65 Even New Religious Movements Have Legacies 1 Eileen Barker London School of Economics Abstract Hundreds of thousands of new religious movements (NRMs) have made an appearance throughout the world since time immemorial. Te majority of them have gathered only a small following for a generation or two, but then they are more likely than not to die out and be forgotten. Many of them do manage, however, to leave a legacy that makes its mark on the wider society, which often forgets their origin. Tis paper looks at some of those legacies in an attempt to indicate the broad range of innovations that have emanated from some of the more recent religious manifestations during their early years. Keywords Arts; Ecology; Environment; Businesses; Education; Healing; Health; Innovation; Good works; Law; New religious movements (NRMs); Politics; Welfare Contact Address Professor Eileen Barker, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2 2AE, United Kingdom, E.Barker@LSE.ac.uk Karl Marx is known for arguing that the economic base of a society determines its general culture and ideas, and that religion is “the opium of the masses”. 2 On the other hand, the German sociologist Max Weber argued that this was not necessarily so, most famously with his thesis that the Protestant ethic was largely responsible for the rise of modern capitalism. 3 Tis article starts from an assumption that, at any time, there are thousands of voices, ideas and practices ‘out there’, although only a few will be chosen while the rest 1 An earlier version of this paper was published in James Walters (ed.), Religious Imaginations: How Narratives of Faith are Shaping Today's World, (London: Gingko, 2018), 159–76. 2 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right” (1843–4), in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. Tomas Bottomore (London: Watts, 1963), 43–59. 3 Max Weber, Te Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) (London: Unwin, 1995). e-Rhizome, 2020; Vol. 2(2), 65–80 ISSN 2571-242X https://doi.org/10.5507/rh.2020.005