New religious movements — conventionally abbreviated NRMs — are religious or spiritual groups that took organisational form in the modern period, typically from the mid twentieth century onwards, and that stand outside the established religious institutions of the society in which they operate. The category is deliberately broad, covering imported traditions, breakaway groups, therapeutic and self-development organisations with metaphysical claims, and movements gathered around a living teacher.
The term was adopted in the 1970s as a replacement for cult, which had ceased to be usable analytically. In American and British public speech cult had come to mean a dangerous, deceptive organisation that captures the vulnerable, and any scholar using it inherited that verdict before the evidence was examined. NRM is a weaker and more honest label: it asserts only novelty and marginality, and leaves open whether a given group is benign, exploitative or something in between. Sociologically the important observation is that every great religion was once new, and was described by its contemporaries much as NRMs are described today.
Wallis's threefold classification
Roy Wallis produced the classification that examiners expect, sorting movements by their orientation to the surrounding world.
World-rejecting movements regard the existing social order as corrupt and demand separation from it. They tend towards communal living, shared property, regulated sexuality, a total claim on the member's time and identity, and often a millenarian expectation. Commitment is high, membership small, and the boundary with the world is sharply drawn.
World-accommodating movements neither denounce nor celebrate society. They supply an intensified inner or devotional life that leaves the member's job, family and citizenship intact, and they often function as a renewal current inside or beside an existing tradition. Charismatic prayer fellowships and many devotional satsang circles fall here.
World-affirming movements accept the goals the world already values — success, confidence, health, calm, effectiveness — and offer spiritual technique as the means to attain them. They frequently lack collective worship, resemble a course or a clientele more than a congregation, charge fees, and make no exclusive claim on the member's other affiliations. Wallis treated these as the most distinctively modern type, and the type most obviously shaped by a market.
Wallis himself allowed that few movements sit purely in one box and that groups migrate between them over time — a world-rejecting commune may become world-affirming as its founder's generation ages and its membership acquires property.
Why they arise
Several explanations coexist rather than compete. Rationalisation and disenchantment leave a demand for meaning that neither bureaucratic institutions nor mainstream churches satisfy, and Weber's account predicts recurrent charismatic irruptions against routinised religion. Anomie and rapid social change, in the Durkheimian line, generate a hunger for moral community; NRMs supply dense belonging in societies where kinship and neighbourhood have thinned. Marginality explains why converts have often been young, educated and between life stages — students, migrants, the recently divorced — people with weak stakes and free time rather than the poor. Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge argued the reverse of secularisation theory: as established religion accommodates the world and loses tension with it, the space for cult formation widens, so novelty is a symptom of institutional decline rather than of religious decline. Finally, globalisation created a genuine international market in spiritual goods, in which techniques and teachers circulate across continents and are consumed selectively.
Recruitment, commitment and the brainwashing thesis
Popular accounts attribute NRM growth to brainwashing — coercive persuasion that overrides the will. Eileen Barker's study of the Unification Church supplied the decisive test. She followed people from first contact through residential workshops and found that the overwhelming majority who attended never joined, that a large proportion of those who joined left within two years without any intervention, and that recruits were on the whole neither uniquely damaged nor uniquely suggestible. Recruitment worked through social networks — friends, relatives, the offer of warmth to people who were lonely — not through hypnotic technique. The thesis survives less as a finding than as an explanation offered by families for a choice they could not otherwise accept, and later by the deprogramming industry that formed around them. Recognising this does not settle questions of financial exploitation, abuse or the treatment of children within particular movements, which have to be established case by case.
Indian instances
India is both an exporter and a site of NRMs. Modern guru organisations built around a living teacher — meditation movements that travelled from India to the United States and back, devotional missions that combine darshan with hospitals and schools, transnational bodies teaching breath and posture techniques to urban professionals, and movements taking Indian devotional practice to Western congregations — illustrate the whole Wallis range. Maya Warrier's study of guru faith among educated urban devotees showed the world-affirming pattern clearly: members chose their guru reflexively, from among alternatives, retained careers and family obligations, and described the relationship in the language of personal growth as much as of salvation. Meanwhile the professionally managed ashram, with its trusts, publications, franchised centres and diaspora branches, demonstrates that charisma in the modern period is routinised through organisation, exactly as Weber predicted.
For the UPSC answer
Open by justifying the label — NRM replaced cult because the older word carried a verdict — and note that all religions were once new. Present Wallis's three types with one crisp defining feature each, and add that movements drift between types. Give at least three causes rather than one: disenchantment, anomie and marginality, with Stark and Bainbridge's inversion of secularisation theory to show that novelty can accompany institutional decline. Use Barker's findings to dispose of the brainwashing thesis, and close with Indian guru movements as evidence of both world-affirming religiosity and the routinisation of charisma.
References & further reading
- Wallis, R. (1984). The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Barker, E. (1984). The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? Blackwell.
- Barker, E. (1989). New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction. HMSO.
- Wilson, B. R. (1990). The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism. Clarendon Press.
- Stark, R. & Bainbridge, W. S. (1985). The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation. University of California Press.
- Warrier, M. (2005). Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission. Routledge.