page_title: New religious movement
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: New religious movement / History
caption_attribution_description: English: From left to right: Virchand Gandhi, Hewivitarne Dharmapala, Swami Vivekananda, (possibly) G. Bonet Maury.
context_page_description: A new religious movement, also known as a new religion or an alternative spirituality, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins but is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges which the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs now number in the tens of thousands worldwide, with most of their members living in Asia and Africa. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
  Scholars continue to try to reach definitions and define boundaries. There is no single, agreed-upon criterion for defining a "new religious movement", but the term usually suggests that the group is of recent origin and is different from existing religions. There is debate as to how the term "new" should be interpreted in this context.
context_section_description: In 1830 the Latter Day Saint movement including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith.  It is now one of the largest new religious movements in terms of membership. In Japan, 1838 marks the beginning of Tenrikyo. In 1844 Bábism was established in Iran from which the Bahá'í Faith was founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 1863. In 1860 Donghak, later Cheondoism, was founded by Choi Jae-Woo in Korea. It later ignited the Donghak Peasant Revolution in 1894. In 1889, Ahmadiyya an Islamic sect was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.  In 1891, the Unity Church, the first New Thought denomination, was founded in the United States.
  In 1893, the first Parliament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago. The conference included NRMs of the time such as spiritualism, Bahá'í Faith, and Christian Science. The latter was represented by its founder Mary Baker Eddy. Henry Harris Jessup who addressed the meeting was the first to mention the Bahá'í Faith in the United States. Also attending were Soyen Shaku, the "First American Ancestor" of Zen, the Buddhist preacher Anagarika Dharmapala, and the Jain preacher Virchand Gandhi. This conference gave Asian religious teachers their first wide American audience.
  In 1911, the Nazareth Baptist Church, the first and one of the largest modern African initiated churches, was founded by Isaiah Shembe in South Africa. The early 20th Century also saw a rise in interest in Asatru. The 1930s saw the rise of the Nation of Islam and the Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States; the rise of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica; the rise of Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo in Vietnam; the rise of Soka Gakkai in Japan; and the rise of Yiguandao in China. In the 1940s, Gerald Gardner began to outline the modern pagan religion of Wicca.
  New religious movements expanded in many nations in the 1950s and 1960s. Japanese new religions became very popular after the Shinto Directive (1945) forced the Japanese government to separate itself from Shinto, which had been the state religion of Japan, bringing about greater freedom of religion. In 1954 Scientology was founded in the United States and the Unification Church was founded in South Korea. In 1955 the Aetherius Society was founded in England. It and some other NRMs, have been called UFO religions because they combine the belief in extraterrestrial life with traditional religious principles. In 1965, Paul Twitchell founded Eckankar, an NRM derived partially from Sant Mat. In 1966 the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in the United States by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan. In 1967, The Beatles' visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India brought public attention to the Transcendental Meditation movement.
  In the late 1980s and 1990s, the decline of communism and the revolutions of 1989 opened up new opportunities for NRMs. Falun Gong was first taught publicly in Northeast China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi. At first it was accepted by the Chinese government and by 1999 there were 70 million practitioners in China, but in July 1999 the government started to view the movement as a threat and began attempts to eradicate it.
  In the 21st century, many NRMs are using the Internet to give out information, to recruit members, and sometimes to hold online meetings and rituals. That is sometimes referred to as cybersectarianism. Sabina Magliocco, professor of Anthropology and Folklore at California State University, Northridge, has discussed the growing popularity of new religious movements on the Internet.
  In 2006 J. Gordon Melton, executive director of the Institute for the Study of American Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The New York Times that 40 to 45 new religious movements emerge each year in the United States. In 2007, religious scholar Elijah Siegler said that, though no NRM had become the dominant faith in any country, many of the concepts they first introduced (often referred to as "New Age" ideas) have become part of worldwide mainstream culture.
caption: 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions.
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