New religious movement

• 1. Introduction

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  A new religious movement is a religious or spiritual group with modern origins, sitting at the edge of its society's dominant religious culture. Scholars have estimated that these movements number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most have only a few members. Some have thousands. A few have more than a million.

  There is no single, agreed-upon test for what counts as one. Even the word "new" splits the experts. Some scholars treat the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the dividing line. Others reach back to 1830, or to 1838, depending on how far modernity stretches.

  Why do these groups multiply when older faiths feel settled? Why have some of them ended in mass death, and why do so many quietly fade once their founder dies? And why did one professor tell a national newspaper that dozens of new ones appear every single year? The answers run through scripture, celibacy, succession, and a decades-long fight over the word "cult".

• 2. A Century Of Foundings

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  In 1830, Joseph Smith founded the Latter Day Saint movement, which by 2023 counted over 17 million members. Eight years later in Japan, 1838 marked the beginning of Tenrikyo. In 1844, Bábism was established in Iran, and from it Bahá'u'lláh founded the Baháʼí Faith in 1863. In 1860, Choi Jae-Woo founded Donghak, later Cheondoism, in Korea, which ignited the Donghak Peasant Revolution in 1894.

  In 1889, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad founded Ahmadiyya, an Islamic branch. Two years later, in 1891, the Unity Church became the first New Thought denomination in the United States. In 1911, Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church in South Africa, one of the largest modern African initiated churches.

  The 1930s brought a wave across continents at once. The Nation of Islam and the Jehovah's Witnesses rose in the United States. The Rastafari movement rose in Jamaica. Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo appeared in Vietnam, Soka Gakkai in Japan, and Zailiism and Yiguandao in China. In the 1940s, Gerald Gardner began outlining the modern pagan religion of Wicca.

  In 1954, L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology in the United States, a movement that can be considered a psychotherapy-oriented religion. That same year, Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in South Korea. In 1955, the Aetherius Society was founded in England, one of the so-called UFO religions that pair belief in extraterrestrial life with traditional religious principles.

• 3. The Cult Wars

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  From the late 1960s through the 1980s, new religious movements became especially visible across parts of North America and Western Europe. Many recruited among young adults shaped by post-war social change and the counterculture. In contemporary discourse this conjuncture was sometimes called a "cult boom". In the apologist literature of the Christian countercult movement, it was framed as a "cult explosion".

  The same decades produced what scholars describe as the "cult controversy", or "cult wars". Disputes erupted over conversion, over allegations of coercive persuasion, over family conflict, deprogramming, and litigation. A secular anti-cult movement and a Christian countercult movement both emerged during the 1970s and 1980s to oppose the new groups.

  The anti-cult movement borrowed the word "brainwashing". The journalist Edward Hunter developed the term, and Robert J. Lifton then used it for methods the Chinese employed to convert captured US soldiers during the Korean War. Lifton himself doubted whether his brainwashing hypothesis applied to how new religions recruit. Academic research later concluded that such brainwashing techniques "simply do not exist".

  Public fears around Satanism crystallised into a distinct phenomenon known as the "Satanic Panic". Scholars such as Eileen Barker, James T. Richardson, Timothy Miller, and Catherine Wessinger argued the term "cult" had become too laden with negative meaning and advocated dropping it in academia. Of the well over a thousand groups in the files of INFORM, Barker writes, the vast majority have committed no criminal activity.

• 4. Naming The Unnameable

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  J. Gordon Melton argued that these movements should be defined by how dominant religious and secular forces treat them. For him they were groups found, from the perspective of the dominant religious community, to be "not just different, but unacceptably different". Barker pushed back, warning that denying the "newness" of new religious movements is itself the problem, since their newness explains many of their key traits.

  George Chryssides favored a simpler test: an organisation founded within the past 150 or so years that cannot be easily classified within one of the world's main religious traditions. Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein went further, arguing that "new religions are just young religions" and so are "not inherently different" from established ones. Melton noted that movements which split from older groups tended to resemble their parent groups more than each other.

  Barker captured the moving target with a list. "In the first century, Christianity was new, in the seventh century Islam was new, in the eighteenth century Methodism was new." The Seventh-day Adventists, Christadelphians, and Jehovah's Witnesses were new in the nineteenth century. By the twenty-first century, she observed, the Unification Church, ISKCON, and Scientology are beginning to look old.

  The phrase "new religions" is a calque of a Japanese term coined for the spread of Japanese new religions after the Second World War. From Japan it was translated by American authors including Jacob Needleman, who used it for groups in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s. Other scholars preferred their own labels: "alternative religious movements", "emergent religions", and "marginal religious movements".

• 5. Scripture And Celibacy

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  The Urantia Book, the core scripture of the Urantia Movement, was published in 1955. Its followers describe it as the product of a continuous process of revelation from "celestial beings" that began in 1911. Other new religions reinterpret existing texts, often claiming these are not new at all but forgotten truths being revived. Many incorporate modern scientific knowledge, sometimes claiming to unify science and religion.

  Some movements promote celibacy, the state of voluntarily being unmarried, sexually abstinent, or both. The Shakers, and more recent groups inspired by Hindu traditions, treat it as a lifelong commitment. The Unification Church treats it instead as a stage in spiritual development. In some Buddhist movements, celibacy is practised mostly by older women who become nuns.

  Groups that promote celibacy need a strong recruitment drive simply to survive. The Shakers tried one answer that doubled as charity. They established orphanages, hoping the children would grow into members of the community.

• 6. When Belief Turns Deadly

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  Violent incidents involving new religions are very rare, and the events with the largest death tolls share one feature: a charismatic leader. 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 1994, members of the Order of the Solar Temple died by suicide in Canada and Switzerland.

  In 1997-39 members of the Heaven's Gate group died by suicide, believing their spirits would leave the Earth and join a passing comet. Other deaths followed not from suicide but from a mistaken belief in invincibility. In Uganda, several hundred members of the Holy Spirit Movement were killed as they walked toward gunfire, because their leader Alice Lakwena had told them the oil of the shea tree would protect them from bullets.

  Opposition has often turned violent in the other direction too. In 1844, a lynch mob killed Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. In India there have been mob killings of members of the Ananda Marga group. In Iran, followers of the Baháʼí Faith have faced persecution, and the Ahmadiyya have faced similar violence in Pakistan.

• 7. After The Founder

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  The death of a founder is the most dangerous moment in a new religion's life. In the months and years that follow, the movement can die out, fragment into multiple groups, consolidate its position, or change into something its founder never intended. Some founders planned ahead to prevent confusion.

  Mary Baker Eddy, the American founder of Christian Science, spent fifteen years writing The Manual of the Mother Church, which laid out how her successors should run the group. The leadership of the Baháʼí Faith passed through a succession of individuals until 1963, when it was assumed by the Universal House of Justice, elected by the worldwide congregation. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of ISKCON, appointed 11 "Western Gurus" as initiating gurus to direct the organisation.

  That plan did not hold. According to the 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". Younger movements carry a related strain in their membership, since they consist largely of first-generation believers and skew younger than mainstream congregations. As those members age and raise children inside the movement, a second generation begins to inherit a faith its parents chose.

• 8. Persecution And Study

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  In 1992, Li Hongzhi first taught Falun Gong publicly in Northeast China. The Chinese government accepted it at first, and by 1999 there were 70 million practitioners. In July 1999, the government began to view the movement as a threat and started attempts to eradicate it. Ethan Gutmann interviewed over 100 witnesses and estimated that 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs from 2000 to 2008.

  Academic attention arrived alongside the controversy. A distinct field of new religion studies developed within the academic study of religion in the 1970s, drawing on anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Barker identified five sources of information: the groups themselves, ex-members and their families, organisations that collect data, the mainstream media, and academics. Most research has been directed toward the new religions that attract public controversy, while quieter ones go understudied.

  Not everyone in the field accepts the alarm. Dick Anthony, a forensic psychologist known for his work on the brainwashing controversy, argued in 1988 that involvement may often be beneficial. He pointed to a large research literature in mainstream journals, saying the mental health effects "seem to be positive in any way that's measurable".

  In 2006, J. Gordon Melton, executive director of the Institute for the Study of American Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The New York Times that 40 to 45 new religious movements emerge each year in the United States. A year later, in 2007, the scholar Elijah Siegler observed that although no new religion had become the dominant faith in any country, many of the ideas they first introduced, often called "New Age", had entered worldwide mainstream culture.