Which religions are cults

Cult or religion? Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then? Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. Of course, they argued vehemently that they were not a cult. Less easy, though, is identifying why.

Plenty of these movements were associated with young people — especially young counter-cultural people with suspicious politics — adding a particular political tenor to the discourse surrounding them. The anti-cult networks believed that cults brainwashed their members the idea of mind control, as scholars such as Margaret Singer point out, originated in media coverage of torture techniques supposedly used by North Korea during the Korean War.

The Baptist pastor Walter Ralston Martin was sufficiently disturbed by the proliferation of religious pluralism in the US to write The Kingdom of the Cults , which delineated in detail the theologies of those religious movements Martin identified as toxic, and provided Biblical avenues for the enterprising mainstream Christian minister to oppose them. With more than half a million copies sold, it was one of the top-selling spiritual books of the era.

Writing the history of cults in the US, therefore, is also writing the history of a discourse of fear: of the unknown, of the decline in mainstream institutions, of change. Particularly gruesome anecdotes often told by emotionally compromised former members worked to place the entire religious movement beyond the bounds of cultural legitimacy and to justify extreme measures — from deprogramming to robust conservatorship laws — to prevent vulnerable people falling victim to the cultic peril.

This terror peaked when atrocity tales began outnumbering genuine horrors. This influential atrocity tale influenced the three-year case in the s against an administrator of the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles and her son, a teacher, that racked up 65 crimes.

The prosecution spun a fear-stoking narrative around outlandish claims, including bloody animal mutilations. The number of convictions? But mass-media hysteria made Satanic panic a national crisis, and a pastime. And yet it is impossible to dismiss anti-cult work as pure hysteria. I picked fights and insulted them viciously. As the prayer group expanded, it became an enchanted sphere where supernatural things seemed to be happening all the time.

I began having ominous dreams in which the school was flooded and taken over by monsters. Once, we found a candy wrapper in the ceiling of one of our members, Micah Moore; we burned it because God showed us that it had been used to practice witchcraft.

In the everyday college world of exams and choir concerts and dining-hall meals, these episodes seemed outlandish—and to outsiders, maybe even disturbing. But within the Gnostic dreamworld of our small charismatic enclave, they seemed perfectly normal.

By the end of the next semester, several of us were already making plans to move to Kansas City. I was kicked out of the prayer group for the first time a year and a half later. Roughly two dozen of us were now living together in group houses in Missouri, sharing our money and working part-time jobs while we attended classes at IHOP University.

Three nights a week, we worshipped together. I continued to live in the house, but I was completely isolated. Why did I stay? I was conflicted. All of my friends said I had a serious problem—so serious that I had been effectively quarantined. These were my closest friends in the world. I began to wonder whether they might be right. Maybe I truly was hateful, malicious—wicked. I no longer trusted my own instincts. The group threw a huge party in my honor, but within a few days, I began to wish I had never come back.

Tyler now said he could sense when a person was sinning. The group was being run like a military boot camp, with chores and activities to keep us occupied virtually every hour of the day. The girls would wake up around seven to clean their house before the guys came over for lunch. Around five, we would reconvene at one of the houses to prepare dinner.

We would eat between 6 and p. Once every few weeks, there was even a surprise evacuation drill. We had prophecy time at least three nights a week. Everyone said similar things, although many of them ended up being proved wrong later. Those who disagreed were called out for being arrogant and rebellious and were forced to repent.

By the end of that summer, even the slightest gesture, no matter how innocent, could be misconstrued as evidence of demonic influence. As a precaution, I was isolated, and two of the boys kept constant watch over me. Once, Micah accused me of manipulating someone into coming over and hugging me. For example in Stark and Bainbridge's view cults grow out of established traditions to which they remain attached.

In this sense they may be new religious movements, but not new religions. New religions on the other hand break with existing traditions to create something which did not previously exist. Thus, as a first approximation, we might define new religious movements as cults and sects which although directly related to modernity grow out of existing traditions which are very important sources for their beliefs and practices.

On the other hand new religions are those groups which reject any attachment to clearly identified ongoing traditions. In this sense new religions express a "love of the new" and rejection of tradition as an authoritative guide for contemporary beliefs and practices. Modernity is more than the spread of industrialization which has still to impact some societies.

Rather, it is change brought about by an awareness of industrial goods, science, and technology. Modernity implies a distinction between that which is new as opposed to that which is ancient, or, that which is innovative as opposed to that which is traditional. It is usually an explicit and self-conscious commitment to be "modern" in intellectual, cultural and religious affairs. There is also some information about the various books published by the author of the site Professor Irving Hexham.

Read excerpts from this book online. Read this book online. Pocket Dictionary of New Religious Movements. Irving Hexham. ISBN: