Sect Shinto is set against Shrine Shinto in the modern classification: where shrine worship centres on place, kami, and communal festival, the sects centre on a founder's revelation, an organised teaching, and a gathered following, in a form closer to that of a church or new religious movement. The category reflects the administrative arrangements of modern Japanese religious history as much as a theological distinction. The affirmation names this founder-and-doctrine mode of Shinto, complementing the shrine-based mainstream and illustrating the diversity of forms that reverence for the kami has taken.
The administrative convenience of the Sect Shinto category has not always matched later scholarly and even the movements' own self-understanding: Tenrikyo, for instance, developed a theology centred on a single, unifying parental deity, Oyagami ("God the Parent"), and a specific sacred site, the Jiba, held to be the very place of human creation, doctrines and an institutional identity distinct enough from kami worship that most scholars of religion today classify Tenrikyo as an independent new religious movement with roots in, rather than a form of, Shinto. The category Sect Shinto thus reflects nineteenth-century Japanese religious administration as much as it reflects a stable, shared theology among the groups it names.