World religions,cults and modalities of worship

Religious Cults

Defining a cult is far more difficult than is often appreciated. Many evangelical Christians support the activities of Jews for Jesus and see them as a legitimate missionary group. But members of the Jewish community regard them as an evil and deceptive cult, a fact that well illustrates the problems surrounding the word. In its modern form the word "cult" was originally used by Ernst Troeltsch in his classic work, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), where he classifies religious groups in terms of church, sect, and cult.

For Troeltsch the cult represents a mystical or spiritual form of religion that appeals to intellectuals and the educated classes. At the heart of the cult is a spirituality which seeks to enliven a dead orthodoxy. Thus for Troeltsch the early Luther, many Puritans, and pietism can be seen as examples of cultic religion. Although Troeltsch's ideas about the distinction between church and sect generated a vigorous debate, little attention has been paid to his views on the cult. However, several liberal writers influenced by Troeltsch have seen evangelical Christianity in terms of a cult.

More important for the modern usage of the word "cult" has been the development of evangelical polemics against groups which they have seen as heretical. The classic work on this subject, which probably gave the word its modern usage, is Jan van Baalen's The Chaos of Cults (1938). In this work van Baalen expounds the beliefs of various religious groups such as theosophy, Christian Science, Mormonism, and Jehovah's Witnesses and subjects them to a rigorous theological critique from an evangelical perspective. In the last twenty years a large number of evangelical books dealing with cults have appeared. Over the course of time these have increasingly concentrated on the allegedly fraudulent claims of the cults, the immoralities of their leaders, and the ways in which their followers are deceived. As a result, in many cases a transition has occurred from a theological argument refuting the claims of various religious groups to a reliance upon psychological arguments which suggest that members of these groups are in some way brainwashed.

This development poses a great danger for evangelical Christianity as can be seen from William Sargent's The Battle for the Mind (1957). In this book Sargent takes evangelical conversion as a classic example of brainwashing. More recently this argument has been developed by Jim Siegelman and Flo Conway in their popular book Snapping (1979), where the experience of born again Christians is compared to the process by which people join groups like the Moonies. Such books as these and stories in the media about brainwashing have led to considerable pressure on governments in various American states, Canada, Britain, and Germany for anticonversion laws. These laws are supposedly aimed at groups like the Moonies. But because of their lack of definition (cf. the Lasher Amendment, State of New York in Assembly, March 25, 1980) they are in practice aimed at any form of change of life style brought about by a religious conversion.

Today the real problem of cults is the propaganda value of the word "cult" in a secular society. Although there are reliable statistics to show that the total membership of groups like the Children of God, the Unification Church (Moonies), and Hare Krishna is less than 35,000 in the United States and even fewer in other Western countries, these groups are presented as a major threat to society. As a result secularists are able to urge the acceptance of laws which replace religious freedom by a grudgingly granted religious toleration. Rather than persisting with the use of a word which has now become a propaganda weapon, the academic practice of calling such groups "new religious movements" should be followed. An alternative to this neutral terminology available for Christians who oppose such groups on theological grounds would be to revive the usage of "heretic" or simply call such groups "spiritual counterfeits." Such a procedure would move the debate away from psychological theories that can be used by secularists against Christianity to the arena of theological discussion and religious argument.

I Hexham
(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)

Bibliography:
M Hill, Sociology of Religion;
W R Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults;
H W Richardson, ed., New Religions and Mental Health;
C Y Glock and R N Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness;
I I Zaretzky and M P Leone, eds., Religious Movements in Contemporary America;
T Robbins and D Anthony, eds., In Gods We Trust;
R S Ellwood, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America;
J Needleman and G Baker, eds., Understanding the New Religions.