Religious Minorities

A religious minority is a minority of the population in a given society who profess a religion markedly different from the conventional religious culture of that society. For example, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims are counted as religious minorities in the United States, where Christianity has retained its dominant normative religious status. In the Islamic world, however, it is Christians with small population percentages that are among the ranks of religious minorities. In the social sciences (especially sociology), researchers have been increasingly concerned with social phenomena that center on religious minorities (i.e., cults/new religious movements). Not only does the religious minority group, as a social phenomenon, deserve serious research in its own right, but also there might exist significant associations between the religious minority identity and deviant behaviors, particularly when confounded with race and ethnicity, under certain social conditions. This has been particularly the case after 9/11. Since this period, Muslims in particular have been demonized as being criminals.

While the research on religious majority groups has dominated the scientific study of religion, [Page 709]remarkable progress has also been made in understanding religious minority groups. One of the earliest such studies dates back to 1965 when John Lofland and Rodney Stark published their well-known research on the formative years of the Unification church (Moonies) in the United States. Several decades later, in 1996, Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge defined sects and cults as the two basic forms of deviant religious groups. While the former (and churches as well) belong to the conventional religious culture, the latter are referred to as a religious minority group that engages in religious deviance. In other words, minority religion per se is deviance.

To be more specific, as religious minorities, members of most cults (or new religious movements) tend to reject the conventional religious culture of a given society and attempt to replace it with an entirely new culture. For example, New Paganism in the Christianity-dominated Western nations is a cult, given its attempt to replace the conventional Judeo-Christian culture of the West with an exotic religious culture claimed to predate Christianity. In addition, it also has been suggested that some conventional religious groups can automatically transform into cults by creating and adding new cultural elements into the existing conventional culture. As a consequence, members of such groups become religious minorities, being socially marginalized and rejected by the dominant religious culture, which views them as heretics and potential threats (e.g., the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [Mormons] and the Unification Church, which rest on Christian beliefs and teachings with newly developed theological elements).

In the exploration of religious minorities as deviant, one area that cannot be neglected is race and ethnicity. Individuals who belong to a religious minority group may be subjected to social discrimination and prejudice from the larger society; this is particularly true when the religious differences correlate with racial and ethnic differences. One exemplary case is Japanese Buddhism during early Japanese immigration to the United States in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. In this period, when anti-Asian sentiment was commonplace, Japanese ethnic identity aroused considerable hostility and oppression from the surrounding Christian culture against ethnic Japanese Buddhists. At this time, although often looked on with scorn by Christians, White Buddhist practitioners were spared from serious religious persecution. With the double burden of religious minority and racial and ethnic minority identities, a group may appear all the more “deviant” in the eyes of “mainstream” culture.

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