The particular complaint inherent in contemporary use of cult seems to arise from residuals of its earlier sense of a group dedicated to rituals of divine worship, especially pagan or Christian priestly devotions. In the hands of the non-priestly Protestant academy of the early 1900s these anti-Catholic sensibilities contributed to the development of a church-sect-cult typology that defined religion in terms of its own social forms. Cult covered the ground formerly occupied by heresy. Cults were off the map of true or real religion and sect was academically baptized back into it. This early 19th century map of religion was, however, a nostalgic one that sought to rationalize the dissolution of Christendom after the fact of Protestant protest and sectarian division.

To sociologist Max Weber is due the credit for first attempting to distill Christian religious organization to the ideal types church and sect without the theologically negative connotations of heresy and schism. In his 1904 classic The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, Weber concluded that a sect is a "the believer's Church," characterized by voluntary membership and the "principle of strict avoidance of the world." This definition of sect arose in the context of his larger analysis of religious adaptation in the early modern era, specifically within the Protestant reform movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ernst Troeltsch elaborated on Weber's church-sect typology in his 1911 The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, the primary source for all subsequent discussions of the subject. Troeltsch shared with Weber, his teacher, a sense of loss over the extent to which the ideal church is affected by its secure position in society. Troeltsch, however, considered Weber's definitional elements -- universality and separateness -- not weakness and strength, but rather two sides of the single coin of Christian ecclesiastical identity. First, in Pauline terms, the church is to be pure and unspotted from the world. Second, as an evangelical enterprise, it is required to constitute a superstructure into which the entire world can be invited. The fact that Christianity produces two types of organization is inherent in the dual requirements of its mission -- to save and to sanctify. Both sect and church, argued Troeltsch, are the natural, organizational response to these mutually exclusive demands.

For Troeltsch, sects become the repository of primitive Christianity's egalitarian and communitarian impulses which have become compromised by the church's social establishment. This, he sais, is the "conclusive insight into the sociological character of Christianity." It is also, like Weber's, a dichotomous insight: only two can play. Notwithstanding its intent to describe, not prescribe social process, Troeltsch's paradigm is a static one which, like Weber's, is oppositional: churches are large, universal, hierarchical and objective and sects are small, particular, egalitarian, and subjective. Churches mediate for the gathered masses and sects employ techniques of lay administration for an intimate collective of the elect. In cataloging these differences, Troeltsch explicitly sought to avoid extant negative connotations of sect as schism and church as dissipated. Nevertheless, by describing the church's definitive action as a "compromise," Troeltsch implied a judgment that invited from others the criticism he sought to avoid in his own writings. Richard Niebuhr is the most notable of these and escalates to blatant lament Weber's irony and Troeltsch's sense of regretful inevitability.

In subsequent years, the triumph of Troeltsch's church-sect typology and its continued vitality, notwithstanding much criticism, may be measured best in its extension to other contexts and entire disciplines. As early as mid the 1940's, it was employed to explain group differentiation with reference to race relations, economics and politics and it continues to exert wide influence in explaining the struggle between personal conviction and societal forms. In a 1988 article in Journal of Religious Ethics, Anthony Battaglia used "churchly" and "sectarian" to describe the response of ethicists and theologians to post-Enlightenment epistemology. Though acknowledging the imprecision of the church-sect terminology, Battaglia nevertheless insisted that as a typology "it captures a tension in Western religions (at least) that seems inescapable, and thus the distinction refuses to go away." The old sense of loss remains alive. Notwithstanding sociology's efforts to the contrary, the subjective sense of loss for a unitary church not only refuses to go away, but thrives in a variety of discourses seeking to describe the modern and, now post-modern, responses to the loss of objectivity and universality. Thus, it may prove to be true that, as Roland Robertson claims, "Religion as a category encapsulates the modern sense of 'what we have lost.' Much of it is a part of modernity's nostalgia." (See, Secularization, Rationalism, and Sectarianism: Essays in Honour of Bryan R. Wilson)

Notwithstanding our search for predictive, ideal types for religion, we live in a particular time and place. Not only do church-sect-cult definitions have a history; they are also grounded in the history of that which they seek to typify. This may be the first point worth remembering for those who seek to define “real religion:” even high-minded conversations over what is religion occur in the cultural context of the failure of a particular religious ideal. As for the street use of “cult,” it bears the nostalgia for the unity of Christendom in its most aggressive form, vainly trying to establish by epithet what is and is not “real religion.”