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.
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.
The historical roots, doctrines, and practices of the NRMs in the West are extremely diverse. The following overview organizes this diversity into certain categories, but many NRMs could be classified under more than one of these rubrics.
Apocalyptic and millenarian movements
Some NRMs are characterized by an apocalyptic or millenarian dimension—the belief that the end of the world is imminent and that a new heaven or new earth will replace the old one. There are apocalyptic strains in many world religions, but it is Christian millenarianism—the belief that Jesus Christ will establish a 1,000-year reign of peace on earth before the Last Judgment—that has formed the backdrop for the development of many of the NRMs in the West.
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. The failure of Miller’s prophecy, the so-called “Great Disappointment,” did not deter many of his followers, who still believed in the prediction but felt that only Miller’s calculations were faulty. The Seventh-day Adventists, formed under the leadership of one of Miller’s followers, the prophet and visionary Ellen G. White (1827–1915), and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, founded by Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), continue to believe in the imminent return of Christ and the end of time.
Millenarianism also underlies the New Age movement that arose in the 1970s and ’80s. The New Age movement is an extremely eclectic conglomeration of beliefs and practices that includes channeling, crystal healing, new versions of shamanism, and a variety of therapies and techniques designed to “transform” the individual into a “higher consciousness.” The movement as a whole optimistically presumes that the world has entered, or is on the verge of entering, a “New Age” (sometimes referred to as the “Age of Aquarius”) of unprecedented spiritual possibilities.
A darker side of apocalyptic expectations has resulted in mass suicides and tragic conflict with governmental agencies. In the 1970s an ordained Methodist minister named Jim Jones (1931–78) moved his congregation (called the Peoples Temple) from the United States to the jungles of Guyana, where he attempted to create a utopian, interracial community based on his idea of “apostolic socialism,” a version of Christianity that was influenced by contemporary Marxist liberation theology. Jones, an increasingly authoritative and paranoid personality, warned his followers that a devastating thermonuclear war was impending. In 1978, after a group of concerned family members (led by a U.S. congressman) visited the group’s commune, Jones and his followers (913 persons in all) committed what Jones called “revolutionary suicide” rather than submit to what they thought would be an attempt to compromise their community. “Death is a million times preferable to 10 more days of this life,” Jones told his group, and, “If you knew what was ahead of you, you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight.”
A similar tragedy befell the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. The group, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist church, first settled near Waco in 1935. After a succession of leaders and internal power struggles, Vernon Howell, who later assumed the name David Koresh, took control of the group in 1987. Koresh taught a highly apocalyptic Christianity and identified himself with the Lamb of Revelation 5, which is traditionally associated with Christ. Allegations of child abuse and the launching of a retail gun business attracted the attention of the authorities, which led to a long standoff with the FBI and a tragic fire that killed Koresh and some 80 members of the group.
The influence of the East
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The religions of India have intrigued the West for millennia, but it was only in the 19th century that accurate and relatively comprehensive information regarding the teachings and practices of Hinduism and Buddhism appeared in Europe and the United States. Indian philosophical doctrines began to influence Western thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The most influential of these doctrines were Hindu monistic beliefs, which maintain that the cosmos is wholly sacred or participates in a single divine principle (brahman, or Being itself). Esoteric groups—such as the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and its many offshoots—integrated Indian philosophical and religious concepts into a synthesis that also drew on Western mysticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbala, religious monism, and communication with the spirit world.
By the end of the 19th century, the first religious group to be imported from India took root in the United States, when Vivekananda attended the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and then founded the Vedanta Society in New York City. Based on the monistic teachings of one of Hinduism’s philosophical schools and on its interpretation of the teachings and mystical experiences of Vivekananda’s teacher, Ramakrishna (1836–86), the Vedanta Society attracted the attention of many prominent members of the artistic community: the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, the American author and publisher Paul Carus, the English novelist Aldous Huxley, and the Anglo-American novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, among others. With centres in India and throughout the world, the Vedanta Society (also known as the Ramakrishna Mission) promotes a highly eclectic and tolerant form of religious unity. It claims that all world religions teach fundamentally the same truth but nevertheless maintains that Vedanta is uniquely capable of articulating this unified doctrine.
Some 40 years after Vivekananda’s journey to the United States, another teacher from India, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952), founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles and introduced the practice and philosophy of Yoga to Americans. Drawing on traditional Hindu teachings of spiritual, mental, and physical discipline, Yogananda represented Yoga in quasi-scientific terms that appealed to his audience, maintaining that other religious teachers (including Jesus and Paul) had also preached much the same message.
It was not until the 1960s and ’70s, however, that NRMs based on Eastern religions became attractive to large numbers of Americans and Europeans. In 1959 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1911–2008) founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement and popularized the technique known as Transcendental Meditation or TM. Transcendental Meditation was also represented as a “scientific” method for obtaining both personal and social peace and harmony; it centred on the repetition of and concentration on an individualized mantra imparted to the initiate by the guru. The Maharishi and his teachings gained great fame and attracted celebrities such as the American film star Mia Farrow, the American engineer and architect R. Buckminster Fuller, and the English rock group the Beatles.
Another group to come out of this period of cultural turmoil and change was the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), founded by A.C. Bhaktivedanta (1896–1977) and popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement. ISKCON is fundamentally a continuation of a Hindu sect, originating in India’s precolonial period, that emphasizes ecstatic devotion to the god Krishna. Conversion to ISKCON entails not only a shift in religious belief and practice but an entire break with Western culture, symbolized by the adoption of Indian dress and diet and by the shaving of male followers’ heads. Such radical signs of alienation from Western culture and values, together with the group’s active proselytizing dimension and its internal crises and leadership struggles, engendered much controversy about the Hare Krishnas.
The Rajneesh International Foundation is another highly controversial NRM that originated in India. The group was led by the flamboyant Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–90), who taught a heavily revised form of Indian spirituality called Tantrism. Known to some as the “sex guru,” Rajneesh urged his Western followers to overcome their repressions through a technique he dubbed “dynamic meditation,” entailing shouting, screaming, and dancing—and in some cases physical violence and uninhibited (sometimes public) sex. Rajneesh thus adapted and repackaged ancient Tantric techniques for a Western audience more familiar with psychotherapy.
ISKCON and other imports from the East, such as movements representing Zen Buddhism and the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism, have been introduced into the United States and Europe with little or no alterations to their traditional forms. Their appeal to Westerners may very well lie in their exotic nature and their clear-cut differences from Western religions. Many other Asian traditions, however, have been highly modified by their new contexts or have provided the foundation for the beliefs and practices of Western groups such as ECKANKAR. Especially noteworthy is the emphasis many Eastern-based NRMs place on religious Universalism (a response to pluralism) and on the “scientific” nature of the spiritual teachings and techniques put forward.
“Scientific” NRMs: UFO groups and Scientology
Many NRMs claim to be not religions at all but rather “scientific truth” that has not yet been acknowledged or discovered by the official scientific community. In the search for authority for new teachings, certain NRMs have thus tapped into what is arguably the most powerful form of legitimizing discourse in the modern world: science. Some groups have claimed scientific “proof” for Yoga and meditation, and other NRMs have developed in the West under the umbrella of self-proclaimed scientific validity.
UFO groups, sometimes called collectively the “contact movement,” represent one manifestation of a “scientific” NRM. Drawing on time-honoured religious stories of the descent of supernatural beings from the heavens, UFO groups developed what has been called a “technological myth” of the arrival—whether imminent or actual and ongoing—on Earth of space aliens, who will bring advanced knowledge and spiritual wisdom. By the 1950s, groups such as Understanding, Inc., founded by Daniel Fry (who claimed to be a contactee), argued that UFOs carried beings who had come to Earth to promote world peace and personal development. The Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, led by Gabriel Green, and the Aetherius Society, organized by George King, maintained that space aliens held the key to the salvation both of the planet as a whole and of every individual on Earth.
A more recent and highly publicized UFO group was Heaven’s Gate, the creation of Marshall Applewhite, who preferred to call himself “Do.” Applewhite declared that he and his female partner (“Ti”) were really representatives from another world, which he referred to as “the evolutionary level above human.” Claiming to have come to Earth once before in the figure of Jesus, Applewhite asserted that the “kingdom of heaven” taught by Applewhite/Christ was a real, physical place inhabited by highly evolved beings. Earth was a “garden” in which human beings had been “planted” by these superior space beings; some such “plants” could hope to mature and further evolve into “members of the level above human,” but only if they systematically shed all vestiges of their humanity, including sexuality (some members of the group castrated themselves to further this end). Formed originally in the mid-1970s, the group settled in the San Diego, Calif., area in 1996, where it supported itself by creating World Wide Web sites for Internet users. In March 1997 Applewhite declared that the appearance of the Comet Hale-Bopp signaled the arrival of a spaceship sent to gather up the “mature plants” before the impending “spading over” of the garden (i.e., end of the world), and the remaining 39 members of the group committed suicide in order to join the alien community in outer space.
UFO groups sometimes couch traditional religious themes such as apocalypticism and heavenly intervention in the language of modern technology and biological evolutionary theory. Other groups, including the Church of Scientology, fashion spiritual teachings and mythology in the language of modern psychology. Founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86), Scientology began as Dianetics, which was Hubbard’s term for a kind of therapy that claimed to eliminate destructive imprints of past experiences, called “engrams,” that had accumulated in one’s unconscious. Hubbard devised a method—employing both discussion with an “auditor” and the use of an electrical device called an “E-meter”—to dissipate such engrams and produce (over a long period of treatment in which one attains and passes through a variety of hierarchical levels) a state of liberation he termed “being Clear.” Over time Hubbard also developed a whole cosmology in which human beings were said to be originally divine beings, called “thetans,” who had fallen into and been entrapped by material existence. The freedom of “being Clear” was equated with regaining one’s status as an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent thetan.
Nature religions: Neo-Paganism and Wicca
Neo-Paganism and Wicca represent a different, even opposite, response to the dominance and pervasive influence of science in modern culture. Rather than integrate scientific claims into new religious teachings, these groups tend to oppose the materialism, technological excess, and alienation from nature that science is seen to foster, offering modern people a way to return to and participate in the rhythms of the natural world. The embracing of magic and the use of spells to help further personal goals in everyday life seems to fly in the face of some of the basic tenets of modern science and secular “common sense.”
Some Neo-Pagan groups, which claim to retrieve and revitalize the pre-Christian pagan traditions of northern Europe and the Middle East, may be understood as a reaction against cultural and religious pluralism and an attempt to reclaim their “roots.” Other groups, especially those that collectively go under the name Wicca, are in large part religious articulations of sentiments derived from the modern ecology movement and feminism. Wiccan NRMs, mostly but not exclusively composed of women, tend to centre on the figure of a goddess and the “female principle” manifest in nature, and, like other Neo-Pagan organizations, they attempt to re-enchant and personalize a natural world they believe science has objectified.
NRMs have appeared in South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia since the mid-19th century. While some of these religious movements have remained small and limited in influence, others have grown quite large and have played important roles in the socioeconomic and political development of their respective nations or regions.
While new religions have appeared frequently throughout Asian history, there are important differences between those that developed before and after the mid-19th century. Religious movements that emerged after 1850 reflect the impact of the West and of Western forms of political, economic, and cultural imperialism. From the 19th century onward the newly industrialized and expansionist West advanced into Asia for God, glory, and gold. Western nations, secure in their sense of political, military, economic, and cultural superiority and armed with either an expansionist Protestant or Roman Catholic faith, frequently sent missionaries as the vanguard of later imperialist ventures. Some areas in South and Southeast Asia—India, Vietnam (along with Laos and Cambodia), Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—were taken outright and made to fit into larger European and American colonial networks. Even those areas that were not controlled directly by the West (such as China, Japan, and Korea) felt its influence in the form of imposed unequal treaties or carefully applied military pressure. The NRMs that evolved in this sociopolitical and cultural environment were either direct reactions against Western imperialism, taking the form of reinvention of an older tradition, or spiritual syntheses of Western and Asian belief systems. These new religions were thus designed to serve both as an answer and as an alternative to the spreading Westernization, secularization, individualism, and materialism occurring within Asian cultures.
The rise of the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj movements in India in the 19th century was a response to the growing British presence in India and the British challenge to Hindu traditions. These movements paved the way for other NRMs, including Ramakrishna’s Vedanta movement, which sought to make Vedanta philosophy and practice accessible to a Western audience. A second such movement was the Transcendental Meditation movement of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. A third new religion, with strong ties to the 12th-century Bhakti movement, was the Hare Krishna movement. Yet another was the cult founded by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who was also known as Acharya Rajneesh and, later, as Osho.
China and Taiwan
NRMs in China emerged after the first Opium War (1839–42) and were the result of Western imperialism, difficult economic conditions in southern China owing in part to the opium trade and the war over opium, and the arrival of the first generation of Anglo-American Protestant missionaries. The first and foremost of these new religions was the Taiping Tianguo (the Heavenly Kingdom of the Great Peace), a mixture of Evangelical Christianity, classical quasi-Confucian methods, and various popular traditions. Under its charismatic leader, Hong Xiuquan, the movement developed into a religious state that controlled key provinces in southern and central China. Taiping Tianguo threatened the stability of the Qing state until the movement was finally put down in 1865.
After the signing of the treaties of Tianjin (1858), the Western Christian missionary enterprise was legalized in China, and many forms of Christian denominational messages spread throughout the country. One effect of this cultural and spiritual influence was the development of indigenous Protestant sects and denominations. One of these Christian new religions, the Zhen Yesu Jiaohui (True Jesus Church), evolved as a result of the Pentecostal charismatic revivals (1900–20) in the United States. A second independent church was the Difang Hui (Local Church), founded in the 1930s by Watchman Nee, whose followers later spread the church to the United States.
Some of China’s later new religions grew out of forms of sectarian and popular faith that predated the Opium Wars. One such major new body, which evolved out of the White Lotus millenarian tradition and the related tradition of moralistic spirit-writing (bailuan/fuji), or shamanistic sects, is the highly syncretistic Yiguan Dao (I-Kuan Tao; “the Unity Sect”). Another fuji group, the Zhihui Tang (Compassion Sect), began in Taiwan in 1949, and, as in Yiguan Dao, Wangmu Niangniang is its major deity.
The constitution adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1982 contains religious tolerance clauses, and both traditional and newer forms of religiosity are flourishing. House churches—small Evangelical and charismatic Christian bodies reminiscent of the True Jesus Church—have appeared, and the number of those who call themselves Christian has risen markedly. Minjian (popular) traditions have also made a comeback, with older temples being restored and new ones being built. The revival of the minjian traditions is due in part to renewed contact with Taiwan and to the moral and financial support of followers in Taiwan of such mainland cults as those of Mazu, the goddess of the sea; Baosheng Dadi, the god of medicine; Guanyin, the popular goddess of mercy; and Guangong, the martial and judicial god.
The most important NRM to appear in China is the faith in the semimystical powers of qigong (Chinese: “discipline of the vital breath”), the classical tradition of spiritual and physical exercise that is often seen as the basis for the martial arts. In the 1980s and ’90s, qigong masters developed followings throughout China by demonstrating their powers. The movement spread to Taiwan, where qigong teachings were integrated into the teachings of syncretistic sects. The most controversial and best-known qigong group is Falun Gong, which was founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992. Li taught meditation techniques and ritual exercises designed to provide a means of obtaining spiritual and mental renewal. In 1999 the group staged a dramatic demonstration in Beijing against the Chinese government, which had denounced Falun Gong as a xiejiao (“heretical cult”) and has continued to suppress the group in the 21st century.
Taiwan’s postwar political and religious experience differs from that of the mainland. Taiwan was taken over by Chinese Nationalists in 1945 and became the refuge for and a bastion of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) after 1949. With considerable American help and a reformed Nationalist regime, it developed into an economic success. Its leaders opened the nation to Christian missionaries and to independent Chinese churches, such as the True Jesus Church. The government of Taiwan also supported mainstream traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism and did little, if anything, to stifle the development of the major popular cults (many from Fujian province) that had evolved on the island after 1600. Numerous syncretistic new religions have blossomed in this climate, including socially active, salvationistic Buddhist organizations; charismatic Christian churches, such as the True Jesus Church and the New Testament Church; the moralistic, syncretistic sect Yiguan Dao (I-Kuan Tao); and a postmodern and highly eclectic millenarian sect, the Zhen Dao (True Way).
The traumatic political, economic, social, and cultural changes that took place during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate and the first two decades of the Meiji Restoration contributed to the formation of a large number of new religious entities that scholars of Japan have termed “new religions.” Such religions had their roots in Shintō and Buddhism, the two dominant traditions in Japan, as well as in Tokugawa neo-Confucianism. The basic causes of the dynamic growth of these religions are rooted in the extreme lack of vitality and formalism of the older traditions and the enthusiasm and sense of renewal of the NRMs. Like those of China, Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, the NRMs of Japan are characterized by high levels of popular participation and volunteerism, with followers running day-to-day operations and converting new adherents.
The earliest of the Japanese new religions include Tenri-kyō and Konkō-kyō. The years between World Wars I and II saw the development of Gedatsu-kai (a sect that is a syncretistic blend of Shintō, Buddhism, and Confucianism), Ōmoto-kyō, and Hito-no-michi (another Shintō-related sect). The postwar period saw further development of some of these earlier groups—Hito-no-michi, for example, became PL Kyōdan (Perfect Liberty Church). New sects also appeared, such as Tenshō Kōtai Jingō-kyō, also known as Odoru Shu-kyō (the Dancing Religion); and Jōhrei, a Christian-based self-help movement. The most notorious of the Japanese NRMs, the radical doomsday religion AUM Shinrikyo, was founded in 1987 by Matsumoto Chizuo (known as Asahara Shoko), whose teachings were a mixture of Asian traditions and Christian apocalypticism. The group fell into disgrace after it launched a nerve gas attack on a Tokyo subway. The group later changed its name to Aleph and tried to rehabilitate itself without its founder.
The most successful of the Japanese NRMs, however, is Sōka-gakkai (Value Creation Society), a lay Buddhist group that claimed more than six million members at the end of the 20th century. Founded originally in 1930, the group was repressed and disbanded during World War II, but it was refounded in 1946. It experienced dramatic growth in the 1950s due to a controversial policy of conversion, and in 1964 it founded the political party Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party). Its teachings are rooted in the tradition of Nichiren, a 13th-century Japanese Buddhist. Sōka-gakkai stresses the values of beauty and goodness (Zen) and the benefits of chanting an invocation to its chief scripture, the Lotus Sutra.
The history of modern Korea has been one of war and division. Long influenced by both the Chinese and the Japanese, Korea became a battleground in the age of imperialism. In the late 19th century Japan entered the ranks of modern militarized and expansionist states, first taking over Taiwan in 1895 and then, in 1910, Korea. Japan ruled Korea with a strong and sometimes brutal hand until 1945. Korea was then divided into two states. In 1950 South Korea was invaded by the communist regime of North Korea. Intervention by the United Nations (largely the United States) saved the two-state system and allowed for a truce that redefined the borders of the two Koreas, one a communist state and the other a Westernized, quasi-military state. Only from the mid-1980s did South Korea move toward democracy, while North Korea remained a poverty-stricken, family-run dictatorship.
This painful and traumatic history created a fertile environment for the development of Korean NRMs. Meanwhile, since the mid-19th century, Korea had been heavily influenced by Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant. In the late 19th century the millenarian Tajong-gyo, or the Tangun Cult, was formulated by Na Chul. The postwar period sparked not only Christian churches—almost 50 percent of Koreans are Christian—but the development of radical forms of Christianity and quasi-Christianity. David Yonggi Cho’s Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul is the world’s largest congregation, with more than 700,000 parishioners. It belongs to the Assemblies of God, the major Pentecostal denomination in the United States. The largest quasi-Christian new religion is Sun-Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia
The nations of Southeast Asia also went through periods of dramatic change during the 19th and 20th centuries, experiencing imperialistic conquest, Japanese aggression, and imperial divestiture followed by civil war and sociopolitical turmoil. One result of these dramatic and painful changes was the development of a number of NRMs.
In Vietnam, for example, two major NRMs formed, both of which contributed to the nation’s political and cultural turmoil. Cao Dai, a syncretistic religion that blended Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, became a military and political force with considerable power during the final years of World War II and over the course of the First Indochina War (1945–54). A second major new religion, Hoa Hao, was founded by a Buddhist reformer, Huynh Phu So. Blending Confucianism, animism, and indigenous Vietnamese religious practices, the movement became a political and military presence that, like Cao Dai, was involved in the violent political universe of Vietnam in the years following World War II.
The Philippines produced its own new religions. These were the Rizalist cults, named after José Rizal, a martyr in the struggle against the Spanish in the years immediately preceding the Spanish-American War. The Rizalist cults were syncretistic and combined Catholic elements with pre-Spanish Malay and Filipino elements, presenting millenarian messages that gave hope to the poor and oppressed.
In Indonesia in 1933, the Sufi Muhammad Subuh, also known as Bapak, founded Subud, a movement that spread to the West in the 1950s. Its followers believe they can open themselves to the power of God through singing, dancing, shouting, laughter, and feelings of rapture and release. Thus, in form, at least, Subud parallels the traditional Sufi mystical experience and the charismatic Christian experience that is seen in the True Jesus Church and the New Testament Church of Taiwan.