Reconsidering Theoretical Approaches to New Religious Movements and their Surrounding Phenomena
February 27, 2025 Márk Nemes
A dissertation revises Ninian Smart's 1996 seven-dimensional model of religion to account for contemporary emergent, new, alternative, quasi-, and para-religious phenomena, collectively termed "new religiosity." Starting from Western social processes of the 1960s and analyzing them from philosophical, historical, social-psychological, and phenomenological perspectives, the author identifies factors that may have fundamentally transformed postmodern religiosity. The argument draws on theories such as the secularization paradigm, the religious market model, pluralism, the culture of individualism opposed to collectivism, and the meaning and identity crisis of spiritual homelessness.