There are few English words as loaded or as disputed as “cult.” Stripped of its connotations, a cult is just a group of people with a charismatic leader who devote themselves to a cause or an idea. But use the word in conversation, and it evokes images of mass suicides, bad haircuts and scenes like the one Friday out of Russia, where seven women emerged from a cave that still holds dozens of people awaiting the imminent end of the world (which, according to their calendar, goes down on Slope Day).
I thought about cults on Thursday, at Alice Cook House’s annual interfaith dinner, as I struck up a conversation with a friendly guy I’ll call “Allen”…
“Nice to meet you. I’m Ben. So, what team are you on?”
“Gaudiya Vaishnava.”
“I’m sorry, didn’t catch that … Godiva-what?”
“Gaudiya Vaishnava. It falls under the umbrella of Hinduism. You’ve probably heard of Hare Krishnas —we’re basically like them — but I don’t like to associate myself with that term because of the stigma attached to it. People hear “Hare Krishna,” and they think “cult.”
I realized later that I’d encountered Allen before in these very pages. He’d written a letter to the editor calling for the head of a fellow columnist who’d called Hare Krishnas “sneaky” and “charlatans.”
“Insert the word Jew or Christian or any other faith-based [pronoun] and see how the text reads,” he wrote. “I think there would be an uprising.”
Allen was right. He’d found himself on the losing end of a double standard in American culture, practiced by social conservatives and politically correct liberals alike. Whereas we’re allowed — nay, encouraged — to poke fun at Hare Krishnas, Scientologists, Wiccans, and members of other spiritual movements we deem “cults,” we dare not speak in unflattering terms of “legitimate” religions, at least in public. At most, we’re permitted to denigrate a religion’s “extremists” so long as we take pains to emphasize that they “in no way represent the vast majority of members who adhere to the true spirit of that honorable religion.”
As a rule of thumb, I abhor double standards unless there’s a reasonable basis for them. So if we’re going to treat “cults” and “religions” differently, I need to know what distinguishes a “cult” from a “religion”.
Most people can’t rattle off a good definition of “cult,” but think they know one when they see it. Here in Ithaca, they might single out the Twelve Tribes religious community that operates The Mate Factor. While I wouldn’t quibble with that characterization, I wonder whether the Twelve Tribes qualifies for culthood because we say so or because it is somehow qualitatively different from mainstream religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
An intermediate case is instructive. Consider the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — cult or religion? Depends who and where you’re asking. I’m a bit biased because I have dead Mormon relatives — more on that in a moment — but Mitt Romney could certainly attest that perceptions of Mormonism are less charitable in the Bible Belt than they are in the Jell-O Belt (that swath of the Rocky Mountain West where Mormons are most prevalent).
Some Mormon facts:
— Mormons believe that God is a flesh-and-blood human being, born a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, who lives with a harem of goddess wives; they believe that, if worthy, after death they too will become gods and goddesses, lording over their own planets.
— Joseph Smith, the faith’s founder who grew up in early 19th Century New York (about 75 miles northwest of Ithaca), supposedly wrote the Book of Mormon by “translating” a series of ancient golden plates shown to him by the angel Moroni; he inaugurated the practice of “plural marriage,” himself taking many wives (though the church abandoned the practice as Utah was applying for statehood).
— Mormons practice “baptism of the dead,” which is exactly what it sounds like. (The ritual entered the news a few years ago, when the Church was found “converting” Holocaust victims; oy, I can only imagine the faces of my three survivor grandparents upon discovering that their dead brothers and sisters had unwittingly become Mormons).
Now, is Mormonism inherently loopier than other religions? Not really. It’s just younger and has fewer followers. Conversely, is it somehow more “legitimate” than The Twelve Tribes? I don’t think so. It’s just older and has more followers. At its present rate of growth, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints may one day have more members than the Catholic Church. And who knows? Perhaps when The Twelve Tribes are as old as the LDS Church, millions of Twelve Tribers from around the globe will be making pilgrimages to Ithaca and other sites of its earliest communities. It’s unlikely, of course, but no more so than the success of groups we now consider religions in good standing.
Christianity got its big break when the Emperor Constantine had a dream about Jesus. Islam spread across continents because Muslims — believe it or not — used to win wars. And while it’s a bit more difficult to trace, all indications are that Judaism grew out of just one among many worship systems in ancient Israel. Their paths to prominence differed, but what unites these and most other religions is that society viewed their earliest members much as we view Scientologists.
Perhaps, then, we can propose at least one qualitative difference between cults and religions. A religion is a cult that won the lottery of history — one that “made it,” the little cult that could. (The lottery metaphor is especially apt given that most adherents of the world’s religions live under the impression that they, too, have won a lottery — a spiritual lottery — that by luck and God’s grace, they happened to be born into the correct religion, unlike all those other poor suckers.)
On the basis of merit, however, it seems to me that the barrier we’ve erected to separate legitimate religions from risible cults exists only in our minds. I hesitate to use the word “barrier” because it implies a continuum where there is only a duality. All religions and cults make propositions about the world — about which people spoke to God, about which books are divine, about which prophecies will come true — propositions that are either true or false. And given the multiplicity of the world’s religious beliefs, many of which flat-out contradict each other, by logical necessity we can state that the vast majority of the world’s people are under certain delusions (another loaded word). Since no delusion is “more” false than another, why are we enjoined to respect some delusions but not others? Come to think of it, why respect any delusion?
Ponder that for a moment while I head to the fridge — all this philosophizing makes me thirsty. I’m gonna fetch me some Kool-Aid. Want some?
Ben Birnbaum is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at bbirnbaum@cornellsun.com [1]. Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.
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[1] mailto:bbirnbaum@cornellsun.com