Cox, Harvey. Turning East: The Promise and the Peril of the New Orientalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.

Cox analyzes the new wave of Asian spirituality based on participant observation. He gives special attention to the significance of new religious movements for American society in general and for established religion in particular.

Ellwood, Robert S. Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

A historical study of religious life in the United States other than mainstream biblical religion through case studies of Spiritualism, Theosophy and American Zen. Provides theoretical interpretation.

Smart, Ninian. "Asian Culture and the Impact of the West." Eileen Barker, ed., New Religious Movements: A Perspective for Understanding Society. New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1982.

Smart stresses the importance of seeing the new religions in an intercultural context and as responses to "challenges to cultural identity." He examines, for example, the impact of the British on Indian self-consciousness and compares the to the effect of Western imperialism on Chinese society. Smart argues that Maoism and Hinduism are new religions developed in response to the cultural imperialism of the modern West. Science and technology may threaten traditional symbolic values. It is this challenge that evokes the new religions of the West as well.

Stark, John Franklin. Alan Watts: A Case Study in the Appropriation of Asian Religious Thought in Post-World War II America. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1983.

Franklin views Watts as filling a vacuum of religious meaning in a time when conventional religions were beginning to lack meaning for a significant number of people. Watts was not so much concerned with cultivating peak experiences, he argues, as with offering an alternative way of life.

Ellwood, Robert S. One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

From the perspective of the history of religions, Ellwood compares the Jesus movement with frontier revivalism and Tibetan religion and sheds light on the nature of American evangelicalism, pop culture and the religious dimension of American life in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Smith, Christian. "Explaining Religious Vitality in America." American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians To the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Albanese, Catherine L. "East is West: Eastern Peoples and Eastern Religions" and "Cultural Religions: Explorations in Millennial Dominance or Innocence" in America: Religions and Religion, 3rd Ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1999 [1981].

Gottlieb, Roger S., ed., This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Rockefeller, Steven C. and John C. Elder, eds., Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Taylor, Bron. "Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island." David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Nation, Mohawk. Akwesasne Notes, 1968-1976. Documents a period of resilience in American Indian culture. For the cultural and religious reasons for the recovery of Alcatraz island, see interview with American Indian leader Richard Oakes, vol. 2, no. 1, April 1970, p. 7.

Carpenter, Dennis D. "Practitioners of Paganism and Wiccan Spirituality in Contemporary Society: A Review of the Literature." James R. Lewis, ed., Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Greil, Arthur L. "Explorations Along the Sacred Frontier: Notes on Para-Religions, Quasi-Religions, and Other Boundary Phenomena." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 153-172.

Leonard, George. "Encounters at the Mind’s Edge." Esquire. June 1985, pp. 306-308, 310, 312, 314-316.

An historical account of the Esalen Institute based on participant-observation. Leonard argues that the frontier experience makes Americans different from their European ancestors. For some, this experience ended in California. For others pioneering stopped only in the physical, geographic sense. Others carry on pioneering " … to the frontiers of social and commercial innovation, of thought, and of the spirit." Leonard portrays the Esalen Institute as a thriving experiment, " … both a place and a vision." What goes on there is not only an education of the body, senses, emotions and perceptions but also "theoretical discussions among scholars and scientists." Although the former is more visible, the latter is more in line, according to Leonard, with what the founders intended.

McGuire, Meredith B. "Health and Healing in New Religious Movements." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part B). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 139-155.

Stone, Donald. "The Human Potential Movement." Glock, Charles Y. and Robert N. Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Stone describes a variety of therapeutic movements and how the compare and contrast with traditional religion. For Stone, the human potential movement reflects a search for a way out of Max Weber’s "iron cage" or Rozak’s "technocratic totalitarianism."

Machalek, Richard and David P. Snow, "Conversion to New Religious Movements." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part B). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 53-74.

Richardson, James T. "A Social Psychological Critique of ‘Brainwashing’ Claims About Recruitment to New Religions." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part B). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 75-97.

Richardson, James T. "Studies of Conversion: Secularization or Re-enchantment?" Phillip E. Hammond, ed., The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Smith, Archie, Jr. "Black Reflections on Study of New Religious Consciousness." Jacob Needleman and George Baker, eds., Understanding New Religions. New York: The Seabury Press, 1978.

Bednarowski, Mary Farrell. "Women in Occult America." in Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, eds., Religion in American History: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Davidman, Lynn and Janet Jacobs. "Feminists Perspectives on New Religious Movements." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part B). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 173-190.

Goldman, Marion S. "From Promiscuity to Celibacy: Women and Sexual Regulation at Rajneeshpuram," in David G. Bromley, Mary Jo Nietz and Marion S. Goldman, eds., Religion and the Social Order: Sex, Lies, and Sanctity: Religion and Deviance in Contemporary North America, Volume 5. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 203-219.

Jacobs, Janet L. "The Violated Self and the Search for Religious Meaning." David G. Bromley, Mary Jo Nietz and Marion S. Goldman, eds., Religion and the Social Order: Sex, Lies, and Sanctity: Religion and Deviance in Contemporary North America, Volume 5. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 237-250.

Ammerman, Nancy T. "Waco, Federal Law Enforcement, and Scholars of Religion" in Stuart A. Wright, ed., Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Barker, Eileen. The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Barker’s major concern is to make a clear answer to the question of "Why shouldhow couldanyone become a Moonie?" She attacks the assumption that because a religious movement is "bad" membership is gathered only through "mind-control or deception." Without ignoring those techniques responsibility for the conversion is considered with respect to the individual and society. Barker examines members on their own terms, describes what "the Unification Church offers to the potential recruit" and provides a theoretical argument based on empirical data.

Bromley, David G. and Thomas Robbins, "The Role of Government in Regulating New and Nonconventional Religions," in Wood, James E., Jr. and Derek Davis, eds., The Role of Government in Monitoring and Regulating Religion in Public Life. Waco, Texas: Baylor University, 1993.

Bromley, David G. and Anson Shupe, "Organized Opposition to New Religious Movements," in David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 177-198.

Foster, Lawrence. "Cults in Conflict: New Religious Movements and the Mainstream Religious Tradition in America." Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn eds., Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility. New York: Crossroad, 1987.

Long, Theodore E. "New Religions and the Political Order," in David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 263-276.

Robbins, Thomas and James A. Beckford. "Religious Movements and Church-State Issues," in David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 199-218.

Roth, Gunther and Wolfgang Schluchter. "Charisma and the Counterculture" and "Religion and Revolutionary Beliefs." Max Weber’s Vision in History: Ethics and Methods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Roth and Schluchter view the social changes of the 1960s as breaking through the old moral paradigm by means of a charismatic new one. They also examine the adequacy of Weber’s theories of religion and contemporary understandings of secularization in light of "the rise of quasi religious political movements and ideologies.

Rozak, Theodore. The Making of the Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969.

Rozak views the counterculture sympathetically arguing that it points the way to a way of life that will, or should, provide an alternative to the present technocratic society. It is from this movement that our still extremely fragile future will emerge. The counterculture provides a check against " … the final consolidation of technocratic totalitarianism."

Shupe, Anson. "The Accommodation and Deradicalization of Innovative Religious Movements." Bronislaw Misztal and Anson Shupe, eds., Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: Revival and Religious Fundamentalism in East and West. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1992.

Shupe, Anson. "Constructing Evil as a Social Process: The Unification Church and the Media." Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn, eds., Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility. New York: Crossroad, 1987.

Shupe, Anson and David G. Bromley, "Social Responses to Cults." Phillip E. Hammond, ed., The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Spickard, James V. "When None Dare Call It Evil: A Sociological Framework for Evaluating Abuse in Religions," in David G. Bromley, Mary Jo Nietz and Marion S. Goldman, eds., Religion and the Social Order: Sex, Lies, and Sanctity: Religion and Deviance in Contemporary North America, Volume 5. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 251-268.

Tabor, James D. and Eugene V. Gallagher. Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Wright, Stuart A., ed., Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Wuthnow, Robert. "Religious Movements and Counter-Movements in North America" James A. Beckford, ed., Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1986.

Finke, Roger and Laurence Iannaccone. "Supply-Side Explanations for Religious Change." Wade Clark Roof, Special Editor, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 529, July 1993.

Stark and Iannaccone, "Rational Choice Propositions About Religious Movements." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 241-261.

Stark, Rodney. "How New Religious Movements Succeed: A Theoretical Model," in David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, eds., The Future of New Religious Movements. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987: 11-29.

Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke, "A Rational Approach to the History of American Cults and Sects." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 109-125.

Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Stark and Bainbridge employ an economic model of human behavior. Human beings seek rewards and avoid costs; they create and exchange compensators. And religious movements offer compensators. A "compensator," a key term, is "the belief that a reward will be obtained in the distant future or in some other context which cannot be immediately verified." Stark and Bainbridge argue against the assumption of a religionless future. They assert that while secularization may increase in some parts of society, counter trends of religious resurgence develop in other sectors of society. It is myopic to assume that the decline of liberal Protestantism, for example, means the end of religion. Relying on U.S. Bureau of Census data, among other sources, one of Stark and Bainbridge’s major arguments is that where conventional religions are weak, for example, the Pacific region of the United States, new religious movements thrive. They bring together an immense amount of statistical data and deduce that "secularization, revival, and cult formation are the future of religion."

Eliade, Mircea, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Melton, J. Gordon, ed. Encyclopedia of American Religions. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996, 5th Ed.

Miller, Timothy, ed., America's Alternative Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Smith, Jonathan Z. ed., The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.

Swatos, William H., Jr. Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Walnut Creek, California: Alta Mira Press, 1998.

Wuthnow, Robert, ed., The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, Two Volumes. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1998.

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. "Piety for the Age of Acquarius: Theosophy, Occultism, and Non-Western Religion" and "The Turbulent Sixties." A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972.

Although pluralism is a major theme in Ahlstrom’s history of religion in the United States, he also stresses the hegemony of the Puritan traditionuntilthe 1960s.

Barker, Eileen. "New Religious Movements: Yet Another Great Awakening?" In Phillip E. Hammond, ed., The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Barker emphasizes the diversity of new religious movements as well as the Beliefs and practices. She also stresses the relatively small numbers of people in a large number of new religious movements. Barker argues that new religious movements simply represent a highly visible group of alternatives chosen from a great variety of social movements in the modern world. She addresses the question of what new religious movements tell us about secularization and provides a useful summary of various explanations of new religious movements.

Barker, Eileen, ed., New Religious Movements: A Perspective for Understanding Society. New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1982.

What does the study of new religions tell us about society and societal change? That is the common theme of the collection of papers representing a wide variety of approaches and concerns.

Bell, Daniel. "The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion", in The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960-1980. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Qualified rebuttal of the secularization thesis.

Bellah, Robert N. and Phillip E. Hammond. The Varieties of Civil Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980. Part IV, "Civil Religion and New Religious Movements."

Bellah argues that the cultural changes of the 1960s reflects the departure of American society from the tradition of "American civil religion." Hammond argues that the belittling and degradation of "American civil religion" was a major contributing factor in the rise of the new religious movements of the 1960s.

Bellah, "Religious Studies as ‘New Religion.’" Jacob Needleman and George Baker, eds., Understanding New Religions. New York: The Seabury Press, 1978.

Bellah, Robert N. "New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity," and "The New Consciousness and the Berkeley New Left." Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976

Bromley, David G. and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., "Exploring the Significance of Cults and Sects in America: Perspectives, Issues, and Agendas," in David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part B). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 1-48.

Ellwood, Robert S. Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Focused on southern California, Ellwood brings a history of religions and phenomenological perspective to bear on the practices and beliefs of neo-pagan, theosophical, neo-Asian and other religious and spiritual groups. He argues that new religions represent a major type of American religion: faith grounded directly in mystical or shamanistic experience and a world view stemming from that basis.

Glock, Charles Y. and Robert N. Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Based on the conviction that religious consciousness, broadly understood, is significant in forming the content and quality of social life, this book is an effort to determine if a major cultural transformation took place in the late1960s and early 1970s. Ethnographic studies of nine groups or movements providing alternatives to conventional forms of religious and secular consciousness in the San Francisco Bay Area are employed.

Hammond, Phillip E. and David W. Machacek, "Cults and Sects in America: Organizational Development." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 93-105.

Johnson, Benton. "A Sociological Perspective on the New Religions." Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, eds., In Gods We Trust: New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction 1981.

Kosmin, Barry A. and Seymour P. Lachman. "Introduction" and "Religion in American Culture: A Historical Overview." One Nation Under God: Religion In Contemporary American Society. New York: Crown, 1993.

Marty, Martin E. "Revising the Map of American Religion." Wade Clark Roof, Special Editor, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 558, July 1998.

Marty, Martin E. "Always A Horizon." Pilgrims in their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America. Boston: Little Brown, 1984.

Marty views the emergence of new religious movements during the 1960s in a historical and political context. He stresses the religious impulse at the heart of the civil rights and American Indian movements and the Chicano struggle for identity. Marty sees Trappist Monk Thomas Merton as a precursor of the sixties new religious movements.

Marty, Martin E. "The New Religions." A Nation of Behavers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Marty argues that new religious movements function as alternatives to, and a judgment upon, mainstream religions. They suffuse and subtly alter Christian, Jewish and secular faiths. He places new religions alongside "Mainline," "Evangelical-Fundamentalists," Pentecostal-Charismatic," "Ethnic," and "Civil" religions. New religions have significantly altered the religious landscape of the United States in providing new options for new generations.

Melton, J. Gordon. "Another Look at New Religions." Wade Clark Roof, Special Editor, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 529, July 1993.

Melton, J. Gordon. "How New is New? The Flowering of the ‘New’ Religious Consciousness since 1965." David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, eds., The Future of New Religious Movements. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987.

Needleman, Jacob. The New Religions. New York: Crossroad, 1984 [1970].

Needleman links the phenomenon of new religions to the American passion for nnovation. He understands new religions as efforts to create alternative communities as metaphysically separate from the larger culture. Needleman remains skeptical as to whether new religions speak to the human condition in the modern West. He provides good insights into the nature of the relationship of new religious movements and California. Californians are not escaping reality, according to Needleman, they are leaving Europe.

Needleman, Jacob and George Baker, eds., Understanding New Religions. New York: Seabury Press, 1978.

The product of a national conference of distinguished scholars and writers, this book examines new religions in the United States in historical context and addresses the following questions: How is American pluralism to be explained? How does the academic study of religion contribute to the development of new religions? Is religious studies a new religion? What are the problems in understanding new religions? Why are most of the adherent and observers White? Are new religions really "new"?

Robbins, Thomas. Cults, Converts and Charisma: The Sociology of New Religious Movements. Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1988.

Roof, Wade Clark. "Modernity, the Religious, and the Spiritual." Wade Clark Roof, Special Editor, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 558, July 1998.

Roof, Wade Clark and Karen Walsh. "Life Cycle, Generation, and Participation in Religious Groups," in David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part B). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 157-171.

Tipton, Steven M. Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change. Berkeley: University of California, 1982.

Employing interpretive sociology and descriptive ethics, Tipton does three ethnographic studies of San Francisco Bay Area new religious movements: a Pentecostal Christian community, Erhard Training Seminars (est) and a group of American Zen Buddhists. He argues that sixties youth joined such groups "to make moral sense of their lives." Alternative religious movements have not replaced traditional religions. Rather, they have selectively appropriated moral threads from older traditionseast as well as westand sowed them into a new pattern. The title probably should be Getting Saved from Utilitarian Individualism: the Moral Transformation of American Culture.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. "Revitalization Movements," American Anthropology 58 (1956): 264-81.

A classic.

Wilson, Bryan. "Historical Lessons in the Study of Sects and Cults." David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., Religion and the Social Order: The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Volume 3 (Part A). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1993: 53-73.

Wilson, Bryan. The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements in Contemporary Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Wilson, Bryan. "Factors in the Failure of New Religious Movements." David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, eds., The Future of New Religious Movements. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987.

Wilson, Bryan. "Secularization: The Inherited Model." Phillip E. Hammond, ed., The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Perhaps the clearest, most recent statement of the secularization thesis by the thesis’ foremost proponent.

Wilson, Bryan. "New Religious Movements: Convergences and Contrasts." Religion in Sociological Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

New religious movements in the West are, Wilson argues, reflections of increasing pluralism, which enhances a sense of cultural diversity. Such developments contribute to a sense of maximum choice but simultaneously undermine social cohesion. The social fact of choice illustrates modern society’s indifference toward religious or spiritual values. New religious movements will function differently for different societies, he adds, because although they may share some common features they also differ significantly. Wilson is the foremost proponent of the secularization thesis.

Wuthnow, Robert. "The Great Divide: Toward Religious Realignment." The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988.

After the mass suicide of more than 900 members of the new religious movement led by Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, many new religious movements tended to adopt a lower profile, Wuthnow observes. Yet, available evidence suggests that experimentation with new religious movements has by no means died out. It just has not grown much since the early 1970s. Many of the democratic movements have done better but the more idealistic of these movements have found it difficult to sustain sufficient levels of commitment over time. The most viable movements have been ones that offer therapy, meditation techniques and short-term courses that don’t intense levels of commitment and changes in life styles, for example, TM,yoga, est and a range of self-help groups. Arguing that there is a liberal-conservative split across all U.S. religions, Wuthnow argues that that division is evident in the publicized reactions to new religious movements. Generally, however, new religious movement played a much less prominent role in the cultural tensions of the 1980s than they did in the early 1970s.

Wuthnow, Robert. Experiment in American Religion: The New Mysticisms and their Implications for the Churches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Wuthnow focuses on the larger social context of new religious movements. Employing an empirical data base (random sample survey), he addresses the following questions, among others: why are some peopleattracted to new religious movements and others not? And why do those who leave conventional religions remain unaffiliated?

Wuthnow, Robert. The Consciousness Reformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Wuthnow investigates the effect of the "current cultural shift" on public and private life. This shift, he says, involves the rise of scientific and mystical world views and the decline of "theism and individualism." With attention to contemporary cultural developments, Wuthnow provides theoretical understanding of the nature of cultural meaning systems.

 

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