ABSTRACT
This chapter considers scholarship completed before the counterculture era of the 1960s. Much of the discussion about what would eventually be labeled NRMs was done by sociologists struggling with models of church and sect, and by liberal Protestant writers who described such groups without appealing to stereotypes. This chapter also includes a section on the countercult, those Protestant Evangelicals who wrote against alternative religions, beginning in the early 1900s and persisting up to the present.
