ABSTRACT
While some would undoubtedly question the first part of the above quotation from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, recent history has put the second part beyond all doubt. Over four hundred ‘new’ religions have emerged in Britain alone since 1945 and many of these and others are to be found in the rest of Western Europe. The figure is very much higher for North America,2 and post-war Japan3 has also witnessed, as have parts of sub-Saharan Africa4 from the 1890s, what amounts to a thriving industry in new religions. Although we have no reliable statistics, the clientele of postSecond World War new religions must be estimated in millions rather than thousands. Although it can be argued that the religions covered in this section, or at least some of them, are not new in a ‘cultural’ and ‘theological’ sense,5
as used in this introduction the term new is employed chronologically to refer to all those religions that have established themselves in Western Europe, North America and Japan since 1945, and in Africa over a somewhat longer time-span. It is worth pointing out here that the new religions that are known about and documented may constitute only the tip of the iceberg; below the surface there would appear to be a large mass of new religions which has neither been located nor measured with any precision. We can mention in this context the phenomenon of neo-pagan, esoteric and related movements. It is also worth mentioning that a number of new religions have burst upon the scene, flourished for a time and died, but in some cases not before having profoundly influenced the behaviour, thinking and general lifestyle of many thousands of people, and also the legal system in a number of societies, a notable and recent example being the Rajneesh movement discussed in Chapter 14, p. 163.6
New religions in the West and Japan derive from many different cultures and can vary enormously in terms of content, ritual, attitudes towards the older, albeit themselves once new religions, and towards one another and the wider society. They have also posed a great many questions for that wider society and the mainstream religions, in particular Christianity, obliging the former, for instance, to re-examine, and in certain instances to refine and develop among other things its legal concepts and definition of religion, and the latter to focus more of its attention on the mystical dimension of its tradition. Further, students of religion, including sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, theologians and historians, have also been pressed by the phenomenal growth in recent times of new religions to examine and improve their techniques of research, and reappraise some of their long held conceptual creations and notions about, for example, the meaning, nature and purpose of religion, the nature and method of interpretation of religious discourse, the mechanics of religious conversion, the question of religious freedom and tolerance, the process of secularisation and the character of modern society (both themes are treated by Bryan Wilson in his chapter on secularisation), the principle of and meaning of the term membership and the social location, nature and limits of charismatic authority. Numerous attempts have also been made to explain the rise and impact of new religions and the response of the wider society to this phenomenon and these are issues addressed by some of the contributors in this section of the volume and elsewhere.7
