Cults and Free Expression: Ivan Rioufol on France's "Absurd and Useless Inquisition"

Ivan Rioufol is a French journalist. Asked by CICNS whether he still stood by an earlier article criticising France’s anti-cult campaign, he says he would write exactly the same thing today. He describes himself as built around the defence of free expression, free belief and free opinion, and says he found the hunt for dissident religious thought excessive. Put to him that the MIVILUDES counts 500,000 victims of dérives sectaires, 60,000 of them children, he is careful: he does not say the agency is wrong, the figures may be accurate, but they may also be inflated, and he would want independent commissions of inquiry to establish which. What he objects to is a right to speak kept under the surveillance of conformist thought, something he does not find worthy of a democracy like France’s.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 21 January 2013. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: The story of the elector. “Through an excess of panic and a lack of discernment, an absurd and useless inquisition.” Sixteen years after his article appeared, he answers our questions.

[Rioufol]: I wrote that because I am built around the defence of freedom of expression, the defence of freedom of belief, the defence of freedom of opinion. And I had found excessive this hunt that had been launched against dissident thoughts, against dissident religious thoughts. And I could not quite see in the name of what a public body could claim to go rummaging through people’s consciences. And so I would write exactly the same thing today.

[Interviewer]: And were you criticised for it at the time?

[Rioufol]: Yes, there certainly must have been criticism. But I also seem to remember that I received encouragement from those — not, incidentally, from the cults themselves, but from those who, and there are many of us like that in France, from those who think that nothing is more important than freedom of expression in France. Our DNA is freedom of expression. But I find it distressing, this pretension that consciences — or in any case the master censors — have today of wanting to impose ideas that would be conformist ideas. Me, I trust people, I am a liberal, and in any case I am not frightened by thoughts, especially religious thoughts or structuring thoughts, at bottom.

Now, I can see, naturally, that there can be aberrations in certain cults. I am not blind, I can see that there can be abuses, enrichment schemes, exploitations of people’s credulity, but it seems to me — I am not a jurist specialised in these matters — but it seems to me that the rules of the penal code suffice.

It had seemed to me at the time — and I still hold that feeling — that through this hunt against beliefs, the aim was first of all to normalise opinions somewhat, and then also perhaps to feed a kind of anti-Americanism, at the time, because it was above all Protestant cults that were being defended in the United States, and the anti-cult commission was, as it happens, chaired by a communist. So one could clearly see that behind all this there were also unspoken things, about the old Cold War coming back by accusing the United States of mental perversion, and so on.

There were also contradictions that already seemed to me fairly insurmountable at the time, that is to say that those who singled out all these cults — the Protestant cults, in this case the North American cults — were already saying nothing about those cults that were arriving, which were Islamist, Wahhabi cults, which were also dangerous, and perhaps even far more dangerous than those North American cults. And so there was, in addition, a kind of imbalance and double standard, with on one side a heightened vigilance towards these American cults, and on the other side an indifference shown, and still today, towards the Wahhabi cults in particular — indeed towards all the cults that revolve around the Islamist movement.

[Interviewer]: But do you not think that this term “cult” is very stigmatising, because it is very pejorative today? And that in this way, in the end, suspicion is cast on a whole set of groups that nobody really knows? Do you think that is a problem?

[Rioufol]: Yes, I agree with you. I use the word “cult” because it is the accepted word, but within “cult” there is a sectarianism, and that sectarianism is first of all very widely dispensed throughout public opinion, and notably among those who conduct the hunt for cults, because at bottom I myself see a sectarianism in the very people who see cults everywhere except in their own chapel, if I may put it that way. But I think there is an abuse — in any case there is a conflation — in wanting to designate by the word “cult” everything that may be, at bottom, nothing more than an individual, philosophical, spiritual search, which seems to me entirely honourable in itself, even if it does not ask for authorisation — and so much the better if it does not ask for authorisation.

[Interviewer]: For six years now, the MIVILUDES has been circulating figures that are very alarmist — for example, that 500,000 people are said to be victims of dérives sectaires, including 60,000 children. What is your reaction when you hear figures of this kind?

[Rioufol]: You know, it is the story of the man who has a hammer and sees nails everywhere. From the moment you have a structure that is there to hunt down cults and sees cults everywhere… Me, I cannot put the MIVILUDES on trial, I do not have the case files, but in such cases there must always be at least a counter-power and a counter-diagnosis, a counter-expertise. So there, the MIVILUDES feeds the very purpose it was created for, that is, finding cults and showing that they are dangerous — and perhaps, indeed, they are; once again, I am not saying the MIVILUDES is wrong, and I do not know, perhaps these figures are accurate, but perhaps it also inflates them. So there should at least, at the very least, be independent commissions of inquiry there to try to see whether what is said is not exaggerated — or truthful, even, sometimes.

[Interviewer]: And what would be the motive or motives that drive a certain number of political leaders to push a fight against cults, which is moreover regarded as a French peculiarity?

[Rioufol]: I believe that in France today we fear the free expressions that made our strength, that structured our history. We have been living now for 30 years under a leaden shroud, because we are somewhat like a country of political correctness, which levels thoughts flat, which cannot bear, once again, dissident thoughts. And I think this fascination — this obsession, rather — with cults is somewhat the child of that political correctness, of that laïque fundamentalism, in this case, which is applied to cults there. And more generally, I see in this hunt against freedom of belief a hunt similar, at bottom, to the one against freedom of expression, for what we are living through — what I myself am living through as a journalist — is a right to speak that is nonetheless placed under the surveillance of conformist thought, of respectable thought, of conventional thought. I do not find that very worthy of a democracy like ours, at bottom.

And I see in this excess of laïcité an excess that one can find in all fundamentalisms, whatever they may be, and there is a fundamentalism of laïcité that I deplore — that I deplore — and which is moreover — I am going to be very polemical — often defended by a new church, the new laïque church, which is that of Freemasonry, which itself has not cut the ties, whereas Freemasonry did a great deal to help cut the ties between Church and State — and I am glad of it. I realise that it has itself become — not a cult, but well — although it is that too, from my point of view — but I see this from a very distant vantage: it has curious rites, which also resemble — with its high priests, its gowns, and so on — somewhat cultish rites. And I see that it, in any case, has become the new laïque church which, for its part, has emphatically not separated itself from the State. Yet I find there ought to be a separation from that point of view as well. But there I am entering a much more polemical theme, and one that is very difficult to broach, in all likelihood.

[Interviewer]: Can one not also say that the media world follows the political world? It is the old problem of the media’s lack of critical spirit and herd-following.

[Rioufol]: But that is something which holds true on a great number of subjects, naturally. Today — and I have deplored this for a long time — journalism itself has become an ideology, that is to say that journalism itself has endorsed a whole series of prohibitions, a whole series of political correctnesses — to take up that portmanteau word, which I do not much like, but which at least has the merit of being quicker — and which precisely forbid saying certain things, above all describing certain things, observing certain societal, cultural, identity-related, economic upheavals — in short, a whole set of things that fall within the essential mission of journalism and which today is made very complicated precisely because of that conformism, that herd-following.

[Interviewer]: What, in your view, could make the media begin to respect adversarial debate a little more? Even in Le Figaro one can read a certain number of articles that echo the word of the public authorities on the danger of cults, without stepping back, without ultimately asking any questions. I mentioned the figures earlier.

[Rioufol]: I believe that we are nonetheless, in spite of everything, in the process of tipping over, of changing eras, first of all under the pressure of facts, because facts themselves are stubborn, and facts increasingly contradict ideologies, received ideas, unspoken things. So facts are truth’s best ally, and truth’s second-best ally, from my point of view, is the witnesses. And the witnesses are civil society; it is the silent France, the France of the forgotten, the France that lives daily what the media are most often loath to describe, precisely.

So today we must recover the taste for debate, the taste for critical spirit, the taste for contradiction. And that is an education; it is indeed up to journalists to open themselves to that, and I think they can do it, if only under the pressure of their readers — yes, of their readers — or even of civil society itself, which from my point of view has moreover become — whereas it has been put about that the media, that journalism, had become the fourth estate — I think that civil society itself is in the process of becoming a fifth estate, precisely, with that strike force it knows how to use, which is the internet, which today makes it possible precisely to balance, or sometimes even to make up for, the failings of the media.