Month: October 2026

From the 1930s onward a family of movements moved the source of revelation away from the biblical God. In its place they put Ascended Masters, channelled entities and extraterrestrial creators: the I AM Activity, the Church Universal and Triumphant, Raël’s…

Most millenarian movements wait for the end of the world. Two movements of the 1990s acted on it instead. Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo built a counter-state, stood for parliament, made nerve agents and on 20 March 1995 released sarin on…

Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian centre outside Waco, Texas, is the most politically contested case in this part of the study. Its story runs from an Adventist schism of the 1920s and 1930s through the Roden family’s leadership to Vernon…

On 18 November 1978, at a remote agricultural settlement in north-western Guyana, more than nine hundred followers of the Reverend Jim Jones died, most of them from cyanide mixed into a fruit drink. The reference shelf describes it as the…

Two of the best-known new religious movements of the post-war decades took shape at opposite ends of the Pacific world and in very different registers. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church came out of the divided Korea of the 1950s. It…

Christian Science (Chapter 128) located illness in “mortal mind”. Spiritualism (Chapter 129) claimed that personality survives the body. In the mid-twentieth century a pulp-fiction writer combined both themes, a mental cause of suffering and an immortal spiritual being, into a…

The Millerites had looked for Christ in the sky over the “burned-over district” of upstate New York. Four years after the Great Disappointment, the same region produced a different promise. The dead, it was said, could be reached directly, at…

The religious ferment of nineteenth-century America produced two kinds of movement that went on to become worldwide denominations. One kind counted the days: it read the prophetic numbers of Daniel and Revelation as a timetable and announced when Christ would…

The 1890 Manifesto ended plural marriage in the official church. It did not end what believers called “the Principle”. Mormon fundamentalists hold that Woodruff suspended, but could not revoke, Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants. They built a chain…

Willis lists the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among the movements that began as “cults” in nineteenth-century America and became an established denomination [Willis, American Cults, #63203]. Its history is also, from the start, a political history: a…