Cult and Culture

Cult: noun: A particular system of religious worship, 

especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies

I was thinking about the passing of the year on my drive into work this morning, when a song by The Cult came on the satellite radio.  For those of you unfamiliar with semi-obscure 1980's genre bending music, The Cult was sort of metal, sort of alternative, all black wearing, somewhere in between Iron Maiden and U2, thus their semi-obscurity.  You don't hear much Cult on the traditional radio stations, because they just don't actually fit.  They were sort of emblematic of a paradigm shift in music, punk and new wave were mixing together and forming something that musically and culturally was going to sink big-hair metal.  The Cult could put on the big hair look, with the leather pants and frizzy blond hairdos, but the lead singer, had this really impressive straight black hair that really made hairspray seem like sort of an abomination (which of course we now know it truly was).
I got to thinking about cults, and cultural paradigm shifts, and remembering that pretty much any religious practice can more or less be termed a cult, in scholarly parlance.  There are other more specific usages that apply to people outside the mainstream of any particular religion, or engaged in various pagan/idolatrous systems, but in the broadest sense, almost any religious activity can be called a cult.  For instance the scribes and temple authorities that Jesus was always butting heads with were representing the Temple cult of Judaism, and Jesus was challenging some of their ways of doing things, even though they were worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he rather strenuously disagreed with how they were going about it.
God may be One, but our cultic devotion to God, and attendant rituals and practices can change pretty dramatically.  And it has, it really has, and you should be deeply skeptical of anyone who presents the history of faith in a way that assumes otherwise.  This is actually highly visible within Christianity, we have sorted ourselves into more variant cults than I care to count, some of them are declared orthodox based on their theology and praxis, others are not, but they're all cults in the broad sense of the word.
The particular cult I'm a part of is called the Presbyterian Church (USA), which in anthropological terms is a reformed church which means it was formed out of the protestant reformation of the 16th century, it is distinguished from Lutherans and Anglicans by the general theological framework of John Calvin, which was brought over from the continent to the British Isles by John Knox, where the first church called Presbyterian was formed in Scotland.  In a confluence of Scottish anti-hierarchy and democratic impulse the Presbyterian cult adopted a system of government based on the rule of Elders, which can be described as a democratic republic, rather similar to the one that was eventually going to emerge in these United States.  Compared with the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and their Methodist progeny, and even the Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian movement has been relatively small, but influential in shaping western society.  By the late 20th century, the Presbyterian Church, along with pretty much every other Christian cult was decidedly on the wane.
One of the things I need to remind myself of, more or less constantly, is that cults live and die and change, and this is just the way of things.  If you take the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox cults, our older Christian Cults, you will notice that they have changed dramatically as well (yes even the Eastern Church), they simply aren't doing things the same way they were 1000 years ago, they have been shaped by cultures.  If  you were to plop down Pope Francis next to Pope Leo X, who was in power during the reformation, Francis would have a lot more in common with an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther than he would with Leo X, and he would probably have a lot more in common with a modern Presbyterian like me, than he would with either of those Roman Catholic folks from 500 years ago.
Sometimes change is good, sometimes change is bad, but when it comes to the church, change is almost always slow, glacially slow, which is why it looks like the church is dying.
Our culture is changing really quickly, and our cults are poorly equipped to keep up.  At our best we're sort of like The Cult, we lose the hairspray and throw some U2 guitar riffs in there, but we're still wearing leather pants and singing like Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden), which some people actually like, and get kind of mad if we all of the sudden go all Kurt Cobain.
Change is driven by grass roots, not by top down decisions.  Punk music flew under the radar of commercial success, but its offspring changed the landscape, it took about ten or fifteen years, which is actually really fast for a cultural shift, it's unbelievably fast for a cultic shift.  In cults we're dealing with people's ideas about God, which are much more difficult to tinker with than their taste in music (although at the moment the two things seem oddly related).
The church next door has a sign with two cups of coffee on it and it says: "Classic, 9:00 AM, Contemporary, 11:00 AM,  Choose your brew."  Referring to worship services.
Worship... of God... the Consuming Fire, the Alpha and the Omega...
I'm not judging, at least I'm trying not to, we do the same thing, we just haven't advertised our consumerism using the same plan as Starbucks (maybe that's why they're bigger than we are).
Something tells me that if that's what it's come to, we're already dead, we just don't know it yet.
We are a zombie church shuffling through the motions moaning, "New Members...."
Luckily, as Chesterton, Ecclesiastes and Battlestar Galactica all remind us, what has happened will happen again.  And a resurrection started all of this to begin with.