“What are new religious movements? Elaborate emphasizing their forms and orientations.” (2023)
New religious movements (NRMs) are religious or spiritual groups of recent origin, mostly since the 1950s, that stand outside a society’s dominant religious institutions. They are new either as offshoots of an old tradition or as imports and innovations. Eileen Barker preferred the neutral term NRM to the pejorative “cult”. The Unification Church, Scientology, ISKCON, Transcendental Meditation and India’s guru movements are typical cases.
Distinguishing features
- First-generation membership: converts rather than people born into the faith, hence intense commitment and high turnover.
- Charismatic leadership in the sense of Max Weber: authority rests on a founder, which makes succession crises likely.
- Tension with society over family, sexuality, money or the state, and so frequent “anti-cult” controversy.
- Rapid change: movements that survive tend to institutionalise, as H. Richard Niebuhr predicted for sects becoming denominations.
Forms: how NRMs are organised
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (The Future of Religion, 1985) classify them by degree of organisation:
| Form | Nature | Illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Audience cult | Loose, mass-mediated, no membership | Astrology, UFO belief, televangelist and YouTube followings |
| Client cult | Practitioner–client service for a fee | Scientology auditing, meditation and wellness courses |
| Cult movement | Full religious community, exclusive | Unification Church, Heaven’s Gate |
By origin, Stark and Bainbridge also separate sectarian NRMs (schisms within a tradition, such as neo-Pentecostal churches) from cultic ones (novel or imported, such as ISKCON in the West).
Orientations: how NRMs relate to the world
Roy Wallis (The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life, 1984) gives the standard typology:
| Orientation | Stance and appeal | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| World-rejecting | Condemns society; communal, total-institution life; strict morality; often apocalyptic | Unification Church, People’s Temple, Aum Shinrikyo |
| World-accommodating | Separates spiritual and worldly life; seeks renewed inner piety within a tradition | Neo-Pentecostalism, Subud, Radha Soami satsangs |
| World-affirming | Accepts society’s goals; sells techniques for success, health and self-realisation; little doctrine | Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, Art of Living |
Wallis admits many groups mix types: the 3HO movement and the Divine Light Mission combine an ascetic core with open classes for outsiders. James A. Beckford adds that members’ own orientations can differ from official teaching.
Bryan Wilson (Magic and the Millennium, 1973) offers a finer scheme of “responses to the world”: conversionist, revolutionist, introversionist, manipulationist, thaumaturgical, reformist and utopian. It is useful for Indian healing and miracle cults, which are largely thaumaturgical.
Indian NRMs
- Export movements: ISKCON (New York, 1966) and Transcendental Meditation took Hindu devotion and yoga to the West.
- Urban middle-class movements: Lawrence A. Babb (Redemptive Encounters, 1986) studied the Radhasoamis, Brahma Kumaris and Sathya Sai Baba devotees; Maya Warrier (2005) studied the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission. Both show “guru faith” fitting modern careers, a world-affirming pattern.
- Subaltern sects: Punjab’s deras and the Ravidassia religion, declared by Dera Sachkhand Ballan in 2010, carry caste protest.
- Legal contest: in October 2024 the Supreme Court closed a habeas corpus case against Isha Foundation, holding that the two women in question were adults living there by choice. The ruling echoes Barker’s rejection of the “brainwashing” thesis in The Making of a Moonie (1984).
Conclusion
NRMs are best seen as laboratories of religious modernity. Their forms track changing social organisation, from mass media to consumer services; their orientations track how people experience the world, whether as corrupt, compartmentalised or full of opportunity. Typologies are ideal types, not boxes, but together they explain why the same modern society produces both ascetic communes and commercial spirituality.