this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Idk, Catholic services and practices are waaaay cultier than protestant ones. I mean, they all have pictures in their homes of the same white guy wearing a giant ceremonial hat and robe who lives in his own special nation. As a firm agnostic, I don't have a horse in this race, but my experience differs greatly from yours. They're all mild hobbyists compared to evangelicals anyway.
Cultish practices vary from church to church, but there's way more protestant cults than catholic ones.
And I mean proper cults, where they know how loony they seem, so they try to seem more normal to potential members. Then they love bomb newcomers, before inviting them to the special wednesday meetings where they promise supernatural powers if the newcomer is humiliated before the group and love bombed again when they're most vulnerable. Last step is making them cut ties with non-believers and ostracizing any apostates.
Catholic King making infallible decrees is harmless compared to that.
It's debatable if those cults are even protestant (some don't even fall under historical Christianity) as protestants are continuing groups that came out of the reformation, believing the Roman Church erred (Think Episcopal/Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutherans, Moravians, etc. They all stem from the pre reformation Catholic Church), while a lot of culty groups are like "yeah the past 2000 years the church was wrong so we are starting over again" (restorationists). But even them, some groups are still recognisably Christian (Baptists, most Pentecostals, non denomonational) believing in the historical Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the sacraments. Then you get the spinoff groups such as Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. And then there are the in betweeners such as Quakers and SDAdventists where it's debatable.
Okay I'm just infodumping now. This isn't relevant.
No, it's relevant actually. I called them protestant, but the OG Lutherans aren't a branch of Catholicism, so why would Pentecostals be a branch of protestantism? Yeah, they're still anti-pope, but they also found enough problems with the established protestants to split off and start something else.
I don't know if there's a term for the wave of new denominations in the last century, if it's even a single wave at all. Revivalism? And is there a common theme in that wave that leads to cults? Or should we say that the cults are a wave in themselves, caused by some other shift in the zeitgeist? Because as much as I'd like to blame pentecostalism for cultish beliefs (and I think I could make that argument), it could also be a general secularization that strips communities to their cultish cores.
The common wave that leads to cults are generally Restorationists, from what I find.