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

Sociologists of religion also made an important observation when they observed that one of the differences between earlier new religious movements and those of the later 20th century in North America was their social location. New religious movements typically emerge among the most marginalized and disadvantaged sectors of society. This phenomenon one would easily recognize if one were to walk through the ghettos of urban America (or the favelas of Latin America, or the squatter towns that ring the cities of Africa) or visit the rural poor: there one would discover a host of religious groupings that are not familiar. But in these social locations, not much attention is given to them. The new element in the religious movements of the late 20th century is that they attracted a different social class: youth from middle and upper-middle classes. (See Bryan Wilson, The Social Impact of New Religious Movements, New York, 1981.) It is easy to imagine middle or upper-class parents becoming distressed when they learned that their 25-year-old son who had graduated from Harvard was now following a Korean messiah, or that their 24-year-old daughter who had graduated from the University of Toronto was now singing and chanting "Hare Krishnan" at the airport. But we know historically--e.g., St. Thomas' parents held him captive for a year when he wanted to become a Dominican, then a new religious order -- that such responses often occurred when adult children embrace new or uncoventional religious traditions. The young adults attracted to the popular new religions of the 1960s and 70s were neither poor nor marginalized. They were from the middle and upper-middle classes. Moreover, these movements were usually much smaller than media accounts suggested. In Canada, for example, memberships in many of the new religious communities numbered in the hundreds or thousands rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands often alleged by opponents of these newer communities. Some groups in Canada, however, had larger memberships.

The "new religions" presented phenomena to the scholar of religion that challenged some conventional academic notions, but no scholar of religion, to my knowledge, had any doubt that in the "new religions" we were dealing with religious phenomena. Whether or not it was "good religion" or "bad religion" was often a matter of considerable public debate, but scholars of religion never doubted that it was religious phenomena that we were encountering here. (See J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, New York, 1986 and The Encyclopedia of America Religions, Detroit, 1989, which includes the "new religions.")