New Religious and Spiritual Movements

This book offers a major rethinking of secularisation and a defining sociological account of religion in the digital age. Based on the author’s ESRC-funded PhD and developed over two decades of research and theoretical refinement, the book argues that modernity does not eliminate religion but reorganises it. Rather than treating spirituality as a residue of tradition or a symptom of fragmentation, it demonstrates how religious meaning is reflexively reconstructed under conditions of globalisation, market rationality, institutional uncertainty, and digital mediation. Advancing a new framework of reflexive realism , the book provides a flagship theoretical intervention in the sociology of religion. It introduces an original “origins–orientations” typology for analysing the diversity of New Religious and Spiritual Movements and integrates classical theory with contemporary social analysis. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography conducted across Britain, the United States, and online communities, it offers a sustained empirical foundation for its theoretical claims. Through detailed case studies of ISKCON, Falun Gong, Scientology, UFO religions, therapeutic spiritualities, and platform-native digital movements, the book addresses key themes including digital religion, algorithmic authority, commodified spirituality, post-secular mythologies, and AI-mediated faith. It shows how platforms, metrics, and data infrastructures are reshaping charisma, authority, and spiritual experience, positioning NRSMs as reflexive mediators through which individuals reconstruct meaning, embodiment, and transcendence in late modern society. By reinterpreting secularisation as transformation rather than decline, this book provides a comprehensive and conceptually ambitious account of religious change in the twenty-first century. It will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students in sociology of religion, religious studies, cultural sociology, anthropology, and media and communication studies.