It has been a long time since I have done a podcast post about a developing news story only one day after I wrote the original post on that topic.
However, yesterday’s post — “New York Times report says the Unification Church is a 'church' and it's as simple as that” — turned out to have some old issues connected to it that, when discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” episode, took us back into a familiar journalism minefield. (To get to the actual podcast, JUST CLICK HERE.) Can you say “cult”?
Before we get to the old issue of journalists (and academics) struggling to define “cult,” let’s look at some of the ways and religious and political language are woven into the story of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan — primarily through the family history of Tetsuya Yamagami, who was arrested after the shooting. This is from The Guardian:
Tetsuya Yamagami has confessed to killing the former Japanese prime minister during a campaign speech on Friday. He blamed the global religious movement — whose members are often referred to as Moonies — for bankrupting his family, and believed that Abe had championed its activities in Japan.
The Japan branch of the church has confirmed that Yamagami’s mother is a member, but declined to comment on the suspect’s claims that she had made a “huge donation” more than 20 years ago that left the family struggling financially.
The branch’s president, Tomihiro Tanaka, told a press conference that Yamagami’s mother became a follower in the late 1990s, adding that the family had suffered financial ruin around 2002.
As I mentioned in the first post, it’s normal to call the Unification Church a “church” on first reference, since that is it’s primary name — as opposed to the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity or the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
The journalism issue here is how reporters describe this religious movement in follow-up references and how much material news reports include about the messianic claims of its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Let’s return to the Guardian report:
Moon, who died in 2012, said he had had a vision aged 15 in which he was told by Jesus to complete his unfulfilled mission to restore humanity to a state of “sinless” purity.
The church’s early adherents were effective recruiters, and membership soared from an initial group of 100 missionaries to around 10,000 in a few years.
Often described as a cult motivated by financial gain, the church became known for conducting mass weddings in huge sports stadiums — involving thousands of couples who were meeting for the first time — and at one time claimed to have about 3 million followers worldwide.
But global membership of the church, whose teachings comprise new interpretations of the Bible, has fallen sharply to several hundred thousand from its 1980s peak, according to some experts.
As you would imagine, practical and theological questions tend to haunt movements of this kind when the messiah dies. But that’s another story.
The key to debates about using the “cult” word pivot, in tis case, around Moon’s claims about his identity and divine status. Reporters cannot wade deeply into those topics, in a story of this kind, but it matters whether Moon claimed to be “a” messiah, “the” messiah or. somehow, the appointed successor to Jesus Christ as the head of a new or restored “church.”
In the end, what matters is that he used the “messiah” term, with divine implications, as opposed to calling himself a “prophet” with new doctrines and revelations.
It a leader hints or proclaims that He is God, people who speak in DOCTRINAL terms are going to call this new religious movement a “cult.” If his actions, and those of his followers, are extremely authoritarian and dogmatic (think mass weddings of followers who often have not even met one another), then sociologists are going to say that the movement is ACTING like a cult.
The stacks get even higher when this kind of movement begins building institutions and holding events that attract some degree of support from world leaders such as Shinzo Abe and (trigger warning) Donald Trump.
For more background, see this Richard Ostling religion-beat memo: “Entering a religion-beat minefield: What is the proper definition of the word 'cult'?” And here, once again, is the overture to an earlier piece that I posted entitled “Define ‘cult’ — give three examples.”
Long ago, during my days in the Church-State Studies program at Baylor University, I took a course on contemporary religious movements and "cults."
The word "cult" is much like the word "fundamentalist." One person's cult is another person's "sect" or another's freethinking religious movement. And, you know what? That's absolutely correct.
In that class, the veteran researcher on this topic stressed that there are sociological definitions of the word "cult" — often dealing with the role of prophetic figures who claim radical new revelations. Then there are theological definitions, in which the leaders of a religion use the word to describe those who have surrendered or radically altered major, historic doctrines in the faith.
There was a time when mainstream Christians used to pin the "c" word on Mormons, using both sociological and theological definitions. Hardly anyone does that, anymore, on the sociology side of the divide. Yet there are traditional Christian thinkers who continue to use the word "cult" to describe Mormons, due to the latter faith's radically different doctrines about the nature of God.
Needless to say, Moon’s messianic claims raised issues about centuries of Christian doctrines about the nature of God and the Holy Trinity.
Thus, is it appropriate — on follow-up references — to call Moon’s movement a “church,” a word directly linked to Christian history, as opposed to a new religious movement with leaders who CLAIM that they are linked to Christianity? I vote for striving to avoid “church” and, at the same time, being very clear why the word “cult” is used by some experts and not others.
Can journalists do that in a paragraph or two?
This is why your GetReligionistas keep saying that newsroom managers need to seek out trained, experienced religion-beat pros, hire them and then give them the time and resources that they need to cover complicated stories of this kind. At the very least, in a story such as this assassination, let them work alongside pros on the international and political desks.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
FIRST IMAGE: From a feature entitled “A Strange Unification” at the Word & Way website.