James R. Lewis: Sects Stats: Overturning the Conventional Wisdom about Cult Members (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sects, Cults, and New Religious Movements: An Introduction
Sect, Cults, and New Religions, 4 volume reprint set, Vol. 1, pp. 1-11. , 2014
The guiding principles for this four-volume collection of reprinted articles and chapters are straightforward and were reached by consensus among the editors. First, in addition to those classics that are rightly known and respected, we have sought to also include studies of an equal standard that have been neglected or have otherwise failed to reach the deserved broad audience, usually as a result of initial publication in obscure journals or small print-run edited volumes and conference proceedings. Second, we have aimed for a balance between the usual emphasis upon either a broad theoretical orientation, or conversely, a bias towards case studies, with an equal and complementary focus on both. Third, we have selected works that are representative of the academic study of new religious movements (NRMs), with a range of methodological approaches being included, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and psychology. Thus, we hope that the methodological rigour of the content is matched by the empirical richness of the panoply of new religions examined.
The Not-So-New Religious Movements: Changes in ‘the Cult Scene’ over the Past Forty Years
Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion
New religious movements (NRMs) tend to exhibit certain characteristics that change with the arrival of second and subsequent generations. The paper explores some of the internally motivated revisions that may be due to demographic changes or disappointed expectations, and some of the changes brought about through the economic, political, technological, legal and cultural influences from the wider society. Although there are always exceptions, unqualified boundaries tend to become more porous and negotiable as the movements accommodate to the outside world and ‘denominationalise’. The paper ends with a brief description of some of the more general changes in ‘the cult scene’ over the past 40 years.
Social change and new religious movements
In this article, originally published in 1995, Professor Bryan Ronald Wilson surveys social challenges facing new religious movements, in particular the problem of intolerance. As a new religion becomes older, it tends to attain a greater degree of acceptance within society because it is considered less different or deviant. In the case of the Church of Scientology, Dr. Wilson contends that it “may arouse suspicion” because its theology, practices and culture are sometimes at odds with forms of religion (typically Judeo-Christian) in Western societies. Numerous examples are outlined, including the affirmation in the Creed of the Church of Scientology that humanity is inherently good, rather than sinful or depraved. “In a rapidly changing world, in which social institutions are all in flux, to religion alone is ascribed a continuing and theoretically unchanging role, function, and form,” Dr. Wilson writes. “Yet the evidence is that considerable numbers of people are seeking, and finding, new patterns of religious practice and new conceptions of religious truth, engaging in new spiritual quests, and participating in new types of religious organizations.” The Church of Scientology, certainly, is one such new religion, based on its unparalleled expansion and testimonies from its parishioners on the benefits of Dianetics and Scientology experienced on a daily basis. BIOGRAPHY Bryan Ronald Wilson, Ph.D., (1926–2004) was reader emeritus in sociology at the University of Oxford. From 1963 to 1993 he was also a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and in 1993 was elected an emeritus fellow. For more than fifty years he conducted research into minority religious movements in Britain, the United States, Ghana, Kenya, Belgium, Japan and other countries. Dr. Wilson earned his doctorate in sociology from the London School of Economics in 1955, authored dozens of articles, and wrote or edited dozens of books, including: Sects and Society: The Sociology of Three Religious Groups in Britain (1961); Patterns of Sectarianism (edited, 1967); Religious Sects (1970, also published in translation in French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Japanese); Magic and the Millennium (1973); Contemporary Transformations of Religion (1976, also published in translation in Italian and Japanese); The Social Impact of the New Religious Movements (edited, 1981); Religion in Sociological Perspective (1982); The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism (1990); and A Time to Chant: the Soka Gakki Buddhists in Britain (1994). In 1984, the University of Oxford recognized the value of his published work by conferring upon him the degree of D.Litt. In 1992, the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, awarded him the degree of doctor honoris causa. In 1994, he was elected a fellow of the British Academy.
Sects, Cults, and New Religions. Introduction to Volume 3: Academy, Modernity, Society, and Culture
Sects, Cults, and New Religions, 4 volume reprint set, Vol. 3, pp. 1-7., 2014
This third volume presents research on new religious movements with particular regards to how they are approached within the academy, how they are situated within modernity and its attendant secularising tendencies, and their relationship to the normative cultures of which they are a part. Rather than focusing upon the particulars of any given new religion, this volume rather highlights the contexts within which new religions are understood and interpreted, be they intellectual, historical, or socio-cultural. In drawing together this research, this volume provides an overview of key issues that arise at the intersection of new religious behaviours with other, non-religious, domains.
Framing New Religious Movements: New Perspectives and Challenges, University of Turin, 24 May 2023
The study of New Religious Movements (NRMs) emerged in the 1960s and was initially largely the area of sociologists who often were participant observers in the NRMs they researched. These groups were generally quite restricted and exclusive in the manner of older religions, and two broad evaluations of them emerged; ‘cultic studies’, which viewed the groups as illegitimate and their members as deviant, and ‘NRM studies’, which argued for the authenticity of NRMs as religions, and in some cases studied them as a laboratory case of how older religions (the so-called World Religions, for example) originated and developed over time. In the twenty-first century NRM studies has significant overlap with contemporary religious trends, and the focus on individual groups has been challenged by studies of sport as religion/ religious, raves and dance parties as mystical experiences, all manner of consumerist and self-improvement behaviours as spiritual, ecology as pantheism, tourism, dress, and even body modification as exemplifying the desire for transcendence of mundane/ profane life. This lecture argues that what unites the fields of NRM studies and contemporary religious trends is a commitment to a secular worldview and methodological agnosticism, and a desire to open up the full range of ways that individuals and groups seek to live to the fullest, and the inventiveness of the immortality systems that they construct. Fiction, invention, the online realm, and all manner of popular cultural phenomena combine with older beliefs and practices in a dizzying array of new religious and spiritual forms, which offer scholars of NRMs and CRTs near-limitless possibilities for research and teaching.
Sects, Cults, and New Religions, 4 volume reprint set, Vol. 1, pp. 12-17, 2014
The origins and emergence of new religions has been an area of enduring interest within scholarly thought. Although approaches to this field of inquiry have rightly shifted in more recent years, a particular concern with how religions emerge is evident throughout scholarship across the 19th and 20th centuries.This first volume presents a selection of chapters that concern themselves with the emergence of new religions in a variety of contexts. Utilising both theoretical and empirical approaches, this volume explores emergence through a number of recurring themes: theoretical models and methodological constructs; charismatic leadership; millenarianism; sacred narratives; and east/west dialogue. These various themes function as focal points for the many and varied sites of new religious practice, community, and belief