This session examines major developments in the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs). Papers consider societal influences on scholars studying NRMs and how technological changes affect NRMs. Additionally they examine how religious difference and religious deviance are situated in the public sphere, as well as how discourses of deviance spread transnationally. Together, this panel offers insights into theoretical debates within the study of deviance, NRMs, and religious rights and freedoms.
This paper will examine the role of writing, printing, mass media, and the internet in the evolution of religion to develop a systems theory of new religious movements. I will place a critical analysis of Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory of religion in dialogue with theories of NRMs and philosophy of religion to show how the systems of meaning we describe as religion/religious develop through the material technologies we use to communicate. NRMs can be said to emerge and evolve in proportion to the degree of complexity needed to access and sustain the communication of a novel system of meaning for individuals-in-community relative to the selection pressures of a communication environment. A systems theory of NRMs can better explain why religion will likely never disappear but only change in form as we find new ways to form systems of meaning through the materials and infrastructure we use to communicate.
This paper positions Speakers’ Corner as a communal ritual space that reifies and celebrates Freedom of Speech every Sunday afternoon. It is an active and functioning as a contemporary hybrid cultic milieu in which New Religious Movements (NRMs), dawah and counter‑dawah, apologetics, conspiratorial worldviews, and emerging forms of new religiosity intersect within a hybrid street–platform environment. Drawing on classic sociological theory including Goffman’s interaction rituals, Habermas’s public sphere, and Campbell’s cultic milieu, the paper illustrates how ritualised performances of Freedom of Speech generate publics and counter‑publics whose exchanges circulate globally via livestreams and short‑form clips. Ethnographic fieldwork (April–June 2025), combined with historical contextualisation, visual sociology and online mapping, traces how confrontational formats, testimonial arcs, and ‘click moments’ become mobile, monetisable, and morally charged. Speakers’ Corner continues an iconic site for examining boundary‑challenging religious innovation, where NRM actors and seekers operate alongside political and heterodox movements. Speaker’s Corner offers a unique vantage point for understanding how democratic values, public order, heterodoxy, and emerging forms of religiosity are being reconfigured into hybrid futures.
This paper analyzes how certain strands of Christian apologetics function sociologically as mechanisms of deviance labeling that generate religious stigma and social exclusion toward minority Christian communities. Drawing on classical theories of deviance and stigmatization developed by Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, Frank Tannenbaum, and Erving Goffman, the paper argues that apologetic discourse associated with the evangelical anti-cult movements of the 1970s transformed theological disagreement into social deviance through symbolic power and ideological boundary-making. It further traces the transnational circulation of these stigmatizing narratives, showing how labels in North American anti-cult discourse were later appropriated as “evil cults” (xiejiao) within the political and legal framework of 1980s China to justify repression of underground Christian communities. Qualitative evidence from the testimonies of persecuted Christians illustrates the lived consequences of such labeling. The paper also examines how digital media amplify these dynamics by accelerating the circulation of stigmatizing narratives across transnational religious networks.
Based on first-hand research experiences in the field of new religious studies, this paper attempts to identify and analyze some of the changing conditions that have confronted researchers attempting to conduct field work in new religious movements (NRMs) over the last fifty years. Four major conditions are identified: i) the rise of “cult-watching groups” (CAG) in an increasingly global “anticult movement” (ACM); ii) the rise of institutional research ethics boards; iii) the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s; iv) media treatment of NRMs. While these four changing conditions have, in some ways, contributed new methods and avenues of access to the field of NRM studies, this paper will focus on their negative impacts on the research field. Citing from research methods studies, and providing examples of researchers’ experiences in the field, this study will attempt to demonstrate how these four factors can impede or limit research access, delay projects, and divert the focus away from longitudinal research and “pure ethnography” towards short-term projects responding to religious freedom issues, legal cases, and human rights concerns.