New Religious Movements

The explosion of brand-new religions across the last two centuries — from the prophets of the American frontier to the global movements and doomsday sects of the present — and the honest work of describing them as religions: neither dismissed as "cults" nor exempted from the evidence-honesty this book applies to every faith, ancient or new.

The golden plates

On a hillside near Palmyra, in the "burned-over district" of western New York, a young farmer named Joseph Smith said that in the 1820s an angel named Moroni had shown him a book written on golden plates, buried in the earth, which he translated by divine power — peering, some accounts say, into a hat that held seer-stones — into the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. From that revelation grew the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: today a global faith of some seventeen million people, with its own scripture, its own priesthood, and temples where rites are performed that no outsider may see.

Whether the plates existed, whether the angel came, whether the translation was inspired or invented — these are exactly the questions this book asks of every tradition, and they are no more and no less answerable for a religion two centuries old than for one four thousand years old. That is the point of the chapter. The birth of new religions did not end with the ancient world. In the modern age — free, literate, restless, and disillusioned — it accelerated.

What a "new religious movement" is

"New religious movement" (NRM) is the neutral scholarly term for a religion of recent origin. It replaced the older, loaded word "cult," which most scholars of religion now avoid in its popular sense because it functions less as a description than as a weapon — a label applied to any group a speaker wishes to mark as sinister. An NRM is typically marked by an innovative response to modern conditions, a stance of counterculture against the religious mainstream, an eclectic blending of older sources, and a charismatic — sometimes authoritarian — founder.

There is no sharp line between a "new religious movement" and a "religion." Every faith in this book was once new. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Sikhism were each, in their day, precisely what we would now call an NRM: a startling innovation gathered around a founder, viewed with suspicion by the powers of the age. The category does not name a lesser kind of religion; it simply lets us look, with unusual clarity, at faiths still within living memory of their founding — where the documents are abundant and the myth has not yet hardened into the unquestioned.

Sociologists have tried to bring order to the variety. The church–sect–cult typology, refined by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, distinguishes movements that break away from an existing tradition (sects) from those that import or invent something genuinely new (cults, in the technical, non-pejorative sense). The sociologist Roy Wallis sorted NRMs by their stance toward the world: world-rejecting (demanding a radical break, like the early Unification Church or the Hare Krishnas), world-affirming (promising success and self-realization within ordinary life, like est or, in part, Scientology), and world-accommodating (renewing the inner life while leaving the outer one intact). These are maps, not verdicts — but they let the field be studied rather than merely feared.

The American century

The modern wave began, above all, in the religious ferment of nineteenth-century America — a continent with no established church, where faith became something like a free market. The Second Great Awakening swept the frontier with revival, and nowhere burned hotter than the strip of upstate New York so scorched by successive revivals that it was called the Burned-over District — the seedbed of the Latter-day Saints, the Millerites, the Fox sisters' Spiritualism (Chapter 36), and the Oneida community all at once.

The millenarian expectation of Christ's imminent return produced the most dramatic episode of all. The Baptist preacher William Miller, reading the prophecies of Daniel, concluded that Christ would return about 1844; his followers, the Millerites, fixed on 22 October 1844 as the day. When the sun rose on the 23rd and the world had not ended, the movement collapsed in what is still called the Great Disappointment. But it did not vanish. A remnant reinterpreted the date — the event of that day, they decided, had been not Christ's return to earth but the beginning of his final work of judgment in a heavenly sanctuary — and from that reinterpretation, shaped by the visions of Ellen G. White, grew the Seventh-day Adventist Church. From the same disappointed current came Charles Taze Russell's Bible Students, who became the Jehovah's Witnesses, still preaching an imminent end and refusing the state's wars and holidays.

Others healed and others communed. Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science on the conviction that sickness is an error of mind curable by right belief, and published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875). The celibate Shakers danced their worship and built a furniture of luminous simplicity. John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida community practiced "complex marriage," in which every man was married to every woman, as an experiment in Christian perfection — before turning, in the end, to making silverware. The century swarmed with prophets, communes, and revelations; the Latter-day Saints, who built a scripture and an American Zion in the Utah desert, were only the most enduring.

The movement goes global

The twentieth century made the phenomenon worldwide and wildly various.

The Bahá'í Faith traces its origin to that same year, 1844, when a young Persian merchant took the title of the Báb ("the Gate") and proclaimed the coming of a new messenger of God; that messenger, Bahá'u'lláh (1817–1892), taught the essential oneness of God, of religion, and of humankind, and the harmony of science and faith. Persecuted out of Iran, the Bahá'í grew into a global community counted in the millions.

America's own soil produced the Nation of Islam, founded in Detroit in 1930 by the enigmatic Wallace D. Fard and built by Elijah Muhammad into a movement of Black self-reliance and separatist theology — its most famous son, Malcolm X, later breaking toward mainstream Sunni Islam. Out of postwar Korea came Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church (1954), whose scripture, the Divine Principle, cast Moon and his wife as the "True Parents" and whose mass "blessing" weddings joined thousands of couples at once. The counterculture of the 1960s carried east-to-west traffic: A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada brought ISKCON — the Hare Krishna movement, a living transplant of the Bhakti devotion of Chapter 30 — to New York in 1966.

And in 1950 the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the seed of the Church of Scientology. Scientology teaches that the true self is an immortal spirit, the thetan, burdened by the recorded traumas ("engrams") of past lives; these are cleared through one-on-one auditing, guided by the galvanometer-like E-Meter (introduced 1960), toward the state of "Clear" and beyond it the graded, secret Operating Thetan levels. After a decades-long fight, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service granted the church tax-exempt religious status in 1993. In East Asia, Japan's postwar "new religions" (Soka Gakkai, Tenrikyo, and dozens more) and China's Falun Gong drew followers in the millions. And across the diffuse New Age — with no founder, no creed, and no membership rolls — the same modern impulse spread: a personal, eclectic, self-directed spirituality assembled from every tradition at once.

Not only in the West: the cargo cults

Not every new religion of the modern age was born in the West. Among the most striking arose in Melanesia, where the sudden arrival of Europeans — and their inexplicable wealth of manufactured goods, their "cargo" — provoked a wave of prophetic movements now called cargo cults. Their prophets taught that the ancestors, or new spirit-beings, would send the cargo to the islanders if the right rituals were performed, and that the whites had wrongly intercepted what was meant for them. The first well-documented case, the Vailala Madness of Papua in 1919, saw participants shake and speak in tongues, destroy their old ceremonial objects, and build storehouses and mock wharves to receive goods that never came. The most enduring is the John Frum movement on Tanna in Vanuatu, born in the 1930s around a mysterious figure — probably "John from America" — and fed by the astonishing abundance the U.S. military brought during the Second World War; to this day, each 15 February, his followers raise the American flag, paint "USA" on their chests, and drill with bamboo rifles, awaiting his return. Scholars now read these not as quaint confusion but as coherent religious responses to colonial disruption — a colonized people making sense of overwhelming power in the only mythic language they had, much as older peoples had done at every earlier collision in this book.

The shadow: when charisma kills

A handful of these movements ended in horror, and they are the reason the word "cult" carries its dread. On 18 November 1978, in the Guyanese jungle, the Reverend Jim Jones ordered the Peoples Temple to a "revolutionary suicide"; 918 people died, most from cyanide, more than two hundred of them children, after Jones's gunmen had murdered the visiting U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan — the only sitting member of Congress ever killed in the line of duty. At Waco, Texas, in 1993, a fifty-one-day federal siege of David Koresh's Branch Davidians (an offshoot of the Adventists) ended on 19 April in a fire that killed about eighty people. On 20 March 1995, the Japanese doomsday sect Aum Shinrikyo, led by Shoko Asahara, released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen and injuring thousands. And in March 1997, thirty-nine members of Heaven's Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite, died by orderly suicide near San Diego, believing they would board a spacecraft trailing the comet Hale-Bopp. These are real, and they are terrible. They are also a tiny fraction of the thousands of new religions that harm no one — which is exactly why the honest question is never "is it new?" but "what does it do?"

The believer's lens

To the adherent, the newness is not a flaw but the whole promise: God, or truth, or the cosmos, has spoken again, now, to us — not only to distant ancients in a dead language. The Latter-day Saint holds a scripture drawn from the American earth and a living prophet who still receives revelation, closing the aching gap between the reader and the age of miracles. The Bahá'í sees in Bahá'u'lláh the fulfillment of every prior faith, the messenger for a world at last grown up enough to be one. The Adventist and the Witness live in the charged expectancy of a promise about to be kept. The Scientologist experiences auditing as genuine relief, a technology of the self that works in the felt experience of the person who undergoes it. For the member, the movement is not a "cult" but a rescue — often found in a season of loneliness or crisis, offering what the mainstream churches had ceased to offer: certainty, community, a task, and a cosmos that cares. To describe these faiths honestly requires taking that experience seriously, as this book takes the interior experience of every tradition seriously — the meaning is real to the one who lives inside it, whatever the historian later concludes about its origins.

The skeptical lens

The critic's first target is the founder. The recency that comforts the believer also exposes the movement to a scrutiny the ancient faiths escape: Joseph Smith's neighbors gave sworn statements about his money-digging; Hubbard's own letters and war record are on file; the finances, the lawsuits, and the defectors' testimonies are all documented. Where an ancient prophet is known only through devoted scripture, a modern one is known also through court records — and the picture is often less flattering.

The fiercest modern controversy is "brainwashing." In the 1970s and '80s, an anti-cult movement — distinct from the theologically motivated counter-cult movement of conservative Christians — argued that NRMs recruited through coercive "mind control," and some families hired "deprogrammers" to seize and reverse-convert adult members. The academic study of religion largely rejected the thesis. When the psychologist Margaret Singer's task force (DIMPAC) submitted its brainwashing report, the American Psychological Association's review board declined to endorse it in 1987, finding it lacked "the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary." The sociologist Eileen Barker, in The Making of a Moonie (1984) — built on years of fieldwork inside the Unification Church — showed that the overwhelming majority of people exposed to even the most intensive recruitment did not join, and most who did drifted away within two years: hardly the signature of irresistible mind control. Scholars replaced the brainwashing model with the ordinary sociology of conversion — social bonds, personal crisis, gradual commitment.

That correction cuts both ways, and the honest skeptic holds the tension. Rejecting the brainwashing myth does not mean the movements are benign; Jonestown, Waco, Aum, and Heaven's Gate are not fantasies of hostile relatives. The reliable danger signals, the evidence suggests, are not strange beliefs but structural: total control of information and contact, a leader beyond accountability, the collapse of the boundary between the group and the world, and apocalyptic urgency. The scholarly verdict is neither the anti-cultist's panic nor the apologist's reassurance, but a harder discipline: judge each movement by its conduct, and keep belief and behavior in separate columns.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The new religions are religions of the modern world — of print, copyright, the corporation, and now the internet — and they encode themselves accordingly.

• Many produce a new scripture on the ancient model, claiming revealed authority in an age of mass printing: the Book of Mormon and Smith's Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price; Ellen White's voluminous writings; the Divine Principle; the Bahá'í Kitáb-i-Aqdas; Hubbard's Dianetics and Scientology corpus. The book itself, cheaply reproduced and widely owned, becomes the movement's portable temple.
• They build new sacred symbols deliberately and self-consciously — the Bahá'í nine-pointed star for the unity of the world's great religions and the ringstone symbol; the golden angel Moroni with his trumpet atop LDS temple spires; Scientology's cross and its "S-and-double-triangle." These are designed emblems, authored in known years by known hands — sacred symbolism whose manufacture we can watch, a rare and revealing thing.
• And they often encode a staged, secret knowledge — the graded initiations of Scientology's Operating Thetan levels, whose advanced cosmology (the tale of the galactic ruler Xenu) is disclosed only to the initiated and the paying; the temple ordinances of the Latter-day Saints, closed to non-members. The ancient pattern of esoteric revelation, of the mystery cult's tiered secrets (Chapter 18), is reborn in the members-only manual and the confidential upper level.

Connections

The new religious movements are the direct heirs of everything before them, recombined. They carry the millenarianism of apocalyptic Judaism and early Christianity (Chapters 10, 16) — the Adventists and Witnesses are its purest modern form. They revive the esoteric initiation of the mystery cults (Chapter 18) and Kabbalah (Chapter 26) in Scientology's graded levels and the LDS temple. They transplant the devotion of Bhakti bodily into the West (Hare Krishna is a Gaudiya Vaishnava order in saffron robes on American streets — Chapter 30). And they inherit the do-it-yourself spirituality that Spiritualism and Theosophy, the subjects of the neighboring chapters (36, 37), first set loose in the modern West — the conviction that the seeker may assemble a faith from all the world's traditions at will. They are what religion looks like in an age of science, freedom, and doubt: not the disappearance the secular prophets forecast, but faith's endless, restless remaking.

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