New Religious Movement - Charismatic Movements

Charismatic Movements

NRMs based on charismatic leadership often follow the routinization of charisma, as described by the German sociologist Max Weber.

In their book Theory of Religion, Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge propose that the formation of "cults" can be explained through a combination of four models:

• The psycho-pathological model – the cult founder suffers from psychological problems; he develops the cult in order to resolve these problems for himself, as a form of self-therapy
• The entrepreneurial model – the cult founder acts like an entrepreneur, trying to develop a religion which he/she thinks will be most attractive to potential recruits, often based on his/her experiences from previous cults or other religious groups he/she has belonged to
• The social model – the cult is formed through a social implosion, in which cult members dramatically reduce the intensity of their emotional bonds with non-cult members, and dramatically increase the intensity of those bonds with fellow cult members – this emotionally intense situation naturally encourages the formation of a shared belief system and rituals
• The normal revelations model – the cult is formed when the founder chooses to interpret ordinary natural phenomena as supernatural, such as by ascribing his or her own creativity in inventing the cult to that of the deity.