Intentional Communities and New Religious Movements

In the decades following World War II, observers of Western culture noticed a marked rise in the number of religious groups whose beliefs and practices differed markedly from those of the several forms of Christianity that had dominated the Western religious scene for more than a millennium. Many of these groups represented newly arrived movements from Asia (and to a lesser extent Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East). Others were indigenous groups, products of a revived Western esoteric or gnostic tradition. In the United States, significant attention was directed at the sudden emergence of Eastern religions at the end of the 1960s and their success at winning new members from the baby boom generation.

Prior to the 1960s, such new religious movements had generally been called cults, indicative of their sharp departure from the mainline Christian or Jewish denominations. However, in the 1970s a popular movement that developed to oppose the recruitment efforts of some high-demand new religions (including the Unification Church, The Way International, the Divine Light Missions, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, [Page 701]and the Church of Scientology) gave the term cult a new, more negative connotation. As a result, most social scientists, psychologists, and religious studies scholars now call such movements new religions, a term originally used to discuss the many new groups that emerged in Japan after religious freedom was declared in 1945.

In spite of sometimes intense opposition to their growth and spread, new religions grew in number steadily through the last third of the twentieth century, and the emergence of new groups shows no sign of decreasing. That growth is supported by the annual immigration to the United States and Europe of tens of thousands of people from countries where religions other than Christianity dominate. The term new religion, however, is generally not applied to religions that are transplanted by ethnic groups seeking to continue their traditional form of worship in their new home. Rather, it refers to those new groups that recruit followers primarily from the larger population.