Bearing False Witness: An Introduction to the Christian Countercult

(Hardback)

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From Hare Krishna to the Latter-Day Saints, and from Jehovah's Witnesses to the New Age, religious pluralism in North American presents evangelical Protestantism with significant challenges. Declaring newer religious groups cults, aberrant sects, and heretical religions, the Christian countercult movement has warned that these groups represent a threat to society. In ^IBearing False Witness^R Cowan considers the Christian countercult as a whole, locating it in sociological perspective as an entity distinct from the secular anti-cult. Through his analysis, the author argues that the primary purpose of the countercult movement is to reinforce and repair the Christian worldview when it appears threatened by the advent of alternative religious traditions. This unique analysis of the Christian countercult helps explain why conservative Christian responses to competing religious movements have taken the form that they have in addition to how those responses are carried out. Unlike the anti-cult movement, which is concerned with removing individuals from cults and returning them to their families, the Christian countercult movement, according to the author, attempts not only to remove cultists from the negative influences of the cults to which they belong, but also to insure that they will join the particular version of Christianity adhered to by the countercultists themselves. Beginning with the countercult's early history, the author provides an historical account of the movement and its present activities. Since the rise of new religious movements, the growing interest in religions imported from outside North America, and the broadening of the religious marketplace continues to grow, understanding the Christian countercult and its presence as a countervailing pressure to these increasingly socioreligious dynamics becomes ever more important.

Reviews

"Surveys an important but heretofore poorly documented movement within American evangelicalism. Cowan has called upon a more theologically neutral discipline of the sociology of knowledge to examine the worldview that informs the countercult exponents and from which to offer some rather important critique. He carefully distinguishes between the secular anti-cult movement and the countercult movement on a variety of issues, inviting readers into the variegated world of the movement."-J. Gordon Melton Director Institute for the Study of American Religion
"We gain real insights into how particular foreign policy-related events took place and how, at a more general level, aspects of the system operate. We are given fresh understandings of the Republican advantage in maintaining control over media framings compared to the Democrats....All will not agree with the empirical conclusions, the recommendation, or the awkward stretch toward the New Model. But the analyses are rich, the writing is clear, and the pages drip with well-conceived irony....[t]his book delivers a lot and advances the field."-American Journal of Sociology
Despite growing religious pluralism in the United States, the countercult movement flourishes by attacking other religions in an attempt to show that most nonevangelical expressions of religion are untrue....This book represents a valuable contribution to understanding the worldview that motivates the countercult movement. Recommended. All levels.-Choice
We gain real insights into how particular foreign policy-related events took place and how, at a more general level, aspects of the system operate. We are given fresh understandings of the Republican advantage in maintaining control over media framings compared to the Democrats....All will not agree with the empirical conclusions, the recommendation, or the awkward stretch toward the New Model. But the analyses are rich, the writing is clear, and the pages drip with well-conceived irony....[t]his book delivers a lot and advances the field.-American Journal of Sociology
"Despite growing religious pluralism in the United States, the countercult movement flourishes by attacking other religions in an attempt to show that most nonevangelical expressions of religion are untrue....This book represents a valuable contribution to understanding the worldview that motivates the countercult movement. Recommended. All levels."-Choice

Author Bio

DOUGLAS E. COWAN is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the co-editor of Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises.