Who was the first person to start a new religion?
Among the first new religions in the United States were the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, both the products of millenarian fervour set off in the mid-19th century by William Miller (1782–1849). Miller predicted that Christ would return to earth sometime in 1843 or 1844.
What is a new movement?
The new movement is usually founded by a charismatic and sometimes highly authoritarian leader who is thought to have extraordinary powers or insights.
What are NRMs in religion?
NRMs are characterized by a number of shared traits. These religions are, by definition, “new”; they offer innovative religious responses to the conditions of the modern world, despite the fact that most NRMs represent themselves as rooted in ancient traditions. NRMs are also usually regarded as “countercultural”; that is, they are perceived (by others and by themselves) to be alternatives to the mainstream religions of Western society, especially Christianity in its normative forms. These movements are often highly eclectic, pluralistic, and syncretistic; they freely combine doctrines and practices from diverse sources within their belief systems. The new movement is usually founded by a charismatic and sometimes highly authoritarian leader who is thought to have extraordinary powers or insights. Many NRMs are tightly organized. In light of their often self-proclaimed “alternative” or “outsider” status, these groups often make great demands on the loyalty and commitment of their followers and sometimes establish themselves as substitutes for the family and other conventional social groupings. NRMs have arisen to address specific needs that many people cannot satisfy through more traditional religious organizations or through modern secularism. They are also products of and responses to modernity, pluralism, and the scientific worldview.
What is the NRM?
New religious movement (NRM), the generally accepted term for what is sometimes called, often with pejorative connotations, a “cult.”. The term new religious movement has been applied to all new faiths that have arisen worldwide over the past several centuries.
What constitutes a new religious movement?
What constitutes a new religious movement? Matters of definition are exceedingly thorny, but this entry seeks to survey a wide range of nonmainstream religions and will cast its net broadly. This entry will presume that there is an American religious mainstream that consists of the major, culturally well-established branches of Christianity and Judaism, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, mainline Protestantism, most evangelical Protestantism, and the three major branches of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform). New religious movements are groups outside that mainstream. Admittedly there are many shades of gray in such a definition, but living with ambiguity is essential to any study of religion.
What religious group was founded in 1830?
Another religious movement that arose while the Shakers and Harmonists were flourishing had the dubious distinction of being arguably the most controversial religious group in American history. Founded in 1830, the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, based their distinctive version of Christianity, which featured an unorthodox account of American history before Christopher Columbus, on revelations that the founder Joseph Smith Jr. (1805 – 1844) claimed to have received. No religious group in American history has suffered more persecution than the Mormons; for nearly a century they were widely derided as devious outlaws and sexual miscreants. Conflicts with neighbors drove the early Mormons from New York State to Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and finally to Utah after the lynching of the founder Smith in 1844. Ex-Mormons fanned the flames with stories of dictatorial theocracy, violence, and corruption among the Latter-day Saints. Although their practice of polygamy was not announced publicly until after the migration to Utah, it had been practiced for years. Such early Mormon leaders as Smith and his successor Brigham Young (1801 – 1877) each had dozens of plural wives. Word about the practice that leaked out provided sensational fuel for the anti-Mormon flames. Only with the passage of time did anti-Mormon agitation diminish. The Mormons, for their part, helped deprive their opponents of rhetorical ammunition by retreating from their most controversial ideas and practices. Polygamy was phased out in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and a teaching that suggested that African Americans were inferior to whites was abandoned in 1978.
How does NRM spread its message?
Furthermore the spreading of an NRM's message is often conducted through mass media, and expertise in writing and speaking, video production, and Web site development has become a critical tool for the propagation of a group's message. Here again the growth of a class of specialized professionals is essential to a religious movement's growth and prosperity.
What is sect and cult?
Sect and cult are terms that were once used with a fair degree of academic precision. Classically a sect is a splinter group, a movement that has split from an existing religious body for some reason. Often such groups see themselves as revitalization movements that seek to return to a pristine purity from which, it is believed, the parent group has departed. The Holiness movement, for example, began when some Methodists came to believe that their church had undergone a degree of liberalization that took it unacceptably far from its Wesleyan roots, and the dissenters set up new churches that they saw as restoring pure Methodist doctrine. A cult, on the other hand, is classically a more distinct group — one that does not have clear roots in an existing, well-established tradition. A cult may be a newly created religion, usually one formulated by a founding prophet of some kind, or it may be a religion that is simply unfamiliar (and in that sense "new") in the American context. Some Hindu movements that have come to the United States, for example, have been widely regarded as cults because they are not familiar to Americans, even though they would be part of the religious mainstream in India.
What was the first amendment to the Constitution?
The First Amendment laid down what was then a bold precept: the United States would have no established, or officially endorsed, religion, and it would permit the free exercise of religion. More than two centuries later more religions are being freely exercised than the nation's founders could possibly have anticipated. Every substantial religion in the world has an American manifestation, and many homegrown startups have appeared in the United States. It is safe to say that no place in the world has greater religious diversity than the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Who studied the non-mainstream religious movement?
Milton Yinger wrote important sociological analyses of NRMs in the 1950s. During the 1940s and 1950s such observers as Marcus Bach, Elmer T. Clark, and Charles S. Braden surveyed the nonmainstream religious scene and discovered many previously little-noticed religious movements, describing them in terms that did not dismiss them as heretical or diabolical.
Who were the Shakers?
A 1780 convert, Valentine Rathbun, soon dropped out of the movement and accused the Shakers of deception and even, perhaps, what some would now call brainwashing. The Shakers received visitors joyfully, Rathbun wrote, feeding and lodging them readily. But after his departure from the group, he claimed it was all a ruse designed to create "absolute dependence" among members. Some years later the Shakers found themselves challenged by an even more formidable opponent, Mary Marshall Dyer (1780 – 1867), whose opposition to the group she had joined and then left became her life's work. Dyer's anti-Shaker polemics sounded like many anticult diatribes of the late twentieth century; among other things, she accused the movement of using mind control of a sort that amounted to hypnotism. In the twenty-first century the Shakers are best known for their classic furniture and exquisite villages, and the few surviving Shakers in Maine enjoy great admiration and support. Only with time — and perhaps with their steep decline in numbers — has their unusual religion become acceptable.
What was the new religion in the 1970s?
In the 1970s a new subfield in academia developed around the study of what was termed new religions. Though minority religions had regularly populated the fringes of Western culture throughout history, a host of new religious movements had appeared in North America at the end of the 1960s and incited public controversy. Parents of the young adults who had joined many of these groups mounted fierce battles against what they termed cults. In order to present a more balanced view, early research efforts began, initially in the San Francisco Bay metropolitan area, to explore these groups from an academic perspective. At the time, it was assumed by some that the sudden burst of new religions was merely a passing phenomenon, particularly related to the social unrest of the 1960s. The long-term role of the many diverse movements was more fully understood only after their growth continued over several decades. Still in its relative infancy, the study of new religions was dramatically affected by the murder/suicides that occurred at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978.
What is the origin of the term "new religion"?
A secondary origin for the term New Religion has also been suggested. In 1970, San Francisco Bay Area scholar Jacob Needleman authored a book titled The New Religions, which his colleagues began to use to describe the emergence of so many unfamiliar alternative religions within the counterculture at the end of the 1960s. Needleman found special significance in Zen Buddhism, the followers of Meher Baba, Subud, Transcendental Meditation, Krishnamurti, Tibetan Buddhism, and G. I. Gurdjieff. He also went beyond the largely descriptive work from Japan, and invited readers to consider the philosophical/theological questions about the nature of genuine spirituality.
What was the purpose of the cult movement?
The leadership of the cult awareness movement sought justification for the necessity of kidnapping and deprogramming the offspring of concerned parents. Such a rationale appeared during the trial of millionaire heiress Patty Hearst in 1976. Hearst's lawyer, F. Lee Bailey (1933 – ), argued that Hearst, who had participated in a bank robbery some months after being captured and held by the Symbionese Liberation Army, had been brainwashed. Though unable to prevent her conviction, two of the psychologists that had worked with Bailey, Louis J. West (1925 – 1999) from the University of California - Los Angeles and Margaret Singer (1921 – 2003), a psychologist in private practice in Berkeley, began to apply the same argument to members of the new religions — that they were being brainwashed and, in effect, held against their will. They found additional support from Massachusetts psychiatrist John Clark (1926 – 1999).
What was the most important trend in the 1980s?
Among the most important trends was the gradual dismantling of the definition of "cult/new religion" which scholars had been using since the 1950s. Sociologists such as J. Milton Yinger had suggested back then that cults were small, ephemeral groups, led by a charismatic leader to whom a cosmic status and/or various supernatural abilities had been assigned, and which operated in a different theological world than that of the dominant mainstream religions.
What was Bryan Wilson's approach to religion?
In England, sociologist Bryan Wilson (1926 – 2004) began to look at what he termed sectarian religion . Following a format already applied to the more familiar churches, both state-sponsored and free, Wilson began to explore the different behavior and theologies proposed by individual sects and ask questions about the social organization of those groups then visible in England, North America, and Africa. His work, published in several books through the 1960s, led to a system of classifying sects according to the variant paths to salvation they outlined for their members:
What was the negative approach to alternative religions?
Attraction to the new religions was seen as a product of economic, social, and educational deprivation, if not actually linked to ill-defined psychological disturbances.
What are the two groups that Wilson and Clark considered sects?
It is to be noted that both Wilson and Clark developed their classification schema apart from the emerging distinction between sect and cult, and both included in their discussion some groups that would later be seen as sects ( Salvation Army, Christadelphians ) and those thought of as "new religions" (Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses) under the single rubric of sects. This approach had the benefit of allowing consideration of some otherwise orthodox Christian groups that evidenced out-of-the-ordinary behavior, such as speaking in tongues, contemporary revelations, communalism, and apocalypticism.
What is NRM movement?
A NRM may be one of a wide range of movements ranging from those with loose affiliations based on novel approaches to spirituality or religion to communitarian enterprises that demand a considerable amount of group conformity and a social identity that separates their adherents from mainstream society. Use of the term NRM is not universally ...
Who was the New Age?
Some writers trace the New Age back to William Blake (1757–1827); others see it as originating in the 'hippie' counter-culture in the USA in the 1960s, while the scholar of the New Age, Wouter Hanegraaff, places it later still, regarding it as beginning in the second half of the 1970s.".
How many NRMs are there?
Scholars have estimated that NRMs now number in the tens of thousands worldwide, with most in Asia and Africa. Most have only a few members, some have thousands, and very few have more than a million. Academics occasionally propose amendments to technical definitions and continue to add new groups.
Who is the author of The New Believers?
Barrett, David V. (2001). The new believers: a survey of sects, cults and alternative religions (Revised ed.). London: Cassell. ISBN 978-0-304-35592-1.
What is a NRM?
A new religious movement ( NRM) is a religious, ethical, or spiritual group or community with practices of relatively modern origins. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may exist on the fringes of a wider religion, in which case they will be distinct from pre-existing denominations. Academics identify a variety of characteristics which they employ ...
What are new religious movements?
New Religious Movements. The term new religious movements has been employed to refer to a number of distinguish able but overlapping phenomena, not all of which are unambiguously new and not all of which are, by at least some criteria, religious. There have, of course, always been new religions – Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, ...
What are the new religions?
The new religions come, however, from a far wider range of traditions – not only Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Shinto, paganism, and various combinations of these, but also from other sources such as science fiction, psychoanalytic theories, and political ideologies.
How many NRMs are there in the world?
No one knows exactly how many NRMs there are. The uncertainty lies partly in the definition, and partly in deciding where to draw boundaries. Are the hundreds of New Age groups all to be individually listed or should they be counted in clusters? There are, moreover, undoubtedly NRMs about which few but their members have ever heard. It is, however, probable that there are around 2,000 identifiable NRMs in Europe and North America, with a roughly similar number in Asia and possibly (depending again on what is included by the definition) several thousand more in Africa and elsewhere.
What is NRM in sociology?
Most NRMs would fit into the sociological category of either sector cult, but scholars came to favor the term NRM in order to avoid the pejorative overtones associated in the public mind with these labels. This has, however, led to ”NRM” being associated in the rhetoric of the movements’ opponents with what they consider to be not a neutral but a ”cult apologist” position. This politicizing of the term, the con fusions caused by the fact that many of the movements had (or now have) been in existence for some time, and the ambiguities associated with the label ”religious” have led to attempts to find other terms, such as alternative religions, minority faiths, or spiritual communities. But none of these had successfully replaced ”new religious movement” by the beginning of the third millennium.
Why did the NRMs arise?
It has often been observed that the more fundamentalist NRMs arose as a reaction to modernization and secularism.
What is the NRM?
But around the late 1960s the term ”new religious movement” (NRM) started to be used to describe a special subject of study within the scholarly community of North America and Western Europe. It referred to two types of ”new” religions: first, as in The New Religions (1970) by Jacob Needleman, it covered various forms of eastern spirituality ...
What is the second sense of "cults"?
Some, however, adopted new characteristics when they were embraced by westerners, making it possible to argue that they had become new movements in the more common, second sense, which referred to the motley assortment of groups that had been founded since World War II and were being identified as ”cults” or ”sects” in the popular media.
What is a new religious movement?
A new religious movement (NRM) is a religious, ethical, or spiritual group or community with practices of relatively modern origins. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may exist on the fringes of a wider religion, in which case they will be distinct from pre-existing denominations. Academics identify a variety of characteristics which they employ in categorizing groups as new religious movements. The term is broad and inclusive, rather than sharply defined. New religious movements are generally seen as syncretic, employing human and material assets to disseminate their ideas and worldviews, deviating in some degree from a society’s traditional forms or doctrines, focused especially upon the self, and having a peripheral relationship that exists in a state of tension with established societal conventions.
What is NRM movement?
An NRM may be one of a wide range of movements ranging from those with loose affiliations based on novel approaches to spirituality or religion to communitarian enterprises that demand a considerable amount of group conformity and a social identity that separates their adherents from mainstream society. Use of the term NRM is not universally ...
Who is the author of The New Believers?
Barrett, David V. (2001). The new believers: a survey of sects, cults and alternative religions (Revised ed.). London: Cassell. ISBN 978-0-304-35592-1.
Why did the New Religious Movement come up?
New Religious Movement comes up generally due to the dissatisfaction from the already existing dominant religions. Mormonism, for example, broke from Christianity because the founders did not agree with the Christianity resentment of hell. Some of the founders of New Religious Movements are against the leadership systems of the dominant religions.
Who was the founder of the New Religious Movement?
They were founded by Joseph Smith. Joseph’s Religious Movements were successful in terms of membership. In 1838, Terinkyo was established in Japan.
What are the characteristics of a new religious movement?
Some of the New Religious Movements have established their own scriptures or books of reference whereas others use already existing scriptures. Some of the scripture writings incorporate scientific writings with a claim that science should be merged with religion. Most of the New Religious Movements are ...
Who was the first religious movement to be formed in South Africa?
In 1911, the Nazareth Baptist Church was the first New Religious Movement to be formed in South Africa by Isaiah Shembe. In the 1930s, Jehovah Witnesses which has been widely spread and known was formed in the United States. John Misachi October 23 2017 in Society.
What happens to religious groups after the death of the founder?
In most cases, power wrangles after the death of the founder or leader may lead to the breaking of the religious movement into several other denominations or the movement might just slowly fade away.
Terminology
NRMS in American History
After 1965
Controversy and Criticism
Women in New Religions
Ethnicity and NRMS
Millennialism and Violence in NRMS
Maturation and Development of NRMS
The Academic Study of New Religions
- Scholarly study of NRMs has expanded and changed with the increased visibility of movements after 1965. Before 1900 scholars paid little attention to dissenting religious movements except in judgmental terms: they were considered heresies, departures from the true faith. After 1900 a few pioneers began to take a less-jaundiced view of new religions...
Bibliography
New Religions Studies
- The contemporary study of new religions grew from two roots: the study of cults (or in Europe, sects) through the early twentieth century, and the burst of new religious life in Japan following World War II. Through the late nineteenth century, observers of the trends in American religion realized that pluralism was altering the Christian community...
Transition
The Emergence of New Religions Study
Picking Up The Study
Additional Developments
Fields Within Fields
Legal Perspectives
Family Life
Western Esotericism
Conclusion