ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have dealt with Christianity’s main traditions and their sub-divisions. However, there are a number of smaller organizations who claim a Christian identity that is frequently called into question by mainstream believers. Chapter 15 drew attention to the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, and to the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Better known in the West are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), the Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’), the Unitarians and e Family International (formerly known as the Children of God). Popularly these movements are referred to as ‘sects’ or, more recently, ‘cults’, although scholars prefer to use the term ‘new religious movements’ (NRMs). Finding a satisfactory term is difficult, however, since not all these organizations are new. Christadelphians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists are now well over a century old, and organizations like the Unitarian Church can trace their origins back to the Protestant Reformation. ere are reckoned to be some six-hundred NRMs in Britain, over two thousand in the USA, and possibly as many as ten thousand in Africa today, although not all of these are Christianderived NRMs. Most of these ‘New Christian’ groups are Protestant, partly because Protestantism, unlike Catholicism and (to a lesser degree) Orthodoxy, lacks central organizational control as a tradition, and partly because Protestants have consequently tended to have a wide variety of beliefs and practices, some of which have tested the limits of acceptability.
