One of the most important features of Jesus' ministry, as described in the New Testament, appears to have been the creation of new social structures for his followers. He openly described those following him as his family, deliberately rejecting his biological family. Curiously, this is one of the features of so-called 'cults' which causes the most complaints.

In New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader, Dereck Daschke and W. Michael Ashcraft explain some of the characteristics of new religious movements:

New Family: As NRMs that constitute themselves as “new families” for their members, New Family groups may reproduce the nuclear family structure and will sometimes use the language and rhetoric that define traditional families to make explicit the relationships among members of the group. Leaders are to be seen as adults — parents, “mothers” and “fathers” — while others are “children” who seek the guidance and protection of their wise and powerful “elders.”

To a large degree, it is the New Family groups that inspire the ire and fear of parents, religious leaders, and politicians. Seeing the ways in which these NRMs construct alternative families may help us make sense of the long-standing public battles involving certain NRMs. For someone to join a new family, in these cases, is to reject the old one, to claim that those who have raised this person have failed to prepare him or her for the world.

This rejection applies to society’s surrogate families, religion and the state, where leaders are often more or less explicitly regarded as parental figures. Hence, when individuals pursue an alternative spiritual path that reinforces their individuality... the communal structures — especially the looser ones in America — are not as openly threatened. Yet when a group seeks to replace those same structures at their very core by redefining the family, those who represent or support the maintenance of social norms feel threatened.

Perhaps if we think of religions as families, it will help us better understand just how important they can be for a person. If your family does something wrong or is criticized, it would be very difficult for you to accept. On the other hand, religions obviously aren’t just families — it would be appropriate to insist that religions aren’t families, even though that’s the sort of emotional attachment which people have to their religion. Negative emotional reactions to criticism or wrongdoing are made understandable through this analogy, but it doesn’t justify or excuse them.

It’s also interesting how this idea of a religious group being a type of family helps emphasize the fact that the distinction between mainstream religion and “cults’ isn’t as great as most probably imagine. It’s clear, I think, that early Christianity matched this criterion of “new religious movement” quite well — and why not? It was a new religious movement at the time. Just because it’s not new anymore doesn’t mean that members are justified in attacking newer religious groups for doing things which Christianity once engaged in.

 

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