What’s the difference?
Some would say that Scientology or Jehovah’s Witness are cults but would say that Christians and Muslims are religions. Some would say vice versa.
So what classifies something as a religion or a cult? What’s the defining line?
Is there one? And how do you recognize if you are in a cult?
A cult excludes.
Scientology and Watchtower Society are typical examples of cults.
Christianity as lived in the apostolic Church is not a cult, because not only it opens its doors specifically to the sinner to offer Him the way of light and life, true peace, and salvation and eternal life, but even affirms that every element of good found everywhere outside Christianity proceeds from God, and that there is hope that even those who are ignorant of Christ’s gospel and of His Church will attain what Christ offers and promises.
Christian or pseudo-Christian cults are different from protestant ecclesiastic communities in that the former are hurtful to the individual.
For instance, the Watcthower Society forces by indoctrination its members to refuse blood transfusions, and people have died for that reason. That’s a cult.
Also when you are told that there are “secret” knowledge principles that can be revealed only to a higher group of elects (contrary to the Christian teaching that nothing has been spoken in a hidden way and that all that is hidden shall be revealed).
Or the practice of “shunning” someone as opposed to “excommunicating” someone - the former being a total rejection of an individual by friends and family, the latter being a medical penance in which the person simply cannot benefit from the Sacraments until he repents for the fault because of which he was punished and which he still refuses to acknowledge as a fault, though his community, his friends, and his family are still there for him and above all else his obligations as a disciple remain in place.
As a Catholic, I know the history of my Church well enough to find in her the mirror and fulfillment of what the apostles taught and practiced, of what the first Christians did and followed (as we find out if we read the corpus of writings of those whom we call “Church Fathers”), and in what it does, namely, being all over the world to help the poorest, having hundreds of thousands of men and women who embrace a vow of chastity or celibacy and sometimes even of full poverty and dedicate themselves to serve Christ in His Church, which the Gospel terms “the pillar and foundation of truth”, in obedience to the episkopoi, the presbyteros, and the diaconi - those who are the successors of the apostles according to Scripture and to history (this was the teaching and practice of the Early Church). Also the fact that the majority of Christedom is a member of the apostolic church, the only Church that affirms to have authority to forgive sins, drive out demons, and to have the Eucharist in which Christ is really present in body, blood, soul, and divinity - and despite it all, still affirming that others can be saved without being formally Catholics if they are invincibly ignorant of Christ and the Gospel, and that elements of sanctification can be found even within separated Christian communities.
That becomes my “pillar and foundation” to evaluate if X or Y community is a cult or just another amidst thousands of Christian communities not in full communion with the Church.
Though, especially in Christianity, this does hold, for, as John wrote: