My friends who are scholars of new religious movements (NRMs) theorize about how NRMs develop or do not, become accepted or do not, assimilate or do not. Some engage in a “scholarship of advocacy,” defending in various fora the human right to start one’s own religion without being labeled a dangerous cult.
But in many cases, I think that they also just enjoy the spectacle of religion, the sheer weirdness and variety of what comes down the road.
Rod Dreher, a cultural commentator who often touches on religion, but not a scholar of NRMS as such, put up a light-hearted post recently about “His Royal Highness Prince Rutherford Johnson of Etruria, who is also Rutherford Cardinal Johnson, the patriarch of the recently invented Anglican Rite Roman Catholic Church.”
Some of the comments are quite good and lead to other links about episcopi vagantes — self-proclaimed or dubious bishops, archbishops, and anti-popes.
One commenter hypothesized an Asperger’s syndrome connection, only with hierarchies, vestments, and churchiness rather than computers, trains, or some of the other intense fascinations that Aspie kids often display.
It all reminded me of my wife’s step-brother. He had a fairly mainstream Roman Catholic childhood in upstate New York, but was always fascinated with orders of knighthood and coats of arms, which he designed for the family. He eventually found some decayed European aristocrat to make him a knight of the “Order of St. Constantine” or something, whereupon he put out a news release about himself, which appeared in his local newspaper.
“Do you think he was somewhere on that spectrum?” I asked her.
“He was always just weird,” she said.
Setting aside the dynamics of her family, maybe some people are just weirdly creative. On a scale of 1 to 5, how much weirder is starting a church than starting a garage band? (Both might have a secondary goal of improving your social life.) Both are creative activities.
Archbishop . . . archdruid . . . arch-whatever. Here comes the parade!
There are quite a lot of people knocking about making these sorts of outlandish claims.
I’ve met people who claimed to be from unbroken doctrinal lineages from the ancient Druids.
I also knew someone who claimed to be the rightful Queen of Ireland. Pre-Norman Irish royal history in particular lends itself to this sort of thing. There are a lot of royal pretenders knocking about, from the relatively sane ones (Jacobites, Carlists, Legitimists, Orleanists, etc.), through to people who claim descent from Edgar the Aetheling, etc.
Buddhism, and traditions like Shugendo, particularly encourage this form of idiocy, as everyone has to have a lineage, but (except for Theravada) there is no Catholic-Church-like body to approve claims.
Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. You can go a little nuts trying to make sense of the various pedigrees here. A lot of it has to do with all the ethnic churches that flowed into the USA from Eastern Europe.
Where I grew up–SF Bay Area–cherished the tradition of indulging the sometimes outlandish claims of the eccentric local celebrity we happened to be fond of. Emperor Norton provides the most notable example, but had plenty, and likely still do.
At least three major Neo-Pagan Trads, a major revival of Satanism, a major poetry movement, a major comix movement, a major rock skool or two, a major current or two of GLBT activity, a major development in martial arts and pop culture, a couple major strands of environmentalism, several major mystery spots of conspiracy thinking, a major approach to stand up comedy, major coffee house sidewalk culture, and major topless dancing, and more (PCs, anybody?) all arose and flourished there thanks to this tradition.
So I now hold to a “the more world views the merrier and more magical the world I live in” outlook.
I’m fascinated by the underlying assumptions about the transference of power/authority that drive claims of lineage, historical succession, etc. For some reason, unlike a garage band, popularity does not seem to equal success for a new religion without the additional transmission of some Thing perceived as impossible to create in any contemporary, subjective context.
As with your step-brother-in-law, I think there are elements of that sort of power/authority outside of religion. Maybe for many people, *any* proximity to power — whether gods, aliens, kings or knights — imparts a sense of enhanced social identity? While I think a social handicap like Aspergers could certainly result in some of the more extreme examples of this, I would certainly describe it on the whole as “natural” behavior…
Nor is this transference of meaning and identity isolated to concepts of power/authority. Some years ago I became fascinated by genealogy, and I found myself grappling with the question, “why does this knowledge have value? What does it mean?” A sense of belonging, sense of place, sense of authority or confidence — I think we look to external sources to fulfill many internal (and largely irrational or sub-rational) emotional appetites.
Discovering the interplay between mental illness and the expression for these searches would be interesting, though I think there is a bias towards categorizing natural and healthy human behaviors as abhorrent simply because they seem irrational. After all, the only “real” difference between the crazies and their claims to power/authority and real power/authority is one of public perception, albeit something perceived (usually on no rational basis) to be greater than mere popularity.