Many of the theories relating the recent proliferations of NRM's to factor such as moral ambiguity, cultural confusion, communal dislocations, civil religious decline, or a linear secularization process tend to be crisis theories and/or modernization theories. They pinpoint some acute and distinctively modern dislocation believed to be producing some mode of alienation, anomie, or deprivation to which Americans are responding by searching for new structures of meaning and community. Most of the theories are parochial, in that they deal primarily with intra-societal sources of sociocultural transformation and ignore contemporary "globalist" or "world system" influences, or they treat the sources of NRM's in isolation from the sources of other contemporary movements. The theories reviewed have not been sufficiently tested with research.