Violence and New Religious Movements

The relationship between cults and violence has long been a topic of intense public interest - an interest heavily fueled by numerous incidents of mass violence involving certain new religious movements (NRMs). These violent incidents have made international headlines, particularly the Jonestown murder-suicides, the ATF/FBI raid on the Mt. Carmel community, the Solar Temple murder-suicides, the Tokyo subway poison gas attack in 1995, and the Heaven's Gate suicides. The earliest studies of NRM-related violence focused on the personality of the leader and emphasized the role of the group's totalistic organization. By the 1990s, many studies shifted emphasis to these groups' millennialist beliefs, implicitly or explicitly portraying millennialism as the key to understanding their violence. More recently, scholars have also examined external forces on the NRMs, such as hostile apostates and intrusive governmental agencies, and have constructed general models that take both internal and external factors into account. This newer perspective also analyzes the nature of violence as it relates to the developmental stages that lead to extreme actions. Maturing literature on new religions and violence puts contemporary researchers in a position to propose different sorts of questions and lines of analyses than were previously possible. Rather than attempting to construct a general model of all NRM-related violence, what if one focused on understanding more specific kinds of violence? Alternately, what if, instead of focusing exclusively on the ''big five'' - Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, AUM Shinrikyo, the Branch Davidians, and the Solar Temple - we examined violence in other, less prominent new religions? Violence and New Religious Movements covers the major groups, but provides a richer survey by examining a dozen other groups that have been involved in violence, as well as NRMs that have been the target of violence. This collection of essays represents the culmination of decades of reflection by specialists in the field.

James R. Lewis is an extensively published scholar of new religious movements. He currently teaches in the History and Religious Studies Department of the University of Tromso in Norway. His reference books have won New York Public Library, American Library Association, and Choice book awards. He has been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, and Meet the Press.