Differences Between Sects, Churches, and Religion

Posted on Sep 5, 2024 in Religion

Church

a) Individuals belong to it by birth, faith is inherited and passed down through families.
b) Tendency to adapt to the sociocultural and institutional environment.
c) Adaptation to current values.
d) High number of members.

Sect

a) Individuals are incorporated into it by self-ascription, after a personal conversion.
b) Promotes a closed social structure, apart from civil society and other religions.
c) Does not fit into the sociocultural environment and tends to marginalize itself.
d) Constituted by a small number of members.

Every religion began as a sectarian movement, in the sense expressed by Weber, as a segregated group or social sector separate from another religion. Later, when it expanded, increased its followers, ceased to be persecuted, it was recognized socially and institutionally as a religion.

Therefore, the sociological term “sect” should not be confused with the term “destructive cult”.

Features of Destructive Cults:

Pyramidal organization, unconditional submission to the leader, whether personal or collective.
No internal criticism allowed.
Pursuit of political and/or economic objectives under the guise of a spiritual ideology, whether religious or philosophical.
Instrumentalization of adherents for the sect’s purposes.
No control or supervision of the sect’s accounts.
Theocratic and totalitarian vertical structure, where the word of the leaders is faith.
Requirement of total cohesion within the group.
Obligation, under psychological pressure, to break all ties with former parents, partners, friends, work, and education.
Living in closed communities or in total dependence on the group.
Suppression of individual freedoms and the right to privacy.
Control of information, manipulating it for convenience.
Using sophisticated techniques of neurophysiology, under the outward form of meditation or spiritual rebirth, to override the will or reasoning of the adept.
Total rejection of society and its institutions.

Characteristics of Alleged Sects of Christian Inspiration:

Absolutizing itself. It is exclusive and narcissistic, closed in on itself. The sect is all that matters.
Excessive polarization in the charismatic leader who sometimes becomes an idol and sometimes behaves like a tyrant with absolute dominion over the followers.
Equal footing of all group members. Hierarchical priesthood is not supported. The power is held by the leader or founder and the circle of leaders to whom he distributes tasks.
The group is voluntary, not sociological. Infant baptism is rejected.
The followers are considered an elected elite, compared to others, who are dismissed as sons of perdition. Often sects are demanding and rigid, reductively, on questions of ethics and morality.
Extreme stress on the experiential, affective, and emotional religious experience, giving up the intellectual and dogmatic.
Rejection and blind and indiscriminate opposition to the world and society as a place of evil. They are a marginal society, ‘uncontaminated’.
Exacerbated proselytizing, often using deceptive means.
The sects of Christianity that arose from or were inspired by it (Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses) are based on the Bible, interpreted from a private revelation to the founder of the sect. They rely mainly on the Old Testament. Their reading and use of the Bible are always fragmentary, biased, reductionist, and fundamentalist.
They function as secret societies with social split personality: one that is lived within and one that is projected outward. Syncretism reigns.
Use of guilt, the fear of God and His punishment, and the end of the world as a means of submission and indoctrination.
Fanaticism and narrow-mindedness to the truth of others. The sect is monolithic, pluralism is banned, and dissenters are expelled.
Community (rather gregarious) and emotional support are highly valued, to create addiction and dilute the person in the group, abdicating one’s personality.
They are conservative and establishmentarian, committed to the far right almost in their entirety.
Generally, the economic dynamic is a concern and a driving factor of sects.
Many of them resort to the marginalized and addicts: alcoholics, drug addicts, the desperate, and the abandoned, to ‘whitewash’ their operation, obtain free labor, and gain economic resources.
Destructive cults use brainwashing, psychological manipulation through mental persuasion techniques, and physical punishment to achieve unconditional surrender.

Difference Between Cult and Religion

A cult differs from formal religion in many respects. It is characteristic of a cult to claim possession of certain esoteric knowledge that has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time, but then is suddenly brought to light. Often there is an unorthodox figure, ridiculed or scorned by the orthodox, who presented these new teachings. There are common rituals that often allow or encourage an individual to perform hitherto repressed impulses. In worship, you feel like you’re exploring ways to conduct novel or hitherto taboo practices. What defines a cult, then, is the implicit glorification of magic rather than theology, the personal bond with the guru or the group rather than an institution or a creed. Theirs is a ritual and myth appetite.

Difference Between Superstition, Idolatry, and Religion

Superstition and idolatry are two attitudes that involve the confusion of mediation (meeting place), so they try to mediate (the Mystery). In both, the mediation fails to be significant for the very meaning of a symbol, and a meeting place with the totally other becomes the object of veneration.

Difference Between Magic and Religion

A classic definition of magic is found in Frazer, who made an extensive, profound, and documented field study on the magical attitudes of some contemporary Indian tribes: According to Frazer, the primitive magician knows magic only practically; for him, magic is always art, not science. He is dedicated to the analysis of the principles that come into their actions, i.e., there are no clear laws or analyses of mental processes, which does not mean they are not budgeted. The difference between magic and religion lies, then, in that the claim of the magician is to dominate, and even tame, that assumed animated or spiritual level of natural beings, while the religious experience is a man’s encounter with the mystery that absolutely transcends and makes him feel like a creature. Consequently, the religious attitude is one of voluntary submission to the mystery and not an attempt to dominate it.

Difference Between Aesthetics and Religion

Certainly, the aesthetic acts as a mediation since it possesses the capacity to symbolize aspects of reality that, although real, go beyond the tangible. The danger lies in making the aesthetic into religion or reducing it to its aesthetic form, then, in this way, religion is drained of its contents to become an external formality.

Features of the Adept:

Sudden and drastic change in the hierarchy of values of the victim, including the abandonment of their previous academic goals. The changes are sudden and catastrophic, as opposed to gradual changes that may result from maturation or education.
Reduction of cognitive flexibility and adaptability. The victim answers questions in a mechanical way, replacing those which might have been their own answers by other stereotypical, specifically sectarian ones.
Blunted affect and narrowmindedness. Spontaneous feelings of love and caring in interpersonal relationships are deleted. The victim may appear lifeless or inexpressive, and too lively.
Regression. The victim becomes childishly dependent on the leaders of the sect and would like them to make decisions.
Physical changes that often include weight loss, with a deterioration of physical appearance, accompanied by a strange facial expression or eye mask with white or evasive eyes. In some cases, they may appear psychopathological changes, including dissociation, obsessive meditations, delusional thoughts and hallucinations, and several more psychiatric symptoms and signs.

Religiousness and Religion

. We have established in earlier chapters how human beings are essentially religious, being so normal store to express their religiosity as cultural parameters in which they are placed, and that religion itself configured. When religious norms is beginning to institutionalized religion as an institution. Religions are thus the result of interaction between the human being essentially religious and cultural universe in which it is embedded, and thus its symbolic universe and enrich the cultural overlaps that emerge.