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A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
Steven Alan Hassan is an American writer and mental health counselor who specializes in the area of cults and new religious movements. He worked as a deprogrammer in the late 1970s, but since then has advocated a non-coercive form of exit counseling.
David Christopher Lane is a professor of philosophy and sociology at Mt. San Antonio College, in Walnut, California. He is notable for his book The Making of a Spiritual Movement: The Untold Story of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar which exposed the origins of Eckankar and demonstrated the plagiarism of its founder, Paul Twitchell. He is also notable for introducing to a wider audience the teachings of Baba Faqir Chand, the Indian exponent of Surat Shabd Yoga from Hoshiapur in the book, The Unknowing Sage: The Life and Work of Baba Faqir Chand. Lane founded the journal, Understanding Cults and Spiritual Movements in the 1980s which featured critical studies of John-Roger Hinkins and Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, Adi Da, and Sathya Sai Baba. His most recent book, The Sound Current Tradition (2022) was on Nada Yoga and Surat Shabd Yoga in new religions and was published by Cambridge University Press. He also co-authored an annotated bibliography on the Radhasoami Tradition with Mark Juergensmeyer for Oxford University Press (2018).
The Waco siege, also known as the Waco massacre, was the siege by U.S. federal government and Texas state law enforcement officials of a compound belonging to the religious cult known as the Branch Davidians between February 28 and April 19, 1993. The Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh, were headquartered at Mount Carmel Center ranch in unincorporated McLennan County, Texas, 13 miles northeast of Waco. Suspecting the group of stockpiling illegal weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) obtained a search warrant for the compound and arrest warrants for Koresh and several of the group's members.
CESNUR, is a non-profit organization based in Turin, Italy that studies new religious movements and opposes the anti-cult movement. It was established in 1988 by Massimo Introvigne, Jean-François Mayer and Ernesto Zucchini.
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Ron Geaves is a British scholar of religious studies who was professor of the comparative study of religion at Liverpool Hope University in England, retiring in December 2013. He was formerly Programme Leader and Chair in religious studies at the University of Chester in England (2001-2007) and Head of Department at the University of Chichester (1999-2001). He was chair of the Muslims in Britain Research Network (2007-2010) and instrumental in the creation of BRAIS, remaining on their advisory board.
Ben Witherington III is an American Wesleyan-Arminian New Testament scholar. Witherington is Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, a Wesleyan-Holiness seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, and an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church.
The academic study of new religious movements is known as new religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by ex-members as well as the friends and relatives of members, organizations that collect information on NRMs, the mainstream media, and academics studying such phenomena.
Randall Herbert Balmer is an American historian of American religion.
James Daniel Tabor is an American Biblical scholar and retired Professor of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he taught from 1989 until 2022 and served as chair from 2004 to 2014. He previously held positions at Ambassador College, the University of Notre Dame (1979–85), and the College of William and Mary (1985–89). Tabor is the founder and director of the Original Bible Project, a non-profit organisation aimed to produce a re-ordered new translation of the Bible in English.
James Roger Lewis was an American philosophy professor at Wuhan University. He was a religious studies scholar, sociologist of religion, and writer, who specialized in the academic study of new religious movements, astrology, and New Age.
Rick Alan Ross is an American deprogrammer, cult specialist, and founder and executive director of the nonprofit Cult Education Institute. He frequently appears in the news and other media discussing groups some consider cults. Ross has intervened in more than 500 deprogramming cases in various countries.
Edwin Scott Gaustad was a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. He achieved fame with his study of the genealogy of religion in the United States, Historical atlas of religion in America. The 1972 edition of this work has been used in secular histories of Mainline Protestantism and the Emergent church movement (denominationalism) for decades, and his a Religious History of America was a standard text for college students. A graduate of Baylor University and Brown University, Gaustad dedicated his career to sharing his expansive research on religious history. Gaustad was president of the American Society of Church History. Gaustad died March 25, 2011, in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 87.
David Koresh was an American cult leader who played a central role in the Waco siege of 1993. As the head of the Branch Davidians, a religious sect and offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, Koresh claimed to be its final prophet. His apocalyptic Biblical teachings, including interpretations of the Book of Revelation and the Seven Seals, attracted various followers.
Steven Emil Schneider was an American Branch Davidian commonly called a "lieutenant" to David Koresh, the leader of the new religious movement. He was formally married to Judy Schneider, but in the community Koresh impregnated Judy and she bore a child with him. Steve Schneider was raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household in Wisconsin. Schneider studied at Newbold College in the United Kingdom, and eventually worked to receive a Ph.D. in comparative religion at the University of Hawaiʻi. In approximately 1986, Schneider encountered Marc Breault, an indigenous Hawaiian Branch Davidian, and converted to Branch Davidianism.
Livingstone Fagan – sometimes misspelled as Livingston Fagan – is a British Branch Davidian who survived the Waco siege in 1993. He was born in Jamaica but moved to Nottingham in 1964 with his parents as part of the Windrush generation. He joined the Branch Davidians in 1989 while studying to join the Seventh-day Adventist ministry in the United Kingdom. He moved to Mount Carmel Center with his wife, Evette, and mother, Doris Adina, both of whom would die in the 19 April 1993 fire. He left the Mount Carmel Center before the 19 April fire. He was tried and convicted in the United States of voluntary manslaughter and using a firearm during a crime. He was given a 30-year prison sentence and spent about half of it in various holding facilities in the United States. He was released in July 2007 and deported to the United Kingdom where he currently lives.
Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict is a 1995 non-fiction anthology book on the Waco siege edited by Stuart A. Wright. It was published by the University of Chicago Press.
Why Waco?: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America is a 1995 non-fiction book written by James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher on the Waco siege and the anti-cult movement in America. It was published by the University of California Press. The same press reprinted it in 1997 in paperback. The appendix of the book contains an unfinished manuscript written by David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, on the Seven seals in the Book of Revelation. The appendix has a preface written by Tabor and J. Phillip Arnold. The manuscript was obtained from a survivor of the fire, Ruth Riddle. The final pages of the book provide a list of Branch Davidians who died in the 28 February 1993 raid, the 19 April 1993 fire, and who survived.
The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect is a 2006 nonfiction book by Kenneth G. C. Newport about the Branch Davidians before, during, and after the Waco siege. It was published by Oxford University Press. The book primarily addresses the beliefs, practices, and crucial events in Branch Davidian history through Victor Houteff to David Koresh and Clive Doyle.
References
- ↑ "Eugene Gallagher". Connecticut College. Retrieved September 12, 2018.
- ↑ "Gallagher, Eugene - College of Charleston". religiousstudies.cofc.edu. Retrieved September 12, 2018.
- ↑ "Eugene V. Gallagher". Connecticut College. Archived from the original on June 12, 2011.
- ↑ Cast Into the Lake of Fire, Mark Silk, 1995-09-03, The New York Times
