What is a cult?

Question 60018.

Ask ten people what makes a group a cult and you will get ten answers, most of them about atmosphere rather than substance. It is small. It is intense. It is odd. It made my cousin move to Wales. Used that loosely the word becomes a way of saying that I find a group unpleasant, and a word that can be aimed at anyone eventually means nothing at all.

I want to be more careful than that, for two reasons. Careless use of the label slanders sincere believers, and careless use also blunts the warning when a group really is dangerous. So let me set out what I mean by the word, and how I decide whether it applies.

Two different questions hiding in one word

There are really two conversations here. The theological one asks whether a group holds to the essentials of the Christian faith or denies them while still using Christian language. The sociological one asks whether a group controls its members in abusive ways. The first is about doctrine, the second about behaviour, and they do not always travel together.

You can find a group that is doctrinally orthodox and behaviourally abusive, and I have had to help people out of churches like that. You can also find a group with a settled denial of the gospel whose members are, on the surface, gentle and free. Both matter. When I use the word in its strict sense I mean the theological one, and I try to say so.

A theological definition of a cult

In theological terms, a cult is a movement that claims the name of Jesus while denying one or more of the doctrines without which the Christian faith collapses. It grows out of Christianity, borrows its vocabulary, and reshapes its centre. That is different from another religion altogether, and it is different again from a Christian group I disagree with about baptism or church government.

The New Testament category closest to this is the word rendered faction or party, hairesis, from which we get heresy. Peter writes of teachers who bring in destructive opinions and even deny the Master who bought them. Paul is sharper still, saying that if anyone preaches a gospel contrary to the one we preached, let him be accursed. That is not the language of preference. It is the language of rescue.

The doctrinal marks of a cult

The first mark is a redefined Jesus. Paul warned the Corinthians about those who come proclaiming another Jesus, and every group of this kind eventually does exactly that. He becomes a created being, or an ascended master, or a brother of Lucifer, or an ordinary man on whom a divine spirit descended. The name is retained and the Person is replaced.

The second mark is an added authority. Alongside Scripture there appears a further revelation, a prophet, a magazine, a translation produced in house, or an interpretation only the leadership can supply. In practice the addition always outranks the Bible, whatever is said officially, because it tells you what the Bible is allowed to mean.

The third mark is a salvation that runs through the organisation. Forgiveness, or paradise, or full membership among the redeemed, comes by staying inside and doing what is required. That is why leaving is so terrifying for those raised inside. They are not weighing a change of church. They believe they are choosing hell.

The behavioural marks

Alongside the doctrine there is usually a pattern of control, and it is remarkably consistent across groups that share nothing else. Information is managed, so members are steered away from outside sources and taught that critics are motivated by hatred. Relationships are managed, so that leaving costs you your family and every friend you have. Questions are treated as symptoms of a spiritual problem rather than as questions.

There is also the leader who cannot be challenged. Where a man’s word functions as the voice of God, and where accountability runs downward but never upward, you have the machinery of harm regardless of the doctrinal statement on the website. Jesus told us to test the tree by its fruit, and part of that fruit is how the powerless are treated when nobody is watching.

What does not make a group a cult

Being small does not make a group a cult. Being unpopular does not. Holding to old fashioned convictions about morality, or expecting real commitment from members, does not. The early church was tiny, widely despised and demanding, and it was the truth. If we call every serious congregation dangerous we will have nothing left to say when a genuinely predatory group appears.

Disagreement within the Christian family is a different matter altogether. I am a Baptist. I differ with my Presbyterian and Anglican friends about baptism, and with my Reformed friends about how God saves, and I do not think for a moment that they belong in this discussion. Where the gospel is held and Jesus is confessed as He is, we are brothers arguing in the same house. Knowing which doctrines are actually essential is what keeps the word from being thrown around carelessly.

Why the label is worth using at all

Because people are at stake. If a movement teaches a different Jesus and a salvation that must be earned inside the walls, then the kindest thing anyone can do is say so plainly, however uncomfortable the doorstep conversation becomes. Paul did not treat false teaching as a difference of style. He treated it as a wolf among sheep, and he named names.

At the same time the label is a starting point rather than a verdict on a person. The man at my door is not my enemy. He is someone who has been given a false Jesus and is working very hard for a salvation he cannot earn. If I use the word to dismiss him rather than to describe his teaching, I have used it badly. This is why I have written separately about Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism rather than lumping everything together.

Helping someone caught in one

Patience is the whole strategy. People rarely leave because they lost an argument on the doorstep. They leave over years, because a question was planted that would not go away, and because somebody outside kept being kind to them long after it stopped being convenient. Stay in touch. Keep the door open. Do not make agreement the price of friendship.

Ask questions rather than firing verses. What did the organisation teach thirty years ago that it no longer teaches? What happens to someone here who disagrees? Where do you get your assurance? And when the door opens, be ready to show them Jesus in the Gospels rather than a system, because a system is what they are exhausted by. John’s instruction to test the spirits is given to ordinary believers, not to specialists, and the tools for it are in your hands already. It is worth learning how to recognise false teachers before you need to.

Why people join in the first place

Nobody joins a cult. People join a community that seems warm, certain and serious at a moment when their own life is none of those things. The recruitment almost never begins with doctrine. It begins with attention, with someone remembering your name, with a group that has time for you in a week where nobody else did.

That matters for how we speak about those inside. The assumption that only gullible or unintelligent people are drawn in is comforting and false. Bereavement, a move to a new city, the collapse of a marriage, a serious illness, the first year of university: these are the moments when almost anyone is reachable, and a cult recruits at exactly those points because its members are actually looking.

It also puts a question to the rest of us. If a group with a false Jesus can offer a lonely person more welcome, more purpose and more genuine friendship than the church at the end of the road, then part of the answer to the problem is not better arguments but better churches. I would rather my congregation were known for the sort of belonging that leaves nobody with a vacancy for a cult to fill.

So, now what?

If you are trying to work out whether a group is a cult, start with Jesus. Ask who they say He is, where their final authority sits, and what they say a person must do to be right with God. Those three questions will take you further than any list of odd behaviours, and they can be asked politely over a cup of tea.

If you have come out of one, or you are inching toward the door, I want you to hear that the Jesus of the New Testament is not the one you were sold. He does not measure your hours, He is not waiting for you to reach a standard, and He does not need an organisation to make you His. Read John’s Gospel slowly and let Him speak for Himself. That is where recovery usually begins.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

Galatians 1:8 (ESV)