Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Database of Religious History (DRH) is fast becoming an established resource for scholars wishing to study the cultural evolutionary dynamics of religion in a historical context. Hosted at the University of British Columbia, it features contributions from over 425 global scholars. There is simply no other platform like it: open access, expert vetted, easily interfaceable, thickly qualitative and designed for quantitative hypothesis testing. The DHR has great promise in helping scholars address questions about cultural morphologies and religion’s facilitation of prosocial cooperative norms. Such questions have, to date, mostly focused on religion’s deep past. As the platform grows, changes are needed to fully realize its potential to become a clearinghouse of data for New Religions. Experts of New Religions currently complete the ‘Religious Group’ poll, but have struggled to articulate their dataset within its epistemic expectations of pre-modern religious formations. The existing poll type cannot fully accommodate the definitional debates, flexible membership, and epistemic paradigms central to many New Religions, esoteric groups and modern spiritualities. This paper describes the creation of a new poll, driven by refined epistemological assumptions and precise categories, which can marshal data on the contemporary formations of New Religions to address two perennial questions in the cultural evolution of religion. First, what structural factors contribute to the mainstream integration and institutional longevity within such groups? Second, how can empirical definitions of New Religions emerge from culture trait clustering within discrete cultural areas? These questions are addressed at the Digital Humanities interface with considerable interdisciplinarity.