Cult Religions (Part One)

Anatomy of a Cult

Most religions are not cults.

Most churches are not cults.

Most religions did not start off as cults.

Few established denominations are cults.

The difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is broad, distinct and definite.

Cults are a business model, a type of confidence game. The sole objective behind a cult is to provide a living for its operator. Cults are largely a service business and follow the model of such to the letter: they are all about sales, profit, expansion and cost reduction. Like many service businesses in a crowded sector, the first order of business is to create a distinction in your offering, target a market, manifest materials and start rolling with the networking.

This is completely different from the process in which most churches are formed. People take their religion with them. When there are enough people of like minds about, they raise a church and perhaps hire a preacher. Or the denomination determines that there are enough people in an area to raise a church that may draw people of their persuasion.

Religion is a mature business. One would almost think that there isn’t room for another one. In a rational world, this would be the last business that anyone would go into. There are large, fairly well funded competitors. Trend-lines for the industry as a whole are heading downward. It’s very economically sensitive—cyclical in a bad way: income goes up in good times, expenses go up in bad times. When done correctly, overhead eats all of the capital. Despite a history dating back to the start of mankind, only a distinct minority of these entities can claim long term solvency. Coca-Cola it isn’t.

It is Coca-Cola on another level, inasmuch as most people prone to having a preference in such a product already have a brand that they like or grew up with. Religions, like soft drinks, have necessary components. That is not to say that they are all the same—they are not---but rather that the mature ones all come to have the same features.

All religions start as philosophies and methodologies. It’s either an enlightening way of thinking or a way to make it rain. To the degree such are satisfying, they spread. (Long story, short.) Christianity starts as the sayings of Christ, grows testaments and additive books, becomes a movement in the Roman sub culture and is eventually made the official religion of the second most powerful political entity in the world. At some point, it grew a bureaucracy. More was expected of it. At no point, from the memorization and reciting of Christ’s phrases up until the moment it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, is Christianity a method of making anyone rich. Quite the opposite. It goes through several hundred years of being a voluntary cause of preventable death.

This is very different from how cults are formed. It is different in function and intention from how cults operate. The majority of cults are formed by people who have been kicked out of another religion. This is what is known as a schism. Even here, however, there is a distinction. Few schisms are cults. Most cults are schisms. That said, the motive behind the splits boil down to two issues: sex and money.

Cults are particularly scandal born and money focused. The leader has been booted because of sex and/or money and he tries to pinch off parts of his old flock to start a new church. Distinctions in philosophy from the main body will flow from here. Cults are also formed as an attempt to formalize a trans-denominational movement. On one occasion a cult was formed after the proprietor failed to sell his service as a science. But these are outliers.

We will deal with cult denominations, common cult operations and types of cults in follow up postings. So far I have given you the general causes for action and points distinguishing a cult from any other religious form.  Having thus far explained the birds and the bees, our focus in the remainder of this posting is in describing the organ itself—a cult’s anatomy. It is a beast apart from the standard religion.

Your average starting cult master has just departed from another religious body. It’s either a voluntary or involuntary move. If the guy is lucky, he’s had time to plan it. Any way you play it, he’s just gone from employed to unemployed.

I can paint a thousand scenarios here. Most of these guys have some skills and some training. Priest is a profession with many different niches. Degrees in theology, counseling and even Music Ministry require an uncommon degree of dedication to obtain. Most of these skills are transportable—and none of them really lend themselves towards entrepreneurial expression. Priests are hirelings. They work for groups. They don’t generally start new, unaligned organizations. Like most folks, they like the steady income and the safety that entails. Getting launched is a blow.

If Mike the Music Minister says he’s leaving Madison Street Church, where music ministry is an afterthought, for Big Sandy Open Bible, which has an integrated music service and events facilities, it’s understandable. It’s about Mike being able to use his talents to a further extent. It would also not be beyond the pale if Mike, a part time Music Minister, leaves once a full time Youth Minister has been hired. That is also understandable. Mike is not qualified to be a Youth Minister and his position is subsumed. Sucks, but it happens. Mike needs to go someplace bigger or different. What wouldn’t make sense is Mike suddenly disappearing from Ministry A and reappearing as a one man show in the basement of the local Stucky’s. That’s not rational. Something went wrong.

Let me paint you the typical picture. Mike got caught doing something very wrong (sex or money)—and not for the first time. The church booted him—and hung a can around Mike so that no other church in the area/denomination will touch him. (They may not have had a choice. An arrest may have been involved.) Mike hits up some pals in the flock for loans—not for him, but for his new ministry. Now Mike and his new flock (the woman he was cheating with, her family, the guys he hit up for cash, their families) are meeting in the basement of Stucky’s and the local community center and trolling the parks.

Has Mike formed a cult?

He’s close. He has most of the anatomy down. Mike has the typical motivation—and origin story.

Most cult leaders do not have transportable skills. Or their credentials have been impaired: they have a horse pucky degree from an unaccredited bible program plus a ministerial license, both issued from the very institution which has just given them the heave ho. (A close look at any number of cult leader biographies will show this pattern.) Our boy has got to eat, so he either needs to find something else to do (would you like fires with that) or strike out on his own (I am the new Apostle/Messiah/Witness/Messenger). If he can swing it, he can look forward to an exciting life of living off others. If he can’t, he blows town with what is left of his operating capital. That is the cult game plan in a nut shell.

In the above example it is possible to detect three of the four necessary conditions for defining an organization as a cult. The first is proprietorship. Mike owns the church. At this point, Mike pretty much is the church. You can argue that Mike is just getting started, but his methods are far removed from the way in which most churches are formed. Most churches belong either to the laity, through a trust and a council or are owned by a set denomination. Churches which are owned or controlled by a sole person, or a close held corporate whole, are proprietary. Almost all cult churches are proprietary. It’s the first sniff of the sniff test.  

Second, Mike’s church is unaccountable. There may be a few handshake loans involved, but for the most part, what Mike says goes. No one tells Mike what to say. No one has the ability to look over the till but Mike. For guys like Mike, being unaccountable isn’t simply a by-product of the start-up nature of his operation—it’s the point of his operation. Bad things happen to people with unlimited power. The history of religion is rife with examples.

It could be argued that some of this can be excused, given that Mike is just getting his act off the ground.

Mike has the ownership and freedom that he has been seeking. Now all Mike has to do is make a living at it. Nothing wrong with that.

Not that Mike didn’t stink to start with, but his organization is already starting to show the third necessary attribute for defining a group as a cult, the Double Standard. There are at least two sets of members in the organization. Mike being the corporate sole sets this in motion. It’s up to Mike and God how his church is to be run. The woman Mike was fooling around with and the two guys who gave Mike money are also more than equal members of the flock. Heading down the road, proximity to these four people is likely to determine the pecking order in this church.

Stratification within groups of people is inevitable, however this is quite different than what would happen in a standard church. In most churches the stratification confers no undue rights or authority. The Priest is an employee, subservient to the denomination and answerable to the local elders. The deacons are representatives of the laity. All are more or less equal in the eyes of the governing body, at least in a perfect world, at least by design, at least by intent.

Not in Mike’s church. At the least, Mike has special customers. The woman whose marriage he screwed up is special. (She thinks.) The two guys who footed the bill for Mike’s start up need to be paid special attention. The attribution of Mike’s attention and indulgence cascades down from this point. The more stratified Mike’s organization becomes, the more cult-like it will be.

It’s the difference between operating in a nation of laws as opposed to a nation where law is derived from the opinion of one man. The authoritarian set-up may never be good anywhere, but it is particularly odious in religious institutions.

One might use the above as a condemnation of many established religions, such as the Catholics or the Anglicans. That would be stretching my point. Only in a cult religion does the minister of the flock have near total say over comportment towards the membership. To the extent that organized faiths have run into trouble with abusing the members, it has come about by violating rules that were in place. (Not that this excuses it.) In a cult religion there are no rules to violate.

If Mike is successful, which I will define as enabling him to sustain his previous standard of living, this may be as far as his cult gets. As far as it goes, it’s hardly much of a cult and it hardly seems dangerous. The general pattern at this stage is that Mike lives well and plays it out for as long as he can. We will cover the typical street corner operations people like Mike ply in our next posting, but this is all most cults ever wind up being. Sadly, this set up is bad enough.

Thankfully most of the Mikes in this world bomb out before the stage where their cult becomes sustainable. Unfortunately, they recycle, they network, they group, they reanimate in new form. Most aspiring cult leaders are going to fail many times before they get it right. Sadly, there are no shortage of places where the carny religion-prone can find themselves a new school for scandal. Once guys like Mike go bad, they keep trucking and a minority of them will succeed either by themselves or within a group of like minded charlatans.

As silly as my Mike story sounds, I have just given you the biography of nearly every preacher on the protestant cable religious network. What separates the Mikes on television from the Mikes still preaching out of an abandoned warehouse in Lynchburg is schtick. The final necessary attribute defining a cult is its distinctive doctrine. I will cover the topics in depth in a later post, but the three winning themes are (1) The way is narrower than you think; (2) God wants to make you rich; and (3) I have magic powers. Most cults do a mix of all three. Established denominations avoid these three themes like the plague. Since they are largely blasphemous, ludicrous and without substantiation, they are plied only by the veteran carnival performers who make up the world of Big Cults.

How you get to these three winning themes is the art of being a cult master. There is no real evolution on the part of the cult master’s thinking involved. The Big Three themes are tried and true winners. All the Mikes of the world have to do is stumble on them and then fabricate a justification.

Coming up with something new in  a field as pecked over as religion can be hard work. But you can base an entire cosmology off a single slanting. For example many standard issue denominations teach that Christ knew he was going to be crucified for a substantial period of time before it took place. This teaching is not justified by any close reading of the texts. An entirely new interpretation of Christ’s teachings can be based upon the idea of a less than fully cosmically aware godhead. A cult leader such as David Pack could wend this new truth into seven three hour sermons of original material without batting an eye. (Incomplete perception on the part of the godhead is not a Pack teaching.) The key is that it would be a teaching only available at Cult Church. And once you have the bible saying what you want, tying it back to the Big Three is no problem. That said, most cult leaders will just rip each other off or graft random scripture bits together to make the bible say what they want. The bible says I have special insight. Enough.

Just teaching the Big Three is enough justification for me to label a group a cult. But why be spare about it? Almost all cults will have all four attributes going for them. Even better, as far as the sniff test is concerned, no legitimate church will. And if you just want to do a quick test, check out what Mister Wonderful’s credentials really are.

Cults are all around us. Every protestant preacher on the television is a spokesman for a cult. Many of the ones on radio are, too. Cults are extremely dangerous, as we will detail in our next posting.

Coda:

I hope that everyone is having a good week. I intend to have this series done by New Years, for those of you tuning out due to the religious nature of our topics.