History of New Religious Movements

The history of new religious movements studies the origin, growth and organisation of religious groups founded in the modern period, establishing when and by whom a movement was actually founded and how its teachings and structure have changed since, rather than repeating a movement's own account of its founding uncritically. The British sociologist Bryan Wilson published Religious Sects, a Sociological Study in 1970, setting out a rigorous typology of sect formation, precise definitions distinguishing a sect from a denomination, that gave scholars a shared analytical vocabulary for classifying how a new movement forms, splits and institutionalizes.

A modern religious movement's own founding narrative, a vision, a revelation, a specific founding date, is a claim the movement makes about itself, and the history of new religious movements supplies the documentary cross checking, contemporary records, founder biographies, organisational charters, needed to establish what actually happened and when. The atlas draws on Wilson's typology and the discipline it founded wherever a modern movement's origin, leadership succession or doctrinal development is described, reporting the documented history rather than either the movement's own hagiography or an outsider's dismissal.