In my experience there are multiple cutls within academia and they operate at different levels. In finance, for example, there is a cult of "efficient market hypothesis" and another cult of "behavioral finance". The two groups don't appreciate each other much although publicly they love to say how much they respect their colleagues from the other group.
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By that measure, all of human society is a cult.
That's a strange statement. So as a human society who do we all hate collectively in secret but claim to love openly? My point is that the academia as a whole is not a cult but there are cults within academia.
Also that's not the only "measure" by which one can claim existence of cults within academia but it's still something you don't want in the research community. Numerous times I have heard statements like "this paper will never get past XYZ because XYZ doesn't like Thaler/Kahneman/[any behavioral researcher here]". That should never be acceptable in research that's claimed to be scientific. Yet, it's common in academia.