SOC 257: New Religious Movements Lectures
University of Virginia
Department of Sociology
Jeffrey K. Hadden

Locating Cults and Sects on the American
Religious Landscape

Lecture Outline:

Review of Introductory Lecture

Typology of Religious Groups

On Cults, Sects and New Religious Movements

Locating "Cults" and "Sects" in the Religious Economy

Winners and Losers in the Religious Economy

Locating Religion on the Internet

Suggested Readings

---

Part I: Review of Introductory Lecture

---

� Cult Legacy
� Whence Comes Our Ideas About Cults?
� Public v Sociological Perspectives
� Why Study New Religions?


Consult Introductory Lecture for details

---

Part II: Typology of Religious Groups

---

� Ecclesia
� Denomination
� Church
� Sect
� Cult


Ecclesia

� A religious group that is highly integrated with the dominant social and political culture

Denomination

� A group of churches bound together by a shared organizational structure and governance.

Church

� A religious group that is part of an established denomination

Sect

� A religious groups created as the result of splintering from an established church or denomination.

Cult

� A religious group that is the product of radical innovation, importation or invention

---

Part III: On Cults, Sects and New Religious Movements

---

Sociologists have adopted the concept new religious movements (NRMs) as an overarching idea that embraces both cults and sects.

� The reason: the highly prejorative meanings of the concepts cult and sect in popular culture.

� The concepts "cult" and "sect" do have precise meaning as they are used by sociologists, and are free of prejudice.

� However, this meaning is not understood by the general public and, thus, the value neutral analytical content is lost.

� New religious movements is free of prejorative meaning, but not without problems.

� Most significantly, many NRMs are not new, and some are not even new to a particular culture.

Faced with the alternative of highly misunderstood meaning, many scholars feel that the use of "new religious movements" is the better option of terms

� Another problem is that "anti-cultist" claim that scholars who use the concept New Religious Movements are really "cult apologists" and, thus, anything they say is not to be trusted. In some measure they have succeeded in casting doubt as to the neutrality of the concept.

� I will use all three concepts, and I try to do so with the precision specified in the definitions offered in the "concepts" lecture here.

� It is very importanat that you master the meaning of these concepts, become sensative to the fact that the terms are widely misused, and learn to discern what a user means whenever using any one of the terms.

Note that on every Profile Page on this site we have a common presentation regarding the use of the concepts "cult" and "sect" . While we will use the concepts in this course, we counsel against their use in public discourse because the terms have such prejorative meaning.

---

Part IV: Locating "Cults" and "Sects" in the Religious Economy

---

How many religious groups are there in America?

The best available answer comes from:

� The Encyclopedia of American Relgions

� J. Gordon Melton, the author, is the leading authority on religious groups in America

� Melton's estimate in the most recent edition of this volume is 2,100 religious bodies.

� These groups are organized into 20 families which share:

o A common heritage
o A "theological" tradition
o A lifestyle

Eleven [11] of these families are Christian in one form or another; nine [9] are not.

� Melton includes all groups he defines as:


o Denominations
o Churches
o Sects (includes what we have thus far called "cults")

Membership by geographical religion

� South 76%
� East 69%
� Midwest 66%
� West 54%


Religious Identification in the U.S.

� Protestant denominations 63%
o Baptist 20.1%
o Methodist 9.0%
o Luthern 6.7%
o Presbyterian 4.9%
o Episcopalian 2.1%
o All others or no denomination 20.9%


� Catholic 25.4%
� Jewish 2.1%
� Other or no answer 2.1%
� No religious preference 6.7%

Part V: Winners and Losers in the American Religious Economy

At any given time, we would expect to find that some religious denominations are growing faster than others, and perhaps some are actually in decline.
Dean Kelley wrote a book in 1972 entitled Why Conservative Church Are Growing. He initially entitled the book Why Liberal Churches Are Declining but the publisher didn't like this title. Kelly did much to call attention to one of the most significant developments in American religion in the 20th century and led the way to the development of a new paradigm to understand the dymamics of religion.

� What factors do you think might impact growth or decline?


� How do new religions figure in this equation?


 

Losers in American Denominationalism

Mainline Demominations    1970         Latest       % Change

Presbyterian (USA)         4,045,408    2,886,482   - 29%
Episcopal                         3,285,826    2,433,413   - 26%
Luthern (LCA)                  2,788,536    2,609,025   -    6%
United Methodist           10,509,198    8,979,139  -  15%
Disciples of Christ           1,424,479    1,052,271   -  26%


Winners in American Denominationalism

Sect & Cult Movements       1970             Latest      %Change

Southern Baptists          11,628,032    14,907,826    +   28%
Mormons                           2,073,146      4,270,690    + 111%
Assemblies of God            625,027      2,137,890    + 242%
Seventh-Day Adventists     420,419          701,781   +    67%
Church of the Nazarene      383,284          561,253   +    46%

� What is the most striking observation about these figures?

� Can we formulate some tentative hypotheses (hunches, generalizations) from these figures? >