The Church Down the Street
Dean Kelley, religious liberty executive for the National Council of Churches for more than three decades, used to say that a cult is what you called the church down the street! My religion is never a cult; it’s a term we use for someone else’s.
To employ the pejorative term “cult,” instead of “religion” or “church,” sets up a false and prejudicial dichotomy between good and bad religion. Indeed, my Baptist forbears — in London, Amsterdam, Boston, and Culpeper, Va. — would have been tagged a “cult” by popular religionists of their day. Heaven forbid we should repeat that error today.
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