Eileen Barker

Not all minority religions (MRs) in the statistical sense are minority religions in the social sense. In this paper, the term MR will refer to religious movements that are deemed in some way to be fundamentally different from ‘mainstream society’. This does not necessarily mean that they are fundamentalist in the original Protestant sense of sticking to certain fundamentals of the Bible, although some are. It means, rather, that there is considered to be sufficient differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’ for sections of society to feel something needs to be done about them, preferably by the state. The paper examines ways in which various states around the world ‘do something’, usually by using the law, either to protect such religions or to persecute them. Most of the examples will be taken from North America, Europe and the Far East over the past century, but other examples will be drawn from different times and different places.