Assessment of the View that Deprivation is the Main Reason for the Growth of NRM's

Assessment of the View that Deprivation is the Main Reason for the Growth of NRM's

Deprivation is distinguishable into relative and absolute deprivation.

Physical abuse, starvation, and poverty are seen as forms of absolute

deprivation, whereas relative deprivation can be defined as the

discrepancy between what one expects in life and what one gets.

In the 1950s and 1960s, much theorizing centred on the construction of

typologies. This was also the case in deprivation theory. For example,

Charles Glock distinguished five types of deprivation, depending on

the kinds of strain felt: economic, social, organismic, ethical, and

psychic deprivation. Every type gave rise to a particular type of

religious group, respectively: sect, church, healing movement, reform

movement, or cult. According to the class into which it fell, Glock

could predict the "career" of the particular religious group.

According to Bryan Wilson (1973), most new religious movements in the

Third World were either thaumaturgic so they responded to very

specific and acute forms of deprivation or revolutionist so they

responded to the strain felt by the putative imminent destruction of

the world.

The growth of sects can be explained by terms of why people join them,

or the wider social changes. These reasons are closely linked, since

social changes affect the number of people available as potential

followers. Weber provided one of the earliest explanations for the

growth of the sects, called the ‘theodicy of disprivilege’ arguing

that they were likely to arise within groups that were marginal in

society; outside of the mainstream of social life and feeling that

they are ...

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... change,

people may join sects, but the theories cannot be applied to every

context, as for example in fundamentalist Islam where sects such as

the Shi’ites and the Sunnis have been established for generations, and

there is little or no undermining of the traditional.

In light of the above evidence I am able to conclude that there are

many reasons for the growth in New Religious Movements and each

individual has a different motivation for joining such movements.

However, it seems that deprivation is quite a dominating reason as an

explanation to the growth of these movements and it could be argued as

a main reason. However it must be taken into account that everyone has

personal motivations for their membership in NRM's and therefore we

must not rely too much upon deprivation being the best answer to this

question.