Too Secularized for French Secularism: Testing the Resilience of Soka Gakkai as a Religious Institution
This paper will explore the hurdles that Soka Gakkai, a Japanese lay Buddhist organization, has had to triumph over in its quest to be accepted as a bona fide Buddhist movement in France. Indeed, when compared to other national branches of the group, it appears that SGI-France has had a particularly...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2021
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| In: |
The journal of CESNUR
Year: 2021, Volume: 5, Issue: 6, Pages: 26-42 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | This paper will explore the hurdles that Soka Gakkai, a Japanese lay Buddhist organization, has had to triumph over in its quest to be accepted as a bona fide Buddhist movement in France. Indeed, when compared to other national branches of the group, it appears that SGI-France has had a particularly ambiguous status in the country of laïcité, the French version of secularism. Some media outlets, anticult groups, and even government agencies, as well as members of the Parliament, have categorized Soka Gakkai as a “cult.” On the other hand, a few years ago it acquired the legal status of a religious association, making it officially a religion in its own right, at least legally speaking. By reviewing the arguments put forward by the people who consider Soka Gakkai as a “cult,” and building on previous scholarly work on Buddhism in France, this paper will argue that one of the main reasons this new religious movement has been labelled as such may be that it does not match the archetypal image of Buddhism held by most French people. This Buddhist archetype is built primarily on Theravāda, Tibetan, and Zen monastic traditions, which are obviously quite different from the secular and socially active Buddhist organization that Soka Gakkai is. This may explain why the group has had trouble being recognized as Buddhist: paradoxically, French secularism does not seem ready to accept a secular religious organization, and is more comfortable with more “traditional,” clerical Buddhist groups. In this perspective, it is significant that SGI-France is not part of the French Buddhist Union, a national federation of Buddhist associations composed mainly of Vajrayana, Zen, and Theravāda congregations. However, in the past two decades, SGI-France has undertaken a major overhaul, both in its structure and its public image, for instance by taking on a new official name in 2007, that is Le mouvement bouddhiste Soka (the Soka Buddhist Movement). These changes might be viewed as evidence of the religious group’s resilience and capacity to adapt to new political and social environments. |
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| ISSN: | 2532-2990 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of CESNUR
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.26338/tjoc.2021.5.6.2 |
