The Witch-Hunt Is Open

(le Québécois libre, no. 57, http://www.quebecoislibre.org)

article reproduced with the author’s permission

The theme of the cults sells well in France, that is the least one can say. One need only observe the politico-media agitation it arouses very regularly, and has for some years. And one understands why: if Alain Gest (1) is to be believed: “beyond the danger the cults represent for individuals and their families, they represent one more and more for the whole community”. For Mr Gest, indeed: “the cults gravely imperil the social and economic equilibrium of the nation”, nothing less! Good grief, but what is to be done, then, against this scourge? Answer: assert that the cults are henceforth an affair of State. Which explains the above-mentioned agitation.

What is really the case? Is civilisation really threatened by the “cults”? And by the way, what is a cult? Might there not be, behind all this circus, a new witch-hunt, very convenient for regilding the escutcheon of the State-man as protector-knight without fear and without reproach - well, above all without fear? Is the State’s “anti-cult” fight not, at bottom, a manifestation of the very intolerance it claims to combat?

Sect, sectarian, to follow and to cut

The word sect derives from the Latin sequi, to follow: those who are part of a sect are those who follow a person, a religious doctrine. So it was with the first Mormons who followed Brigham Young in his march towards the American West. For the German Protestant sociologists like Max Weber or Ernst Troeltsch, the sect appears as a contractual grouping of volunteers inclined to a very radical religious approach, in opposition to the conservatism of the Churches. Mgr Vernette (2) notes that these two tendencies are present from the beginnings of Christianity, for example. The Pauline tradition (Saint Paul) would fall within the perspective of a centralised, universal institution - a Stoic influence, no doubt. On the contrary, the Johannine tradition (Saint John) would be sought in small communities practising a radical mysticism, awaiting the return of Jesus and the thousand years of happiness that would go with it - the millennium - while leading an ascetic and devout life in the interval.

Today, Émile Poulat has rightly been able to say that “sect is a trap word, a socially booby-trapped word”. It indeed conveys a negative, devaluing image. Difficult, in this context, to use this word in the manner of wertfrei sociology - without value judgement. That is why the authors who treat the subject often prefer to use the expression “religious non-conformisms”. Whose fault is it? In fact, for a long time, the dominant Churches have tended to present the schisms carried out by “heretical” groups as sects, those who cut themselves off - from the Latin secare, to cut - from the “official” religion to form a minority religious group. This theological use of the word sect, conveying an (unfavourable) value judgement, explains in part why this word keeps company with the pejorative qualifier sectarian in popular culture. As Jean Séguy wrote:

The term Church is, in current usage, always valorising, and every sect (in the sociological sense) wants to be a Church (in the theological sense), taxing as sects (in the vulgar sense) the Churches that do not answer to its ideal.

This tendency is not about to reverse itself, as we shall see. Indeed, the use of the word “secte” in an exclusively pejorative sense has passed a new milestone since our dear politicians and their media valets made it their duty to work on the file with the zeal and finesse we know them for. Not without skill, it must be admitted, they have managed little by little to take the word secte out of its religious context, to secularise its pejorative connotation, so to speak. To do so, they had to evacuate almost completely the question of the followers’ religious motivations - at the heart of the sociological distinction of Troeltsch and Weber - and to approach the cults through a new prism, that of “dangerousness”.

Between religious association and criminal conspiracy

Since the question has become, it seems, an affair of State - which is the case as soon as an affair interests the men of the State - our text factories have produced the inevitable, obligatory reports. The last two are particularly interesting. One dates from 1995 and is remarkable for its grotesque attempt to define the concept of the cult on the basis of the criterion of dangerousness. A cult would thus not be a dissident religious association: it would be above all a dangerous association, an intermediate category between the criminal conspiracy and the honest association. Ah! Progress! Into conceptual treacle, certainly, but progress… By the way, how to spot the religious-dangerous associations, i.e. the cults? It is here that the genius of the parliamentarians bursts forth: they have concocted for us a battery of ten alternative criteria - fulfilling a single one suffices to receive the loathed qualification - to find our way in the jungle of religious associations. What is amusing, in passing, is that the State, analysed from a libertarian perspective, qualifies on all of them…

Mental destabilisation; Exorbitant character of financial demands; Induced rupture with the environment of origin; Attacks on physical integrity; Indoctrination of children; More or less antisocial discourse; Disturbances of public order; Scale of judicial entanglements; Possible diversions of traditional economic circuits; Attempts to infiltrate the public authorities.

The Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne (3) has noted the incongruity of these criteria. Thus, he saw clearly the dead ends of the holism implicit in the criterion of “attacks on physical integrity”:

If a pastor of a Protestant community is guilty of rape, does his whole denomination become a “cult”, or does that label concern only his parish or local community? Exactly how many pastors must be accused for their Church to become a “cult”?

What to say, in the same vein, of the criterion of the “exorbitant character of financial demands”, except that this is a new avatar of the centuries-old economic error of the objective “just price”, a thing which obviously exists only in the heads of those who claim to be able to judge in our place the appropriateness of our choices? Now, from the moment a transaction is voluntary - without physical violence or the threat of its use - the price is “just”; no matter that an outside observer subjectively considers - as I do, for that matter - that it is a high price to pay for mystical wind that will do more harm than good to the one who fills his head with it. Moreover, one could apply the same reasoning to the people who spend their money buying Le Devoir, Libération or Marianne - a weekly of the French leftist crackpot J.-F. Kahn.

The funniest thing about this approach based on “dangerousness” as the criterion of the cult is that the 1995 parliamentary report recognises that certain movements commonly called sects - like the Mormons, the Baptists - are not dangerous! All this fuss, to end up self-torpedoing the very criterion on which the whole edifice rests… Now that is work worthy of a legislative draughtsman, I must say!

The 1995 parliamentary report nevertheless ends by listing about 200 “dangerous” cults. Four years later, they lay the table again! And this time, they cast the net wider. I quote:

The criterion of dangerousness retained in 1995 remains independent of economic and financial weight (…) On the other hand, organisations not noted in the previous report, but which on the one hand fulfil certain of the criteria retained in the 1995 report, and on the other have acquired a certain economic and financial weight, were signalled to the commission which, in view of the elements of information gathered, wished to include them in the field of its investigations. An eleventh criterion to add to the other ten, making it possible to extend still further the possibilities of pronouncing the magic word cult, in an accusatory tone?

Mental manipulations: a manipulative concept

Of all these criteria, the one that has made the most ink flow so far is that of “mental destabilisation”, the modern terminological costume for the old “brainwashing”, brought back into fashion in a high-tech version - the washing would now be possible without physical constraint, solely thanks to a psychological constraint. Alain Gest does not hesitate to say of a Scientologist who spoke during a televised debate that he was “remote-controlled by the cult”! Without being a specialist in psychology, I think it possible to note a certain number of elements that allow one to suspect a great intellectual swindle; if only the scale of the defection rate of these “remote-controlled” people - generally between 50% and 100% a year according to D. Bromley.

Fundamentally, these theses indulge in hard determinism and quite simply deny the free will of the human being, which should put us on our guard from the outset. In fact, I think there is a rather close kinship here with the fashionable nonsense about advertising - advertising which supposedly “makes us act in spite of ourselves”, against our will. The sociologist James T. Richardson sums up the problem very well: the theoreticians of mental manipulation carefully ignore the aspects of will in adhesion to the new religions, as well as the character traits - the acquired behavioural habits - predisposing to such adhesion. Whether we like it or not, people knowingly seek out such intense mystical experiences.

J.-F. Mayer, in his work Sectes nouvelles (4), cites the words of an American ex-Moonist: When the outside observer notes that the aims and orientation of the Moonists’ behaviour have changed so much, he calls it brainwashing - I was simply strongly influenced and manipulated by my own will to become acceptable and to belong to the group. Essential. If we forget it, we would then have to qualify as a mental manipulator the woman who threatens to break with her partner if he does not adopt such-and-such behaviour, the partner in question preferring to comply rather than lose his companion. In fact, we would have to accuse of mental manipulation every person, every organisation of persons maintaining with others an exclusive relationship implying the following of a code of rules on pain of rupture. For “emotional blackmail” is in no way specific to the cults, or even to religious milieux in general. It is even, in a certain way, at the base of the cohesion of every human association: family, club, company, etc.

At bottom, what seems to worry the report’s authors per se is that a minority of individuals should be able to cooperate in a process of collective differentiation. The individual on one side, the democratic nation-State “representing society” on the other, and nothing in the middle that could trouble this sacred union: there is the citadel they apply themselves to defending. On this subject, one should know that one of the principal reproaches addressed in France to the Jehovah’s Witnesses turns on the fact that their doctrine based on non-violence invites them to refuse military service - a big reproach made to the Witnesses by the Conseil d’État (the supreme administrative jurisdiction in France). The C.É. considers that the Witnesses are not a worship association within the meaning of the 1905 law - a much lightened tax bludgeoning at stake - because, by inciting their followers not to pay that tax of lost time which is military service, they “do not respect public order”.

Towards a new moral and spiritual administration

Reading the parliamentary reports, one quickly realises that beyond the maniacal and bloodthirsty gurus - who ought in fact to be treated like the “laymen” who commit the same criminal acts -, it is the free market in religious beliefs that disturbs. Take for example the typology of the cults established by the 1995 commission of enquiry and taken up by last year’s. One finds there, for example, the following categories, explicated thus:

The alternatives: advocate an organisation radically different from society and from human relations. [Broad, is it not? It is clear that, as libertarians, we may feel targeted. What is simply hi-la-rious is that the rapporteur of the 1999 commission is… a communist! By the way, do you hear the voice of the State muezzin? “The political status quo thou shalt not contest.”]

The pseudo-Catholics: refer to the Catholic tradition, which they mean to maintain against the reforms imposed by Rome. [And the muezzin continues: “The directives of the central authority thou shalt not discuss.”]

The syncretists: are characterised by a mixture of different worship traditions, according to the guru’s recipes… [ “Thou shalt not innovate overmuch.”]

The neo-pagans: want to re-establish the cults of before Christianity. [“Of antiquity, only the passion for the City shalt thou retain.”]

What, then, is to be done to save the nation from the peril that threatens it? The communist J.-P. Brard was the most radical on this terrain, demanding nothing less than anti-cult legislation and the establishment of a High State moral authority - of the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel type - to decide which religious associations are “cults” and which are not, a Stalinist solution that has the merit of clarity.

Mr Brard was not followed. His colleagues have for the moment a softer imagination, like the gentle tyranny they are accustomed to distil. Nevertheless, the proposals are indeed there and they are not cheering. In the name of the anti-cult fight, certain sectors of activity favoured by these religious movements may be put through the State mincer. Thus, the paramedical professions, professional training and the associative world as a whole risk becoming a manoeuvring ground where the administration will deploy a new regulatory arsenal, with great blows of approval procedures. Let us also note that the report recommends creating posts of magistrates specialised in the matter - there already exists a “cults correspondent” at each prosecutor’s office. Good! The anti-cult judge will be able to shake hands with his colleague, the anti-doping judge (see THE ANTI-DOPING CRUSADE, QL, no. 53)… Finally, the cherry on the cake, the report invites the launching of a project for a European anti-cult convention, at once under the aegis of the European Union and under that of the Council of Europe.

Consulting Alain Gest’s book, I also found this, in bulk: extend the procedure of administrative dissolution of associations through a broader interpretation of the notion of “disturbances of public order”, organise closer control of school curricula by the administration, revise the law of defamation the better to hinder the diffusion of the cults’ written publications, etc. By the way, what were we talking about earlier? The totalitarian drift of the dangerous cults, if I am not mistaken…

Liberty and responsibility

The risk of a fascising drift linked to the cults is quite real. However, it is not located on the side of what is per se only a world market in religious beliefs. It is located, on the contrary, in this very worrying attempt by the State to seize control of that market. The fact that certain cults merge with genuine criminal conspiracies - I do not doubt it for an instant - must not serve as a pretext (5) for letting the most powerful criminal conspiracy run riot all the more.

I will conclude my remarks with this citation drawn from J.-F. Mayer’s work: The society that values its liberties must accept that it cannot always protect those of its members who voluntarily renounce their independence, devote their goods to vain causes or engage in practices harmful to them. Where questions of faith and association are at stake, the individual who is truly free is not only free to enjoy his choices, but also to suffer from them. (Daniel G. Hill)

On the pretext of sparing us useless sufferings, the men of the State want nothing less than to choose in our place. To yield to their de-responsibilising “benevolence” is to take here, as elsewhere, a great step down the road to serfdom.

Olivier GOLINVAUX was a (DEA) student at the Law Faculty of Aix-en-Provence. He is a contributor to Québécois Libre.

Alain Gest, Les sectes, une affaire d’État, L’Archer, Paris, 1999. Mr Gest chaired the parliamentary commission whose enquiry led to the much-mediatised 1995 report.
J. Vernette, Les sectes, collection Que sais-je?, no. 2519, P.U.F., Paris, 1990. 3. M. Introvigne, “Sectes et droit de persécution” in Pour en finir avec les sectes: le débat sur le rapport de la commission parlementaire, Dervy, Paris, 1996.
J.-F. Mayer, Sectes nouvelles, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1985.
“If it is judged in conformity with the public good to put an end to the malfeasance of the cults, let that malfeasance be ended, even if the principle of liberty has to be jostled for it.” Roger Ikor, Je porte plainte, Albin Michel, Paris 1981. Mr Ikor was addressing the President of the Republic, who “embodies our country and our civilisation”.

The Witch-Hunt Is Open

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