New religious movement
[4] Some scholars view the 1950s or the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the defining time,[5] while others look as far back as the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830[4][6] and of Tenrikyo in 1838.
[26][27] Sabina Magliocco, professor of Anthropology and Folklore at California State University, Northridge, has discussed the growing popularity of new religious movements on the Internet.
[29] In 2007, religious scholar Elijah Siegler said that, though no NRM had become the dominant faith in any country, many of the concepts they first introduced (often referred to as "New Age" ideas) have become part of worldwide mainstream culture.
"[33] Bryan Wilson wrote, "Chief among the miss-directed assertions has been the tendency to speak of new religious movements as if they differed very little, if at all, one from another.
[44] Some people join NRMs and practice celibacy as a rite of passage in order to move beyond previous sexual problems or bad experiences.
[47] Beginning in 1978, the deaths of 913 members of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, by both murder and suicide brought an image of "killer cults" to public attention.
In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group committed suicide in the belief that their spirits would leave the Earth and join a passing comet.
For example, in Uganda, several hundred members of the Holy Spirit Movement were killed as they approached gunfire because its leader, Alice Lakwena, told them that they would be protected from bullets by the oil of the shea tree.
Over the months and years following its leader's death, the movement can die out, fragment into multiple groups, consolidate its position, or change its nature to become something quite different from what its founder intended.
Mary Baker Eddy, the American founder of Christian Science, spent fifteen years working on her book The Manual of the Mother Church, which laid out how the group should be run by her successors.
[52] The leadership of the Baháʼí Faith passed through a succession of individuals until 1963, when it was assumed by the Universal House of Justice, members of which are elected by the worldwide congregation.
[55][56][57] However, according to British scholar of religion Gavin Flood, "many problems followed from their appointment and the movement has since veered away from investing absolute authority in a few, fallible, human teachers.
[62] Within Western countries, they are more likely to appeal to members of the middle and upper-middle classes,[62] with Barrett stating that new religions in the UK and US largely attract "white, middle-class late teens and twenties".
[64] Dick Anthony, a forensic psychologist noted for his writings on the brainwashing controversy,[65][66] has defended NRMs, and in 1988 argued that involvement in such movements may often be beneficial: "There's a large research literature published in mainstream journals on the mental health effects of new religions.
[68] According to Marc Galanter, professor of psychiatry at NYU,[69] typical reasons why people join NRMs include a search for community and a spiritual quest.
[70] A popular explanation for why people join new religious movements is that they have been "brainwashed" or subject to "mind control" by the NRM itself.
[71] This explanation provides a rationale for "deprogramming", a process in which members of NRMs are illegally kidnapped by individuals who then attempt to convince them to reject their beliefs.
[85] This came to change in later scholarship, which began to apply theories and methods initially developed for examining more mainstream religions to the study of new ones.
[89] George Chryssides favors "simple" definition; for him, NRM is an organization founded within the past 150 or so years, which cannot be easily classified within one of the world's main religious traditions.
[97] This is because various groups, particularly active within the New Age milieu, have many traits in common with different NRMs but emphasise personal development and humanistic psychology, and are not clearly "religious" in nature.
[107] From Japan this term was translated and used by several American authors, including Jacob Needleman, to describe the range of groups that appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s.
[113] Consequently, scholars such as Eileen Barker, James T. Richardson, Timothy Miller and Catherine Wessinger argued that the term "cult" had become too laden with negative connotations, and "advocated dropping its use in academia".
Real or serious religions, it was felt, should appear in recognizable institutionalized forms, be suitably ancient, and – above all – advocate relatively familiar theological notions and modes of conduct.
The 1938 book The Chaos of Cults by Jan Karel van Baalen (1890–1968), an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, was especially influential.
[132][133] In the 1970s and 1980s, some NRMs as well as some non-religious groups came under opposition by the newly organized anti-cult movement, which mainly charged them with psychological abuse of their own members.
[136] The anti-cult movement adopted the term brainwashing, which had been developed by the journalist Edward Hunter and then used by Robert J. Lifton to apply to the methods employed by Chinese to convert captured US soldiers to their cause in the Korean War.
For instance, in the late 1980s a man in Dublin, Ireland, was given a three-year suspended sentence for falsely claiming that he had been drugged, kidnapped, and held captive by members of ISKCON.
[139] Of the "well over a thousand groups that have been or might be called cults" listed in the files of INFORM, writes Eileen Barker, the "vast majority" have not engaged in criminal activities.
[140] New religious movements and cults have appeared as themes or subjects in literature and popular culture, while notable representatives of such groups have produced a large body of literary works.
In the twentieth century, concern for the rights and feelings of religious minorities led authors to most often invent fictional cults for their villains to be members of.
