Spirituality – Anthroposophy

Anthroposophy

Reception

Religious Nature

As an explicitly spiritual movement, anthroposophy has sometimes been called a religious philosophy. In 2005, a California federal court ruled that a group alleging that anthroposophy is a religion for Establishment Clause purposes did not provide any legally admissible evidence in support of this view; the case is under appeal. In 2000, a French court ruled that a government minister’s description of anthroposophy as a cult was defamatory.

Statements on Race

Anthroposophical ideas have been criticized from both sides in the race debate:

• From the mid-1930s on, National Socialist ideologues attacked the anthroposophical world-view as being opposed to Nazi racist and nationalistic principles; anthroposophy considered “Blood, Race and Folk” as primitive instincts that must be overcome.
• “A naive version of the evolution of consciousness, a theory foundational to both Steiner’s anthroposophy and Waldorf education, sometimes places one race below another in one or another dimension of development”.

The Anthroposophical Society in America has stated:

• We explicitly reject any racial theory that may be construed to be part of Rudolf Steiner’s writings. The Anthroposophical Society in America is an open, public society and it rejects any purported spiritual or scientific theory on the basis of which the alleged superiority of one race is justified at the expense of another race.

Luc Paquin