Religion, Cults, Prophets, and Missionaries

A group is determined to be either a cult or a religion based on how the surrounding population views the members and beliefs of that group.   In other words, whether followers of a belief system make up a cult or a religion is determined by the people outside the group looking in on the group’s structure and ideology.

The word cult is generally used derogatorily to refer to a group of people with a belief system that threatens established ideas, and whose leader holds a seemingly dangerous amount of influence over the members. Groups with certain ideologies are often labeled cults because people outside of the group believe that the group’s ideology is destabilizing to society.  People believe that the group’s belief system defies the norms of accepted belief systems, and may cause trouble to existing ideologies and bring chaos to society.  For example, when Christianity was just being established, the Romans looked at the early followers as a cult because their devotion to Jesus threatened loyalty to the Roman government and leadership. 

In addition to being fearful of the belief system, people outside of the cult worry that a cult leader can rule his/her members with a dangerous amount of influence. Leaders of cults are believed to control their members to the point where they position themselves to be as important as the ideology itself.  This is thought to be dangerous because if a cult leader is too powerful, the members of a cult lose their ability to think for themselves.  They begin to follow only what the leader tells them to do.   In a way, the leader has absolute power.

Religion, on the other hand, is thought of as a belief system where no leader or figure is more important than the deity and the ideology overall.  Unlike a cult, religious beliefs are not seen as undermining the norms and laws of society, but are often the basis of them.  For example, the Ten Commandments, a religious code of laws recognized by both Jews and Christians, do not defy law and order in the Judeo-Christian American society, but rather are the backbone for them.  Furthermore, followers of a belief system make up a religion when their beliefs are shared by a larger number of people.  In a way, a necessary condition for a belief system to be considered a religion is if enough members support it and believe in it.

The main difference between cults and religions has to do with how people outside of the group view the structure and belief system of the group. However, I believe that a cult can turn into a religion and a religion can turn into a cult.  If a cult’s belief system gradually spreads and becomes more widely accepted, similarly to how Christianity spread in ancient Rome, it will gradually be looked at as a religion.  As the ratio of believers to non-believers increases, the cult becomes less threatening and dangerous to societal norms.  Yet at the same time, a religion may suffer a decrease in believers and followers.  For instance, if a new religion is beginning to spread in an area, the religions that were previously accepted and followed may become less observed.  This radical change may bring the population to view these shrinking religions not as religions any longer, but rather as cults that defy society’s status quo. 

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I believe that the difference between a prophet and a missionary is related to the person’s communication with god and the person’s reason for spreading the work of god.

Historically, individuals who have called themselves prophets have been people who preach the direct word of god that they have personally heard from the deity. For example, in Islam, Mohammed is considered a prophet because god speaks directly to him and he relays god’s messages to the rest of the world.   Furthermore, a prophet’s motivation for spreading god’s words is generally based on the idea that it is his or her purpose in life to do so.  The prophet’s responsibility is not to keep a religion alive, or to convert individuals to a certain belief system, but rather to tell others exactly what god wants them to do.  It is a prophet’s duty to help humans live more righteous lives in the eyes of god.

In distinction to a prophet, a missionary does not receive god’s words directly from the source, but rather from religious texts, teachings, or even from the words of a prophet. Therefore, a missionary’s connection to god is more distant than that of a prophet.  In addition, missionaries spread religious beliefs and ideas for the purpose of converting people to their belief system.  Their basic motivation for teaching religious ideas is that it is their duty to expand the number of followers for the good of the religion and the good of the individuals being converted.  In contrast to a prophet who seeks to spread the word of god, a missionary seeks to persuade others about the truth of a specific religion as well as about god’s teachings. 

All in all, the main differences between prophets and missionaries revolve around communication with god and the motivation for spreading god’s word.  Though both types of religious figures work to bring god’s words to a broader public, prophets work to improve humanity and missionaries work to promote a specific religion.