I used to have a book on my shelves which had the title When a Church becomes a Cult.  It has not survived the house moves since retirement, so I can only remember its contents in outline.  I believe it was written with a conservative Christian perspective so that I was not in agreement with some of its presuppositions.  But the problems that the book raised, even in its title, are important ones to all of us.  However much we want to see clear water between our churches and fellowships and the so-called cults, the contrast or differences between them are not always so obvious to an onlooking public.   How many non-church people can clearly tell the difference between door-knocking Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of a local Pentecostal group? 

As the long-term readers of this blog will know, I have been a member and a participant in an international organisation which studies the groups, political and religious, that are loosely described as cults.  The organisation called ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association), has been encouraging the study of these ‘high-demand’ groups for over 40 years.  The association is aware of the difficulties of language in this area of study.  While I do not propose to offer definitions of the word cult, there is a consensus that it is appropriate to use the adjectival form, cultic, to denote the fact that there are many groups which share a family resemblance to well-known and publicly identified cults.  These latter ones would include such groups as Jim Jones’ community in Guyana, the Branch Davidians of Waco and the Korean based group, commonly called Moonies after their founder, Sun Myung Moon. 

My ICSA membership and the conversations it has allowed me to have during their conferences, has kept me constantly asking myself a key question.  While churches would normally vigorously distinguish themselves from cultic bodies, are they all justified in doing so?  This blog piece will suggest that some church bodies do stray into behaving in ways that are close to those practised by high demand cultic groups.  When they do this, it is not surprising if observers on the outside find it hard always to tell the differences between them.   The impression that the outside world picks up about the behaviour of leaders and members of some of our churches does not always conform to the highest standards of ethical behaviour.  Social media followers and readers of daily newspapers also cannot be blamed if they pick up some strange ideas about what Christians claim to believe. If the Church were to be only to be a network of closed social groups, then its public reputation and profile might not matter.  If, on the other hand, it wants to reach out to the wider society with a message, then the reputation it wants to have is of some considerable importance.

I have pondered the apparent similarities between the groups we describe as cultic and some churches. Here I want touch on three areas where there is room for misunderstandings and seeming overlap.  The first is in the area of a claim to possess utterly reliable, even infallible, texts.   For the Christian this would normally be a devotion to the Bible. On its own devotion to the words of Scripture is not in itself a sign of cultic leanings. Other groups might find their ultimate authority in other foundation texts like the Book of Mormon or the writings of L Ron Hubbard. In the second place, we would expect to find at the centre of every cultic group, and churches which resemble them, a leader who exercises a degree of charismatic and coercive control over ordinary members.  In some groups and churches this control would appear to be abusive and exploitative.  A third feature of the more dedicated cultic groups is their readiness to withdraw from mainstream society and engage in what we might regard as intense forms of community living.

In each of these three marks of behaviour or practice which can slip over into the cultic arena, we can see that some churches are not always clearly differentiated from full-blown cultic groups.  The first area where some Christian bodies seem to have much in common with cultic groups is in the way that the group treats its primary written authority.  Whether it is the Bible, or some unique revelation given to a founder, a similar dependence and devotion to that scripture can be seen.  At this point I am not arguing for or against the truth of any written authority around which a church or cultic group is organised.  I simply note that such a document is used as a touchstone for everything else.  The believer/devotee is tied to that document as the mediating force of all truth.  If a belief or form of behaviour is thought to be contradicted by the central source document, it has to be rejected.  This is what I have elsewhere called binary thinking.  Not all examples of binary thinking qualify a church to be described as cultic, but all cultic groups seem to operate with this notion that everything is either true or false.   There is no space for a gradual discovery of any new insight or revelation.  All that is important has already been written down for our learning by L Ron Hubbard, Moon or God.  From my perspective such binary thinking Christians are moving with a similar world perspective as that operating within all the cultic groups.  I have written about this attitude to truth many times.  My summary here will be to say that, if truth is found at the beginning of life’s journey, there is no possibility of discovering newness, creativity and wonder at some stage late in life. Binary thinking is a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac, and it is hard to escape from it.

Along with binary thinking there is another feature of cultic groups which they share with many Christian bodies. This is what I call the narcissistic exchange. This expression summarises a distinctive but often toxic quality of relationship found in Christian and cultic groups alike. It describes the adulation and prominence given to a leader when followers get caught up in a kind of uncritical worship of their figurehead.   It is narcissistic because first it seems to be feeding an inner need for such flattery and importance in the leader.  Often the leader is deliberately kept physically apart from the followers so as to enhance his mystique and apparent holiness.  This kind of superior detachment is apparent in both the cults and some large churches.  The inner circle around the leader is there to protect the leader/guru from getting too close to the followers. They might then see behind the curtain that the leader is an ordinary fallible human being.  The followers do, of course, have their chance to venerate a leader when he appears at a highly choreographed event like a service or gathering.  They then receive their ‘narcissistic feeding’ because the leader will do his own version of flattery towards the congregation.  He will tell them that they are the chosen saved group and he will always protect them.  The self-esteem of the individual followers is this way being fed by the scraps of attention that they receive, even at a distance. In a somewhat different context, we see something of this narcissistic exchange going on in political rallies organised by Donald Trump.

The third area of recognisably cultic experience which churches share with the cultic groups is the way that each organises the experience of community life.  Loneliness is a major problem in our society and there is particular trauma associated with growing up in Western societies. The trauma experienced by most young people is that around leaving home.  The support of parents is not always available when the adult world is first encountered. Many churches and cultic groups recognise this state of deprivation. They offer experiences of community life which may make few demands on those who come. The problem about fellowships in some churches and cultic groups is that they may be offered as a kind of palliative to the trauma of growing up.  Here you don’t have to engage with conflict and other painful learning about relationships that is the normal part of entering adulthood. To offer fellowship or an instant friendship circle to a lonely individual may act as an instant pain relief in the short term, but it may not be necessarily in the individual’s long-term interest. One of the issues much discussed at the ICSA conferences is the issue of readjustment to modern society after membership of a cult. In some cases, the individual has never had to deal with conflict, housing, money or mature relationships. At the age of 35, the ex-cult/fellowship member may find themselves all alone and unable to cope emotionally or practically with the world that they had been encouraged to leave behind at the age they joined the church or cultic group.

These three experiences, binary thinking, narcissistic exchange and claustrophobic experiences of community life – these are three areas which can create emotional, social and intellectual disability in churches and cultic groups alike.  An army of psychotherapists seem to exist in the States to help individuals recover and return to maturity and resilience, but far fewer seem to exist in Britain.  It is not that we lack qualified people to do psychotherapy, but few trained here seem to understand the religious aspects of the trauma created by cultic groups and the churches that resemble them.  The therapists in the States also face the current political madness of Trumpian inspired conspiracy theories.  This deeply corrupted thinking seems thoroughly entrenched in churches of many kinds.  To call it a political and religious craziness is probably no exaggeration

In the New Testament there is a word which is translated perfect. The Greek word, teleios, in fact means something like complete or mature. The question that we have is whether we are helping those who come to our churches to move towards completion, fulfilment and the finding of their full potential. Surely that is a good and laudable aim for all Christian churches, one that does not involve the immaturity found so many cult-like fellowships and congregations.