The thirteen-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji astonished festival organisers and the assembled multitudes by turning up unannounced in a white Rolls-Royce, taking over the stage, and delivering an impromptu five-minute satsang (literally, 'truth talk') before the power on the microphone was cut.
Detailed, authoritative, challenging and often controversial, The New Believers is essential reading for anyone with a personal or professional interest in sects, “cults” and new religions and their effects on members and their families.
This phenomenon took place in the United States (and at the edges of American-influenced Canadian society) among young people who had been committed to bringing about what they called "the revolution" but were converting to a wide variety of Eastern and Western mystical and spiritual movements.
Stephen Kent maintains that the failure of political activism led former radicals to become involved with groups such as the Hare Krishnas, Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, the Jesus movement, and the Children of God.
Drawing on scholarly literature, alternative press reportage, and personal narratives, Kent shows how numerous activists turned from psychedelia and political activism to guru worship and spiritual quest as a response to the failures of social protest—and as a new means of achieving societal change.