Social Change, Gender Roles, and New Religious Movements

Abstract

The relationship between gender role ambiguities and religious movements is explored by an analysis of religious and nonreligious communes utilizing both survey and ethnographic data. The existence of a single, morally absolute set of definitions and specific rules concerning sexuality and gender roles distinguishes religious from secular communal movements. Participants in religious groups are characterized by uncertainty about rather than outright rejection of traditional gender roles, and low tolerance for ambiguity. Findings are discussed within a broader explanatory framework which emphasizes the significance of lifestage and gender roles for understanding the interrelationships among structural change, cultural fragmentation and social movement participation. A recurrent phenomenon on the historical landscape is the periodic upsurge of movements sweeping in their condemnation of the society that surrounds them and offering alternative communities of moral regeneration and social fellowship. Such times of countercultural protest are characterized by relatively sudden economic, social, and demographic changes that have eroded the taken-for-granted legitimacy of prevailing institutions (Yinger, 1982). Where and when traditional understandings and values no longer fit emerging realities, large cracks appear in the consensus underlying existing social arrangements and prophets and visionaries can command the attention of more than a few passersby. Religious movements flourish as competing visions of a New Moral Order receive enthusiastic support. In periods of major social and cultural disjuncture, religious as well as many secular movements have a communitarian focus-oriented to the establishment of actual communities of co-enthusiasts. Within small, well-bounded communities of likeminded others, new values, goals, and role behaviors can be socially defined and consensually affirmed (cf. Bennett, 1975; Bestor, 1950; Cohn, 1970; Darin-Drabkin, 1962; Zablocki, 1980).