Last Updated on September 9, 2026 by Karl Thompson
World rejecting new religious movements are the type most people picture when they hear the word ‘cult’. Their defining feature is hostility to mainstream society: the movement’s ideology holds that the outside world is corrupt, fallen or spiritually bankrupt, and that salvation requires separating from it.
This is one of three types of new religious movement identified by Roy Wallis in The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (1984), alongside world affirming and world accommodating movements. The material is part of the Beliefs in Society option and comes up on Paper 2 (7192/2).
Examples of world rejecting new religious movements
- The People’s Temple
- Krishna Consciousness
- The Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’)
- The Manson Family
Key features of world rejecting new religious movements
The ideology is highly critical of mainstream society, and often of the mainstream religions within that society too. The world outside is not merely imperfect; it is the problem.
Because the outside world is the problem, these movements demand very high levels of commitment. Members are frequently expected to give up jobs, education and family ties, live communally, and hand over property and income to the movement. Some function as what Goffman called total institutions, controlling every aspect of a member’s daily life — where they sleep, what they eat, who they are permitted to speak to.
HOWEVER, that control is usually tightest lower down the hierarchy. Members closer to the leadership typically retain more contact with the outside world, partly for the mundane reason that someone has to deal with lawyers, landlords and journalists.
They are typically founded by a charismatic leader, and membership involves personal loyalty to that individual rather than to an institution, a text or a tradition. This is one reason such movements are often short-lived: when the leader dies, there is frequently nothing holding the movement together.
The goal is radical transformation, either of the individual member or of society itself. And many hold strikingly conservative beliefs about sex and marriage, which sit oddly alongside their radicalism about everything else — a tension worth noticing, because it undercuts the popular idea that these movements are simply permissive.
Size varies enormously. The People’s Temple operated from essentially one location; the Unification Church became a global organisation with members across several continents.
Of the older categories of religious organisation, world rejecting movements are closest to Troeltsch’s sect — small, exclusive, in tension with wider society, and claiming a unique route to salvation. For A-level purposes the two categories overlap almost entirely, though see churches, denominations, sects and cults for why they are not quite the same scheme.
How this differs from the other two types: world accommodating movements are indifferent to wider society rather than hostile to it, and world affirming movements actively embrace its goals. The full comparison table is on the world affirming page, along with an evaluation of the typology as a whole.
Why do people join new religious movements?
Wallis’ typology tells you what kinds of movement exist. It does not explain who joins them, and exam questions frequently ask about the second thing — usually about world rejecting movements, since those are the ones which demand a genuine sacrifice.
Marginality. Max Weber argued that sects tend to emerge among groups who are marginalised — denied the status, wealth or recognition that mainstream society distributes to others. Such groups may develop what Weber called a theodicy of disprivilege: a set of religious ideas which explains their disadvantage and offers spiritual compensation for it. If a group believes it is God’s chosen people, poverty in this life becomes a test of faith rather than a mark of failure. The recruitment of disadvantaged Black Americans by the Nation of Islam in the 1960s is the standard illustration.
Relative deprivation. Stark and Bainbridge use this to explain a pattern that marginality alone cannot: comparatively privileged people leaving established churches for new movements. Deprivation here is subjective. Someone may be materially comfortable and still feel spiritually short-changed, particularly if they believe their church has watered down its beliefs in order to fit in with a secular world.
Eileen Barker on the Moonies. Barker’s The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (1984) is the study to know, partly because what she found was not what anyone expected. She spent close to seven years on the Unification Church, using questionnaires, in-depth interviews and participant observation, and comparing members with ex-members, non-joiners and matched control groups.
Barker found no single reason why people joined. The typical member was young, middle class and well educated, frequently with parents working in the caring or service professions — the opposite of the marginalised profile Weber’s account would predict.
She also rejected the brainwashing thesis, on the straightforward grounds that it cannot explain the many people who attended a recruitment workshop and did not join, nor the many members who later left of their own accord. This is a valuable evaluation point: the popular account of NRMs as machines for stealing people’s minds does not survive contact with the evidence.
Exam application: a 10-mark question
‘Outline and explain two reasons why some groups are more likely to join World Rejecting New Religious Movements than others’ (10)
This is the no-item type of 10-mark question, which on Beliefs in Society appears in Section A of Paper 2 (7192/2).
There are no marks for evaluation on the no-item 10-markers. This catches people out every year. Save the criticisms for the 20-mark question — here, every sentence should be doing the work of outlining or explaining. On the with item 10-markers the rules are different: analysis and application are credited, and both points must be taken from the item.
Have a go at this yourself before reading on. There is general advice on both types of 10-mark question here.
The technique that works: identify a type of group, link it to a named movement, then explain the reasons connecting the two. Two developed points of roughly equal length. Do not attempt three.
A possible answer
Reason one: economically disadvantaged ethnic minority groups.
Economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities are more likely to join world rejecting NRMs such as the Nation of Islam. Weber argued that such groups suffer high levels of deprivation and marginality — they are pushed towards the edge of society and denied the status and rewards distributed to others, and so do not experience themselves as fully part of it. For ethnic minority groups, the experience of racism compounds the effects of economic deprivation, since the disadvantage is not only material but a matter of how the group is treated and perceived.
World rejecting movements may appeal precisely because they reject mainstream society, which has in effect already rejected these groups. The rejection is mutual, and there is a certain logic in joining a movement which shares your view of the society that excluded you. Some such movements offer what Weber called a theodicy of disprivilege — a religious explanation for the group’s suffering, and spiritual compensation for enduring it. Others go further: the Nation of Islam held out the prospect of social change and actively challenged the powerful, which offers not only hope of a better life but solidarity with others engaged in the same struggle.
Reason two: well educated young people from middle class backgrounds.
The second group is one which surprised researchers when it was identified: highly educated young people from comparatively privileged backgrounds. This is what Eileen Barker found in her study of the Moonies, published as The Making of a Moonie in 1984. The typical member was young, middle class and well educated, frequently with parents working in the caring professions.
The explanation here is relative rather than absolute deprivation. Such young people have watched their parents achieve material success without obvious happiness, and are expected to follow the same path. Despite being privileged in every measurable way, they may feel that something is missing — a spiritual deprivation rather than an economic one. A world rejecting NRM offers exactly what they feel they lack: certainty, purpose, community and a total account of how to live.
Two further factors make young people more available to these movements than older adults. They have fewer binding attachments — no mortgage, no children, no career yet built — so the withdrawal from mainstream society that a world rejecting movement demands is practically achievable in a way it would not be at forty. And for a young person from an affluent family the risk is lower than it looks, because they generally know they can go home if the spiritual phase does not last.
KT’s commentary
The examiner is looking for two clearly separate groups, each properly explained, and this answer gives them: one marginalised, one privileged. That contrast is doing useful work, because it demonstrates that the question of who joins NRMs has no single class-based answer — which is exactly the point Barker’s research established.
The one thing I would add if there were room is that the second point is stronger with the study named and dated, as it is here, than with a vague reference to research. Named sociologists with dates attached are cheap marks and most students leave them on the table.
Note that I have said nothing about whether Barker’s findings still hold forty years on, or whether the Nation of Islam example is dated. Both would be perfectly legitimate criticisms — and neither would earn a single mark on this question.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying the Beliefs in Society option, as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course (7192/2).
The other two types in Wallis’ typology are covered separately: world affirming new religious movements, which carries the full account of Roy Wallis, the comparison table and the evaluation of the typology, and world accommodating new religious movements.
For the older classification of religious organisations, see churches, denominations, sects and cults.
For the with-item type of 10-marker in this topic, see two ways in which social change may lead to the growth of sects.
For more A-level sociology exam questions and answers see my page on exams, short answer questions and essays.
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