Wuhan Journal of Cultic Studies
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Volume 3: Issue 1, 2026
Pedagogical Reflection: Teaching New Religious Movements Hugh B. Urban Ohio State University I first began teaching courses on new religious movements in 1999, shortly after the collective suicides undertaken by thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate movement in March 1997. While my graduate training was primarily in South Asian religions, I have always had a strong secondary interest in new religions; and the enigmatic deaths and complex beliefs of Heaven’s Gate led me (and many others) to want to understand these groups and their role in contemporary society (Urban 2000; Zeller 2014; Chryssides 2016). Like the mass murder-suicides of the Peoples Temple community in 1978, Heaven’s Gate represented something so tragic and confounding that it was really a kind of challenge to scholars of religion to try to make sense of such phenomena. As Jonathan Z Smith famously said of Peoples Temple, “as students of religion, we have become stubbornly committed to making the attempt (even if we fail) at achieving intelligibility” (1982, 104)... | ||