"Like Armageddon": Kōfuku no Kagaku and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Kōfuku no Kagaku is a most visible new religious actor in contemporary Japan thanks to the vast publishing activities of its founder and its widespread professional use of new media. This paper examines how Kōfuku no Kagaku engages with the COVID-19 pandemic in practical and doctrinal terms. Notably...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Pokorny, Lukas 1980- (Author) ; Mayer, Patricia Sophie (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: MDPI 2022
In: Religions
Year: 2022, Volume: 13, Issue: 5
Further subjects:B New Religious Movement
B Millenarianism
B Coronavirus
B Covid-19
B Japan
B Happy Science
B Kōfuku no Kagaku
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Summary:Kōfuku no Kagaku is a most visible new religious actor in contemporary Japan thanks to the vast publishing activities of its founder and its widespread professional use of new media. This paper examines how Kōfuku no Kagaku engages with the COVID-19 pandemic in practical and doctrinal terms. Notably, early in the pandemic, Kōfuku no Kagaku’s international promotion of spiritual cures and vaccines even prompted The New York Times to feature the group in a widely circulated article in April 2020. This paper outlines these "spiritual technologies" and examines their doctrinal rationale as well as the wider doctrinal appropriation of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be shown how the latter is instrumentalised to echo Kōfuku no Kagaku’s millenarian agenda.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel13050428