From Faith-Healing Group to New Religion: The Discursive Formulation of Tenrikyo in Meiji

Tenrikyo is a popular religious movement founded in the nineteenth century based on the revelation of Nakayama Miki. The group become a Shinto sect in 1908 only after reforms in response to charges of “superstitious” faith healing and heterodoxy. These reform efforts are often presented as a part of a victim narrative of a new, universal but magical “revealed religion” struggling to persevere against the modern Shinto-centric establishment through compromise. I propose that this narrative has it backwards: the negotiation between “religion” and its supposed opposite, “superstition,” affected Miki’s healing group in its efforts to construct its self-image as the original revealed “new religion” Tenrikyo. Contrasting publications from the 1890s shows that both critics and proponents operated within the same discursive field to delegitimize or legitimize Tenrikyo, respectively. This entailed negotiating the meaning of religious salvation and healing by strategically relating their arguments to the paradigm of science and the Christian-occidental exclusivistic concept of “revealed religion.” This article gives legitimate agency back to proponents of new religious movements, showing how they strove to provide scientifically legitimate interpretations of their faith in modern times.