Better Know an Archive: UCSB’s American Religions Collection

by Dusty Hoesly

This summer marks the 50^th 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 8^th edition. The ARC contains thousands of books and serials, and almost 1,000 linear feet of manuscripts relating to 20^th 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.

Book(s) of the Month:

Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion 

Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion 

Review by Jim Bennett

Of late, I have been pondering twentieth century California and the fertile ground it offered for incubating and nurturing a wide variety of religious movements in the twentieth century. Already, two of the books reviewed in our still young Book of the Month describe various dimensions of this religious fertility, especially in Southern California: Matthew Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sun Belt. Conservative Protestant growth and innovation is an important part the story of religion in California over the last century, spanning from Holiness denominations such as the Church of the Nazarene and the emergence of Pentecostalism to groups such as Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Christian Fellowship that emerged in the second half of the century.

But religious creativity in California also extended well beyond these Christian denominations, suggesting a spiritual hothouse akin to that a hundred years earlier along the Western edge of the Second Great Awakening. Many twentieth century new religious movements, even if they did not start in California, experienced significant growth by (re)locating in California, from the Theosophist community in Point Loma, to David Berg's The Family, to Jim Jones' People's Temple. As early as 1935, according to Philip Jenkins, commentators were flagging southern California as the epicenter of the "cult racket" (Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs, p. 11).

I was reminded of all this with the publication last summer of two new books on Scientology, a tradition whose secrecy and defensiveness has made it difficult for scholars to research and write about. Taken together, Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) and Hugh Urban's, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), provide much useful information for those who teach—or would like to teach—about Scientology and its contributions to the complexity of both the region's and the nation's religious landscape.

Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and her book is an expansion of a March 2006 article that appeared in that magazine. Her book is an engrossing and easy to read journey through the history of Scientology, touching on enough of the popular controversies—from questions about L. Ron Hubbard's background to Tom Cruise's involvement and the motives and methods of current president David Miscavige—to appeal to a popular audience. But Reitman goes well beneath the sensationalist headlines, myths, and rumors that shape most people's impressions of Scientology. This is also a deeply researched volume. Reitman has examined vast amounts of Scientology materials, taken time to review what scholarly materials exist, as well as conducting extensive interviews to paint a much broader picture of Scientology than previously available. The details prove helpful for those seeking a deeper understanding of how Scientology operates in its various organizations and orders. She also illumines changes in the organization, especially as leadership shifted from Hubbard to Miscavige, that have created a movement more isolated and secretive than the organization's formative decades. The strength of the book rests in the stories she tells and the narratives she reveals, many of them quite wrenching, rather than offering radically new interpretive frameworks. Even as Reitman's tone is more nuanced and her treatment and profile more even-handed than most accounts, this book will not do much to counter popular skepticism about Scientology.

Hugh Urban's TheChurch of Scientology takes a somewhat different approach, dealing with larger theoretical questions that Scientology raises about the study of religion in general and the definition of religion in the United States more specifically. Aware of the challenges and repercussions of writing about Scientology, Urban is less interested in the juicy controversies that Reitman tackles than the scholarly questions ethat frame his study. While Reitman calls Scientology "America's Most Secretive Religion" in her subtitle, it is Urban who is the expert on secrecy in religion and brings his knowledge of esotericism as a category of comparative religious studies to bear on his analysis of Scientology. Like Reitman, Urban moves in a chronological fashion, tracing the emergence of Scientology as a religion under Hubbard's guidance, with a strong emphasis on how Hubbard guided Scientology into the category of religion even as that classification has remained highly contested by many outsiders, both within and beyond the United States (The IRS did not recognize Scientology as a religion entitled to tax-exempt status until 1993).

Neither text argues that Scientology is specifically a religion of the American West (clearly neither author shares our angst about such questions!). Indeed, Scientology is not nor has it ever been a practice exclusive to the American West. Nonetheless, in both accounts, the West is very much present. Hubbard himself frames his own narrative largely around experiences in the West, from an early childhood on the western plains and claiming friendships with Native Americans, to naval service in the Pacific that oriented his religious thinking towards religious traditions of the East. Urban's account emphasizes the Cold War context out of which Scientology emerged, a mindset and material reality which profoundly shaped the ethos of Southern California where defense contractors were among the region's largest employers. For Hubbard, several of these interests fused during the time he spent in the home of a Cal Tech Rocket Scientist who also had a deep interest in the occult. Reitman likewise shows how heavily Hubbard built his religion around the culture of celebrity that was Hollywood, a conflicted relationship that remains at the center of popular conceptions of Scientology.

All of which is not try to force either of these immensely useful volumes into categories where they do not fit. Still, especially as we consider the last century of history of religion in the American West, these volumes on the particular tradition of Scientology contribute to broader conversations about critical issues that emerge in other stories of religion in the American West. To offer just one example, the questions Urban raises intersect in intriguing ways with those raised by Tisa Wenger's We Have a Religion about who gets to define religion with what consequences. When attentiveness to religion in the American West brings together such diverse experiences and books, surely we know that we are in a space that is creating conversations worth having!