The Youth-Crisis Model of Conversion: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed?

Abstract

Initially formulated in the 1970s when large numbers of former counterculturists were joining alternative religions, the youth-crisis model of conversion posited that new recruits were predominantly young people whose involvement could be explained as a function of their youth (e.g., as an adolescent developmental crisis). The present study presents statistics on recruits to seven different contemporary new religions that fun damentally challenge this item of conventional wisdom. Six out of seven data sets also embody a striking pattern of gradually increasing age across time for new converts.In addition to uncovering the growing age-at-recruitment pattern -which I desig nate the E-correlation -I argue that: (1) With the exception of efforts to understand true youth movements such as Internet Satanism, attempts to interpret conversions to contemporary emergent religions as being a function of the imputed youthfulness of recruits is no longer in touch with the reality on the ground. (2) The persistence of the characterization of converts as youthful reflects a failure to build a strong empirical base for such generalizations. Instead, we have relied upon quantitative work carried

The Religion of the Educated Classes Revisited: New Religions, the Nonreligious, and Educational Levels

“…Along with the convention that NRM members are more highly educated, these older studies have continued to inform the view that recruits are generally younger, that NRMs are dominated by one or the other sex, that their members primarily became involved through preexisting social networks, and that they tended to have fewer or weaker ideological alignments prior to joining. However, a number of recent, diachronically informed studies (e.g., Lewis , ; Lewis and Baumann ) have decisively demonstrated that the NRM field has been relying on outdated demographic data to inform our understandings of the traits of NRM members. With few exceptions, such as Rochford's () monograph on the Hare Krishna movement, researchers have, in effect, been studying NRMs as if they were static entities, failing to capture the change in membership demographics over time.…”