Breaking down the question
The question has two parts — a definition ("What is cult?") and an explanation of a trend ("the growth of cults in the contemporary world"). You must first locate the cult within the sociological typology of religious organisations, distinguishing it from church, denomination and sect, and then account sociologically for why cults have proliferated in modern, secularising societies.
How to approach it
Define the cult using the church-sect typology associated with Troeltsch and refined by Yinger and Wilson, highlighting its distinctive features. Then explain its growth by connecting it to secularisation, anomie, individualism and globalisation, drawing on scholars such as Roy Wallis and Stark and Bainbridge. A balanced answer treats the cult not as an aberration but as a characteristic form of religiosity in late modernity.
Model answer
A cult is a loosely organised religious grouping centred on individual mystical or spiritual experience rather than on doctrine or a bounded community. In the church-sect continuum developed by Ernst Troeltsch and extended by J.M. Yinger, the cult is the most loosely structured, most tolerant and least demanding form. Its characteristic features include the absence of a rigid organisation, a charismatic leader or novel teaching, an emphasis on personal experience and self-fulfilment, fluid and undemanding membership, and a tendency to be world-affirming and eclectic, borrowing freely from many traditions.
Roy Wallis classified new religious movements as world-rejecting, world-accommodating and world-affirming, with many contemporary cults falling in the last category, promising success, health and personal growth within the existing social order.
The growth of cults in the contemporary world can be explained by several linked processes. First, secularisation has weakened traditional religious institutions, leaving a spiritual vacuum that cults, offering personalised meaning, come to fill — a paradox noted by Stark and Bainbridge, who argue that religious demand persists and generates new suppliers. Second, the anomie and disenchantment of modern urban life create a search for community, certainty and transcendence. Third, rising individualism and consumer culture favour the pick-and-mix spirituality that cults and the New Age movement provide. Fourth, globalisation and modern media have circulated Eastern mysticism, therapies and gurus across the world, widening the spiritual marketplace.
Cults are therefore not a residue of superstition but an expression of religiosity reshaped by modernity itself.
For related material, see types of religious practices.
Examiner's perspective
A high-scoring answer defines the cult precisely within the church-sect typology rather than in loose everyday terms, and explains its growth through the sociology of secularisation and modernity. Naming Troeltsch, Yinger, Wallis and Stark and Bainbridge, and linking cults to the New Age and consumer individualism, signals conceptual depth beyond a descriptive account.