Several things strike me when I hear that word applied as a term of opprobrium to fairly large, well established faiths (Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists have all been targets of this abuse).

First, it often says more about the user than the abused. Do people feel so insecure in their own faith that they need to resort to defining a group as a cult as a means of reassuring themselves? It may be quite convenient to dismiss other faiths in this way, but it does nothing for serious dialogue or understanding.

A couple of years ago I was seated on a plane next to someone who was reading a book with which I was familiar. I knew that it described The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in disparaging terms as a cult. In the inevitable conversation that followed, I asked my fellow traveler to define the word. For every definition he offered, for example, “a group showing religious veneration of a person or object,” or “a small group of people whose religious beliefs are considered strange or anti-social,” it was a simple matter to point out that each one applied precisely to the beginnings of Christianity, to the Protestant reformers and, of course, to Islam and Judaism.

Way back in New Testament Times, when the apostle Paul shared the Christian message with Jewish community leaders in Rome, they responded: “…as concerning this sect, we know that every where it is spoken against” (Acts 28:22). The rest, as they say, is history. The sect, or cult, became the religion of the Roman Empire and today is the dominant faith throughout much of the world. Unorthodox religious thought gradually became orthodoxy. It’s easy to forget that we now decide what is religiously acceptable by measuring it against a global faith system that was once a hated and feared sect.

As for what constitutes religion, I think the Book of James in the New Testament summarizes it rather succinctly:

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (James 1:27).

So is the term “cult” ever justified? I think so, but it should be used with care. The Aum Shinrikyo followers who released sarin gas on Tokyo subways in 1995, or groups nearer to home that induced mass suicide or violent behavior toward society as a whole, are examples. But the word “cult” should never be applied as a means of masking our own intolerance for competing faiths that simply differ from our own.