The term "cult" is a pejorative label used to describe certain religious groups outside of the mainstream of Western religion. Exactly which groups should be considered cults is a matter of disagreement amongst researchers in the cult phenomena, and considerable confusion exists. However, three definitions dominate the writings of social scientists, Christian counter-cult ministries, and secular ant cultists (Singer, 72-82).
When social scientists began their discussion of cults in the 1920s, they were aware of only a few cult groups, well-known groups which they could not fit into their more crucial debates about churches versus sects--theosophy, Christian Science, spiritualism, and the two large Hindu groups: the Vedanta Society and the Self-Realization Fellowship. Elmer Clark's pioneering survey of The Small Sects in America listed fourteen New Thought bodies and thirteen esoteric bodies, showing an awareness of some twenty-seven cults.
A second definition of cult arose among Christian polemicists. In the early twentieth century several conservative Evangelical Protestant writers, concerned about the growth of different religions in America, attacked these religions for their deviation from Christian orthodox faith (Tobias, 300-327).
The third definition, the one which became the dominant force in the public debates on cults in the 1970s, developed within the secular anti-cult movement. The definition has shifted and changed over the last decade. It did not develop out of any objective research on alternative religions, rather it emerged in the intense polemics of parents who had been disturbed by changes observed in their sons and daughters who had joined particular religious groups. These "cults"--predominantly the Children of God, the Church of Armageddon, the Unification Church, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, and the Church of Scientology--had, they charged, radically altered the personality traits of their children (Martin, Langone, Dole, Wiltrout, 219-250)...................
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