Religious Toleration and Organisational Typologies

In Britain at least, secularisation has proceeded to the point where the characteristics that conventionally divide churches, denominations, sects, and cults as types of religious organisation have largely disappeared. Drawing on survey data and newspaper reports collected over the last three decades, we argue that societal hostility now focuses so narrowly on tangential aspects of religion that the characteristic of existing in a high degree of tension with the wider environment (which is central to most definitions of the sect) is increasingly rare and is now likely to be applied to churches and denominations. The article concludes with a suggestion for a new typology.