Susan J. Palmer – författare

While scholars, media, and the public may be aware of a few extraordinary government raids on religious communities, such as the U.S. federal raid on the Branch Davidians in 1993, very few people are aware of the scope and frequency with which these raids occur. Following the Texas state raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints in 2008, authors Stuart Wright and Susan Palmer decided to study these raids in the aggregate--rather than as individual cases--by collecting data on raids that have taken place over the last six decades. They did this both to establish for the first time an archive of raided groups, and to determine if any patterns could be identified. Even they were surprised at their findings; there were far more raids than expected, and the vast majority of them had occurred since 1990, reflecting a sharp, almost exponential increase. What could account for this sudden and dramatic increase in state control of minority religions? In Storming Zion, Wright and Palmer argue that the increased use of these high-risk and extreme types of enforcement corresponds to expanded organization and initiatives by opponents of unconventional religions. Anti-cult organizations provide strategic "frames" that define potential conflicts or problems in a given community as inherently dangerous, and construct narratives that draw on stereotypes of child and sexual abuse, brainwashing, and even mass suicide. The targeted group is made to appear more dangerous than it is, resulting in an overreaction by authorities. Wright and Palmer explore the implications of heightened state repression and control of minority religions in an increasingly multicultural, globalized world. At a time of rapidly shifting demographics within Western societies this book cautions against state control of marginalized groups and offers insight about why the responses to these groups is often so reactionary.

While scholars, media, and the public may be aware of a few extraordinary government raids on religious communities, such as the U.S. federal raid on the Branch Davidians in 1993, very few people are aware of the scope and frequency with which these raids occur. Following the Texas state raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints in 2008, authors Stuart Wright and Susan Palmer decided to study these raids in the aggregate--rather than as individual cases--by collecting data on raids that have taken place over the last six decades. They did this both to establish for the first time an archive of raided groups, and to determine if any patterns could be identified. Even they were surprised at their findings; there were far more raids than expected, and the vast majority of them had occurred since 1990, reflecting a sharp, almost exponential increase. What could account for this sudden and dramatic increase in state control of minority religions? In Storming Zion, Wright and Palmer argue that the increased use of these high-risk and extreme types of enforcement corresponds to expanded organization and initiatives by opponents of unconventional religions. Anti-cult organizations provide strategic "frames" that define potential conflicts or problems in a given community as inherently dangerous, and construct narratives that draw on stereotypes of child and sexual abuse, brainwashing, and even mass suicide. The targeted group is made to appear more dangerous than it is, resulting in an overreaction by authorities. Wright and Palmer explore the implications of heightened state repression and control of minority religions in an increasingly multicultural, globalized world. At a time of rapidly shifting demographics within Western societies this book cautions against state control of marginalized groups and offers insight about why the responses to these groups is often so reactionary.

As we approach the Millennium, apocalyptic expectations are rising in North America and throughout the world. Beyond the symbolic aura of the millennium, this excitation is fed by currents of unsettling social and cultural change. The millennial myth ingrained in American culture is continually generating new movements, which draw upon the myth and also reshape and reconstruct it. Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem examines many types of apocalypticism such as economic, racialist, environmental, feminist, as well as those erupting from established churches. Many of these movements are volatile and potentially explosive.Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem brings together scholars of apocalyptic and millennial groups to explore aspects of the contemporary apocalyptic fervor in all orginal contributions. Opening with a discussion of various theories of apocalypticism, the editors then analyze how millennialist movements have gained ground in largely secular societal circles. Section three discusses the links between apocalypticism and established churches, while the final part of the book looks at examples of violence and confrontation, from Waco to Solar Temple to the Aum Shinri Kyo subway disaster in Japan.Contributors: James Aho, Dick Anthony, Robert Balch, Michael Barkun, John Bozeman, David Bromley, Michael Cuneo, John Dimitrovich, John Hall, Massimo Introvigne, Philip Lamy, Ronald Lawson, Martha Lee, Barbara Lynn Mahnke, Vanessa Morrison, Mark Mullins, Ansun Shupe, Susan Palmer, Thomas Robbins, Philip Schuyler and Catherine Wessinger.

As we approach the Millennium, apocalyptic expectations are rising in North America and throughout the world. Beyond the symbolic aura of the millennium, this excitation is fed by currents of unsettling social and cultural change. The millennial myth ingrained in American culture is continually generating new movements, which draw upon the myth and also reshape and reconstruct it. Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem examines many types of apocalypticism such as economic, racialist, environmental, feminist, as well as those erupting from established churches. Many of these movements are volatile and potentially explosive.Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem brings together scholars of apocalyptic and millennial groups to explore aspects of the contemporary apocalyptic fervor in all orginal contributions. Opening with a discussion of various theories of apocalypticism, the editors then analyze how millennialist movements have gained ground in largely secular societal circles. Section three discusses the links between apocalypticism and established churches, while the final part of the book looks at examples of violence and confrontation, from Waco to Solar Temple to the Aum Shinri Kyo subway disaster in Japan.Contributors: James Aho, Dick Anthony, Robert Balch, Michael Barkun, John Bozeman, David Bromley, Michael Cuneo, John Dimitrovich, John Hall, Massimo Introvigne, Philip Lamy, Ronald Lawson, Martha Lee, Barbara Lynn Mahnke, Vanessa Morrison, Mark Mullins, Ansun Shupe, Susan Palmer, Thomas Robbins, Philip Schuyler and Catherine Wessinger.

In a single decade, AIDS has grown to pandemic proportions. The combined forces of medical research and public education have thus far failed to halt the spread of the disease, which remains mysterious, stigmatizing, and fatal. In this highly original study, Susan Palmer explores the healing practices, metaphors, and apocalyptic fantasies of various religious, racial, and sexual minority groups as they respond to the AIDS threat.Palmer looks at the response to AIDS by specific groups as diverse as white and black identity movements, gay spirituality circles, communal and millenarian cults, and sci-fi and horror films. Her study reveals a proliferation of AIDS metaphors that refer variously to medieval plagues, social disorder, decline of the nuclear family, and supernatural powers. She argues that the human body tends to become a symbol that mirrors the social body, and she finds this process especially dramatic in persecuted marginal groups.Well known as a researcher and writer on new religious movements in Europe and North America, Susan Palmer brings experience and insight to this study of the metaphors surrounding alternative spirituality and sexuality.

The late 1960s and early 1970s constituted a remarkable period for spiritual experimentation and for the proliferation of new religious groups. Now the children born into these religions have come of age. While their parents made the decision as adults to embrace alternative religious practices, the children have been raised with a very different orientation toward the larger society. While they take their religious communities for granted, many of these children gaze with curiosity at the surrounding secular world which their parents, not they, chose to reject. The contributors to this volume examine children from many different alternative religious movements worldwide, including The Family, Hare Krishna, Wiccans, and Pagans, Messianic Communities, and the Rajneesh (Osho) Movement. The essays explore two general questions: 1) What impact does the presence of children have on a new religion's lifestyle and chance of surviving into the future? 2) Is child abuse more likely to occur in unconventional religions, or are children born into them, the 'new' religions have grown up and have become an important and rapidly changing social force that we cannot reasonably dismiss or wisely ignore

Aliens Adored is the first full length, in-depth look at the RaËlian movement, a fascinating new religion founded in the 1970s by the charismatic prophet, RaËl. Born in France as Claude Vorilhon, the former race-car driver founded the religion after he experienced a visitation from the aliens (the "elohim") who, in his cosmology, created humans by cloning themselves. The millenarian movement awaits the return of the alien creators, and in the meantime seeks to develop the potential of its adherents through free love, sexual experimentation, opposition to nuclear proliferation and war, and the development of the science of cloning. Sociologist Susan J. Palmer has studied the Raelian movement for more than a decade, observing meetings and rituals and enjoying unprecedented access to the group's leaders as well as to its rank-and-file members. In this pioneering study she provides a thorough analysis of the movement, focusing on issues of sexuality, millenarianism, and the impact of the scientific worldview on religion and the environment. Rael's radical sexual ethics, his gnostic anthropocentrism, and shallow ecotheology offer us a mirror through which we see how our worldview has been shaped by the forces of globalization, postmodernism, and secular humanism.

Presenting the life stories of ten Uyghur women, this book applies the techniques of narrative analysis to explore their changing worldviews and conversions to political engagement. Born and raised in East Turkestan/Xinjiang in the 1970s-90s, each woman, after personally experiencing incidents of ethnic discrimination, chose to leave China before 2005. Settling in a western country, they strive to become the voice of the Turkic people who are silenced or detained in the “re-education” camps.The narratives are based on interviews conducted online between 2020 and 2021, collected as a form of oral history. The book focuses on the escalating tensions, turning points experienced in their youth, and the religious, political and psychological factors that prompted their transformations in self-identity, ideology and the emergence of a new Uyghur–Muslim feminism.Through the women’s stories, the book describes how women activists are navigating the competing reality constructions of the dire situation in the Uyghur Homeland and actively restorying a genocide to bring about social and political change.

Presenting the life stories of ten Uyghur women, this book applies the techniques of narrative analysis to explore their changing worldviews and conversions to political engagement. Born and raised in East Turkestan/Xinjiang in the 1970s-90s, each woman, after personally experiencing incidents of ethnic discrimination, chose to leave China before 2005. Settling in a western country, they strive to become the voice of the Turkic people who are silenced or detained in the “re-education” camps.The narratives are based on interviews conducted online between 2020 and 2021, collected as a form of oral history. The book focuses on the escalating tensions, turning points experienced in their youth, and the religious, political and psychological factors that prompted their transformations in self-identity, ideology and the emergence of a new Uyghur–Muslim feminism.Through the women’s stories, the book describes how women activists are navigating the competing reality constructions of the dire situation in the Uyghur Homeland and actively restorying a genocide to bring about social and political change.

Addresses how to balance freedom of religion and parental rights with the wellbeing of the child That belief that children are likely to be harmed when they are raised in new or minority religions has led to dramatic and sometimes tragic events, such as the 2008 government raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas, which resulted in the removal of over 400 children from the community, although doctors and psychologists found no evidence of abuse, and the courts eventually demanded the return of all 400 children to their families.Children in Minority Faiths showcases original field research and vivid ethnographies of alternative childhoods. It adopts a sociological approach to analyze state responses to alleged abuse and problematic aspects of childrearing in marginal religions. Offering thirteen case studies of alternative childhoods and spiritually-based childrearing patterns in minority religions, the volume argues that these groups' minority status has often led to mounting tensions and investigations over alleged child abuse by police and social workers. On one hand, the volume challenges the assumptions that children growing up in sectarian religions are routinely abused or at risk. Yet it also examines cases where children did come to harm, assessing the ideological and structural factors that have fostered child abuse in specific groups. Children in Minority Faiths examines the delicate balance between the rights of religious parents and their children. Ultimately, the volume considers what appropriate state intervention looks like, and how the state might prevent crimes against children that happen within the setting of new and marginalized religious movements in the future, while at the same time pushing back against anti-cult narratives that claim that new religions are dangerous environments in which to raise children.

Addresses how to balance freedom of religion and parental rights with the wellbeing of the child That belief that children are likely to be harmed when they are raised in new or minority religions has led to dramatic and sometimes tragic events, such as the 2008 government raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas, which resulted in the removal of over 400 children from the community, although doctors and psychologists found no evidence of abuse, and the courts eventually demanded the return of all 400 children to their families.Children in Minority Faiths showcases original field research and vivid ethnographies of alternative childhoods. It adopts a sociological approach to analyze state responses to alleged abuse and problematic aspects of childrearing in marginal religions. Offering thirteen case studies of alternative childhoods and spiritually-based childrearing patterns in minority religions, the volume argues that these groups' minority status has often led to mounting tensions and investigations over alleged child abuse by police and social workers. On one hand, the volume challenges the assumptions that children growing up in sectarian religions are routinely abused or at risk. Yet it also examines cases where children did come to harm, assessing the ideological and structural factors that have fostered child abuse in specific groups. Children in Minority Faiths examines the delicate balance between the rights of religious parents and their children. Ultimately, the volume considers what appropriate state intervention looks like, and how the state might prevent crimes against children that happen within the setting of new and marginalized religious movements in the future, while at the same time pushing back against anti-cult narratives that claim that new religions are dangerous environments in which to raise children.

This study of new religious movements in Quebec focuses on nine groups—including the notoriously violent Solar Temple; Eleven contributing authors offer rich ethnographies and sociological insights on new spiritual groups that highlight the quintessential features of Quebec's new religions (“sectes” in the francophone media).