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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Kōfuku no Kagaku
• Happy Science
• coronavirus
• COVID-19
• millenarianism
• new religious movement