Moderate Fundamentalists

New religious movements and quasi-religion: Cognitive science of religion at the margins

“…In effect, following Boyer (2003), paradise representations are understood as by-products of other evolved mental functions. In a recent book, M. Afzal Upal (2017) offers a multifaceted approach for the cognitive science of NRMs, and applies it in a case study of Ghulām Aḥmad (1835–1908), the founder of the Aḥmadiyya Movement (see also, Upal, 2005a, 2005b).…”

“…On the other hand, thanks perhaps to the greater space for discursive decomposition provided by book-length accounts, Upal’s (2017) and Ketola’s (2008) monographs suggest ways in which CSR and social-cultural accounts of religion can enrich each other when they are dynamically engaged. There are three stages to Ketola’s (2008) account: (1) ‘cultural and social explanations are unable to satisfactorily account for the success of exotic movements such as ISKCON’ on their own, (2) ‘in order to develop better explanations we have to look more closely into the concept of culture and the psychological mechanisms’, and (3) ‘cognitive theories of the origins of religious symbolism, and the developmental trajectories of the modes of religiosity’ can help explain these (p. 208).…”

“…Upal’s discussion comes, as it were, from the opposite direction but to the same conclusion. He cautions ‘against the tendency among some cognitive scientists of religion who argue that the universality of cognitive explanations blunts the need for understanding the sociocultural and historical context that leads to the creation and spread of radical religious ideas’, urging instead that ‘[u]niversal cognitive processes simply do not provide a complete explanation unless they are instantiated in a particular sociocultural context that is investigated by historians of religion’ (Upal, 2017, p. 20). Upal’s account goes on to integrate his core CSR approach with a social psychological model of NRM founders as ‘social-identity-change entrepreneurs’ and a contextual model of the psychology of memory, alongside the history-of-religion approach just referred to.…”

“…A core example in Upal’s analysis is his revision of the theorized role of counterintuitiveness in the take-up of religious ideas. Upal argues that traditional CSR is ‘overly restrictive’ in proposing that only ‘maturationally natural knowledge’ (concepts acquired naturally during human maturation in ordinary environments without explicit tuition) and not ‘practiced natural knowledge’ (ideas learned through socially and culturally embedded explicit training) ‘provides the intuitive expectations whose violation leads to a preferential processing for the counterintuitive concepts’ (Upal, 2017, pp. 46, 45.…”

“…310–311). Upal, instead, sees ‘historical and sociocultural contexts as crucial to understanding how concepts were seen as counterintuitive by people who were attracted to them’ and proposes taking ‘historical and sociocultural approaches to the study of religion as necessary complements to a cognitive account of religion’ (Upal, 2017, p. 55. See also, p. 67).…”