There is no single agreed definition of a cult. This traces the word from worship to warning, sets out how experts and dictionaries define it, and offers a test whose one job is to separate an actual cult from a political base or a fandom.
Cult researchers are moving to high-control group and coercive control. The reasons are real. But for warning people before they walk in, the blunt word cult still does work the softer terms cannot.
Acts 24 calls the early church a sect. Here is why that first-century word means something completely different from what we now call a cult.
Long before critics did, the Potter’s House cult comparison appeared in the movement’s own books. Wayman Mitchell cited Jim Jones to explain how people follow a pastor, pointed to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, and an insider book named the cult reputation directly.
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