What Motivates the Anti-Cult Militants? The Question Nobody in France Asks

Anti-Cult Militancy… Pathological, Impassioned, on a Mission or Instrumentalised?

What motivates the anti-cult militants? (October 2009)

By André Tarassi

If the words and acts of members of spiritual minorities are analysed in a hypercritical manner, generally in order to extract suspect elements or hidden intentions from them, those of the anti-cult militants benefit from an aura of respectability, from a favourable presumption never questioned in French public debate.

Yet ought not the unrelenting intensity of the combat of some of them (to the point of devoting their existence to it) and the ferocity of their accusations (generally devoid of proof, thus flouting the elementary rules of respect for others and of the presumption of innocence) to interest psychologists and sociologists?

The absence of any study on the subject in France reflects unambiguously the nature of the anti-cult combat, whose objective is not to analyse a phenomenon in a neutral and balanced manner, but to repress and to destroy, even if that means profiting from certain hatreds, rancours or pathologies.

A suspect methodology

The first observation that any jurist, journalist or sociologist of good faith could make is that the methodology of the anti-cult militants does not respect the fundamental rules of an honest debate, not to mention the laws in force on the presumption of innocence and on defamation[1]. We may observe also that sanctions for their excesses are very rare and that the tendency of the public authorities is rather to instrumentalise their gratuitous attacks, to the point of presenting them as the point of view of experts. The fact that certain apostates active in the anti-cult movement, who have had their quarter of an hour of televised glory, may be people with psychological problems or subject to court decisions (listen to Maître Hincker’s testimony on the subject) is occulted in favour of the sledgehammer effect of their words, overflowing every deontological framework.

The questions that arise

The drift is considerable, and the CICNS would therefore like to pose the taboo question: what motivates the anti-cult militants? And its corollary: what is the objective difference between their methods and those they attribute to their sworn enemies?

History of the apostates’ mission, the growth of a tempting notoriety

In 1981, the sociologists David Bromley and Anson Shupe defined the anti-cult movement in the United States as a rationalist group that supported the theories of brainwashing. Simultaneously, the opposition was also theological, and numerous associations of Christian inspiration formed to fight against “religious heresies”, under the official cover of denouncing abuses. The pioneers of active anti-cult struggle are therefore indeed those American Christian families, generally parents of adult children affiliated to spiritual minorities, at the origin of the expansion of the violent practices of deprogramming in the 1980s. These family groups federated into associations were the first to instrumentalise the testimony of apostates for their campaign of denunciation of the spiritual minorities and to give them rapidly an undue credibility.

Certain sociologists have called the testimonies gathered by these associations “atrocity tales”[2]. David Bromley and Anson Shupe think that the telling of such stories, as a demonstration that grave drifts exist within the targeted spiritual minorities, had as its object to institute or reinforce normative limits for society. The fact that the audience (television, radio, lectures) reacts viscerally on hearing such stories reinforces populations’ need to see rules and sanctions created or reinforced against those who are then designated, without further ado, as criminals[3].

Stuart Wright in turn describes the accounts of these apostates as an attempt to make it heard that the members of spiritual minorities are victims of horrible cultic practices, in the situation of hostages; that the places of worship or of assembly themselves are like prisoner-of-war camps; and that deprogramming is the heroic solution in the effort to fight all these heresies. These American studies demonstrate the instrumentalisation of accounts whose content is never verified, indeed unverifiable by nature.

Gordon Melton, citing the studies of Lewis Carter and David Bromley, considers that the pathologies of certain apostates have quite simply moved from their investment in the movement to which they belonged towards the anti-cult groups[4], but that the religious movement did not create that pathology. According to him, to give credit a priori to the accounts of apostates is like “seeking to get a picture of what marriage is from the mouth of someone who has just been through a difficult divorce”.

A study by Marc Galanter, bearing on 237 members leaving the Unification Church, seems to demonstrate that a great proportion of these individuals had significant disorders before their conversion to that Church, which therefore cannot be the cause of their problems (30% of them had sought the support of psychiatrists and therapists before being affiliated to the Church)[5].

The psychological problem and the apparent sufferings of certain apostates given media coverage did not arise because they had undergone abuses within “cults”, according to David Barrett (who works at INFORM), but rather at the moment of the traumatising rupture with the group to which they were affiliated. A few reasons he mentions: intense religious experiences, a feeling of love for the founder of the religious group, a very significant investment, the fear of losing a chance of spiritual salvation, the broken link with a spiritual family, the financial loss in the investment “for nothing”, the weight of responsibility that arises when they are no longer supported by a group, so many reasons that could dissuade a member from leaving and that weigh heavily in the experience of the one who goes.

Lonnie Kliever, professor of religious studies, writes in his article on the reliability of apostate testimonies in the new religious movements that “the vast majority of those who leave of their own free will are positive about various aspects of their past experience (in the group) (…) but for those who leave with bitterness, the dynamic of separation is similar to that of a divorce (…) They then transfer the cause of their suffering onto the group they have left (…) by magnifying flaws into enormous threats, they transform their personal disappointment into betrayal and malevolence on the part of others and are capable of inventing incredible stories to destroy their past religion”.

In a state governed by law, who then gives them this authorisation for their accounts to take up so much space in public debate?

Elements of questions and answers, pending a serious study in France

We had already underlined, in an article devoted to the anti-cult forums on the Internet, the hatred and aggressiveness of certain apostates who seem to spend their time on the Web with impunity pouring out their attacks in a very crude manner and often in grouped fire. The same words on other forums, dealing with other themes, would probably be censored by moderators because they infringe the elementary principles of propriety and of dialogue, besides practising calumny to excess. But within the framework of the anti-cult fight, we know that all the dykes broke long ago and that we are all drowned in the crudest unpunished imprecations (which has even incited some, in the apparent disappearance of any imposed limit, to plant bombs at the headquarters of spiritual minorities[6]). The fact that these words may be symptomatic of an obsessional disorder, for example, is never evoked in France. The necessity of psychologically supporting certain of these individuals, rather than leaving them the possibility of maintaining their anger against a specific target for years, infringing the laws on defamation and sometimes committing grave acts (like the example of the bombs cited above, or of murder[7]), is quite simply ignored. Might this be in order to serve the excessive dramatisation of the anti-cult campaign, by passing over in silence the poor quality of the sources and of the studies on this nevertheless impassioned subject?

The legitimacy of the militant apostates rests on a status of victim, never called into question. Even if one may admit a “need of the apostates to reconstruct themselves”, what appears above all, in their words, is a flagrant need to “destroy everything”. The orientation of the anti-cult fight offers media coverage for wounds, a temptation that is difficult to resist for the most fragile personalities, all the more so as their rancours, which nobody tries to elucidate, find there an unheard-of opportunity for vengeance, non-existent for any French citizen in any other circumstance, but shutting them into a vicious circle of hatred.

Is it not aberrant that a former member of a cult (sometimes having left his movement 25 years ago![8]) should not have turned the page on his past. That nobody should indicate to him that he would recover better from his disappointments by “moving on to something else” and by expressing himself in a more responsible way about his past choices? But it is then that the notion of “mission” intervenes which, very paradoxically, makes the apostate resemble a religious preacher, as in a sort of transfer of his past spiritual quest, frustrated by power games that turned to his disadvantage, into a combat against the group he has left.

That is how one accords today to the vengeful discourse of those leaving cults the same value as to a serious university study. Apart from a very great majority of the viewers of botched television programmes, few serious observers are taken in by these manipulations, which serve neither the anti-cult cause nor the interest of the apostates. This tends to confirm, from the point of view of the members of the CICNS, that a malevolent campaign has been at work for years in our country and that the apostates may be puppets of an anti-cult campaign then guilty of “abuse of weakness”. A tragic reversal of the situation for anyone who knows that fetish accusation of anti-cultism.

Read also:

Anti-cult pathology

Instrumentalised distress

[1] According to a member of Soka Gakkai, for example: “Those responsible for the publication on prevensectes.com are (…) manifestly not trained to be in a position to verify scrupulously what they publish, by cross-checking their sources, on the basis of an irreproachable deontology of information. We are even light years from it!”

[2] Bromley, David G., Shupe, Anson D., Ventimiglia, G.C.: “Atrocity Tales, the Unification Church, and the Social Construction of Evil”, Journal of Communication, Summer 1979, p. 42-53.

[3] Duhaime, Jean (Université de Montréal), Les Témoignages de Convertis et d’ex-Adeptes, RENNER Studies in New Religions, Aarhus University Press. Shupe, A.D. and D.G. Bromley 1981, Apostates and Atrocity Stories: Some Parameters in the Dynamics of Deprogramming, in: B.R. Wilson (ed.), The Social Impact of New Religious Movements, Barrytown NY: Rose of Sharon Press, 179-215.

[4] F. Derks and professor Jan van der Lans, Post-cult syndrome: fact or fiction?, published in the magazine Religious movements in the Netherlands no. 6, pages 58–75, by the Free University Amsterdam (1983). Kramer, Joel, and Diana Alstad, The guru papers: masks of authoritarian power. Martin, Paul R. Ph.D., Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse, edited by Michael D. Langone, Ph.D., Chapter 10, Post-Cult Recovery: Assessment, published by the American Family Foundation.

[5] Galanter, Mark et al., The “Moonies”: A Psychological Study of Conversion and Membership in a Contemporary Religious Sect, 136 AM. J. PSYCHIATRY pp. 165-170 (February 1979).

[6] The explosion of a bomb in front of the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church in the 14th arrondissement in 1996 was treated thus by a journalist of Le Figaro: “This a priori minor affair relaunches the debate on the proliferation of parallel churches in the capital”. In the same box, the journalist had listed “57 addresses in the sights, across 17 arrondissements of Paris”.

[7] On Tuesday 28 July 1992, in Lyon, Roger Dorysse, a 62-year-old pensioner, coldly fired several rifle shots at Jean-Richard Miguères. His victim collapsed, hit in the legs. Roger Dorysse calmly returned to his car, reloaded his gun and coldly finished off his victim at point-blank range. Jean-Richard Miguères was the founder of a UFOlogist movement. He was Roger Dorysse’s son-in-law, and the young couple had just moved into a district of Lyon. The Dorysse couple are said to have been ardent militants of the ADFI Lyon, the CEIRUS being catalogued as a dangerous cult and, according to the declarations of its president, in the “sights” (sic) of the association. Moreover, as soon as the murder was revealed in the press, the president of the ADFI is said not to have hesitated to overwhelm Jean-Richard Miguères by accusing him of being a dangerous and malevolent man, without expressing the slightest condolences for his widow. The CEIRUS had never been talked about in the region and its activities were limited to the regular organisation of lectures on the subject of UFOs. Madame Dorysse declared to the press: “My husband of course regrets his act, but he is completely relieved and serene. He did it with a single aim: to save our little girl from the clutches of this dangerous character”.

[8] Read on a blog: “According to his own statements, Mr Gonnet even works for the government. If the State has only Mr Gonnet as a specialist on the cults and on Scientology, I hope the government does not take only specialists retired for 25 years to deal with nuclear safety or other subjects that require the opinion of experts”.

André Tarassi was born in 1961. He is the founder of the CICNS. An independent researcher, he has been studying the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual approach.