New Religious Movements: Coherence Communities in Formation

Series: Gene-Culture Coevolution | Part: 6 of 9

New Religious Movements (NRMs)—often dismissed as "cults"—are natural experiments in coherence community formation. They show us, in compressed timeframes and with visible founders, the same dynamics that shaped major religions over centuries.

The Mormons went from a single revelation in 1820s New York to a global religion with 17 million members. Scientology emerged from L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction writing in the 1950s and built a billion-dollar organization. Pentecostalism exploded from early 20th-century revival meetings to over 500 million adherents worldwide.

These aren't aberrations. They're coherence community formation in real time—the same evolutionary process that created Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, just faster and more visible.

Understanding NRMs through gene-culture coevolution reveals what makes religious communities succeed or fail, how they attract and retain members, and why some groups thrive while others collapse.

What Makes a New Religious Movement

NRMs emerge when existing religious frameworks fail to provide coherence for a critical mass of people. This happens during:

• Social disruption: Industrialization, migration, war, technological change
• Meaning crisis: Traditional narratives no longer make sense of lived experience
• Identity fragmentation: Old categories (class, ethnicity, occupation) no longer organize social life
• Institutional failure: Established religions feel irrelevant, corrupt, or disconnected

When coherence collapses at scale, there's demand for new frameworks. NRMs supply them.

The pattern is consistent across history. The 1st-3rd centuries CE (Roman Empire fragmenting) produced Christianity, Gnosticism, Mithraism, and dozens of other movements. The 19th century (industrialization, urbanization) generated Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science. The 1960s-70s (countercultural upheaval) spawned hundreds of new movements.

NRMs fill coherence vacuums. When existing systems fail to integrate experience into meaningful narrative, new systems emerge to meet the need.

The Formation Dynamics

Most NRMs follow predictable patterns:

Charismatic Founder

Nearly all successful NRMs begin with a charismatic founder—someone who claims direct access to truth, whether through revelation, enlightenment, or discovery.

Joseph Smith received golden plates. L. Ron Hubbard discovered Dianetics. Sun Myung Moon was chosen by Jesus. The founder's claim is non-negotiable: they have access to knowledge others don't.

This creates an asymmetric authority structure. The founder defines doctrine, interprets ambiguity, and settles disputes. Members accept this authority in exchange for the coherence framework the founder provides.

The evolutionary function is rapid innovation and coordination. One mind generating doctrine is faster than committee consensus. Charismatic authority allows for quick adaptation to member needs and environmental pressures.

The risk is obvious: unchecked power, potential for exploitation, collapse if the founder dies or is discredited. But in the formation phase, centralized authority accelerates coherence construction.

Boundary Marking

New movements must differentiate themselves from both mainstream society and competing movements. They do this through boundary practices—distinctive behaviors that mark in-group vs. out-group.

• Dietary restrictions: Kosher (Jews), no coffee/alcohol (Mormons), vegetarian (Hare Krishnas)
• Dress codes: Hijab, turbans, temple garments, robes
• Language: Sacred terms, insider jargon, special honorifics
• Ritual calendar: Different holy days, prayer times, observances

These aren't arbitrary. They're costly signals that filter commitment. Only those willing to bear social costs (weird food, strange clothes, restricted freedoms) join and stay. The costs ensure members are genuinely committed, not free-riding.

Boundary practices also create identity fusion. When you dress differently, eat differently, and speak differently, your group membership becomes central to identity. You can't switch on and off. You're marked.

Demanding Practices

Successful NRMs require significant investment:

• Time: Daily prayer, weekly meetings, intensive study
• Money: Tithing, donations, communal living arrangements
• Social sacrifice: Cutting ties with non-believers, restricted relationships
• Behavioral conformity: Sexual restrictions, substance prohibitions, lifestyle requirements

Why would anyone accept this? Costly commitment creates group cohesion.

Richard Sosis's research on religious communes found that groups with more costly requirements survive longer. Lenient groups collapse within years. Strict groups persist for decades or centuries. The costs filter out half-hearted members and create intense in-group trust.

This is the same dynamic as hazing in fraternities or boot camp in militaries: shared suffering creates bonds. The more you sacrifice for the group, the more valuable membership becomes. You've invested too much to leave casually.

Novel Coherence Framework

NRMs must provide something traditional religions don't: a new narrative that makes better sense of contemporary experience.

Christianity reframed Roman moral categories around love and grace rather than honor and shame. Mormonism provided American exceptionalism with sacred genealogy. Scientology medicalized spiritual progress as "going clear." Each offered frameworks that existing religions didn't.

The framework must be:

• Comprehensive: Explains suffering, purpose, cosmology, ethics
• Actionable: Provides concrete practices, not just beliefs
• Socially embedding: Creates roles, relationships, status hierarchies
• Phenomenologically compelling: Produces genuine experiences that validate the framework

If the framework delivers coherence—if members' lives make more sense, feel more integrated, and function better within the narrative—the movement grows. If it fails to integrate experience, members leave and the movement collapses.

Why Some NRMs Succeed and Others Fail

Cultural evolution is brutal. Most new movements disappear within a generation. A few explode into global religions. What determines success?

Reproduction Problem

Early Christianity had celibate priests but encouraged lay members to have families. This allowed biological reproduction alongside cultural transmission. Shakers required celibacy for all members. They went extinct.

NRMs need either biological reproduction (members having children who inherit the tradition) or aggressive recruitment (converting enough outsiders to replace losses). Groups that do neither disappear.

Institutionalization

Charismatic founders die. What happens then?

Successful movements routinize charisma (Max Weber's term)—they translate the founder's authority into institutional structures that persist beyond individual leadership.

Mormonism survived Joseph Smith's death by creating a robust hierarchy (Quorum of Twelve Apostles) and succession procedures. Many movements collapsed when their founders died because no institutional framework existed to maintain coherence.

The transition from founder to institution is the most dangerous phase. Too rigid, and the movement ossifies. Too flexible, and it fragments into competing factions. Getting this right is the difference between collapse and persistence.

Adaptive Pressure

The environment selects. NRMs facing legal persecution, economic hardship, or social marginalization either adapt or die.

Mormons abandoned polygamy under U.S. government pressure. Jehovah's Witnesses developed sophisticated legal strategies to defend religious freedom. Groups that couldn't adapt to hostile environments disappeared.

But moderate adaptation is risky. Change too much, and you lose distinctiveness. Members ask: "If we're the same as everyone else, why bother?" The movement must maintain enough boundary to justify costs while adapting enough to survive.

Second-Generation Retention

The children of converts are the real test. They inherited the costs (weird lifestyle, social stigma) but not the conversion experience (personal revelation, relief from crisis).

Groups that retain second-generation members have achieved cultural transmission success. Groups that lose them are one generation from extinction.

Retention requires:

• Early socialization: Intensive childhood integration into practices
• Rites of passage: Meaningful transitions that confer adult status
• Identity rewards: Social roles, status, belonging that compensate for costs
• Ongoing phenomenology: Practices that produce compelling experiences throughout life

The movements that survive past the founder's generation are those that successfully transmit not just beliefs but lived coherence—the experience that this framework makes life meaningful.

NRMs as Cultural Evolution

NRMs are evolution in action. Variation (new movements), selection (most fail), and retention (a few persist and grow). The successful variants aren't necessarily true—they're functionally effective at creating and maintaining coherence communities.

What's selected for:

• Costly commitment mechanisms that ensure member quality
• Compelling narratives that integrate contemporary experience
• Robust institutional structures that survive founder loss
• Effective transmission to second generation
• Adaptive capacity to environmental pressure

This is cultural group selection operating on timescales short enough to observe. The groups that survive are those whose cultural variants promote cohesion, coordination, and reproduction.

The Coherence Laboratory

In AToM terms, NRMs are coherence laboratories—experiments in constructing and maintaining shared meaning at group scale.

They show us:

• How quickly coherence communities can form (years, not centuries)
• What mechanisms generate and stabilize collective coherence (costly signals, ritual practice, shared narrative)
• Why some configurations persist and others collapse (functionality, not truth)
• How cultural selection operates on community-level traits

Studying NRMs isn't morbid curiosity about cults. It's watching the same evolutionary process that created all religions, just accelerated and transparent. The Mormon Church today is what early Christianity was 2,000 years ago—a successful NRM that escaped extinction and achieved institutional stability.

The mechanisms are universal. The outcomes vary. And understanding why is central to understanding how humans construct and maintain coherence at scale.

This is Part 6 of the Gene-Culture Coevolution series, exploring how genes and culture evolve together to make humans uniquely human.

Previous: Why Humans Form Religious Groups: Cognitive and Social Foundations
Next: Digital Tribes: Gene-Culture Dynamics in Online Communities

Further Reading

• Stark, R., & Finke, R. (2000). Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. University of California Press.
• Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). "Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion." Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239.
• Dawson, L. L. (2006). Comprehending Cults: The Sociology of New Religious Movements (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. AltaMira Press.