What is a "cult"?

The label is contested at its root. Historian of religion Philip Jenkins wrote in 2001 that the word “cult” “has acquired over the last century or so such horrible connotations that it can scarcely be used as an objective social scientific description. It is a pejorative term used only by enemies or critics of the movement concerned”, a judgment the Australian scholar of religions Bernard Doherty quotes in his analysis of Victoria’s 2025 “cults” inquiry [1]. Legal scholar and sociologist James T. Richardson calls the term a “social weapon”. Doherty’s own conclusion is blunt: “no empirical or legal distinction can be made that distinguishes a ‘cult’ from a ‘religion’.”

Why definitions fail

Mike Southon of the legal think tank Freedom for Faith argues that attempts to define a cult end in one of two places: a definition so narrow that nothing qualifies, or one so broad that any church you dislike does [2].

Victoria’s 2025 inquiry illustrated the problem. Its guidance note conceded that it could not really define a cult, then listed identifying factors. The vast majority of them, Southon observed, describe things every church does, such as evangelism and promising salvation. Freedom for Faith warned that the definition proposed in the guidance note is broad enough to capture groups within almost every mainline Christian denomination in Australia, along with sectors of the Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu communities [1]. And at the hearings, witnesses did label the Australian Christian Churches, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the country, a “cult”. What the loose usage targets in practice, Doherty observes, are small minority religious groups that have very little in common, though many are socially conservative, keep strict behavioural standards for their members, and adhere to more traditional gender roles.

Southon’s conclusion is to retire the word altogether and talk about group-based coercion instead: “and even then,” he notes, “you would realize we can’t even define that for a legal context”.

”New religious movement”

Scholarship reaches for neutral vocabulary instead. The study of new religious movements is an academic specialisation in its own right, and one conspicuously absent from Victoria’s hearings: as of Doherty’s writing, no Australian scholar of religion, “let alone an academic specializing in the study of New Religious Movements”, had been invited to appear, while the hearings had primarily heard from former members and at least one international anti-cult activist [3]. Even the inquiry’s chair used the neutral term: “Many groups, including new religious movements, provide individuals with a sense of belonging, shared belief, and meaningful support,” Ella George said when the inquiry was announced.

”Spiritual minority”

This site’s preferred term is “spiritual minority”, an editorial choice rather than a scholarly category: it names the same communities by their position outside the religious mainstream, not by an accusation. The framing has legal pedigree in Australia. In the 1983 Church of the New Faith case (won by the church before the full bench of the High Court, and still the benchmark for how religion is defined in Australian case law [3]), the High Court warned that the Constitution’s religious-freedom guarantees “would lose their character as a bastion of freedom if religion were so defined as to exclude from its ambit minority religions out of the main streams of religious thought”, and that such minorities “stand in need of especial protection” [4]. The same Court put the function of a legal definition of religion plainly: it is “to mark out an area within which a person subject to the law is free to believe and act in accordance with his belief without restraint”.

Cult

Why definitions fail

”New religious movement”

”Spiritual minority”

Further Reading