This session examines how new religious movements are constituted and contested as objects of knowledge through practices of classification, representation, regulation, and pedagogy. The papers analyze the historical formation of the category ‘new religious movement,’ contemporary digital representations of a minority religion on YouTube, state regulation of Tibetan Buddhist new religiosity in Vietnam, and the challenges of teaching cults and NRMs in teacher education programs. Taken together, they show how scholarly categories, media narratives, legal frameworks, and educational contexts shape authority, legitimacy, and stigma surrounding NRMs. By foregrounding the production and circulation of religious knowledge across institutional and public arenas, the session invites reflection on how NRMs are named, governed, and taught in politically sensitive and highly mediated environments.
This paper seeks to identify the origins of the term “new religious movement.” It addresses various previously proposed theories of its origins, like the works of H. Neill McFarland, Harold W. Turner, and Jacob Needleman. It concludes that H. Neill McFarland’s early use of the term in 1967 as a portmanteau of terms “new religion” and “religious movement” is the definitive earliest use of the modern term “new religious movement.” This paper also shows the pitfalls of other theories of the term’s origins. Additionally, it comments on the reinvention of the term as a “neutral” term (compared to “cult”) in order to fight for religious freedom and free expression of religion for religious minorities. More recent uses of the term, like in describing the present religious landscape of Iran and the religious aspects of the QAnon conspiracy, are explored as well.
No social group is exempt from inflammatory online rhetoric, but minority religious groups are increasingly vulnerable to stereotyping and “othering.” This presentation reports key findings from a systematic qualitative analysis of YouTube transcripts from leading content creators and news organizations about Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The growing tension between influencer-style content and more traditional news reporting on YouTube will be discussed with a focus on Japan and Britain. Former members with anti-Witness narratives were found to dominate the discourse in these countries. Cultural aspects and current political climate were identified as factors influencing content. “Control” was a common theme in democratic, individualistic countries like Britain. The theme of “family” was common in Japan, reflecting issues of second-generation Japanese, anti-cult activists, and some government officials to restrict minority religions, including Jehovah’s Witnesses. Discussion will include how these representations are crafted out of new digital spaces and have broader societal and legal implications.
This presentation analyzes the 2010s emergence of “Tibeto-Vietnamese Vajrayana” (TVV), an umbrella term for adaptive Tibetan Buddhist new religiosities in Vietnam. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2018-26, it examines how TVV navigates tension with state regulatory frameworks and mainstream Buddhist institutions. Under Vietnam’s late socialist legal framework, Tibetan Buddhism is often framed as a foreign new religiosity that must be indigenized or incorporated into national heritage because it operates outside the state sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Sangha. This has led to state monitoring, legal investigation, and police intervention, exemplified by the alleged extrajudicial state killing of Hungkar Rinpoche in Vietnam in 2024. Other recent cases involving alleged spiritual manipulation, financial misconduct, and religious licensing abuse have drawn intense media coverage and intensified scrutiny of some TVV groups. These dynamics shape TVV as an emerging field of new religiosity. This presentation draws from an article accepted for publication in Asian Ethnology (2026).
This paper advances the argument that a College of Education is not merely an alternative institutional location for teaching about cults and new religious movements, but a pedagogically and politically necessary site for rethinking how contested religious knowledge is produced, negotiated, and taught in contemporary universities. While Religious Studies, History, and related disciplines have generated extensive scholarship on new religious movements, largely focused on classification, historical development, and sociological explanation, they have paid comparatively little attention to the pedagogical and relational challenges that arise when these movements are taught within increasingly polarized and publicly scrutinized educational environments. As teaching religion at the post-secondary level has become more visibly politicized, the central challenge is no longer only how new religious movements should be defined or analysed, but how they should be taught, by whom, and for what educational purposes. A College of Education provides a distinct institutional and intellectual context in which these questions can be addressed directly, because education as a field is fundamentally oriented toward curriculum design, learner experience, professional responsibility, and the social consequences of teaching practices.