France, with its approach to managing religion known as laïcité, has been almost unique among Western nations in religious freedom for minority groups and movements. In recent decades it passed widely criticized laws efforts implement a program of social control over such groups, including both new movements (NRMs) well older that have functioned France many decades. Examining why how this happ...

In sociology of religion, there are few works on the quantitative analysis reactions main social institutions to phenomenon religiosity. Social representations and illusions about non-traditional religiosity formed within boundaries many unrelated uncoordinated representatives each institution. The logic choosing object among existing religious organizations reflects both specifics institution ...

This paper examines the Pakistani state’s shift from the accommodation to exclusion of the heterodox Ahmadiyya community, a self-defined minority sect of Islam. In 1953, the Pakistani state rejected demands by a religious movement that Ahmadis be legally declared non-Muslim. In 1974 however, the same demand was accepted. This paper argues that this shift in the state’s policy toward Ahmadis was...

Previous literature on religion and sexual behavior has focused on narrow definitions of religiosity, including religious affiliation, religious participation, or forms of religiousness (e.g., intrinsic religiosity). Trends toward more permissive premarital sexual activity in the North American Christian-Judeo religion support the secularization hypothesis of religion, which posits an increasin...

The jurisprudential path which led to the legal qualification of Scientology as a religion, according to Italian law was very interesting. The problem concerned the lack of definition of religion and the fact that recognition as a confession gives a religious denomination several benefits such as political taxation. Furthermore, the absence of recognition had led to the possibility of consideri...

 New research on networks has put individual well connected agents at the centre of the spread of many social phenomena, including religious ideas.  England in the 1550s provides a model of how a society can be radicalized through heavy‐handed public persecution.  Much can be learnt from the spread of the medieval Cathar heresy by relatively few individuals, the ‘perfecti’. The inquisitors s...