State Cynicism or Political Pragmatism Facing the Spiritual Minorities

State Cynicism or Political Pragmatism

Facing the Spiritual Minorities

An analysis of the statements of Nathalie Luca, anthropologist, researcher at the Centre for interdisciplinary studies of religious facts (CEIFR) and member of the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES, at the colloquium “The lawyer facing dérives sectaires”, in her paper entitled: “The ‘cults’: an obstacle to citizenship? European and United States policies”

by Émile D’Albret of CICNS

Beyond the intention of justifying the French policy of fighting against dérives sectaires, one finds in this intervention, crudely exposed, and far indeed from the humanist pretensions of the usual discourses, the part that can be played by the hegemonic will to control citizens on the part of the French State.

She poses as the definition of a cult: “a religious group socially non-assimilated and perceived as menacing for the stability of a given society”, and takes the angle of a study whose subject is finally the state more than the cult, considering that “the capacity of a society to integrate this or that type of group varies according to its points of vulnerability”.

France is classed, according to her, in the category of states which “refuse (…) communitarian particularisms within the public sphere” according to a “republican logic”.

The few lines that follow explain her theory:

”(…) thus the strongly politicised religious groups, which reject the idea of a confinement of the religious to the private sphere alone, are targeted by the fight against the cults in this country ( editor’s note: France): they call its foundations into question by annihilating the individual-citizen in favour of the community-citizen. This individual-citizen is equally denied by groups which, conversely, refuse any investment in social life, the refusal to vote or to enrol children in state schools being salient aspects of it. The adherent then lives in and for the community, beside the Republic whose primacy he renounces. He is no longer a citizen of it”

One may conclude that what is reproached to the groups catalogued by the MIVILUDES is inventing a new citizenship, without its being established that this lies outside the framework of the laws. It is simply opposed to a political will to format society.

A second sub-category of the analysis groups the States which “refuse (…) communitarian particularisms within the public sphere” in a “cultural logic”, of which Germany would be an example.

These states would refuse the new groups in order to preserve their religious or cultural traditions. She gives the example of Greece and recalls its repeated condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Nathalie Luca denounces a “mote” in the Greek eye which does not seem to us absent from the French gaze on the new spiritualities, while omitting moreover to mention the “beam” constituted by France’s numerous condemnations linked to its policy of fighting the cults by that same ECHR.

We read, through her statements, that the French State acts not according to its Constitution and the principles laid down by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but for a republican ideal which in fact opposes them, in the definition she gives of it.

How, indeed, to reconcile article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guaranteeing “freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, including “freedom to manifest one’s religion or conviction individually or collectively, in public or in private, through worship, teaching, practices and the performance of rites”, with a “refusal of communitarian particularisms within the public sphere”? Or again, how to perpetuate the French constitutional right guaranteeing the freedom to choose one’s children’s education, when the refusal to send one’s children to state school can be considered a “denial of the republic” or “a negation of citizenship”, and entails being “targeted by the policy of fighting against the cults”? (Note: a lawyer confirmed to us that certain groups had been qualified as a “cult” for the sole fact of having removed children from school, without for all that having neglected to give them a solid and valid instruction, in accordance with French law.)

At the opposite pole from France, Nathalie Luca presents States which accept communitarian particularisms, according to a logic she calls “multi-culturalist”, on the example of England, where “one can, in theory, be a citizen while publicly claiming the specificities due to one’s communitarian belonging”, supposed to serve “the general interest and the good functioning of society as a whole”, and where “religious movements, however controversial they may be, have little difficulty integrating into the social fabric”.

This observation of a successful integration of certain movements, which demonstrates, quite evidently, their absence of intrinsic dangerousness, does not seem, in her eyes, to call into question the legitimacy of the French policy which has nevertheless been fighting for years against these same groups in the name of the significant danger they would present for human rights and fundamental liberties.

Further on, the evocation of the tragedy of the Peoples Temple (the Guyana massacre of 1978) to justify the action of the French government is dismaying in its approximation and simplism. Let us quote this sentence as an example: “an altercation with members of an association fighting them led to a shooting. There were ten wounded and five dead. The followers then found themselves at an impasse, and took their own lives, by poisoning.” (We recall that this concerns the death of 923 people!). In 1997, the FBI’s 39,000-page report on the subject fell into the public domain and revealed the ineptitude of the suicide thesis and the reality of the CIA’s responsibility. To ignore this in the context of this colloquium is a breach of academic ethics and the demonstration of a flagrant partiality.

The analysis continues beyond our borders, answering directly the reproach often made to the MIVILUDES of isolating France by its policy. Curiously, the argument tends not to demonstrate the legitimacy of the French approach, but to denounce another form of state cynicism.

Mme Luca expounds this while evoking certain groups and supposed criminal behaviours and malevolent intentions, totally forgetting that most of the time these are only allegations…. For example, the Unification Church of the reverend Moon disturbs the States, according to her: “because it represents a flight of capital”. Then, because it claims to recast the “social bond” proper to each “community of citizens” into a “social bond” shared by a “planetary community”. It is therefore “undesirable wherever its values dissociate themselves ostensibly from those which found the national sentiment”.

Having recognised the true reasons for the hostility of certain States towards this movement, the least one could do would be to cast doubt on the pretexts commonly put forward to justify the persecutions that flow from it. Yet it is without precaution that her statements evoke supposed links with “fascist” and “Nazi-type” groups.

Her next analysis is interesting, and we invite the reader to compare with his own aspirations the image of France given here by a representative of the government:

She opposes France and the United States on their “type of national regulatory instances”. For the latter, “it is the courts of justice which fill the role of ‘normative institution’”, a system in which she recognises “the suppleness of Regulation” since the cases are necessarily judged one by one, in a pragmatic fashion, which allows each time the possible revisiting of previous decisions, in order to adapt them better to societal demands”. Which forbids any “rigid regulation by an established principle of regulation”.

(…) “This pragmatic, supple and dynamic mode of regulation is opposed to the French system, very centralised and orchestrated by the legislator. In this case, the political is supposed to precede the legal, elaborating new laws or transforming them, according to the evolution of needs. The action of the deputies is centred on prevention: preventing the abuses observed or the affairs that have occurred from being able to recur; protecting the citizens. This protective mission that the citizens give to the French State makes it possible to understand why the latter was the first, in Western Europe, to pass from the generally shared observation of the necessity of watching the cults, to an effective policy of fighting against dérives sectaires”.

(…) “The reports on the cults, national and European, published from the 1980s, show in effect that despite a common will to warn against certain groups, the political handling, of a necessarily preventive nature, of the question of the cults has remained delicate. It poses the problem of the frontier between freedom of beliefs and the necessity of preventing offences associated with certain beliefs.

France nevertheless launched itself into the elaboration of a preventive campaign by publishing, in 1996, the Gest and Guyard parliamentary report on the cults, where the mission of protecting the citizen is reaffirmed and serves to legitimise the warning against 173 groups, listed in alphabetical order and by number of adherents”.

This last point is surprising to say the least on the part of a representative of a State body, for it amounts to saying that a tool, the parliamentary inquiry report, was deliberately used and diverted for the ends of a political will and not of an objective study of a problem.

The parliamentary inquiry report is originally a tool of reflection intended for the debates of the National Assembly, and in no case a means of diffusing a nominative and totally subjective accusation, which is what it has nevertheless become here.

If you give “parliamentary inquiry report” to an Internet search engine, you will at once see the word “cults” appear on your screens. When one knows that the twelfth legislature has already seen more than 200 similar reports appear, one can only note the exceptional use made of this one.

Her commentary on the About-Picard law joins the same pragmatism: “Finally a law of general application is voted, but politically conceived and practically constructed to reinforce the effectiveness of legal repression against the cults”. And further on: “The mission of prevention and protection of the French political leader and legislator can sometimes collide with the power of the legal, which possibly operates as a counter-power”.

Power and counter-power… The foundations of the Republic and its ideal of respect for persons and their liberties as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seem totally absent from this portrait of France.

As for the conclusion of the paper, concerning Franco-American relations: “one may note that with the replacement of the MILS by the MIVILUDES, whose title is more in accord with the European positions, the European and United States tensions have very visibly calmed”, it resembles more the self-congratulation of the marketing department of a company that has suffered a bad press than the positive assessment of a responsible state body, faced with what is in fact a challenge from the whole international community on the grave subject of its non-respect of fundamental liberties.