What moves a spiritual movement or religious sect to the big time is more predictable than you'd think.

If, as Karl Marx suggested, religion is the “opium of the people,” we live on a planet where nobody needs to walk too far down the street to get drugs. Each year, hundreds of new religious movements are born; they’re all over the place if you know where to look. Never mind that only a tiny fraction of them will survive — there’s more where they came from.