The Christian countercult movement or the Christian anti-cult movement is a social movement among certain Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist and other Christian ministries and individual activists who oppose religious sects that they consider cults.
Deprogramming is a controversial tactic that seeks to dissuade someone from "strongly held convictions" such as religious beliefs. Deprogramming purports to assist a person who holds a particular belief system—of a kind considered harmful by those initiating the deprogramming—to change those beliefs and sever connections to the group associated with them. Typically, people identifying themselves as deprogrammers are hired by a person's relatives, often parents of adult children. The subject of the deprogramming is usually forced to undergo the procedure, which might last days or weeks, against their will.
Landmark Worldwide, or simply Landmark, is an American employee-owned for-profit company that offers personal-development programs, with their most-known being the Landmark Forum. It is one of several large-group awareness training programs.
Eileen Vartan Barker is a professor in sociology, an emeritus member of the London School of Economics (LSE), and a consultant to that institution's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. She is the chairperson and founder of the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (INFORM) and has written studies about cults and new religious movements.
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as new religion or an alternative spirituality, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
The Center for Studies on New Religions, otherwise abbreviated as CESNUR, is a nonprofit organization based in Turin, Italy that focuses on the academic study of new religious movements and opposes the anti-cult movement. It was established in 1988 by Massimo Introvigne, Jean-François Mayer, and Ernesto Zucchini.
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Cult is a term often applied to new religious movements and other social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals. Extreme devotion to a particular person, object, or goal is another characteristic often ascribed to cults. The term has different, and sometimes divergent or pejorative, definitions both in popular culture and academia and has been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study.
The anti-cult movement, abbreviated ACM and also known as the countercult movement, consists of various governmental and non-governmental organizations and individuals that seek to raise awareness of religious groups that they consider to be "cults", uncover coercive practices used to attract and retain members, and help those who have become involved with harmful cult practices.
The academic study of new religious movements is known as new religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by ex-members as well as the friends and relatives of members, organizations that collect information on NRMs, the mainstream media, and academics studying such phenomena.
FECRIS – (in French)European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism, a French non-profit association and anti-cult organization, serves as an umbrella organization for groups which investigate the activities of groups considered cults in Europe.
The Family Survival Trust (FST) is a charity registered in the United Kingdom, established in order to support and offer counselling for members of abusive cults, religions, and similar organizations, and their families members.
A self religion is a religious or self-improvement group which has as one of its primary aims the improvement of the self. The term "self religion" was coined by Paul Heelas and other scholars of religion have adopted/adapted the description. King's College London scholar Peter Bernard Clarke builds on Heelas's concept of self religion to describe the class of "Religions of the True Self".
The Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR) is an academic association with more than 700 members worldwide. It publishes a journal, Sociology of Religion, and holds meetings at the same venues and times as the American Sociological Association.
James Arthur Beckford was a British sociologist of religion. He was professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1988/1989, he served as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and from 1999 to 2003, as the president of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.
Karel Dobbelaere was a Belgian educator and noted sociologist of religion. Dobbelaere was an Emeritus Professor of both the University of Antwerp and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. He was past-President and General Secretary of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.
Cultists Anonymous (CA) was a British anti-cult organization made up of ex-cultists from Family, Action, Information, and Rescue (FAIR), Britain's largest anti-cult organization. CA formed in 1985 but rejoined FAIR in 1991. CA's leaders generally remained anonymous to avoid intimidation from new religious movements (NRMs). However, George D. Chryssides, a British religious studies scholar, believes that Lord John Francis Rodney, 9th Baron Rodney (Lord Rodney) was the leader of the group.
The People's Organised Workshop on Ersatz Religion (POWER), also called the People's Organised Workgroup on Ersatz Religion, was a British anti-cult organisation founded in 1976 based in Ealing, London. Some believe that POWER is a front organisation by large new religious movements (NRMs) meant to delegitimise other anti-cult organisations like Family, Action, Information, Rescue (FAIR). POWER functionally disappeared in 1977 but caused major controversy within its roughly one-year lifespan. The organisation published a brochure called Deprogramming: The Constructive Destruction of Belief: A Manual of Technique, which advocated for mass deprogramming of cult members, including methods like sleep deprivation, food deprivation, forced nudity, kidnapping, and "aggressive sex".
Cult Controversies: The Societal Response to New Religious Movements is a 1985 nonfiction book by James A. Beckford on the reaction to new religious movements (cults) in America, Britain, France, and Germany. It was published by Tavistock Publications in London and New York. Beckford covers the literature and sources on various new religious movements (NRMs) in various places, but also the various reactions that non-NRM members had to their sudden presence in different societies, including America, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan.
