The Wrong Camp: 2013 CICNS Interview with Raphaël Liogier (2/4)

Raphaël Liogier is a French political scientist and sociologist of religion. At the time of this interview he directed the Observatoire du religieux and taught at the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence. In this second part of the 2013 CICNS interview he recounts first-hand how, on French television, merely asking why people believe gets read as taking the wrong side, and he recalls the political cost paid by Emmanuelle Mignon for questioning the anti-cult consensus.

CICNS video interview, part 2 of 4. (English translation of the interview transcript, machine-transcribed from the CICNS YouTube channel, where the video was published on 1 July 2013, and cleaned before translation.)

[Liogier]: I tell you (in almost every television programme where I have been to speak about this problem, while I was trying to be as rational as possible, I was told on several occasions) the mere fact that I try to hold a discourse saying: “Well now, why do these people believe that? What is going on? How does it work?”, immediately, and it was even said to me formally: we can see whose side you are on. What is there to answer to that, once I am classed as being on one side, when I am not on it, well, objectively, I am not on it? But “we can see whose side you are on” means: you are on the side of evil. That is to say, it is this sort of binary vision that comes back again and again.

So, nobody… It is not propaganda. It is that it would be too great a risk, for someone at the top of the bill, for someone who has political or media power (well, a symbolic power of whatever kind, who represents something), to fragilize their pedestal, to erode their pedestal, by taking a position that would be critical on the question of anti-cult policy, for example. As it is a question that commands a sort of unanimity, of unanimism, with this notion that “cult means evil”, you will not find a single politician who will have the courage to express it.

There was one woman in politics who had the courage to say it, it was Emmanuelle Mignon. I don’t know whether you remember, she merely voiced it, and that is to show you just how risky it is. You ask me why. I answer you why. Emmanuelle Mignon, since she comes from the Ministry of the Interior. She was very close to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was at the Ministry of the Interior, but it is not a political question, because it was the same before with the left, the same today, a field ministry, so she was acquainted with the reality. So, being acquainted with the reality, she allowed herself to say (merely allowed herself to say): “the cults do not in themselves constitute a social problem — not a political, social problem, etc., requiring the establishment of a public policy”. She was heaped with abuse [FR: « agonir d’erreur », as machine-heard], she had to perform her palinode, go back on what she had said, in short, it was something she had to explain almost to the point, one might say, of resignation.