John McKelvie Whitworth - Gods Blueprints: A Sociological Study of Three Utopian Sects

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Volume 14

GODS BLUEPRINTS

First published in 1975 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

This edition first published in 2019

by Routledge

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1975 John McKelvie Whitworth

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In the last quarter of the twentieth century there are few more important topics of study than the forms and styles and fate of utopianism. It is very easy to suppose that a scholarly study of three utopian sects provides mere footnotes to real history and to normal society. In fact, the footnotes to history often provide its most instructive material. One has only to recollect that for Tacitus and Suetonius Christianity itself had the status of an obscure footnote to see the force of this point. And the sects here described are part of the persistent undertow of Christian aspiration and expectation.

There are many ways of viewing utopian sects. There is, first of all, the point of view adopted by the sect itself. For the members of the holy community its boundaries form a colony of heaven, and the world outside is an overgrown untidy garden within which sin and corruption rage. Against that world they attempt to create the Lords garden through what Dr Whitworth calls viable isolation. To achieve viable isolation you must first build a wall to protect the planting of the Lord. For some sectarians this is enough: they avert their eyes from the world outside, and cultivate their own enclave of salvation. They have discovered how a garden should be run and they will now proceed to run the garden that way to all eternity. This form of perfectionist aspiration is, as Dr Whitworth shows, inherently stagnant and usually produces a peasant character: heavy, repetitious and circumscribed, though not necessarily uncreative or resistant with regard to specific economic and agricultural techniques.

Not all sects look inward towards the tiny enclave of perfection: some look over the wall, signal to the world outside and even make carefully controlled forays into the uncultivated mess brought about by sin. These belong to the kind of sect described with such scholarly care by Dr Whitworth. He gives us a historical account of three such sects and a sociological analysis of their origins. He also describes the sequence of their development, their techniques of social control, their options and limitations, and their ways of monitoring the traffic across their boundaries with the outside world.

Within a general category of utopian sect certain problems are solved in different ways, each involving specific opportunity costs and achieving a characteristic partial mesh with the solution of other problems. For example, two central difficulties are rooted in sexuality and property: which of these is to be held in common, or are both? Is sexuality to be denied, heavily restricted, or opened up to wider permutations than those available in ordinary society? All the central problems of community size, local economic viability, social stability and innovation, the ownership of goods and the expression of sexuality can be examined instructively within the context of utopian sects.

I have already trespassed on the second way of viewing sects: that of the social analyst. For the analyst of social arrangements there is more to the study of utopian sects than the balance of options within what are called system problems. There is also the interest belonging to the uncontrolled experiment. For the sectarian himself, of course, his experiment is incomparable and unique; for the sociologist the sectarians sense of uniqueness is an item in a set of marginal variations between one example of a sub-category of sect and another example. The sociologist carefully moves through the superabundant data of religiosity and isolates a sub-class within which he observes the variant forms and their empirical correlates. The uncontrolled experiment of a given sect becomes an item in the vast laboratory of human history. The sociologist observes that solution to system problem X in a particular sub-category of sect S is susceptible to a, b, c n solutions, of which a and e are peculiarly congruent and empirically likely in conjunction with external circumstances of such and such kind. He then asks why this is so, i.e. he enquires why the socio-logic of this solution to a problem is congruent with that solution to another problem. And by working over all the extant examples he begins to approximate the likely sets of congruences, the possible incompatibilities, and the conditions under which the heavy congruences are likely to recur and those under which the incompatibilities are relatively likely. This approach is based on categorization, cross-categorization and comparison over time and over social and geographical space. To be quite short about it: Dr Whitworth employs the comparative method, the logic of which (as distinct from certain practical limitations) is identical with statistical logic. That is why Dr Whitworth begins with the problem of categorization.

The sociological study of sects teases the analyst with problems which transcend either issues of optimal size, economic viability, sexual regulation, boundary maintenance, or of what is involved in the logic of comparison. One is confronted by further questions about which most of us are too ill-informed to attempt a confident answer. The sect clearly sees itself in several roles: as exemplary and as anticipatory, as both set aside and potentially universal It is small, but God will use the small things of the world to confound the mighty. These varieties of self-conception are in sober fact varying empirical possibilities in human history. The sociologist wants to know whether these experiments are in their present form or in some transmuted form a marginal development permanently incapable of being universalized or whether they are nuclei which indicate the form of the future. He is teased by the issue as to whether they are inherently and for ever parasitic on the fact that other men are not as they are, or whether all mankind will one day come together on some basis pre-figured by the utopian sect. This set of queries fits into an enormous intellectual task: the role and place of utopian sects within the general schemata of social development. Given the vagueness of criteria, the lack of adequate knowledge, the disjunctions and partial disconnections of human history, and the reappearance of problems at higher levels which seemingly belonged to lower levels, there is room for varied answers, including maybe the answer which rejects the very notion of social development. Quite a lot begins to turn on ones