The Question of the Cults: Institutional Deregulation or French Singularity?

The Political and Social Treatment of the Question of the Spiritual Minorities in France

The “Question of the Cults”: Institutional Deregulation or French Singularity?

Archives de science sociale des religions 2002, No. 118, April-June, 29-44

Based on the book by Danièle HERVIEU-LÉGER: “La Religion en miettes ou la question des sectes”, Calman-Lévy

By Jean BAUBÉROT and Micheline MILOT

(…) The political and social treatment of (the question of the cults) in France is doubly dangerous: dangerous by the ignorance and/or contempt of any scientific discourse on social reality (…), dangerous by its consequences for freedom of religion and conviction.

(…) The social problem of the cults must be placed back within the specific aspects of the crisis of the institutions with symbolic capacity, of their respective roles and of their specific interrelations in the history of French modernity.

(…) The “cult fact” is perceived in a dominant way in France “as a sort of disease liable to undermine, starting from the contaminated individuals, the whole social body” (p. 56). The fight against the cults then becomes a “campaign of public hygiene”, a therapeutic fight against an “epidemic menace” (p. 57), inscribed in medical science’s secular combat against ‘obscurantism’ and ‘superstition’, indirectly relegitimising the latter. The circle is thus closed.

(…) Certainly it seems clear to me that deregulation poses new problems and that they must be faced in a new way. But why regulate the religious specifically, when the work itself shows that analogous problems, paradoxes and contradictions run through the religious and the non-religious? Because the religious has a relation to the absolute (p. 71) and thus always risks inducing fanaticism, “sect-ness”? Would it not rather be the whole of the symbolic, of the ideological, and notably of the multiple forms of associative engagement sacralising a cause (ecology, hunting, the right to housing, anti-globalisation, etc.) or a corporation, that can have a relation to the absolute?

The extensive pluralism of modern societies overflows the religious. It multiplies ambivalences. Social perception can valorise it or find it menacing. But it is not always lucid and, when it denounces dangers, it often takes the effect for the cause. All the more so as it does not master the cause.

Perhaps one of the causes of the current risks – and what society would live without risk? – is to be found in a profound mutation of the articulations between socialisation, subjectivation and identity.

(…) communities or groupings around religious references constitute one of the places of construction of meaning and of moral normativity which often arise in reaction and in resistance to the dominant tendencies of society. From then on, that conflicts of norms arise with the surrounding society becomes inevitable. But these conflicts take place in a social dramaturgy that differs greatly according to the normative framework prevailing in the various societies.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger gives us access, in the mode of a rigorous and uncomplacent analysis, to the French scene where a veritable collective anxiety manifests itself concerning the question of the cults. The author places the cult phenomenon back within the more general religious landscape of modernity, putting into perspective the new economy of believing. Her incisive sociological analysis makes it possible at once to grasp all the ambivalence French society maintains with the religious fact and to delineate the crystallisation of collective fears expressed by this political anxiety over the cult question, an anxiety largely constructed and strongly maintained by the media. But what is thus put on trial is the capacity of the republican tradition to come to terms with the diversification of conceptions of meaning which abound in France as elsewhere in the West. The author therefore calls, in conclusion, for a reasoned public debate that would make possible the construction of a “new approach to religious pluralism within laïcité itself”.

(…) Yet there is no direct correspondence between the facts and French society’s anxiety on this subject. So, is this much ado about nothing, Shakespeare would ask? Or is France showing itself avant-garde in hunting down the “cult disease” lurking in every democracy?

After demonstrating the imprecision and historical reversibility of the criteria retained for drawing up the list of cults, D. Hervieu-Léger underlines well that “the publication of the list and the effort undertaken by the parliamentarians to fix the spiritual cartography of the ‘potentially dangerous groups’ […] reveal above all a dead-end effort to dam up the disorder induced by the deregulated pluralisation of a religious scene which is no longer organised exclusively from the ‘great religions’ instituted and long known on the national soil” (p. 48). By bringing to light the incoherences, the gropings and the preoccupations of French policy concerning the cult question, the author draws out two problematics which are superimposed in this impassioned debate.

If such a mobilisation of the public authorities appears “normal” in France, D. Hervieu-Léger points out first of all that it rests on an anxiety-inducing “doublet”: the fear of the cult risk and the allergy to pluralism, which translate into a will to regulate the religious in a normalising mode, modelled on a Christian confessional pluralism. Very well described, this Christian typification of normalisation surprises, at first sight, in a country where laïcité was constructed precisely to contain the Catholic Church within certain limits. Thus, even if the French State claims neutrality, in the sense that it forbids itself to judge the content of this or that belief, there is there, it seems to me, a first narrowing of the very meaning of neutrality, since an implicit definition of the “normal” religion serves as markers for the public power to approve or stigmatise this or that association of persons gathered around certain beliefs.

The second problematic delineated by D. Hervieu-Léger is that of the opposition, whose lineaments go back to the Enlightenment, between the democratic will to guarantee freedom of belief and the will, less explicit, “to tear consciences from the influence of representations judged radically contradictory to reason and autonomy” (p. 22). This highly ambivalent relation between laïcité and religion has been translated, in the works of Jean Baubérot to which the author refers, by the argument of freedom of thought against that of religious freedom. This ambivalence maintains, at least outside France, the perception that laïcité, at bottom, is less the accommodation of religious pluralism than its ousting. In Quebec notably, a former French colony, despite notable structural advances of laïcité, the use of the term itself has always carried a major difficulty, and the neologism “non-confessionality” is preferred to it, to get round its anti-religious tenor!

D. Hervieu-Léger demonstrates to what point French society’s relation to the cult question is translated by a whole semantic arsenal of the pathological and prophylactic type. Whence the importance taken, in political and media discourse, by the couple “regulation-protection”. From a North American legal point of view, this manner of presuming such a “malaise in civilisation” would doubtless be perceived as a tactic for surreptitiously getting round the fundamental question of freedom of conscience. There is a sort of paradox of consequences in the French political tradition facing the religious fact: the indifference and neutrality the State wishes to display transform themselves into anxiety in the face of any group not situated within the spectrum of the implicit definition the political power gives itself of the religious; this implies that the protection one wants at all costs to ensure for freedom of thought against beliefs considered absolute carries all the ingredients of a possible repression of freedom of religion.

The question which poses itself, beyond the French case, is to know what type of regulation a democratic State can claim, and to what end? How far can the secular State go in its interventions to facilitate or brake the expression of the identity particularities of groups which reject, to different degrees, the normative ideal of societies of law? Must the State be tolerant towards the intolerant – to take up here a question of Locke’s? On the contrary, should one expect the deep convictions of individuals and the behaviours flowing from them to conform, if not at once, at least gradually, to the democratic principles which rule social life, even if the groups to which the individuals belong must, to achieve this, reinterpret their doctrines and values?

(…) For John Rawls, for example, it is clear that “imposing” the liberal conception of man or imposing a sect doctrine is one and the same. That is moreover the argument sustained, before the American courts, by several fundamentalist religious groups which oppose the secular orientation of the public school, for, in their eyes, “secular humanism” is not a neutral doctrine. Rawls nevertheless agrees that, given his political conception of the person, he cannot admit that a group, whether majority or minority, should restrict the right of its members to re-evaluate their conception of the good life and of ultimate ends. On the other hand, one must indeed recognise that certain individuals believe sincerely and firmly that their own conception of the good cannot be revised. The fundamental stake, in the end, then consists in knowing how to resolve this tension between freedom of thought and freedom of conscience.

(…) can the State legitimately intervene to bring the individual back to “the right path” of political citizenship, which presupposes that he adheres to certain democratic virtues of which freedom of thought is one of the most essential to political deliberation?

(…) What surprises, from a North American point of view in any case, is that membership of a cult appears in France, de facto, suspect, insofar as the doctrines or practices of the group in question suppose the submission of the members to a religious authority.

In Canada and Quebec, the publication of a list identifying certain groups as potentially dangerous in the chapter of freedom of thought and religion would without any doubt be judged contrary to the Constitution. The State would be blamed for abandoning its position of neutrality if it thus decreed what is religiously correct or in conformity with the more commonly shared values. In Canada, the cults do not constitute in themselves, in social or political perception, a menace for society or for their members (even if certain individuals or ex-members may think so personally). The excesses of believing are, in Canadian society, neither more nor less grave or numerous than in France. Reprehensible acts, accomplished within a religious group or in the name of a belief, fall quite simply within the domain of criminal, civil or administrative law.

If, for example, the safety of children is threatened, whether in a religious group (as has happened) or in an ordinary family, they will be placed under the protection of the State and the responsible adults will be accused of harming physical integrity and of ill-treatment, if such is the case; the cult logic then has little to do with the judgment rendered and the social perception. As for adults who voluntarily place themselves in a situation of submission and abandonment to some guru (or spouse…), it appears rather difficult to define the dividing line between the right of an individual to renounce his freedom of thought, or his freedom full stop, and the duty of the State to make effective the exercise of the fundamental rights of the person, including freedom of thought, by intervening actively to do so.

Compared with the French tradition and with the very position advocated by D. Hervieu-Léger, who valorises a clearer political regulation, Canadian legal regulation is perceived by the population as more apt to ensure a treatment of equal justice and a true protection of the freedoms of thought and conscience. It is not for all that a political liberalism which lets the courts settle “case by case” the deviances liable to criminal prosecution while the State washes its hands of them. It is on the contrary a matter, in the judges’ eyes, of protecting individuals, particularly those who endorse non-conforming values, against the pressure to social conformity or against the State itself. One does not for all that tip over into a Republic of judges.

(…) it must also be said that the type of laïcité put in place in North America was, at its base, a framework making possible the cohabitation of differences, whereas French laïcité seems to have difficulty freeing itself from the normative ideal which first defined it in its conquest of legitimacy in opposition to the hegemony of Catholicism.

It is obvious that the perception of the constraint a minority group imposes on its members is generally conditioned by the dominant social representation, rarely by the group’s real practices. However that may be, the recognition of diversity and of social non-conformism can oblige the State to review a certain number of its own political presuppositions. Such an adaptation of the political to pluralism concerns in the first place the capacity for cultural interiorisation of pluralism in society itself. But equally, recourse to law to rethink the forms of laïcité appears as necessary as it is inevitable, given the internationalisation of human rights and the conventions flowing from it.

(…) The proposal to create in France a “High Council of Laïcité”, which the author advances in conclusion, could doubtless make it possible to rethink the “regulation-protection” dilemma. But being positioned with the President of the Republic, does this council not risk making itself the relay of demands for social conformism in the examination and follow-up of the “problems” that would be catalogued? For who says problems says an implicit definition of what is normal. Moreover, could the groups or individuals targeted have recourse to law to defend themselves against a regulation they judge contrary to freedom of conscience?

(…) In every society, the tyranny of public opinion and the pressure to social conformity tend to impose, implicitly, what is considered “religiously correct”. But the State has the duty to protect non-conforming convictions, those of each individual as those of minority groups, and to avoid serving as a relay for this social conformism, while allowing the legal power to exercise its function.

Jean BAUBÉROT

Groupe de Sociologie des Religions et de la Laïcité – EPHE-CNRS

Micheline MILOT

Université du Québec à Montréal