Children in New Religions / Edition 1

by Susan J. Palmer, Charlotte E. Hardman

Overview

The late 1960s and early 1970s constituted a remarkable period for spiritual experimentation and for the proliferation of new religious groups. Now the children born into these religions have come of age. While their parents made the decision as adults to embrace alternative religious practices, the children have been raised with a very different orientation toward the larger society. While they take their religious communities for granted, many of these children gaze with curiosity at the surrounding secular world which their parents, not they, chose to reject. The contributors to this volume examine children from many different alternative religious movements worldwide, including The Family, Hare Krishna, Wiccans, and Pagans, Messianic Communities, and the Rajneesh (Osho) Movement. The essays explore two general questions: 1) What impact does the presence of children have on a new religion's lifestyle and chance of surviving into the future? 2) Is child abuse more likely to occur in unconventional religions, or are children born into them, the 'new' religions have grown up and have become an important and rapidly changing social force that we cannot reasonably dismiss or wisely ignore

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813526201
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

SUSAN J. PALMER is an adjunct professor at Dawson College. She has authored numerous books about new religious movements.

CHARLOTTE E. HARDMAN is a lecturer of religion at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Table of Contents

Introduction: alternative childhoods / Susan J. Palmer and Charlotte E. Hardman
Witches: the next generation / Helen A. Berger
Education and collective identity: public schooling of Hare Krishna youths / E. Burke Rochford Jr
In whose interest? separating children from mothers in the Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community / Amy Siskind
God's children: physical and spiritual growth among Evangelical Christians / Simon Coleman
Osho Ko Hsuan school: educating the "new child" / Elizabeth Puttick
Growing up as Mother's Children: socializing a second generation in Sahaja Yoga / Judith Coney
The children of ISOT / Gretchen Siegler
Children of the Underground Temple: growing up in Damanhur / Massimo Introvigne
Frontiers and families: the children of Island Pond / Susan J. Palmer
Social control of new religions: from "brainwashing" claims to child sex abuse accusations / James T. Richardson
The precarious balance between freedom of religion and the best interests of the child / Michael W. Homer
Children of a Newer God: the English courts, custody disputes, and NRMs / Anthony Bradney
The ethics of children in three new religions / Charlotte E. Hardman

What People are Saying About This

Eileen Barker

What happens to a new religious movement of 'born again converts' when it has to cope with its 'born into' children? What happens to the kids as they grow up? This important book provides a unique and long-awaited opportunity to learn about the second-generation membership of a wide range of alternative religions.
— FBA, professor of sociology, London School of Economics.

Timothy Miller

As new and alternative religions become standard fixtures in society, understanding their children becomes an important key to understanding their future. This wonderfully rich, panoramic book provides that key.
— Professor of religious studies, University of Kansas.

Editorial Reviews

This is a timely and important book focusing on the second generation of members in new religious movements (NRMs) born largely in the 1960s or 1970s. The book is important for two reasons. First, NRMs provide a unique social laboratory to observe and test ideas and theories about social movements. . . . Second, as many social scientists have observed, children have a significant impact on religious movements. . . . This is an invaluable contribution to the literature on new religions and social movements. The cross-cultural scope is especially significant.

Contemporary Sociology

Palmer and Hardman . . . make an important point when they note that the "study of children in new religious movements (NRMs) is a largely uncharted terrain" (p. 1). Their book opens up this field of research through thirteen interesting studies by authors from Europe, Canada, and the United States. For main issues are considered: the impact of children on NRMs; the socialization of children within NRMs; issues of religious freedoms surrounding children in NRMs; and how children in NRMs construct meaning.

Sociology

Palmer and Hardman collect much new material about an understudied dimension of new religious movements.

Novo Religio

What happens to a new religious movement of "born again" converts when it has to cope with its "born into" children? What happens to the kids as they grow up? This important book provides a unique and long-awaited opportunity to learn about the second-generation membership of a wide range of alternative religions.

FBA, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics - Eileen Barker

As new and alternative religions become standard fixtures in society, understanding their children becomes an important key to understanding their future. This wonderfully rich, panoramic book provides that key.

Professor of Religious Studies, University of Kansas - Timothy Miller

Palmer and Hardman are acknowledged experts in the study of religions, especially "new" ones. Until now, very little has been written about children in new religions except, of course, for accusations about abuse. . . . There is something remarkably refreshing, then, to read a series of discussions by authors who know that there are other matters of interest and more to be said. . . . Its ethnographies complement more detailed interaction and presentation of the groups at issue. While the book continues in the tradition on which the Sociology of Religion predominates as the methodology of choice in approaching new religions, and while concerns about power, sex and gender predominate among issue that excite interest, it does so in new directions. Seeing children, let alone hearing them, enables some quite different thoughts about new religions.

Reviews in Religion and Theology