New Religious Movements

42 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

Modern movements that came into open conflict with the society around them. Sociologists of religion mark a sect or a new religious movement off from a settled church by its tension with the surrounding world, and what this heading collects is the part of that class where the tension entered the public record: litigation and criminal conviction, official inquiry, and in several cases mass death, from Peoples Temple and Heaven's Gate to Aum Shinrikyo and NXIVM. The selection criterion is notoriety, and saying so is fairer than claiming a neutrality the list does not have. Movements that are simply new are filed under Religions, in the New Religious Movement grouping, where Cao Dai, Tenrikyo, Cheondoism and Falun Gong will be found. The word cult is contested in the study of religion, and the entries stay with what is documented: a court judgment and a hostile press campaign are not recorded as the same finding.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 42
What Defines This Grouping: Movements formed in the modern era around a founder, a new revelation or a distinctive practice, and standing in tension with the surrounding society - the feature that distinguishes a sect or new religious movement from a church in the sociology of religion. 1

Origins

Origin of the Name: From Latin cultus, the care or tending owed to a god - the sense kept in a phrase such as the cult of Mithras. The pejorative sense is a twentieth-century development and is not the sense meant here. 2

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category: Contested: in ordinary use the word delivers a verdict rather than describing a thing, and the study of religion has largely replaced it with new religious movement. Several groups classed this way contest the word as defamatory. 3

Sources

New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction Eileen Barker, 1989
The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), 2012, s.v. cult
Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, 1981

Learn More

What This Heading Collects

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.

A contested word, and where the rest are filed

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.