Cults Are Religion

Cults Are Religion

There is no real definition of cult. But the term is usually given to a group that is characterized by some kind of devotion to a person or to a practice that is not a part of the cultural mainstream society.

Religion is most commonly classified as churches or sects. Church is a religious organization, which is highly structured, but also tries to minister to the secular society. Sects are protests against the church, which are like the secular society.

Cults are almost the same as sects, but there are a few differences. Cults do not go against the church, but their practices are thought to enrich the life of their parent religion in which they are a part of.

Some types of religion such as Franciscan started out as a built around a charismatic leader. Mormonism started out as a cult, then became a sect, then became a church. Almost all of the large world religions followed this pattern and became larger as more people joined their religion.

Cults have been around since history has been recorded, but many peoples started joining and creating cults during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Many of these people were middle class youth who left their traditional religion and moved toward beliefs and practices that had never been done before or go back to practices of an earlier era. Many of the young people were living in different types of religious communes and participated in unconventional behavior. That behavior included speaking in tongues, faith healing, meditating, and following the leaders of the society,

Many of the modern cults have a large variety of ideas, practices, and types of leadership. They range from Christian beliefs to those seeking sudden enlightenment. Many cults have a flexible leadership like in the Charismatic Movement, other religions mentors who control cultic events.

The word "Cult" was used first by Ernest Troeltsch in his work, the Social teaching of the Christian Churches. In his work he puts religious groups into classifications of church, sects, and cult. He wrote that a cult represents more of a spiritual form of religion.

In Jan van Baalen's work, The Chaos of Cults, he talks about the different beliefs of different religious groups such as theosophy, Christian Science, Mormonism, and Jehovah's Witnesses. HE also puts them through a tough theological critique from a Christian perspective.