There's lots of insulting labels that are thrown at Catholics, like Papist or Romanist,

but there's one that non-Catholics should avoid because it undermines what they believe,

and that is calling Catholicism a cult.

Here's the problem.

It's almost impossible to define the word cult in a non-arbitrary way that doesn't also make your own religion or church a cult. The Latin word cultists

referred to care, cultivation, adoration, or worship. It forms the root of the word culture,

meaning what a group of people values. For most of history, the English word cult just meant

a system of religious worship. It could be used, for example, to describe the cult of Mithras in ancient

Rome. In the 19th century, it expanded to include excessive devotion outside of religious context,

like the growing cult of Shakespeare in the 19th century. But it wasn't until the 1960s and 70s that

the meaning of the word cult shifted to refer to new kinds of religious systems

that were considered dangerous. Events that shifted this opinion included the 1969 murders

committed by the Manson family cult and the 1978 Jonestown massacre where over 900 members

of Jim Jones' people's temple took their own lives or were murdered as part of the cult of

Jim Jones. Among evangelicals, the word cult came to be synonymous with non-Christian religions

that claim to be Christian, as can be seen in Walter Martin's 1965 book, The Kingdom of the Cults.

Martin was even interviewed about Jones Town in a 1978 news report. Why did they stay? Why did they submit to a Jim Jones? Why did so many die at Jonestown?

Now the person is conditioned into this gradually, isolated, indoctrinated, made dependent,

and then taught that everybody who contradicts this is indeed their enemy.

They developed what could be called a religious paranoia, in which everybody's against us.

So we all hang together.

Martin's book focused on so-called Christian groups that deny core Christian doctrines, like the deity of Christ or the Trinity.

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