According to some experts more than five hundred new religions arose in the world just last year. Almost all these movements fade as quickly as they arise, even fewer make it to ever wind up being known by anyone outside a very small circle and then there are those that make a enough of a splash (often by attracting the young and/or the wealthy) that they get the attention of established religious authorities who feeling threatened use the word cult as shorthand for a movement that “brainwashes”, “manipulates”, “oppresses woman”, “requires submission”, “separates people from their families and societies”…Of course recent best selling authors Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennet claim the religions we know best function in just these ways.

So like most of these sort of questions the devil/divine is in the details. There is no firm objective line between a religion and a cult that we can just plug in to distinguish between good and authentic religion and evil and nasty cults. My rule is when some religious authority calls some new religious/spiritual group a cult e.g., in my own community when established Jewish religious authorities call groups like the Kabbalah Center or Aish Hatorah a cult, or even when I reflexively feel some group is a cult, I first reflect on the possibility that jealousy and envy are hiding out in the designation cult. Am I jealous of the passion, commitment, energy, success, enthusiasm, purity, newness and excitement the group generates? What are the partial truths these groups are tapping into about life and people and meaning and purpose? Where has my own Way become dull, routine and rote? In the face of these questions, more often than not, the fear of some cult dissipates and my own religious theory and practice is deepened. (This is precisely what has happened personally in my relation to Jews for Jesus - clearly considered a cult by most Jews and feared by many religious authorities. While I disagree in almost every way with Jew for Jesus, by asking these questions I learned a great deal about my own community including the lack of overtly and clearly expressed love as a central public currency in my community.)

Only after I go through this process do I then ask the questions that we always should be asking about any group of which we are a part. What is the difference between brainwash and indoctrinate? What is the difference between manipulate and confidently persuade? What is the different between dangerous charismatic leadership and galvanizing visionary leadership? What distinguishes unhealthy submission of my identity to the group and healthy contracting of my ego to more deeply connect to those around me? What is the difference between dangerous separatism and exclusivity of a group and the solidarity of and commitment to my “chosen” group? The answers to these questions usually challenge me as much to think about my own group as to think about the feared cult and that clarity helps me better understand what is genuinely dangerous about what we call cults.

So what is the difference between a cult and a religion? It is not that one man's cult is another man's religion or one man's religion is another man's cult but neither are the groups we rush to call cults as dangerous as we make them. As all powerful labels, the word cult reveals as much as it hides about both the groups designated with the dreaded label and the groups dong the designated. The key metrics for whatever group one is whether belonging to the group and abiding by its ways increases ones Self-awareness (helps one see the truths about oneself) and enhances ones ability to care and love ever-widening circles.