All the major traditions we are considering in this course took their characteristic form in a two-thousand year period, roughly from 1200 BCE to 800 CE.  We have also seen how they could be remade as reformers would appear who typically called for a return to what they thought of as some more fundamental pattern of belief and practice.  Any discussion of new movements today often involves reviewing relatively recent patterns that present themselves as the "true" way things were done in the past.  An example in Judaism would be the Chabad movement, while in Islam there is the Wahabi tradition of Saudi Arabia (also the basis for the Taliban in Afghanistan).

Sometimes there are movements which attempt to combine elements of distinct traditions, and here the best example are the Sikhs of India melding Hindu and Islamic ideals into something new.

Sometimes there are movements in which, as in the origins of Christianity itself, an individual is seen as a new prophet come to take an older tradition to a new level, and good examples are the Baha'i tradition that originated in Persia and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon (the "Moonies").  Still another, particularly significant for Americans, is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons, although recently that term is being downplayed in order to focus more strongly on the group as a Christian denomination), based in Salt Lake City in Utah but sending out missionaries worldwide.

Perhaps the most controversial of the new movements has been the Church of Scientology, which had its basis in a unique technique of therapy developed by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard.

Finally, there are Wicca and Santería, both of which link their followers with pre-Christian folk practices.

Possibly the best way to develop some feeling for all of these movements is to go through the links carefully, especially when the webpage is an authoritative statement from the tradition itself.

At the end of this course, as at the beginning, I want to stress the idea that there is no one set of characteristics that allows a single definition of what a religion is.  The Church of Scientology, for example, has virtually nothing in common with most of the traditions we have met, and even in just the Christian world the differences between the Latter-Day Saints and other Christian denominations are very striking.  There are, however, a number of themes that surround the appearance of distinct traditions.  Often enough, something that might be considered just a breakaway sect becomes sufficiently established for it to be a major denomination (arguably, this is the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism or between Judaism and Christianity).  Other times there is a charismatic leader who moves in a very new direction (as in Islam).

The question I would like you to ask is why a movement gains or loses followers.  Almost paradoxically, those that are most demanding (the Latter-Day Saints or the Jehovah's Witnesses) may often grow the fastest, and here the actual beliefs of the group may be less important than the sense of community or belonging encouraged within the group.  If the sense of community breaks down enough, the group may decline and even die out.

Finally, once again I come back to what I've called the Eusebius Principle: a believer may look at the history of these traditions and, like the old bishop, argue that their similarities are how God prepares the way for the believer's own truth, and a non-believer may look at the same evidence and insist that the variety of traditions itself shows that there could not be some unique truth.  Some of you are believers and others are not, but what you have learned does not have to threaten a belief nor does it prove that the non-believer was right all along.