Konferencia - EASR: Péter, Róbert: “English Freemasonry as a New Movement in Religion”

New Movements in Religion Theories and Trends

10th Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions

18-22 September, 2011

Budapest, Hungary

Locat ion: Hungarian Culture Foundation, Budapest, Szentháromság tér 6.

Wednesday, 21 September, 2011

14.00 – 16.00 (Room: “Lecture I”) Chair: Kwantes, Gemma
“Challenging Approaches to New Religions/Spiritualities:
Experiences from the Field” Session II., panel 2., Individual Abstracts, (Davidsen panel)

− Mäkelä, Essi and Lehtinen, Hanna: “’It Is My Firm Belief That It Is A Mistake To Hold Firm Beliefs’: Discordianism – A Religion?”
− Popescu, Lelia: “The Emperor’s New Clothes?! The New Energy Movement: A Retrospective on the Decade 2000-2010”
− Péter, Róbert: “English Freemasonry as a New Movement in Religion”
− Mantsinen, Teemu: “Social Class Study Perspective in the Study of Religion, New and Local Perspectives”
− Belanova, Andrea: “Ex-moonies in Czech Republic: Towards a New Typology?”

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Péter, Róbert, University of Szeged, Hungary

English Freemasonry as a new movement in religion

In recent years the United Grand Lodge of England, the mother organization of all regular lodges worldwide, has emphasized that freemasonry is not a religious but a secular fraternity. However, in a debate about the compatibility of Christianity and freemasonry with the Church of England in the late 1980s, the leaders of the order stated that freemasonry has a religious basis and supports religion in teaching morality but it lacks the basic elements of a religion. Reflecting on this allegedly confusing and shifting attitude, this paper is an attempt to investigate in what sense and to what extent English freemasonry could be regarded as a new movement in religion in the eighteenth century. In order to answer this question, Ninian Smart´s seven dimensional framework of religion will be adopted as a methodological tool. It will be argued that it is hardly possible to interpret the phenomenon of freemasonry with the binary opposition of religious versus secular since they are not necessarily irreconcilable polarities. The example of English freemasonry reinforces the view that we should rather speak about an interplay between the opposites of this dichotomy, that is, we should consider the religious and the secular as part of a continuum. If in an organisation such as freemasonry, secular and religious values coexist, and even if the balance of the ideas and practices appears at certain moments to be manifestly on the side of the secular, this does not nullify a designation of that institution as a religious one.

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Forrás: http://www.easr10.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/easr10book.pdf