What does the word cult mean, and why do many scholars avoid it?

There is no single agreed meaning of "cult". In everyday speech it is a pejorative, a label for a group with unusual beliefs and intense devotion, often to one leader. In academia it has been an ongoing source of contention, and by the end of the 1970s many scholars had largely replaced it with the neutral term "new religious movement". Scholars such as Eileen Barker and James T. Richardson argued that the old word had become too laden with negative connotations.

The word comes from the Latin cultus, meaning worship, and it once carried no insult at all: historians still speak of the imperial cult of ancient Rome. Today the problem is that the label does two jobs at once. It describes a group, and it also passes a verdict on it. Susannah Crockford calls it a shapeshifter that changes with whoever is using it, and Benjamin Zeller argued that calling any disliked group a cult may be common but is not scholarship.

Yet the stricter term has critics too. The anti-cult movement mostly regards "new religious movement" as a euphemism that hides real harm, and some former members have found the word "cult" empowering because it names what happened to them. Eileen Barker writes that of the well over a thousand groups that have been or might be called cults in the files of INFORM, the vast majority have not engaged in criminal activities. The rest of this path looks at how researchers describe the harmful cases without judging a group by how strange its beliefs look.