Dr John Walliss Profile Page

 I am currently senior lecturer in the sociology of religion, and Director of the Centre for Millennialism Studies) within the Department of Theology and Religious Studies  

Research

The Brahma Kumaris as a Reflexive Tradition
My PhD, which was supervised by Richard Jenkins and Sharon MacDonald at the University of Sheffield, was an examination of the role of ‘tradition’ in what some social theorists have claimed is a post-traditional society. The empirical aspect of the thesis was an ethnographic study of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, a millenarian New Religious Movement of south-Asian origin. In the PhD, that later became my first book, I was interested in the ways in which the Brahma Kumaris’ millennialism had developed over the last seventy or so years, from a position of world rejection to what I termed ‘world ambivalence’, as well as how this ambivalence was manifested in both the movement as a whole and among the movement’s membership. 

• ‘From World Rejection to Ambivalence: the Development of Millenarianism in the Brahma Kumaris’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 14, no. 3 (1999), pp. 375-85
 
• ‘The Brahma Kumaris’ in Barker, C and Tyldesley, M. Sixth International Conference on Alternative Futures and Popular Protest: A Selection of Papers from the Conference, 25 - 27 April 2000, Volume II. Manchester Metropolitan University, (2000), pp. 148-60.


• ‘The Problem of “Tradition” in the Work of Anthony Giddens’, Culture & Religion, vol. 2, no. 2 (2001), pp. 81-98.


• The Brahma Kumaris as a ‘Reflexive Tradition’: Responding to Late Modernity , (2002) Oxon: Ashgate

Relationships Between the Living and the Dead Within Contemporary Spiritualism

Towards the end of my PhD work I became interested in spiritualism, and found that there had not been any ethnographic work in the area since the late 1960s. Consequently, during 2000, I conducted an ethnographic study of my local spiritualist centre. Drawing on work in bereavement counselling and the sociology of death, I was interested in the role that mediumship played in maintaining bonds between the living and the dead, and the impact that messages from the deceased had on the living. In 2004, I began a follow-up investigation and interviewed a number of mediums about their lives and the process by which they became mediums. I have never written this material up for publication, and it would make a good starting point for any PhD in the area.  

• ‘Continuing Bonds: Relationships between the Living and the Dead within Contemporary Spiritualism’, Mortality, vol. 6, no. 2 (2001), pp. 127-145

 In 2001, I returned to one of the central themes of my PhD: the ways in which traditions are drawn on and (re)created in the contemporary world. As a case-study, I looked at the work of the British author Graham Hancock who, over the course of the 1990s, wrote several popular books where he developed a form of modern Atlanticism. Noting a number of similarities across a number of mythological systems (relating particularly to ‘culture gods’ and the notion of a giant flood) and the ways in which a number of ancient monuments are aligned to constellations, Hancock suggested that these revealed the ‘fingerprints’ of an ancient, lost civilisation. In the work I published on Hancock’s work (which I co-wrote with Wayne Spencer), we eschewed the historical or scientific accuracy of his claims, and focused instead on how t may be understood within the context of the contemporary ‘spiritual supermarket’ and re-traditionalising trends.

• (with Wayne Spencer) ‘The Lost Aisle: Selling Atlantis in the “Spiritual Supermarket”’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Vol. 3, (2003), http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art-atlantis-print.html

I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of couples of wouldn’t darken a church’s door deciding that that they would nevertheless like to be married in one. In 2001, I decided to investigate this phenomenon and interviewed a number of couples, registrars, and religious ministers to ascertain their views and experiences. My conclusions were that couples’ choice of a church stemmed less from some form of latent religiosity, but rather because of several factors bound up with ‘tradition’; that is churches looked better (or ‘more traditional’) than secular buildings, it was what was expected by their parents and families, and because it was perceived by the couples as ‘the done thing’ to do.  

• "Loved the Wedding, Invite me to the Marriage”: The Secularisation of Weddings in Contemporary Britain’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 7, no. 4. (2002) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/4/Walliss.html

Religion and Social Theory

Over the course of my PhD studies I became more and more critical of both the ways in which religion was discussed within contemporary social theory, and the absence of any real engagement with broader theoretical debates within the sociology of religion. One outcome of this was a collection of essays that I co-edited with Jim Beckford, which brought together a number of international figures who were interested in the intersection of social theory and the sociology of religion. I also edited a special edition of the journal Fieldwork in Religion on the topic.

• (Co-editor with James A. Beckford) Theorising Religion: Classical and Contemporary Debates, Oxon, Ashgate, (2006)


• Fieldwork in Religion: Special Issue on the Sociology of Religion (vol 1. no. 3, 2006)

Apocalyptic Trajectories

From the very beginning of my academic career I have been interested in contemporary manifestations of apocalypticism/millennialism, particularly its relationship to violence. In 2004, I published Apocalyptic Trajectories, which was a comparative analysis of several recent examples of violence involving millennial religious movements (such as, for example, Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians, and the Order of the Solar Temple). My goal in the book was to examine comparatively each group’s respective ‘apocalyptic trajectory’ or path to violence, highlighting the central recurring internal and external factors in each. One consequence of this research is that I have become more and more critical of the dominant paradigm, at least among US scholars, of millennial violence. In contrast to these scholars who would locate the genesis of millennial violence in the interaction of millennial groups and real or perceived hostile forces in the outside world, I have sought in my subsequent work to shift attention back to the internal characteristics of the groups themselves. In particular, I have drawn attention to the role of what I term ‘crises of charismatic authority’ in the unravelling of these groups and their subsequent turn to violence.

• Apocalyptic Trajectories: Millenarianism in the Contemporary World , Oxon: Peter Lang AG. (2004)
 
• ‘Peoples Temple’, Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, 2004. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~remoore/jonestown/


• ‘The African Jonestown? Making Sense of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God’, Nova Religio, 9 (1), (2005) pp. 49-66


• ‘Millenarianism and Violence in the Contemporary World’, in Newport, K.G.C. and Gribben, C. (eds) Contemporary Millennialism: Expectations of the End in Social and Historical Context. Baylor, TX: Baylor University Press, (2006), pp. 25-48.
   
• ‘Crises of Charismatic Authority and Millenarian Violence: The Case of the Order of the Solar Temple’, in Lewis, J. (ed.) The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death. Aldershot: Ashgate, (2006), pp. 105-116.


• ‘Millenarian Violence and Persecution: Rethinking the Role of Cultural Opposition’, in M. Leppäkari & J. Peste (eds.), Hotbilder: våld, agression och religion, Åbo Akademi, Finland, (2006), pp. 177-94.
 
• ‘Charisma, Volatility and Violence: Assessing the Role of Crises of Charismatic Authority in Precipitating Incidents of Millenarian Violence’, in Ahlbäck, T. (ed.) Exercising Religion: The Role of Religions in Concord and Conflict. Abo, Finland: the Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History (2006), pp. 404-24.
 
• ‘Understanding Contemporary Millenarian Violence’, Religion Compass, 1 (4), (2007), pp. 498-511.
 
• ‘Millenarianism and Violence’, in Wessinger, C. (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. (under contract)

Apocalypse and Popular Culture

Over the last year or so, I have become more and more interested in the ways in which apocalyptic ideas and themes are found within popular culture, particularly in films. I have also become interested in the phenomenon of ‘rapture films’; films produced by evangelical Christian filmmakers to portray a popularised premillenial/dispensationalist account of the End times, and the fate of those ‘left behind’ within it. Over the next few years, I will be editing a number of volumes on this topic for a series with Sheffield Phoenix Press. At present five volumes are planned, covering film, music, the Left Behind series, Comics and Graphic Novels, and the internet/electronic forms of communication, and it is anticipated that the first volume in the series will be published in 2010

• (eds. with Lee Quinby) Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film. Sheffield: Phoenix Press (forthcoming 2010)

 

PhD Supervision

I would be interested in supervising theses in most areas of the sociology of religion, particularly in the areas of alternative religions or religion and popular culture. I would particularly welcome applications in the broad area of contemporary apocalypticism/millennialism, either in terms of its relationship to violence or the ways in which apocalyptic themes and motifs are found within popular culture.