ABSTRACT
The power of religious movements to change society depends very much upon the general capacity of religion to shape individual human behavior, and sociological research has found that this capacity is extremely variable. Religious movements that seek to change society are of many kinds, and some would seem to fall under each of the hypotheses. Thus the very complexity of findings about religion and individual deviance predicts a matching complexity in the patterns of success and failure experienced by religious movements whose goal is the transformation of public morality. Religion used to mean regulation. That is, religion traditionally was believed to provide the moral center for a society, controlling the behavior of individuals so that cooperation was possible. This chapter shows that religion has the capacity to shape individual behavior, but this power is highly variable.
