{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03933364183248496, 'fraction_numerical': 0.016196205460434984, 'mean_word_length': 4.93956043956044, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History . By Philip Jenkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. vii + 294 pp. $27.50 cloth.

The arguments in this book will be familiar to any specialist in new religious movements (NRMs, a.k.a. cults and sects). Jenkins, like Robert Ellwood, Gordon Melton, and Catherine Albanese, argues that NRMs are continuous in U.S. culture (and therefore not really "new") and that they are significant gauges of religious imagination and the borders of tolerance. What makes Jenkins' interpretation distinctive is his tracking of NRM popularity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and his analysis of anti-cult movements rising in response. His assertion that, like cults, anti-cult movements are not new but rely on stereotypes and rhetorical strategies to differentiate between "us" and "them" is the most compelling aspect of the book. While Mystics and Messiahs is organized chronologically, it is not a history of cults and sects. Rather, it is a history of new religious movements as a cultural phenomenon with periods of emergence and upsurge followed by suppression and quiescence. Jenkins first acknowledges the complexities of the terms "cult," "sect," and "church," and the role of media in fostering negative and positive connotations. He then surveys the largest groups accused of being cults, including Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, and many of the smaller ones, like Psychiana, Silver Shirts, and I AM. Subsequent chapters detail the "First New Age," the refraction of Hinduism and Buddhism through Theosophy, New Thought, and other esoteric groups at the turn of the twentieth century, and predominantly African American groups such as Father Divine, Nation of Islam, and voodoo. Jenkins argues that African American and Anglo movements emerged from the same cultural milieu and had many features in common, a comparison rarely made by NRM scholars. Later chapters trace the anti-cult movement from 1920 to 1950, the NRM boom during the 1960s and 1970s, and anti-cult responses of 1970-2000, in the wake of Jonestown, Waco, and Heaven's Gate.