Heaven's Gate: An Examination of Modern Religious Movements

Following a mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in Rancho Sante Fe, California, individuals were faced with the quandary of an additional unconventional religious group and cult arisen in the United States. Heaven’s Gate is recognized as a coeval cult originating in America with the religious goal of reaching the next level, ultimately achieving such through a mass suicide mission. The Heaven’s Gate Cult serves as a modern exemplar of a new religious movement, providing a belief system with a particularly intellectual focus on religious movements, leadership within cults, and suicide to reach certain holy levels of existence. Religious cults and their development in America has been an interesting topic in many sociological and religious studies. Since the begging of the 1800’s, certain religious cults and sects have been classified as new religious movements, specifically defined as “[Religious movements that] offer innovative religious responses to the conditions of the modern world,” according to Encyclopedia Brittanica (Rubinstein 2016). According to David Bromley’s book, Teaching New Religious Movements, “While the number of people involved in new religious movements (NRMs) is small, the attention they have received in the popular media and academic discourse suggest a greater significance. In the popular media, NRMs are most often seen as a social problem. In academic studies, they are more often associated with processes of social change and the critique of modernity” (Bromley 2007). UFO religions, defined as religious beliefs centrally

. . Quit using drugs; change your name; shave your beard; get rid of clothing and jewelry that symbolize your old self; rid of all past belongings; rid of money . . . no sex, no human-level friendships, no socializing on a human level” (Balch