Sectarianism

Sources

Sectarian Impulse. The revolutionary era saw the beginnings of a more diverse religious society than America or Europe had ever known. The basis of the religious pluralism of the United States today lay in the new religious movements of the 1770s and 1780s. Even earlier, groups of revivalists had broken away from the established churches of New England and the Chesapeake Bay area to form new religious communities. But these groups of Virginia Baptists or New Light Congregationalists did not reject the basic Calvinist theology that most English settlers had brought with them to the New World. During the revolutionary years a few new groups made a more radical attack on those Calvinist premises. In doing this they exhibited one of the most common features of Protestantism, the tendency of some people to break away from the dominant church and form a new group, or sect. This sectarian impulse had its roots in the Protestant belief that all individuals are able to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. This belief made the formation of new, individualized religious groups possible. In addition the lack of central authority in Calvinism made it difficult to control the possibility of new, unorthodox

beliefs developing as people thought for themselves about religion. In colonial America religion was primarily congregational, even in the South, where Anglicanism was established, since there were no bishops or other strong central authorities. It is no surprise then, that sectarianism took hold.

Social Factors. Sectarianism is often linked to social disruption, something else that early America had in abundance. The revivals of the Great Awakening and the years after were just one sign of the social tensions that could be expressed in religious forms. Opponents of the revivals, such as Boston minister Charles Chauncy, complained about the disruptive forces let loose on society by the revivals, which they feared radically undermined the social order. In the 1770s, as the war spread through the colonies, there were other challenges to settled life, creating the conditions for new religious experiences and developments. One case occurred in rural New England. During the war years many people moved away from the coastal areas, where the danger of attack was great, into the relatively undeveloped interior areas of what is today Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Here they experienced the privations of life on a frontier, as they struggled to clear land, start farms, and build a new society. These unsettled people also experienced one of the periodic episodes of religious revival that marked eighteenth-century life. As early as 1778 western and northern New England began to exhibit the signs of a significant religious revival, which came to be known as the New Light Stir. The New Light Stir continued into the mid 1780s, as the Baptists came to dominate the area and displace the Congregationalists as the leading denomination.

New Sects. The Baptists were the main beneficiaries of the New Light Stir, which was thus part of that group’s longer-term growth across America. Yet some settlers in these areas developed even more-radical positions on religion, and at least three groups sprang up that had a lasting influence on American religion despite their relatively small size. In each case the unsettled conditions of life on the frontier led a visionary leader to develop a more radical view of religion and society. These groups rejected many traditional Christian beliefs in favor of a variety of new thoughts about the Bible, God, and the end of the world. In doing this they also reconsidered the way society should be organized, and in this respect they were participating in the main social project of the revolutionary era and helping to frame the new nation. Socially and politically this area became a hotbed of anti-Federalist feeling, home to the people most suspicious of schemes of big government and organized economic development. The religious parallel was a highly individualized spiritualism, emphasizing the direct access of believers to God. Many people considered this to be a clear challenge to more-traditional religious institutions and to the society those institutions upheld.

Shakers. Probably the best known today of these new groups was the Shakers, or the Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, as they called themselves. The Shakers began in England as an enthusiastic offshoot of a group of Quakers. They got their name from the shaking they experienced when moved by the spirit during worship. The Shakers came to America in 1774, when a group led by Ann Lee arrived in New York. Lee’s spirituality had become increasingly intense over the course of a difficult life that included sickness, unhappy marriage, and even prison. She turned to increasingly radical ideas about God, ideas that she continued to develop in America. In 1776 Lee led her small group of followers to the village of Niskeyuna in the hill country north of Albany, New York. The group began to recruit converts from the area and from northern New England and slowly grew. Lee preached enthusiastically about the coming end of the world and encouraged her followers to establish a new society to prepare for the final judgment. That new society included sexual purity and the public confession of

sin and then the taking up of a reformed, simpler life. Eventually, Lee came to believe that the judgment day had already come and that Christ had returned to earth in her own body. The Shakers came to consider Lee the embodiment of sinless perfection and as Christ’s fulfillment in a female counterpart. As recruits arrived, Lee began to envision a community organized on her principles, where all members would be celibate and share their goods and lives equally and peacefully. Lee’s doctrine of pacifism combined with news of this radical lifestyle to get the attention of the authorities in Albany. In July 1780 she and six other Shakers were jailed as “enemies to the country.” Lee was released the following December and in 1781 started a tour of New England that extended over two years. By that time the Shakers were beginning to establish their first settlements where they could live apart from the world and pursue their lives in their distinctive style while they awaited the fulfillment of the millennial visions Lee had found inspiration for in the Bible. The first lasting Shaker village was in New Lebanon, New York, founded in 1785. It was the model for Shaker towns that would dot New England and New York in the coming decades and that can still be visited today.

Universalists. The Universalists did not take up celibacy or believe that the end of the world had already come, but their faith that God had saved all humans from damnation was just as radical, in the context of the time. Unlike other sects, the Universalists had a presence in urban areas as well as on the frontier. English revivalist John Murray arrived in New Jersey on 21 July 1770 after being awakened to God by revivals in his home country. He became an itinerant preacher and soon became well known in the coastal towns of the Middle colonies and in New England. In 1775, following the logic of his own reading of the Scripture and of the revivalists’ emphasis on the free acceptance of God that was potentially available to all, he publicly took up Universalism. In 1779 he established one of the earliest American Universalist congregations in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He persevered in his ministry despite being at times arrested, stoned by mobs, and threatened with deportation. His influence extended mainly to city dwellers, especially those already drawn to the ideas about human nature and the benevolent deity that were attractive to people there in touch with the latest European thinking.

Rural Growth. At the same time in the New England backcountry, a homegrown version of Universalism was taking hold, again as an outgrowth of the revivals. There three prophetic men led the way, Isaac Davis, Adams Streeter, and Caleb Rich. Davis preached in the Connecticut River valley, honing in on the story of how Christ’s suffering and death atoned for the sin of Adam once and for all. As early as 1775 a number of Davisonians withdrew to form a Universalist congregation in Oxford, Massachusetts. Adams may have been influenced by Davis, as he passed from being a Separate Congregationalist, then a Baptist, to finally a Universalist, taking over Davis’s leadership role. Rich had the widest influence of the three. Long-term religious conflict in his family in the 1760s and early 1770s led Rich to a series of visions, in which a “still small voice” led him to accept Universalist principles, and an angel presented him with biblical texts with which to instruct others. Rich was attacked as a heretic by his Baptist neighbors, but in 1773 he and a few others formed a separate religious society and started attracting new members. Further visions of angels and even of Christ himself in 1778 pushed Rich to an even more radical position, as he now came to preach about the imminent end of the world as well. Rich was also impressed by Christ’s easy manner with him during his vision, which emphasized the dignity of all humans since all had been saved equally, and he began to add a call for egalitarianism to his ministry as well.

Freewill Baptists. This group traced its start to the death of George Whitefield, the English evangelist of the Great Awakening. Whitefield’s death in 1770 greatly moved Benjamin Randel, who had heard Whitefield preach a week before and had found him a “worthless, noisy fellow.” Changing his first opinion while thinking of Whitefield in heaven and himself on the way to hell, Randel fell into a spiritual despair that ended with a profound experience of a new birth through the spirit. He continued to struggle with his faith, which he felt needed to be stricter, and in 1776 became a Baptist. He became an itinerant preacher and faced stonings, mobbings, and other abuses for his increasingly radical ideas. A failed attempt to settle at a church in New Hampshire led to another period of doubt and further revelations from God, who demanded even greater efforts to purity from Randel. The visions he had while praying in a cornfield in 1779 led him to reject family and congregation in favor of itinerant preaching. He spoke about the coming judgment day, about the need for Christian perfection, and most importantly about the free will humans had to accept Christ. This last point especially was a departure from the orthodox Calvinism of the Congregationalists and Baptists of the area. Randel faced down the opposition with a complete reliance on God. “I makes no odds with he who disowns me,” he said, “so long as I know the Lord owns me.” The first Randelite congregation formed in Strafford, New Hampshire, in August 1780, and the sect grew over the next two decades to become one of the largest groups on the Northern frontier, with more than 150 congregations by 1815.

NEWPORT’S SYNAGOGUE

There were probably only about 1,000 Jews in revolutionary America. Despite their small numbers, they were beginning to make their presence felt. They were also feeling the pressures of needing to acculturate to a Christian society, something that burdened the American Jewish community well into the twentieth century. One of the most important early communities was in Newport, Rhode Island. Drawn by the colony’s tradition of religious freedom, the first Jews arrived there in the 1680s. Most successfully participated in the shipping and commerce of this important port city. By 1763 Congregationalist Ezra Stiles counted 15 Jewish families, with about 80 individuals. That number had grown to about 125 by 1774. The Newport Jews mostly came from the Mediterranean area, although by the Revolution some had arrived from Germany. In 1763 the community dedicated their first permanent home, a building today called the Touro Synagogue, named in honor of Isaac Touro, the lay leader of the group. The synagogue was designed by Peter Harrison, who had earlier designed the home of Newport’s Redwood Library, one of America’s first private libraries. Harrison gave the community a synagogue in the Palladian style, then popular in England. The building was elegantly proportioned, symmetrically arranged, and detailed with classical elements. The interior was modeled after the synagogue of a wealthy London community and while arranged in the traditional form also conformed to the neoclassical style. The building captured the desire of this community to be true to their distinct heritage, as well as to conform to the standards of their Christian neighbors. The balance the Newport Jewish community tried to strike between their past and America’s future was precarious and short lived, however. Many of the Jews sided with the British during the war, drawn to them through the commercial connections of their families. The long British occupation of Newport and the eventual American victory were serious blows to the Jewish community. By the early 1800s the community had completely collapsed.

Source: Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 84–88.

Shared Characteristics. None of these groups was ever large or long lived, although a few Shakers still survive today. Yet their experiences have been a model for many Americans of later times. The sectarian impulse has emerged repeatedly in American history, sometimes in tiny movements that soon disappear and sometimes in movements that result in huge new religions, such as the Mormons. All of these movements have some of the elements that were shared by these three original American sects. They were each founded by a charismatic leader, one who had visions and was able to translate them into preaching that excited others to follow them. The death of these leaders created problems in how to carry on the group, which in each case involved giving the sect a more carefully considered set of beliefs and practices that could be taught to others in an organized way. Other characteristics made stability hard to achieve. The sects placed no restrictions on lay preaching, which left them open to new ideas and influences that clergy trained in seminaries or colleges would never have entertained. Many of the people joining sects were people who moved from one religious group to another frequently throughout their lives, always searching for a more perfect expression of their ideas about God. Sects drew converts from all levels of society, although in the revolutionary period they were much less prominent in the coastal cities. The notion of a pure community and the emphasis on sin and repentance was often at the forefront of sectarianism. Because of this, such groups tended to withdraw from the wider world, as the Shakers did, and form communities of their own with limited exposure to the profane ways of others. In these separate places sectarians were free to pursue an ideal world that would be a heaven on earth. These perfectionist communities often brought larger social conflicts to the surface, as they divided existing churches and even families and challenged the existing social and religious order. Emotions often ran high in these communities, founded as they were on intensely personal experiences of God’s spirit. In this sense many sects had close ties to the evangelical Protestantism that was the heart of American religion in the nineteenth century even if many sects were extreme versions of tendencies within the larger denominations. Part of that extreme behavior was linked to a prevalent feeling in many sects that the end of the world was at hand. Such dire circumstances called for extreme expressions of reform and love and contributed as well to the willingness of many to reject the world.

Dissent. Finally sectarianism drew on at least one important aspect of American religion that has become a cherished part of our national identity. This is the tradition of religious dissent. Ann Lee, John Murray, Caleb Rich, and Benjamin Randel each departed from the mainstream of American religious thought and practice. Being an outsider was a basic part of their religious identity and of the identity of the groups they formed. Over the years since, strong individuals who stand up for what they believe is right against all opposition have become important symbols of American culture. Dissent is also an important means by which religion has developed in America, as freethinkers such as these sectarians have broken away from old traditions to start new ones with greater meaning for their own times. These people struggled against the opposition of their neighbors to find a way to express their ideas about God that were relevant to the unsettled conditions of life in revolutionary-era America. This process is so fundamental to American society that after the end of the Revolution, it became embedded in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which protected dissent by guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Sources

Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982);

Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper & Row, 1963);

R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);

Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

SECTARIANISM

Religious dissent from the Russian Orthodox Church.

The word sect entered the Russian language in the eighteenth century from the Latin word secta. Long used in the Catholic Church to indicate groups or parties that had separated themselves from orthodox teaching, the word was adopted by the Russian Orthodox Church during the reign of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) to label the increasing numbers of religious dissenters.

The first substantial movement of Christian dissent occurred only in the seventeenth century in response to the liturgical and bureaucratic innovations of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (r. 1652–1658). By the 1680s, those who opposed these new reforms called themselves "Old Believers"; many of them withdrew from the Church and society to create their own purified communities on the outskirts of the Muscovite state. Although Old Believers were sometimes tarred with the label "sect," by the late nineteenth century Russian Orthodox here-siology began to reserve the word sectarian for the growing numbers of religious dissenters who had separated themselves from the state church for reasons other than Nikon's reforms. In accordance with this usage, this article deals only with those sectarians who were not Old Believers. It also does not deal with the fourteenth-century Judaizers and its predecessors.

the faith of christ (flagellants) and the castrates

The Faith of Christ (khristovshchina ) arose in the seventeenth century. Its members continued to visit the Orthodox state church, but also met in secret assemblies where they repeated the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) until the Holy Spirit descended upon them and they danced, prophesied, and spoke in tongues. In their secret assemblies, they believed that they had recovered the original faith and practice of Christ. Following a realized eschatology, they also believed that Christ had returned spiritually to dwell in their leaders whom they called Christs and Mothers of God. They composed a rich repertoire of spiritual songs celebrating these leaders and their faith. The adherents of the Faith of Christ practiced an intense asceticism that included celibacy, restricted diet, long periods of prayer, and fasting. Over time, some of them flagellated themselves, and so they became known as flagellants. This label was applied indiscriminately to many different sectarians, most of whom did not practice flagellation.

The Faith of Christ established broad religious, social, and economic networks across the Russian Empire. The grave of the monastery peasant Danilo Filippov (d. c. 1700), one of the early leaders of the sect, was located in a small village near Kostroma; it attracted pilgrims from cities and towns all over central Russia for at least two centuries. The members of the Faith of Christ used money earned in the textile trade to support their co-religionists who entered Orthodox monasteries.

In 1733 and again in 1745, extensive state investigations sought to eliminate the movement by arresting and sentencing hundreds of suspects. By forcing the defendants to confess falsely to horrible crimes of secret mass orgies, infanticide, and cannibalism, the inquisitors of the second commission helped to create a powerful myth that envisioned the flagellants as a dangerous, homicidal, sexually perverted fifth column within Russian society.

By the 1760s, some members of the Faith of Christ, not satisfied with vows of celibacy, began castrating themselves. Under the leadership of the fugitive peasant Kondraty Selivanov (d. 1832), these castrates broke away from the Faith of Christ and created their own peculiar rituals and eschatology. In its rich tradition of spiritual songs, the Castrates claimed that their leader Selivanov was actually Emperor Peter III (r. 1762)—the unfortunate husband of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796). Though the real Peter III was killed in Catherine's 1762 coup, the Castrates held that he actually escaped to Orel province where, as the peasant Kondratii Selivanov, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. After Catherine's death, the legend claims that Emperor Paul (r. 1796–1801) recalled Selivanov to St. Petersburg, where he recognized him as his father.

Although Selivanov lived and taught freely in St. Petersburg from 1802 to 1820, he spent the last twelve years of his life in a monastery prison in Suzdal. Thanks in part to their severe asceticism, many of the Castrates became wealthy merchants. Because they were severely persecuted, the Castrates outwardly adhered to the Orthodox Church and often proved to be generous patrons.

spiritual christianity: dukhobors and molokans

Spiritual Christianity, another powerful strain of sectarianism, arose as an apocalyptic movement in the 1760s in the black-earth region of Tambov province. Preaching that the day of the Lord was imminent, Ilarion Pobirokhin (fl. 1762–1785) called on true Christians to stop venerating icons and to reject the Orthodox sacraments and priest-hood. Instead of kissing icons, they kissed one another, and especially their leader, as the image of God. They met together regularly to read the Bible, sing spiritual psalms of their own composition, and listen to their teachers' sermons.

Despite state efforts to repress them, the Spiritual Christians, who were also called the Dukhobors (Spirit-Wrestlers), survived. In an effort to isolate them from their Orthodox neighbors, the Russian state in 1802 first resettled them in Melitopol in Crimea, and then in 1841–1845 forcibly moved them to the Caucasus. In these isolated colonies, the Dukhobors largely governed themselves and followed their own folkways. Led by charismatic descendants of Pobirokhin and a Council of Elders, the Dukhobors preached that God's Spirit lived in all people, both men and women. Although they used the Bible, they emphasized their own oral tradition of spiritual psalms, which they called the Living Book.

By the 1880s, the Dukhobors numbered about twenty thousand. A radical group of Dukhobors led by Petr Verigin (d. 1935) preached pacificism, rejected military service, and struggled to take over the community in 1886–1898. In 1898, Verigin led his followers to immigrate to Canada.

A second group of Spiritual Christians, known as the Molokans (milk-drinkers, because they did not observe the Orthodox fasting periods in which milk was forbidden), broke away from the Dukhobors. Semen Uklein (d. 1809), an erstwhile follower of Ilarion Pobirokhin, insisted on the authority of the Bible, and went on to preach his own version of Spiritual Christianity throughout the provinces of the lower Volga in 1790s. Like the Dukhobors, the Molokans rejected icons, sacraments, and priest-hood. But as serious students of the Bible, Uklein's followers also observed Old Testament holidays and dietary restrictions.

In the 1830s, a group of inspired apocalyptic Molokan prophets predicted that the world would end in 1836 and introduced ecstatic dancing and singing into the Molokan meetings. Lukian Petrov Sokolov (d. 1858) led his followers to Mount Ararat to await the return of Christ. Despite the failure of this prophecy, these Molokan "Jumpers" retained their ecstatic practices and regrouped under a new charismatic leader, Maksim Rudometikin (d. 1877). From the late nineteenth century, new prophets taught pacifism and their new apocalyptic visions encouraged the Jumpers to emigrate and establish colonies in California, South America, Mexico, and Arizona.

western religious movements

In the 1830s, German pietists introduced a revival in the German colonies of the Ukraine. By the 1860s, this revival, which emphasized personal prayer and a Bible study hour [Stunde in German], had been adopted by Ukrainian and Russian peasants who lived near the German colonists. Although initially these Shtundists, as they came to be called, wanted to remain in the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox hierarchy rejected their independent Bible studies and the Protestant doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Ultimately, many of these Ukrainian and Russian peasants turned away from Orthodoxy to embrace Baptism. In 1867, Nikita Voronin, a convert from Molokanism, was the first Russian to receive baptism. A Russian Baptist Union was created in 1884.

Other Protestant movements also gained Russian adherents. German and American preachers brought Seventh-Day Adventism into Russia in the 1880s. In the 1870s in the northern capital of St. Petersburg, the pietistic preaching of the English Lord Radstock established a pietistic following that later helped to support the formation of a Union of Evangelical Christians in 1909.

Overwhelmed by the 1905 revolution, the tsarist government issued an edict of religious toleration that allowed much greater freedom of worship—though not of proselytizing—to most sectarians. Baptists, Molokans, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Evangelical Christians created their own legal organizations, published newspapers, books, and journals. A 1912 census counted 393,565 sectarians (not including the Old Believers). Taken together, Baptists and Evangelical Christians were the largest group, with more than 143,000 adherents; Molokans represented the next largest group with 133,935.

the soviet period

After the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik government initially courted sectarians, but this policy came to an end in 1929 with the First Five Year Plan. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate religion altogether by closing and destroying churches and arresting religious leaders. This policy failed, and resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture actually provoked new apocalyptic sectarian movements which attacked the Soviet state as the "red dragon" of the Apocalypse. Persecution of the Orthodox Church forced some of its members underground to form the True Orthodox Church. Rejecting the Moscow Patriarchate as hopelessly compromised, the members of the True Orthodox Church claimed that they alone maintained the true faith.

The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 forced Josef Stalin to moderate his antireligious policies and to allow limited legal existence of sectarian groups. In 1944, Baptists and Evangelical Christians formed the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, and soon Adventists also were granted a national organization. Dissatisfaction with the limits on religious freedom and a renewed antireligious campaign under Nikita Khrushchev led some Baptists and Adventists to form independent, underground organizations in the 1960s: the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists and the True and Free Seventh-Day Adventists. The Soviet period also witnessed the vigorous growth of Pentecostals, who had first appeared in Russia in 1913. In the 1970s and 1980s, circles of educated urban intellectuals sometimes faced persecution for their interest and participation in Eastern religions, including Tibetan Buddhism and the Hare Krishna movement.

the post-soviet period

In 1990 the Soviet parliament passed a law allowing complete religious freedom and ushered in a new, open spiritual marketplace. Missionaries from the United States and Western Europe helped to establish and finance Mormon ward, Jehovah's Witnesses kingdom halls, and charismatic and evangelical churches. Underground movements, such as the True Orthodox Christians, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, and the Baptist Council of Churches, emerged to compete in the new atmosphere.

The new freedom, and the collapse of the Soviet economic and political systems, also encouraged the formation of new sectarian movements. Distressed by the moral degeneration of Russian society, prophets from the Church of the Transfiguring Theotokos claimed that the Mother of God had appeared to warn Russia and the world of an impending judgment. The White Brotherhood, a syncretic movement, combining elements of Hinduism and Orthodox Christianity, gathered to witness the end of the world in Kiev in 1993.

Alarmed by these apocalyptic movements and by the influx of foreign missionaries, the Russian parliament in 1997 passed a new law that favored the traditional religions of Russia. Local administrations have interpreted the law quite differently, so that the Jehovah's Witnesses, who have peacefully established their headquarters in St. Petersburg, have also had to defend themselves in Moscow courts.

Sectarianism first became significant in Russia in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, sectarianism represented the growth of individual initiative and freedom, as religious virtuosi took upon themselves the responsibility of constructing and living out new religious visions. But on the other hand, the classification and enumeration of sects reflect the growth of bureaucratic systems of social control in both state and church. The continued vitality of sectarianism in the twenty-first century is a product of the dialectic between these two opposite trends.

See also: old believers; orthodoxy; protestantism

bibliography

Anderson, John. (1994). Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bolshakoff, Serge. (1950). Russian Nonconformity: The Story of "Unofficial" Religion in Russia. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Conybeare, Frederick C. (1962). Russian Dissenters. New York: Russell and Russell.

Engelstein, Laura. (1999). Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.

Witte, John, and Bourdeaux, Michael, eds. (1999). Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for Souls. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press.

J. Eugene Clay

sec·tar·i·an / sekˈte(ə)rēən/ • adj. denoting or concerning a sect or sects: among the sectarian offshoots of Ismailism were the Druze of Lebanon. ∎  (of an action) carried out on the grounds of membership of a sect, denomination, or other group: they are believed to be responsible for the recent sectarian killings of Catholics. ∎  rigidly following the doctrines of a sect or other group: the sectarian Bolshevism advocated by Moscow.• n. a member of a sect. ∎  a person who rigidly follows the doctrines of a sect or other group.DERIVATIVES: sec·tar·i·an·ism / -ˌnizəm/ n.sec·tar·i·an·ize / -ˌnīz/ v.