A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion or a modern 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 modernising 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.Eileen Barker, 1999, "New Religious Movements: their incidence and significance", New Religious Movements: challenge and response, Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell editors, Routledge
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.A notable proponent of the earlier dating is George Chryssides .
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 contextualise the rise of NRMs in modernity as a product of, and answer to, modern processes of secularisation, globalisation, detraditionalisation, fragmentation, reflexivity, and individualisation.
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.Elijah Siegler, 2007, New Religious Movements, Prentice Hall,
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 (1945) 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.Partridge, Christopher Hugh (ed.) (2003) UFO Religions. Routledge. Chapter 4 Opening A Channel To The Stars: The Origins and Development of the Aetherius Society by Simon G. Smith pp. 84–102James R. Lewis (ed.) (1995), The Gods have landed: new religions from other worlds (Albany: State University of New York Press),. p. 28Sablia, John A. (2006). The Study of UFO Religions, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, November 2006, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 103–123.
In 1965, Paul Twitchell founded Eckankar, an NRM derived partially from Sant Mat. In 1966, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) 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.
From the late 1960s through the 1980s, new religious movements became especially visible and, in parts of North America and Western Europe, proliferated in ways that often drew heightened public and media attention, with many groups recruiting among young adults shaped by post-war social change and the counterculture. In contemporary discourse—and occasionally in scholarly writing—this conjuncture was sometimes described as a so-called “cult boom”. In apologist literature of the Christian countercult movement, this NRM visibility was also framed with labels such as “cult explosion”. The same decades also saw what scholars describe as the “cult controversy” (or “cult wars”), involving disputes over conversion, allegations of coercive persuasion (“brainwashing”), family conflict, deprogramming and litigation, and the growth of organised opposition in the form of anti-cult and Christian countercult movements, alongside the consolidation of new religion studies as an academic field. Subsequent decades brought marked changes in “the cult scene” as second generations emerged and many movements routinised, declined, or “denominationalised,” even as new forms continued to appear. Although the phenomenon is often narrated through North American and Western European cases, reference works also document diverse new religious and revitalisation movements in Latin America and other regions, where trajectories varied by country and religious environment.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, the decline of communism and the revolutions of 1989 opened up new opportunities for NRMs in Eastern Europe. In China, 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.Seth Faison (27 April 1999) In Beijing: A Roar of Silent Protestors , The New York Times 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 use the Internet to give out information, recruit members, and sometimes to hold online meetings and rituals. That is sometimes referred to as cybersectarianism.Paul Virilio,The Information Bomb (Verso, 2005), p. 41.Rita M. Hauck, "Stratospheric Transparency: Perspectives on Internet Privacy, Forum on Public Policy (Summer 2009) Sabina Magliocco, professor of Anthropology and Folklore at California State University, Northridge, has discussed the growing popularity of new religious movements on the Internet.Magliocco, Sabina. 2012. "Neopaganism". In O. Hammer and M. Rothstein, Eds., The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements, pp. 150–166. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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.Seeking Entry-Level Prophet: Burning Bush and Tablets Not Required , New York Times, August 28, 2006
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.
Beliefs and practices
Eileen Barker 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,John Bowker, 2011, The Message and the Book, UK, Atlantic Books, pp. 13–14 utilising 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 claiming to unify science and religion. Some NRMs believe that their scriptures are received through mediums.The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements, George D. Chryssides, Benjamin E. Zeller, A&C Black, 2014, p. 214 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.Teaching New Religious Movements, David G. Bromley, Oxford University Press, May 25, 2007 In some Buddhist NRMs, celibacy is practiced mostly by older women who become nuns.New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response, Jamie Cresswell, Bryan Wilson, Routledge, 2012, p. 153 Some people join NRMs and practice celibacy as a rite of passage in order to move beyond previous sexual problems or bad experiences.The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, Volume 1, James R Lewis, OUP US, 2008, p. 385 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