New religious movement

A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion or an alternative spirituality, is a religious or spiritual groups 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. 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. 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.

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. Scholars favored it over the more widely used term "cult", which is often considered derogatory.

Scholars continue to try to reach definitions and define boundaries. 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.

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 combat 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.

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. In 1989, the sociologist of religion Eileen Barker defined the term "new religious movements" as "a disparate collection of organisations, most of which have emerged in their present form since the 1950s, and most of which offer some kind of answer to questions of a fundamental religious, spiritual or philosophical nature." Similarly, the scholar Paul Oliver viewed the Second World War as the dividing line after which religions could be regarded as "new".

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