Seminar 2003-2004, Cults and Laïcité

From October 2003 to June 2004, MIVILUDES organised a university seminar on the subject of Cults, in which 44 speakers took part: historians, sociologists, philosophers, representatives of the major religions, parliamentarians, jurists, doctors and heads of associations.

By this action, MIVILUDES partly answers the wishes of CICNS, although its statements and its actions in other respects testify to an ambiguity that remains entire.

We feel entitled to ask: are the pertinence of these academics’ remarks and their unavoidable suggestions simply used by MIVILUDES as a smokescreen to appease its detractors, or is there a genuine will to treat the question of spiritual minorities seriously?

We present below a few high-quality contributions from among those which seem to us the most suited to the work of information and reflection carried out by CICNS.

extracts from http://www.miviludes.gouv.fr/

Address by Danielle Hervieu Léger

Address by Jean Baubérot,

Extracts from the address by Danielle Hervieu Léger, President of the EHESS

(…) Let us place ourselves at the turn of the seventies, the moment when sociologists of religion discover with astonishment the development of what were then called “new religious movements”, never designated as cults at that time. Why are they so struck by this phenomenon which is, indeed, exploding in the public square? Because for roughly thirty years, ever since the discipline constituted itself as a sociology of religion, in the line of the founding fathers of sociology, it has been considered a law of historical development and a rule, a principle of the modernisation of contemporary societies, that the ebbing of the religious, the ebbing of religious and spiritual questioning in our societies, is an inescapable movement.

What explains this conviction? In theoretical terms, it can be articulated around three principal propositions. The first is that the great cosmologies, through which individuals and societies accounted for the hazards of human life, the phenomena of nature and the events of the psyche, collapse before the advance of scientific and technical rationality, of knowledge. There is thus a sort of disqualification of religious explanations of the world, and notably of the natural world. The second locus of the calling into question of the importance of religion in modern societies — perhaps more important — is that modern societies are societies in which the autonomy of the subject asserts itself: in particular — and it is even the greatness of these modern societies — there is built up the capacity of autonomous subjects, citizens, to debate and to work out together the rules of their living together. These autonomous individuals are themselves — because they are endowed with reason — capable of determining for themselves what is good and evil. This autonomy calls into question, in an absolutely radical way, the heteronomy of laws and principles which would impose themselves from all eternity, in a transcendent manner. This political exit from religion lies exactly at the centre of the very process of the elaboration of modernity.

Today we are in a wholly unsettled situation. Formerly it was quite easy to describe religious individuals; the key to the description was the figure of the practising believer: the religious individual was the individual who performed the religious acts according to the criteria of conformity of the institution to which he referred. (…) Religious identities today are less and less inherited.

Where, in all this, do the dérives sectaires stand? For everything I have described there is neither dangerous nor threatening, and poses no particular problem in itself: it refers to things which have moreover already been played out historically, in part, but in a fairly new form which is that of the culture of self-fulfilment. There is nothing in it that threatens the Republic. At what moment does the question arise, for States but also for religious institutions, of the moment when this process becomes a social problem, becomes a threat? And it is here that the notion of dérives comes in, and one sees clearly how powerful the theme of the dérive is — not only in a country like France, which has a sort of obsession about these things, but including in countries where religious freedom is claimed to be absolute and total and where people also worry about the problems of the dérive.

There are 3 principal lines of dérive:

The first dérive is communal encystment, the runaway of the processes of coalescence (the rising of the heat). When a group of people united by the certainty of personal regeneration and of the possession of the truth end up losing contact with external reality, isolating themselves in a sort of bubble which places them in a kind of waking dream, that presents a certain number of risks. There is nothing new in this. There have been, in convents, in the emotional Protestant groups of the radical reformation, these phenomena of escalating feedback, in which the moment of collective emotion of forming the nucleus of the pure produces this derealisation of the group.

The second register of dérives: the slippages of the personalisation of adherence, the perverse effects of this rise in power of the charismatic figure of authority. There are moments when this kind of personalisation of adherence can find itself instrumentalised by individuals conscious of the capacity to exercise that power and who will use it deliberately, and particularly in the direction of individuals who have less power of resistance.

Third line, the diversions of the market. The question of money returns in force. It returns in force, and there is nothing new in that either. Do not forget that one has to be truly French of the French to experience the world of money and the world of religion as a sort of total incompatibility. We have a very great sensitivity to this question, which is bound up with old historical memories concerning the properties of the Church, the goods of the Church, and so on. But for an American citizen who attends some denomination or other, supporting his community is the first act of religious participation. It is true that the deregulation of the symbolic market, the multiplication of entrepreneurs, the demand for immediately effective goods, has as its consequence the reappearance, within the religious space, of clientele practices deriving from magic. Durkheim said that the difference between the magician and the priest is that the magician has a clientele whereas the priest has faithful. The magician may paradoxically become once again an extremely pertinent form of religious authority — the magician, the one who for a fee supplies you with immediately operative symbolic goods. This ultramodern revaluation of magic is a thoroughly interesting thing to study, because it is not a catastrophe in itself: we pay for all sorts of things, why not for spiritual services? There is no taboo in itself on spiritual services being marketed services. What is a real problem is the moment when the business slides into swindling, into abuse, into the systematic pursuit of the extortion of funds or the extortion of inheritances. In other words, you have there three forms of dérive which, I repeat, have been attested in every period, as historians have shown. This description of the dérives is utterly commonplace. What is not commonplace is the questioning about the role of the public authority in relation to it. It being understood that, fundamentally, in an institutionally regulated space, the monitoring of these risks of dérive falls logically to major institutions which take charge of the regulation.

There is no human activity — and above all not religion — that could enter into a sort of antiseptic regime of a soft spirituality in which there would be no risk; that does not exist. It is an activity which by nature carries a certain number of risks. It carries risk, and ineliminable risk. Therefore, and what is more, risk which adult individuals have the right to take; that is to say that the right to religious radicality is also a right the State must protect — so everything is asked of the State, because in a democratic society individuals of full age who decide to live poor, chaste and obedient must not be placed under judicial guardianship for mental debility.

So one must at once protect religious radicality, protect weak persons from the slippages I have just described, and take account of the susceptibilities of institutions — which, though largely dispossessed of their power, still intend to exercise it, even if it turns in the void. The outcome, I prefer it for the politicians than for myself.

Address by Jean Baubérot, Director of Studies in the History and Sociology of Laïcité, E.P.H.E

(…) One finds, consistently, a rhetoric of the “Republic under threat”, invested from within, and this has worked and still works just as well against “Jews”, “clericals”, “masons”, “Jesuits”, “Protestants”, “congregations”, “cults”. The problem always consists in knowing how to keep one’s head, in distinguishing imaginary danger from real danger, in evaluating (in the latter case) the degree of reality of the danger without yielding to ideological inflation, and in finding effective (and, if possible, positive) measures to face it, without oneself imperilling democracy.

That is why vigilance in the face of “dérives sectaires” demands a great deal of rigour and requires that reason should be able to supplant passion.

(…) The importance of this problem of cults is due to the conjunction of two factors. The first has nothing specific to France about it and concerns the outrages which took place, from the Guyana affair to that of the Solar Temple by way of the gas attack by the Aum Shinri-kyo movement in the Tokyo metro, and so on. These various affairs led all democratic countries to concern themselves with the nebula of diverse, little-known movements which could, all of a sudden, cause loss of life. One would naturally understand nothing by underestimating the importance of this factor, and if I treat it briefly it is only because we are here on very familiar ground and because there is nothing specific to France about it. As a senior official of the Spanish Ministry of Justice said to me recently, “we have broadly the same problems as you, but we treat them in a far less impassioned way”. It is this specific social treatment which therefore holds the attention of the specialist in the human sciences.

(…) A few years ago, for example, going to teach in Tokyo shortly after the passage of a MILS delegation, I had to face fairly sharp questioning from Japanese professors greatly surprised at the manner in which that delegation had conducted its inquiry without meeting the specialists concerned. I was asked to explain sociologically the reason for a practice which seemed strange to them and which, in France’s case, disappointed them by its lack of critical and scientific spirit. And it is important to understand that if, in France, some make an immediate ideological interpretation of the remarks made by historians and sociologists, thereby forbidding themselves to understand them, abroad we are quite logically judged on criteria of scientificity. These two universes — that of scientific encounters and that of social treatment — were long antagonistic in France. One must salute the initiative of MIVILUDES which, in organising these conferences, is attempting to build a bridge.

(…) the parliamentary commission speaks in its report of “recognised religions”, in formal contradiction with the law of separation of Church and State, article 2 of which affirms that the Republic recognises no religion. This transgression of the principle of laïcité is explained by the fact that the parliamentarians are thereby attempting to re-institutionalise religion, which is all the more doomed to failure in that a process of globalisation of the religious sphere is taking place today.

(…) how can one be surprised that some are ready to pay a high price (in money, but also in personal commitment, in obedience to a master or to norms) for the new chance which a group of a more or less cult-like character claims to be able to offer them? One also better understands the aggressiveness of those for whom this hope proved to be a new mirage, a new illusion, even though it cost them a great deal, in every sense of the word. And one likewise understands their permeability to a new narrative: that of the anti-cult associations, where the ex-member can exonerate himself of all responsibility in the itinerary that was his and think of himself as having been “prey”. For this ex-member, “the only way of reconstituting, in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, the dignity of his failed course is to insist on the irreversible character of the pressure to which he was subjected”.

The aim of my remarks is not, as you will have well understood, to disqualify all action. It is much more to plead for the passage, which Régis Debray calls for, to a “laïcité of intelligence”. France succeeded in avoiding any McCarthyism in the face of Stalinist communism, because there were enough people who understood that conflation was as ineffective as it was intolerant and dangerous for democracy. These people also understood that it was necessary to perceive the dysfunctions of society which Stalinist communism revealed. But France is doubtless, by its history since 1685 and 1793, less at ease in confronting religious problems than political ones.

Certainly the religious involves a relation to the absolute and therefore always risks inducing “fanaticism”, “cult-mindedness”. But that is equally true of the non-religious, of the political, of the ideological, of the multiple forms of associative commitment sacralising a cause, and even of certain corporatisms. And the rule of the double standard has always proved dangerous for democracy. The same criteria must apply to all: to parties, to trade unions, to religions, and so on. If you wish to combat “dérives sectaires” in an intelligent and democratic way, you must apply the same criteria to all and not, a priori, exclude such and such an organisation from your field of analysis on the pretext that it is a party or a religious organisation belonging to the establishment. You must also find positive solutions to the problems these “dérives” raise, for otherwise, disappearing here, they will resurface elsewhere.

Seminar 2003-2004, Cults and Laïcité

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