A Standard That Marks ISKCON Among New Religious Movements

The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements situates the four regulative principles among the clearest markers by which scholars of new religious movements have distinguished committed ISKCON membership from looser affiliation or sympathetic interest, since the principles function as a visible line an outsider can observe being crossed or kept, unlike an internal doctrinal conviction that leaves no outward trace. The Encyclopedia of Hinduism notes that the specific combination, diet, sobriety, sexual conduct and gambling governed together as facets of a single discipline, has parallels in older strands of Vaishnava asceticism but was codified into this particular fourfold form by the movement's own twentieth century founder for a following drawn substantially from Western converts unfamiliar with the wider ascetic vocabulary of Vaishnava tradition. That codification has proven durable, continuing to structure initiated life within the movement across the generations since its founding, and the principles have become, for many outside observers, the practical shorthand by which the difference between an interested visitor to a temple and a formally initiated devotee bound to the community's discipline is most readily explained.