Politics and Spirituality: Was Anti-Cultism Born on the Left?

Politics and Spirituality

Was Anti-Cultism Born on the Left?

by André Tarassi (February 2007)

Was anti-cultism born on the left?

The spiritual minorities in France became conscious of a new repression against them at the arrival of the socialist power in 1981. The official cause invoked was the necessity of “cracking down” because there had been the great affair of the Jonestown “collective suicide” in 1978, but if the following governments, of all tendencies, reappropriated the “mission”, the fact remains that the most virulent adversaries of the spiritual minorities are indeed committed “on the left” (Jean-Pierre Brard, Catherine Picard, Alain Vivien, Philippe Vuilque, Anne Hidalgo, Roger Ikor and also Lionel Jospin, who created the MILS, ancestor of the Miviludes, then the creation of the “offence of mental manipulation” by the socialist deputies).

Does the left embody the will not to tolerate the spiritual approach (especially when it leaves the beaten track) within the Republic? Or is it a matter of simple opportunisms independent of the parties? With the presidential elections approaching, CICNS wishes to examine this question.

In 1982, one year after the socialists came to power, deputy Alain Vivien was charged by Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy with a parliamentary mission on the question: The cults in France: expressions of moral liberty or factors of manipulation? following which he made nine proposals against the cults, the sixth of which was judged contrary to individual liberties (a family could have applied to a judge to remove their adult child from a spiritual group, for example). Once invested with this mission, M. Vivien never abandoned it. He was long perceived as the “Mr Anti-Cults”.

When it comes to broaching the subject of spirituality, statements are often epidermic. Michel Portal, in an article on la gauche.org, recognises that when spirituality is at issue “we stop thinking, doubtless because of sufferings inherited from the centuries of confessional domination in our country”. But Sylvain Ethiré, on the same page of this left-wing site, adds: “We do not ask everyone for a certificate of unbelief, but we do ask everyone not to break our ears with their possible divine frolics”.

Everything is said. On the left side of life, one does not want to hear about it, and the idea of reducing spiritual expression to the “private sphere”, as one says in protocol language, is the sweetened way of signifying “reduce it to nothing”. The actions of these last years indicate without ambiguity how the “fight against dérives sectaires” has as its true object the indiscriminate decimation of the spiritual groups that have not yet acquired enough notoriety to be untouchable (as the great religions are). One has only to see how certain people, in the circles of anti-cultism, openly congratulate themselves on the disappearance of this or that movement in France.

Michel Bussi, of the university of Rouen, says: ”(…) The French model of laïcité is rather deceptive: the struggle between State and Church, in its duration and its intensity, is a French specificity which has hardly any equivalent in other countries. For this reason, the French way of ‘laïcité’ as the way of democratic modernity can hardly be erected into a universal model. On the contrary, many early democracies retain affirmed links with religion.”

Where does the public of the spiritual minorities come from?

In Le Monde Diplomatique, in an end-of-century survey, Dominique Vidal revealed to us that “half of citizens declare they no longer belong to a Church, any more than to a temple, a synagogue or a pagoda. Who are these ‘without-religion’, soon to be in the majority? Why do they not recognise themselves - or no longer - in the religious institutions? (…) In 1966, 89% of the French declared they belonged to a religion and 10% affirmed themselves ‘without religion’ (1). Thirty-two years later, the respective percentages come to 55% and 45%” “the specialists (…) assert that the ‘without-religion’ prefer ‘do-it-yourself’, ‘rambling’ and ‘off-piste’, that they believe ‘à la carte’ rather than ‘from the set menu’, that they are ‘heirs without a testament’, indeed ‘the homeless of belief’ (…) For ‘without-religion’ is not, far from it, synonymous with ‘atheist’. According to the 1999 inquiry, 29% of the ‘without-religion’ declare themselves ‘convinced atheists’ but 23% believe in God, 26% in ‘a sort of spirit or vital force’, 26% in life after death, 12% in paradise, 7% in hell, 15% in sin, 23% in reincarnation (7). Religious ceremonies seem important to them for birth (33%), marriage (39%) and death (46%).”

For Yves Lambert, of the Group for the sociology of religions and laïcité, two components prevail today: “the ‘indifferent’, children of secularisation who did not grow up in a religious universe and are ignorant of it, and the ‘interested’, whose search for an individual and free spirituality, outside any institution, excludes ready-made thinking”.

The new forms of spirituality, more or less derived from the great traditions, have gathered these millions of people who have moved away from the old dogmas and from the framework of religion. It is a phenomenon playing out on the margins of political considerations in a country like France which, having proudly created a separation between Church and State, is still taken by surprise by the evolution of spirituality. Moreover, the political parties suffer an ever more marked rejection by the population, a discredit occurring in parallel with corruption affairs and a real lack of inspiration among political leaders.

Politics and the meaning of life

The spiritual minorities, at the golden mean between the religious fundamentalisms of the far right and the “neither god nor master” of the far left, have the favour of a great part of the population, which finds in them the freshness and the meaning increasingly lacking in politicians’ programmes.

In the presentation of his book “La voie humaine”, Jacques Attali asks: “Does the left still have something to say, or is it no longer, like the right, anything but a machine for winning elections? Is there room for a political project? The parties seem not to have the courage to answer these questions. They content themselves with waiting for a sanction to strike the other camp. In particular, the parties of the left no longer have a vision of the world, a doctrine or a programme; they have nothing left but postures.”

For Yvon Quiniou, the interpretations of the religious phenomenon proposed by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud led to the anthropological reduction of religion, that is to say to the fact that science attempts to understand and explain religious experience without faith, which is an essential contradiction.

The expressions on the right

Contrary to the anti-religious affirmations of the left, very rare political figures said to be “of the right”, like Nicolas Sarkozy, have expressed themselves against the current of the pensée unique or of the discretion customary on this sensitive subject. On 20 June 2005, at an interreligious meeting at the Théâtre de Neuilly, he declared: “the religions are a plus for the Republic! they make it possible to hope (…) Our neighbourhoods have become spiritual deserts; I do not think we have anything whatever to gain from that (…) if nobody explains that life is not a consumer product, one must not be surprised that the meaning of life is not the same at La Courneuve as at Neuilly (…) Do not yield to the terrorism of the pensée unique. Do not let yourselves be mocked, defamed, insulted. (…) You do not have to apologise for what you believe. It is normal to take part in public debate. If you believe, you must speak, take sides, share” and he added, on the question of the necessity of preserving the private sphere and the public sphere: “there are not two lives. As though the most intimate and most interesting part of oneself had to be abandoned until Saturday morning and Sunday evening included. The domain of private life has no meaning. It is the domain of life full stop”. M. Sarkozy does not merely preach tolerance, entirely absent from the discourses of his politician colleagues, but urges the affirmation of faith and the overflowing of the habitual secular framework in France. It is a courageous position, or perhaps a calculated one, though we do not see, given the outcry his statements provoke and the risk that the French will not really follow, how this calculation could play in favour of his ambitions. The fact remains that his position is diametrically opposed to that of M. Jean-Pierre Brard, a communist, who has apparently seized on this crusade against the cults to make himself known in another way. Two methods similar in form which may betray ambitions but which reflect rather faithfully, however, the wide split of the political parties with regard to spirituality.

The reign of the pensée unique in politics

In 1999, the rapporteurs of the commission of inquiry on the cults and money asked: “Is it normal that at the last European and legislative elections, the Natural Law Party (Transcendental Meditation) had the same speaking time as, for example, the parties issuing from the ecological movement?” According to these rapporteurs, speaking time should therefore be calculated according to the credibility of the candidates? And who will judge that credibility? Two parties were targeted in the Report: the Natural Law Party and the Humanist Party. The rapporteurs reproached “cults” for having created political movements with the hidden objective of collecting public subsidies and making themselves known on television. Officially, then, it is a matter of defending democracy against cult movements that would interfere in the political game. But the true logic of the report appears more clearly in the solutions proposed: “Is it not fitting, in the first place, to make the benefit of the first fraction of the annual budgetary aid subject to obtaining a threshold of votes at the last legislative elections? This first recommendation would be of a nature to prevent the State from financing, each year, the propaganda of cult movements.” Such reasoning is in flagrant opposition to the spirit of democracy. An Internet user asks on the “Webzine du cercle social”: Would citizens be judged incapable of pronouncing on the political credibility of the ideas proposed by this or that organisation? Proposals of this type show the will to prevent minority organisations from expressing themselves in public. The fight against the cults is finally only an alibi for passing anti-democratic measures, as the anti-terrorist fight was for the government of the United States (see the Patriot Act).

We are witnesses of an era which sees, once again in history, the regression of the principles of individual liberty so painfully won from the natural despotism of rulers.

Should the spiritual minorities, prevented from expressing themselves, vote for the right?

The spiritual minorities are constrained to a guilty silence. They have heard that they should not exist and that they constitute such a menace for the Republic that nothing remains to them but the voting rights of their members. But, once at the ballot box, do the latter really take their spiritual aspirations into account, in a country which has known so effectively how to separate life into several pieces?

It is difficult to decide on the subject of political intolerance towards spirituality, but CICNS commits itself to an increased vigilance on the eve of the elections in our country, in order to provide clear and objective information on the proposals of the political leaders for the new millennium which, according to the thought attributed to Malraux (on the right), “will be spiritual or will not be”.

We can legitimately demand of political leaders that they integrate the spiritual dimension, in its new and legal forms, into their project of society, and we shall not fail to draw a parallel between the proposals of the various sides and to establish a barometer of sincerity.

Read also “Can we reunite politics and spirituality?” by Corinne McLaughlin

André Tarassi was born in 1961; he is the founder of CICNS. An independent researcher, he has studied 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.