The history of the Hare Krishna Movement in the USA and Great Britain in terms of the Weber-Troeltsch conception

Abstract

This article deals with the history of the Hare Krishna Movement in the USA and Great Britain. It demonstrates how the history of this religious movement could be shaped in two different ways by different researchers. Using the Weberian concept of sect-to church transformation, we can figure out the stage of ``church'' as a phase of extinction (destruction) of the religious movement as far as its members re-orient on the social success and assimilation into the main society - or as a phase of matureness, openness and dialogue with the outer world. Therefore, there are two main sect-to-church concepts relating to ISKCON. The first reflects the point of view of Rochford, the most famous researcher of the Hare Krishna Movement in the USA. Rochford accounts the modem ISKCON as a religious organization on its way to a complete ``Hinduization'' and dissolving in the main social milieu, which is accompanied with the loss of its specific religious message. The article overviews his fmdings based on the 1976-2010 research, where the changes that the Hare Krishna movement in the USA has undergone in the recent four decades are revealed. Among them the collapse of the financial basis of the Movement in the 1980s, the issue of child abuse in the schools of the Movement, the changing role of women in the Movement, the process of change in how families are viewed, the development of a congregational approach to its organization, and the Hinduization of the Movement are documented. The main point of Rochford's analysis of the recent situation with ISKCON is that ISKCON is an example of the decline and the failure of a religious organization which survived only due to the Indian-Hindu immigrants' support. The second concept, supported by Michael Gresset, Kimmo Ketola and Kim Knott, states that ISKCON successfully found its niche in the modem world with maintaining its original religious content. Among arguments of the researches discussed in the article, there are Gresset's data about the circumstances in the North-American Hare Krishna community in Florida (New Ramana Reti) and Knott's report about the social development of the London community (Bhaktivedanta Manor). Both the concepts are based on the same historical facts from ISKCON history, but, once more, while the first one interprets it as a failure, the second one focuses on the constructive aspects of its recent being. It is quite interesting, because one could question the core of the concept of the Weberian sect-to-church transformation.