New Religious Movements, Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Like new religious movements historically, new religious movements during the 19th century took inspiration from larger sociocultural and religious processes, were both the product and the producer of social change, and in some cases led to enduring forms of Christianity and alternative Christianities. The advent of western modernity (which overturned medieval theology and authority), the Renaissance, the age of reason through the Enlightenment, the age of revolutions, romanticism, and western industrialization had all given rise to significant social ferment by the 19th century, for new religious thinking, democratization, and movements. By the mid 1800s, with Darwinism, the sciences had been set forth as a foundation for the hegemonic epistemology of modernity. This is not to say that religion was supplanted by secularism wholesale, but rather that competing modern epistemologies were to provide the impetus for new religious responses, both in terms of Christianity's involvement with modernity and western imperial designs, and in new religious movements.