New Religious Movements

The movements grouped here are modern: nearly all of them formed within the last century, around a single founder, a new revelation or a distinctive practice. That is the loose half of the description. The part the grouping actually rests on is narrower: each of these movements came into conflict with the society around it, and the conflict left a public record.

Sociology of religion supplies the first half. What marks a sect or a new religious movement off from a settled church is tension with the surrounding world, and every movement here stood in such tension. What this atlas has added is a threshold. Collected under this heading are the cases where the tension stopped being a matter of unfamiliarity and became a matter of record: civil litigation, criminal conviction, official inquiry, and in a number of cases mass death.

That threshold is an editorial decision rather than a scholarly category, and it is set out here instead of being left to be inferred from the list. The selection criterion is notoriety. A reader is owed that plainly, because the alternative is a heading that looks like a neutral survey of modern religion and is not one.

Cult is contested in the study of religion. In ordinary use it delivers a verdict rather than describing anything, and Bromley and Shupe's Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare argued in 1981 that the panic of that decade was itself the thing most in need of explanation. Several groups classed this way contest the word as defamatory. The heading is kept because the grouping it makes is a real one, and it is offset by saying what the grouping is rather than by pretending the word is harmless.

Movements that are new and unfamiliar without being in conflict with anyone are not filed here. They are treated as religions in their own right, under Religions in the New Religious Movement grouping, where Cao Dai, Tenrikyo, Cheondoism, Falun Gong, Spiritism, Spiritualism, New Thought, Eckankar and Discordianism will be found. A reader who came to this page expecting Tenrikyo should look there.

The entries within this heading are not all of a kind either, and the difference matters. Some concern movements whose leaders were tried and convicted. Some concern movements whose reputation rests on journalism and on the accounts of former members and has never been tested in a court. A few concern movements that were as much the object of hostility as the source of it. Each entry says which it is, and describes the beliefs and practices in the same terms it would use for any tradition.