Is the inner healing movement in Lithuania a local religious response to the cultural trauma of Socialism?

Abstract

This article analyses the pattern of emergence of religious healing movements after society or community goes through periods of totalitarian rule. Totalitarian rule produces so called cultural trauma, which is being transmitted to the next generations. Religious healing movements seem to tackle the issue in religious manner. Authors demonstrate that the pattern itself is found cross-culturally. However, the article focuses on particular religious movement called the Inner Healing movement in Post-Soviet Lithuania. Through the analysis of psychological and social anthropological theories of cultural and transgenerational trauma the authors reveal how the Inner Healing movement can be analysed as society’s attempt to treat the collective trauma produced by the totalitarian rule of Soviet regime. Analysis of the Inner Healing movement through the theory of cultural and transgenerational trauma provides an explanation why the Catholic Charismatic movement which is well known globally, in post-totalitarian Lithuania rapidly underwent modulation towards the local Inner Healing movement, which concentrate all its teaching around the healing aspect of Christianity.