The Difference Between a Cult and a Religion is Money
Yesterday at work, a particularly infamous witch came in. Ask me in person and I'll give you a diatribe about our experience with her yesterday, but for now I'll stay off the karma train.
However, her presence brought up a discussion of her politics, her followers, her motivations. Which led me to describing to a coworker my reasons for calling her a cult leader.
This woman makes her money on selling potions, "witch supplies", teaching classes, reading cards and telling the future. Ask anyone in town and they'll say, wide-eyed, that if you look her in the eye, she'll hex you. I looked her in the eye yesterday as I pleasantly asked if she needed help, and then we discussed the weight of bread. But I digress. Essentially she is well-known, feared in a vague sort of way, and the only witch to collect on her fame every time the Discovery Channel comes to town.
Now, not only does she receive money for the reading of cards and sell meaningless potions to tourists who have never heard the rule of three, but she also has a large following who work in her stores and act as "teaching assistants" in her classes for free. That's right, her business is staffed by "volunteers"*. These volunteers follow her religiously. She is their spititual guide.
Okay. So Christians need crosses, and those who consider themselves Wiccan may need supplies for their rituals. Running a business that sells "witch supplies" is no worse than a Catholic gift shop. BUT Catholic gift shops are businesses. Priests do not run them and the employees do not work there for free to "get in good with God". Charging money to read cards is, I believe, equivalent to paying a priest for a blessing or a referral to an appropriate passage in the Bible when a Christian needs guidance. It is slimy and ingenuine, not to mention that it lowers an ancient ritual to cheap entertainment.
The real difference, I believe, between a cult and a religion is money. You pay to belong to a church, but that is membership in a community. Any person off the street can walk into any church or synagogue anywhere in the world and the priest or rabbi will tell them everything they know about Christ or Moses. You do not pay for knowledge in a religion, only to be an ongoing member of a community that needs, say, heat in the winter and snacks after the service. In a cult you pay for knowledge.
Take Scientology: to become more and more advanced toward "cleanliness" or "self-realization" or whatever they have chosen to call it, you must pay. You move through the levels of the cult by paying huge amounts of money. You cannot be a poor Scientologist (or, I suppose, all Scientologists are poor by the time they reach enlightenment). I think that this witch's organization is much the same. You pay to take classes to learn her religion. You pay for her or her minions to give you (what was once spititual) guidance through the reading of cards.
BUT WAIT! you say. Everyone needs to make a living! Why can't she make a living at what she knows best?
Because she is selling her religion. And in the exchange she is turning it into a cult. And, of course, she wields a huge amount of influence over people who look up to her for spiritual fulfillment. Therefore it is a cult and she is a leader.
BUT WAIT! you say. She is putting Wicca in the mainstream! She is representing a community and letting the rest of the world know about it!
No, she is representing her community. She is putting Wicca in the mainstream as a joke for tourists and mixing its image with that of the historical killing of innocents (who were not witches) and the pointy-hatted witch on a broomstick that shows up on every t-shirt ever sold around here. This woman tried to sell a potion to break the Curse of the Bambino a few years ago. She is not a community head or a PR witch. She is a minor celebrity here to collect.
Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about Wicca. I am talking about one woman and her covencult. Real witches do not charge money. Real witches are willing to give knowledge to anyone who honestly shows an interest in the religion. Real witches do not sell love potions.
*I am only ninety percent sure of the source I got this fact from, so I will not quote it, but I believe it was printed in a newspaper.
posted by Bry at 11:22 AM
4 Comments:
Bry, I agree that the difference between a cult and a religion is money but not the way you have it. Both exist to take in money. The Catholic Church, for instance, rakes in all kinds of money from believers - it just doesn't charge off a menu, a la carte. In the end, though, it's the same thing: get someone hooked (or, like Tom Cruise's kid, get born into the religion or cult) and then pick their pockets.
When I say I agree, I mean: a cult (money, but not pots of it because fewer members) and a religion (pots of money from millions of members). It's a matter of degree.
I think we essentially agree on the nature of the cult, although I am pointing to the fact that cult members pay for doctrine itself rather than for membership in a club of those who love the doctrine (as in organized religion, where the doctrine is free). But the difference in what we're saying has to do with the nature of organized religion.
I think the question, at least in Christian terms, is: is there a difference between what Jesus taught and the organization that owns churches dedicated to what he taught? A cult would charge money to learn his teachings. Jesus started a religion because his teachings were originally free. The Catholic church is the bureaucracy which has sprung up around the communication of his teachings. Can you separate the two?
In a cult you cannot. The cult leader is most often the divine one and he sets up his buraucracy as soon as he decides what to preach. But religions are founded on men who may or may not have had power, but originally taught for free. Jesus, Buddha, (Mohammed is a difficult case because he was both a religious and political leader), these men were essentially philosophers. But their teachings have been altered here and there over the centuries by those who passed them on, so I am still unsure of my feelings on religion and whether the teachings of Jesus and the Catholic Church are two separate things. If they are, the teachings of Jesus is the religion, which is morally superior to a cult, though the bureaucracy may be a form of cult built by those who latched onto his teachings. If one decides that Jesus' teachings cannot be separated from the cult built in his name then one must look at religion as a significant, long-lasting cult. I tend toward the first of these two options, though I cannot back it up and need more time to think about it. Either way, I believe that at the root, with the original "prophet" there is a difference between what has gone on to build a bureaucracy as a religion and what has kept its' original bureaucracy as a cult.
I need more time to figure this one out...I've been meaning to post about organized religion for a long time...
I consider the difference between religion and cult to be not how they collect money but what is done with it. Say what you will about the mainstream religions but they put money back into the community through schools, aid or even the ocaisional AA meeting in the church basement. Cults collect money for the enrichment of the leader. Is this famous witch turning her store over to Narcotics Anonymous once a week or sending aid packages to families who've lost everything in a fire?
She used to come into the Rook once a week. Cheapest thing she could buy to sit there all night. Lousy tipper. Creepy vibe.
Come to think of it, exactly like this priest I know.
I've always maintained that The only real difference between a cult and organized religion is how socially acceptable it is. Most people hear "cult" and freak out and think brainwashing, white robes, and a commune in the hills. Both have a set of beliefs practiced by like-minded people. Both have traditions and symbolism used by those same individuals. But, alas, (as a former Catholic) Catholocism or one of the more "mainstream" religions is more acceptable to people than Wicca. That, and Catholics in general are not accepting of things they don't understand, and that breeds fear and exclusion.
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