by Dusty
Hoesly
This
summer marks the 50th anniversary of the Department
of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). It is
one of the oldest such departments at a secular university in the United States,
established one year after the Supreme Court’s Abington v. Schempp decision allowed teaching about religion (but
not proselytizing) in public schools, and it has been a leader in the field ever
since. Well-known faculty specializing in American religions have included
Robert Michaelsen, Thomas O’Dea, Phillip Hammond, Ines Talamantez, Catherine
Albanese, Wade Clark Roof, Charles Long, Rudy Busto, Ann Taves, and Kathleen M.
Moore.
UCSB
also maintains one of the finest collections in the world of archival and
documentary materials on new religious movements and “alternative” religions. The
cornerstone of the library’s Department of Special Collections is the American Religions
Collection
(ARC), mainly comprised of materials assembled by J. Gordon Melton for his Encyclopedia of American Religions,
first published in 1978 and now in its 8th
edition.
The ARC contains thousands of books and serials, and almost 1,000 linear feet
of manuscripts relating to 20th century sects and newer religions, such
as Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, Scientology, the Church of God, New
Age groups, Asian religions in the U.S., and mail-order religions. Melton’s manuscript files, containing
correspondence, newsletters, flyers, articles, clippings, and ephemera relating
to hundreds of such groups, make up the bulk of the collection. Like his Encyclopedia, materials are organized by
“families” of religious traditions.
In
addition to the ARC manuscript files, some of the other holdings within the ARC
include:
·
Bromley Papers: legal case
files compiled by scholar David Bromley relating to est, ISKCON, Unification
Church, and The Way International, among others.
·
Burnell
Collection: materials by Los Angeles-area New Thought leaders George and Mary
Burnell.
·
Chicagoland
Psychic Archives
(1964-1985): materials relating to practitioners of paranormal phenomena in the
Chicago area, such as psychics, astrologers, mediums, ghosthunters, and devotees
of the occult, UFOs, and parapsychology.
·
Clifton
Collection: files about pagan, witchcraft, and occult subjects.
·
Cult Awareness
Network (CAN) Collection: files on hundreds of religious groups, as well as
internal administrative files of the former cult watchdog group.
·
Hadden Papers: files
collected by scholar Jeffrey K. Hadden about evangelical groups and leaders such
as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim Bakker.
·
Russell Chandler
Collection:
files from the 1960s-1980s collected when Chandler was a religion writer for
the Los Angeles Times.
·
Santa Barbara
Parapsychology Collection: materials related to parapsychology groups in
central coastal and southern California.
Other
sub-collections include materials about Ramtha, Estreletta, Worldwide Church of
God, World Prophetic Ministry, Children of God, Old Catholics, Krishnamurti,
ISKCON, Unification Church, Soka Gakkai International, Goddians, Christian
Science, Unity School of Christianity, Swedenborgianism, Foundation for Christian
Living, Brotherhood of the White Temple, Process Church of the Final Judgment, and
Christian anti-Communism.
If
you are looking for a complete run of FATE
magazine or a complete set of Jack Chick books, the ARC has them both. Metaphysical
serials include Hypnosis Quarterly, Health Alternatives Newsletter, Parapsychology Bulletin, Pagan Dawn, Eck News, and Astrologers’
Almanac, to name just a few. Aside from non-traditional religions and
spiritualities, there are periodicals and other materials on a range of
Christian sectarian groups, including Pentecostalism, Adventism, and various
stripes of Evangelicalism, as well as Asian, African, and Native American
religions, plus many more.
Beyond
the ARC, the Special Collections department contains other resources useful for
studying religion in the American West. For example, the Humanistic
Psychology Archives
encompasses manuscripts about “spiritual psychology” and related topics, and
the J. F. Rowny
Press Records
collection contains materials from the Santa Barbara-based J. F. Rowny Press, which
published metaphysical works. The Ricardo Cruz
Catolicos por la Raza Papers (1967-1993) includes correspondence,
legal documents, transcripts, and ephemera of Cruz, a Chicano rights attorney and
founder of the controversial Católicos por la Raza, which demonstrated against
the Catholic Church for its neglect of the Latino community.
Best
of all, the library staff is always helpful and courteous, making research in
the Special Collections a joy. Curator and archivist David Gartrell, in
particular, can locate anything you are looking for quickly, typically offering
relevant suggestions about other files which may aid in your research. In my
experience, he will even sit with you and comb through manuscripts or serials
looking for that one piece you are searching for. One time, he spent twenty
minutes with me flipping through the classified ads in the back pages of FATE magazine for a particular advertisement.
In
this brief and rather arbitrary look at the ARC and the UCSB Special
Collections department’s holdings, I have focused more on the “alternative” and
“new” religious movements which gained steam in the 1960s rather than
“traditional” or “establishment” religions. I do this primarily because it
reflects much of J. Gordon Melton’s collection as well as his scholarship, both
of which are the core of the ARC. However, California should not only be seen
as a place for “weird” religions, immigrant religions, and religious
innovation. It is also a place of mainstream religions, nativism, and religious
conservatism. Happily, the ARC contains materials on all of the above and more
besides. Next time you’re visiting the American Riviera, stop by, introduce
yourself, and surf through UCSB’s Special Collections and especially the
American Religions Collection. Scholarly—or other—enlightenment awaits.
2 comments:
A great NRMs collection! The gossip in me is dying to know why Jeffrey Hadden's papers are at USCB, not UVa.
I do have to say, as an alumnus of a department that was founded immediately after the Second World War: Post-Schempp departments that tout themselves as "one of the oldest" religious studies departments in the country are johnny-come-latelies. Nyah nyah.
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