Review: New Religious Movements: The Basics, by Joseph P. Laycock
Joseph P. Laycock’s New Religious Movements: The Basics is a brief, but effective introduction to theory and method in the academic study of new religious movements. While covering much of the same ground as previous textbooks—such as Lorne Dawson’s Comprehending Cults (2006) and Douglas E. Cowan an...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Californiarnia Press
2023
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| In: |
Nova religio
Year: 2023, Volume: 26, Issue: 4, Pages: 143-144 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Joseph P. Laycock’s New Religious Movements: The Basics is a brief, but effective introduction to theory and method in the academic study of new religious movements. While covering much of the same ground as previous textbooks—such as Lorne Dawson’s Comprehending Cults (2006) and Douglas E. Cowan and David G. Bromley’s Cults and New Religions (2008)—Laycock’s presentation is concise, reader friendly, and up to date. QAnon and NXIVM, for example, are prominently featured. The first chapter gives a capsule history of the academic study of new religions in order to contextualize the eventual adoption of neutral terminology and to interrogate the social utility of such study. This leads to a chapter on research methods, which includes a discussion of research ethics and the limits of objectivity, along with helpful tips on how to pursue archival and ethnographic projects. The remaining chapters cover the suite of sociological issues typically associated with the study of new religious movements: brainwashing, charisma and authority, millennialism and failed prophecy, violence, and gender and sexuality. Each of these chapters gives the background for why each of these specific issues arose among the first generation of new religions scholars, as well as covering more contemporary research that has tended to complicate and add needed nuance to their original conclusions. A good example of this is Laycock’s discussion of the imbricating impact of feminist theory, gender studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory on our evolving understandings of gender and sexuality in alternative religions. The book ends with a chapter on the role of social media in the development of new religious movements, particularly its role in generating new moral panics involving those groups branded as "dangerous cults." Given its length, relatively low price, the accessibility of its writing, and its attention to recent scholarship, Laycock’s New Religious Movements is a welcome addition to the growing list of textbooks in this area. It will be especially useful in introductory courses on new religious movements at the upper-division undergraduate level. |
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| ISSN: | 1541-8480 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nova religio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.143 |