Scholars adopted the term new religious movements (NRMs) in order to avoid the pejorative connotations of the popularly used term cult. Although the word cult originally referred to an organized system of worship (and is still used in that sense by scholars in several disciplines), cult began to take on negative connotations in popular discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, when a variety of unconventional religions appeared in North America. The word conveyed a stereotype that prevented objective research into these religions; moreover, NRMs were so different from one another that it was impossible to generalize about them. Instead, NRM scholars preferred to investigate each new religion separately without imposing the filter of a stereotype. Beginning in the 1970s, people called "deprogrammers" began illegally kidnapping NRM members and attempting to undo their alleged "brainwashing," curtailing their civil liberties in the process. As a result, many NRM...