New Religious Movements

A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or 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 which 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, with most of their members living in Asia and Africa. 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". There is debate 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 religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. An alternate perspective is that "new" should mean that a religion is more recent in its formation. 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 from the middle of the 19th century or the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830 and Tenrikyo in 1838.

New religions have typically 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. In the 1970s, the distinct field of new religions studies developed within the academic study of religion. 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 in terms of membership. 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 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. 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 and the Unification Church 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.James R. Lewis (ed.) (1995), ''The Gods have landed: new religions from other worlds'' (Albany: State University of New York Press),. p. 28 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 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, to 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 (often referred to as "New Age" ideas) have become part of worldwide mainstream culture.

Beliefs and practices

As noted by Barker, NRMs should not be "lumped together". They differ from one another on many issues.
Virtually no generalisation can be made about NRMs that applies to every group, with Barrett noting that "generalizations tend not to be very helpful" when studying NRMs. 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 altogether and indiscriminately to attribute to 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 had been 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 to bring new members into 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 1995 members of the Japanese new religion Aum Shinrikyo murdered a number of people during a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. 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

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