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calling exploitative cult a religion is quite bad taste imo
Which religion isn't though?
They're all exploitive and cult-like in my opinion.
There's a difference, aside from size and social recognition?
Control. Generally speaking a religion and a cult are differentiated by how much they demand or control in members lives. Scientology, Mormons, and even a lot of Southern Baptists are generally cults or really cult like. For comparison Anglicans, Quakers, and progressive Neo-Pagans are on average not cults even if they are insane and playing with the dynamics at times.
The hallmarks of cults is: separation from friends or family, a person or ruling body that delivers the one and true version, punishment for rule breaking, and a difficulty separating. Also, it almost always devolves into sex slavery and/or arranged unions.
Those things give you control of course, but they are the basic guidelines of cult like behaviour.
Yeah there are probably dozens of definitions of cult with tonnes of overlap but without complete agreement. Just a notable example is there are some cults which pop up wherein they don't necessarily have a ruling body since it's basically a cavalcade of idiots feeding into each other.
So christianity was more of a cult in medieval times?
Depended on region and what period of the medieval era, for example Iceland around 1000 absolutely not, but in France during the crusades absolutely was. Remember the medieval era lasted about a thousand years and was spread across Europe so there's lots of nuance.
Plenty of sects cut you off still. Like Catholics.