Youth Culture Religious Movements: Evaluationg the Integrative Hypothesis.

This paper assesses the "integrative hypothesis" as an aid to understanding the current emergence of new religious movements appealing mainly to young persons. Four ways in which these movements reintegrate young persons into the social system are identified: adjustive socialization, combination, compensation, and redirection. The limitations of each of these as an explanation for the integrative consequences of youth culture religious movements are discussed. A distinction is made between adaptive movements which actually appear to reassimilate social "dropouts" into conventional instrumental routines, and marginal movements which appear to take converts out of conventional roles and routines, but which also perform latent tension management functions for the social system. The correlated properties of adaptive ami marginal movements and the tendency for marginal movements to evolve into adaptive movements are discussed. Finally, the problem of "reductionism" in analyzing religious movements in terms of their latent integrative "functions" is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]