Is Evangelical Christianity a Cult?

Is Evangelical Christianity a Cult?

Author Bob Larsen states that the things cults share in common are: "(1) a centralized authority which tightly structures both philosophy and lifestyle, (2) a 'we' versus 'they' complex, pitting the supposed superior insights of the group against a hostile outside culture; (3) a commitment for each member to intensively proselyte the unconverted; and (4) an entrenched isolationism that divorces the devotee from the realities of the world at large."1
How does the above description not represent how the world views a large portion of the evangelical church? In fact, this is how I view a large portion of the evangelical church. I don’t believe that the majority of evangelicals have investigated the claims of scripture from an evidentiary standpoint. Further, I have not found too many pastors that don’t represent the outside world in the ‘we’ versus ‘they’ framework listed above. Commitment to proselytize the unconverted, we call “passion for the lost” and outreach. We seem to suspect that the non-Christian culture is hostile toward us. And although our service to the less fortunate members of our society is considered laudable by most, our view of science as espoused by the young earth creationist clearly divorces Christians from the realities of the scientific world at large.
In fact we are so separate from society these days the only accurate way to describe our situation is that “we have a social disease!” I’m imagining the melody to Gee, Officer Krupke! (In West Side Story by Bernstein and Sondheim). We shutter when we see Ned Flanders hit the scene on The Simpsons. What a scary caricature. However, unlike most Christians, Ned is consistent in how he acts maintaining the same persona behind closed doors. Indeed a man in whom there is no guile. A few questions might help shed light on this subject.
Why was Jesus so upset with the religious leaders of his day?
Weren’t the religious leaders that Jesus dealt with every bit as sincere to do their duty as religions leaders as pastors are today? Weren’t they zealous to fulfill the only revelation God had given at the time?
What are the things that we should do to embrace our culture?
How should we be in the world blending with culture but not stained by it?
What group structure or learning culture might avoid the cultic aspects of church culture listed above?
How can a pastor or Christian Leader transform from the cultic attributes listed above and what should the positive attributes look like?

Those Bones Unset

Those Bones Unset

There was a certain augury presence about him
Just as a man with bones broken, not properly mended, predicts the weather for a lifetime
So too this man had an empirical sense of future pain

But pain is a generic unworthy of this man’s knowledge
What cognomen could accurate describe the level of his gifting
Or the complexity of the foreknowledge in some cases even knowing the great Why

Yet this gift was not without its cruel blindness
In matters of greatest import and most personal immediacy
When injustice crouches and not out of weariness but rather perfect evil intent

Too watch horror’s repetition which demands of us a response
Not unlike the children of Medusa and yet to be calloused is to be immature
So we chisel away the stone a speck at a time.

Then we become as Sisyphus, knowing unending repetition
The young don’t intuit that stone grows as fast as it can be chiseled
Patience and perseverance are being taught they say

However unlike the 300 no rescuers follow
Alas even Greece falls eventually, and in our day men are turned to ashes
Fools warm themselves by the furnaces at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka, knowing not the fuel

Only to this “gifted man” do patience and perseverance sound
Well, so similar to arbeit macht frie
Their purveyors have read much about such matters but are void of ontology

This pain portended, born of man’s knowledge of the divine reaches it crescendo,
How can this be, what does God have to do with man’s evil
“Theodicy” echoes from the broken bones that will not heal

The bones refuse to heal in order to stand as a testament to an odd syllogism
A God who knows of evil and injustice and who is powerful enough to stop it and doesn’t
Has not love

Thus the “gifted man” measures his knowledge of pain by his knowledge of his creator’s apathy