Like Classic Coke and Diet Coke, both religions and cults look alike even if they taste different. A religion belongs to the wider culture; its adherents come and go freely. A cult tends to be counter-cultural, restricting the social life of its adherents to other cult members. The key characteristic of a cult is the axis mundi, the shamanic leader at the center of the organization. The cult leader claims exclusive access to transcendent reality, and dispenses power and grace as he or she sees fit. It is not theology that distinguishes a cult from a religion; in fact, cults may appear within a religion, for example, the Branch Davidians or Jim Jones' Peoples Church were both cults within Christianity. The most interesting cult operative today, in my opinion, is the UFO cult oriented around its leader, Rael (Claude Vorilhon), who connects his 60,000 adherents to extraterrestrial wisdom and power.

I suspect that each of the higher religions underwent some cult-like stages at their beginning. When a cult grows too large for the leader to control or when the leader dies, spontaneous leadership democratizes the belief system and a religion can begin to spread. Note that the distinguishing characteristics have to do with leadership more than with theological content of the belief system.

In the 1970s, the word "cult" became quite pejorative due to anti-cult organizations. Scholars such as myself tended to substitute the term "new religious movements" or NRMs so as to ascribe a level of legitimacy to otherwise innocent experiments with religion. Even so, when a NRM exhibits a tight organization around an authoritarian leader, I get worried. This almost always leads to violence. If the word "cult" connotes the potential for violence, I suggest we simply exercise care in using the term rather than dispense with it entirely.