Antinomianism, Utopianism, and the Struggle for Community: The Case of the American Hare Krishna Movement

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), known more popularly as the Hare Krishnas, was one of the best-known new religious movements of the 1960s and 1970s American counterculture. Famous for their saffron robes, Indian banquets, and ecstatic dance, the movement’s leaders adeptly deployed their own exoticism to seek publicity and converts. Yet in their willingness to challenge Western norms, such as dress, food, and—of course—religion, ISKCON revealed a strong antinomian impulse. Its members sometimes falsely represented themselves to potential donors and converts, bilked customers, and violated local laws regarding housing and food.

The Hare Krishnas called for nothing less than revolution against the established social norms of the Western world. Such antinomianism surprises historians of Indian religions, since ISKCON originated as a breakaway from a moderate, bourgeoisie Hindu sect with roots in both Anglo-Indian modernism and Indian gentile nativism. I argue here that ISKCON’s antinomianism emerged from its members’ utopianism, particularly their call for the creation of an idealized Indian civilization within the heart of American society. Like other utopian religious groups, ISKCON not only inverted American social and religious norms, but rejected the power of such norms in their quest to establish new ones.

Yet stable social movements require nomos, and antinomianism reached its limit as the Hare Krishnas struggled to mold themselves into a community. As ISKCON’s members turned their transformative utopian agenda within, they increasingly rejected their own antinomian tendencies, seeking greater conformity with the outside world as well as within its own communities. ISKCON’s leadership increasingly stressed the need to accept the force of Western social and legal norms, even as the movement challenged them through the creation of an alternative community. The history of the Hare Krishna movement in America shows that just as utopianism enables antinomianism, it also limits it.