Who joins new religious movements and why: Twenty years of research and what have we learned?

Surprisingly, perhaps, controversy about the nature and dangers of cults or new religious movements remains a topic of considerable public concern and significant misunderstanding. Scholarship in the study of new religious movements, however, has reached a certain obvious maturity. This article summarizes and integrates the empirical data available in dispersed sources to provide a sociological profile of what reliably can be said about how people become interested in new religions, who tends to become interested in new religions, and some insights into why people join such religions.