Cult pejoratively refers to a religious group whose beliefs or practices could be considered strange or sinister. The term was originally used to denote a system of ritual practices. The narrower, derogatory sense of the word is a product of the 20th century, especially since the 1980s, and is a result of the anti-cult movement, which uses the term in reference to groups seen as authoritarian, exploitative and possibly dangerous.
The popular, der...
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Cult pejoratively refers to a religious group whose beliefs or practices could be considered strange or sinister. The term was originally used to denote a system of ritual practices. The narrower, derogatory sense of the word is a product of the 20th century, especially since the 1980s, and is a result of the anti-cult movement, which uses the term in reference to groups seen as authoritarian, exploitative and possibly dangerous.
The popular, derogatory sense of the term has no currency in academic studies of religions, where "cults" are subsumed under the neutral label of "new religious movement", while academic sociology has partly adopted the popular meaning of the term.
The concept of "cult" was introduced into sociological classification in 1932 by American sociologist Howard P. Becker as an expansion of Ernst Troeltsch's church-sect typology. Troeltsch's aim was to distinguish between three main types of religious behavior: churchly, sectarian and mystical. Becker created four...
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