The Guide for the Mayors of France against Cults

The Guide for the Mayors of France against Cults

In December 2001, the MILS (replaced in 2002 by MIVILUDES) published a guide for the use of Mayors, entitled “Cults” and written by Alain Vivien, President of the Interministerial Mission for Combating Cults, and Jean-Paul Delevoye, President of the Association of Mayors of France.

Commentary by Emile D’Albret for CICNS; extracts from the guide in italics

We invite you to read this book while imagining the reactions it may induce in an elected official hitherto little concerned by the subject.

Editorial

The cult phenomenon constitutes one of the dangers our society faces.

Yes, everyone has heard of the “social scourge” that cults are said to constitute… And yet there exists no legal definition of the term cult, which sociologists, historians of religion and ethnologists use only with caution when it applies to contemporary groups. Moreover, this “self-evidence” of the danger scarcely extends beyond our borders. There are even countries in Europe which know nothing of any “cult danger”.

A danger all the more complex in that our fundamental freedoms to think, to believe, to associate must be preserved, while combating those who take advantage of human weakness by processes of spiritual and often material alienation.

While we may note the ambiguity of an action which, all the while claiming to protect the weak, collides with fundamental freedoms, the Mayor alas will certainly retain nothing but the difficulty of the subject and the term “spiritual alienation”. The disquiet born of reading notions so vague will find itself reassured a few lines further on, where we are promised “simple and concrete information on this difficult subject and indications on the means of verifying, of checking, of acting or of seeking advice”.

The first “simple items of information” are the following:

“In what way are we concerned? The topicality of the cult phenomenon is permanent: for thirty years, the collective tragedies (the massacres of Guyana, of Waco, the “suicides” of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland, in France and in Quebec, the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo metro), the individual tragedies (deaths of children, suicides, ill-treatment, sexual abuse) and the trials have fed a rich chronicle.”

This passage, with the help of a few key words, will insidiously open in the unconscious the memory file constituted year after year by the absorption of one-way information from the general media.

These great myths, whose existence and horrors we deny in no way, nonetheless reveal over time mafia and political implications far more convincing than any religious fanaticism or dérives linked to spirituality. See our page on the myth of cults.

But they will remain a “war-horse” of anti-cult activists for as long as journalists tirelessly repeat the same absurdities and untruths about them.

As for the “individual tragedies”, if they are not further commented upon by the book’s authors, it is for want of being able to cite figures in the matter. There exist in fact only very rare cases in which it is demonstrated that an individual’s membership of a new spirituality was able to lead him to a criminal act or to suicide. If these movements carried a real criminal tendency, then given the particular surveillance of which they have been the object for 25 years, this would translate into a substantial number of convictions, a number which would not fail to be cited here. This omission shows that the dangerousness of the incriminated movements remains a hypothesis which no statistic comes to support.

There is no doubt that the peremptory tone of a senator and a former minister designated by the government as experts on cults, added to the weight of the collective consciousness, suffices to obscure this evidence in the minds of elected officials.

“States are reacting, above all in Europe, by multiplying parliamentary inquiries (France, Belgium, Switzerland), by the creation of “ad hoc” bodies charged with following the dossier and making legislative or regulatory proposals, or indeed, as in Bavaria, by promoting professional bans.”

Indeed, in Europe only Belgium, Germany and Switzerland have sketched out an approach similar to France’s. And in the world, only China (which Mr Vivien and Mr Delevoye omit to mention) has, like France, made the “anti-cult campaign” a priority by pursuing a repressive and inhuman policy against certain spiritual minorities.

After a paragraph taking up commonplaces about the malaise of our society, individuals’ loss of bearings, and the economic, ecological and humanitarian problems of the world, it is concluded:

“These expectations, these refusals are used by cult groups and diverted to their sole profit: in exchange for pseudo-answers, a real dependence and an unfailing allegiance.”

Since the report of the 1995 parliamentary commission of inquiry, the term “cult group” has been attached to an arbitrary list of movements and, by extension, to everything resembling them. It is therefore in fact a gratuitous accusation which reinforces the general suspicion towards spiritual minorities.

The following paragraph, “Cults: an ancient term, a contemporary reality”, is built on the same principle: after an etymological digression, it designates persons by the term “guru”, attached (like the word “cult”) to the new spiritualities, accuses them of malevolence and incites action against them.

“But if, on the other hand, it is a matter of a “guru” and his lieutenants exercising towards a person or a group of persons an action of captation which in the end deprives them of their freedom, not to react would be akin to complicity.”

A Mayor will assuredly not make himself complicit with such individuals… Then come the promised indications for “verifying” whether “it is a cult or not”.

“For a decade or so, researchers from various disciplines have identified criteria which make it possible, faced with an unknown group, to apprehend its possibly cult character.”

This sentence deserves comment. In fact, all the researchers, sociologists, historians of religion and ethnologists (including among the French authorities we know) refuse to establish such criteria and judge them subjective and dangerous. Many of them attended the seminar “cults and laïcité” organised by MIVILUDES, where they expressed their reservation and their caution, if not their opposition, regarding the use of the notion of cult in the present context. And yet, to this day, MIVILUDES continues to pursue its policy while disdaining these appeals to reason and to a genuinely objective approach.

“The criteria are fairly numerous. None of them, on its own, permits any movement to be characterised as a cult. But two or three must raise the alarm and justify the greatest caution (when in doubt, refrain from all collaboration). Beyond three, there is unfortunately every chance that the group observed is a cult.”

The difficulty (indeed the impossibility) of applying these criteria, which are either wholly subjective or applicable to any human group whatever, contrasts singularly with the simplistic recipe given in the introduction.

Mayors are being asked to sort their constituents into two categories, the recommendable and the non-recommendable, and to adopt an attitude of rejection towards the second.

”- The group develops a radical, exclusive and intolerant alternative ideology.

- Its structure is authoritarian and autocratic, in the form of a living guru or of a bureaucratic organisation heir to the message.

- It claims an exclusive reference to its own interpretation of the world, whether applied to beliefs, to scientific data, to ethics, to everyday behaviour, to interpersonal relations, or to the means of making the group’s cause triumph.

- It advocates or imposes ruptures of every kind: previous references, personal orientations, relationships (family, friends…), convictions, free criticism, emotional choices, relations with the outside world becoming marked by rejection, suspicion, or indeed demonisation.

- It implements a transformation of persons, according to a type of standardising moulding that excludes autonomy.

- It appropriates to its own profit the vital forces, the initiative, the creativity, the energy of the followers, thereby achieving an instrumentalisation of individuals in the sole service of the group and its leaders.

- It exploits the followers financially, either by endlessly repeated levies and services paid for at exorbitant prices, or by the unpaid work it demands.

- It multiplies promises and assurances of every kind: personal development, elitist salvation, complete power over oneself, health, collective power, internal promotion.

- At the same time it masks the real costs, the constraints, the risks, the progressive hold, the transformations in the direction of dependence.

- It exploits anxieties and fears, develops guilt, the fear of rejection, the dread of disloyalty, and mutual surveillance aimed at a permanent control founded on denunciation.

- It renders problematic in various respects the prospect of leaving the group, which has become a relational prosthesis surrounded by threatening or empty alternatives.

- It carries dangers, variable according to the group, for free will, autonomy, health, education, finances and in certain cases democratic liberties or personal safety.

On the subject of the criteria, read our commentary on the Miviludes report

We have highlighted the only words which will enable the Mayor to discern to whom to apply these criteria and which, once again, designate the same groups.

The following chapters — “ASSOCIATIONS, STATUTES AND MEANS OF CONTROL”, “TOWN PLANNING”, “COMPULSORY SCHOOLING”, “COMPULSORY VACCINATION”, “PEDDLING”, “MAKING A MUNICIPAL HALL AVAILABLE” — describe for the most part laws and legal statutes, their fields of application, and some case law.

Imagine the same work entitled “YOUTH GANGS”, which would set out for Mayors the texts of the laws concerning “the anti-pollution standards to be applied to two-wheeled vehicles”, “the obligation to wear a helmet”, “CROSSING OF THE PUBLIC HIGHWAY BY A PEDESTRIAN OUTSIDE THE CROSSING PROVIDED FOR THAT PURPOSE”…

These are discriminatory measures, barely disguised — a tactic alas commonly employed by all States which wish to make a category of the population disappear or fall silent without passing laws against them which the international community could not ignore. Certain Mayors have, it seems, followed the instructions proposed by MIVILUDES and the bodies which preceded it in the same function. Indeed, cases of refusal to rent halls or to grant building permits, checks on vaccination or on compulsory schooling, and unannounced inspections of the conformity of a place of worship following a “cult rumour” have become frequent.

Apart from the texts of the laws, one finds scattered a few sentences and paragraphs of commentary significant of the incitement to discrimination which this book constitutes.

Extracts:

”(…) Leaving the domain of the declarative, this legal form, by the obligations and controls it imposes, does not find favour with cults.”

“Cults, taking advantage of the freedom of declaration of associations enshrined by the 1901 law, register at the time of filing their official declaration that they are also governed by the 1905 law.”

“Subject to common legislation, cults frequently commit infringements linked to the statutes of non-profit associations, in matters of tax law and of URSSAF declarations”

”(…) a judgment of the Administrative Court of Paris (…) Must be regarded as carrying out as its principal activity operations for valuable consideration (…), the association with a spiritual object one of whose directors is remunerated, which organises trips at rates at least equivalent to those of other tour operators… paid sessions of harmonisation and relaxation, which sells books, bulletins and cassettes… and whose surpluses are not reinvested in these statutory activities.

“Whereas verification by the tax administration is carried out on the accounts, URSSAF inspection agents may, without warning, verify on the spot the management of associations declaring staff and, for those which declare none, the concordance between the declaration and the reality of the situation”.

”(…), “checks” may be carried out at the time of a subsidy application; cults do not draw up particular statutes providing for these elections, and it is therefore extremely difficult for a follower to contest legally the moral and material management of a guru”

”(…) discretionary power of the commune. It may, for example, request financial reports or activity reports which often give an indication of the association’s real activity.”

“After examination, subsidy applications are submitted to the sovereign approval of the municipal council, which has the possibility, for any application, initial or renewed, of giving a negative answer.”

An instructive little story:

“On this subject, a deputy put a written question to the minister of the interior (question 882 of 7 July 1997) concerning the possibilities open to the mayor when a building-permit application is filed by a cult: “The purpose of the building permit is … to check the conformity of any construction with the legislative and regulatory provisions, national and local, concerning town-planning rules. […] Consequently, the fact of the competent administrative authority refusing a building permit by relying on considerations foreign to town planning, or by deliberately modifying the existing local regulations in the matter, would constitute a misuse of power whose sanction by the administrative courts seised of the dispute would be the annulment of the contested refusal decision. There exists therefore no legal possibility of founding a refusal to issue a building permit on the supposed “cult” character of the grouping applying for it”.

What is one to say of a deputy’s question on the legal possibilities of refusing a building permit on a discriminatory criterion?

It is the demonstration of the gulf which has come today to exist between the very principles of the Republic and the collective consciousness.

The text that follows shows that the extravagant character of such a question from an elected official does not so much as occur to the drafter.

When a cult files a permit application, three types of criteria may more particularly be examined:…

These notions, which leave room for a measure of local appreciation, may legitimately motivate certain refusals to issue.”

Another “gem”:

“Faced with certain threats, the commune may be tempted to exercise its right of pre-emption”.

To be valid, the initial decision must contain in precise terms the purpose for which the pre-emption is exercised. (…) when pre-emption is exercised for the purposes of land reserves within the framework of a deferred development zone, mere reference to the general motivations mentioned in the act creating the zone suffices.

Go on then, be tempted…

A scenario worthy of science-fiction films comes to reinforce the argument:

Local authorities constitute a priority objective for cults.

Cults seek to introduce themselves most of the time via a front company or association, into certain sectors of activity (…) Vocational training bodies (sliding more or less surreptitiously from training proper towards personal development)

(…) aimed at employees or job-seekers, and recruitment firms, present several attractions for cults. They make it possible to obtain substantial information about the company or authority which has accepted their service and about the employees who make it up. This clandestine action is sometimes accompanied by a discreet but pressing proselytism.

Computer services companies. These companies make it possible to have access to the totality of an entity’s data (personnel files, customer files, industrial secrets…). Cases of industrial espionage or of blackmail have been reported.

A little further on, a list of totally gratuitous accusations is drawn up, since the infringements in question, even if they exist, are no more frequently observed among the movements in question than in the rest of the French population (1).

Some of the frequently observed infringements:

The range of offences, infringements or crimes committed by cults in France is extremely wide.

Among these, the principal ones encountered are:

- fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness,

- fraud,

- homicide or wounding, intentional or unintentional,

- sexual assault,

- incitement of minors to debauchery,

- endangering minors,

- failure to assist a person in danger,

- failure to report a crime,

- illegal practice of medicine,

- non-compliance with the data-protection law,

- misleading advertising,

- infringements of the general tax code and notably tax fraud (VAT, corporation tax…),

- infringements of the labour code (clandestine work, working conditions…),

- infringements of the construction and housing code,

- infringements of the legislation on compulsory schooling and on compulsory vaccination,

- fraud in respect of family benefits.

The last chapter of this book gathers addresses to which Mayors may turn in case of doubt as to how to behave towards a “suspect” group.

It is unsurprisingly that we find there the anti-cult associations, indispensable partners of the policy of the MILS and of MIVILUDES (namely the ADFI and the CCMM) which will confirm without hesitation the well-foundedness of the vigilance, suspicion and repression described above.

In conclusion, we would say that this is a set of instructions for the use of the legal and administrative apparatus for the purposes of persecuting minority groups designated by their alternative choices in matters of spirituality, health or education.

If such a work appeared and was distributed without raising any controversy, it is because after 10 years of systematic disinformation, public opinion is won over to the government’s anti-cult policy.

Nonetheless we do not despair that public opinion (still hypnotised by the current of the single permitted thought, carefully fed by media in the service of a strictly materialist national policy) will one day end up turning, as it discovers the lies with which it has been stuffed for decades in order to keep it in fear and deprive it of all discernment.

CICNS has therefore undertaken to awaken a consciousness which is merely asleep.

The new spiritualities are a scapegoat, and through them it is freedom of thought, of conviction and of religion that is threatened, if not quite simply individual right in the face of a new reason of State.

(1) With the exception, perhaps, of infringements of the legislation on compulsory schooling, on compulsory vaccination and the illegal practice of medicine, which highlight the conflict between the hegemonic aspirations of the Republic and individual liberties rather than representing attacks on the physical or moral integrity of others.

to download: The Guide for mayors against cults