New Religious Movements

A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion or an alternative spirituality, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and which a peripheral place within its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges posed by the modernizing world by embracing individualism whereas others seek tightly knit collective means. Many have their own unique scriptures, while others reinterpret existing texts. Scholars have estimated that NRMs now number in the tens of thousands worldwide, with most of their members living in Asia and Africa. Most have only a few members, some have thousands, and only very few have more than one million members.

The term shinshūkyō ("new religion") first developed in Japan to describe the proliferation of Japanese new religions following the Second World War. The term was then introduced to the United States in the 1960s. It gained increasing usage among scholars of religion—and in particular sociologists of religion—over the following decades, being favored over the more widely used term "cult", which is often considered derogatory.

New religions have often faced a hostile reception from established religious organisations and various 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.

Within the 1970s, the distinct field of new religions studies developed within the academic study of religion; there are now several scholarly organisations and peer-reviewed journals devoted to the subject. Religious studies scholars contextualize the rise of NRMs in modernity, relating it as a product of and answer to modern processes of secularization, globalization, detraditionalization, fragmentation, reflexivity, and individualization. Scholars continue to try to reach definitions and define boundaries.

There is no singular, agreed upon criteria for defining a "new religious movement". However, the term usually requires that the group be both of recent origin and different from existing religions. There is debate as to what the term "new" should designate in this context. One perspective is that "new" can designate that a religion is more recent in its origins than large, well-established religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism which are over a thousand years old. An alternate perspective is that the term "new" should designate that a religion is more recent in its formation, with some scholars viewing the 1950s or the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the defining time, while others look as far back as the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830.

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