A sect is a group with distinctive religious, political or philosophical beliefs, often an offshoot of a larger religious group. Although in past it was mostly used to refer to religious groups, it has since expanded and in modern culture can refer to any organization that breaks away from a larger one to follow a different set of rules and principles. The term is occasionally used in a malicious way to suggest the broken-off group follows a more negative path than the original. The historical usage of the term sect in Christendom has had pejorative connotations, referring to a group or movement with heretical beliefs or practices that deviate from those of groups considered orthodox.
A sect as used in an Indian context refers to an organized tradition.
Read more about Sect: Etymology, Sociological Definitions and Descriptions, In Other European Languages, In Christianity, In Hinduism
Famous quotes containing the word sect:
“The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)
“Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)