The 2004 MIVILUDES Report

The 2004 report of MIVILUDES

Interministerial Mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires

The report to download

As in the past year, we offer you our commentary on key passages of this report.

Our first unpleasant “surprise”, among others, was to discover that our centre was mentioned on page 54, at the end of a paragraph that permits a discreet but effective conflation with “the new forms of cultism”. Within a “mission” which elsewhere affirms its will no longer to draw up lists of “cults”, it is revealing to note this unambiguous attempt to discredit our action.

The members of CICNS, who retained a very slight hope of dialogue, deplore this attitude and can only observe a fierce will to eradicate every expression that does not echo the single permitted thought on the subject of “cults”.

Nothing new in this nagging report which pursues its destructive impetus in blindness. The same extreme cases of dérives are mentioned here and there in an “incantatory manner” (to borrow an expression from the report) in order to justify the ever more numerous instruments of the indiscriminate repression waged against groups that are inoffensive, to say the least, and whose work could in many cases be recognised as being of public utility. Once again, CICNS does not contest the necessity of punishing criminal actions, but we can unfortunately only underline again and again the use made of certain criminal acts and isolated dérives in order to stigmatise and eliminate the new forms of the eternal spiritual search.

The extracts from the report are in italics.

By André Tarassi

A review was made of the implementation of the ten proposals for the year 2004 (…) proposal no. 2: “Encourage the reporting of persons in a state of weakness” was the object of numerous interventions, from the representative of the Chancellery, the National Council of the Order of Physicians and the Council of State. The aim would indeed be to allow persons bound by professional secrecy (health professions and legal professions, notably lawyers or notaries) to be able to denounce to the judicial authority acts of fraudulent abuse of weakness of which they might have knowledge.

The incitement of persons bound by professional secrecy to denounce is the next stage after the incitement to denunciation addressed to the general public last year. When rules founded by enlightened minds end up being repudiated one after another, we are facing a decline of civilisation. Reading this report is profoundly saddening. It gives one to imagine where all these well-intentioned people (the language would have us believe so, at any rate) wish to lead our society. Since informers are above all informed of the dangers of difference, it is a fair bet that calumny and defamation still have fine days ahead of them.

Concerning the Guide (for the public official facing dérives sectaires), the members of the Council (of orientation of the Miviludes) well received this document of information and training for public officials. The practical and pedagogical side of the document was underlined. The representative of the Order of Physicians argued for the Guide to be widely distributed to the hospital public service. The representative of the Ministry of Defence, for his part, wished all gendarmerie brigades to receive the guide.

When one becomes acquainted with the partiality and narrow-mindedness of this guide’s contents, one might see the extended distribution of this little manual as propaganda worthy of totalitarian regimes. A unilateral vision of the world which denies the richness of the spiritual path by reducing it to its least representative expressions can only be the fruit of an intention no longer resting on democratic principles.

ASSESSMENT OF THE APPLICATION OF THE ABOUT-PICARD LAW “As regards the offence of fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness provided for and punished by article 223-15-2 of the Penal Code, it was possible to count, as at 1 October 2003, three preliminary investigations and five judicial inquiries. Of the three preliminary investigations, two opened exclusively on the count of fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness were closed without further action; the third, opened on that count and on that of undeclared work, was likewise closed without further action. As for the five judicial inquiries on counts of abuse of weakness and fraud, one of them was the object of a discharge order, and the four others are still in progress”. “The Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice, informs the honourable parliamentarian that the possibility of dissolving movements of a cult character which have been convicted of offences provided for by article 1 of the law of 12 June 2001 has not been implemented to date, in the absence of the final convictions required by that law. The implementation of this provision presupposes that two final convictions have been pronounced against the legal person or against the de jure or de facto director of that legal person for offences exhaustively enumerated”.

There is the instructive assessment of that famous application of the About-Picard law in which the anti-cult camp glories. Of three investigations… three were closed without further action. Of the five judicial inquiries, one was the object of a discharge and the four others “are in progress”. The Keeper of the Seals concludes, without saying so, that this law is useless, “in the absence of convictions”. This law seemed so pressing at the time of its promotion, as though there were a queue at the gates of the prisons and the guillotines. And now, once passed, it demonstrates its absurdity.

The American State Department publishes each year a report on religious freedom, covering all States. Until 2001, this report was indeed critical of France, calling into question the policy pursued against “cults”, commonly designated on the other side of the Atlantic and in numerous multilateral bodies as “new religious movements”. The abolition of the interministerial mission for combating cults (MILS) and its replacement by the interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires (MIVILUDES) have contributed to the resumption of a more serene dialogue on this dossier. Thus the 2003 report of the American State Department on religious freedom in the world no longer denounces French policy in this field. (…) The effort of explanation undertaken has therefore begun to bear fruit. It must be continued. (…)”

It is amusing to read how Miviludes worries more about the opinion of the Americans, as a motive for questioning its own excesses, than about the opinion of the people concerned in France. Today the members of Miviludes, like all anti-cult structures, regard people engaged in a spiritual path or an alternative therapy as animals devoid of intelligence and speech. This doubtless explains the fact that they cannot envisage the slightest dialogue.

Two spouses were members of the Sahaja Yoga movement, whose doctrine advocates in particular that children be taken in charge by structures dependent on the movement (abroad). The parents asserted that they no longer envisaged sending their children abroad (…). The conclusions of the expert report established, however, that the children were psychically in danger, “given the very strong hold of their parents on account of their adherence to the theses of the Sahaja Yoga movement”. The Court deduced from this that the conditions of the minors’ education were thereby gravely compromised (…) the experts do not exclude the possibility of a separation to protect the children if the “alliance” with the parents cannot succeed. This decision has the merit of establishing a direct link between the doctrine of a movement and the notion of danger within the meaning of article 375 of the Civil Code.

Yes, what a marvellous merit, is it not? We can now establish a link between “doctrine” (the beliefs which ought to be respected and protected by the law) and the notion of danger. Let us be clear: doctrine = danger. We should like to see this equation extended, if it must survive, to anti-cult doctrine = danger. Is it extravagant to think so? There is in this report no demonstration whatever of the harmfulness of this movement’s teaching, which is condemned solely for “its doctrine” and a few speculations about the children’s future. But of course the paragraph is designed for people already won over to the anti-cult cause, and dispenses with the integrity genuine researchers require.

On the whole, our European partners keep to a very liberal approach to the cult phenomenon. In the countries of Anglo-Saxon tradition, long accustomed to an ever-renewed flowering of religious movements, it is a deliberate attitude (…) In this context, our approach to the cult phenomenon sometimes surprises, but interests.

Apart from China, we are not aware of many countries “interested” in the repressive measures with a whiff of dictatorship which France is putting in place with such conviction.

(The Miviludes) had wished to energise this apparatus by asking departmental prefects to convene their vigilance unit at least once in the year. It must be observed that for the year 2004, only 34% of departments called this meeting, so one may wonder about the reasons for this weak mobilisation (…). Certain prefects consider that their department has very little “cult activity” and that it is doubtless neither necessary nor useful to set up this structure and keep it alive. Others apprehend the question of the cult phenomenon as a question of public security and deal with this problem within the framework of the departmental security conference.

It seems to us much more “interesting”, on the other hand, to note along with the Miviludes that not all prefects see things in the same way. Some see no cults in their area, and others think, as we do, that criminality is a question of “public security” and not of witch hunting. When the Miviludes, cut off from the realities of the world like other policies, discovers that it is living in a dream, it will doubtless be able to call into question the idea it has of reality. CICNS, in direct contact with the world of spiritual minorities, sees nothing in their situation and their acts that validates the necessity of such repression.

(During the) seminar “Cults and laïcité”, the Miviludes’s will was to give a voice both to those who see only “new religious movements” and to those who on the ground deal with victims of dérives sectaires. This dialogue, by way of the seminar, had never taken place (…) In this year preparatory to the centenary of the 1905 law, it was necessary to seek the support of laïcité, not as an anti-religious weapon, but as a means of “living together” in a multicultural society of multiple belongings.

The Miviludes took good care not to invite all the people concerned to this seminar. The few somewhat measured sociologists present in the debate were received as speakers one had to pass through in order to burnish the Miviludes’s image. But their perception of the world remains a dead letter in these biased debates. As for spiritual teachers, alternative therapists, and the thousands of people satisfied with the relationship they have with one another, it would be unthinkable for the Miviludes to invite them to speak of what they live daily — testimonies which would nonetheless be a far cry from the clichés and commonplaces conveyed by the media for 25 years and served up tirelessly in these soulless colloquia.

One of the possible definitions for characterising a group as a “cult organisation”, whatever its size and its object, lies in its capacity to modify the personality of its followers with a view to promoting unconditional allegiance to the clan and to its guru. At the outset, the individual freely chooses to submit to the demands of his new reference group, in the name of hoped-for and promised positive returns, or to satisfy unresolved aspirations of every kind (spiritual quest, desire for personal fulfilment, will to change the world, wish to fill an emotional void, etc.…).

At the outset, the individual freely chooses… But the Miviludes already knows what is going to happen to him:

Progressively, the individual will abandon all his previous bearings in favour of those imposed by his tribe of election, and will accept that the latter should govern in his stead the least aspects of his life, dictating to him new rules of conduct, imposing on him apprenticeships, a vocabulary, rituals, all tending towards the same goal: to shape him according to the imposed model of the docile and entirely available follower, enslaved to the law of the group.

As with all the assertions of anti-cult activists, it is always instructive to transfer the accusations made exclusively against cults onto the situation of our consumer society (which the individual, moreover, does not freely choose). The individual is obliged to adopt bearings which must not be called into question (which is why minorities of different convictions are persecuted), “dictating to him new rules of conduct, imposing on him apprenticeships, a vocabulary, rituals, all tending towards the same goal: to shape him according to the imposed model of the docile and entirely available follower, enslaved to the law” of society. This observation is not merely a reversal of the situation. It is the one any serious person must make, without stigmatising minorities, and thus avoid dealing with the problems of our society by refusing to look at them squarely. The certainty of our moribund Republic that it holds the right “rules of conduct”, “apprenticeship”, “vocabulary” and “rituals” is a grave social problem.

The necessity of fully informing young people of the dangers that uncritical adherence to a group may conceal. “Not being snapped up by a cult in the course of a sports training session or an artistic or other initiation requires knowing how to recognise its outward signs and being able to count on one’s own reason to do critical work at decisive moments”.

Does the “reason” invoked by the Miviludes make it possible to do critical work? CICNS was founded on the observation of a deficit of reflection and in order to show the aberrations of dramatic certainties. Must the diversity of points of view on a situation at “a decisive moment” — such as that of the Miviludes or that of CICNS, for example — lead to condemning one for the exclusive benefit of the other? Does the Miviludes hold the truth? Critical work begins with work on humility… a quality much lacking in the devotees of anti-cultism.

The victims of cult hold and subjection are not only the former followers who experienced their membership of a group solely as a suffering from which they have difficulty relieving themselves; they are also the families whose members have broken off all ties with them to join a movement. Admittedly, these individual or family tragedies do not directly disturb public order. And they do not automatically call for judicial treatment. The public authorities cannot, however, be indifferent to them.

Always this everlasting dramatisation of a universal phenomenon. Today we send young people to war without batting an eyelid, knowing that they “will break off all ties” with their family, sometimes definitively; we accept that monasteries and convents have been able to be a legitimate life choice for centuries, and that any person of full age may take directions which sometimes distance them from their parents. This string which the Miviludes likes to pluck demagogically, while acknowledging that there is no disturbance of public order, is abusive and constitutes an intrusion into citizens’ private lives. Up to now, the demand that religion be exercised in the private sphere was already a serious slippage, since the law authorises the manifestation of one’s faith so long as there is no disturbance of public order. But the fact that the Miviludes envisages controlling family ties, as the ADFI already does with the government’s blessing, is an abuse that cannot be passed over in silence.

The French example is not (…) easily transposable. It is even regarded by some of our partners as singular. Here we find again the difficulty of getting our conception of laïcité shared. A laïcité which totally guarantees freedom of conviction and the autonomy of the person, but which also sees to it that a social order made of common values is respected.

This last sentence, which constitutes the screen of dignity behind which the real intentions of the authors of this text and of those who inspired it are hidden, is a lie. French laïcité is a laïcité of exclusion, which nourishes fear in the minds of the population in order to curb diversity. Here is another blindness typical of minds resistant to the natural evolutions of societies: diversity is not controlled, or not for long. It is inscribed in the laws of nature. The frightened behaviour of our cult hunters perhaps reflects their more or less conscious sense of a decline of the forces which had led the world until now.

André Tarassi was born in 1961; he is the founder of CICNS. An independent researcher, he has been studying the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual path.

Read also “the Miviludes seminar on cults and laïcité” The Guide for the public official facing dérives sectaires The Mayors’ Guide and the 2003 report