Organized founder-led sects

Sect Shinto refers to the organised, founder-led movements that were recognised as a distinct category of Shinto in modern Japan, a set of religious bodies, each with its own founder, teachings, and congregation, grouped apart from the shrine tradition. These sects, formed largely in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, include mountain-worship groups, faith-healing and revivalist movements, and confessional communities, and unlike the shrine tradition they are defined by their founders and doctrines and by voluntary membership rather than by attachment to a local shrine.

Thirteen groups were officially recognised as Kyoha Shinto ("Sect Shinto") sects under Meiji-era administrative classification, among them Kurozumikyo, founded by Kurozumi Munetada after a revelatory experience in 1814; Tenrikyo, founded by Nakayama Miki following revelations beginning in 1838; and Konkokyo, founded by Kawate Bunjiro after his own revelations from 1859. Each developed its own scripture, headquarters, and ordained ministry organised around the founder's teaching rather than around a particular shrine or locality, and several, Tenrikyo especially, grew into substantial international religious movements with millions of adherents, complicating any simple description of them as merely a Shinto subcategory.

Sect Shinto is set against Shrine Shinto in the modern classification: where shrine worship centres on place, kami, and communal festival, the sects centre on a founder's revelation, an organised teaching, and a gathered following, in a form closer to that of a church or new religious movement. The category reflects the administrative arrangements of modern Japanese religious history as much as a theological distinction. The affirmation names this founder-and-doctrine mode of Shinto, complementing the shrine-based mainstream and illustrating the diversity of forms that reverence for the kami has taken.

The administrative convenience of the Sect Shinto category has not always matched later scholarly and even the movements' own self-understanding: Tenrikyo, for instance, developed a theology centred on a single, unifying parental deity, Oyagami ("God the Parent"), and a specific sacred site, the Jiba, held to be the very place of human creation, doctrines and an institutional identity distinct enough from kami worship that most scholars of religion today classify Tenrikyo as an independent new religious movement with roots in, rather than a form of, Shinto. The category Sect Shinto thus reflects nineteenth-century Japanese religious administration as much as it reflects a stable, shared theology among the groups it names.