Glossary

The activist milieu campaigning against groups it labels "cults", historically associated with the contested "brainwashing" and "mind control" theories.

A pejorative label for a religious movement, used by its critics. Scholars find no empirical or legal test that separates a "cult" from a "religion".

The practice of attempting to compel or persuade a member of a group labelled a "cult" to renounce their beliefs and leave it.

The administrative category the French state put forward in 2002, when it claimed to be fighting conduct (« dérives sectaires ») rather than groups of people, and replaced the MILS with MIVILUDES. CICNS argues the shift was a trompe-l'œil.

The human right guaranteed by Article 18 of the ICCPR: freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to adopt a religion or belief of one's choice and to manifest it, alone or in community with others, in public or private.

The French settlement between religion and the state, given juridical form by the law of 1905. Raphaël Liogier notes that most serious researchers know laïcité is not, concretely, the separation of churches and state that the law's own title announces.

The Mission Interministérielle de Vigilance et de Lutte contre les Dérives Sectaires, the French state's interministerial mission in charge of the question of "sectes" (cults), attached to the Prime Minister.