly reported they had fled to Iran, which the Israeli government considered then “an existential threat” (Izso 2013)). Several children were seized in Trinidad and Tobago en route to Guatemala and returned to Canada. Two more, a 17-year-old mother and her baby were apprehended in Calgary. The children thus separated from their parents were placed in foster care. Their request to spend Passover with the community was not accepted by the court. Some of them abstained from food in protest against their forced removal from Lev Tahor and their parents (Third 2014).

Since the United Nations defines “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as genocide, it has been argued that the repeated removals of children from Lev Tahor without proven evidence could be qualified as genocide. Indeed, the Ontario judge who treated the case of Lev Tahor after they moved from Quebec affirmed that what was at issue was perpetuation of the group through its children (Forte 2014). [Image at right]

Sensitivity to this issue is high in Canada, where past removals of aboriginal children from their communities in order to “civilize” them has been officially condemned as genocide. (Spratt 2019) There also remains the dark history of the Doukhbors, a pacifist religious community, which saw its children taken away by provincial authorities in British Columbia and kept for several years separated from their families (Ombudsman 1999). Removing children from the group would be one of the most effective ways to put an end to Lev Tahor. Israeli authorities are also known to have removed babies born to Arab Jews, telling then that the babies had died, and placing them in families of European extraction. This was done in order to reduce the allegedly negative impact of Arab Jewish cultures on the modernization of Israeli society as conceived by the Zionist leaders of the country (Weiss 2002: 61; Halevi Klein 1996:14-19).

Most of Lev Tahor core members, about 150 people, settled in a lakeside town in Guatemala, but were asked to leave after a few months in response to concerns of local indigenous communities about protecting their culture (Woods August 29, 2014). They were later reported living in Guatemala City and in the Mexican state of Chiapas. In September 2016, responding to signals from Israeli authorities, Guatemala police raided several houses of Lev Tahor followers but found nothing suspicious. When the Israeli authorities requested the seizure of all children in the community and offered to transfer them to Israel, the Guatemalan authorities refused their request. Reportedly, Israeli agents had followed Lev Tahor to Guatemala and Mexico, impeding purchases of property there (“More On” 2017). According to a Canadian lawyer who traveled to Guatemala, the chase after Lev Tahor is political in nature (Watch 2016). Prior to Lev Tahor’s flight from Canada an Ontario parliamentarian confirmed that the intervention of the child protection agencies constituted “a political issue,” and that Canadian politicians had been in touch with the local police (Patis 2014).

In early 2017, an Israeli court concluded five years of deliberation ruling that Lev Tahor was “a dangerous cult.” The court’s verdict supported attempts made by irreligious relatives of Lev Tahor Hasidim to remove children from Lev Tahor and bring them to Israel. While only two families figured as defendants, the court’s verdict, a part of which remains secret, stipulated the removal of all children of Lev Tahor from their parents. The court also qualified the Guatemalan town of Oratorio, Department of Santa Rosa, where the community found home, as “the jungle.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak compared Israel to “a villa in the jungle”. Comparing “civilized” Israel with “a villa” and Israel’s Arab neighbors with the “jungle” betrays orientalist attitudes quite common in the Zionist state, which also affect the treatment of Lev Tahor there.

In 2018 and 2019, there were several departures from Lev Tahor. One of them involved a daughter of the founder of Lev Tahor who took her small children to the United States after leaving her husband in Guatemala. These children were later kidnapped in an attempt to bring them back to their father. The kidnappers included several leading members of Lev Tahor. They were arrested and indicted in New York (Oster 2019).

Currently, in spite of persistent efforts by Israeli authorities to destroy Lev Tahor, its members can be found in Britain, Canada, Guatemala, Israel, Mexico, El Salvador and the United States. While precise figures are unavailable, probably the largest community resides in Southwest Guatemala.

** The authors acknowledge the advice earlier drafts of this entry received from Professors Ariel Stravynski and Yaacov Yadgar as well as from Miriam Rabkin.

IMAGES

Image #1: Founding Rebbe of Lev Tahor Shlomo Helbrans.
Image #2: Yakov Rabkin interviewing Shlomo Helbrans.
Image #3: Conversation between two community members.
Image #4: Women and girls of Lev Tahor.
Image #5: A Lev Tahor member in weekday prayer.
Image #6: Yakov Rabkin interviewing Uriel Goldman.
Image #7: Boys of Lev Tahor.
Image #8: A Sabbath walk.

REFERENCES

Alamenciak, Tim. 2014. “Lev Tahor Children speak out for the first time.” Toronto Star, January 16.

Alamenciak, Tim and Allan Woods. 2014. “Secret Lev Tahor Orders prevent Jewish sect’s children from leaving Canada.” Toronto Star April 10.

“Charedi Family Tried to Get to Canada via Jordan.” 2013. Yeshiva World, May 24.

Cohen Yirmiyahu. 2019. Introduction to the Sefer Vayoel Moshe, Brooklyn, NY: True Torah Jews.

Dumais, Jacques. 2015. Etude sur l’intervention du Directeur de la protection de la jeunesse et de ses partenaires auprès de la communauté Lev Tahor et dans des milieux potentiellement sectaires. Accessed from http://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/fr/medias/Pages/Communique.aspx?showItem=678 on 1 September 2019.

Efron, Noah. 1991. “Trembling with Fear: How Secular Israelis See the Ultra-Orthodox, and Why.” Tikkun 6:15-22, 88-90.

Forte, Maximilian. 2014. “Targeting Lev Tahor, from Israel to Canada”. Zero Anthropology. Accessed from https://zeroanthropology.net/2014/04/26/targeting-lev-tahor-from-israel-to-canada/ on 1 September 2019.

Gillis, Wendy. 2014. “Media not allowed to make copies of Lev Tahor transcripts.” Toronto Star, March 19.

Halevi Klein, Yossi, Toronto Star. 1996. “Where Are Our Children?” March 21.

Hart, Alan. 2015. Zionism : the Real Enemy of the Jews. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, Three Volumes.

Helbrans, Shlomo, 2011. Ohr Hashem, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Qc : Da’at.

Helbrans, Shlomo, 2001. Derech Hatzolo, Jerusalem, Israel: Da’at

Hisachdus Hayereim and the Office of Derech Hatzolo. 2002. Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Qc : Da’at.

Infokatot. http://www.infokatot.com/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%93%D7%A2-%D7%A2%D7%93%D7%9B%D7%A0%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%91-%D7%98%D7%94%D7%95%D7%A8.html

Izso, Lauren. 2013. “Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist community flees Quebec for Iran.” Jerusalem Post, November 22.

Kroth, Maya. 2016. “A Tale of the Pure Heart.” Foreign Policy, January 25. Accessed from
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/25/a-tale-of-the-pure-at-heart-guatemala-israel-lev-tahor-judaism-religion/ on 1 September 2019.

“The Legal Battle Surrounding Lev Tahor Sect – AKA ‘Jewish Taliban Women’.” 2011. Yeshiva World, October 5..

“More on the Death and Levaya of ‘Lev Tahor’ Cult Leader Shlomo Helbrans That Drowned In Mexico.” 2017. Yeshiva World, June 11,

Ombudsman Province of British Columbia. 1999. Public Report No. 38: Righting the Wrong: The confinement of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobor Children.

Oster, Marcy. 2019. “Indicted for Kidnapping Attempt.” Jerusalem Post, July 31.

Patis, Ashton, 2014. “Lev Tahor a Political Issue.” Blackburnnews.com, March 31. Accessed from https://blackburnnews.com/chatham/chatham-news/2014/03/31/lev-tahor-a-political-issue/ on 1 September 2019.

Personal Interviews. 2011. A series of interviews were conducted by Yakov Rabkin and Estela Sassón in May 2011 in Sainte-Agathe.

Rabkin, Yakov. 2006. A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, London: Zedbooks.

Ravitzky, Aviezer. 1996. Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spratt, Michael. 2019. “Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples fits the definition of ‘genocide’.” Canadian Lawyer, June 10.

“Third Child In Lev Tahor Cult Who Is Hunger-Striking Has Been Hospitalized.” 2014. Yeshiva World, March 11.

Weiss, Meira. 2002. The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

“Watch: Lev Tahor’s Lawyer in Defense of the Cult.” 2016. Yeshiva World, September 21.

Woods, Allan. May 14, 2014. “Quebec human rights commission looking at what went wrong in Lev Tahor case.” Toronto Star, May 14.

Woods, Allan. August 29, 2014. “Jewish Group Lev Tahor expelled from Guatemala Sanctuary.” Toronto Star, August 29

Publication Date:
21 September 2019

World of Warcraft

WORLD OF WARCRAFT TIMELINE

1994: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a strategy game in which two players could compete online, was released.

1995: Warcraft II, an advanced version of the first game, was released, receiving an expansion the following year.

2002: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was released, evolving toward a fully multiplayer, role-playing online version.

2004: World of Warcraft was released, allowing thousands of players to interact within a vast virtual world called a “realm” and eventually having hundreds of realms for different areas of our world and languages.

2007: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was released, an expansion that added an entire continent to the geography of the original version.

2008: The first large scientific conference to be held inside a gameworld takes place, with encouragement from Science magazine, on three days at three locations in World of Warcraft.

2010: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the third expansion, substantially modified the original geography and began to shift the focus of gameplay away from narrative and role-playing toward esports.

2016: World of Warcraft: Legion, the sixth expansion, added the demon hunter class of heroic avatars.

2018: World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, the seventh expansion, changed some of the rules governing combat between players.

2019: World of Warcraft Classic was released in parallel with the regular WoW, duplicating the original game as it was immediately before the first expansion.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Since the Renaissance, some genres of art and literature in Western cultures have drawn upon ancient “Pagan” religions and imaginary religions created by modern authors. As secularization advances, it seems that increasing numbers of people seek to experience fictional religions without necessarily having faith in them. In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that the arts and literature require “suspension of disbelief.” However, outside monotheism and without strong institutions that enforce orthodoxy, the difference between belief and the suspension of disbelief may vanish. A major field of modern culture where this proposition may be explored is massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), notably World of Warcraft (WoW) that highlights a nature religion devoted to the Moon Goddess, Elune (Bainbridge 2010b).

The genre of MMOs derived from creative developments in the 1970s, most obviously the tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax 1979) and the MUDs or multi-user dungeons that were text-based online games that like D&D embedded the action in stories (Bartle 2004; Castronova 2005). Originally formed by three graduates of UCLA in 1991, rapid corporate development established Blizzard Entertainment as a major force in the game industry by the 1994 release of the first Warcraft game, as explained in the company’s Wikipedia page. Absent at first, the Elune religion emerged in preparation for the WoW MMO.

The developers of WoW did not have any apparent religious motive in creating their mythos, but drew upon the wider fantasy culture to which they belonged. However, they did occasionally express their own thoughts and feelings. One example is the novelette “Of Blood and Honor” by one of the chief designers, Chris Metzen (2002). It tells the deeply thoughtful story of Tirion Fordring, a Human aristocrat who by chance encountered an Orc hermit, which led to instantaneous battle given they were arch enemies, until by accident part of a ruined tower fell on Tirion, rendering him unconscious. The Orc considered it dishonorable to kill an accidentally incapacitated foe, so Tirion returned home safely with the challenge of deciding whether he should keep the Orc’s location secret, or let him be killed like all the others. In the title, “blood” represents particularistic morality, seeking benefit for one’s tribe alone, and “honor” represents universalistic adherence to an abstract set of ethnical principles. A very different example also involves an Orc, deceased and lying at the Shrine of the Fallen Warrior on a hilltop in the Barrens region of WoW, representing Michel Koiter, a leading creator of WoW’s art, who died unexpectedly at the age of nineteen shortly before the game’s release.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans imagined that a Human civilization has just been attacked by barbarian invaders known as Orcs, probably inspired by the hostility between Humans and Orcs in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythos. As the virtual cultures developed, major religious differences emerged. In WoW, Humans have a well-organized religion with priests, while Orcs have semi-religious tribal magic performed by shamans. The two versions of Warcraft II added to the military history of these two hostile races, while Warcraft III added two other races, the Undead and the Night Elves, establishing the basis for the Elune religion of the Night Elves as the four races struggled to decide their relationships.

When a player developed a Night Elf character in the original version of World of Warcraft, one class must be selected from a list of five, two of which were religious specialists: priest and druid (Nardi 2010). The starting zone for Night Elves was the island of Teldrassil, which is actually a gigantic tree, undoubtedly named after Yggdrasil, the World Tree in Norse mythology. After a series of missions, many of which are oriented toward environmentalist protection of nature, the character would visit Darnassus, the Night Elf capital city, then voyage across the sea to one of the two original continents of the vast world of Azeroth.

Teldrassil is a short distance northwest of the Kalimdor continent, and the Night Elves held nearby territory on it. Much of Kalimdor was held by the Orcs and by a rather different tribe named Tauren, while a tiny area was held by humans around the beleaguered city of Theramore. The main Human city, Stormwind, is far across the sea in the Eastern Kingdoms, where they have an alliance with the Dwarves in Ironforge, and are opposed by the Undead Forsaken in Undercity. Two weaker races in the beginning were the Trolls and the Gnomes. The races collected into two competing and often combating factions. The Alliance originally combined Night Elves, Humans, Dwarves and Gnomes, while the Horde combined Orcs, Tauren, Forsaken and Trolls.

In 2007, The Burning Crusade expansion added a continent, as well as two races, the Draenei in the Alliance and the Blood Elves in the Horde. Several subsequent expansions added continents or groups of islands, plus Worgen in the Alliance, Goblins in the Horde, and Pandaren who could join either faction (Bainbridge 2016:237-60). By 2010, the original 2004 graphics seemed primitive to some potential players, so the Cataclysm revised the two original continents and the missions players would undertake on them. The 2018 Battle for Azeroth expansion added territory but also applied the same rules to all realms. From the beginning, some realms encouraged PvP or player-versus-player combat over wide territories, leaving weak characters vulnerable to attack. Other realms were “normal” and limited PvP to separate arenas and battlegrounds. The 2018 expansion rendered all realms normal. The 2019 World of Warcraft Classic release added many new PvP realms in the same style and structure as the original ones fifteen years earlier.

World of Warcraft has been the focus of much research and of much popular publishing. In May 2008, an academic conference was held in WoW that resulted in a conventional book of proceedings (Bainbridge 2010a). On each of three days, about 120 participants gathered at a different virtual location: the seacoast east of the Orc city of Orgrimmar, a cavern near the Forsaken capital of Undercity, and a ruined castle at the southern end of the Stranglethorn jungle. A panel led the discussion for each meeting, and each was followed by an expedition, including the simulated wedding of two avatars on the last day. The panel was organized inside Azeroth by setting up a guild named Science, with support from the already existing guild Alea Iacta Est, allowing the communications to be carried out in a private text chat channel, the content of which was automatically downloaded for subsequent publication.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Perhaps ironically, the gods and demigods in imaginary virtual worlds are true in a sense that real-world faiths may not be able to match: Their past deeds and current powers are literally realized through the graphics and software. A mage can fire a visible and very harmful ball of fire magic at an avatar, even as a priest can help the wounded avatar with a healing light. An avatar who has been killed becomes a colorless spirit at a graveyard, but can be resurrected either there at some cost, or more beneficially by running back to the location of its corpse. One of the races, called either the Undead or the Forsaken, had been fully dead but were restored to life by a plague, were exploited and then rebelled to establish their own society. Members of the Worgen race and the Death Knight class who arrived in expansions had a comparable history.

Across the vast geography, many non-player characters (NPCs) belong to radical cults, and each culture of avatars has some aspects of religion. However, the Night Elf and Tauren races share devotion to the most significant religion, Elune worship. The specialized wiki WoWpedia proclaims: “Elune is the primary goddess of the night elven pantheon. She is associated with the larger of Azeroth’s two moons, the White Lady, and is considered to be the mother of Cenarius, the forest lord and patron god of all druids. Elune is one of the few full deities of Azeroth. In Tauren culture, she is known as Mu’sha, the left eye of the Earthmother, with the right eye being the sun, An’she.” Unlike the Orc invaders, the Tauren were an indigenous race, apparently influenced by the Night Elf civilization, horned and rather bovine in appearance. They are a rather obvious metaphor for plains Native Americans, having totem poles, feather headdresses, and wigwams. Here we see a Tauren student sitting at the feet of arch druid Hamuul Runetotem, on the Elder Rise at the Tauren city of Thunder Bluff. [Image at right]

The Night Elves and Tauren share a fundamental value, considering nature to be sacred. They serve as environmentalists who cure pollution and defend the natural world against harm from the other races. Presumably, the Tauren always worshiped the Earthmother, but adopted Elune from the Night Elves, considering her to be a celestial manifestation of their traditional goddess. The Night Elves are a faction of an ancient civilization that endured a terrible war thousands of years earlier, as recounted in a trilogy of novels by Richard Knaak (2004a, 2004b, 2005).

Powerful magic, which may be conceptualized as a metaphor for advanced technology, was unleashed and shattered the continents of Azeroth. In reaction, the Night Elves sought salvation in the Elune nature religion. However, another faction rejected religion and formed the Blood Elves, who seek absolute power through magical technologies.

The intellectual sophistication of WoW is largely based on its depiction of a set of complex, competing cultures is a world ravaged by conflict, not merely between the races and factions, but also between nature (Night Elves) and technology (Blood Elves). So, one function of religion is to provide central principles that define some of the cultures, although the Lord of Light has some of the quality of a critique, given that the bureaucrats of the Cathedral of Light are corrupt in partnership with the rich Human elite. At a deeper level, where we can only hypothesize about the attitudes of players, World of Warcraft is a narrative about the collapse of civilizations, for which religion may be either a cause or a cure.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Both the Night Elves and the Tauren assign early-level players to undertake missions related to the religious significance of water, expressed more fully in the Classic version of WoW than the fully expanded version. In his office high in the sacred tree Aldrassil, the NPC Tenaron Stormgrip tells a student Night Elf: “It is time for you to set out to seek your destiny. But before you are ready to set out into the world beyond our enchanted forests, there is much you must learn about our recent history.” After brief instruction, the avatar must take an empty phial to a sacred moonwell to the north, and bring back some of its water. “While there is more I could speak to you of the moonwells and of Teldrassil, I must send you along. Corithras Moonrage will be expecting you. I have poured the phial of water you brought to me into this vessel to bring to him… You will find him at the moonwell in Dolanaar.” Corithras offers further instruction: [Image at right] “First, let me tell you more of the task you must complete. The druids in Darnassus use the water of the moonwells of Teldrassil, and their moonwell must be replenished from time to time. Using these specially crafted phials, you can collect the water of the moonwells.”

Missions send the student to gather water from moonwells outside of Starbreeze Village, on the shores of the Pools of Arlithrien, and in the Oracle Glade. Corithras explains that the world tree is in great danger:
Without the blessings of Alexstrasza the Life-Binder and Nozdormu the Timeless, Teldrassil’s growth has not been without flaw. Strange beasts have been reported arising from the very ground of the tree, and crazed furbolgs attack passing travelers. I can only hope that the solution the Arch Druid is looking for will be found quickly. I will pour all the phials you brought into this vessel, for you to deliver to Darnassus.

The Tauren series begins when an NPC named Mull Thunderhorn exclaims: “Goblins and their servants have tainted our sacred water wells! We cannot allow this. To cleanse each well, I must create a cleansing totem, then you must bring the totem to the well and perform a cleansing ritual.” The player’s avatar must obtain ritually required raw materials by hunting animals, because among the Tauren hunting is sacred. “Hunt prairie wolves for their paws and adult plainstriders for their talons.” The quest arc in is six parts, three of which gather ritual items from animals, and three of which take a totem made from them to sacred wells that have become surrounded by Goblins who must be killed to permit performing the ritual immediately at the well. Throughout Azeroth, the Goblins were the NPCs most harmful to nature, caring only for economic profit and technological innovation.

Although Night Elves and Tauren are enemies in secular terms, belonging to the hostile Alliance and Horde factions, they peacefully co-manage a sacred zone called Moonglade. Walled off by high mountains, this unusual area cannot easily be entered except by druids who can teleport there magically. Every year, however, a Lunar Festival is held there, and NPC druids can transport any avatar to Moonglade, effectively rendered peaceful by a holy truce. The rituals require formally honoring elders and ancestors.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

The formal leaders of the virtual WoW religions are simulated people, non-player characters or NPCs. Among the Night Elves, the recognized church is the Sisterhood of Elune, headquartered in the Temple of the Moon on the south side of Darnassus, the Night Elf city. Tyrande Whisperwind is high priestess of the goddess Elune, and all the officers of the Sisterhood are female Night Elves. Arch Druid Fandral Staghelm resides in the Cenarion Enclave on the north side of Darnassus, a district named after Cenarius, Lord of the Forest and commander of the male leadership of the Cenarion Circle organization that guides all druids regardless of race, most visibly since the Cataclysm expansion. The image below [Image at right] shows an ordinary Night Elf standing on the balcony of the Temple of the Moon, between Malfurion Stormrage, the historic founder of the druids, and Tyrande Whisperwind, whom he married during the Cataclysm.

Avatars may become leaders of the voluntary organizations called “guilds,” but they cannot become officials of organizations like the Sisterhood of Elune or the Cenarion Circle. However, four different classes of avatars have religious significance and serve as clergy or magicians for secular avatars such as hunters or warriors. Some other classes have magical abilities, notably paladins and warlocks, but they do not seem fully religious. When a player is creating a new avatar, these descriptions of the four supernatural classes are offered, priest, druid, shaman and mage:

Priests guide the spiritual destiny of their people. Through their unique insight into the mind, they are able to shape an individual’s beliefs, whether to inspire or terrify, soothe or dominate, heal or harm. Just as the heart can hold both darkness and light, priests wield powers of creation and devastation by channeling the potent forces underlying faith.
Druids live in a state of unparalleled union with nature. Tightly bound to the plant and animal kingdoms, they are natural shapeshifters and so they know firsthand the abuse visited on their wild brethren. In Consequence, despite their numbers, druids tend to be wary, reclusive, and difficult to spot. Few outsiders have plumbed the depths of their secrets.
Shaman commune directly with the elements. Their combination of wisdom and resilience makes them ideal as tribal advisors and leaders. In battle the shaman use totems and spells to manipulate the elements and provoke other fighters to untold heights of rage and might. Shaman exemplify the primal bond between the savage races and their environment.
Magi are wizards of immense knowledge and skill. Their obvious physical frailty is deceptive, for they can call upon the cosmic energies of the Twisting Nether. Rarely do magi engage in melee combat. Instead, they prefer to attack from a distance, hurling powerful bolts of frost and flame at their unsuspecting enemies.

Depending upon the environment and the point in WoW’s history, avatars may combine in teams of various sizes for battles against a diversity of enemies. The most common teams are temporary groups of as many as five, one serving as organizer but all members cooperating in terms of a natural division of labor. For example, a warrior may attack an enemy directly in melee combat, while a mage hurts harmful spells against the enemy, and a priest hurls healing spells for the warrior. Classical raid groups could consist of as many as forty avatars, in eight groups of five, with the raid leader directing the action of all forty in direct communication with the leaders of the eight groups. Existing in the beginning but more common later in the history of WoW, many group battles took place in areas set aside for that purpose, while more legendary battles of the early years often involved attacking a town or city belonging to the enemy faction.

The Alea Iacta Est guild that assisted the 2008 scientific conference in WoW has demonstrated how extensive such a group can become. It originated from a WoW-related podcast in 2007 and grew to 6,600 members by the year 2000 when a technical limit of 1,000 was imposed on all guilds. So, AIE responded by splitting into multiple guilds and developing an add-on program called GreenWall that allowed members of all of them to communicate and team up in WoW. A decade later, AIE had guilds in seven other prominent MMOs as well, and a modest Facebook discussion group with 102 members. Many other groups oriented toward WoW are far more active in Facebook, including two bearing the same name, World of Warcraft, with 66,557 and 110,510 members, while two new groups for players of WoW Classic have 22,821 and 17,035 members.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The Cataclysm expansion of 2010 ignited forest fires in southern territories held by the Night Elves, and attempts to extinguish them have failed ever since. Elune worship faces many competitors among the other races, and the Night Elves tend to remain aloof and avoid proselytizing or being proselytized. However, the main challenges are religious in nature. As a sign of the weakening of the Elune faith, Cataclysm allowed Night Elves to be mages.

The somewhat amoral primary allies of the Night Elves are the Humans, who claim to worship the Lord of Light, except that they really do not personify this Lord as a deity. In Stormwind city, the Cathedral of Light was damaged, required rebuilding, and apparently the archbishop and other elites decided not to bother paying the workers they had hired, resulting in a minor rebellion. Just as Darnassus has both the Temple of the Moon for priestesses and the Cenarion Enclave for druids, Stormwind has the Cathedral of Light for priests, and the Mage Quarter for mages. Well may Night Elves wonder whether the religion of the humans is merely camouflage for economic and political repression, and they may worry that the priestesses of Elune could become tainted by any association with the priests of Light.

An extreme sect of the religion of Light is the Scarlet Crusade, that seeks to cleanse Azeroth of any beings that had returned from death, most notably the Forsaken race who belong to the Horde. Like the Humans, the Forsaken include both priests and mages, which suggests that their cultures are not really very different.

Within the Horde, the Tauren have the most purely traditional culture of the four original races, given that the Orcs are invaders, the Forsaken are Undead, and the Trolls have fallen into a primitive state after the destruction of much of their civilization. Tauren manage their ambivalent relationships with the Orcs and Night Elves reasonably well, and may be the only members of their faction with the practical ability to be conservative.

The 2016 Legion expansion of WoW revived the Burning Legion that had been largely responsible for the ancient sundering that devastated Elven civilization. It is an army of demons that seek to destroy all life, and a new class of avatar was thus created, called demon hunters, to combat their new invasion. Only Elves could play this role, Night Elves within the Alliance and Blood Elves among the Horde. The main WoW website describes them thus:

Demon hunters, disciples of Illidan Stormrage, uphold a dark legacy, one that frightens their allies and enemies alike. The Illidari embrace fel and chaotic magics – energies that have long threatened the world of Azeroth – believing them necessary to challenge the Burning Legion. Wielding the powers of demons they’ve slain, they develop demonic features that incite revulsion and dread in fellow elves.

Indeed, as a Night Elf demon hunter walks through a community of normal Night Elves, one or another of them may criticize the avatar’s choice of that abnormal class. Not so for demon hunters among the Blood Elves, one of whom is shown here [Image at right].

In the Classic version of WoW, an avatar would ascend a ladder of experience measured in sixty levels, and the maximum had become 110 with the Legion expansion. A demon knight did not need to work all the way up from level one, because they began at level ninety-eight, with a special set of adventures that would take them to level 100. A player could have only one demon hunter on a given realm, and must have already worked another character up to level seventy to have access to that option. Thus, other players need not envy or resent a player having a demon knight, but logically other avatars and NPCs would feel that the magical power of a demon hunter was unfair. Among faithful Night Elves, a demon hunter member of their own race may seem like sacrilege.

As fanciful as it may seem, World of Warcraft may have relevance for our “real” world, which seems to be slowly descending toward comparable chaos, splitting into hostile factions both nationally and internationally. It is worth remembering that both Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings were profound parables, not merely fantasy entertainments.

IMAGES

Image #1: A Tauren student sitting at the feet of arch druid Hamuul Runetotem, on the Elder Rise at the Tauren city of Thunder Bluff.
Image #2: A Night Elf priestess standing at one of the holy moonwells.
Image #3: An ordinary Night Elf standing on the balcony of the Temple of the Moon, between Malfurion Stormrage, the historic founder of the druids, and his wife, Tyrande Whisperwind, high priestess of the goddess Elune.
Image #4: A Blood Elf demon hunter.

REFERENCES

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2010a. Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. London: Springer.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2010. The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2016. Virtual Sociocultural Convergence: Human Sciences of Computer Games. London: Springer.

Castronova, Edward. 2005. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Colleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1817. Biographia Literaria. New York: Kirk and Merein.

Bartle, Richard. 2004. Designing Virtual Worlds. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

Gygax, Gary. 1979. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide. New York: TSR/Random House.

Knaak, Richard A. 2005. The Sundering. New York: Pocket Books.

Knaak, Richard A. 2004a. The Well of Eternity. New York: Pocket Books.

Knaak, Richard A. 2004b. The Demon Soul. New York: Pocket Books.

Metzen, Chris. 2002. “Of Blood and Honor.” Pp. 545-613 in Warcraft Archive. New York: Pocket Books.

Nardi, Bonnie A. 2010. My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Wikipedia. “Blizzard Entertainment.” Accessed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment on 10 September 2019.

WoWpedia, “Elune.” Accessed from wow.gamepedia.com/Elune on 10 September 2019.

Publication Date:
23 September 2019

New Religious Movements: Theory and Research

A Historical Introduction to the Study of New Religious Movements

Abel de Castro

Abel de Castro is doctoral student at the University of Montreal.

Yoel Matveyev

Yoel Matveyev is Yiddish-language journalist located in Saint-Petersburg, Russia.

Yakov M. Rabkin

Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Montreal.

Shincheonji

SHINCHEONJI TIMELINE

1931 (September 15): Lee Man Hee was born at Punggak-myeon, Hyeonri-ri, Cheongdo District, North Gyeongsang Province, Korea (now South Korea).

1946: Lee was among the first graduates of Punggak Public Elementary School after the Japanese left Korea.

1950–1953: Lee served in the South Korean Army’s 7^th Infantry Division during the Korean War.

1957–1967: Lee participated in the religious activities of the Olive Tree movement.

1967: Having left the Olive Tree, Lee joined another Korean Christian new religious movement, the Tabernacle Temple, in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province.

1979–1983: Lee repeatedly wrote letters to the leaders of the Tabernacle Temple, denouncing the corruption in the movement and urging them to repent. As a result, he was threatened and beaten.

1984 (March 14): After leaving the Tabernacle Temple, Lee founded Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony.

1984 (June): The first Shincheonji temple was opened in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

1986: Branch churches were established across South Korea. Shincheonji counted some 120 members.

1990 (June): The Zion Christian Mission Center was established in Seoul.

1993: Missionary activity was started abroad. The first Shincheonji National Olympiad was organized in Seoul.

1995: The Twelve Tribes of Shincheonji were formally organized.

1996: The first church in the West was inaugurated in Los Angeles.

1999: Headquarters were moved from Anyang to Gwacheon.

2000: The first church in Europe was inaugurated in Berlin, Germany.

2003: Mannam Volunteer Organization was established.

2003: The first cases of deprogramming of Shincheonji members occurred in South Korea.

2007: Shincheonji membership reached 45,000.

2007 (October 12): Shincheonji member Ms. Kim Sun-Hwa was killed by her husband in connection with her attempted deprogramming.

2012: The first church in Africa was inaugurated in Cape Town, South Africa. Worldwide membership reached 120,000.

2012 (May): Chairman Lee conducted his first World Peace Tour.

2013 (May 25): Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL) was established. The Declaration of World Peace was proclaimed.

2014 (September 18): HWPL organized the World Alliance of Religions’ Peace Summit in Seoul.

2016 (March 14): The Declaration of Peace and Cessation of War (DPCW) was proclaimed in Seoul by HWPL.

2017: HWPL was granted special consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

2018 (January 9): Shincheonji member Ms. Gu Ji-in died, eight days after having been hospitalized during her second attempted deprogramming.

2018 (January 28): More than 120,000 gathered in Seoul and other Korean cities to protest deprogramming and the death of Ms. Gu.

2018: Worldwide Shincheonji membership reached 200,000.

2019 (June 20): A statement asking South Korea to put an end to the deprogramming of Shincheonji members was submitted by the NGO CAP-LC at the forty-first session of the United Nations Human Rights Council and published on the United Nations’ Web site. An oral statement followed on July 3.

2020 (February 18): A Shincheonji female member from Daegu, South Korea was hospitalized after a car accident and identified as infected with COVID-19.

2020 (March 2): Shincheonji founder Lee Man Hee held a press conference at which he apologized for possible mistakes and delays in supplying information to the government and promising ongoing full cooperation.

2022 (August 12): The Supreme Court in South Korea upheld the acquittal of Lee Man Hee on charges that he obstructed the government’s response to COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The story of Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony (in short, Shincheonji), as it often happens in the world of religions, may present the same events in different terms, depending on whether they are told from the emic point of view of the members or the secular perspective of outside observers. The emic story, in turn, cannot be ignored by scholars, as it offers crucial elements on the self-perception of the members.

Lee Man Hee [Image at right] was born on September 15, 1931, at Punggak Village, Cheongdo District, North Gyeongsang Province, Korea (now South Korea). In 1946, he was among the first graduates of Punggak Public Elementary School after the Japanese left Korea. Lee did not receive any higher education, but is proud of his level of knowledge and understanding of all books in the Bible, which he attributes to revelations he received from Heaven.

Lee started his life of faith by praying fervently with his grandfather, who was a devout Christian (Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony 2019a:3–4; Personal interviews 2019). Lee served in the South Korean Army’s 7^th Infantry Division during the Korean War and, when the war ended, settled in his native village of Hyeonri-ri, Punggak-Myeon, Gyeongsang Province as a farmer. As he later reported, he started experiencing visions and revelations from divine messengers and from Jesus himself. For ten years, between 1957 and 1967, he participated in the religious activities of the Olive Tree, founded in 1955 by Park Tae-seon (1915–1990), which had a religious village in Sosa District, Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, and was at that time the most successful Christian new religious movement in Korea, with an estimated 1,500,000 followers. Although repeatedly arrested and tried for fraud, Park managed to achieve what many regarded as a phenomenal success.

During the 1960s, Park’s message [Image at right] evolved into a direction that positioned the Olive Tree far away from traditional Christianity. He started claiming that he was God incarnate and had a position higher than Jesus Christ. The number of members rapidly decreased, and several senior pastors and laypersons left the Olive Tree, including Lee. In 1966, under the leadership of Yoo Jae Yul (b. 1949), seven people gathered on the Cheonggye Mountain, where they remained for 100 days, asking the Spirit of God to teach them. Following what they believed was the will of God, they established the Tabernacle Temple. Lee was among its first members. The seven who gathered with Yoo had not received a formal theological education, but their sermons appeared as persuasive to many who gathered around the Tabernacle Temple. However, corruption and divisions soon developed. Yoo was arrested for fraud. In first degree, in 1976, he was sentenced to five years in prison, but his sentence was shortened to two and a half years with four years probation on appeal (Dong-A Ilbo 1976; Kyunghyang Shinmun 1976).

Giving voice to many members, Lee wrote to the seven denouncing the corruption prevailing in the Temple and calling them to repent. As a result, he was repeatedly threatened and beaten, until he gave up his attempts at reforming the Temple. The Tabernacle Temple, in the meantime, had collapsed.

In 1980, when General Chun Doo-hwan (b. 1931) led a military coup and became President of South Korea, the government launched an anti-cult campaign known as the “religious purification policy” (part of a broader program of “society purification”), and promoted an institution called the Stewardship Education Center, which was introduced in the mainline Christian churches with the aim of unifying their action against the “cults.” In order to avoid the consequences of the anti-cult campaign, Oh Pyeong Ho, an evangelist of the Tabernacle who had a certificate as pastor from the Presbyterian Church, was appointed as the new head of the Tabernacle, replacing Yoo. Oh introduced the Stewardship Education Center into the Tabernacle, which eventually caused the whole of the Tabernacle to merge into the Presbyterian Church, with all its members and assets. Yoo willingly gave up his position as leader of the Tabernacle, and eventually left for the United States in the late 1980s, to study theology there and escape dangerous accusations of being a “cult” leader by the Korean authoritarian government.

Lee continued to visit the Tabernacle Temple when the latter was in the process of joining the Presbyterian Church. He denounced the corruption prevailing in the Temple to its members. Having listened to his testimony, several members came out of the Temple and followed Lee. With them, Lee founded his own separate organization, Shincheonji (“New Heaven and New Earth”) on March 14, 1984. Since then, Lee continued to expose the corruption of the Temple and what he believed to be the destructive role performed by the Stewardship Education Center. Finally, the Stewardship Education Center closed its doors in 1990.

All these events, according to Shincheonji, were not coincidental, and represented the fulfillment of key prophecies in the Book of Revelation (Lee 2014:176–278). The Cheonggye Mountain in Gwacheon, Shincheonji argues, is the location where these prophecies were physically fulfilled, and for this reason God commanded Lee to join the Tabernacle Temple. As foretold in the Book of Revelation, first seven stars (Revelation 1–3: the seven leaders of the Tabernacle, whose representative was Yoo) appeared, then the heretic “Nicolaites” (Revelation 2:6 and 15: those in the Tabernacle Temple who corrupted the doctrine), seven destroyers (the pastors of the Stewardship Education Center, or the destroyers of the Tabernacle from outside) and a “chief destroyer” (Revelation 13: Oh Pyeong Ho, the destroyer of the Tabernacle from inside). Finally, the “one who overcomes” manifested himself (Revelation 2–3: Lee), fought and was victorious over the Nicolaites and the chief destroyer, and became the “promised pastor of the New Testament” Jesus had announced. As the time when the new heaven and the new earth (Shincheonji) were created, 1984 according to the movement also represents the year when the universe completed its orbit and returned to its point of origin (see Kim and Bang 2019:212).

The first temple of Shincheonji was opened in June 1984 in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. [Image at right] The beginnings of the new church were not easy. Branch churches were opened between 1984 and 1986 in Busan (now Busan Metropolitan City), Gwangju (now a Metropolitan City, then in South Jeolla Province), Cheonan (South Chungcheong Province), Daejeon (now a Metropolitan City, then in South Chungcheong Province) and in the Seongbuk district of Seoul. However, the total membership in 1986 did not exceed 120 (Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony 2019a:8).

A key event for the expansion of Shincheonji was the establishment of Zion Christian Mission Center in Seoul in June 1990. Members started being prepared through courses and exams. The first graduation ceremony, in 1991, involved twelve graduates. In South Korea, the work progressed through the territorial division of the members into Twelve Tribes, formally established in 1995. The South Korean tribes were also assigned responsibility for missions abroad, which led to the inauguration of the first church in a Western country in 1996, in Los Angeles, the first in Europe, in Berlin, in 2000, the first in

Australia, in Sydney, in 2009, and the first in Africa, in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2012.

In 1999, the headquarters were moved from Anyang to Gwacheon, [Image at right] an area with great spiritual and prophetic significance in Shincheonji’s theology. Shincheonji became also known to the public through the activities of the Shincheonji Mannam Volunteer Organization (established in 2003) and the Shincheonji National Olympiads, started in 1993. By 2007, membership had reached 45,000, and the growth accelerated in subsequent years. According to the movement’s own statistics, there were 120,000 members in 2012, 140,000 in 2014, 170,000 in 2016, and 200,000 in 2018 (Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony 2019a:8).

This growth could not go unnoticed from mainline Christian churches, particularly because most new members of Shincheonji were converted from among their flocks. They started increasingly vocal campaigns against Shincheonji, and 2003 saw the first cases of deprogramming (see below, under “Issues/Challenges.”)

Controversies, however, did not stop Shincheonji’s growth, nor the development of its peace and humanitarian activities. In May 2012, Chairman Lee conducted his first World Peace Tour. On May 25, 2013, he proclaimed a “Declaration of World Peace,” and Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL), an NGO also including non-members of Shincheonji, was incorporated (Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light 2018a). One of the main events HWPL organized was the World Alliance of Religions’ Peace Summit in Seoul, on September 18, 2014. [Image at right] On March 14, 2016, the Declaration of Peace and Cessation of War (DPCW) was proclaimed. In 2017, HWPL was granted special consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Chairman Lee continued to conduct world tours and visiting heads of states, religious leaders, and chiefs of international organizations.

For several years, he was accompanied in his tours by Ms. Kim Nam Hee, a close disciple who critics argued may become his “successor” in leading the movement. Shincheonji, however, dismissed these as mere rumors, and stated that there are no projects for electing a successor of Chairman Lee. In fact, it seems it was Ms. Kim herself who was fueling the rumors. When it became clear that Shincheonji would not accept her as leader or “successor,” Ms. Kim started creating her own splinter group, which met with limited success. She was expelled from Shincheonji in January 2018, and she had to face a trial at the Seoul Central District Court on charges of embezzling 1,400,000,000 won from the Shincheonji-owned SMV Broadcasting and occupying the broadcasting station by force. On July 26, 2019, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced her to two years in prison, with three years of probation, for embezzlement. Some congregation members of Shincheonji also accused her of having fraudulently collected 16,000,000,000 won from church devotees.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Shincheonji insists that, strictly speaking, it does not have a “doctrine,” as doctrines are created by humans while Shincheonji’s teachings are all found in the Bible. The Bible is interpreted allegorically and through the method historians of Christianity call “typology,” where events of the Old Testament are considered as “types” to which parallel “antitypes” correspond in the New Testament. Shincheonji believes that, although the Bible records historical facts, prophecies are expressed through parables. These prophecies are the promises that will be fulfilled in the future. Shincheonji teaches that, when the prophecies are physically fulfilled, the true meaning of the parables can be understood (Shincheonji 2019b:8). For example, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden were not real trees but symbols referring to two types of pastors and spirits working with them, coming respectively from God and Satan.

Regarding the content, the Bible according to Shincheonji is divided into history, moral instruction, prophecy, and fulfillment. Shincheonji teaches that promised future events in the Bible are announced in prophecies, and these prophecies are presented in parables. When the events develop according to the prophecies, the true meaning of the parables becomes known. According to Shincheonji, there is a consistency between the Old and the New Testament. The prophecies in the Old Testament were fulfilled during Jesus’ first coming, and the prophecies of the New Testament are fulfilled during the Second Coming. The Second Coming is today, and the fulfillment of the New Testament prophecies is Shincheonji itself.

Shincheonji believes that God created both the spiritual and the physical realm. Because in the spiritual realm Satan sinned and separated from God, in the physical realm two seeds, the seed of God and the seed of Satan, were sowed in the heart of humans (Lee 2014:289–304). “The parable of the two seeds [Matthew 13:24–30] is the first parable we should understand out of all the parables Jesus told” (Shincheonji Church of Jesus 2019b:3), and the two spiritual seeds reappear through the whole of human history. In the Garden of Eden, the two seeds correspond to God, who is the tree of life, and the devil, who is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Lee 2014: 377–383) [Image at right]

In Daniel 4, the evil King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is also described as a tree, and represents the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, while God’s chosen people represents the tree of life (Lee 2014: 379–380). In the Gospels, Jesus is the tree of life, the true vine (John 15:1–5), and the Pharisees are the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In the Lord’s Prayer, whose interpretation is also crucial for Shincheonji (Lee 2014:314–23), Christians ask God that “his will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). God’s will is done in heaven, but after Adam’s sin, it was not done on earth. God acted on earth for the restoration of his will through several providential figures or “pastors,” including Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Joshua. A scheme of salvation (through a covenant with God) after betrayal and destruction was repeated throughout the different eras. Among the people God chooses, some betray and destroy his covenant until a new covenant is fulfilled (Lee 2014:55–56).

Shincheonji views the Bible as a succession of covenants between God and groups identified as the “recipients” of each covenant. The covenant God established with the Israelites in the era of the Old Testament was not faithfully kept by the recipients. God thus changed the recipients of the covenant, substituting the Physical Israelites with the Spiritual Israelites (i.e. the Christians) in the new covenant that was established by Jesus. Today, Christians need to keep the new covenant made with Jesus’ blood (Luke 22:14-20) and join the New Spiritual Israel.

Jesus saved humans from their sins by carrying the cross (Matthew 1:21). God’s spirit came and dwelt with Jesus. At the first coming of Jesus, the Physical Israel came to an end and was replaced by the Spiritual Israel. However, Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot (just as one of the Twelve Tribes, Dan, had betrayed the Physical Israel), and, after Jesus left this earth and ascended to heaven, his message was gradually betrayed by the Catholic and Protestant churches. Shincheonji teaches that the New Testament and the Book of Revelation prophesy that a “promised pastor” will come, overcome the false pastors representing the group led by Satan (the “Nicolaites” of Revelation 2 and 3), and establish the third Israel, the New Spiritual Israel.

The promised pastor of the New Testament, however, could only appear after a figure, or figures, performing the role of John the Baptist would manifest themselves, and after a new process of betrayal and destruction (2 Thessalonians 2:1–4). Shincheonji teaches that the events prophesied in the Book of Revelation were physically fulfilled in Korea in the twentieth century (Lee 2014:176–278). The role of John the Baptist was performed (at the second coming of Jesus) by the seven messengers of the Tabernacle Temple, the seven lampstands (Revelation 1:20), holding lamps that burned in the night for a time until the promised pastor came. According to Shincheonji, the betrayal prophesied in different books of the New Testament (2 Thessalonians 2:1–4; Matthew 8:11–12; Matthew 24:12), in addition to the Book of Revelation, was fulfilled through the corruption of the Tabernacle Temple, and Oh Pyeong-Ho was the chief destroyer who persuaded many in the Tabernacle to receive the mark of the Beast (Revelation 13), i.e. the false teachings of the mainline Christian churches.

At that time, just when Satan’s Nicolaites had invaded the tabernacle where the seven messengers worked (Revelation 2 and 3), “one who overcomes” appeared, defeated Satan’s pastor, the destroyer, and received authority from God and Jesus as the promised pastor. He received an opened book from an angel coming from Heaven after Jesus had broken the seven seals (Revelation 6 and 8) of the sealed book of Revelation 5, which corresponds to the sealed book mentioned by Isaiah (29:9–12). The scroll is now open, and the promised pastor can testify the words of prophecy recorded in the book and their physical fulfillment.

The promised pastor of the New Testament that Shincheonji announces is Chairman Lee. This teaching is often misunderstood by critics, who claim that Shincheonji regards Chairman Lee as God or Jesus. This is not the case. Chairman Lee is regarded as a man, not as God, although in the last days God works through Chairman Lee, who is the pastor and teacher announced by the prophecies of the New Testament, serves as the “advocate” for humankind, and ushers in the Kingdom of God (Lee 2014:78–85). In John 14:16–17 and 26, the “advocate” is the Holy Spirit. This, Shincheonji teaches, refers to a “spiritual advocate” whom Jesus sends to earth in the last days. However, the “spiritual advocate” works and speaks through a physical advocate (John 14:17), i.e. Chairman Lee.

Having conquered the evil Nicolaites, the promised pastor established the new heaven and new earth (Shincheonji) as the New Spiritual Israel, and restored the Twelve Tribes. From the new Twelve Tribes, 144,000 saints (Revelation 7:2–8 and 14:1–5), the sealed 12,000 from each tribe, will participate in the “first resurrection,” unite with the souls of the martyrs who will descend from Heaven, and reign on earth with Jesus for 1,000 years as priests and kings. The return of the martyrs is not intended as a sort of “possession” of humans by the martyrs’ souls. The martyrs will resurrect in spiritual, heavenly bodies (1 Corinthians 15) and will reign together with the 144,000 saints in a family relationship of sorts.

Today, Shincheonji has more than 144,000 members. However, it was anticipated that some would betray and form their own “apostate sects.” Some tribes have not yet completed their quotas of 12,000 “priests.” And not all members of Shincheonji will be part of the 144,000. Some will belong to the “Great White Multitude” (Revelation 7:9–10). [Image at right] Satan “will be locked up during the 1,000 years, but he will be set free again when the 1,000 years are over,” although “those inside the holy city [Shincheonji] will not be harmed” (Lee 2014:141). After the 1,000 years and this final temptation, Satan and those corrupted by him will be thrown into hell (Revelation 20:7–10), while those belonging to the seed of God will live forever in the new heaven and new earth.

Prophecies, Shincheonji claims, indicate that the promised pastor will not die and will enter the millennial Kingdom of God with his body. However, when asked what would happen if Chairman Lee, who turned eighty-nine in 2019, will die, Shincheonji members simply answer that everything will happen according to the will of God, who until now has fulfilled every promise he made.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Shincheonji’s services are offered twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday. Shincheonji members kneel during the services, therefore, there are no chairs (except for the elderly and infirm) in their churches. Churches are often located in large buildings where other floors serve different purposes. Devotees wear white shirts (an allusion to Revelation 7 and 14) and signs of different colors corresponding to their affiliation to one or another of the Twelve Tribes (Revelation 21:19–20). The services mostly consist of singing hymns and hearing a sermon, often preached by Chairman Lee himself and broadcast all over the world. The themes come from the entire Bible, but the Book of Revelation is emphasized.

Once a month, a Wednesday meeting includes the sharing of information about Shincheonji’s main activities in the month. Once a year, a General Assembly reports on the year’s activities in Shincheonji and includes a statement about the church’s finances.

Special services are held four times during the year, [Image at right] for Passover (January 14), the Feast of the Tabernacles (July 15), the Feast of Ingathering (September 24), and for commemorating the day when the church was founded in 1984 (March 14).

Shincheonji does not hold events celebrating Christmas or Easter, as it believes they are not appropriate celebration in the time of Jesus’s second coming. Rather than celebrating Jesus’ birth, it is time to greet Jesus at his second coming. Furthermore, instead of celebrating Jesus’ resurrection, it is now time to participate in the “first resurrection.” Shincheonji believes that his teachings reveal the true meaning of Christmas and Easter, making their celebration unnecessary.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Shincheonji regards itself as the only church where one enters not through baptism, but by completing a Bible study course (for which it refers to Revelation 22:14). This is an extremely serious matter for the members. They should follow through Zion Christian Mission Center, across all South Korea and abroad, a course of at least six months (divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced stages) and prepare for the exams. The courses can now be followed also via Internet, in different languages.

The exams, in written form, are uniformly described by members as difficult and severe. They consist of three questionnaires with a total of 300 questions about the Book of Revelation. It is not uncommon to repeat them several times (Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony 2018). On average, women score better than men. The highest scores for age cohorts are by those in their forties, but there are cases when students older than eighty graduated with a very high score (Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony 2018:54–55). [Image at right] The graduation is celebrated in style, as the graduates are regarded as “walking Bibles,” ready even for the harshest missionary fields. Although there are few full-time missionaries, each Zion graduate is expected to devote some time to proselytization activities.

All the organization of Shincheonji is articulated through the Twelve Tribes, each with a tribe leader: John, Peter, Busan James, Andrew, Thaddeus, Philip, Simon, Bartholomew, Matthew, Matthias, Seoul James, Thomas. The Twelve Tribes oversee 128 churches in twenty-nine countries (seventy-one churches in South Korea, fifty-seven overseas). As mentioned earlier, missions outside South Korea are also distributed among the various Korean tribes.

Many around the world are cooperating with Chairman Lee through HWPL. Opponents of Shincheonji, media, and even academic scholars (Cawley 2019:162–63) claim that HWPL and other organizations are simply fronts for Shincheonji’s proselytization activities. These claims seem, however, incorrect. HWPL promotes international peace through peace education, inter-religious dialogue, “peace walks” and a campaign to “legislate peace” through international law (Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light 2018a). Presidents and prime ministers, international organizations dignitaries, and leaders of different religions participate in these initiatives (Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light 2018b). While it is correct to say that they increase the visibility of Chairman Lee as a global religious and humanitarian leader, obviously Shincheonji does not expect that these international luminaries will convert to its faith.

Promoting world peace is seen by Shincheonji members as a necessary part, solidly grounded in the Bible and in Jesus’ own teachings, of the efforts to usher in the Kingdom of God in the last days. However, HWPL activities are not limited to Christians, and indeed one of its main efforts is the promotion of the comparative study of the world’s holy scriptures as part of an endeavor to prevent religious conflicts. For this, HWPL is organizing inter-religious dialogues through the HWPL World Alliance of Religions’ Peace (WARP) Offices in over 130 countries.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Through its history, Shincheonji has faced allegations of cultic organization and brainwashing practices and, more recently, allegations of intensifying the spread of COVID-19.

Shincheonji’s rapid growth largely happened by converting members of other Christian churches. They reacted by accusing Shincheonji of “sheep stealing,” “heresy,” and being a “cult” (see e.g. Kim 2016). South Korea is a country where old stereotypes about “cults” survive, promoted by both secular media and mainline Christian churches, particularly those part of the Christian Council of Korea (CCK).

Apart from “heresy,” an accusation liberally traded between Christians since the times of the Apostles, Shincheonji has been accused of dissimulation and “brainwashing.” Indeed, Shincheonji does admit that Christians and others invited to its meetings are not immediately told that the organizer is Shincheonji. The movement justifies this by explaining that opponents of Shincheonji spread derogatory information through seminars organized by CCK churches and media outlets, thus causing a vicious circle. Because of the media slander and CCK propaganda, few would attend events if the name Shincheonji would be mentioned, as the movement is described negatively as problematic to society. In turn, the fact that the name of the church is not immediately advertised is used by critics to claim Shincheonji is a “cult” that practices “dissimulation.” There is also, Shincheonji claims, a Biblical justification for this behavior. Apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:2 prophesied that at his second coming Jesus will come “as a thief in the night,” which Shincheonji interprets to the effect that the harvesting will be very difficult due to organized opposition, and suggests a cautious approach.

The idea that new religious movements use “brainwashing” has been debunked decades ago by Western scholars of new religious movements (Richardson 2015, 2014, 1996), but is still used by popular media and seems to maintain supporters among Korean mainline Christian churches. Because they were “brainwashed,” opponents of new religious movements claimed in the 20^th century in North America and Europe, “cultists” needed to be “deprogrammed,” i.e. kidnapped, confined, and submitted to intensive anti-cult indoctrination (Bromley and Richardson 1983). By the end of the twentieth century, deprogramming had been declared illegal in most Western countries (Richardson 2011). It survived for some years in Japan, until courts there reached the same conclusions. The only democratic country where deprogramming is still widely practiced is Korea.

Although other groups (Providence, World Mission Society Church of God) are also targeted, the largest number of cases concern Shincheonji. In 2019, Shincheonji reported 1,418 cases of deprogramming since 2003, the year when the practice started in South Korea. [Image at right] Korean deprogrammers are specialized pastors from the mainline churches, most of them Presbyterian. “Cultists” are often kidnapped and imprisoned by their relatives. Two members of Shincheonji, Ms. Kim Sun-Hwa (1959–2007) in 2007 and Ms. Gu Ji-In (1992–2018) in 2018, died in connection with deprogramming attempts. Kim was beaten by her husband with a metal bar, and died on October 11, 2007, from traumatic subdural hemorrhage resulting from blunt force trauma at Dongkang Medical Center in Taehwa-dong, Jung-gu, Ulsan (CAP-LC and others 2019).

For Gu, this was her second deprogramming, after a previous attempt in 2016 had failed, as she only pretended to have been “de-converted” and, once freed from captivity, rejoined Shincheonji. On December 29, 2017, Gu’s parents used as a pretext a family trip to abduct her again. She was taken to a secluded recreational lodge in Hwasun (Jeonnam, South Jeolla Province), where she was held captive. As she threatened to escape, the parents bound and gagged her, causing suffocation. Gu lost her consciousness and was pronounced brain-dead on December 30, 2017. Her heart ceased to beat on January 9, 2018 (Fautré 2019b).

On January 28, 2018, more than 120,000 gathered in Seoul and other Korean cities to protest deprogramming and the death of Ms. Gu. [Image at right] Shincheonji members created a Human Rights Association for Victims of Coercive Conversion Programs (HAC) to fight deprogramming in South Korea. The protests were mentioned in the 2019 U.S. State Department Report on Religious Freedom, including violations of religious freedom in the year 2018 (U.S. Department of State 2019:7). However, there were new cases of deprogramming even after Gu’s death (CAP-LC and others 2019; Fautré 2019a).

On June 20, 2019, a statement asking South Korea to put an end to the deprogramming of Shincheonji members was submitted by the NGO with ECOSOC (Economic and Social Council of the United Nations) special consultative status CAP-LC at the forty-first session of the United Nations Human Rights Council and published on the United Nations’ Web site (CAP-LC 2019b). An oral statement followed on July 3 (CAP-LC 2019a), and a letter of several NGOs to South Korean President Moon Jae-in (CAP-LC and others 2019).

These NGOs claimed that South Korean authorities have not taken adequate actions against the deprogrammers. Relatives who hired the deprogrammers and kidnapped and held captive the victims, and those who used violence, including Ms. Kim Sun-Hwa’s husband (sentenced to ten years in jail) have sometimes been investigated (Ms. Gu’s father is a fugitive from justice at the time of this writing), indicted and found guilty by Korean courts, but the deprogrammers themselves have so far largely escaped punishment. Media and even judges regard deprogramming as a “family matter,” and suing one’s own parents is considered as contrary to Korean traditional ethos. In fact, when victims of deprogramming sue their parents, opponents denounce this as a confirmation that “Shincheonji destroys families,” and end up blaming the victims rather than the perpetrators.

South Korean authorities also seem to be unaware of the fact that the defense that victims submitted “voluntarily” to deprogramming, or even signed (under coercion) statements to that effect, has been dismissed by courts of law in other democratic countries.

Deprogramming is also supported by hate speech going well beyond the normal boundaries of religious controversy and de-humanizing members of Shincheonji, thus justifying and preparing violence against them. Specialized cycles of lectures called “Cult Seminars” have a key role in propagating these forms of hate speech, while “Cult Counseling Offices” and “Heresy Research Centers” operated by some mainline Christian churches and pastors put relatives in touch with the deprogrammers (CAP-LC 2019b). While a reaction by mainline Christian churches against teachings they regard as “heretic” and proselytization techniques perceived as involving dissimulation is understandable, the verbal violence against Shincheonji is often extreme, and may indeed lead to physical violence.

Although the threat of deprogramming is a serious problem for Shincheonji members in South Korea, the international protest against the practice is growing, and it is becoming difficult for Korean authorities to ignore it. On the other hand, both Shincheonji and HWPL continue their growth, confirming that violent opposition, although causing significant distress for members, met with only limited success.

Shincheonji became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the spread of COVID-19 early in 2020. On February 18, a Shincheonji female member from Daegu, South Korea, was hospitalized after a car accident and identified as infected with COVID-19. She was designated as Patient 31, and, before being diagnosed, had attended several functions of Shincheonji. As a result, she became the origin of hundreds of new infection cases, most of them involving fellow members of Shincheonji.

The authorities asked Shincheonji for a full list of its members. It was supplied but included members, not those (called “students” in the movement) who attend Shincheonji churches but have not (yet) become members. When the list of “students” was requested, it was also supplied. Authorities complained that the delay contributed to the spread of the virus, while Shincheonji claimed it was being scapegoated to distract the public attention from the authorities’ own shortcomings in handling the crisis.

Anti-cultists went much further, accusing Shincheonji members of intentionally spread the virus and behaving irresponsibly, trusting that God would protect them from the epidemics. Violence followed. Shincheonji members were beaten and fired from their jobs, and in Ulsan, on February 26, a Shincheonji female member died after falling from a window on the seventh floor of the building where she lived. The incident occurred while her husband, who had a history of violent hostility to her faith and claimed the fall was accidental, was attacking her and trying to compel her to leave Shincheonji.

On March 2, Shincheonji founder Lee Man Hee held a press conference apologizing for possible mistakes and delays in supplying the lists of members, promising full cooperation with the authorities. Meanwhile, the City of Seoul filed a complaint against Lee and other Shincheonji leaders for homicide, claiming the delayed cooperation with the authorities caused the loss of human lives.

The Korean police raided Shincheonji churches and seized the lists of members. After comparing these with the lists supplied by Shincheonji, they concluded that discrepancies were but minor and that the church did not voluntarily submit incomplete or altered lists (Kim 2020). CESNUR and the Belgian NGO Human Rights Without Frontiers published in March 2020 a “White Paper” on Shincheonji and the coronavirus, concluding that the church did commit some mistakes in its handling of the crisis but they did not amount to criminal negligence (Introvigne, Fautré, Šorytė, Amicarelli and Respinti 2020). The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom also expressed concerns that Shincheonji’s religious liberty may be violated in South Korea (USCIRF 2020).

In what may be the final chapter of the government’s case against Lee Man Hee for violating the infectious disease control law, he was acquitted of that charge but was convicted of embezzlement. The court issued a three-year suspended jail term sentence (“South Korea sect” 2021). In 2022, the Supreme Court upheld lower courts’ acquittal of Lee Man-hee of charges that he obstructed the government’s response to COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020 (Yonhap 2022).

The anti-Shincheonji campaign has been fueled by both Christian anti-cult opponents, who have argued for the dissolution of the movement and spread discrediting rumors about it, and international media who have repeated depictions of Shincheonji as the “coronavirus cult.” What effect the crisis will have on Shincheonji future remains to be seen.

IMAGES

Image #1: Chairman Lee interviewed by the author of this profile, Gwacheon, South Korea, June 6, 2019 (in front of the Palace of Peace).
Image #2: Park Tae-seon.
Image #3: The first temple of Shincheonji, opened in June 1984 in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.
Image #4: Shincheonji headquarters in Gwacheon.
Image #5: A moment of the World Alliance of Religions’ Peace Summit in Seoul, 2014.
Image #6: Teaching aid about the two seeds.
Image #7: An artistic rendering of the New Jerusalem.
Image #8: A Founding Day Shincheonji service (2019).
Image #9: Exams in Seoul (Peter tribe).
Image #10: Graphic showing the number of attempted deprogrammings of Shincheonji members.
Image #11: January 28, 2018 manifestation protesting deprogramming.

REFERENCES

Bromley, David, and James T. Richardson, eds. 1983. The Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal and Historical Perspectives. New York and Toronto: The Edwin Mellen Press.

CAP-LC (Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience). 2019a. Oral statement. Human Rights Council of the United Nations, Forty-first session, July 3, 2019. Accessed from http://webtv.un.org/search/item4-general-debate-21st-meeting-41st-regular-session-human-rights-council-/6055074714001/?term=&lan=english&cat=Meetings%2FEvents&page=3 [No. 62, 01:55:53], on 14 July 2019.

CAP-LC (Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience). 2019b. “Forcible deprogramming of members of Shincheonji in the Republic of Korea.” Written statement, Human Rights Council of the United Nations, Forty-first session, June 20, 2019. Accessed from https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G19/177/94/pdf/G1917794.pdf?OpenElement on 14 July 2019.

CAP-LC (Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience) and others. 2019. “Forced Conversion in South Korea Should Be Put to an End: An Open Letter to President Moon Jae-in.” Accessed from https://www.eifrf-articles.org/Forced-Conversion-in-South-Korea-Should-Be-Put-to-an-End-An-Open-Letter-to-President-Moon-Jae-in_a234.html on 22 July 2019.

Cawley, Kevin N. 2019. Religious and Philosophical Tradition of Korea. Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge.

Dong-A Ilbo. 1976 “장막성전 교주에 징역 5년을 선고” (Sentenced to Five Years Imprisonment). March 1.

Fautré, Willy. 2019a. “South Korea: Hyeon-Jeong KIM: 50 days of confinement for forced de-conversion (1).” Human Rights Without Frontiers, August 22. Accessed from https://hrwf.eu/south-korea-hyeon-jeong-kim-50-days-of-confinement-for-forced-de-conversion-1/ on 23 August 2019.

Fautré, Willy. 2019b. “South Korea: A Young Woman Died in an Attempt to Forcibly De-Convert Her in Sequestration Conditions.” Human Rights Without Frontiers, July 8. Accessed from https://hrwf.eu/south-korea-a-young-woman-died-in-an-attempt-to-forcibly-de-convert-her-in-sequestration-conditions/ on 22 August 2019.

Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light. 2018a. Declaration of Peace and Cessation of War White Paper. Seoul: Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light.

Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light. 2018b. Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light 2018. Seoul: Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light.

Introvigne, Massimo, Willy Fautré, Rosita Šorytė, Alessandro Amicarelli and Marco Respinti. 2020. “Shincheonji and coronavirus in South Korea: Sorting Fact from Fiction. A White Paper.” Brussels: CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers. Accessed from https://www.cesnur.org/2020/shincheonji-and-covid.htm on 20 March 2020.

Kim, So-Hyun. 2020. “Shincheonji didn’t lie about membership figures.” The Korea Herald, March 17. Accessed from http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200317000667 on 20 March 2020.

Kim, David W., and Bang Won-il. 2019. “Guwonpa, WMSCOG, and Shincheonji: Three Dynamic Grassroots Groups in Contemporary Korean Christian NRM History.” Religions 10:1–18. DOI: 10.3390/rel10030212.

Kim, Young Sang. 2016. “The Shincheonji Religious Movement: A Critical Evaluation.” M.A. Thesis, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Kyunghyang Shinmun. 1976. “장막성전 교주에 집행유예를 선고” (Leader of Tabernacle Temple Sentenced to Probation), July 10.

Lee, Man Hee, ed. 2018. The True Story of Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light: Peace and Cessation of War. Seoul: Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light.

Lee, Man Hee. 2014. The Creation of Heaven and Earth. Second English edition. Gwacheon, South Korea: Shincheonji Press.

Personal Interviews. 2019. Personal interviews were conducted with members of Shincheonji in Seoul and Gwacheon in March and June 2019, including one with Chairman Lee in Gwacheon on June 6, 2019.

Richardson, James T. 2015. “’Brainwashing’ and Mental Health.” Pp. 210–15 in Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Second Edition, edited by Howard S. Friedman,. New York: Elsevier.

Richardson, James T. 2014. “’Brainwashing’ as Forensic Evidence.” Pp. 77–85 in Handbook of Forensic Sociology and Psychology, edited by Stephen J. Morewitz and Mark L. Goldstein, New York: Springer.

Richardson, James T. 2011. “Deprogramming: From Private Self-Help to Governmental Organized Repression.” Crime, Law and Social Change 55:321–36. DOI 10.1007/s10611-011-9286-5.

Richardson, James T. 1996. “Sociology and the New Religions: ‘Brainwashing,’ the Courts, and Religious Freedom.” Pp. 115–37 in Witnessing for Sociology: Sociologists in Court, edited by Pamela Jenkins and Steve Kroll-Smith. Westport, CT and London: Praeger.

Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. 2019a. Introduction Materials for Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. Gwacheon, South Korea: Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony.

Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. 2019b. Shincheonji Core Doctrines. Gwacheon, South Korea: Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony.

Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. 2018. Examination for Shincheonji 12 Tribes: Verifying They Are Sealed. Gwacheon, South Korea: Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony.

“South Korea sect leader cleared of hindering virus effort.” 2021. Yahoo News Australia, January 13. Accessed from https://au.news.yahoo.com/south-korea-sect-leader-cleared-064218607.html on 15 January 2021.

USCIRF (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom). 2020. “The Global Response to the Coronavirus: Impact on Religious Practice and Religious Freedom.” Washington D.C.: USCIRF. Accessed from https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2020%20Factsheet%20Covid-19%20and%20FoRB.pdf on 20 March 2020.

U.S. Department of State. 2019. “Republic of Korea 2018 International Religious Freedom Report.” Accessed from https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/KOREA-REP-2018-INTERNATIONAL-RELIGIOUS-FREEDOM-REPORT.pdf on 7 July 2019.

Yonhap. 2022. “Supreme Court upholds acquittal of Shincheonji leader.” Korea Herald, August 12. Accessed from https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220812000335&np=1&mp=1 on 13 August 2022.

Publication Date:
30 August 2019

Home Laymen Missionary Movement

Laurie Larvent, “Home Laymen Missionary Movement“