Anti-Sect France: The State of Play — CICNS Documentary (Short Version)

“La France antisectes : état des lieux” (“Anti-sect France: the state of play”) is a documentary produced by the CICNS, the French Centre for Information and Study of New Spiritualities, and published on its YouTube channel in 2011. This is the short version (about 48 minutes), which condenses the three-part series of the same name; the three full parts are also published in English translation on this site. Around a CICNS narration, the film assembles excerpts from the hearings of the 2006 French parliamentary commission of inquiry on sects and children, interviews with academics who study new religious movements — the ethnologist Maurice Duval, the historian of laïcité Jean Baubérot, the sociologists Raphaël Liogier and Michel Maffesoli — and testimonies from members of small spiritual communities, therapists and ordinary citizens who have been labelled “sect” members. Its argument is that France’s anti-sect apparatus, unique in the world, has found almost no victims yet has itself produced many.

CICNS documentary — short version of « La France antisectes : état des lieux ». (English translation of the short version of the documentary published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 29 April 2011. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: New spirituality, esotericism, personal development, New Age, alternative approaches to health or education, other conceptions of living together. This list is not exhaustive, but most of the victims of the repression we are going to describe in this film would recognize themselves in it. What these people have in common is having one day found themselves stigmatized by the use of the word “sect”. The common question is: “What is a sect?” We prefer another one: do sects exist? That is the thread of the reflection we have undertaken. Indeed, the very existence of the word “sect” in its current meaning perpetuates an outrageous amalgam between a few criminal cases and spirituality in general — and its new expressions in particular. This word inspires fear and can become a formidable weapon.

Voice: The gendarmes, night and day, kept watch around a church. An aberrant situation. I telephoned the mayor and said: “You are a racist.” He said: “No, no, sir.” “No? Fine — then if you are not a racist, what are you?” “Yes, but that movement — you never know.” I said: “Why do you not suspect the Catholic Church?” He said: “It’s a word of life, it’s a word of life.” “Yes, but we know them.” “But on what basis do you know them? Have you checked the theology of these churches? Have you established that their theology is bad?”

Voice: We had the case of a person whose children had been placed in a home because the mother and the grandmother were spending time with the children. They were the Antoinists, in Valenciennes.

Voice: A staggering and, in my view, unbelievable decision, which comes in 1981: the Court of Cassation upholds a court of appeal’s ruling. It concerned a petition for divorce. And the court of appeal had said that, under the sway of her religious convictions, the woman, a member of a sect, imposed a strange diet on those around her and on her son in particular, and was not raising him according to the principles of the family’s religion. That is all.

[Interviewer]: What places individuals in the wrong category? What makes a spiritual association or a church a sect in the minds of our fellow citizens?

Voice: You referred to two sects, one of which had already made headlines in the past, the Citadelle, and the other one I did not know — because they are indeed proliferating: Tabitha’s Place, is that it?

Voice: A parent, when one of their children comes back from a course, is astonished by the change in his behaviour. For example, he no longer wants to eat meat.

Voice: The New Age is making its nest in the holy-water font of the churches. There, Christ becomes a cosmo-planetary figure, the Virgin a substitute for the White Lady.

Voice: I will say things very clearly: I believe that if you belong to a sect, you can no longer practise this profession.

Voice: If, however, the sect decides that this child must not exist, the child will be sacrificed.

Voice: Can we really consider that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not making their children infirm, intellectually speaking?

Voice: Things are happening, there are people suffering, there are victims, and faced with that, the State, the government, the country cannot remain a mere observer. It is an inactive actor.

[Interviewer]: Sects, gurus, an insidious and omnipresent danger. Victims, children in danger. That is the picture painted by these actors in the fight against sects.

Voice: The finding we made — an alarming finding, on two counts. First, the number of children affected in France by this phenomenon, who number several thousand — it can be estimated at between 60 and 80 thousand children.

[Interviewer]: Behind these peremptory statements, there is in reality no proof whatsoever of the existence of children in France [inaudible ?] in danger as a result of supposed sectarian aberrations. Any journalist, reading this report attentively or watching the commission’s hearings available on the internet, could have suspected the enormity of a lie commonly accepted for some ten years. A few hours were enough for us to gather the elements of a small demonstration. Mr Fenech, chairman of the commission, on 19 December 2006, the day the report was delivered.

[Fenech]: Given the reports of the interministerial mission, which places the emphasis on the dangers for children, and given a certain number of reports that were brought to our attention, notably by judicial authorities, we considered that this was where our action should be directed.

[Interviewer]: Madame Sancy, representative of the judicial authority, three months earlier, during the hearings.

[Participant]: We were quoted the figure of 80,000 children said to be affected by the phenomenon.

[Sancy]: Yes, except that in 2003–2004, when we conducted that survey, we counted 192 files and not one more, opened for a sect-related issue — and even then, direct or indirect. There was even a certain number of files in which the issue was indirect, that is to say, we were not even sure it had a direct influence on what had been called into question.

[Participant]: You said earlier: there are about a hundred files, already old — you said monitored. And I was wondering about the “already old”, because “already old” means there are no new ones, it means they are dragging on and nothing gets resolved — what does it mean? What was behind that aside of yours, “already old”?

[Sancy]: It means, indeed, that we are seeing a great decrease in the number of reported cases.

[Interviewer]: Monsieur Dupuis, of the “sects” mission at the Ministry of National Education.

[Dupuis]: We asked the education-authority inspectors which of these children in danger were in danger because of sectarian movements, and they answered us that there were 8.

[Participant]: Out of the 19,000 reports to the prosecutors’ offices concerning children in danger, you are telling us: only 8 concerned the sect phenomenon. So there we are entitled to ask ourselves questions. Why this figure, which is [inaudible ?]?

[Interviewer]: We believe that we, for our part, are entitled to ask the following question: how can it be explained that the commission did not even consider that these figures might quite simply correspond to the reality of the near-non-existence of victims, and instead obstinately pursued its quest for proof with each ministry? Hearing of Madame Françoise Lebihan, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

[Participant]: Your ministry, your directorate is not seized of cases involving divorced parents with children moved abroad? Ah yes, yes, you do have some after all.

[Lebihan]: Yes. It is in that capacity that we know of these two files, the two files I cited to you.

[Participant]: But no more than two files, you say.

[Lebihan]: Concerning sectarian aberrations involving minors.

[Interviewer]: For want of figures, the commission falls back on the media’s habitual scapegoats. In this respect, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would be cited no fewer than 415 times over the course of the hearings. Here again, the rumour would at times suffer some scathing denials. Messrs Dupuis and Polivka, inspectors-general of National Education.

[Participant]: Never have we had a report from teachers, from parents of pupils, from elected officials, alerting us to the behaviour…

[Participant]: We have had no reports concerning Jehovah’s Witness children. That kind of thing is indeed not reported.

[Participant]: Because it seems to us that they are not really in danger.

Voice: Things are happening, there are people suffering, there are victims.

[Interviewer]: There are certainly things happening, but they do not seem to worry the ministries’ observers. There are perhaps victims, but their victims are not the same ones. Their number in no way justifies the government’s action. Looking at that action over the last 25 years, one might even say that if there are no proven victims, it is not for want of having looked for them. A “Guide for the public official confronted with sectarian aberrations”, distributed throughout all the administrations, recapitulates the main elements of an apparatus unique in the world. Since 1996, a permanent interministerial mission, the MILS, succeeded by the MIVILUDES. A vigilance and coordination mission within each ministry. A “sects” correspondent magistrate in each court of appeal. 50 “sects” correspondents among the investigators of the Central Directorate of General Intelligence. In every prefecture, a vigilance unit on the sect phenomenon. Brochures warning against sects in the 1,239 youth information points. A special “sects” handbook for mayors. And, at every level of this apparatus, the intervention, alongside the MILS, of the anti-sect associations: the CCMM, the Centre against Mental Manipulation, and above all the ADFI, the Associations for the Defence of the Family and the Individual, which are recognized as being of public utility, subsidized to more than 90 per cent and to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros. It is this impressive arsenal, then, that proves incapable of detecting more than a few victims of sectarian aberrations each year. Mr Leschi, head of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, concludes our tour of the ministries and shows that the State’s action sometimes runs up against a public servant’s simple good sense and ethics.

[Leschi]: If the administrative authorities that have been put in place to protect children put together a sufficiently substantiated file that they can pass on to the Minister of the Interior, saying: here, on the basis of all these established facts, of these files, we have a movement whose philosophy means that the children are systematically raised in contradiction with the international conventions signed by France — well then, we will examine the file. For the time being, I have not seen it; I am not going to invent it; I am not entitled to substitute myself for this absence of proof.

[Interviewer]: What, then, feeds the supposed work of the parliamentary commissions of inquiry, of the MIVILUDES and of the associations subsidized by the State? Do they know those whom they denounce as dangerous?

Voice: But you know, we fully respected the adversarial principle. We sent questionnaires to all the communities concerned. They had every opportunity to reply to us, so everything is quite clear.

Voice: So the Jehovah’s Witnesses — contrary to what they say, you are saying: you talked with them, they were heard?

Voice: But one does not talk with sectarian communities. We take note of their acts when they cross the yellow line, that is to say, the law of the Republic.

[Interviewer]: In fact, and following Mr Fenech’s example, the option of not engaging in dialogue with the persons incriminated is a general consensus. There is another: that of ignoring the work of the historians of religion, sociologists and ethnologists employed by the State who for years have been studying the emergence of the new spiritualities. Yet they proved before our camera that they had things to say about the French situation. Maurice Duval, ethnologist, who among other things studied the Aumist religion for four years.

[Duval]: Today we are at that period where there are ever greater controls. And now, like Big Brother, they are trying to control people’s thoughts, to control people’s belief systems. That is the reason I am fighting against this: because I think it is extremely dangerous socially. And I would say to the MIVILUDES that they are in that position, and that they know it perfectly well, moreover, despite all the talk. Because when you look at how many people, groups, sects have been caught by the courts for wrongdoing, for things that have nothing to do with religion [inaudible ?] — it is a very dangerous situation — and for offences, you see that it is derisory compared with the number of groups. Besides, it bothers them, at the MIVILUDES, because they can see very well that there is no object. There is no object.

[Interviewer]: Jean Baubérot, holder of the only French chair on laïcité, an indispensable contributor to every French or foreign colloquium on the subject.

[Baubérot]: That there are associations fighting against other groups — that is part of society at large, that is part of freedom of expression. That these associations should be tied to the State, be recognized as being of public utility, that they should be able to instrumentalize the State — that is serious, and that is what distinguishes France from the other democracies.

[Interviewer]: Raphaël Liogier, director of the Observatoire du religieux, an institution of the University of Aix-en-Provence.

[Liogier]: Most social-science researchers agree on the diagnosis, on what is happening, on religion, on the new religious movements: there are no serious social-science researchers in France who are afraid of the new religious movements.

[Interviewer]: Few or no victims. A harmless population, according to the academics who study it — and yet a national mobilization against this population, and the entrenched idea that it represents a major social scourge. What amounts to a genuine psychosis is not without consequences. We invite you to discover the other side of the picture: men, women and children, the unrecognized victims of a genuine repression.

Voice: With sects, courtesy is not the same thing. You have no rules. You have to come by surprise.

[Interviewer]: In December 2006, we went to meet a small Christian community which was then, at its own expense, serving as publicity for the third parliamentary report of inquiry into sects.

Voice: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for your attention. Here are the headlines for this Wednesday. The parliamentary commission of inquiry into sects has discovered 18 children living in complete isolation in the Christian community, the Tabitha’s Place biblical community.

[Participant]: At around 9 in the morning, I was starting class with my three pupils. And then a child comes to warn me that there are some gentlemen waiting at the door. I am told that these are people from Parliament. So I let them in and we sit down, we begin to talk together calmly.

[Participant]: We knew that these were parliamentarians who had made the fight against sects, in inverted commas, their battle-horse. So we knew very well that they would come. I listen to my heart, I say to myself: for ten years we have been asking them to come here to see for themselves, and observe for themselves, what we are doing, what we are living, how our children are. So they visited three classrooms; they briefly asked the children a few questions.

[Interviewer]: The visit would be short, for the deputies’ schedule was very tight that day.

[Participant]: While the parliamentarians were still on our premises, we were already starting to be contacted by the first journalists, who told us that an AFP dispatch had come through, saying that the commission was going to hold a press conference in Paris at 6 p.m.

[Interviewer]: Before leaving, the deputies are invited by their hosts to talk over a drink.

[Participant]: We sit them down in these rooms here, where we are now, and we ask them what their first impression was. And thereupon it fell to Mr Georges Fenech to speak, and he himself tells us — and I regret not having recorded it — because he tells us: “Listen, frankly, we were pleasantly surprised by the welcome you gave us, since we came unannounced: you received us with a smile, you opened your doors without resistance. We found premises that were clean, we found children who were healthy, children who seemed happy. We were even able to see that they played together; we saw them through the window.” Mr Georges Fenech saying that. A few hours later, these gentlemen take the plane and arrive in Paris, and there the picture changes; it becomes something dramatic: they have discovered Natascha Kampusches, children who were asocial, cut off from the world.

Voice: We were deeply shaken — I think there is no point hiding it. We saw these 18 children given over to a community of psychological confinement. The law does not make it possible to fight this psychological confinement. These children who are cut off from the world.

[Participant]: Cut off from the world? From what world? Really, we are not cut off from the world, insofar as we regularly receive guests, our families — we visit them, we go to fairs and markets. Our children themselves travel with us. We are not at all cut off from the world.

[Interviewer]: The “sect” label is a veritable passport to trouble, a life sentence to the presumption of guilt, even for those who have been through judicial proceedings and come out of them cleared. Another place, other people, gathered around other convictions, victims of the same collective psychosis.

Voice: I note that there are communities committing aberrations [inaudible ?] which may be liable to cause harm. I am going there, and I fully intend to go, and I will go to all the départements at least.

[Participant]: I suddenly saw eight people arrive, a camera on someone’s shoulder. I experienced it a little like a raid — that is to say, Mr Fenech is quite incisive in his manner of introducing himself, in his manner of entering. He imposes something of an examining magistrate’s relationship, if I may put it that way.

[Participant]: Well, I do not even know whether I gave permission to film, because it was so brutal. I did not realize what was happening. A gentleman comes toward me and introduces himself. I did not really understand what he was saying to me. He quoted an acronym at me; I heard “ud” at the end — that is all I remember.

[Participant]: We saw at once that Mr Fenech was truly the important person, with his areopagus of people around him.

[Participant]: I still had the idea that these were really people who had come to conduct an inquiry. So I answered the questions. So we did a tour of the property. Questions were asked.

[Participant]: Now Mr Fenech, in particular, has stereotyped questions that come around cyclically. There are always the same references: whether the children are in school; the notion of health, and what is proposed with regard to health. Then, there was something a little peculiar: the questions were very slanted and there was no openness. And every time Éric or Véronique set off onto that ground — that is to say, what people actually live here — they would cut them off, ask another question, invite one of his colleagues to ask questions. And we sensed that there was irritation, that there was impatience.

[Participant]: I felt an unease. I sensed that the answers mattered little to them. The children do not go to school: you are a sect. Your children go to school: you are a sect, and you are trying to hide behind the fact that your children go to school; it is a cover. So everything is interpreted so as to drive one very precise line.

[Participant]: And then came the truly dishonest questions, about the money Frère Abel was earning off our backs.

[Participant]: As the visit went on, I realized full well there was a real bitterness, saying: “But in fact, what we say does not interest them in the slightest. They already have their ideas about what they have come to see.” Especially Mr Fenech. The other people were more respectful.

[Participant]: Mr Fenech was insinuating that Frère Abel was a member of the Order of the Solar Temple.

[Participant]: I was somewhat frightened and indignant at what [inaudible ?] insisted on seeing of the work that is done here. It seemed to us perfectly… not false, but worse than that: not fair, really. It does not correspond at all to the spirit of the place.

[Participant]: There, I have the impression of having been deceived a second time, because I had really trusted that person who was beside me, that journalist from Le Parisien.

[Participant]: A France 2 crew had come to the site, with a journalist and a cameraman, and we said to ourselves: “But what if it is more of the same?” I called France 2 back to find out exactly what it was about, what it corresponded to and where it was going. She tried to reassure me, telling me there was an ethics code, that there was nothing to worry about, and so on. Only, the title of the programme was “Les gens portés disparus” (“Missing persons”). We decided, in agreement with our colleagues, in agreement with our lawyer, to refuse the publication of these images, or the broadcasting of these images.

[Participant]: When we met that lawyer, he told us plainly that the MIVILUDES had no business entering our home as it did, that it was not empowered to do so. And that is the reason why letters went out to the prefect.

[Participant]: By rights, we could call ourselves “ADFI”. That is to say, if there is an association for the defence of the family and the individual, it is surely in places like this. That is all we do: defend the family and the individual.

[Participant]: For years I have been saying: come and inspect what goes on here, come and see what goes on.

[Participant]: Where it troubles me is that such raids may endanger people who are fragile.

[Participant]: They have taken steps with lawyers. Anyway, I am following this very, very closely. It is important to me because… because without the Moulin, I do not know what will become of me.

[Interviewer]: The statements circulated today by the anti-sect associations and certain media come mainly from former members, when it is a matter of attacking minorities of conviction. Here is the opinion of a specialist on the question.

[Participant]: Of course, the media very often centre their vision on the account of the “repentant” — what I call the repentant, that is to say, people who were in a group and who left it, and who obviously are not happy, because they spent time, money, devotion on a cause which, after the fact, no longer appears good to them. And that is true in religion; it is true in politics too. The history of the Communist Party is written far more by listening to those who left it than to those who stayed in it. There is an obviously juicy side to it, since there you have a terrible critique of the structures of the Church or of the party one has left.

[Interviewer]: Today, someone leaving a spiritual minority in France is moreover offered financial, logistical and moral support from associations specializing in collecting this kind of recrimination. The conjunction of these three elements — media, apostates and anti-sect associations — leads to every kind of excess.

Voice: [inaudible]! [inaudible]! Damn it!

Voice: They’ve been here!

[Participant]: That was the Kingdom Hall, the temple we attended — the last hall, at any rate, that we attended, for nearly three years. That was the group of people we were with when we left the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[Participant]: No one takes the trouble to form an objective view of the phenomenon; instead they fixate solely on the discontented. And so we get an extremely biased view of reality.

[Interviewer]: The supposed sects are invariably charged with the same counts of accusation. Around three great universal themes — sex, power, money — we find the vague, unanswerable notion of mental manipulation or psychological suggestion. We do not have the means to analyse every case of supposed sectarian aberrations put forward by the media, but every time we do so, we discover, beyond the lies and the patent absence of proof, the same distressing picture: that of people with very real suffering, propelled into a role which, in the long run, cannot serve them. These disappointed followers who turn against their former group are, so to speak, the raw material of anti-sect action, which showcases their criticisms and grievances as though they were absolutely true and representative of a majority opinion.

[Participant]: It is one face of reality, but it obviously has to be cross-checked — in history, we always cross-check testimonies: you have a person from one party, a person from another party; you can hope to obtain a somewhat more balanced view. And on the question of the so-called sects, in fact, we systematically take the point of view of the repentant — as one says of those who have left the mafia, the repentant, the apostates — and we systematically neglect the point of view of the people who live there happily.

Voice: If the media have an interest — because it brings ratings, because it works, and so on — in manufacturing fear with the groups called sects as its object, well, they will do it, and it will work. People will go along with it. I could develop heaps of examples that demonstrate it. From the moment the media say it, people think it is true. Even if, in the abstract, they know they are being led into falsehood by these media, concretely, when they watch, they nod along; they say yes.

[Interviewer]: It is perhaps worth asking ourselves, on a personal level, about this observation. In 30 years of anti-sect campaigning, how many of these abuses have we let pass? How many lies about the so-called sects have thus gone and lodged themselves in our memory? We are all potential links in a rumour that today feeds itself.

Voice: No one in the village was really worried?

Voice: Let’s say that up to now, they haven’t done anyone any harm.

Voice: And you know that it’s a sect?

Voice: I know it. They often talk about them on television. And they said it’s the worst one we’ve got.

[Interviewer]: We have just seen that, in the case of a spiritual minority, a simple arrest can take the form of an armed assault. The following testimonies will show that the rest of the judicial process can be even more destructive.

[Participant]: Eight months of imprisonment at home. With two children, and pregnant besides. Writing numerous letters asking them to try to find a way to earn some money. At one point I even wrote a letter saying that I wished to go to the Restos du Cœur to have something to eat. That was refused.

[Interviewer]: It should be borne in mind that at the end of the judicial process, nothing would remain of the initial accusations of mental manipulation, theft, violence or false imprisonment — and nothing, in any event, to justify what happened during the investigation period, and in particular the reprehensible turn taken by the gendarmes’ inquiry.

[Participant]: I had distributors; they were sent a file: “Careful, it’s a sect.” They no longer wanted anything to do with us. We had booksellers we work with: “Careful, Manitara is a guru.” So they no longer wanted to work with us. So the gendarmerie went through a whole process so that everything would pull away from us. And people do not look into it. They do not seek to know whether what is brought to them is true or not true. For them, from the moment it is put in front of their nose, for them it is true.

[Interviewer]: The accused hope that the court hearings will at last bring a fair confrontation, where they will be able to defend themselves and obtain justice. That expectation is often disappointed by magistrates who seem to lose all rationality when it comes to judging a “sect” case. Tal Schaller, a physician and naturopath, first found himself suspected of belonging to the Order of the Solar Temple and of fomenting a collective suicide. Two days later, all that remained against him were infringements of the hotel-trade regulations, which would be punished in a rather surprising manner. He testifies, as the inhabitants of Terranova have done, that to be accused of being a sect is often to be the powerless spectator of this theatre of the irrational.

[Schaller]: We received not only an extremely high fine, but also a strange penalty, which consisted in prohibiting us for five years from organizing courses and lectures on anything concerning health and personal development. We went back to court several times, and we always had this impression that the judges were in effect telling us: yes, you may not be a sect, but you are nevertheless a sectarian deviance. With this term “sectarian deviance” you can include whatever you like, and in a way we were as good as condemned in advance, since we were within a sectarian deviance.

[Participant]: When they questioned us — when they made us stand at the bar for I don’t know how many hours, eight or nine hours — they insulted us, as guru, as sect; they refused to hear anything, anything, truly anything; at one point I was even forced to shout in order to explain. When I was accused of something — in principle, you have a certain amount of time to answer the question; there, it was: you are accused of this. I begin to speak, I would get four words out: “Yes, but you are always trying to defend yourself. We know that you are a sectarian deviance, you are a sect; there is no point trying to prove anything.” So I explain to them that I have papers proving that I am innocent of what they accuse me of: “Yes, but that is not true.” So then the lawyers, at that point, intervene and say that this is outright discrimination.

[Interviewer]: These supposed “sect” cases therefore reveal no victims of sects, but a few disputes, such as arise in every sector of society — and above all people persecuted for entirely legitimate life choices. This balance sheet may seem strange. It stands at 25 years of the fight against sectarian aberrations, as Maître Florand and Maître Biro, both lawyers specializing in individual liberties, testify.

[Participant]: So, if there were a citizens’ inquiry — statistical, sociological, judicial — one would find, one, that there have been very few convictions in the last ten years — practically nothing: one would find about ten — and that of that ten or so, eight or nine of them concern personal misconduct by members belonging to minority groups. So it is indeed a fantasy to think that there is a particular delinquency or criminality, a particular delinquency, that affects the sects. It is a phenomenon that is non-existent.

[Participant]: We equipped ourselves with an enormous arsenal to chase, like some Tartarin de Tarascon, after the wild beast that haunted the public forest. We found hardly any dangerous animals, and we produced disastrous effects among the population. Notably this collective phobia that has taken hold of the country. And behind this collective phobia, a plethora of lawsuits that had no connection with it, such as divorces, in which one side accused the other of being in a sect. That is the balance sheet: an utterly disastrous balance sheet.

[Interviewer]: The accusation of being in a sect is far more widespread than people believe, and it can strike anyone. When a couple separates, it is common to see the wounds generate all kinds of aggression, and the courts of justice become the theatre of the most extreme and the most gratuitous allegations. One testimony, to speak for the hundreds of people who have one day found themselves accused of being in a sect in a divorce dispute.

[Marie-Christine]: I managed to find within myself the energy to ask my husband for a divorce. Something I had wanted to do for years, but he was fiercely opposed to it, and he would not hear of it. He spoke about it a great deal to my children, to my eldest sons, who were of age, and they got it into their heads that I must belong to a sect: it was not possible that I should want a divorce of my own accord, it was unimaginable, someone must have been putting ideas into my head. And that is when they decided to go and see the ADFI.

[Interviewer]: This turn of events stems from the fact that Marie-Christine, who leaves the family circle only once a week, takes part, among other things, in the activities of an association for meeting and sharing around various books and personal-development techniques.

[Marie-Christine]: So the ADFI played on paranoia, on fear: “You don’t realize: your mother — it’s not exactly a sect she is in — but she risks meeting extremely dangerous people. So she could be drawn into a sect, so she could draw in your two little brothers” — that is, my two youngest children, who were minors — “and at that point, getting them out of there will be impossible. So, to avoid all that, as a preventive measure, it is better to take custody of the children away from her.” Then the ADFI recommended to my husband a lawyer in Aix-en-Provence, a lawyer who had an enormous tome marked “anti-sect fight”. So he contacted this lawyer, who told him that a fault-based divorce had to be brought in order to take the children away from me. This lawyer said that this was the normal procedure in such cases. The file was going to be put together in such a way that I would not be able to get out of it.

[Interviewer]: Marie-Christine, who cannot leave the marital home — which could constitute a fault in the context of the divorce — must then endure, for long weeks, a veritable persecution.

[Marie-Christine]: They told my children to search through all my personal papers, my diary, my cheque stubs, my address book. They truly all turned against me. They attacked me; they even insulted me. I was called a slut, a liar, and worse. All this under the pretext of saving me — because they had been told that I really had to be saved, that I was in grave danger. Trying to discuss all this with my husband was impossible. He was in refusal of any discussion. There was one of my children with whom I was able to talk, just one. So, little by little, I managed to get him to understand a certain number of things. So then he tried to speak about it to his brothers and to my ex-husband. And at that point they all called him a traitor.

[Interviewer]: Where, then, are the victims? Could one not speak, in this case, of psychological confinement, of mental manipulation or of brainwashing — all things the new spiritualities are habitually accused of? Marie-Christine’s ex-husband would in the end abandon the proceedings under way, seized by remorse, but also, certainly, for financial reasons. It is worth returning to the targets of these campaigns, which we always believe to be further removed from our own personal practices than they are.

[Interviewer]: What is it? Courses? Training programmes?

Voice: Personal-development courses, training. Yes, everything to do with constellations — which is very, very clearly written in the report —: family constellations, psychogenealogy, organic food, that sort of thing.

[Interviewer]: 40 formulas or key words that the MIVILUDES considers decisive for assessing sectarian risk appear in the guide “L’entreprise face aux dérives sectaires” (“Business confronted with sectarian aberrations”), which it published at the beginning of 2008. Another hunting ground of the sects: education, where nearly 60,000 children are exposed through tutoring, but also the medical and paramedical fields. No fewer than 28 alternative health practices come under suspicion in the MIVILUDES’s latest report.

Voice: The impression we had, with regard to the MIVILUDES, with regard to the practice of gentle medicine in France, is that the convictions we were subjected to are not isolated cases. For we have heard from dozens and dozens of therapists, holistic physicians or naturopaths who have had trouble, whether with the courts, with the tax authorities, or with all sorts of other institutions.

[Participant]: When my wife and I took over the Marchesseau school in ‘92, we were subjected to an enormous number of inspections and pressures. It made us realize that there was discrimination against all these techniques of health, vitality, well-being and spirituality. We work a great deal with continuing education, with the training bodies, and many — not to say almost all — of the documents, all the files, were returned to us, refused, quite simply because all these bodies had received circular letters telling them that we were, in inverted commas, a sectarian activity. Nowadays, many terms can no longer be used. They are terms that cause offence, or else we are shut into boxes as so-called sects. Terms like holistic, terms like well-being, terms like vitality, terms like chakra, and so on. As soon as you are in medicine that is not conventional, chemical medicine, they try to demonize people. So, to demonize them, they say they belong to sects. It is easy: that way, they are rejected wholesale and there is no more discussion.

[Interviewer]: There are certainly hundreds of thousands of us, if not millions, affected in one way or another by these discriminatory and defamatory campaigns. But very rare are the people fully aware of the scale of this action — and also of its unique character at the international level.

Voice: In the Netherlands there was also an inquiry into sects, and the final report said that this is not a problem. There are small religious groups, large religious groups, but they are not criminogenic, and so we do not have to concern ourselves with them particularly.

Voice: We really had the impression that France was almost one of the champion countries of this witch-hunt. And this kind of story, such as the one we went through, is not imaginable in Switzerland, nor, I think, in Germany, in Italy or in Spain.

Voice: For my part, I do not understand what is happening in France; I find it unacceptable. Nor do I understand the motive for such a stance.

Voice: The fight against sects gives the feeling that something useful is being done, and it can be pushed to the front of the stage when there is a more serious problem. It is the representation of a permanent aggression that can take the place of the real underlying problems: the social problems, the economic problems, at every level.

[Interviewer]: For some, the anti-sect fight is put in the service of a certain authoritarian drift which, in France, is more usually attributed to foreign governments.

Voice: In France, it is our axis of evil.

Voice: The fight against sects manufactures collective fear. People are afraid of sects. They have very friendly faces, but they are going to brainwash people, especially the weakest, children, and so on. That is the terrible danger. This fear means that people agree — once they are afraid — to accept retreats of democracy: in their own interest, they believe, since it will make it possible to protect them. Since it makes it possible to protect them, we will go so far as to say: “The physician’s professional secrecy — perhaps it should be set aside, because that might make it possible to fight sects”, without anyone asking the question: “But what is a sect? Who are these people?” There are only ever partisan debates in the media, which do not open our minds but close them again.

[Interviewer]: Why such a fight, in the end? Perhaps, quite simply, because the stakes are high, as Christiane Singer expressed it before our camera in April 2006.

[Singer]: I see in it an indirect homage paid to the religious, to this religious dimension of the human being. That is to say: if so many forces have to be mobilized to discredit it, it must have power within the inner being.

[Interviewer]: Faced with fear, one tool: the approach of knowledge, the will to understand.

Voice: Where there is understanding, fear diminishes. Where there is no understanding, fear grows. Where fear grows, positions become radicalized. Where positions become radicalized, [inaudible ?] on one side or another develop. I would suggest to people who are worried at seeing a parent or someone close to them turn toward unconventional practices that they quite simply try to understand, and move toward an openness that is not merely superficial — one that therefore implies a will and a necessity to understand. It being understood that understanding is work. It requires informing oneself — really informing oneself — taking the time, looking, weighing, reflecting, rather than deciding, judging, contenting oneself with a few slogans, a few unverified pieces of information, as we so often do. So understanding is work; fear is laziness.

[Interviewer]: The CICNS proposes the creation of an independent observatory of spiritual minorities, in response to a public action known as the “fight against sectarian aberrations” and judged inadequate by many witnesses in our society. This observatory would be a consultative body composed both of figures critical of and of figures favourable to spiritual minorities. It would undertake an approach of knowledge toward spiritual movements, which would thus come out of the shadows. What the general public would then discover would be quite different from the idea it may currently have of them, and would, in our view, accord with the assessment of the sociologist Michel Maffesoli.

[Maffesoli]: Well, it can of course be disorderly, like anything in its nascent state — it is for better and for worse, as always, there too — but I for my part would see in it rather the expression, how shall I put it, of a welcoming of the non-rational, a welcoming of life, a welcoming of the other, of the stranger, in its various forms. And from that point of view, in contemporary reconnection, in what I call this somewhat syncretistic religiosity that is at play, well, there is something there which, once again, expresses new forms — in the simple sense of the term — of solidarity, new forms of generosity, in ways of being, in the relationship one has to others and to the world. So yes, from that point of view, it can be regarded — contrary to what many say — as a form of enrichment; and let us think of it as such.

[Interviewer]: We denounce the persecutions of a discriminatory policy that perpetuates itself without any serious justification. A few individual aberrations have been used for 25 years by the media and certain public authorities in order to sustain a hunt against spiritual minorities that has caused much suffering in our population. The flagrant injustice of such a situation could quickly become the shame of our society if the springs of this dramatic misapprehension are not exposed in broad daylight, so as to move the debate toward more wisdom and intelligence.