Joseph P. Laycock’s New Religious Movements: The Basics is a brief, but effective introduction to theory and method in the academic study of new religious movements. While covering much of the same ground as previous textbooks—such as Lorne Dawson’s Comprehending Cults (2006) and Douglas E. Cowan and David G. Bromley’s Cults and New Religions (2008)—Laycock’s presentation is concise, reader friendly, and up to date. QAnon and NXIVM, for example, are prominently featured. The first chapter gives a capsule history of the academic study of new religions in order to contextualize the eventual adoption of neutral terminology and to interrogate the social utility of such study. This leads to a chapter on research methods, which includes a discussion of research ethics and the limits of objectivity, along with helpful tips on how to pursue archival and ethnographic projects. The remaining chapters cover the suite of sociological issues typically associated with the...
University of California Press