Dérive sectaire

Dérive sectaire is the category the French state put forward in 2002. According to CICNS (a French association whose stated objectives include ending the association between criminality and spiritual minorities), the state claimed at that point to be fighting no longer the « sectes », groups of people, but agissements: conduct. The MIVILUDES was created in replacement of the MILS to carry the new remit, which its full name states: Mission Interministérielle de Vigilance et de Lutte contre les Dérives Sectaires.

This site keeps the phrase in French. The reason is the subject of this entry: what the category names is a French administrative act, and the argument recorded below turns on a distinction between a secte and a dérive sectaire that an English rendering dissolves. Pages republished here before that decision may still render it “sectarian drift” or “sectarian aberration”.

What the category was meant to change

The shift was, on its face, from groups to conduct. Susan Palmer describes what came before: the report that named the sects carried a list of them, and the sect itself (the group, the organisations) was the problem. Then MIVILUDES answered by speaking of dérive sectaire, and it became vaguer: sects, inevitably, result in criminal acts and antisocial behaviour. So vague, on her account, that they did not have to name the groups.

Raphaël Liogier traces the same debate through the successive renamings of the bodies supposed to observe the sectes: from the observatory, to the Mission interministérielle de lutte contre les sectes, then, petit à petit, to a mission of lutte et de vigilance, in which the state is only vigilant. And against dérives sectaires, he notes, means only when there is drift, which implies that there could, a priori, be sects that do not deviate and that remain legitimate religious movements. He calls it a symbolic evolution that never took hold in practice, in the real.

Why the category is contested

Éric Bouzou argues the evolution proved to be a trompe-l’œil that allowed the fight against the « sectes » to continue with impunity, notably by persisting in naming them that way. His essay arguing the category is incoherent is republished here: Can the Notion of Dérive Sectaire Be Useful?

Jean-Marc Florand stated in 2006 that the terms secte, sectaire, dérive sectaire and sectarisme are not legal notions.

CICNS, for its part, describes MIVILUDES (the mission in charge of the question of the sectes, attached to the Prime Minister) as having recently hardened its action, encouraging a resolutely repressive approach and choosing to dissociate itself from the work of the leading sociologists of religion.

A note on the words

This site renders secte as “cult”, not as “sect”. That choice is grounded in what the corpus’s own scholars say about the word. Michel Maffesoli holds that the pejorative charge carried in France by « secte » and « sectaire » is a French specificity, though perhaps not uniquely French, he allows: one may find it in this or that other European country. But not, he says, in the United States, nor even in England. In Japan, where he travels often, the word designates a group that has cut itself off from another, and can there be taken in a non-pejorative way. Raphaël Liogier notes that in countries of Protestant tradition the notion is much less pejorative than in France, because sects are part of the very dynamism of the cultural space.

Dérive sectaire, however, is a fixed phrase naming a French category, and no word inside it is separately translated.