Roughly 40 new religions are born in the United States every year
Speaking to The New York Times in 2006, the scholar J. Gordon Melton estimated that America sees between 40 and 45 fresh religious movements emerge each year. Worldwide they number in the tens of thousands. Most never grow past a handful of followers, but a few, like the Latter Day Saint movement, now count members in the millions.
A new religious movement is a faith of modern origin that sits at the edge of its society's dominant religion, either invented outright or branching from an older tradition. Nobody agrees on how new counts as new. Some scholars start the clock after 1945 or in the 1950s; others reach back to Joseph Smith's movement in 1830 or Japan's Tenrikyo in 1838. Melton argued that no feature unites them all, not even their newness.
The nineteenth century was fertile ground. Bábism arose in Iran in 1844 and gave rise to the Baháʼí Faith in 1863, Choi Jae-Woo founded Donghak in Korea in 1860, and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad launched the Ahmadiyya in 1889. The 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago gave Asian teachers such as the Zen master Soyen Shaku and the Jain preacher Virchand Gandhi their first large American audience. The twentieth century added Isaiah Shembe's Nazareth Baptist Church in South Africa in 1911, Rastafari in Jamaica and Cao Đài in Vietnam in the 1930s, and Gerald Gardner's Wicca in the 1940s.
After the 1945 Shinto Directive separated the Japanese state from Shinto, new religions flourished in Japan. Scientology and the Unification Church both date from 1954, and England's Aetherius Society of 1955 blended belief in extraterrestrials with older religious ideas. The Beatles' 1967 visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spotlighted Transcendental Meditation. From the late 1960s through the 1980s a so-called cult boom brought fierce disputes over brainwashing claims, deprogramming and lawsuits, and organised anti-cult and Christian countercult campaigns, while new religion studies became an academic field in the 1970s.
Many such groups present their teachings as forgotten truths revived rather than inventions, and some claim scriptures received through mediums; the Urantia Book of 1955 is said to stem from celestial revelations beginning in 1911. Scholars such as Eileen Barker warn against lumping them together. Elijah Siegler noted in 2007 that none has become any country's dominant faith, yet many of their ideas have slipped into mainstream culture.
Source: New religious movement
