re: Catholicism, Judaism, &c.
I admit that it does seem that the difference between a cult and a church is in the numbers, but there are other distinctions. It's hard to conceive that in the United States, where the First Amendment to the Constitution is allegedly sacrosanct (ha!) something like "Wicca" can run into difficulty being recognized as a proper religious status. Then again, while the witches may have their problem, Branch Davidian asserted its First Amendment right to marry multiple ten year-old girls to their leader David Koresh. We all know how that ended.
However, there are more cults around than you would know to shake a stick at.
In Catholic high school, or if you take a college course on Judeo-Christian history, you will come across the comparative terms cult and creed. If we look back to Ozymandias' offering from Merriam-Webster, this comparison involves definition 1, formal religious veneration. You learn to observe, of the superficial, the aspects of, for instance, the Catholic "cult" of worship and the Catholic "creed" of worship. Incense, funny hats, pieces of dead saints hidden in the altars, graven images of Christ and the saints adorning the walls, the eucharist--go sit through a Mass, you'll see the cult of Catholic worship, as well as hear folks recite a few aspects of the creed of Catholic worship. (Throw in a Catechism, some other stuff ... ask a Catholic about it.)
And in this sense, cult is a mechanical process of sorts. How many of our internationals watch baseball, especially Major League Baseball? You'll see a mixing of cult and creed in American (and some Canadian) baseball fans. National anthems, ceremonial first pitch, starting lineups, ritualized chaos. That's essentially the beginning of a baseball game. The ritualized chaos follows certain rules, and you get ejected from the ballpark if you violate them. In addition to those rules, there are rules that will get even children booed and jeered by thousands of people unless they conform to the ritual. One guy, obviously too drunk to think clearly, caught the ball after Cal Ripken hit a home run in his last appearance in Seattle; the guy threw the ball back onto the field. Yeah, he held a little piece of history that people would pay hundreds of dollars for, and he threw the ball back onto the field in order to take part in a baseball ritual of being too snotty to want the other team's home run baseballs. The seventh-inning stretch is one of the most curious rituals I've ever seen. And now they're even contracting the big-board displays, so that on the coasts and in appropriate river cities, they show computer-generated hydroplane races; almost every ballpark shows a "shell game" with the team's caps and a baseball; music is standardized between ballparks, and that's how "Who Let the Dogs Out" sold millions of copies.
(Also of interest is the Catholic "football mother." You see them, naturally, at Catholic high schools and colleges during football season. But if you ever want to hear the Ave Maria in English or Latin in under 3.37 seconds, yeah, a Catholic mother watching her fourth son make a run for a college scholarship or a championship trophy is almost a pure incarnation of faith.)
In academia there is a phrase, "death cult," that refers not to pseudo-Satanic blood ritualists and orgiastic necrophiliacs, but to that set of customs and rituals which surround the treatment of the dead in a given culture. Obviously, Egyptian pyramids come to mind, as do various mounds from premodern and prehistoric Europe and America; how can we forget the pyramids of Mexico and the tales of human sacrifice among American precolombian empires? But what about your grandmother's funeral? My condolences, of course, and I don't mean to be insensitive, but really ...?
The larger point being is that it's all cult. Personality, religious, or societal, almost everything is ritualized. Remember that both cult and culture share an etymology through the Latin cultus.
At the point that we return to the numbers having anything to do with the idea of cult or church, we must remember that cult in such a sense is usually declared according to definition 3, so when you get to be the size of the Catholic Church, for instance, you don't think of yourself as "unorthodox," and few if any people of any faith actually wish to be regarded as "spurious."
So I think numbers just have to do with advertising and repetition. There was a bit on the Daily Show the other night about Condoleeza Rice being interviewed by Matt Lauer; apparently she buried the word "dangerous" in almost every response she made. "World's most dangerous region. Most dangerous man in the world." It's a lot easier to make the idea stick when millions of people around you believe what you're saying at the outset. "We're not a cult. We're a church." Listen, on those occasions that you find those "unorthodox or spurious" cult members caught up in some public brouhaha. They use the word "church" repeatedly, almost self-consciously.
Honestly, that's really all the difference is.
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