Anne Morelli: Extracts from Lettre ouverte à la secte des adversaires des sectes

Anne Morelli

extracts from the book: “Lettre ouverte à la secte des adversaires des sectes” [Open letter to the cult of the adversaries of cults]

published by éditions Labor, collection Quartier Libre

Anne Morelli took part as an expert in the parliamentary Commission of enquiry on the cults. She is professor of the History of contemporary Christian Churches and of Contemporary Christian Texts at the Institute of the history of religions of the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Throughout this book she establishes a parallel between the “small religious groups” commonly called cults and the great religions. In her childhood she knew numerous religious communities. Three of her mother’s cousins entered different communities (the monastery of the Visitation, the little sisters of the poor and the little sisters of the Assumption).

See the video interview with Anne Morelli by the CICNS

The parallels:

· Words:

“Every word we employ is generally charged with a negative or positive emotion… It is the same with the words ‘religion’ and ‘cult’. The first sounds really serious. Religions are respectable and it is shocking, indeed vulgar, to attack their practices.

By contrast, the word ‘cult’ arouses anguish and disquiet. One forgets that until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Church (with a capital letter, the Catholic Church of course) designated as ‘sect’ everything that was not itself.”

There follows a whole series of words that vary according to whom one is speaking of:

religions	cults
Priest	guru
Believer, faithful	follower
Proselytism	propaganda
Apostles, companions of the messiah	Acolytes of the guru
Catechesis	Indoctrination
Faith	Beliefs
Liturgical vestments	Disguises, trinkets

· Work:

“The Guyard report on the cults in France accuses them of ‘diverting the economic circuits’ by recourse to clandestine work… The bill instituting in Belgium a parliamentary commission of enquiry charged with elaborating a policy with a view to fighting the cults (March 1996) considers that the cults recruit people who work like slaves without any protection. … But when one has faith (and I think I have it in the domain of the struggle for equal rights, for example) one does not have the impression of working or of devoting oneself. One does not earn money by one’s action, but one gains something else that is not measurable and yet real… The cults have taken up the traditions in force in the religions, according to which total commitment passes through total devotion. Monastic life is obviously built on this basis.”

· Money:

“One can also bring this base-hierarchy dualism of convents and of ‘cults’ closer to what happens in the Church in general. The priests of the base today often live in scarcely brilliant material conditions in view of those reserved for the prelates… The common rule is rather that religions draw profit from the goods, gifts and work of their members and that the spiritual domain does not long remain sheltered from the commercial domain.”

· Private life, sexuality:

“But I see no fundamental difference between Mme Gabrielle, high priestess of the Ananda group, who imposes the condom, the pill or the coil on her faithful, and Mr Wojtyla, ‘sovereign pontiff’, who forbids them to them. Both, for reasons that seem excellent to them, intervene in the most intimate part of lives, come and rummage in bedside tables and take it upon themselves to choose in the individuals’ place.”

· Brainwashing, indoctrination:

“Can one distinguish ‘true’ conversions from ‘false’ ones, and if so, by what objective elements? One must remember that the apostles were recruited on a simple ‘Come and follow me’. That Saint Paul converted in an instant on the road to Damascus… I believe — personally — that they did not lie in describing themselves as struck by the sudden grace of conversion… The millennial permanence of the religions is due only to this untimely invasion of childish consciousnesses, this permanent violation of their liberty by a forced information, which is proper to all conditioning, but doubtless also to all education.”

· Losing one’s personality:

“The cult, like the charismatic community, the convent, the prison, the hospital, the barracks, the boarding school (and perhaps also certain parties or companies when it is a matter of Disney or McDonald’s!) is one of those total institutions which take, mark, change the name of or number, print into a mould and disguise in order to give the impression of uniformity of bodies and minds. It removes by essence the individual’s personality, who has interest and dignity only as a member of the group. Its rules explain everything and one cannot get out of them. To call them into doubt is already to exclude oneself from them.”

· Having dealings with the courts:

“The parallel with the way the judicial entanglements of the cults are treated is telling. For the cults, an accusation is worth proof and is highly highlighted by the media. If it is a matter of a minister of a recognised religion, the greatest discretion, for the longest possible time, is always in order.”

· “Healthy” life and “unhealthy” life:

“If one is to believe the image maintained in public, another distinctive trait of the ‘cults’ in relation to the religions would be that the former lead to living an ‘unhealthy’ life, contrary to the latter. By ‘unhealthy’, one may in turn and according to the case understand a sexual life too much or not enough regulated, an ‘abnormal’ dietary regime, strange clothing, incomprehensible rites and decorum… a very rigorous discipline that weakens the individual and reduces his critical spirit…

· Intervening in politics:

“As vice-president of the MRAX (Movement against racism, antisemitism and xenophobia), when I think that a forthcoming political decision is going to influence the causes I defend… I write to the political representatives setting out our movement’s point of view; I ask them for a meeting in order to defend this point of view in person; I point out to them the consequences that their vote or their decision may have on the lived experience of those I consider myself to be defending. This set of steps in politics is called by a barbarous term: lobbying… Now this right to influence political decisions is recognised for all… except for the minority religions…”

· Wacky beliefs and serious beliefs:

“All beliefs are by essence of the domain of the irrational, but we consider those we have known for ever serious and ‘normal’ and those we discover today wacky and ‘abnormal’. It is certainly not on the terrain of beliefs that we can objectively establish the frontier one would like to erect between cults and religions.”

· “Harmful” cults and “beneficial” religions:

“The difficulty of defining and of distinguishing the cults is evident. Their practices are similar and their beliefs impossible to classify in terms of rationality.”

so, other criteria: antiquity, number of faithful, “above a certain floor, the cult would accede to the status of religion… If harmfulness is calculated in number of deaths, the Order of the Solar Temple must be considered a poor amateur in relation to the human damage caused simultaneously by the great religions… I think that the cults are still, in matters of ‘harmfulness’, only pale amateurs beside the great multinationals of the religions, whose dead are to be counted in millions. As for knowing which among today’s cults will be dangerous tomorrow, I refuse this type of forecasting, because the evolution of human groups is impossible to predict… Who could have imagined in the first centuries of our era that those persecuted Christians, so likeable in the firmness of their convictions before their torturers, would become, a few centuries later, the driving force of the Inquisition…”

· Should the obligation to persecute the “gullible” be instituted?

“Under the pretext that the naive are abused by scarcely democratic religious leaders whom they obey, to whom they devote themselves, to whom they consecrate their money, their health and sometimes their life, all in the name of ideas that seem absurd to us, must one add to their various alienations an official persecution that would make martyrs of them? … The public authorities thus arrogate to themselves the right, in religious matters, to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’. To the first would go the subsidies, to the second the legal proceedings…”

· A very powerful lobby: the anti-cult lobby:

“Their methods are everywhere similar: to cast discredit on all religious groups outside the great classic religions and to sow disinformation on the subject. The cult of the adversaries of cults grips the media and the political world quite particularly, but does not neglect the approach to the world of university research either… Another practice of disinformation conducted by the cult of the adversaries of cults is to inflate the figures of the adherents of these minority religions… The anti-cult lobbies also insist on an aspect of the ‘capture of our fine youth’, which scarcely corresponds to the reality we have been able to verify during our field enquiries.”

· The legislative initiatives of the great multinationals of religion against the religious SMEs:

“The religious monopolies, losing ground if not in peril in our regions, have imagined legislative strategies to slow their erosion and prevent the development of their young competitors. The offensive is conducted on the European as much as on the national plane… Unanimously decried by university circles, the report of the French parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults has been the object of a systematic refutation both in its hazardous working methods and in its conclusions.”

· Conclusion:

“Not having found in the course of my research a single objective criterion permitting the cults to be distinguished from the religions, I obviously refuse to take part in this sorting… I plead for openness to the ideas of tomorrow and for tolerance. Tolerance is an inconvenient virtue…”

Information about Anne Morelli at http://www.ulb.ac.be/rech/inventaire/chercheurs/0/CH1160.html