| The many new religious movements that have appeared in late twentieth-century America are providing scholars with a unique opportunity to study the processes by which religious communities emerge, grow, and accommodate themselves to their cultural environment. This work traces the remarkable twenty-three year evolution whereby one such group (the Holy Order of MANS), an independent Christian monastic movement that appeared in California in the late 1960s, dropped the distinctively nonsectarian, esoteric, and millenarian teachings of its founders and transformed itself into a branch of the Greek Orthodox Church. Adopting an interdisciplinary strategy that synthesizes theories and methods from history, sociology, and religious studies, I probe the movement's emergence and rapid growth in the years between 1968-1976, as well as its decline and radical transformation between 1977-1991. I especially focus upon the dimensions of the group, now called Christ the Savior Brotherhood, that were most susceptible to change. These include leadership, gender roles, liturgy, doctrines, internal discourse, and public propaganda. By showing how, in each dimension of its communal existence, the movement both reacted against and reflected the prevailing values, norms, and shifts of its surrounding culture, I demonstrate clearly the reciprocal influence that societies and new religious movements exert on each other.;The dissertation interprets the brotherhood's gradual transformation as a search for coherence and stability in cultural conditions of ephemerality and fragmentation and as an attempt to create a compelling metanarrative in a world where all metanarratives are increasingly viewed with suspicion. This research also examines the pressures that were brought to bear on the Holy Order of MANS to re-create continually its self-representation in order to maintain its viability in the postmodern era's "domination of simulations." It is argued that a combination of internal and external pressures forced the movement to jettison its original value orientations and accommodate itself to mainstream Christian religious norms. This study provides compelling evidence of the fluid, innovative, amorphous, and contingent nature of new religious movements in their founding generations. |
