Abstract
The cognitive minorities that are the sect, the new religious movement and the religious order, constitute social organizations that publicly affirm the difference which is of a symbolic nature. In consequence, the organizations self-define their frontiers, and hence demonstrate the capacity for self-regulation of their internal relations and the instances of conflict resolution in society at large. Social Compass has studied the subject, above all through an analytic analysis. It went through its most intense periodfrom the 1970s to the 1990s, linked, it would seem, to the debate on secularization as a social withdrawal on the part of religious institutions. The debate has rekindled, in recent years on points of method and theory, in the tension between a sociology of implication and a distanced sociology.