“Windows To Spirituality”
New Religious Movements
New religious movements, a heterogeneous group of religious faiths emerging since the nineteenth century, often syncretizing, re-interpreting or reviving aspects of older traditions such as Western esotericism (Occultism, New Age, Satanism), Modern Paganism (Wicca, Neopaganism, Hellenism, Polytheistic reconstructionism), Hindu derived religions (Transcendental Meditation), New ethnic religions (Nation of Islam, Native American Church, Order of Nine Angles), Entheogenic religions, New Thought (Christian Science), some inspired by science-fiction (UFO religions, Scientology), Political Religions, and Parody religions.
A cult is a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal.
Unification Church The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely known as the Unification Church, is a new religious movement whose members are called Unificationists, more widely known as “Moonies“. It was officially founded on 1 May 1954 under the name Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC) in Seoul, South Korea, by Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012)....
Satanism And Youth’s Quest For Identity Briefly defined as the worship of Satan as if he were God, Satanism is the name given to a reaction that basically started in the 1880s in such countries as France, England, Germany, and especially in the USA, against Christianity and religious understanding and...
Evolutionism Evolutionism is a term used (often derogatorily) to denote the theory of evolution. Its exact meaning has changed over time as the study of evolution has progressed. In the 19th century, it was used to describe the belief that organisms deliberately improved themselves through progressive inherited change (orthogenesis). The teleological belief went on to...
Doomsday Cult A doomsday cult is a cult that believes in apocalypticism and millenarianism, including both those that predict disaster and those that attempt to destroy the entire universe. Sociologist John Lofland coined the term doomsday cult in his 1966 study of a group of members of the Unification Church of the United States: Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of...
Outline Of New Religious Movements Here is the outline of New Religious Movements. New religious movements, a heterogeneous group of religious faiths emerging since the nineteenth century, often syncretizing, re-interpreting, or reviving aspects of older traditions such as Western esotericism, Modern Paganism, Hindu derived religions, New ethnic religions, Entheogenic religions,...
List Of New Religious Movements Here is the list of New Religious Movements. A new religious movement (NRM) is a religious, ethical, or spiritual group or community with practices of relatively modern origins. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may exist on the fringes of a wider religion, in which case...
New Religious Movements: An Overview Scholars adopted the term new religious movements (NRMs) in order to avoid the pejorative connotations of the popularly used term cult. Although the word cult originally referred to an organized system of worship (and is still used in that sense by scholars in several disciplines), the cult began to take on...
Academic Study Of New Religious Movements The academic study of new religious movements is known as New Religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by...
Japanese New Religions Japanese new religions are new religious movements established in Japan. In Japanese, they are called shinshūkyō (新宗教) or shinkō shūkyō (新興宗教). Japanese scholars classify all religious organizations founded since the middle of the 19th century as “new religions”; thus, the term refers to a great diversity and number of organizations....
Falun Gong Falun Gong or Falun Dafa (“Dharma Wheel Practice” or “Law Wheel Practice”) is a new religious movement that combines meditation and qigong exercises with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance (真、善、忍). The practice emphasizes morality and the cultivation of virtue and identifies as a practice of the Buddhist school,...
Mexicayotl Mexicayotl (Nahuatl word meaning “Essence of the Mexican”, “Mexicanity”; Spanish: Mexicanidad; ) is a movement reviving the indigenous religion, philosophy and traditions of ancient Mexico (Aztec religion and Aztec philosophy) among the Mexican people. The movement came to light in the 1950s, led by Mexico City intellectuals, but has grown significantly on a grassroots level only in more recent times, also...
Indian Shaker Church The Indian Shaker Church is a Christian denomination founded in 1881 by Squaxin shaman John Slocum and his wife Mary Slocum in Washington State. The Indian Shaker Church is a unique blend of American Indian, Catholic, and Protestant beliefs and practices. The Indian Shakers are unrelated to the Shakers of New England (United Society of Believers) and are not to be confused with the Native...
Ghost Dance The Ghost Dance (Nanissáanah, also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka (renamed Jack Wilson), proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on...
Goddess Movement The Goddess movement includes spiritual beliefs or practices (chiefly neopagan) which emerged predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1970s. The movement grew as a reaction to perceptions of predominant organized religion as male-dominated, and makes use of goddess worship and a focus on gender and femininity. The Goddess...
Matriarchal Religion A matriarchal religion is a religion that focuses on a goddess or goddesses. The term is most often used to refer to theories of prehistoric matriarchal religions that were proposed by scholars such as Johann Jakob Bachofen, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Marija Gimbutas, and later popularized by second-wave feminism. In the 20th century,...
Earth Religion Earth religion is a term used mostly in the context of neopaganism. Earth-centered religion or nature worship is a system of religion based on the veneration of natural phenomena. It covers any religion that worships the earth, nature, or fertility deity, such as the various forms of goddess worship or matriarchal religion. Some find a connection between earth-worship and the Gaia hypothesis. Earth religions are also...
Heathenry Heathenry, also termed Heathenism, contemporary Germanic Paganism, or Germanic Neopaganism, is a modern Pagan religion. Scholars of religious studies classify it as a new religious movement. Developed in Europe during the early 20th century, its practitioners model it on the pre-Christian belief systems adhered to by the Germanic peoples of the Iron Age and Early Middle Ages. In an attempt to reconstruct these...
Cargo Cult The term cargo cult was first used in print in 1945 by Norris Mervyn Bird, repeating a derogatory description used by planters and businessmen in the Australian Territory of Papua. The term was later adopted by anthropologists, and applied retroactively to movements in a much earlier era. In 1964, Peter Lawrence...
Cult Of The Supreme Being The Cult of the Supreme Being (Culte de l’Être suprême)[note 1] was a form of deism established in France by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. It was intended to become the state religion of the new French Republic and a replacement for Roman Catholicism and its rival, the Cult of Reason. It went unsupported after the fall...
Cult Of Reason The Cult of Reason (Culte de la Raison)[note 1] was France’s first established state-sponsored atheistic religion, intended as a replacement for Catholicism during the French Revolution. After holding sway for barely a year, in 1794 it was officially replaced by the rival Cult of the Supreme Being, promoted by Robespierre. Both cults were officially banned in 1802 by Napoleon...
