The Wrong Camp — 2013 CICNS Interview with Raphaël Liogier (2/4)

Raphaël Liogier is a French political scientist and sociologist of religion — at the time of this interview, director of the Observatoire du religieux and professor at the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence. In this second part of the 2013 CICNS interview, he recounts first-hand how, on French television, merely asking why people believe gets read as taking the wrong side — and recalls the political cost paid by Emmanuelle Mignon for questioning the anti-sect consensus.

CICNS video interview, part 2 of 4. (English translation of the interview transcript, machine-transcribed from the CICNS YouTube channel, where the video was published on 1 July 2013, and cleaned before translation.)

[Liogier]: I tell you — in almost every television programme where I have been to speak about this problem, while I was trying to be as rational as possible, I was told on several occasions — the mere fact that I try to hold a discourse saying: “Well now, why do these people believe that? What is going on? How does it work?” — immediately, and it was even said to me formally: we can see whose side you are on. What is there to answer to that, once I am classed as being on one side, when I am not on it — well, objectively, I am not on it? But “we can see whose side you are on” means: you are on the side of evil. That is to say, it is this sort of binary vision that comes back again and again.

So, nobody… It is not propaganda; it is that it would be too great a risk, for someone at the top of the bill, for someone who has political or media power — well, a symbolic power of whatever kind, who represents something —, to fragilize their pedestal, to erode their pedestal, by taking a position that would be critical on the question of anti-sect policy, for example. As it is a question that commands a sort of unanimity, of unanimism, with this notion that “sect means evil”, you will not find a single politician who will have the courage to express it.

There was one woman in politics who had the courage to say it — it was Emmanuelle Mignon; I don’t know whether you remember — she merely voiced it, and that is to show you just how risky it is. You ask me why; I answer you why. Emmanuelle Mignon — since she comes from the Ministry of the Interior; she was very close to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was at the Ministry of the Interior, but it is not a political question, because it was the same before with the left, the same today — a field ministry, so she was acquainted with the reality. So, being acquainted with the reality, she allowed herself to say — merely allowed herself to say —: “the sects do not in themselves constitute a social problem — not a political, social problem, etc., requiring the establishment of a public policy”. She was heaped with abuse [FR: « agonir d’erreur », as machine-heard], she had to perform her palinode, go back on what she had said — in short, it was something she had to explain almost to the point, one might say, of resignation.