III. THE ''NEW RELIGIONS'' AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION

The second half of this century has seen the emergence of a host of "new religions" in North America and Europe. In the public media they were often called "the cults" and included such groups as Hare Krishna, 3HO, the Unification Church, Transcendental Meditation and Scientology. When the "new religions" attracted the attention of the public media it was usually in relation to sensational claims that members of the new religious communities were not there by choice but had been "programmed" or "brainwashed." Such claims have been the subject of scholarly investigation (Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie, Oxford, 1984) as well as a number of governmental inquiries (Hill Report on "Mind-Development Groups, Sects, and Cults in Ontario," 1980). Such responsible scholarly and governmental inquiries have found no grounds for such charges, but such prejudicial images still persist.

When scholars of religion turned to the study of the "new religious communities" in the 1960s and 70s, they made several observations that are worth noting here. These studies continued into the 1980s and 90s and extended the investigations to other parts of the world.

Many of the "new religions" were not really "new" but just new to North America. For example, the Hare Krishna movement is often regarded as a "new religion"/"cult," but it was in fact only "new" in North America. It is a community of long standing in India and has its origins in the life and work of the 15th century Hindu reformer, Caitanya. It has been a continuous presence in India since that time, but only came to North America in the 1960s. The same is the case for a number of other new religious movements that have their origins in Eastern Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions.