New religious movement

A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means.^[1] Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.^[2]

There is no single, agreed-upon criterion for defining a "new religious movement".^[3] Debate continues as to how the term "new" should be interpreted in this context.^[4] One perspective is that it should designate a religion that is more recent in its origins than large, well-established religions like Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.^[4] Some scholars view the 1950s or the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the defining time,^[5] while others look as far back as the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830^[4][6] and of Tenrikyo in 1838.^[7][8]

New religions have sometimes faced opposition from established religious organisations and secular institutions. In Western nations, a secular anti-cult movement and a Christian countercult movement emerged during the 1970s and 1980s to oppose emergent groups. A distinct field of new religion studies developed within the academic study of religion in the 1970s. There are several scholarly organisations and peer-reviewed journals devoted to the subject. Religious studies scholars contextualize the rise of NRMs in modernity as a product of, and answer to, modern processes of secularization, globalization, detraditionalization, fragmentation, reflexivity, and individualization.^[1]