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My experience with the word

Comment comment by Brandon on 13 February 2008

From what I can tell, "cult" is a word used by mainstream Christians to describe anyone who believes differently than they do. A friend of mine in high school had a book called "The Big Book of Cults" and it had just about every religion in there - Buddhists, Catholics, Mormons, etc.

The dictionary definitions include:

  • a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
  • an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
  • the object of such devotion.
  • a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
  • a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
  • a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
  • the members of such a religion or sect.
  • any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.

I guess the evangelicals are going by the first clause of the sixth definition...

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RE: My experience with the word by anthonyanthony :: NR5

From what I can tell, "cult" is a word used by mainstream Christians to describe anyone who believes differently than they do.

Exactly. The term "cult" makes an Other out of religions alternative to the mainstream. Pagan gets used in a similar way, only, because of its Latin historical origins, it tends to demarcate that which is specifically non-Christian rather than say...Christian churches that perform snake-handling.

Anyway, by the definitions Brandon listed every spiritual practice people enjoin in can be considered a cult. However, because the term carries with it a pejorative connotation, no one is going to come out and readily agree that their form of worship is a cult. In addition, if everyone calls his or her religion a cult, then a new term would crop up for people to use when bad-mouthing another religion: which is really the crux of the term. Words like "cult", all racial slurs, and umbrella terms like "the homeless", "the rich", and "the people" are used primarily to distance the user and his or her audience from the group in question. If a person says, "The gays are taking over Hollywood and they're filling the minds of our children with sexually deviant ideas" then that person is dehumanizing the group; it's much easier to fall into an US vs. THEM mentality when people begin talking like that.

Posted 16 February 2008, Hide, Parent, Reply