New religious movement

A new religious movement, or NRM, is a spiritual or religious group with modern origins. These groups are often considered peripheral to the dominant religious culture of their society. This means they exist on the edges of the main religious traditions. Some NRMs are entirely novel in their origin. Other NRMs are branches of wider, older religions that have become distinct from their original denominations.

NRMs vary greatly in how they respond to the modernizing world. Some movements embrace individualism, focusing on the personal spiritual experience of the person. Other movements embrace tightly knit collective means, focusing on a strong, shared community. Scholars estimate that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Their size varies significantly. Some groups have only a few members. Others have thousands, and a few have grown to include more than one million members.

Scholars debate how to define the "new" in new religious movements. There is no single, agreed-upon criterion for this classification. One perspective compares NRMs to large, well-established religions like Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Some scholars use the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the 1950s as a defining time period. Others, like George Chryssides, look much further back. They point to the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830 or Tenrikyo in 1838 as early examples.

History shows a wide variety of these movements appearing across different eras and nations. In 1830, Joseph Smith founded the Latter Day Saint movement, which had over 17 million members by 2023. In 1863, Bahá'u'lláh founded the Bahá'í Faith in Iran. In 1889, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad founded the Ahmadiyya branch of Islam. In 1911, Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church in South Africa. The 1950s and 1960s saw a rise in many groups during the height of counterculture movements. For example, Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard in 1954.

In 1893, the first Parliament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago. This event included NRMs such as spiritualism, the Bahá'í Faith, and Christian Science.

The conference allowed Asian religious teachers, like the Jain preacher Virchand Gandhi, to reach a wide American audience. Later, in the 1950s, the Aetherius Society was founded in England. This group is an example of a "UFO religion," which combines traditional religious principles with beliefs in extraterrestrial life.

New religious movements have often faced significant social tension. During the 1970s and 1980s, many groups became highly visible in North America and Western Europe. This period is sometimes described as a "cult boom" or "cult explosion" in certain literature. This visibility led to the "cult wars," which involved disputes over conversion and allegations of coercive persuasion. These disputes included legal battles and the growth of organized opposition, such as the secular anti-cult movement and the Christian countercult movement.

Despite these tensions, the study of NRMs has become a formal academic field. Scholars study how these movements relate to processes like globalization, secularization, and individualization. In the 21st century, many NRMs use the internet for recruitment and rituals, a practice called cybersectarianism. Even if a movement does not become a dominant faith, its ideas can still spread. Scholar Elijah Siegler noted that many "New Age" concepts introduced by NRMs have become part of mainstream worldwide culture.