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flameburns623
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The term ‘cult’ was long used in the RCC to specify certain movments with a particular form of devotion, to Mary, for example. The word was picked up by social scientists as a neutral way to refer to certain sorts of new relgious movements, usually movements which were in the first to second generation of their birth and develpment. By this understanding, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, the Baha’i Faith, and so forth, would NOT be cults. All of these have moved into later phases of development as religious movements. Even the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon would be moving out of the ‘cult’ phase of it’s existence into what would be deemed a ‘sect’.
In the late 1950’s and 1960’s and especially in the 1970’s the term was picked up by journalists seeking a way to describe off-beat religious movements, not all of them necessarily ‘new’. So Zen Buddhism, the Krishna sect of Hinduism, etcetera, began to be lumped together with such groups as the Unificationists, Children of God/Family of Love, People’s Temple, etcetera as ‘cults’. In journalistic understanding the term simply seemed to mean a non-traditional or novel religious group, especially one which seemed authoritarian and/or which was clearly out-of-sync with the broader American culture. Often the implication was that a groups styled a ‘cult’ was somehow vaguely or expressly dangerous.
Evangelical Christians picked up on this. Since post-WWII Americans have become increasingly uninterested in claims of ‘absolute truth’. Labeling a group as a ‘heresy’ was often ineffectual. People would challenge the label by asking by what right Evangelicals declared one group a ‘heresy’ or not–after all, don’t Roman Catholics consider Evangelicalism a heresy too? On the other hand, calling a group a ‘cult’ seemed to be a way of saying, “Hey–those guys over there: they’re DANGEROUS! Stay away from them!”
Expropriating the term ‘cult’ allowed Evangelicals to gain a hearing about whatever criticisms they had of a specific group. Often, if you actually READ what the Evangelicals said about Mormons, JW’s and so forth, you realized they were simply asserting these groups were ‘heresies’. (As opposed to certain groups such as the Solar Temple, the Waco group, some of the Mormon fundamentalist sects, certain Satanist organizations, probably also Scientology, all of which really are dangerous to the unwary).
I’m not suggesting that heresy or false doctrine are not spiritually dangerous, or that spiritual poison is somehow less dangerous than literal poison. My point is that the term is unfairly appropriated by Evangelicals to shock and frighten, and ought to be used with greater care. In most cases we would be better advised to use terms such as ‘false doctrine’ or ‘heresy’ to label teaching we disagree with; To call groups proposing novel or unfamiliar doctrines ‘new religous movments’ or ‘minority faiths’ rather than use a loaded term such as ‘cult’.
Just my opinion.
I’d like to know this as well.
