OPPOSITIONAL MILIEUS, RELIGION, AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION

In 1972 philosopher Colin Campbell published a provocative essay about what he called the cultic milieu (Campbell 1972). His key insight was that different individuals and groups within oppositional subcultures engaged in a relatively free exchange of motivational metaphors and tropes, although they generally retained distinctive identities and sometimes even antithetical beliefs and goals. An edited volume from religion scholars Jeffrey Kaplan and Helen Loow (2002) took up Campbell's idea, highlighting the impacts of increasing globalization on oppositional subcultures. Cults thrive, and freely exchange ideas, however, only within a cultural medium in which the dominant cultural milieu—either structurally, intellectually, or academically—facilitates the emergence of cults (Campbell 2002: 14). Campbell's original analysis and Kaplan and Loow's book focused on particularly rich eras in the emergence of alternative subcultures. In Kaplan and Loow's volume, Bron Taylor adapted Campbell's theory by postulating the existence of a global environmentalist milieu, which not only promoted information exchange between environmentalist subcultures but between such subcultures and mainstream individuals and institutions. In a milieu where the characteristics and foci of cults adapt to specific socio-political circumstances, it would be expected that in an age of eco-crisis there would be increasingly strong environmentalist and anti-globalization activity, and hybridity among participants.