Talk:Sect

Church and sect typology

Here a discussion on the Weberian distinction between church and sect. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 13:48, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

In other languages

The section "In other languages" has many problems. In 2014 a few templates were added ("citation needed", "Request quote", "which (meaning)?") and since then no progress has been made. Moreover, the section is self-contradictory: it states that "the corresponding words for "sect" (...) translate into English as "cult"", which to me doesn't make any sense, unless "sect" and "cult" were perfectly synonymous. Maybe the whole section should be dropped. However, it also contains a grain of truth, and yesterday I've tried to make sense of it with this edit, which @Editor2020: reverted because it lacks references. Indeed I cannot provide a reliable source for an edit which is based only on my (possibly mistaken) understanding of English, Italian, German and Spanish. It seems to me that words like the German Kult, the French culte, the Spanish and Italian culto, etc., usually do not refer to a group of people with a given religious or philosophical identity (a "New religious movement" or "cult"), but rather translate the English word "worship": they refer to the devotion accorded to a deity or sacred object, and to the religious ceremonies that express that devotion. English (and no other European language, I guess) uses both "sect" and "cult" to indicate religious groupings of some sort. How "sects" differ from "cults" is a reasonable topic for discussion in English, and not in German, French or Italian (I think). As I said, I have no authoritative reference at hand, but one can have a look here, which shows that German use the word Sekte for referring to what an English-speaker would probably call "cult" - and here (same for the French secte) and here (reliable Italian dictionary says that "cult" translates into culto when it means venerazione, ie. worship, veneration, reverence, while it translates into setta when it has a religious meaning) and maybe also here ("In Europe, the term "sect" is often used to describe "cults" in this sense", that is "a cohesive social group, usually of a religious believers, which the surrounding society considers outside the mainstream or possibly dangerous"). --Gitz (talk) (contribs) 02:26, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I believe you are writing about Cult (religious practice). Which is distinct from both Cult and Sect. Editor2020 (talk) 02:35, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, @Editor2020, that's exactly the point I was trying to make. As you can note, Cult (religious practice) has many interlanguage links from Kult (de), culto (es, it), culte (fr), etc., while most of the links to Cult (manipulative social group) are from articles such as secte (fr), setta (it) Sekte (nl). Basically non-English wikipedias are split in two: some (fr, it, nl) link their secte, setta, Sekte, etc., to Cult (social group), while others (de, es) link their Sekte, secta, etc., to Sect. But the point I raised is fully confirmed: Kult, culto, culte, etc. never refer to Cult as manipulative social group - they always refer to the religious practice. Clearly the section "In other languages" in this article is trying to express this point - European languages do not have the pejorative sense of the English "cult" as "excessive devotion" which according to the Cult article arose in the 19th century; to that end they use instead secte, Sekt, etc. It seems to me that my edit is an improvement:
Most European languages other than English do not distinguish between "sect" and "cult", and therefore use the same word for referring to both types of religious groups (...) Words like the German Kult, the French culte, the Spanish and Italian culto usually do not refer to a group of people with a given religious or philosophical identity ("cult"), but rather translate the English word "worship": they refer to the devotion accorded to a deity or sacred object, and to the religious ceremonies that express that devotion.
Do you have any suggestion as to how we might modify the text in order to make it clearer? Gitz (talk) (contribs) 10:20, 15 February 2022 (UTC)