Revision - Religion and New Relgious Movements

Just a few quick pointers on religion and NRMs today.

This topic can ‘stand alone’ as it were, or be tacked on to questions about secularisation, so you can’t afford to leave it out.

Deprivation

Some explanations of the rise of NRMs see it in terms of economic or spiritual deprivation; these sorts of explanation can come from either Marxist or Weberian theory. So NRMs like Black Pentacostalism, the Baptist Church, Rastafarianism, or the Nation of Islam, can fit into this sort of framework. Roy Wallis and Eileen Barker can be seen as arguing along these broad lines, but it would be simplistic to label them either Marxist or Weberian.

Another approach is to see NRMs as the logical consequence of secularisation; what Herberg called ‘desacrilisation’ means that NRMs can fill the void left by the decline of mainstream religion.

The conceptof disengagment runs along similar lines. It suggests that as churches have disengaged from the wider society, and no longer engage with key aspects of modern life and people’s concerns, a path is left open for more spectacular forms of worship to emerge.

And to conclude, its always useful to be able to see the links between NRMs and broader sociological theory:

The growth in NRMs can be explained in lots of ways and its unsurprising that sociologists will be influenced by their general theoretical approach in trying to explain it.

Conflict-influenced theorists will tend to see the growth of NRMs as the result of economic inequalities are the alienation which stems from them.

Consensus-based theorists may tend to see NRMs as an inevitable result of the dislocation of cultural and spiritual values.

A postmodernist approach might suggest that globalisation and the end of metanarratives makes it feasible for everyone to seek their own answers to questions of faith. This will lead to the end of the dominance of the major world religions and bring about an era of pluralism and choice.