The Christian Research Institute (CRI), an American counter-cult organization, was founded in 1960 by Southern Baptist minister Walter Martin (1928-89), author of The Kingdom of the Cults. In some ways it is the most traditional of ‘cult-watching’ organizations in that its aim is to educate Christians about new religious movements by comparing their beliefs with those of Bible-based Evangelical Christianity, and showing where they have strayed from ‘the truth’.
According to the CRI website, http://www.equip.org/, Walter Martin was ‘the first evangelical Christian clergy [sic] to recognize the threat and opportunity presented to the Christian church by cults and alternative religious systems’. Although his book, which has gone through numerous editions, was one of the most influential in its field, Martin was actually following in the well-trodden footsteps of other Christian writers such as William C.Irvine (Heresies Exposed, 1921, originally 1917 as Timely Warnings), J.K. van Baalen (The Chaos of Cults, 1938), J.Oswald Sanders (Heresies and Cults, 1948), and Horton Davies (Christian Deviations: The Challenge of the Sects, 1954), amongst others.
The stated mission of CRI today is ‘To provide Christians worldwide with carefully researched information and well-reasoned answers that encourage them in their faith and equip them to intelligently represent it to people influenced by ideas and teachings that assault or undermine orthodox, biblical Christianity.’
CRI claims to be ‘the largest, most effective apologetics ministry in the world’. Its current president, Hank Hanegraaff, runs a question-and-answer radio programme called Bible Answer Man. He has also written numerous books on aspects of Christian belief, against the Mormon Church, and against evolution. In his writings and broadcasts, as well as arguing against both ‘pseudo-Christian cults’ and non-Evangelical religious scholars, he has been heavily critical of some of the more controversial aspects of Evangelical Christianity, including the Toronto Blessing, faith healing, and deliverance, discipling, Word of Faith preachers such as Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and Oral Roberts, and the practice of setting the date of the End Times. Perhaps because of what some have called Hanegraaff’s confrontational style, many CRI articles are responses to critics of CRI.
