History

While new religions are documented throughout history, the term New Religious Movement (NRM) has its origins in the “cult wars” or ‘cult scare’ in western countries during the 1970s and 1980s. A plethora of NRMs emerged in these countries from the 1950s through both migration and through changing social dynamics, including greater opportunities for young people to explore spiritual journeys and become “seekers”.

NRMs really came to the forefront of public consciousness in the 1970s, with the murder-suicides of more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple living in the Jonestown community in the jungle of Guyana in 1978. Jonestown’s leader, Jim Jones, became the stereotypical charismatic “cult leader”, ordering his followers to consume a fruit drink laced with cyanide, and sacrifice their lives, rather than relinquish the values of the community. Jones, 47, died with his followers.

The popular fear of new religions being involved in violence continues because of occasional high-profile tragedies, such as the Japanese group Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway, which left 13 dead and hundreds injured by the sarin nerve agent. NRMs are also sometimes associated in the public imagination with group suicide, such as the Heaven’s Gate incident in 1997 in which 39 members of a UFO-based movement died, or being attacked by government agents with tragic results, such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993. However, the vast majority of new religions exist without violent episodes that make headlines.

In the period after the Second World War, tensions often arose between young adult converts to NRMs and their families and friends. Relatives sometimes elicited the help of various “anti-cult” organisations to try to “rescue” the converts through various means — from encouragement and interventions through to kidnap and forcible “deprogramming”. These actions were often based on the premise that the convert was a “victim” who had been “brainwashed” into joining the movement.

While deprogramming is now illegal in both the United States and UK it still takes place in some east Asian countries and the stereotype of the brainwashed cult member remains popular. It was in response to this context that some scholars of religion, including Eileen Barker and Gordon Melton, began using the term New Religious Movement to provide a more academic and objective starting point for analysing these movements.

What exactly is a New Religious Movement?

While different scholars have different definitions of a new religious movement, the term is generally used to cover a variety of newer, alternative religious and spiritual movements that may be of new origin or a breakaway from an established religion. Some NRMs may have split from an established religion, such as the Neo-Charismatic Movement or the Jesus People, both of which were established in response to criticisms of “mainstream” Christianity. Sometimes, NRMs emerge from combining beliefs and practices found within a counterculture, as a critique of current social structures, capitalism or society itself.

Although the term NRM has provided a more neutral approach in academic discourse, there has been much disagreement over what kind of groups should and should not be covered by the term. One such debate is how to define what timespan “new” refers to. Some argue “new” primarily means that the NRM should be younger than the majority of the established religions (such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism), although without specifying an exact time period. However, others such as the sociologist Roy Wallis argue NRMs only began to emerge in the 1950s and places the end of the Second World War as the criterion for a new religious movement.

Gordon Melton, an historian and theologian, takes a different approach. He argues “new” religions usually develop in tension with society and he therefore understands “new” to mean the tense interaction between the emerging religion and wider culture. “New”, for Melton, refers more to the deviation from social norms and less to their year of origin. Some groups which are relatively old still retain the tensions noted by Melton and are sometimes considered “cults” in popular discourse. For instance, the sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson names the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh-day Adventists and the Salvation Army as the first NRMs, thus expanding the time span all the way back to the 1830s.

Eileen Barker prefers a sociological framing of a “new” religion; she argues that NRMs involve a charismatic leader and a membership base of converts (the first-generation membership). These social characteristics create the potential for beliefs and practices that diverge significantly from social norms and for more volatile responses in the face of opposition. Barker has argued that as the second and third generations are born into an NRM, the movement needs to interact with the surrounding society to a greater extent and can go through a process of “denominationalisation”, becoming less alternative and converging more with “mainstream” society and/or religious movements.

More recently some scholars have highlighted the importance of new information technology, noting that new religious movements were often early adopters of new media. Therefore, some have argued that only religious movements which were established as “internet natives” are at this point truly “new” as a social phenomena. The internet has made it much easier to disseminate teachings worldwide, so that new religious teachings, practices, and philosophies can circulate quickly.