Conclusion
The evaporation of the counter-culture has meant that the recruitment base for the world-rejecting new religions has largely disappeared, and in consequence many of them have declined, while others have had to change their style, accommodating more to the wider society to secure new bases of support.
The Unification Church has begun a parochial mission; ISKCON has begun to locate a new source of support among East Indians living in the West who wish to avail themselves of the devotional facilities of the movement, without becoming themselves totally committed to it.A deepening of the religious life, a magical recipe for securing more of what this world has to offer, or a millenarian programme for the transformation of a world conceived to be altogether unsatisfactory, these are three responses to life’s vicissitudes which recur constantly, in many societies and historical epochs. The new religions which emerged or flourished in America in the post-Second World War era reiterated these recurrent themes, but they did so in ways which sharply reflected and refracted the particular circumstances of the world in which they appeared or flourished.
Bibliography
Wallis, Roy The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984)
----- and Bruce, Steve Sociological Theory, Religion and Collective Action (The Queen’s University, Belfast, 1985)
Wilson, Bryan Religious Sects (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970)