Most scholars stopped using the word cult back in the 1970s
The word cult once simply meant worship, as in the imperial cult of ancient Rome. Today it is an accusation. By the late 1970s most academics had swapped it for new religious movement, while anti-cult campaigners call that phrase a euphemism that hides real harm. Few words in religious studies are more contested.
Cult comes from the Latin cultus, worship. In its older, neutral sense it described the devotional practices surrounding a particular figure or place, fully normal within a culture. A sense of excessive devotion appeared in the 19th century, and in modern English the word is mostly pejorative, applied to everything from fringe religions to gangs. The anthropologist Susannah Crockford calls it a shapeshifter that bends to its user's intentions; her least subjective definition is a group consciously building a new kind of society that everyone else rejects.
Sociologists built the academic version on Max Weber's ideas about charismatic authority and the difference between churches and sects. Ernst Troeltsch added a mystical category, and Howard Becker later split sect into sect and cult, the latter meaning a small, loosely organised group focused on private belief. In this scheme sects break away from an existing religion and keep continuity with it, while cults gather around new ideas. William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark distinguished cult movements, client cults offering services such as psychic readings, and loosely organised audience cults spread through media; Bainbridge later said he regretted using the word at all.
Field research undercut dramatic assumptions. In the early 1960s John Lofland followed Unification Church recruiters in California and found most of their outreach failed; people who joined usually did so through friends or relatives. His study became one of the most cited on religious conversion. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described thought reform techniques, such as treating doctrine as beyond question, reducing complex life to slogans, and recasting doubt as personal failure.
The label has consequences. Catherine Wessinger argued it dehumanises members and their children, and some scholars say branding the Branch Davidians a cult contributed to the deaths at Waco. Ex-members, however, may find it empowering. Courts can weigh in too: in 2002 Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the government had defamed the Osho movement by calling it a destructive cult without factual basis.
Source: Cult
