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New Religious Movements have arisen not only in the present but have also developed in the past. While they differ in ideology and practice, they generally seem to live in high tension with mainstream society, especially when it comes to child-rearing. This Element examines several aspects of children growing up in new religions. It relies upon literature from different groups concerning child upbringing, the function of children in the groups considering the religious ideologies, and parental perspectives and parental styles. It also utilizes accounts from young adults growing up in these groups, both those who chose to stay and who chose to leave their groups as adults. A range of topics, such as socialization, education, health care, and relations to surrounding society are explored. In addition, this Element considers issues of physical and emotional abuse, state interventions, and the impact of second- and third generations of children in new religions.

This book tells the story of the children and youth of the charismatic new religious commune Knutby Filadelfia in Sweden. It recounts the history of the congregation, which started out as a part of the Swedish Pentecostalmovement in 1921. In the 1990s, it developed into a new religion, when the congregations female pastor embraced the role of the Bride of Christ. The congregation became widely known in 2004 when one of its members was murdered by another member, the latter claiming to have been acting on orders from God. In 2018, the congregation dissolved after a few years of internal crisis. Sanja Nilsson provides rich empirical analysis of archival material and interviews with the congregations children and youth. The young informants personal perspectives on their own childhoods encompass narratives from their time inside the congregation, when they identified as members of a stigmatizedminority religion, aswell as from the time after the dissolution of the group, when they identified asdefectors from what they came to view as a sectarian milieu. This work offers a comprehensive insight into the Knutby Filadelfia congregation, a group, that although notoriously charted by the media, has been hitherto unexplored by academics. It adds to the growing field of studies concerned with childhoods within new religions and expounds the dynamics of the defection process from the rarely applied perspective of children and youth themselves.

The authors have published another article, based on the same empirical material (Frisk and Nilsson 2018). This article will give an in-depth “thick description” of child rearing and schooling in the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church in Sweden. The first part of the article is based on interviews with children and young people in the group conducted in 2014 and 2015, and focuses on Brethren identity and socialization. The second part of the article discusses the Labora School, a non- confessional free school which was established by a group of Brethren parents and business owners in 2007. This part of the article also reflects the public debate about confessional and non-confessional free schools in Sweden. The Labora school has been criticized by both the Swedish Schools Inspectorate and the media. This section of the article is based mainly on official school inspection documents and media material. Since writing this article, the Labora School changed its name in 2019, to One School Global Nyby Campus, and is affiliated to One School Global, the Brethren schools worldwide (One School Global 2020). The third part of the article deals with parents’ and children’s experiences of the school, again using interview material.

A broad definition of what constitutes a sectarian group is social and theological deviance and/or innovation, often paired with some level of critique of and isolation or withdrawal from society. It is impossible to say how many children (under the age of 18) worldwide grow up in so-called sectarian groups. There are primarily three reasons why such an estimation is problematic: the definitions of the terms new religions, cults, and sectarian groups vary according to time and location; the nature of sectarian groups tends to encompass withdrawal from society, which means that the beliefs of a group may not be known to wider society; and the groups are often wary about stating or have no knowledge of their own membership figures, sometimes due to unclear definitions of membership. This entry examines various impacts of the ways in which sectarian groups interact with socialization, education, health, and abuse, and the possible consequences for children reared in such groups.

The Knutby Filadelfia Congregation, founded in 1921, started out as a Pentecostal congregation. It has, however, been considered a deviant and semi-isolated new religious movement ever since it became known to the public after a murder took place within its community in 2004. The massive media attention it received revealed the presence of a charismatic leader within the group, and the development of a new theology in which the charismatic leader was considered to be the Bride of Christ. After 2004, the congregation reinforced its boundaries with society, and then suddenly began to dissolve in 2016. This study discusses the development of totalistic features within the congregation from the perspective of sociologist Erving Goffman; it highlights the simultaneous presence of in-group as well as out-group social stigma; and it explores the conflicting presentations of childhood in the congregation in performances from before and after the dissolution of the congregation.

The results are based on empirical material from 25 semi-structured interviews with children and youth aged 7–25, 2 focus group interviews with youths, and 24 days of participant observations. Goffman’s theoretical framework, including the key concepts total institutions, stigma, and presentations, is used together with an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach in order to explore the experiences of childhoods as presented by children and youth within the congregation.

The findings suggest that their individual understandings of and responses to the presence of a charismatic authority, as well as the consequences of such authorities on parent–child relations, are individual. The Pre-Narratives focus on stigmatisation from society, while the Post-Narratives include stigma within the congregation in the form of social exclusion. The study further indicates that the presentations of childhoods given prior to and after the dissolution of the congregation, the so-called Pre- and Post-Narratives, differ due to changing dramaturgical loyalties, although they should both be considered front-stage activity in Goffman’s terms.