| Sumario: | Resistance to understanding the beliefs of modern New Religious Movements (NRMs) is well‐known to those who teach in the area. This paper builds on Eugene Gallagher's repurposing of "methodological belief" for college classes on NRMs by suggesting that scholars and teachers in the field of religious studies engage methods and content drawn from the discipline of early‐modern history. Doing so, I argue, allows the instructor to make an end run around our assumptions about "cults" by providing students the space to hone their skills with less immediately charged subject matter from the distant past. I then offer two learning modules drawn from classes at a large public university in the United States, intended to show instructors how aspects of early‐modern minority religion might inform the teaching of NRMs. I conclude by analyzing papers and in‐class discussions in an effort to demonstrate the potential of this approach for fostering methodological belief.
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