For me, the difference between a church, a sect and a cult is a difference of degree. A church is the original: it is the thing that starts it all off. In Christianity it would be the main churches that eventually became known as the Catholic Church with the base in Rome. Then there was the split between the East and the West—the schism. Then there was the Protestant Reformation. Sects would be subsets of both: they would have some of the teachings but would disagree on certain matters. Cults would introduce new and novel ideas and get further away from the original truths and teachings of the churches. So this is the difference in degree that I would point out.
I think that Stark and Brainbridge (Defining Cults/Sects, n.d.) define these distinctions well and I would use their definition as a rule to explain the differences. However, I do think that it would be easy to interchange all three as most would not be able to say that there was an “original” church. I think that only in Christianity was there ever an original church, as it is so unique in history. I disagree...
I think historians do not like to use the words because they do not want to offend in today’s PC climate.
Response One
I agree that cult has a bad reputation and connotation and no one wants to use that word because it could offend someone. I think that in earlier times these words were used more frequently and without much worry. However, it always depended on who was doing the defining. A person in a cult would not define their church as a cult. A person in a church would look at a cult and define it as a cult. The same for a sect: it all depends on who is looking out and in and what they are seeing. I think that in any case it could also be called a church, but I think back in the Middle Ages when there was only one Church this all made much more sense, because the Christians could define cults and sects according to the degree that they separated from…
