Cult groups have spread rapidly across the United States in recent years. Secular author Margaret Thaler Singer estimates that in the last two decades roughly 20 million Americans have been involved in a cult. Christian cult expert Ron Rhodes concurs with this estimate, claiming that this has been a 3,000 percent increase over the last 150 years. Rhodes writes, “It is for good reason that every book in the New Testament except Philemon has something to say about false teachers, false prophets, false gospels, or heresies.”While cults have certainly proliferated over the last century, many have had difficulty clearly defining what they mean when they use the term cult. Atheistic critics have grouped all religious groups together. For instance, arch-skeptic Richard Dawkins writes,
"Jesus’ family values, it has to be admitted, were not such as one might wish to focus on. He was short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own mother, and he encouraged his disciples to abandon their families to follow him. ‘If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’ The American comedian Julia Sweeney expressed her bewilderment in her one-woman stage show, Letting Go of God: ‘Isn’t this what cults do? Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you?’
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