Interview with Janine Tavernier (1)

Interview with Janine Tavernier (1)

by Joseph Veillard The media-prominent president of UNADFI (Union Nationale des Associations de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu, which helps the victims of cults) receives us in her house in the western suburbs of Paris. She has just resigned from her post as president and seems relieved to pass the baton in a fight into which she threw herself twenty years ago, after her husband joined the eco-fundamentalist cult Ecoovie. Irony of fate: the former first cult-hunter of France finds herself in the dock, since her daughter works as a specialised educator in an establishment inspired by the pedagogy of Rudolph Steiner, classified as a cult. Shocked by the blacklisting of which her grandchildren’s schools have been victims, mocked by certain cult-hunters who reproach her for her indulgence towards a cult movement, she worries about an atmosphere of witch-hunting which can lead to a general confusion, indeed to certain blunders. Janine Tavernier, why are you leaving the presidency of UNADFI? After twenty years in this association, and ten years of presidency of UNADFI, I consider it is time to hand over. Moreover, there are people arriving in our associations with new ideas and who want to change the course of things a little. Meaning? There is a whole team of people who want to interest themselves in doctrines and philosophies. I do not care for that. I joined the association precisely because we did not concern ourselves with doctrines or beliefs. We concerned ourselves only with the victims of totalitarian groups. The cult phenomenon is changing completely in France. I think the general public knows what a cult is whereas, in 1974, the date of the creation of ADFI, everything had to be discovered. Today there is a renewal in this milieu and I want to step back to reflect. Could there have been amalgams in the anti-cult campaign? More and more, people see cults everywhere. If you do yoga, if you treat yourself with homeopathy or acupuncture, you belong to a cult. I find that extremely grave, because one must have a great openness and accept parallel medicines without judging or cataloguing. What is more, the cult phenomenon is used to denounce and to create rumours. Broadly, if you have it in for your neighbour, you accuse him of belonging to a cult. People dear to you, involved in the Steiner schools, have thus been directly accused… We interest ourselves only in victims, and we have never received any from the Steiner schools. I find it abnormal that they are catalogued as cults and that I am reproached for supporting them because my grandchildren are educated there. I ask myself questions. I would like to fight against that, notably when I see that shops like Nature et Découvertes are presented as belonging to Scientology. All these rumours are inadmissible and I will not play that game. Me, I feel entirely free, I have no belief, no philosophy. One must draw the difference between the new religious movements and the cults. The former are entirely respectable, while the latter are harmful. Your departure from UNADFI leaves the field free for other, more dogmatic people. Is that not a bad sign? I hope not. It is important to change, to take stock of everything anew, to allow a better study of the phenomenon. Me, I have done my time, it was a formidable period, not always easy, during which I acquired much maturity and humility. Faced with the cult phenomenon, one must question oneself all the time. There is no instruction manual for helping someone leave a cult, for helping the families. Today there is less need to make the cult phenomenon known, for the world is more or less aware of it. What is needed is to work with finesse and to see to it that people no longer get taken in. (Interview published in Technikart Number 57 of November 2001. This issue is missing from the archives of the magazine Technikart ) Read another interview with Janine Tavernier