NRMs

A new religious movement (NRM) is a religious community or ethical, spiritual, or philosophical group of modern origin, which has a peripheral place within the dominant religious culture. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may be part of a wider religion, in which case they will be distinct from pre-existing denominations.

Although there is no one criterion or set of criteria for describing a group as a "new religious movement," use of the term usually requires that the group be both of recent origin and different from existing religions.

The study of New Religions emerged in Japan after an increase in religious innovation following the Second World War. "New religions" is a calque (a word-for-word translation) of shinshūkyō, which Japanese sociologists coined to refer to this phenomenon. This term, amongst others, was adopted by Western scholars as an alternative to cult. "Cult" had emerged in the 1890s, but by the 1970s it had acquired a pejorative connotation, and was subsequently used indiscriminately by lay critics to disparage groups whose doctrines they opposed.

New religions studies is the interdisciplinary study of new religious movements (so called cults) that emerged as a discipline in the 1970s.

In the book Theory of Religion, it was proposed that the formation of "cults" can be explained through a combination of four models:

• The psycho-pathological model – the cult founder suffers from psychological problems; he develops the cult in order to resolve these problems for himself, as a form of self-therapy
• The entrepreneurial model – the cult founder acts like an entrepreneur, trying to develop a religion which he/she thinks will be most attractive to potential recruits, often based on his/her experiences from previous cults or other religious groups he/she has belonged to
• The social model – the cult is formed through a social implosion, in which cult members dramatically reduce the intensity of their emotional bonds with non-cult members, and dramatically increase the intensity of those bonds with fellow cult members – this emotionally intense situation naturally encourages the formation of a shared belief system and rituals
• The normal revelations model – the cult is formed when the founder chooses to interpret ordinary natural phenomena as supernatural, such as by ascribing his or her own creativity in inventing the cult to that of the deity.

"Why Do People Join NRMs?" [http://www.has.vcu.edu/wrs/#scholar_v_public,  Hadden, Jeffrey K. SOC 257: New Religious Movements Lectures, University of Virginia, Department of Sociology.]

1. Belonging to groups is a natural human activity;
2. People belong to religious groups for essentially the same reasons they belong to other groups;
3. Conversion is generally understood as an emotionally charged experience that leads to a dramatic reorganization of the convert's life;
4. Conversion varies enormously in terms of the intensity of the experience and the degree to which it actually alters the life of the convert;
5. Conversion is one, but not the only reason people join religious groups;
6. Social scientists have offered a number of theories to explain why people join religious groups;
7. Most of these explanations could apply equally well to explain why people join lots of other kinds of groups;
8. No one theory can explain all joinings or conversions;
9. What all of these theories have in common is the view that joining or converting is a natural process.

There are at least three ways people leave a NRM: 1) by one's own decision, 2) through expulsion and 3) or through intervention (Exit counseling, deprogramming).