Scholars, Sects and Sanghas, I: Recruitment to Asian-Based Meditation Groups in North America
Sociological and psychological research on why Westerners join new religious movements in the U.S. has often focused on seven of the more spectacular groups. Sociological studies have usually understood “joining” as a response to cultural upheaval and a decline in symbolic integration. The weight of...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
[publisher not identified]
1988
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| In: |
Sociological analysis
Year: 1988, Volume: 49, Issue: 2, Pages: 136-170 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Sociological and psychological research on why Westerners join new religious movements in the U.S. has often focused on seven of the more spectacular groups. Sociological studies have usually understood “joining” as a response to cultural upheaval and a decline in symbolic integration. The weight of the literature argues that this upheaval creates disaffiliation leading to “needs,” and that New Religious Movements (NRMs) arise out of them. Thus a “disruption-neediness-belongingness thesis” dominates much of the literature on new religious movements.Psychological studies have often seen “joining” as a by-product of maladjustment, immaturity, or family disturbance: neediness in some form. Thus, new religious movements are seen as primarily recruiting members from a pool of persons seeking a community to which to belong that will overcome their sense of loneliness or self-estrangement.A sample was drawn of 327 respondents associated with 10 mainline Asian-based meditation groups in the United States. Data show that the need for community belongingness—proceeding from disaffiliation and neediness—was only a moderately important reason for joining these groups. Much of the literature suggests that recruits to NRMs are marginally employed and are avoiding taking on adult roles. Instead, we find that members are drawn predominantly from the upper-middle class level of the American mainstream and have substantially higher educational and occupational attainment than the population as a whole. There are strong cohort effects in the data: younger recruits appear to have disproportionally been motivated to join Asian-based meditation groups for therapeutic or counterculture-based reasons. |
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| ISSN: | 2325-7873 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Sociological analysis
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3711010 |