The 2005 MIVILUDES Report

The 2005 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 saddening and unsurprising report. The will no longer to draw up lists of cults or to name groups that have not been convicted, which prevailed in the previous reports, has entirely disappeared this year. This one consists in large part of an inventory of spiritual minorities and their “dangers”.

The extracts from the report are in yellow and in italics, and the comments in white.

By André Tarassi

Commentary on the word of the president of the Miviludes, Jean-Michel Roulet (extracts):

MIVILUDES, listening to victims and their families, today draws up a worrying account of the damage caused by the hold exercised by persons or organisations conducting themselves as intellectual masters. Such dérives occur in every sector of social life — care and health, continuing education and school support, sports and cultural activities, esoteric or mystical groups… It notes that new bodies appear almost every day, with no point of the territory being spared, these micro-structures often being much harder to pin down than the well-known large organisations.

Since CICNS has been following the Miviludes’s work, it observes that this “mission’s” demagogic postulates have unfortunately not evolved, despite the reminders from our association as well as those from numerous sociologists, historians and jurists expressing their disapproval or their disquiet at such statements.

Here, the Miviludes seems unwittingly to acknowledge that the dérives it denounces belong “to every sector of social life”. Alas, the list that follows this assertion pursues the enterprise of stigmatisation begun 25 years ago by the public authorities, making spiritual minorities the scapegoats for the malaise and the dérives of our society. The other “sectors of social life” do not merit the same attention.

Does the Miviludes itself not conduct itself as “an intellectual master” in this matter? If, as the sentence seems to indicate, behaving thus is “a dérive”, why not widen the debate — as we have been asking for two years now — to all domains of society, where power and criminality have taken a far more alarming place than in small spiritual groups about which a great deal of noise is made without valid reason (Our project for a CEC, citizens’ commission of inquiry, will aim to give an objective measure of the possible threat of spiritual minorities and of their tangible harms to our society).

It is in no way a matter of painting an apocalyptic picture of the situation, but of becoming convinced that there are real and good reasons not to renounce the fight against dérives sectaires, on the fallacious ground that this would infringe freedom of conscience or religious freedoms.

The ground is not fallacious, but we can understand that it displeases the activists of anti-cultism. There is today in our country, as at the advent of every totalitarianism, an intellectual and spiritual void widening between the actors of repression and its victims, who attempt — sometimes desperately — to communicate the value and legitimacy of their faith and their commitments.

From the moment victims are reported, damage observed, and likewise when public order or the laws of the Republic are infringed, the State cannot confine itself to being a passive observer.

CICNS, along with many people equally attached to the values of democracy, would like precisely these victims and this damage to be assessed dispassionately, beyond the rumours and the ambient disinformation. That work remains to be done. On the other hand, our knowledge of many spiritual minorities in France already allows us to “report” that a great many victims and a great deal of damage have been generated by the anti-cult campaign itself.

Yet one sees stirring, under cover of associations created under the regime of the 1901 law, organisations which are the virulent spokesmen of groups whose methods and activities justify particular vigilance from the State (…) they practise disinformation, and that with the most evident bad faith. The founding principles of the Republic and those who defend them must not yield before a façade of humanism, even if the criticisms or accusations levelled against the action of the public authorities oblige France to have to explain the motivations of its policy on the international stage.

It is fortunate that, as in any democracy, the public authorities should have to render account as soon as possible on phenomena which will, in our view, be judged by history as the repetition of the everlasting dérives of power, in contexts fairly similar in their fear of the “non-rational”, of faith and of the spiritual path in general. The “offences” which these public authorities like to put forward to justify repression — and which for many remain unelucidated, as in the case of the great massacres that made headlines — are so minute in comparison with what happens everywhere else, that “organisations” decried by the Miviludes in the paragraph above were indeed inspired to mobilise in order to fill the terrifying lack of “reason” in the face of such a slippage. That, at any rate, is the motivation behind the creation of CICNS.

Have those who plead, in the name of freedom of conscience, for the recognition of these “minorities of conviction” considered that they thereby bring a semblance of respectability and credibility to persons or groups for whom the sacred comes far behind profit? Have they measured the sufferings endured by the victims of dérives sectaires?

CICNS is not insensitive to the dérives of profit. But we find this accusation grotesque when it is addressed to spiritual minorities which, in their vast majority, make no profit at all — and, for those that do, do so in a derisory way compared with certain large enterprises, hidden or in plain sight, which the public authorities would never think of pointing at despite the absence of the “sacred” in their behaviour.

As for the sufferings endured by humanity, we have the intimate conviction that they are not the doing of spiritual minorities, which for the most part work or aspire towards a better world. On the other hand, we know of dozens of case files which demonstrate indubitably that the anti-cult campaign has served many people to discredit others, to obtain exclusive custody of children, to settle personal scores, to tarnish reputations, and so on. We are in daily contact with the sufferings occasioned by these dérives. It is obvious that when organisations such as the Miviludes, enjoying all the visibility and media coverage that power procures, know how to balance their statements, the responses of organisations such as ours will consequently be less virulent, without any doubt. We at CICNS aspire, moreover, to a balanced and non-militant dialogue. But that relationship cannot be one-sided.

There is today an excess and an injustice in the anti-cult crusade which can only mobilise more and more people.

What room is left for fraternity? When the spirit of fraternity, the cement of our social contract, is flouted, only a few words empty of meaning remain.

Like the word “cult”, for example? Or indeed that of “fraternity”? The words above could just as well be returned to their author. What room for fraternity when discernment is absent from this tendentious campaign which aims to destroy the millennial aspirations of man, the seedbed of a true fraternity? The disastrous record of our materialist societies ought to permit less arrogance in this debate, currently so soulless.

After this introduction there comes, in this report which has lost the little measure that remained in the previous ones, a list of grievances aimed at the beliefs and ways of life of various named groups.

Page 13 of the report is instructive in this regard.

Where are the offences in the fact that certain people wish to marry “among themselves”? In what way would “the hours devoted to meditation or prayer” be more of an obstacle to children’s education than any other distraction our society promotes (“It must be stressed how much time is devoted to “spiritual activities” which, added to the time of compulsory schooling, make these children beings exhausted by their day”)? Why is the millennial status of “spiritual master” systematically associated with “an offence”, when all the more secular structures of teaching rest on the same relation of master and pupils? In what way would watching television today be a sign of good mental health? In what way does the fact of “distributing leaflets” or of having an ideology that “plays on the idealistic fibre” suffice to present a group as though it were criminal (see “solidarity and progress”, page 21)? One also finds examples of children said to have been sent to “different” schools around the world, all described in such a way that one confusedly senses there must be a problem… without really putting one’s finger on it.

The problem seems to us simple, although it is not stated openly: a struggle against the new spiritualities is at work in the name of a certain vision of the world, rationalist and totalitarian.

Why would the beliefs of our society, which likewise impose obligations and punishments (a reproach made to certain “cults”), be superior to those denounced in this report? Current debates demonstrate that abuses of all kinds are omnipresent in the modern world, and that this infamous campaign diverts the gaze onto the scapegoats which spiritual minorities are in this generation.

On page 15, one finds the following assertion:

“What is striking, in the first place, is the intense suffering of these young children subjected to emotional, physical or psychological ill-treatment, or to family ruptures in difficult contexts. Judgments, in civil as in criminal matters, give voice to these sufferings.”

Where are the references, the names, the facts, of which the Miviludes is generally not sparing? Today it is no longer enough, as we sometimes see in certain television programmes, to invoke “sufferings”, “children in distress” and other formulas of strong emotional power in order to have “the audience in one’s pocket”, because the population as a whole is fortunately becoming ever more alert to manipulation.

What strikes us at CICNS is the will to impose one belief over another, and the impossibility, for minority beliefs which create no more suffering than the others, of existing in our country. It is probable, as the sociologist Michel Maffesoli says, that for some years our governments have been overtaken by the mutation of our society and are pursuing “rearguard battles”. In the meantime, our association wishes to see to it that these do not themselves produce more suffering in circles which strive to bring a little soul into our disenchanted world.

On page 32, one may read a paragraph which manages to describe a problem “whose apprehension is uneasy”, of “potential dangerousness” and a “crucible of dérives”. A whole potential of various risks, of which the last, nebulous sentence allows one to measure the vagueness presiding over this question, as over everything relating to the frightened crusade of anti-cult militants:

This phenomenon (practices of care and healing), whose apprehension is uneasy in the opinion of the local services, is worrying by its potential and real dangerousness on account of convictions for the illegal practice of medicine, of pharmacy, irregular advertising, importation of medicines without marketing authorisation, the establishment of false medical certificates and evasion of legal obligations compromising health. In any event, it is the crucible of dérives which, before being characterisable as cult-related within the meaning of the agreed criteria, are, at the very least, therapeutic by reason of charlatanism.

On page 34, one reads:

The small number of complaints lodged makes it difficult to assess the extent of the dangers of these practices on a criminal level.

… implying, as usual in this kind of report, that if there is no complaint it is because people are afraid to make one, and not because there might be no real reason to do so. Not to mention that a good number of the complaints we know of are founded on personal rivalries rather than on the status of victim in the proper sense of the term.

In the third part of the main lines of the Miviludes’s action, the attack on the infiltration of cult movements into the humanitarian field is founded on the same absence of valid reason. Mr Jean-Michel Roulet moreover acknowledged on France Info, on 26 April 2006, “that they brought real aid”. Where then is the problem? Here it is: these people “who bring real aid” are suspected of having in one hand the tools to help and in the other the manual of beliefs. What is in fact being alleged against persons and groups who have committed nothing illegal is that they have hidden interests. But these accusations, like many others in the same register, generally rest only on speculation, tending moreover to draw a distinction between the motivation of certain groups of spiritual vocation and that, apparently more disinterested, of all the others. In the end, their actions are discredited and their image weighed down with the burden of these accusations, which make them out to be criminals even in the aid they bring.

On this subject, the report quotes the MILS:

“cults [which] do not hesitate to take advantage of the world’s misfortunes to try to impose their miracle solutions and to draw fragile individuals into a mechanism of regimentation”.

We find this assertion interesting in that it presents the action of the groups called “cults” as automatically harmful. An atheist or rationalist organisation would have only the good of humanity in mind (“that is of course not the objective of the serious, disinterested and exemplary organisations which redistribute all donations”) whereas the fact, for these groups, of wanting to share their belief is here systematically defined as an attempt to “take advantage of the world’s misfortunes”.

Among the Miviludes’s achievements and actions, one finds again the three or four affairs which had been widely covered in the media: NéoPhare, the affair which had been linked to Kinesiology, and the imprisonment of Doctor Hamer. A very poor record for a “mission” which claims that a genuine cult scourge exists (the three affairs, analysed in detail, could moreover convince none but pure anti-cult militants versed in every kind of conflation).

Thanks to “An accelerated transmission procedure by the departments for ‘alert sheets’ reporting to the DCRG (central directorate of the general intelligence services) any individual attitude, structure or new doctrine that intrigues or disquiets, will thus be implemented” as well as to the necessity of “seeking and identifying, within the remit of each administration concerned, any activity, whatever its form, liable to take on a cult character”, one may observe that MIVILUDES approves the incitements to denunciation already present in the previous reports, and whose principal effect — our files bear witness to it — has been to feed the most indecent settlings of scores between neighbours or relatives.

CICNS’s conclusion:

CICNS does not wish to defend abuses, from whatever quarter they come, and hopes that the Justice of our country will know how to preserve the necessary wisdom in its action. But we are obliged to observe that this wisdom is absent from the “anti-cult” debates with which television and the militants opposed to spiritual minorities deluge us. The few genuine excesses and offences put forward by the latter constitute an unacceptable stigmatisation of groups of spiritual or therapeutic vocation in France. If there are truthful facts in this report which incriminate a person, they should on no account serve to feed the conflation currently at work. The spiritual minorities we know are not criminal and are not motivated by profit and the desire to create suffering. Quite the contrary. And we obviously ask that this be respected.

It is, in our view, just as much in these minority hearths that creativity and renewal can manifest themselves. There should be no question of crushing the aspirations of certain groups in the name of the possible excesses of a few members. Let us, moreover, leave men the right to make mistakes, justice the right to punish them with discernment, and humanity the right to grow from its errors and its successes without crushing in the bud everything that seems new.

The present attitude of the public authorities and of militant anti-cult organisations, some of them subsidised by the State, constitutes a serious impediment to democracy, to fundamental human rights and, more simply still, to a serious and profound debate on this question.

This conviction of the CICNS team, which works “on the ground”, in direct relation with spiritual minorities as much as with sociologists and jurists, should soon be shared by all when the reality of the phenomenon appears in broad daylight.

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 the commentary by Patrick Le Berre, researcher, on the same report.

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 the 2004 report