So it turns out: labels matter. As a young Jesus freak in the 1970s I knew that Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness and Scientology were cults. At my high school, in harmless suburban Mission Viejo (CA) an older guy, not a student, showed up one day, claiming to be some kind of prophet with a higher knowledge and understanding of the Bible and got the attention of a couple of the girls in our group. I don’t remember whatever happened to the guy or his followers, but I recognized, even then, that all of this felt suspicious and was more than a little dangerous. At the same time my friends and I sampled all of the different flavors of Christianity that were available in our community, from the ultra-conservative Church of Christ (that didn’t believe in instrumental music in church services), to our local Calvary Chapel, to being the weirdo Jesus freaks in whatever church we originally were raised in (I identified as a Catholic Charismatic for a season or two). A bit later, I was a Biblical Studies student at Biola University when the whole People’s Temple suicide thing came down and I got a message from my Roman Catholic mother lamenting that I was going to end up in the same way. In her mind, switching from Roman Catholic to Fundamentalist Protestant was the same as drinking poisoned cool-aid. To her I was now part of a cult. And depending on who was speaking, maybe I was.

The danger is that almost every small church is going to claim that they have a better version of Christianity than the other churches down the street. Either the leader or the leadership is going to claim to be following the original teachings of Jesus better and that’s why you need to be a member of their church. It’s kind of a form of religious capitalism, where to be successful means beating out the competition. Traditional churches were more likely to recognize the “validity” of other churches, that it was a personal or family or historical choice whether one was going to attend there or at some other church. They were going to be less “we alone have the true gospel.” As a larger organization they have to claim some “superiority,” but locally we were all on the same team, just trying to serve our different communities. The “cults” tended to claim exclusive access to revelation or God. 

It’s so interesting that the word “cult” originally just designated an offshoot of some recognized religious practice and wasn’t by nature good or bad, just an offshoot. From example, the Essenes were a sect of 1st Century Judaism, some of whom practiced celibacy and withdrew from society while others married and raised children because they recognized that without families they would eventually disappear from history. Sadly they did disappear, but we have access of ancient Biblical texts and extra-Biblical texts because the Essenes were most likely responsible for what we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

So much of modern biblical scholarship is dependent on findings such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that give us so much of a broader perspective on our cultural and religious heritage beyond what was preserved by official religious channels. It makes one appreciate that there are those who choose to go a different path than what the official church instructed or demanded, and we’re all the better for it. While I still think that some religious cults are dangerous, maybe we need to think about it not in terms of religious divisions but just in terms of the welfare of the participants and how much choice they exercise in their given interpretation of their religious community and practice. At the same time, we still need to exercise extreme care that we are not prejudging based on our own personal categories and have no means to determine what is “right” for radically different cultures. At the least we need to be careful when we or others wield “exclusivity” as part of what our community or culture possesses. Maybe it’s good to determine if we’re not the “cult” that we so fear. 

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Tags: crash course religions, cults, in bad faith, personal religious history, video Mondays 

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