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Lorne L. Dawson is a Canadian scholar of the sociology of religion who has written about new religious movements, the brainwashing controversy, and religion and the Internet. His work is now focused on religious terrorism and the process of radicalization, especially with regard to domestic terrorists.
Dawson, who has an Hons. B.A. from Queen's University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from McMaster University, is a Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo. He was Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the university (2000-2006) and co-founder and second Director of the Lauier-Waterloo PhD in Religious Studies (2006-2009). From 2011-2015 he was Chair of the Department of Sociology & Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. He has served on the editorial boards of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, [1] Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, the journal of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. [2] [3] and "Nova Religio" and "Fieldwork in the Study of Religion."
Dawson has published a large number of scholarly articles on new religious movements, along with books such as Cults in Context (editor, 1998), Comprehending Cults (1998; 2nd ed. 2006), Cults and New Religious Movements: A Reader (2003, editor) and others (e.g., Religion Online, edited with Douglas Cowan, 2004). Dawson expressed the view in 1998 that "In the late 1980s the activity of NRMs tapered off, and membership in the relatively well-established groups like Scientology, Krishna Consciousness, and the Unification Church has stabilized well below levels achieved in the early to mid-seventies", arguing that "fewer new religions are being formed now, and they are attracting fewer followers" – a view that has been contested by other more recent authors perceiving ongoing proliferation of such groups, although they acknowledge that these communities take different forms now to those that were common in the 1970s and 1980s. [4]
Dawson's research has also focused on the significance of new religious movements in modern culture and the role the Internet, with sites such as YouTube , plays in contemporary religion, including religious conflict and hate propaganda: "The antireligion perspective has been around on the Internet since its beginning, though using YouTube to express such thoughts is new. To my mind, it is a very unique scheme. In a sense, it is a new twist on a long habit of trolling, baiting and flaming people online and purposely seeking to attract attention and stir up trouble. It is in line with the culture of the Internet and the bad-boy element of the Internet." [5] [6] [7] Dawson has commented that the semi-anonymous nature of the Internet makes it a medium to voice feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed: "Suppressed, maybe even truly repressed, feelings may be expressed – from anger to love. People simply will say things they would not say otherwise. Rather virulent expressions of ridicule or hatred, for example, are commonly encountered on the Internet. So are statements that would probably be too embarrassing for most of us to say in other kinds of public forums. Ironically, under conditions of technical anonymity, the sociality of the Internet offers an unparalleled opportunity for greater self-disclosure and exploration." [8]
His research and publications have also focused on the nature of charismatic authority and its role in fomenting violence behaviour in some new religious movements, and how groups respond to the failure of prophecy.
His research on why some new religious movements become violent led to work on the process of radicalization in cases of homegrown terrorism (e.g., "The Study of New Religious Movements and the Radicalization of Home-Grown Terrorists: Opening a Dialogue," Terrorism and Political Violence 22, 2010: 1-21). He has done many presentations on religious terrorism and radicalization for groups like the RCMP, CSIS, Public Safety Canada, Defence Research and Development Canada, The Conference Board of Canada, Global Futures Forum, and Homeland Security. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (www.tsas.ca), which was established in 2012. Since 2010 his research has focused primarily on the study foreign terrorist fighters, the role of religion in motivating religious terrorism, the social ecology of radicalization, and methodological issues in the study of religious terrorism (see the publications listed below).
In a 2007 New York Times article, Dawson self-identified as "an agnostic with a 'Buddhist world view'." [6]
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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 which 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, with most of their members living in Asia and Africa. 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.
Bryan Ronald Wilson, was Reader Emeritus in Sociology at the University of Oxford and President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (1971–75). He became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1963.
David G. Bromley is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult movement.
The anti-cult movement consists of various governmental and non-governmental organizations and individuals that seek to raise awareness of cults, uncover coercive practices used to attract and retain members, and help those who have become involved with harmful cult practices. One element within the anti-cult movement, Christian counter-cult organizations, oppose New Religious Movements on theological grounds, categorizing them as cults, and distribute information to this effect through church networks and via printed literature.
Anson D. Shupe, Jr. was an American sociologist noted for his studies of religious groups and their countermovements, family violence and clergy misconduct. He was affiliated with the New Cult Awareness Network, an organisation operated by the Church of Scientology, and had at least one article published in Freedom magazine.
Stephen A. Kent is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He researches new religious movements (NRMs), and has published research on several such groups including the Children of God, the Church of Scientology, and other NRMs operating in Canada.
Benjamin Zablocki was an American professor of sociology at Rutgers University where he taught sociology of religion and social psychology. He published widely on the subject of charismatic religious movements, cults, and brainwashing.
Douglas Edward Cowan is a Canadian academic in religious studies and the sociology of religion and currently holds a teaching position at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Prior to this appointment he was Assistant Professor of Sociology & Religious Studies at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
A doomsday cult is a cult that believes in apocalypticism and millenarianism, including both those that predict disaster and those that attempt to destroy the entire universe. Sociologist John Lofland coined the term doomsday cult in his 1966 study of a group of members of the Unification Church of the United States: Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith. In 1958, Leon Festinger published a study of a group with cataclysmic predictions: When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World.
John G. Horgan is a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He studies involvement and engagement with terrorism, with a focus on disengagement and deradicalisation from terrorist movements. He has been described by the European Eye on Radicalization research group as the "world’s most distinguished expert in the psychology of terrorism". Since 2019, Horgan has been leading a team of researchers funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to research the incel subculture.
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.
Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field was edited by Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins. The book was published by University of Toronto Press, on December 1, 2001, and includes contributions from ten religious, sociological, and psychological scholars.
Susan Jean Palmer is a Canadian sociologist of religion and author whose primary research interest is new religious movements. Formerly a professor of religious studies at Dawson College in Westmount, Quebec, she is currently an Affiliate Professor at Concordia University, and is also the Principal Investigator on the four-year SSHRC-funded research project, "Children in Sectarian Religions" at McGill University in Montreal, where she teaches courses on new religious movements.
David Charles Rapoport is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who focuses on the study of terrorism.
Various sociological classifications of religious movements have been proposed by scholars. In the sociology of religion, the most widely used classification is the church-sect typology. The typology is differently construed by different sociologists, and various distinctive features have been proposed to characterise churches and sects. On most accounts, the following features are deemed relevant:
Radicalization is the process by which an individual or a group comes to adopt increasingly radical views in opposition to a political, social, or religious status quo. The ideas of society at large shape the outcomes of radicalization; for example, radical movements can originate from a broad social consensus against progressive changes in society or from a broad desire for change in society. Radicalization can result in both violent and nonviolent action – academic literature focuses on radicalization into violent extremism (RVE) or radicalisation leading to acts of terrorism. Multiple separate pathways can promote the process of radicalization, which can be independent but are usually mutually reinforcing.
Thomas Robbins was an author and an independent scholar of sociology of religion.
Dick Anthony is a forensic psychologist noted for his writings on the validity of brainwashing as a determiner of behavior, a prolific researcher of the social and psychological aspects of involvement in new religious movements.
Online youth radicalization is the action in which a young individual, or a group of people come to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation. As for radicalization, online youth radicalization can be both violent or non-violent.
