Sociological Study of a Pentecostal Assembly Labelled a 'Cult': The Porte Ouverte Chrétienne Case

Sociological Study of a Pentecostal Assembly Labelled a “Cult”

CICNS reading report on Etude sociologique d’une assemblée pentecôtiste mulhousienne « Mission du Plein Évangile. La Porte Ouverte Chrétienne », October 2004, by Jean-Paul Willaime and Laurent Amiotte-Suchet.

In this sociological study, Jean-Paul Willaime and Laurent Amiotte-Suchet present the history and the theological heritage of the Mission du Plein Evangile (MPE-POC), a movement founded by Jean Peterschmitt. They also describe the worship and cultural activities of the mission, as well as the polemic, against a background of the anti-cult fight, that developed around the movement. If the sociologists’ work is instructive on every plane, it is this last aspect that we summarise.

The dispute that developed around the MPE-POC is a typical example of the negative impact of the French anti-cult climate on French society’s relationship with its spiritual minorities, and we recommend reading this study.

The two researchers do not present the MPE-POC as a victim group. The movement, according to the sociologists, clearly asserted its desire for growth and gave itself the means of that growth through an effective and conquering proselytism which ended up vexing the Catholic Church (from which a great number of the MPE-POC’s faithful come). Quarrels of a theological order developed; people disappointed with the MPE-POC expressed their discontent. The affair could have stopped there, despite the MPE-POC’s ill will about engaging in dialogue with mediation structures. But the France of the 1990s was resolutely anti-cult, and the first accusations of “secte” began to appear (the first seems to come from the Catholic Church, according to the researchers). From there, the anti-cult machine set itself in motion; the CCMM seized the file, and the “disappointed of the MPE-POC” transformed themselves into “victims of mental manipulation”. A husband refusing his wife’s membership of the movement, a conflict leading to their divorce, drew close to the CCMM, then founded his own victims’ association, the AVIPOC. His posture as victim and the joint action of the CCMM seduced the media, which backed the movement’s supposed cultic thesis: the MPE-POC had become a dangerous cult. The first anti-cult files on the movement appeared after the first commission of enquiry on the cults (1995), which, according to the sociologists, allowed the MPE-POC to avoid being listed in the parliamentary report of 1996. But the sustained action of the anti-cult associations, against the background of the vote of the About-Picard law in the 2000s, allowed them to put an accusatory national media spotlight on this movement. The AVIPOC and MPE-POC filed complaints against each other. These complaints were dismissed without further action or their authors were unsuccessful (one of the MPE-POC’s lawyers was Maître Biro).

A few extracts from the study on the anti-cult context:

”(…) Until the end of the sixties, the term ‘secte’ is used to designate Christian religious groups cut off from the great Churches and seeking a spiritual purity in an ascetic practice. The 1967 Robert dictionary cites as an example, for that matter, ‘la secte des luthériens’. The term ‘secte’ at that point still has only a slightly pejorative connotation. It is principally with the development of an increasingly diversified religious market that this term will pursue its semantic career, progressively coming to designate organisations (religious or not) which, to increase their demographic and financial power, will use destabilising psychophysiological methods in order to draw numerous new followers in their wake and obtain from them obedience and devotion body and soul to the movement’s cause. The increasingly deep conviction that numerous movements are flourishing everywhere in France whose discourse is only a façade for an enterprise of alienation of the followers then becomes dominant. Scientists and media of every kind relay this preoccupation with its paranoid dimension and participate in the elaboration of a ‘new’ vocabulary: sectes, followers, guru, mental manipulation, psychic rape, freely consented submission, etc.”

“To consider that a religious ideology can be the target of complaints from a follower for its deceitful and alienating character is not self-evident. The passage from malcontent to complainant therefore represents not the becoming-conscious of a reality, but the modification of the interpretation of a situation. 1993 is, let us recall, the year of the first great collective suicide of the members of the Davidian movement. The structuring of a way of thinking about cultic movements therefore resurfaces that year with more impact. The elaboration of a psycho-scientific discourse on the cult phenomenon invests the media universe in a growing manner. In the image of the historical emergence of a new category of illnesses, it is one of the new ills of our society that then comes into being: les sectes. As with other ‘curses’ (AIDS, mad cow disease, etc.), the phenomenon will be the object of repeated report-programmes carrying out the meticulous autopsy of this ‘virus’ henceforth ‘discovered’. The ill then has a name, and therefore a face. Everyone can rapidly acquire the recognition tools necessary to protect themselves from it. Everyone can realise that these angelic façades have everything of the colourful carnivorous plants that excel in matters of predation techniques. A globalising discourse on ‘les sectes’, which pushes into the background the heterogeneity of the groups so designated, then contributes to constructing scientifically the concept of ‘mental manipulation’ aiming to dissociate edifying beliefs from imprisoning ones. The enterprise of defining the cult phenomenon, largely driven by associations gathering former members of groups (or relatives of members), thus makes it possible to put in place fixed categories on the surface of a fluid and intermingled reality. The ‘secte’ is not an intrinsic reality but a socio-historically constituted reality. Our purpose therefore does not aim to contest the reality of the doings of certain controversial groups, but to take note of the fact that, on the one hand, such doings have become unacceptable through the action of a new semantic context and, on the other hand, that even in the absence of condemnable doings, the rate of suspicion that weighs on minority and heterodox religious groups now puts them in a situation where the slightest lapse of conduct can be fatal by triggering the process of stigmatisation.”

“If the first steps towards complaints against the MPE-POC take place from 1993, that can be explained, in our view, by the rise to power of a mediatised discourse on the cult phenomenon offering the malcontents of a religious group new tools (concepts) for re-thinking their experience. ‘The national debate on the “sectes”, by the climate of suspicion it has generated, obviously has repercussions at the local level’ (Willaime, 2001a, p. 356). The relations of indifference or even of trust that certain groups had with the local authorities could brusquely be called into question by the national hypermediatisation of the cult question. The argument in terms of religious fraud by mental manipulation offers a de-culpabilising semantic solution for giving meaning to a necessarily polysemous experience. The discontent can then mutate towards a victimisation of the vexing experience, legitimising the filing of a complaint by the former member as ‘abuse of trust or of weakness’ and that of the relative of a ‘follower’ as ‘assistance to a person in danger’. Without dwelling longer on the evolution of semantic tools, we do wish to recall here that words construct us just as much as we construct them. In this sense, mental illnesses like the old melancholia or the recent obsessional neurosis, for example, are sometimes less intrinsic pathologies than the products of historical constructions linked to a specifically Western interiorisation of the ill (guilt).”

”(…) The C.C.M.M., for its part, is one of the most active anti-cult associations in France. Its objective is not only to listen to and advise suffering people. The construction of a file on a movement suspected of cultism aims to have it recognised as a dangerous cult by the parliamentary commission of enquiry. (…) The objective of the C.C.M.M. is therefore situated in a repressive approach aiming, through the application of existing legislation, to combat effectively the movements recognised as cultic.”

”(…) It is only at the end of 1996 that the C.C.M.M. publishes a first working document on the MPE-POC. The latter describes in eighteen pages the activities of the assembly, its organisation chart, its history, and analyses the practices of the Church by the yardstick of the eleven criteria retained as indicators of dangerousness by the C.C.M.M. This document being confidential and its content rather ‘classic’ for anyone who knows the works published by the anti-cult associations, we will not return here to the argument developed. The facts cited in it, in the light of our enquiry, appear to be the object of a scarcely pertinent amalgam, with gratuitous accusatory formulas added here and there (linked to the sole intuition of the writer). The document ends with a few ‘well chosen’ extracts from the book of Jean PETERSCHMITT and with a dubious rapprochement between the MPE-POC and the Église Evangélique de Pentecôte of Besançon, recognised as cultic by the Gest-Guyard parliamentary report.”

Concluding remarks

This study brings to light the importance of adopting an approach of knowledge towards the spiritual minorities. Such an approach makes it possible to put possible disputes within minority groups into perspective inside the French anti-cult context that the authors qualify as “paranoid”. This rebalancing of reflection, if it were systematised within an independent observatory of the spiritual minorities, would make it possible to clean up the French climate. But the current action of the MIVILUDES is the opposite of this approach and the result is predictable; in their conclusion the researchers specify:

”(…) The logic of radicalisation developed by the assembly since at least 1984 constitutes the first act of this play. But this element is only a spark without a future if it does not meet a fuel. The latter seems to us to appear during the 80s with the progressive irruption of a whole grammar on the cult phenomenon largely developed by the media. The Catholic parishes of Mulhouse are the first to feed the fire by exploiting this inflammable vocabulary. But at that moment, the relations that the MPE-POC maintains with established Protestantism and most of the local evangelical Churches are too slight for the fire doors of the great Protestant family to be able to close. The E.R.N.R. [CICNS editor’s note: a mediation structure initiated by the Catholic Church] will only manage for a while to limit the intensity of the flames by keeping them at a distance from one another. The concentration operated by the C.C.M.M., then by the A.V.I.P.O.C., will contribute to making the situation explode by setting the whole Mulhouse sector ablaze. The few buckets of water that the MPE-POC will belatedly go to fetch from the A.E.F. [CICNS editor’s note: Alliance Evangélique Française] and the F.P.F. [CICNS editor’s note: Fédération Protestante de France] will then prove quite derisory in the face of so many years of slow combustion. If the ‘rain of the Spirit’ did not make it possible to avoid this incendiary process, the faithful at least credit it with having truly fireproofed the assembly by allowing it to pursue its growth without any truly vexing consequence being able to make it regret today not having concerned itself earlier with the smells of smoke that were amplifying around it day after day.”

“An article by François KOCH, with a strong critical dimension, which appeared in June 2002 in L’Express (no. 2659), proves that the social disqualification of the MPE-POC is still very much alive and that any obscure affair concerning one of its members always risks turning against it. To get out of this vicious circle and engage a minimum of constructive dialogue, perhaps it would be fitting for everyone to manage to distinguish better the possible condemnable facts (already provided with a legal arsenal) from the effects of strangeness provoked by the discourses and practices of a movement issued from a ‘religious culture’ simply out of step with the ambient liberal theologies.”