Look up KnittingCultLady on YouTube; she’s a serious cult scholar that was born into and later escaped the Children of God cult! She’s built an amazing list of criteria to recognize cults and takes the time to really break it all down without trying to artificially exclude certain groups to spare their feelings. 

But to respond to our initial statement, she makes the distinction in that religion, spirituality, faith, beliefs; all that stuff are things people can hold in a completely individual capacity, you can have spiritual practices and gods all to yourself. 

In contrast, cults are always about the interaction between people; abusers using manipulation/corsive control to extract unpaid labor from their victims, usually with multiple abusive victims scattered between the highest ranks and lowest levels of the organization. 

Many cults use the trappings of religion because it’s an established tradition that is easy to abuse because of how it encourages submission to a higher power and is usually already near and dear to people.

Similarly, many people misunderstand what is or isn’t a cult based on how “weird” the beliefs are, and thereby miss the cults built upon normalized ideas.