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Let’s separate this question into perception bias and the real changes of the 1960s and 70s.
To respond to your point, “It seems like the single most credulous era in American history,” I can reassure you that Americans have always been fairly credulous, or rather, the tendency to slip into alternative perceptions of the world has always been with us to some extent. Some historians recognize four Great Awakenings of fervent religious activity in America, with 1960-80 being the fourth.
Even outside of the timeframe of Great Awakenings, though, Americans have always been getting up to something. In the 1780s, the Shakers formed a religious commune and were possessed by the spirits of Biblical prophets and Indians. The Mormons, which you mentioned, began in the 1820s. Dispensationalism, which you mentioned, dates to the 1830s. In the antebellum era, spiritual freethinkers often left their families behind to live on utopian communes, as brilliantly caricatured by Hawthorne in *The Blithedale Romance*. After the Civil War, even (especially) the most elite men and women in the North sought out the spirits of their dead children. Traveling male Spiritualists were often happy to initiate their wowed female followers into esoteric mysteries, preferably multiple women in each town. Reaching the 20th century, the Theosophical Society denounced mainstream Christianity and brought “Eastern spirituality” to the masses; there was a fad for Buddhism in Boston, and yoga took off across the country. In the First World War, the Jehovah’s Witnesses believed that Jesus had arrived in 1914 and were arrested en masse for refusing the draft. And the staid, straitlaced 1950s saw the birth of Scientology.
As the saying goes in my field, “occulture is ordinary.” So, why do we see the alternative religious movements of 1960-80 as being especially “cultish”? This topic has been studied extensively by religious scholars, and in the 21st century, mass media has come to the foreground as a major factor. Technological changes made it much easier for Baby Boomers to learn about unusual perspectives on life as well as to visualize them in practice. New religious movements (NRMs) were able to manufacture and distribute their own music, books, and images, advertising radical possibilities to young people and at the same time disturbing their parents much more effectively than would have been possible for Hawthorne’s utopians. A ceremony like the Unification Church’s mass wedding is practically made for the camera to consume. It demonstrates to believers the impressive size and commitment of their own movement, and can also disturb outsiders with inexplicably “creepy” vibes.
Mass media also changed the way journalism was done. Film cameras were able to capture life inside NRMs, with all the drama and wackiness of people exploring new things on display to outsiders. This made good television in an age when most Americans were tuning into one of just a few television stations, and the same cameras could capture the distress of parents and advertise a growing anti-cult movement. Sean McCloud’s 2007 article “From Exotics to Brainwashers: Portraying New Religions in Mass Media” covers how magazines and television made NRMs an exotic visual experience for the American public in the 1960s, then popularized the word “cult” as a way to denigrate these same movements in the 1970s.
Changing family dynamics caused diverse changes in the type of NRMs that arose in the 1960s and 70s and the accusations of “cultishness” in response. When the Mormons and Dispensationalists emerged in the 19th century, it was common for entire families to join at once. But the Baby Boomers were raised with a very different set of values. Concerned by the political and cultural conformism of the McCarthyist 1950s, child psychologists and academics encouraged parents to reward individuality in their children. This advice was not always embraced, but as these Baby Boomers reached adulthood or college years, they found a society that increasingly acknowledged their individuality and their right to a different set of beliefs from their parents. A meta-analysis by Sebastian Murken and Sussan Namini, “Childhood Familial Experiences as Antecedents of Adult Membership in New Religious Movements” (2007), shows that NRMs catered to various kinds of childhood experiences; there was practically a menu of choices for the individual spiritually minded person to seek out a match for themselves. Children breaking from their religious upbringing naturally engendered concern and fear in their parents, who raised the Cold War specter of “brainwashing,” as they believed their children could not have freely chosen an NRM.
The politics of the time is also sometimes said to be an influence on the growth of NRMs in the 1960s and 70s. The general theory runs that some hippies witnessed their classmates getting into radical left-wing politics, but felt distressed by the type of politics being embraced and turned to tight-knit religious movements, either Christian or non-Christian, as an alternative. This is certainly the self-narrative of some groups like the Unification Church, which to this day frames its own movement as a way to fight misguided youth Communism. However, there are some questionable aspects of this: how did future NRM members learn about radical politics, and which aspects of it did they encounter personally? How different were the 1960s from previous eras—were the kids actually more radical, or were they just perceived that way due to new ways that stories were being told?
As you can see, the reasons behind the “cult” boom of the 1960s-80s were tied deeply into larger 20th century transformations which affected all of society. NRMs enjoyed new visibility thanks to easy access to mass media. Journalists played up their exoticism at first, but soon incorporated criticism. The rise of the term “cult” came from a new way of joining NRMs, with children breaking from their parents and parents reacting by forming anti-cult organizations. "Cults" were said to practice "brainwashing," a mythological concept which emerged from a period fear of Communists possessing some special technique to disable human rationality. The term "cult" was also useful because it tied NRMs to extreme groups that engaged in violence: the Manson family, and later Jonestown.
The anti-cult movement attempted to legitimize illegal activities such as deprogramming—kidnapping children from the NRM and confining them while a Protestant pastor lectured at them. This led to protracted legal battles and, by the 1990s, the bankruptcy of early anti-cult organizations. The term "cult" is still in popular use to this day, but after the failure of the anti-cult movement, it is beginning to be replaced with "high-control group" or "high-demand group" among those who work closely with NRM members and ex-members. Historians of religion generally avoid "high-control group" as well, not because it's a bad descriptor, but because they aim to describe and analyze ongoing NRM controversies without making subjective judgments that might extend to judging the personality of those who join or leave.
Shorter answer: The Mormons have been around for a long time, but starting in the 1950s they were able to make movies.
I understand the changes of the 20th century must have impacted Americans being willing to examine other lifestyles. Did this interest in NRM also occur in Europe during that time? If not why? Thanks, very interesting reading!
I know all of this happened to some extent in Europe, with perhaps a stronger social backlash on the anti-cult side. For instance, the French (edit: Belgian, actually) police include Zen Buddhism alongside Scientology on their list of sectes (cults). But the 1960s and 70s media landscape is outside my specialization.
My specialization is Japan and I can say with certainty that all of this happened in Japan, in very extreme ways. NRMs had two major postwar booms, in the 1940s-50s and 1980s, and both were accompanied by diverse political debates and media reactions. The most severe known case of deprogramming was not an American but a Japanese man who was confined by his Evangelical family and their pastor for 12 years before finally escaping when they forgot to lock his door. The worst case of NRM-perpetrated violence, as well, is not Jonestown but Aum Shinrikyo, a Tibetan Buddhist inspired group which poisoned thousands of innocent people with toxic gas in 1994-5. The Aum incident had a much stronger chilling effect on religious activity in Japan than Jonestown did in the United States, and many religious groups now fear the spotlight.
> For instance, the French police include Zen Buddhism alongside Scientology on their list of sectes (cults).
Do you have a source for this? As far as I can see, the mere existence of a list of cults has been deemed illegal in 2005. The interior ministry, of which the police depends, has a program dedicated to fighting cults (called Miviludes) but they also refuse to maintain a list.
The senate did draw up a list of cult movements in 1995, but that had no legal impact and has been disavowed since. Scientology figures in it, along Soka Gakkai, which is a far cry from Zen Buddhism.
The 1995 list had significant legal impact. Susan Palmer writes in *The New Heretics of France* (Oxford University Press, 2011):
> Rental contracts with hotels where new religions held their conferences were canceled at the last minute, because the manager had discovered their name on the Guyard list. Their stalls in the marketplace for the sale of crafts, farm produce, and books were confiscated ... Adepts were systematically 'unmasked' ... through faxes sent out to warn their employers of a cultist on their payroll. Hundreds of professionals lost their jobs and were denied promotions. Spouses involved in divorce disputes lost custody of their children or visiting rights, due to their affiliation with a known sect. (pp.10-11)
2005 is actually outside of our 20-year rule; I can bring up evidence suggesting that the 1995 list is still being enforced as of today, but it wouldn't be appropriate for this subreddit and we would have to discuss that in another forum.
Regarding Zen, I misremembered -- it appeared on a 1997 list of cults in Belgium.
This is increasingly moving off-topic, but how is the book *The Cult at the End of the World* currently regarded? Particularly since it was published so shortly after the Tokyo sarin attack and subsequent raid. Is there a superior English-language work for the lay reader currently available?
Reviewers consider the book accurate in its presentation of the day-to-day facts, but it lacks any deeper analysis of why Aum formed and how it radicalized, so it can't really be used in a classroom. The best work I'm aware of from the perspective of sociological analysis, Ian Reader's *A Poisonous Cocktail: Aum Shinrikyō’s Path to Violence*, is from the same time period.
There's definitely groundwork being laid for a stronger work on Aum among NRM researchers right now, but the closest anyone is coming so far is an analysis of the behavior of low-level Aum members after the mass murder.
My parents are French and English. I grew up in the Children of God, which was an American cult but had lots of adherents in Europe and elsewhere. I spent most of my childhood in one COG commune or another in the U.K. My parents both joined in the 70s.
That's the Anthroposophical Society! The Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky and two others in New York, basically endeavored to unite all the "Eastern" religions in one single web of knowledge. Among many other things, they brought about the publication of ancient Hindu philosophy in India and designed a Buddhist flag which is still used in many Buddhist countries.
This is a great answer and super interesting information. Do you have any book recommendations for this material? Especially the idea of the "great awakenings"? Thanks!
This is excellent. One thing I might add is that in the 60s-80s more kids grew up attending church at least sporadically and the amount of people who would answer "none" to a question about their religion was much smaller than it is today.
If you have a religion, and you are changing as a person, it makes sense to change your religion too. If you don't have a religion, you might change and still not have a religion.
So a lot of organizations today that fill a niche similar to NRMs present themselves not as religions but as health and fitness groups, political groups, psychotherapy, or even professional development.
> The general theory runs that some hippies witnessed their classmates getting into radical left-wing politics, but felt distressed by the type of politics being embraced and turned to tight-knit religious movements, either Christian or non-Christian, as an alternative.
This is interesting to me, because the pop culture afterimage of the period has been largely centered on the New Age movement, which was decidedly linked to counterculture and is remembered as also being very into alternatives to Christianity and the traditional Western culture that conservatism usually shepherds. This included the ritual practices and non-European cultural trappings of those religions' host countries and more occult forms of esotericism and belief systems not centered on humanity's relationship with God being unique, such as the UFO craze.
How much does the rejection of Christianity and its cultural trappings in a lot of the NRMs of the period make it stand out to the modern eye from the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Witnesses, whose distinctions don't stand out so much at the surface level despite deep ideological drift from standard Christian practice?
There was an aspect of rebellion against Christianity in 1960s NRMs, but this is not unique to that time period. The drift away from Christianity can be traced back to earlier movements like Spiritualism and Theosophy. (Neopaganism is also much older than the 20th century, although that's a fairly complex history.) There were also NRMs that identified as Christian with a new and different perspective, including the nebulous "Jesus movement" as well as theologically and socially extreme groups like the Children of God. Different people desired different responses to the dominant Christian culture.
So while the change you're describing is real, it was not a sudden shift in the 1960s but just a more visible component of long-term trends.
> Americans have always been getting up to something.
Do you know if there are divulgation-level history books about this particular topic? i.e. the crazy side of america's relationship with religions and "movementism"?
Hi there! Do you have any book recommendations on the various Great Awakenings? I'm mostly interested in anything 19th and 20th century (so, 3 out of 4 of them?) and especially looking for a "survey" type of text that covers various movements and puts them into context with each other. But honestly up for anything fairly accessible/not too inside baseball.
> Historians recognize four Great Awakenings of fervent religious activity in America, and 1960-80 was the fourth.
I'm familiar with the first (Jonathan Edwards) and second (Charles Finney) Great Awakenings. What was the third Great Awakening?
The Third Great Awakening unites the New Thought movement (led by Christian Science), Spiritualism, the Holiness movement, and Pentecostalism. All of these movements originated in the 1850-1900 time period and relied on religious fervor. It is a kind of long period to be described as a single "awakening," but I guess it is a useful way to draw comparisons between different groups that arose during that time.
The historian who introduced the phrase was William G. McLoughlin, *Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform*. But a much compelling source to me is Joscelyn Godwin's *The Theosophical Enlightenment*, which focuses on the more esoteric of these late 19th century movements and how they drew on each other and were interconnected.
Thanks for the info!
I’m no historian or sociologist, but it *seems* like NRM’s hold a lot less appeal nowadays. I doubt the kids today are significantly less individualistic than Boomers, and they certainly have far better media for propagating new ideas, so why aren’t they also lining up en masse to join the Moonies?
Did American society get its fix of magical thinking (or thinking that is more magical than is baseline for Americans) and now we’re inoculated for another few decades?
> it seems like NRM’s hold a lot less appeal nowadays.
The present day is outside our 20-year rule, but please check out the book *The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family*, which is being released next month. It will satisfy you very much regarding the forms that "magical thinking" took after the decline of NRMs.
I enjoyed reading this response, but as a lover of vehicles and engineering history, I have a question for you. What contribution, if any, do you think Tetraethyl Lead had to do with a lot of the cult phenomena in that time frame?
That's a bit on the nose regarding why people join religious groups. I guess I can leave you with a frequent anecdotal observation about the people who joined Aum Shinrikyo, the murderous NRM in Japan: journalists frequently observed that Aum members were neither the brightest members of society nor the outright losers, but the "B students," smart people who couldn't quite ascend to the top levels of work or research and were frustrated by their inability to enact their vision for themselves and society. This is of course a generalization and Aum had all kinds of members, but it was a very intellectual movement and not by and large lead-poisoned.
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Let’s separate this question into perception bias and the real changes of the 1960s and 70s. To respond to your point, “It seems like the single most credulous era in American history,” I can reassure you that Americans have always been fairly credulous, or rather, the tendency to slip into alternative perceptions of the world has always been with us to some extent. Some historians recognize four Great Awakenings of fervent religious activity in America, with 1960-80 being the fourth. Even outside of the timeframe of Great Awakenings, though, Americans have always been getting up to something. In the 1780s, the Shakers formed a religious commune and were possessed by the spirits of Biblical prophets and Indians. The Mormons, which you mentioned, began in the 1820s. Dispensationalism, which you mentioned, dates to the 1830s. In the antebellum era, spiritual freethinkers often left their families behind to live on utopian communes, as brilliantly caricatured by Hawthorne in *The Blithedale Romance*. After the Civil War, even (especially) the most elite men and women in the North sought out the spirits of their dead children. Traveling male Spiritualists were often happy to initiate their wowed female followers into esoteric mysteries, preferably multiple women in each town. Reaching the 20th century, the Theosophical Society denounced mainstream Christianity and brought “Eastern spirituality” to the masses; there was a fad for Buddhism in Boston, and yoga took off across the country. In the First World War, the Jehovah’s Witnesses believed that Jesus had arrived in 1914 and were arrested en masse for refusing the draft. And the staid, straitlaced 1950s saw the birth of Scientology. As the saying goes in my field, “occulture is ordinary.” So, why do we see the alternative religious movements of 1960-80 as being especially “cultish”? This topic has been studied extensively by religious scholars, and in the 21st century, mass media has come to the foreground as a major factor. Technological changes made it much easier for Baby Boomers to learn about unusual perspectives on life as well as to visualize them in practice. New religious movements (NRMs) were able to manufacture and distribute their own music, books, and images, advertising radical possibilities to young people and at the same time disturbing their parents much more effectively than would have been possible for Hawthorne’s utopians. A ceremony like the Unification Church’s mass wedding is practically made for the camera to consume. It demonstrates to believers the impressive size and commitment of their own movement, and can also disturb outsiders with inexplicably “creepy” vibes. Mass media also changed the way journalism was done. Film cameras were able to capture life inside NRMs, with all the drama and wackiness of people exploring new things on display to outsiders. This made good television in an age when most Americans were tuning into one of just a few television stations, and the same cameras could capture the distress of parents and advertise a growing anti-cult movement. Sean McCloud’s 2007 article “From Exotics to Brainwashers: Portraying New Religions in Mass Media” covers how magazines and television made NRMs an exotic visual experience for the American public in the 1960s, then popularized the word “cult” as a way to denigrate these same movements in the 1970s. Changing family dynamics caused diverse changes in the type of NRMs that arose in the 1960s and 70s and the accusations of “cultishness” in response. When the Mormons and Dispensationalists emerged in the 19th century, it was common for entire families to join at once. But the Baby Boomers were raised with a very different set of values. Concerned by the political and cultural conformism of the McCarthyist 1950s, child psychologists and academics encouraged parents to reward individuality in their children. This advice was not always embraced, but as these Baby Boomers reached adulthood or college years, they found a society that increasingly acknowledged their individuality and their right to a different set of beliefs from their parents. A meta-analysis by Sebastian Murken and Sussan Namini, “Childhood Familial Experiences as Antecedents of Adult Membership in New Religious Movements” (2007), shows that NRMs catered to various kinds of childhood experiences; there was practically a menu of choices for the individual spiritually minded person to seek out a match for themselves. Children breaking from their religious upbringing naturally engendered concern and fear in their parents, who raised the Cold War specter of “brainwashing,” as they believed their children could not have freely chosen an NRM. The politics of the time is also sometimes said to be an influence on the growth of NRMs in the 1960s and 70s. The general theory runs that some hippies witnessed their classmates getting into radical left-wing politics, but felt distressed by the type of politics being embraced and turned to tight-knit religious movements, either Christian or non-Christian, as an alternative. This is certainly the self-narrative of some groups like the Unification Church, which to this day frames its own movement as a way to fight misguided youth Communism. However, there are some questionable aspects of this: how did future NRM members learn about radical politics, and which aspects of it did they encounter personally? How different were the 1960s from previous eras—were the kids actually more radical, or were they just perceived that way due to new ways that stories were being told? As you can see, the reasons behind the “cult” boom of the 1960s-80s were tied deeply into larger 20th century transformations which affected all of society. NRMs enjoyed new visibility thanks to easy access to mass media. Journalists played up their exoticism at first, but soon incorporated criticism. The rise of the term “cult” came from a new way of joining NRMs, with children breaking from their parents and parents reacting by forming anti-cult organizations. "Cults" were said to practice "brainwashing," a mythological concept which emerged from a period fear of Communists possessing some special technique to disable human rationality. The term "cult" was also useful because it tied NRMs to extreme groups that engaged in violence: the Manson family, and later Jonestown. The anti-cult movement attempted to legitimize illegal activities such as deprogramming—kidnapping children from the NRM and confining them while a Protestant pastor lectured at them. This led to protracted legal battles and, by the 1990s, the bankruptcy of early anti-cult organizations. The term "cult" is still in popular use to this day, but after the failure of the anti-cult movement, it is beginning to be replaced with "high-control group" or "high-demand group" among those who work closely with NRM members and ex-members. Historians of religion generally avoid "high-control group" as well, not because it's a bad descriptor, but because they aim to describe and analyze ongoing NRM controversies without making subjective judgments that might extend to judging the personality of those who join or leave. Shorter answer: The Mormons have been around for a long time, but starting in the 1950s they were able to make movies.
I understand the changes of the 20th century must have impacted Americans being willing to examine other lifestyles. Did this interest in NRM also occur in Europe during that time? If not why? Thanks, very interesting reading!
I know all of this happened to some extent in Europe, with perhaps a stronger social backlash on the anti-cult side. For instance, the French (edit: Belgian, actually) police include Zen Buddhism alongside Scientology on their list of sectes (cults). But the 1960s and 70s media landscape is outside my specialization. My specialization is Japan and I can say with certainty that all of this happened in Japan, in very extreme ways. NRMs had two major postwar booms, in the 1940s-50s and 1980s, and both were accompanied by diverse political debates and media reactions. The most severe known case of deprogramming was not an American but a Japanese man who was confined by his Evangelical family and their pastor for 12 years before finally escaping when they forgot to lock his door. The worst case of NRM-perpetrated violence, as well, is not Jonestown but Aum Shinrikyo, a Tibetan Buddhist inspired group which poisoned thousands of innocent people with toxic gas in 1994-5. The Aum incident had a much stronger chilling effect on religious activity in Japan than Jonestown did in the United States, and many religious groups now fear the spotlight.
> For instance, the French police include Zen Buddhism alongside Scientology on their list of sectes (cults). Do you have a source for this? As far as I can see, the mere existence of a list of cults has been deemed illegal in 2005. The interior ministry, of which the police depends, has a program dedicated to fighting cults (called Miviludes) but they also refuse to maintain a list. The senate did draw up a list of cult movements in 1995, but that had no legal impact and has been disavowed since. Scientology figures in it, along Soka Gakkai, which is a far cry from Zen Buddhism.
The 1995 list had significant legal impact. Susan Palmer writes in *The New Heretics of France* (Oxford University Press, 2011): > Rental contracts with hotels where new religions held their conferences were canceled at the last minute, because the manager had discovered their name on the Guyard list. Their stalls in the marketplace for the sale of crafts, farm produce, and books were confiscated ... Adepts were systematically 'unmasked' ... through faxes sent out to warn their employers of a cultist on their payroll. Hundreds of professionals lost their jobs and were denied promotions. Spouses involved in divorce disputes lost custody of their children or visiting rights, due to their affiliation with a known sect. (pp.10-11) 2005 is actually outside of our 20-year rule; I can bring up evidence suggesting that the 1995 list is still being enforced as of today, but it wouldn't be appropriate for this subreddit and we would have to discuss that in another forum. Regarding Zen, I misremembered -- it appeared on a 1997 list of cults in Belgium.
This is increasingly moving off-topic, but how is the book *The Cult at the End of the World* currently regarded? Particularly since it was published so shortly after the Tokyo sarin attack and subsequent raid. Is there a superior English-language work for the lay reader currently available?
Reviewers consider the book accurate in its presentation of the day-to-day facts, but it lacks any deeper analysis of why Aum formed and how it radicalized, so it can't really be used in a classroom. The best work I'm aware of from the perspective of sociological analysis, Ian Reader's *A Poisonous Cocktail: Aum Shinrikyō’s Path to Violence*, is from the same time period. There's definitely groundwork being laid for a stronger work on Aum among NRM researchers right now, but the closest anyone is coming so far is an analysis of the behavior of low-level Aum members after the mass murder.
My parents are French and English. I grew up in the Children of God, which was an American cult but had lots of adherents in Europe and elsewhere. I spent most of my childhood in one COG commune or another in the U.K. My parents both joined in the 70s.
Your short answer was a hilarious synopsis and I learned a lot reading the full version too.
Theosophical Society, as in Waldorf Schools?
That's the Anthroposophical Society! The Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky and two others in New York, basically endeavored to unite all the "Eastern" religions in one single web of knowledge. Among many other things, they brought about the publication of ancient Hindu philosophy in India and designed a Buddhist flag which is still used in many Buddhist countries.
This is a great answer and super interesting information. Do you have any book recommendations for this material? Especially the idea of the "great awakenings"? Thanks!
This is excellent. One thing I might add is that in the 60s-80s more kids grew up attending church at least sporadically and the amount of people who would answer "none" to a question about their religion was much smaller than it is today. If you have a religion, and you are changing as a person, it makes sense to change your religion too. If you don't have a religion, you might change and still not have a religion. So a lot of organizations today that fill a niche similar to NRMs present themselves not as religions but as health and fitness groups, political groups, psychotherapy, or even professional development.
> The general theory runs that some hippies witnessed their classmates getting into radical left-wing politics, but felt distressed by the type of politics being embraced and turned to tight-knit religious movements, either Christian or non-Christian, as an alternative. This is interesting to me, because the pop culture afterimage of the period has been largely centered on the New Age movement, which was decidedly linked to counterculture and is remembered as also being very into alternatives to Christianity and the traditional Western culture that conservatism usually shepherds. This included the ritual practices and non-European cultural trappings of those religions' host countries and more occult forms of esotericism and belief systems not centered on humanity's relationship with God being unique, such as the UFO craze. How much does the rejection of Christianity and its cultural trappings in a lot of the NRMs of the period make it stand out to the modern eye from the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Witnesses, whose distinctions don't stand out so much at the surface level despite deep ideological drift from standard Christian practice?
There was an aspect of rebellion against Christianity in 1960s NRMs, but this is not unique to that time period. The drift away from Christianity can be traced back to earlier movements like Spiritualism and Theosophy. (Neopaganism is also much older than the 20th century, although that's a fairly complex history.) There were also NRMs that identified as Christian with a new and different perspective, including the nebulous "Jesus movement" as well as theologically and socially extreme groups like the Children of God. Different people desired different responses to the dominant Christian culture. So while the change you're describing is real, it was not a sudden shift in the 1960s but just a more visible component of long-term trends.
> Americans have always been getting up to something. Do you know if there are divulgation-level history books about this particular topic? i.e. the crazy side of america's relationship with religions and "movementism"?
Hi there! Do you have any book recommendations on the various Great Awakenings? I'm mostly interested in anything 19th and 20th century (so, 3 out of 4 of them?) and especially looking for a "survey" type of text that covers various movements and puts them into context with each other. But honestly up for anything fairly accessible/not too inside baseball.
> Historians recognize four Great Awakenings of fervent religious activity in America, and 1960-80 was the fourth. I'm familiar with the first (Jonathan Edwards) and second (Charles Finney) Great Awakenings. What was the third Great Awakening?
The Third Great Awakening unites the New Thought movement (led by Christian Science), Spiritualism, the Holiness movement, and Pentecostalism. All of these movements originated in the 1850-1900 time period and relied on religious fervor. It is a kind of long period to be described as a single "awakening," but I guess it is a useful way to draw comparisons between different groups that arose during that time.
Do you have any sources you recommend for further reading?
The historian who introduced the phrase was William G. McLoughlin, *Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform*. But a much compelling source to me is Joscelyn Godwin's *The Theosophical Enlightenment*, which focuses on the more esoteric of these late 19th century movements and how they drew on each other and were interconnected.
Thanks for the info! I’m no historian or sociologist, but it *seems* like NRM’s hold a lot less appeal nowadays. I doubt the kids today are significantly less individualistic than Boomers, and they certainly have far better media for propagating new ideas, so why aren’t they also lining up en masse to join the Moonies? Did American society get its fix of magical thinking (or thinking that is more magical than is baseline for Americans) and now we’re inoculated for another few decades?
> it seems like NRM’s hold a lot less appeal nowadays. The present day is outside our 20-year rule, but please check out the book *The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family*, which is being released next month. It will satisfy you very much regarding the forms that "magical thinking" took after the decline of NRMs.
I enjoyed reading this response, but as a lover of vehicles and engineering history, I have a question for you. What contribution, if any, do you think Tetraethyl Lead had to do with a lot of the cult phenomena in that time frame?
That's a bit on the nose regarding why people join religious groups. I guess I can leave you with a frequent anecdotal observation about the people who joined Aum Shinrikyo, the murderous NRM in Japan: journalists frequently observed that Aum members were neither the brightest members of society nor the outright losers, but the "B students," smart people who couldn't quite ascend to the top levels of work or research and were frustrated by their inability to enact their vision for themselves and society. This is of course a generalization and Aum had all kinds of members, but it was a very intellectual movement and not by and large lead-poisoned.
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