Chapter 14 New Religions
CHAPTER SUMMARY What Is “New” About New Religious Movements? The modern era has witnessed an explosion of new religious movements (NRMs); in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no fewer than 14,000 new religious communities have arisen, collectively testifying to the influence of three historical factors: modernization, globalization, and secularization. Many of those who have joined such communities identify themselves as “seekers”—that is, individuals who have distanced themselves from established faiths, and who are open to new, often countercultural influences. The first World’s Parliament of Religions (1893) brought together a number of such “communities of dissent,” and the repeal of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965 brought an increasing number of immigrants and cultural influences from Asia to the United States, expanding and enriching the pool of religious ideas from which nontraditional religious communities could be drawn. Some of these influences can be seen in so-called New Age communities, where such practices as channeling and astrology are common. Alternative Christianities and Their Offshoots Contemporary social scientists have proposed various ways of classifying these movements. J. Gordon Melton, for example, groups NRMs into “families” (Latter-Day Saints, Communal, Spiritualist/Psychic, Ancient Wisdom/Magical, and Eastern and Middle Eastern), while Roy Wallis identifies religions as “world-affirming,” “world-renouncing,” and “worldaccommodating.” Peter Clarke, by contrast, distinguishes between religious communities that emphasize a social transformation of the self not found in established faiths, leading to a distinction between persons who are “spiritual” as opposed to those who are (conventionally) “religious.” All of these typologies, however, are incomplete attempts to categorize and explain the profusion of NRMs in an era dominated by science and technology. One obvious and descriptive way of describing dissenting forms of Christian thought in the modern era is to refer to them as “alternative Christianities.” Within that expansive category one can include such divergent communities as the Mormons (Latter-Day Saints), Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Family, and the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (“Moonies”). Several of these communities are clearly “Adventist” in their orientation, reflecting the influence of the “Second Great Awakening” and the Millerite movement of the 1840s. And at least two of these (The Family and the Unification Church) have been criticized for exhibiting elements of a personality cult. At the furthest remove from historic Christian thought, but very much within an Adventist frame of reference, one encounters the Rastafarian movement, whose divine redeemer-figure is Haile Selassie, who briefly reigned as Emperor of Ethiopia in the 1930s, and whose birth name—Ras Tafari Makonnen—gave this Jamaican liberation movement its name.
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