Billy Graham: How to distinguish cults from real Christian groups

Renowned preacher Billy Graham gave three simple guide questions that would help one determine whether a religion is a cult or a real Christian group.

The evangelical leader said Christians should protect themselves from being swayed into a cult as they face a smorgasbord of religions existing today. In order to equip oneself, he shared three simple questions one can use in evaluating a religious group.

"What do they believe about the Bible?" wrote 97-year-old Graham on his advice column for The Kansas City Star on Thursday.

The founder of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) believes a Christian religion should only place its faith in the Word of God and should not add anything to it nor "claim they alone have translated it correctly."

"What do they believe about Jesus?" should be the second question, said Graham. Christians believe Jesus to be the Son of God, who came down from heaven to save humankind from sins, he said. On the other hand, cults do not believe in Jesus but believe in working for their own salvation.

Graham penned the last question as "What do they believe about other Christians?"

"Do they claim that they, and they alone, have the truth, or do they rejoice that God is also at work elsewhere?" he added.

The issue of identifying a religious group as a cult became a fodder for controversy and backlash against the preacher in 2012 after BGEA removed Mormonism from its list of cult religions. BGEA said it did so because it doesn't want to involve itself from a "theological debate about something that has become politicized during this [2012] campaign."

Graham just pledged to help the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a Republican and a Mormon.

Many Christian leaders criticized the acceptance of Mormonism as a Christian religion while the preacher's son, Franklin Graham, expressed "shocked that we even had that on there."

The junior Graham, also the president and CEO of BGEA, said he wasn't even aware of an article on their website that made such a list and criticized it as name-calling.

"If I want to win a person to Christ, how can I call that person a name? That's what shocked me, that we were calling people names," he told CNN.