The Relgious Movements Page: Why Should We Study NRMs?

Why Should We Study New Religious Movements?

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As far as historians and social scientists know, there has never been a human society without some form of religion. Anthropologist Anthony Wallace, a leading authority on religions, estimates that in the history of humankind there have been approximately100,000 religions. Whether or not this is a reasonable estimate doesn't really matter. What is clear is that new religions are constantly emerging and older religions slip away into oblivion.

No new religion emerges full blown but evolves--sometimes slowly, other times at a rapid pace. New religions take the form of either a sect or a cult and only gradually become recognized as a legitimate faith tradition of the culture in which they reside.

This course is about how cults and sects emerge, develop and interact with a host culture. The sparsity of historical records prohibits detailed reconstruction of the emergence of any of the worlds great religions. By studying emerging religions, however, we can learn a lot about how and why these great religious came into existance and developed, as well as why religion has persisted.

New religious movements have almost always been unpopular. The leaders have been accused of illegitimate motives. Their followers have been viewed as misguided, or worse yet, victims of some sinister form of "mind control." The "cult controversies" of our day are not very different from the conflicts of new religions over the course of human history. When religious movements are new, there are no easy criteria for sorting out "legitimate" from "illegitimate" groups; charlitans and co-artists from bonified religious prophets. Only with the hindsight of history, and the evidence that a group has survived and entered the mainstream of cultural life, do we tend to assign "legitimacy" to new religions movements.

The United States presents a special case in the study of new religions because theConstitution guarantees both freedom of religious conscience and freedom to act upon one's beliefs. The constitutionally guaranteed rights of religious establishment and exercise have been repeatedly challenged throughout American history. As Harvey Cox of the HarvardDivinity School has written, "[d]espite all the elegant rhetoric about the Pilgrim fathers and the smiling exchanges at interfaith banquets, America has not set an exemplary record in the area of religious freedom." The firey immolation of David Koresh and his followers near Waco, Texas in 1993 is the most recent tragedic episode in American history. However seemingly bizarre, the beliefs and practices of the Branch Davidians were not all that different from other religious movements in American history. To understand what happened to the Davidians, we need to learn about the treatment of Catholic immigrants, the Mormons, the Christian Scientists and many other groups.

Studying new religions from a social science perspective provides conceptual tools for theanalysis of new religions. These conceptual tools help us understand how and why contemporary conflicts are mirror images of conflicts that have occured repeatedly in the history of humankind. The social sciences also provide important insights about the nature and central role of religion in human social organization.

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