My wife, whom you all now know and love, recently joined a new church here in town. This church is what you would call “contemporary.” All this really means is that everything about the establishment–from the music, the dress code(there isn’t one), the preaching style, the church groups–is modern. In fact their slogan is that they are a “Church for people who don’t like church.”

If I were a Christian, I would attend this church. Trouble is, here in the South, folks like tradition–especially when it comes to religion. Once this church came into town with its hip music and non-dress code and modern logo, all of a sudden, church attendance from the surrounding area dropped. Turns out, people started going to this new church.

Not only were folks checking out this new gig, they liked it so much that they stayed.

Now, it’s not really that big a deal right? I mean, as long as these new guys are preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ as lord and savior then everyone is cool, right?

Wrong. Once church attendance dropped, the rumors began. The one toxic word that slipped from everyone’s lips: “Cult.”

By the way, here’s the link to the “cult” my wife looks forward to attending every Sunday: Vertical Church.

Hearing this, I began to wonder what a cult really is. I always thought cults were made up of crazy people who perform strange sex rituals and sacrifice kids and neighborhood pets to the devil or something like that, right? At first, I thought it was a waste of time to look up the word, you know, to actually discover the meaning for myself instead of depend on what culture and media tells me.

Here’s what I found from Webster’s Dictionary: Cult…

1) Formal religious veneration.

2) A system of religious beliefs and ritual.

3) A religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.

4) Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as art).

Uh, wow, that actually sounds like religion in general. In fact, every faith tradition I’ve practiced so far in this journey and every one I know of contains most if not all of these elements.

So why are cults considered bad things?

Because the term is associated with folks like Charles Manson and his infamous “Manson Family”…and therefore any group considered on the religious fringe. But why? How did this innocuous term of categorization become so criminalized?

The term “cult” in the area of religious studies remains a neutral term which describes religious movement or practice in general. A more derogatory incarnation of the term took root in the 1940’s and throughout the 1980’s with the advent of “Christian counter-cult movements” and secular “Anti-cult movements.” These groups identified elements of belief and philosophy which lay on the outskirts of the mainstream religion (mostly Christian) and culture and demonized them as cults. Some of these isolated movements, such as the Manson Family and the People’s Temple founded by Jim Jones, were obviously dangerous, however it is the fierce categorization of anything outside one’s own theological perspective as a cult that disturbs me the most.

Oh people, how soon we forget the past of our own hallowed traditions.

Franz Kafka once said that “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

The monotheistic ideals of Zarathushtra and the Hebrews (during the age of the prophets) was a revolution against the polytheism of their day. Buddhism is a social and cultural revolution within Hinduism. Jesus brought new, revolutionary ideals to Judaism. Muhammad saw Islam as a reform within the faiths of Abraham. Guru Nanak, who founded Sikhism, started a revolution to erase the lines between Muslims and Hindus.

In this way, everything I lists–and all I have not listed–fulfill the “unorthodox and spurious” requirements of the definition above.

Ladies and gentlemen, your religion or philosophy, no matter how ingrained into the national culture, no matter how much it echoes throughout history…is a cult.

How many readers did I just lose for that one?

The truth is, we need these unorthodox and spurious movements. Every one of them represent the evolution of spiritual and philosophical thought. Each wave of new ideas and insights proves that, like life itself, our spiritual awareness and concepts continually evolve. But that’s a subject for another day…

I hope you realize now that cults aren’t a bad thing. If you still think that all cult members are just brain-washed lunatics, then I recommend you stop attending your church, mosque, temple, study circle, grove of trees, classroom now before you are told more dangerous ideals. In fact, stop reading this blog and leave our “Congregation,” because we are part of a movement which goes against the mainstream as well. The real danger is when we judge the traditions of our neighbor with such a fine-toothed comb, yet leave our own convictions with every stone unturned.

As for those traditionalists who labeled Vertical Church as a cult, I wonder what would happen if they examined their our own faith with such a ferocity as when judging others? It’s okay really, because we all do it. But maybe we don’t use that same lens on ourselves because we are afraid of what we might find, or even more terrifying…what we might not find.