"They're Going to Make it a Religion"

I grew up in the United States Baba world, i.e. the small group of a couple thousand Americans who still identify as followers of Meher Baba. There’s a saying I heard all my life from the older baby boom followers. It was, ‘They’re going to make it a religion.’ These followers would say this despondently and then sigh as if facing some sad inevitability. Is that really inevitable? I want to explore this idea that the Baba world will soon become a religion.

The first question one needs to ask is 'Who are the they they have in mind that are going to do this?' Their words give the impression they envision some kind of outsider. It invokes a sense of other, some intruder? 

This kind of xenophobia about outsiders is common to cults.

What is this sense of other that they are calling future religion? What are the traits they feel a religion has that they don't have? In what sense are they not a religion?

Well, it is likely they are speaking of religion as a religious organization that has a centralized authority, establishes doctrines, enforces compliance with that doctrine, has initiation rituals and membership rolls, collects fees, has a priesthood, builds houses of worship, and has an enlarged organizational outreach and proselytizing. 

There are many problems with this vision. Religions of the past had a need for doctrinal clarity because people were illiterate and did not have access to scriptures they could read for themselves. Today the vast majority of the world is literate and books are cheap. The Avatar Meher Baba Trust even has Baba's books freely available online. So, if debates occurred over the meaning of what Baba wrote, mediation by a central authority would be unnecessary. People could work these issues out on their own. The marketplace of ideas is a concept where truth and best concepts emerge naturally when diverse opinions are allowed to compete in open, unregulated public discourse. Such openness would best conform to Baba's own words on the importance of individuality and personal conscience.

And even if a central authority, such as the Avatar Meher Baba Trust in India, chose to dictate some interpretation of what Baba said, rather than let people read and consider it for themselves, what possible form of enforcement would they have?

My next point is this. Today, in the United States, half a century after Baba's passing, there are about 2000 Baba followers. Most of them are over 70. That is fewer than would fit in a single modern megachurch today. In other words, Baba's teachings have had little appeal to Americans. What would change to cause people to so flood Baba centers across America that a religion would need to be created?

In response to this many Baba followers would likely cite Baba's words about breaking his silence. But this assumes that a social trend is coming where people are so attracted to the idea of following Meher Baba exclusively, that they volunteer to come under some central authority. This means that they don't know what he taught, for he definitely said he did not want that.

The Baba world is already what sociologists call a folk religion. Folk religions include beliefs and practices transmitted culturally rather than through formal theology. Folk Religion is based on very low standards of word-of-mouth. Formal religion generally evolves to weed out the strangest of interpretations of a set of founding texts or sources. And it allows for some basic common principles to be established.

People are of course free to choose a formal religion, find a group of like-minded people to form their own unique one, or leave religion altogether and seek God directly or with a master.

The idea that the forming of a religion around the teachings of Meher Baba seems extremely unlikely, but even if it ever happened it is not necessarily a bad thing. For many of the current views now forming are truly strange.

I wish to point out another possibly that such people don't seem to have considered. That is that Baba's teaching may be viewed in the future as a moral and cosmological philosophy as opposed to a formal religion. An example of this is Confucianism. 

Scholars generally agree that Confucianism is better described as an ethical and philosophical system rather than a traditional religion. However, its classification remains nuanced, and many experts prefer to call it a "way of life" or "civil religion" because it addresses spiritual, cosmological, and moral dimensions. Why it is NOT a traditional religion. No Organized Church: Unlike Christianity or Islam, Confucianism does not have a formal priesthood, a centralized governing body, or a strict institutional hierarchy. 

The Scholarly Consensus. Most experts categorize Confucianism as a deeply humanistic spiritual philosophy. In East Asia, its teachings are often so deeply intertwined with local traditions (like Buddhism and Taoism) that people often practice Confucian ethics alongside another religion without contradiction.

My Opinion

Here, then, is my opinion on the matter. Will people in the future establish one or more religions around the life and teachings of Meher Baba? Unless things change very drastically, and there is no sign of that happening, it is highly unlikely. Most people have never heard of Meher Baba, and numbers of followers are going down, not up, mostly due to his few remaining followers from the 1960s and 70s dying of old age. Outside of India and Iran, his followers under 40 worldwide are in the hundreds.

World conditions might change, and unforeseen events could cause a renewed interest in his and other spiritual teachers from the 20th century. Or a wildly successful movie or video game based on his teachings could come along and cause such a stir. 

Baba himself strongly implied there would be a new philosophical interest in his teachings and his samadhi in India in about 13 years.

Seventy years after I drop my body [hence around 2039], this place [his samadhi in India] will turn into a place of pilgrimage, where lovers of God, philosophers and celebrities will come to pay homage. (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 5296)

I have long gambled on that prophecy coming true, though I have to admit there is no current sign of that being possible. We will see.

I think it would be a nice thing if there were a religion, though I would likely not join it. It would be a nice thing for others. Or it could be nice if some of his teaching were adopted as a new non-sectarian moral and cosmological philosophy like Confucianism. 

And of course it is silly to speak of one religion. Why not several? Or something we have not thought of before.

One more consideration is the time factor. A person may seem more respectable when their name is very old. For instance, before Emperor Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism in 263 BCE Buddhism consisted of only a few thousand monks and nuns. This was over 250 years after the death of the Buddha. So some important similar conversion might happen in a couple hundred years, leading to Baba's name spreading.