A Genealogy of a Subject Heading: ‘Cults,’ New Religious Movements, and Nomenclature in the Academic Study of Religions

In 2019, Atla began our critical reassessment of the RDB and AtlasPLUS thesaurus, updating and reconsidering the controlled vocabulary integral to the databases. Our databases provide subject indexing for journal articles, reviews, and essays supporting the study of religion. Some updates cover contentious or emerging issues, while others are engendered by observations from research in the fields covered in the databases. This relationship between academic research and knowledge organization produces a multi-faceted community of practice comprising researchers, librarians, bibliographers-subject specialists, and users of the database. Atla is part of this research and practitioner community and shares their care and commitment to language and description.

All of this informs our reassessment as we consider the continued utility of the term ‘cults’ as a subject heading for information retrieval. This research community has largely jettisoned the term because of its negative prejudgment of social phenomenon: it is popularly used as a social or political tool — to besmirch the position or reputation of another. Instead, this community largely refers to the same social phenomena with the term ‘New Religious Movements’ (henceforth NRMs). ‘Cults’ is a contentious term that persists in popular usage.

This essay offers a genealogy of the term ‘cults’ so we can better support the use of ‘NRMs’ as the primary description in library materials. We have to understand ‘cults’ because that’s where ‘NRM’s came from. These fragments trace the etymology and popular application of ‘cults’, through to its use in the social scientific study of religion, and then to an understanding of how and why NRMs is a readymade replacement. In the process, we’ll ensure that we are describing the same things with the two terms — best understood as a constellation of human social phenomena — popularly called ‘cults’. With this developed understanding, we conclude with some examples of the human-personal stakes of the persistent use of ‘cults’ in juridical-political, cultural, and geo-political settings. 

There’s plenty of negativity to go around

What’s the problem with a negative prejudice? James T. Robinson (1993) shows why scholars avoid the term for this reason. Because of

the negative connotations of the term cult […] the term ‘cult’ should be severely limited in scholarly and other writings about religious groups. To do otherwise promotes the agenda of those using the term as a social weapon against new and exotic religious groups […] scholars should abandon the term cult, in favor of terms which have not been so taken over with popular negative usage.

Continuing to use this term confirms and legitimates the negative claims made by those wielding this weapon. The problem with this negativity is that ‘cults’ functions as a negative prejudgment, whose use confirms the user’s prejudices. This attempt at professional disinterest is a research virtue extendable to our librarian’s task.

Nomenclature debates and the academic study of religion

For a broad audience, I want to provide a background on the academic study of religion, a massive field sharing no methodology, with no shared concerns, no unifying approaches, and only nominally sharing the same object. The academic study of religion occurs across many disciplines, concerned with myriad data and human phenomena, utilizing a multitude of academic disciplines. Researchers often critique the very construction and conception of what makes something ‘religious’, ‘sacred’, and/or ‘Holy;’ the field is often described as ‘in crisis’ for those reasons. I will continually use ‘this field’ but it’s a constellation of fields.

Across this field, researchers are keen to accurately name and describe religious phenomena.  Nomenclature is this practice: choosing names for things in scientific discourses. It’s the perfect name for what we are doing here, and it constitutes a lot of the academic study of religion, too. That’s also why I sometimes refer to our task as a ‘nomenclature debate’: cults v. NRMs. Keep the vastness of these fields in mind, as we proceed! We focus on the social sciences of religion and History of Religions school, but a study like this can start from anywhere among the fields.

Cults & cultus: ritual, practices, and cultivation of the gods

There are upwards of 900 different Religion-focused encyclopedias and reference materials to choose from. I’ve chosen two works that aren’t specialist titles and likely accessible to the reader: the Wendy Doniger edited volume Encyclopedia of Religion and the larger Mircea Eliade Encyclopedia of Religion. Both are good entry points into the etymology of the term ‘cults’.   

The 1999 Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions, edited by world-renowned religions scholar and theorist, Wendy Doniger, provides a two-part definition of ‘cults’. ‘Cult’ simply refers to “collective veneration or worship,” the practical aspects of religion. The short entry concludes with the observation, “in the West, cults are usually thought of as groups that have deviated from normative religions. […] often identifying new religions which are viewed as foreign, peculiar, or dangerous.” Of course, there is no necessary connection between collective worship and novel forms of religion.  Elsewhere, this work is instructive as it begins a multi-page article on “New Religious Movements,” clearly stating that NRMs are “the generally accepted term for what is called (often with pejorative connotations) a ‘cult.'” 

With over 900 works, I wanted to highlight the less specialized materials and so, we turned to the Mircea Eliade edited 1987 16 volume work The Encyclopedia of Religion.  For ‘cults’ Eliade et al refer us to other entries on New Religions, Community, and so on. What is instructive here is the next entry for ‘Cult of Saints’, which addresses the proper collective veneration and rites associated with Christian saints and martyrs, a form of indirect worship of God. Here too, we get the same worship and veneration, as a primary understanding of ‘cults’.

‘Semantic shift’ describes the change of a terms’ primary meaning over time. ‘Cults’ has undergone quite the shift from “collective worship” to “social problem.” James T. Robertson (1993) provides a history of this shift in the social scientific study of religion. He finds an original technical use of ‘cult’ in a taxonomy describing levels of religious institutionality, organizational establishment, and sophistication. In this way ‘cult’ was used to describe a less-than-institutional religious organization, interested in subjectivity, mysticism, possibly charismatic authority, less formal than a sect, or a church. He shows how the term then shifts to refer to small groups, loosely organized around the above with seeming cultural differences, as in a counter-culture framework. Finally, he captures the ossified negative assessment of ‘cults’ as deviant, problematic small groups, utilizing extreme forms of social control. I think what we arrive at is a sense of extreme difference, where the question is ‘when is it too different’. 

To understand the role of difference in the semantic shift of ‘cults’, we turn to the archaic but related term, cultus. Since at least the seventeenth century cultus referred to the veneration, worship, devotional practice, or homage to deities. Most Oxford English Dictionary entries demonstrate the primacy of the worship definition, referring to this practical activity as the historical sense of the term.  We can confidently associate ‘cults’ with cultus. In Atla’s databases, one encounters the term cultus in such topical subject headings like: ‘cultus, Israeli’; ‘cultus, Hittite’; ‘cultus, Egyptian’.[i] Similarly, Library of Congress linked data service provides these examples: ‘Pharaohs — ‘cultus’’ as a variant for ‘Pharaohs — Religious Aspects’, and suggests ‘Emperor — Cult’ as a variant for ‘Emperor worship’ as in cases dealing with Rome. Imperial religion is a common way to developing our understanding of the active and practical aspects of cultus. Wikipedia for instance illustrates cultus relying primarily on the imperial cult of the Roman emperor as its main framework.  Wikipedia editors write,

Cult is the care (Latin: cultus) owed to deities and temples, shrines, or churches. Cult is embodied in ritual and ceremony. Its present or former presence is made concrete in temples, shrines and churches, and cult images, including votive offerings at votive sites. The ‘cultivation’ necessary to maintain a specific deity was that god’s cultus, ‘cult,’ and required ‘the knowledge of giving the gods their due’ (scientia colendorum deorum).

It’s helpful to understand that the research community sometimes characterizes religion as having two major aspects: a theoretical aspect and a practical aspect. The theoretical aspect would be concerned with doctrine, philosophy and theology, morals and right-conduct, problems of the system. Cultus is the side of practice, the activities we’ve encountered already: devotion, sacraments, sacrifice, worship, veneration, homage, ritual. It is this practical activity operative in Atla’s historical use of ‘cultus’ for historical religions, and in LCSH’s vocabulary for imperial religions. 

With cultus we see the primarily practical aspect, but what about difference and differentiation? As we said above, church and sect are usually understood to be institutional, normative forms of religious organization, and cults less-so, but no less able to engender small groups. We get the sense of differentiation in the French word for religious sect: culte. Culte denotes a particular religion (e.g., culte Catholique, culte protestant) or religious path or way, and refers also to a specific protestant religious office. Paths and road images abound in religious literature and are common metaphors to structure the evaluation of differences. Of course, focusing on the difference of the differences alone, leads to the contested realm of ‘sectarianism’.

Sect refers to the differences between groups based on what they do, how they practice; this sense is found in an admonition from William Penn in 1679 where he states, “Let not every circumstantial difference or Variety of Cult be Nick-named a new Religion.” Penn cautions against overstating differences among practices. Most of the uses of ‘cult’ as sect focus on whether these differences are insurmountable. In 1875, we finally see the sense of ‘cult’ as too different, the practices of a small group are secret, different and sinister, different and strange, different and dangerous. The British Mail states, “Buffaloism [ii]is, it would seem, a cult, a creed, a secret community, the members of which are bound together by strange and weird vows, and listen in hidden conclave to mysterious lore.” I argue that this negative assessment can never be fundamentally about belief or doctrine alone; proper belief is seldom the lone concern for those writing about ‘cults’. Deviant, divergent, emerging beliefs and ideas are treated elsewhere. Those who study ‘cults’ are concerned with belief as it informs practices and social forms. The focus on differences, and negative evaluation, comes from negative appraisals of a group as a social concern, or social problem. 

The ‘there’ there, when we talk about ‘cults’

I asserted above that we likely have the same thing in mind when we talk about ‘cults’. What sorts of social forms are we talking about, though? This negative prejudice is primarily directed at groups accused of extreme practices, harm, and other potential social problems. There must be a way to thread the needle: to describe these social problems while also characterizing the novel social and cultural forms these groups take.

When researchers evaluate these social movements, they wish to draw attention to and understand some of the differences arising from novel social practices. Perhaps their research is animated by a social concern, but surely that cannot be the methodological underpinning of the field. To illustrate this methodological ethos, we’ll turn separately to Eileen Barker and Ulrich Brener, who provide lists of related-enough phenomena capturing what we talk about when we talk about ‘cults’, what cults supposedly do to people, and what religions researchers are trying to do in their work. By understanding the research community’s object of study, we can ensure we’re attempting to explain the same things.

Eileen Barker (2010) lays out her understanding of the nomenclature debate in a chapter entitled, “The cult as a social problem.” She begins by describing the negative or disparaging sense used to highlight a group or person’s behaviors as a social problem. Barker writes,

Most lay understandings of the terms ‘cult’ and ‘sect’ start from an assumption that the movements are social problems. Exactly what kind of problems they are thought to pose may vary, but these can include imputations of heretical beliefs, political intrigue, child abuse, criminal activity, financial irregularity, the breaking up of families, sexual perversion, medical quackery, and/or the employment of mind control or brainwashing techniques.

Barker shows the term’s deployment demonstrates the user’s concerns more than the phenomena described. Assumptions and prejudices that take one’s moral concern as a fact about the novel social form, foreclose on the possibility of understanding such emerging social movements and formations as anything other than a problem.

Barker’s list of pernicious issues is typically the main concern, as ‘cults’ are popularly presented in consumer media, as well. Robinson’s history likewise points to certain core qualities typically of concern: these small groups are typically “manipulative and authoritarian,” “communal and totalistic,” “employing mind-control, consisting of behaviors considered extreme in their separation, retreat, relation to larger society.” This becomes clear in stream-ready documentaries, and the 90’s-era talk shows focusing on the salacious details of sexual abuse or coercion, moral panic, and social contagion. 

The actual social problems described in these materials: forms of abuse, trauma and PTSD, techniques of coercion and mass psychology, ‘brainwashing,’ sexual violence and rape, teacher-student relationships, and religious minorities, are all available as useful Library of congress subject headings. LoC has terms under the broader headings like “Offenses against the person”, “sex crimes’, “psychological abuse” and “social problems” and so on to properly characterize the harm and social problems. By offing ‘cults’ we aren’t without terms to describe real social problems in our materials. On the contrary, we have a robust thesaurus that also includes other descriptive subjects like: communalism, teacher-student relationships, charisma, leadership, religious; and social marginality, community—religious aspects, etc.

Emic, etic, person-first language, and so on

We mentioned professional disinterest earlier as a methodological virtue. Barker shows what this methodological position looks like. She argues that researchers, in response to the negative prejudgments associated with ‘cults’, developed the following observations:

Social scientists have tended to start from a more neutral perspective, using ‘cult’ and ‘sect’ as technical terms to refer to religious groups in tension with the wider society. Around the early 1970s, however, a number of scholars who were studying organizations such as the Children of God, the Church of Scientology, ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) and the Unification Church decided to abandon use of the terms cult and sect, at least in public discourse, largely because they wanted to avoid the negative connotations now widely associated with these words. Instead, they opted for the term ‘new religious movement’ (NRM) in the hope that this would provide a generic label for the phenomena they were researching without prejudging whether or not they were social problems.

Implied in Barker’s sketch are two distinct, self-conscious groups: researchers and their objects of study. Neither group uses the term ‘cults’ to describe what they are doing or the social phenomena occurring. In other words, the unsuitability of ‘cults’ has informed researchers’ methodologies, critically developing the term New Religious Movements to replace it. Jettisoning ‘cults’ for NRMs, doesn’t just stave off offense; by directly addressing persistent biases in collection metadata, we can actively prevent the delegitimization of and prejudices towards groups represented in our collections. 

After describing the constellation of social concerns and developing the methodological problem in the research community, we are ultimately left with a simple fact about the phenomenon: its novelty.  Where is the new, the emergent aspect in ‘cults’ when it’s integral to our shared understanding? 

NRMs refer to the same family of things as ‘cults’?

It seems to be the encounter of novelty that remains to be described. The perennial questions of power-legitimacy-authority apply here: Novel for whom? New compared to what? Emerging from what/when/where? Again: how different is it? Ulrich Brener (2000) addresses the importance of novelty as he develops the NRMs concept. In “Reflections upon the Concept of ‘New Religious Movement,’” Brener describes the constellation of these new social forms, and practices known as ‘cults’, as term NRMs developed out of Africana studies. Often, the new religious forms are responses to contact with European colonial and imperial expansion. The myriad responses in that over 500-year span have gone by many names, and that isn’t very helpful for the scientific grounding of this field.  For example, he writes,

The forms taken by these movements are so varied and the points of view from which they have been described are so diverse, that it is not surprising to find them described by many different names: thus we have prophet, syncretist, messianic or millennial movements, independent or separatist churches, nativistic or revitalization movements, crisis or deprivation cults, adjustment movements and the over publicized and little understood cargo cults of Melanisia.

For those who wish to ground these fields of study in some rigor, this list is unruly. “Such a variety of names is problematic,” he goes on to say.

Discussion of this phenomenon will be very difficult and confusing if nobody knows, for instance, whether “prophetic” and “charismatic” are synonymous or whether “movement” and “church” are used interchangeably.

Brener leads us to a classic early statement on the necessity of naming the NRMs as such. One of those passages comes from H.W. Turner (1970). He suggests a long history within the academic study of religion that includes this grappling with the new, or novel. And that it’s almost an absurdity to have to assert that the history of religions ought to be concerned with so-called new religions. He writes,

In one sense it is a bold suggestion that there is anything new in the history of religions. On the other hand there would be little religious history if there had not been a succession of new developments, new features, new religious experiences, and most of the major religious traditions claim an origin in some new departure. Our present suggestion is that the religious reactions of primal societies to higher cultures, and in particular to encounter with Western-culture and its Christian religion, present a range of phenomena sufficiently distinctive to be designated as a new field of study in the history of religions.

Much scholarship is produced in this colonial framework. Ideologically, indigenous social forms that appropriated or mimicked European forms were more likely to be considered religions, and non-Abrahamic or indigenous African and Africa Diaspora religions were relegated to the simpler, less developed category of ‘cults’.  This form of the negative term belies a colonial hierarchy and ethnocentrism.  What is more, this colonial tendency of racist hierarchy leads to absurdities in knowledge management as in LCSH, where ‘Candomblé (Religion) is a narrower topic of the broader ‘Afro-Brazilian cults’, and other nonsense!  

Instead of insisting on the disparaging or ambiguous terms like syncretism, deviant religions, and alternative religions — New Religious Movements captures the myriad variety Turner, Brener, and Baker list, without erasing the violence of contact and response. To illustrate, here is Turner’s taxonomy of New Religious Movements, based on the field in the early 1970s:

It seems clear that there is an informal consensus as to the existence of a range of new religious developments with so much in common that they may initially, at least, be regarded as belonging together and constituting a common phenomenon, distinguished by four features. 1. They have appeared in the same historical period, the ‘modern’ period of Western expansion, and in the same encounter situation where one people and culture have dominated another, usually in the colonial manner. 2. One party to the encounter has been a primal society and the other has most often been Western culture. 3. The reactions by the primal society have taken the form of movements that have been predominantly religious, and even where they have assumed a more political or economic appearance there has usually been a religious dimension also. 4. The religious phenomenology of these movements is remarkably similar across all the culture areas in the five continents principally concerned.

We have a solid picture of 1. Why ‘cults’ isn’t useful and what that negative assessment looks like, what’s important or of concern in what we are describing when we use ‘cults’ and 2. why NRMs captures something unique about the social forms of emerging religions and social movements. This coupled with the ‘social problems’ topics provides us with a rich vocabulary to describe materials covering NRMs.

The stakes of the nomenclature debate

As we’ve sketched the popular and academic understanding of ‘cults’ and the constellation of phenomena known as NRMs above, we’ve alluded to a politics of naming. Why is this religious form a cult, but the one with a building or a 990 IRS form is a religion?  What are the real, material consequences for groups pre-judged as ‘cults’? Who decides and how? There can be immediate legal and political aspects to this nomenclature debate. Similarly, describing materials on undocumented migrants as ‘illegal aliens’ dehumanizes the people and reduces migrating peoples and refugees to categories of criminality or a juridical-political framework. Reducing a small group to a ‘cult’ is likewise a social weapon. Returning to Robinson again, he points to numerous legal moments of tacit endorsement of prejudices when the term ‘cults’ is allowed to be used in court proceedings. 

Contemporary treatment of the legal, social, and political issues of the nomenclature debate can be found in the research of Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR). Amongst many of CESNUR’s significant studies in the religious freedom-New Religious Movements field we see court cases dealing with marriage law and accusations of polygamy, custody and parenting time for religious minorities, and citizenship and asylum claims for Taiwanese religious minorities. There are anti-cult court cases, where religious minorities, or a small group might be ostracized and estranged from work or property, or the courts used as a political bludgeon to curb dissent or neuter political opposition. We see also, secular issues like corporate crime, tax code, embezzlement and fraud cases alongside organizations vying for legitimate ‘religious’ credentials while their detractors condemn them as ‘cults’. There are numerous real criminal cases of sexual, psychological, and emotional abuse, predatory relationships, and non-traditional family forms. And of course, one’s religious minority status or cult designation has a massive bearing on one’s civil rights, citizenship, and asylum seeking. 

Political legitimacy is operative in this nomenclature debate, too. In fact, it’s in this way that ‘cults’ is found in the USA Congressional record: they employ ‘cults’ in quotations to note its use as a political and social tool to malign a rival group. The Congressional record focuses on issues of persecution, religious freedom, and religious minorities, in terms of treatment of marginal and minority groups by a State or State-like entity. Of course, this discussion occurs within a geopolitical framework that favors US ‘interests’ and where the US Congress is concerned with the naming power of China, for example, designating a pro-American group as a ‘cult’. This political milieu complicates our attempts at clarity, of course, but these elite political discussions have real bearing on religious refugee asylum status depending on the country.

Lastly, the academic cult wars of the 80s and the 90s — debates on the objects of study, the role of the Anti-Cult Movement, and various sects within this nomenclature debate — culminated in daytime television reporting and talk shows highlighting so-called satanic cults, witchcraft, and other ‘cult-like’ social groups; often this was presented as an inter-generational drama. This moral panic was a feedback loop of paranoia, shifting values and material changes, coupled with generational conflict. This led to scapegoating innocence and a moral hygiene campaign that has only amplified and increased in contradiction into the present day. Today, there are stream-ready documentaries, adjacent to true crime series, focusing on coercion, social control, and abuse stories, for the same consumption models predicated on tawdry, salacious, and prurient interest. These seemingly secular, or irreligious concerns are a large part of what gets lumped into the Anti-Cult Movement (ACM), a big-tent coalition that also includes evangelical Christians and social conservatives. The ACM is an interesting intellectual and social movement in its own right and is also a Library of Congress subject heading.

We begin and end with an understanding of the way ‘cults’ has outlived its utility. In conclusion, we’ve developed the case to jettison the term ‘cults’ based on observations from the fields of academic research of the study of religion. Research communities suggest using ‘New Religious Movements’ in place of ‘cults’, because the contemporary use of ‘cults’ is devoid of its etymological nuance referring to collective religious worship, and erroneously negatively prejudges the social phenomena the research community and librarians are describing.

Works Cited

Barker, Eileen (2010) The cult as a social problem. In: Hjem, Titus, (ed.) Religion and social problems. Routledge Advances in Sociology . Routledge, New York, USA, pp. 198-212. ISBN 9780415800563 

Berner, U. (2000). Reflections Upon the Concept of “New Religious Movement”, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 12(1-4), 267-276. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/157006800X00175

Turner, H.W. (1971) A new field in the history of religions, Religion, 1:1, 15-23, DOI: 10.1016/0048-721X(71)90004-2

Richardson, James T. (1993), “Definitions of Cult,” Review of Religious Research 34(1993):348-356

[ii] I.e. Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes (RAOB), a fraternal organization originally organized to support the former British Empire.