New Religious Movements

Abstract

The term new religious movement has been employed to refer to a number of distinguishable but overlapping phenomena, not all of which are unambiguously new and not all of which are, by at least some criteria, religious. There have, of course, always been new religions – Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam all started off as such. With the hindsight of history, it is possible to recognize periods that have been particularly prone to the growth of new religions. Examples would be the 1530s in Northern and Central Europe; England between 1620 and 1650 and again at the turn of the nineteenth century; the Great Awakening of the late 1730s followed by the Second Great Awakening of 1820–1860 in the United States; and a “Rush Hour of the Gods,” to borrow Neill McFarland's (1967) term, arrived in Japan when the new religions that had been suppressed during World War II became liberated in the mid‐1940s, then, roughly 30 years later, they were joined by what are now referred to as the Japanese new new religions (Shimazono, 2004).