What Price Syncretism?

Last January the Christian Century began a four-part series on U.S. Christian cults and soon began to regret it. Author Marcus Bach, writer on offbeat religions (Strange Altars), was treating his subjects so sympathetically that sect-shopping Century readers were writing in to ask how they could get in touch. Managing Editor Theodore A. Gill, a staunch Presbyterian, grimly published all the articles--on Psychiana, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unity and Baha'i; then he tore off an editorial taking the sects apart.

"The proliferation of the sects," he writes in the current issue, "[is a] judgment upon us all. But accepting the judgment has never necessarily entailed embracing the instrument of judgment." Psychiana, a mail-order course in positive thinking, showed how "pathetic an expedient" it was when it collapsed completely upon Founder Frank B. Robinson's death in 1948. As for the doctrine of the ubiquitous Witnesses: "What response but horror can there be to this conversion of profound myth to lurid legend"--the bloody Armageddon which they eagerly anticipate between 1970 and 1980. The eclecticism of Unity (a self-help faith) and Baha'i (a world brotherhood offshoot of Islam) "amounts to metaphysical and theological hodgepodge. And the history of each involves bitterness and schism that matches anything in the church's story."

Such synthetic religions, says Gill, "seek to put together from materials that are immediately available religions that are promptly useful . . . The syncretists pick and choose among all the 'truths' they know the ones that check with their own understanding of what will be good for them and for the world. [But] Christians claim that the truth, incarnate, now picks and chooses among them the possibilities for the world's good. The cults try to put truths at the service of men. The church tries to put men at the service of truth . . . Nothing but confusion of counsel can come from attempts to gloss over that."

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