New religious movement
A new religious movement, also known as a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
There is no single, agreed-upon criterion for defining a "new religious movement". Debate continues as to how the term "new" should be interpreted in this context. One perspective is that it should designate a religion that is more recent in its origins than large, well-established old religions like Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Some scholars view the 1950s or the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the defining time, while others look as far back as the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830 and of Tenrikyo in 1838.
New religions have sometimes faced opposition from established religious organisations and secular institutions. In Western nations, a secular anti-cult movement and a Christian countercult movement emerged during the 1970s and 1980s to oppose emergent groups. A distinct field of new religion studies developed within the academic study of religion in the 1970s. There are several scholarly organisations and peer-reviewed journals devoted to the subject. Religious studies scholars contextualize the rise of NRMs in modernity as a product of, and answer to, modern processes of secularization, globalization, detraditionalization, fragmentation, reflexivity, and individualization.
History
In 1830, the Latter Day Saint movement was founded by Joseph Smith. It is one of the largest new religious movements, with over 17 million members in 2023. In Japan, 1838 marks the beginning of Tenrikyo. In 1844, Bábism was established in Iran, from which the Baháʼí Faith was founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 1863. In 1860, Donghak, later Cheondoism, was founded by Choi Jae-Woo in Korea. It later ignited the Donghak Peasant Revolution in 1894. In 1889, Ahmadiyya, an Islamic branch, was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. In 1891, the Unity Church, the first New Thought denomination, was founded in the United States.In 1893, the first Parliament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago. The conference included NRMs of the time such as spiritualism, Baháʼí Faith, and Christian Science. Henry Harris Jessup, who addressed the meeting, was the first to mention the Baháʼí Faith in the United States. Also attending were Soyen Shaku, the "First American Ancestor" of Zen, the Theravāda Buddhist preacher Anagarika Dharmapala, and the Jain preacher Virchand Gandhi. This conference gave Asian religious teachers their first wide American audience.
In 1911, the Nazareth Baptist Church, the first and one of the largest modern African initiated churches, was founded by Isaiah Shembe in South Africa. The early 20th century also saw a rise in interest in Asatru. The 1930s saw the rise of the Nation of Islam and the Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States; the rise of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica; the rise of Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo in Vietnam; the rise of Soka Gakkai in Japan; and the rise of Zailiism and Yiguandao in China. In the 1940s, Gerald Gardner began to outline the modern pagan religion of Wicca.
New religious movements expanded in many nations in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the counterculture movements. Japanese new religions became very popular after the Shinto Directive forced the Japanese government to separate itself from Shinto, which had been the state religion of Japan, bringing about greater freedom of religion.
In 1954, Scientology was founded in the United States, by L. Ron Hubbard. It can be considered a psychotherapy-oriented religion. In 1954 the Unification Church by Sun Myung Moon was founded, in South Korea. In 1955, the Aetherius Society was founded in England. It and some other NRMs have been called UFO religions because they combine the belief in extraterrestrial life with traditional religious principles.
File:Russian Hare Krishna Devotee on Sankirtan.jpg|thumb|A member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness proselytising on the streets of Moscow, Russia
In 1965, Paul Twitchell founded Eckankar, an NRM derived partially from Sant Mat. In 1966, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in the United States by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and Anton LaVey founded the atheist Church of Satan. In 1967, the Beatles' visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India brought public attention to the Transcendental Meditation movement.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, the decline of communism and the revolutions of 1989 opened up new opportunities for NRMs. Falun Gong was first taught publicly in Northeast China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi. At first, it was accepted by the Chinese government, and by 1999 there were 70 million practitioners in China. But in July 1999, the government started to view the movement as a threat and began attempts to eradicate it.
In the 21st century, many NRMs are using the Internet to give out information, recruit members, and sometimes to hold online meetings and rituals. That is sometimes referred to as cybersectarianism. Sabina Magliocco, professor of Anthropology and Folklore at California State University, Northridge, has discussed the growing popularity of new religious movements on the Internet.
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.
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 have become part of worldwide mainstream culture.
Beliefs and practices
has argued that NRMs should not be "lumped together," as they differ from one another on many issues. Virtually no generalisation can be made about NRMs that applies to every group, with David V. Barrett noting that "generalizations tend not to be very helpful" when studying NRMs. J. Gordon Melton expressed the view that there is "no single characteristic or set of characteristics" that all new religions share, "not even their newness." 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. The tendency has been to lump them together and indiscriminately attribute all of the characteristics which are, in fact, valid for only one or two." NRMs themselves often claim that they exist at a crucial place in time and space.Scriptures
Some NRMs venerate unique scriptures, while others reinterpret existing texts, utilizing a range of older elements. They frequently claim that these are not new but rather forgotten truths that are being revived. NRM scriptures often incorporate modern scientific knowledge, sometimes with the claim that they are bringing unity to science and religion. Some NRMs believe that their scriptures are received through mediums. The Urantia Book, the core scripture of the Urantia Movement, was published in 1955 and is said to be the product of a continuous process of revelation from "celestial beings" which began in 1911. Some NRMs, particularly those that are forms of occultism, have a prescribed system of courses and grades through which members can progress.Celibacy
Some NRMs promote celibacy, the state of voluntarily being unmarried, sexually abstinent, or both. Some, including the Shakers and more recent NRMs, inspired by Hindu traditions, see it as a lifelong commitment. Others, including the Unification Church, as a stage in spiritual development. In some Buddhist NRMs, celibacy is practiced mostly by older women who become nuns. Some people join NRMs and practice celibacy as a rite of passage in order to move beyond previous sexual problems or bad experiences. Groups that promote celibacy require a strong recruitment drive to survive. The Shakers established orphanages, hoping that the children would become members of their community.Violence
Violent incidents involving NRMs are very rare. In events having a large number of casualties, the new religion was led by 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. Several subsequent events contributed to the concept. In 1994, members of the Order of the Solar Temple committed suicide in Canada and Switzerland. 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. There have also been cases in which members of NRMs have been killed after they engaged in dangerous actions due to mistaken belief in their own invincibility. 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. The history of the Latter Day Saint movement includes multiple cases of significant violence committed by or against Mormons.Leadership and succession
NRMs are typically founded and led by a charismatic leader. The death of any religion's founder represents a significant moment in its history. 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. In some cases, a NRM moves closer to the religious mainstream after the death of its founder.A number of founders of new religions established plans for succession to prevent confusion after their deaths. 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. 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. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, appointed 11 "Western Gurus" to act as initiating gurus and to continue to direct the organisation. 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."