The Current Policy of the MIVILUDES Is Condemned to Fail

The Current Policy of the MIVILUDES Is Condemned to Fail

CICNS article - May 2009

At the moment of the release of the MIVILUDES 2008 report, followed by an impressive media coverage, it is not useless to evaluate the action of this Mission.

In no. 18 of the magazine Culture-Droit of November 2008, Jean-Michel Roulet, former president of the MIVILUDES, drew up an assessment of his work: “A relationship of confidence with Parliament and the victim-defence associations (…), a better cooperation between the police and justice services (…)”. Thirty years of fighting against one of the principal “scourges of our society”, according to part of the public authorities and the majority of the media, end in this meagre balance sheet. A neutral observer would probably conclude that the MIVILUDES is not effective, or that the problem of the cults as it is posed does not exist, or indeed both.

And as if these statements were not sufficient to demonstrate that something is not working in the public action applied to the cult question, Jean-Michel Roulet specifies, when asked how he envisages the future of the interministerial mission: “One must remain vigilant. Towards dérives sectaires but also towards ourselves. We must not transform ourselves into a cult by setting ourselves up as directors of conscience” (ibid). This warning is not anodyne. It is addressed, then, to Georges Fenech, the new president of the MIVILUDES, who is apparently not sensitive to the argument.

We have already had occasion to comment on the parliamentary commission of inquiry which Georges Fenech chaired, and his report to the Prime Minister “La justice face aux dérives sectaires”. In his radio and television interventions to present the 2008 report, he methodically repeated that he himself and the mission as a whole respected freedom of belief and the personal choices of citizens. We have nevertheless, on several occasions, commented on unfounded statements and verbal slips which leave a serious doubt hanging over his recent declarations. Can he really respect citizens representing 1% of the population, when he asserts that he has them in his “crosshairs” and wishes to have the necessary means to put them under surveillance?

The impulse he gives to the action of the Mission by hardening it further can, in our view, only lead to a failure, even if a few mediatised events here and there will probably be presented as victories of Good over Evil.

We shall retain three principal themes of analysis among others.

A failure on the two principal objectives of the MIVILUDES

One of the principal objectives of the MIVILUDES is to defend the victims (real, potential) of cult movements.

There exists in fact a second objective, passed over in silence (or rather disguised as incantatory affirmations about respect for fundamental liberties). The passage from the MILS to the MIVILUDES (i.e. from the fight against cults to the fight against dérives sectaires) was supposed to put an end to indiscriminate discrimination by concentrating on the evasive notion of “dérives sectaires” while avoiding unfounded and globalising accusations against groups and persons. The second, implicit objective of the MIVILUDES, at its creation, was therefore to ensure that an end was put to the discriminations.

To defend the victims of the cults, an adapted methodology should have been followed: cataloguing these victims, to evaluate their number and verify the pertinence of a large-scale public action on the subject; categorising these victims into “real victims” or “non-credible victims”; qualifying, for the real victims, the offences suffered; evaluating the offences caused by individuals or those that could be attributed to a movement’s doctrine; establishing quantified comparisons between the delinquency observed within the spiritual minorities and within society in general, to verify whether these minorities could be a particular home of delinquency (we think not, following our own inquiries). This groundwork would have required the cooperation of recognised and independent experts in several disciplines (sociology, theology, psychiatry, psychology, law, etc.), publishing referenced and cross-evaluated results.

To ensure that an end was put to the discriminations against the spiritual minorities, an assessment should have been made of the damage caused by the policy of fighting the cults (parliamentary reports of 1996, 1999, 2006, MILS), analysing it qualitatively and quantitatively; verifying, within the groups arbitrarily qualified as dangerous cults, that people no longer suffer for their spiritual choices in their professional, associative or private life. A preventive action oriented on the “case by case”, without amalgam, without the use of rumour as a weapon of discrimination, would have been of a nature to clean up the debate on this question of society.

One is forced to observe that the results obtained by the MIVILUDES on the first objective are non-existent. The attentive reader will be hard put to find, in the mission’s successive reports, credible inquiries into the victims of cults. The only available data are those of the administrations, which totally invalidate the conclusions of the MIVILUDES, whose own figures are at best far-fetched, at worst irresponsible, and used as publicity effects to feed the anti-cult psychosis. This disinformation allows the Mission to consolidate at little cost (or at great cost to the taxpayer…) the false idea of a social scourge (on the basis of information mainly issuing from the anti-cult associations), but finally prevents it from properly attending to the true victims (those who can exist in any human group) by asserting that everyone is a victim.

As for the second objective, putting an end to the discriminations, it is not excessive to say that they are on the contrary institutionalised, through a devaluing official rhetoric (the anti-cult terminology) and a specific legislation (the About-Picard law, the law protecting witnesses at parliamentary commissions). Our association has produced enough information to illustrate it.

Faced with such a failure, responsible public authorities (or ones on the way to becoming responsible on this subject) should conclude that the MIVILUDES is inadequate for treating a badly posed question of society, and decide on the creation of an independent Observatory of the spiritual minorities.

The non-respect of the secular pact

Evoking the legal means of fighting against cult movements, the MIVILUDES 2007 report specifies: “It is absolutely essential to refer to the movement’s doctrine and to integrate it into the investigation, for it contains in a quasi-systematic manner the ideology which advocates or leads to the violation of the law”.

Within the framework of the 1905 law, the State and its services recognise no religion and therefore have no business evaluating beliefs. The evaluation of a movement’s doctrine can therefore only be envisaged if it is entrusted to independent and competent persons, in this case and for example to sociologists of religion. Yet the MIVILUDES has freed itself from any approach of knowledge by ousting the academics, thus preventing the constitution of a balanced information base on the spiritual minorities. In so doing, it therefore encourages the services of the State to give lapidary and undocumented opinions on beliefs, and this in contradiction with the secular pact.

It is moreover not excluded that the MIVILUDES itself draws on associations like the ADFI for this type of analysis, since the rapprochement between the two types of structure is considered by Jean-Michel Roulet as a positive element of his balance sheet. Madame Picard, president of UNADFI, clearly indicated at her hearing in the framework of the parliamentary commission of inquiry “L’enfance volée” that her association carried out such analyses (see her answer to deputy Christian Vanneste). The probable contribution to a work of evaluating beliefs on the part of an association declared to be of public utility, without recognised competence on the subject, in a privileged relationship with the MIVILUDES (Mme Picard is a member of the mission’s Orientation Council), not to say instrumentalising the mission, poses real questions.

In his book “Une laïcité légitime - la France et ses religions d’Etat”, Editions Entrelacs, the sociologist Raphaël Liogier describes French laïcité as a system of self-justified and extensive intervention in the religious domain. The MIVILUDES merely implements this strategy of intervention within the spiritual minorities. It is legitimate to hope, despite the difficulty of broaching this subject in France, that this perversion of the secular spirit, exacerbated in the framework of the anti-cult fight, will end up being “seen” and prompt various social actors to demand a complete re-evaluation of the treatment of the cult question.

The incomprehension of a groundswell of society

At the colloquium organised by CICNS on the theme “Cults, social scourge or scapegoat”, Raphaël Liogier specifies: “I cannot stop myself, even if we are told we have no right to do so, from studying these new religious movements, because that gives us a vision of what the evolution of values and beliefs is becoming”. This groundswell of society is inescapable, and it is probably vain to oppose it; it should rather be accompanied. The MIVILUDES chooses on the contrary a brutal confrontation. In his latest book “La République des bons sentiments”, Editions du Rocher, Michel Maffesoli writes: ”(…) what the defenders of piety and the bigots of yesteryear sensed, what their worthy scientistic, republicanist and other dogmatic rationalist successors sense well, is that they are overtaken by the mutation of societal values, and therefore by the mutation of minds that it induces”.

The people who make an alternative spiritual choice today, even in the context of the so-called “spiritual supermarket”, are answering a deep personal need. They will not put an end to their spiritual search and their deliberate life choices, even if an unsuitable policy throws them to public opinion as fodder on the pretext of saving its “victims”.

Understanding this movement of society requires going out to meet these people, “exposing” them to the public but in the sense of an open and respectful dialogue, within the framework of the law, the same for all. The persistence of the MIVILUDES and of a certain number of parliamentarians in ignoring the fact that a dialogue respectful of the adversarial principle is the only means of answering questions of society in general, and this one in particular, leaves doubts as to their competence or their sincere desire to favour social cohesion. No doubt their obstinacy will be swept away by this groundswell of society.