New Religious Movement - Joining

Joining

According to Marc Galanter, Professor of Psychiatry at NYU, typical reasons why people join cults include a search for community and a spiritual quest. Sociologists Stark and Bainbridge, in discussing the process by which individuals join new religious groups, have even questioned the utility of the concept of conversion, suggesting that affiliation is a more useful concept.

Jeffrey Hadden summarizes a lecture entitled "Why Do People Join NRMs?" (a lecture in a series related to the sociology of new religious movements, a term Hadden uses to include both cults and sects) as follows:

1. Belonging to groups is a natural human activity;
2. People belong to religious groups for essentially the same reasons they belong to other groups;
3. Conversion is generally understood as an emotionally charged experience that leads to a dramatic reorganization of the convert's life;
4. Conversion varies enormously in terms of the intensity of the experience and the degree to which it actually alters the life of the convert;
5. Conversion is one, but not the only reason people join religious groups;
6. Social scientists have offered a number of theories to explain why people join religious groups;
7. Most of these explanations could apply equally well to explain why people join lots of other kinds of groups;
8. No one theory can explain all joinings or conversions;
9. What all of these theories have in common is the view that joining or converting is a natural process.

In the 1960s sociologist John Lofland lived with Unification Church missionary Young Oon Kim and a small group of American church members in California and studied their activities in trying to promote their beliefs and win new members. Lofland noted that most of their efforts were ineffective and that most of the people who joined did so because of personal relationships with other members, often family relationships. Lofland published his findings in 1964 as a doctorial thesis entitled: "The World Savers: A Field Study of Cult Processes," and in 1966 in book form by Prentice-Hall as Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith. It is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, as well as one of the first sociological studies of a new religious movement.