Explaining the growth of religious movements

• Marginality:


  Troeltsch noted, sects tend to draw their members from the poor and oppressed.
• Marginality:


  Weber: sects tend to arise in groups who are marginal to society. Such groups may feel that they are deprivileged - that is, that they are not receiving their just economic rewards or social status.
• Marginality:


  Weber: sects offer a solution to this problem by offering their members of a theodicy of disprivilege - that is, a religious explanation and justification for their suffering and disadvantage. This may explain their misfortune as a test of faith e.g. while holding out the promise of rewards in the future for keeping the faith.
• Marginality:


  Historically, many sects, as well as millenarian movements, have recruited from the marginalised poor. E.G. in the 20th century of the Nation of Islam recruited successfully among disadvantaged blacks in the USA. However, since the 1960s, the sect-like-world-rejecting NRMs such as the Moonies have recruited mainly from more affluent groups of often well-educated young, m/c whites.
• Marginality:


  However, Wallis argues that this does not contradict Weber's view, because many of these individuals had become marginal to society. Despite their m/c origins, most were hippies, dropouts and drug users.
• Relative deprivation:


  Relative deprivation refers to the subjective sense of being deprived. This means that it is perfectly possible for someone who is in reality quite privileged nevertheless to feel that they are deprived or disadvantaged in some way compared with others.
• Relative deprivation:


  Although m/c people are materially well off, they may feel they are spiritually deprived, especially in today's materialistic, consumerist world, which they may perceive as impersonal and lacking in moral value, emotional warmth or authenticity. As a result, Wallis argues, they may turn to sects for a sense of community.
• Relative deprivation:


  Stark and Bainbridge argue that it is the relatively deprived who break away from churches to form sects. When m/c members of a church seek to compromise its beliefs in order to fit into society, deprived members are likely to break away to form sects that safeguard the original message of the organisation.
• Relative deprivation:


  E.G. deprived may stress Christ's claim that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle - a message that the better off might want to play down.
• Relative deprivation:


  By contrast, the deprived may want to emphasise Christ's message that 'the meek shall inherit the earth'. Stark and Bainbridge argue that the world-rejecting sects offer to the deprived the compensators that they need for the rewards they are denied in this world.
• Relative deprivation:


  By contrast, the privileged need no compensators or world-rejecting religion. They are attracted to world-accepting churches that express their status and bring them further success in achieving earthly rewards. This distinction is very similar to Wallis' two main types of NRMs.
• Social change:


  Wilson: argues that periods of rapid change disrupt and undermine established norms and values, producing anomie or normlessness. In response to the uncertainty and insecurity that this creates, those who are most affected by the disruption may turn to sects as a solution. e.g. the dislocation created by the industrial revolution in Britain in the late 18th century led to the birth of Methodism, which offered a sense of community, warmth and fellowship, clear norms and values and the promise of salvation.
• Social change:


  Wilson: Methodism succeeded in recruiting large numbers of the new industrial w/c.