The Belgian scholar, who died in 2024, explored why the two movements should be considered full-blown religions.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*A paper presented in the session honoring Karel Dobbelaere at the 38th Biennial Conference of the ISSR (International Society for the Sociology of Religion), Kaunas, Lithuania, July 2, 2025.
Although it was not the only nor perhaps the central theme of his sociological work, Karel Dobbelaere’s contribution to my field, the study of new religious movements, was outstanding. He also deserves praise for his bravery in defending his points of view when they ran counter to popular emotions. I particularly remember his testimony in 1996 before the Belgian Parliamentary Commission Investigating Cults, where I was also a witness. Confronted with a largely hostile political audience, Dobbelaere insisted that both Soka Gakkai and Scientology can be considered religions. It is a theme he returned to in important academic works.
It was within the context of an extended essay he co-signed in 1997 with his wife Liliane Voyé that Dobbelaere elaborated the reasons why Scientology was, in his opinion, a religion. He started by commenting that no definition of religion was unanimously accepted by scholars. Having surveyed substantive, functional, and structural theories, Dobbelaere and Voyé did not propose another definition of religion but a checklist. First, they listed the features that the leading scholars who discussed a possible definition of religion had indicated. Then, they attributed a value to each feature, based on the scholars’ consensus about it. They described some features as “obligatory,” others as “obligatory, but not exclusively typical of a religious context,” and others still as merely “optional.”
They regarded as the “conditio sine qua non” to recognize a religion “a belief in the transcendent.” However, they specified that, “This transcendent may be conceived as God, gods (kami), spirits, souls, saints, angels, sacred law (Dharma), etc. as part of a more or less developed mythology, involving good and evil forces.” In addition, they regarded it as “obligatory” to find a religion that the belief in the transcendent should generate a system of secondary beliefs, rites (broadly understood), a moral code, an organization, and references to an authority and tradition legitimizing the belief system. They considered other features, such as the capacity to generate deeply felt religious experiences, optional.
Examining Scientology against the checklist, the presence of a system of belief, an organization, and references to an authority was obvious. A look at Scientology’s normative texts confirmed that a moral code was also present. The most difficult, yet essential, questions concerned the presence of a belief in the transcendent and rites. Dobbelaere defined the transcendent as a force inaccessible through the normal perception of the senses. He found it in Scientology at two levels: God and the thetan. First, he located in texts of Scientology statements such as “We believe that God exists.” He noted that Scientology remained vague about the form of God’s existence and that the discourse about God was somewhat underdeveloped in the movement. On the other hand, Dobbelaere observed that the notion of the thetan, the spiritual core of every woman and man that has created the universe of matter, energy, space, and time (MEST) we inhabit, also belongs to the transcendent. Alone, it would be enough to conclude that Scientology does believe in the transcendent.
As for the rites, Dobbelaere and Voyé were aware of the critics’ objection that rituals for naming ceremonies (similar to baptism and aimed at “getting the thetan oriented” after he incarnates in our world), weddings, and funerals do exist in Scientology but occupy a very peripheral role. Besides arguing that they are not irrelevant, they insisted that these objections are based on a restrictive notion of rites, modeled on the Christian churches. If, however, we define rites as acts expressing the belief in the transcendent and inscribing devotees in a community of fellow believers, we may conclude that the core practices of Scientology, including the auditing, and advancing during the years along what Scientologists call “the Bridge to Total Freedom,” are in themselves rites.
Dobbelaere also confronted the objection that Soka Gakkai was not a religion but a “cult” or a political organization that should not even be considered Buddhist. Apart from Western anti-cultists, this criticism came from rival Buddhist sects in Japan. In 1991, there was a traumatic separation between Soka Gakkai and what had been its parent organization, the monastic Nichiren Shoshu order. The monks of this order became the most vocal critics of Soka Gakkai.
In 1994, Dobbelaere co-authored with leading British sociologist of religions Bryan Wilson a book titled “A Time to Chant,” on the British members of Soka Gakkai. They also mentioned the then-recent separation from the Nichiren Shoshu monks. The book was based on an 85-question questionnaire sent to a random sample of 1,000 non-Japanese members in the UK. They achieved a 62% usable response rate, providing a substantial analysis dataset. The survey results were supplemented with thirty qualitative interviews. Dobbelaere and Wilson concluded that most British members, particularly the younger ones, were drawn to Soka Gakkai due to its emphasis on personal autonomy, self-improvement, and the practical benefits offered by the chant of the daimoku (Nam Myoho Renge Kyo). This attitude, the author noted, resonated with contemporary Western values, particularly the decline in belief in an anthropomorphic deity and the increasing emphasis on personal autonomy in religious practice.
In 1998, PierLuigi Zoccatelli asked Dobbelaere to write a small 90-page book on Soka Gakkai in French that he would translate and publish in Italian as part of the collection “Religioni e Movimenti,” of which I was the general editor. Zoccatelli died unexpectedly in the same year as Dobbelaere, 2024. They shared a conversation on Soka Gakkai for several decades.
The subtitle Dobbelaere insisted on including in the book after the descriptive title “Soka Gakkai” was significant: “From Lay Movement to Religion.” It is precisely in this short book, which was also published in English in 2001, that we find Dobbelaere’s most thorough discussion of the religious nature of Soka Gakkai.
He observed that the conflict between a strong movement of laypersons and the priests or monks who try to control them is not peculiar to Nichiren Buddhism. It is found at all times and in all religions. When lay movements grow, they tend to break free from clerical control and sometimes may also realize that monks and priests are more interested in their money than in their spiritual well-being. Dobbelaere noted that this is a key, although not the only one, to interpret the separation of Protestants from Catholicism. He observed in Soka Gakkai that the “lay movement” did indeed “become a religion.”
After separating from the monks, it lost access to some of its most typical religious features: the link with a tradition legitimizing the group and the possibility of receiving from the clergy its key religious object of worship, the Gohonzon. This is a copy authenticated by the clergy of a scroll inscribed by the medieval originator of the sect, Nichiren. However, Dobbelaere reports that the Soka Gakkai patiently reconstructed its religious connections, including by obtaining authenticated replicas of an 18th-century authorized copy of the medieval Gohonzon from a different monastery.
What is a religion? How should we interpret socially constructed claims of orthodoxy and authenticity? Dobbelaere (or anybody else) could not provide a final answer to these century-old questions. However, he offered abundant food for thought to future scholars, inspired not only by unimpeachable scholarship but also by common sense and a spirit of tolerance. Although they belonged to different generations, this was something he had in common with Zoccatelli. It is a legacy we should all honor.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
