Society and New Religious and Spiritual Groups

In recent decades, the formation of new spiritual groups and the attraction of people, especially adolescents and young people, to these groups has created problems for some people as well as for some government institutions. Appropriate confrontation with this reality is based on recognizing it exactly, and its accurate cognition in today's globalized world is based on knowing similar developments in other parts of the world. Only from a multiple and comparative perspective a complete cognition about effective social trends and their orientation and appropriate confrontation can be reached. The important features of the new spiritual groups are numerous, and each deserves a separate study. In this article, by logical analysis of research and findings in sociology of religion, just one of these features - that is, the way of interaction between society and new religious and spiritual groups - is studied from a global perspective comparing with an internal example. In Iranian society, the reaction of the traditional sections of the society, in coordination with the official institutions, is hostile when facing these groups. While these groups are spreading in other parts of the society. Researches show that the spread of these groups cannot be considered only as a kind of foreign influence, but the growth of these groups is mainly a cultural and religious development and is influenced by macro social trends, and therefore, the social issues they have created in the interaction with the society cannot be resolved by physical and security confrontation alone.