Raphaël Liogier at the CICNS Colloquium (1/2): Defining "Cult", Defining Laïcité

In this first half of his talk at the CICNS colloquium « Sectes : fléau social ou bouc émissaire ? » (“Cults: social scourge or scapegoat?”), Raphaël Liogier traces how Western Buddhism became a “good religion” while Soka Gakkai did not, sets out three competing definitions of the word “cult”, and analyses French laïcité as a contested neutrality caught in what Bourdieu called a struggle of classifications.

CICNS colloquium talk, part 1 of 2. (English translation of the talk as published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 19 April 2011; the French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation. Spans the machine could not render reliably are marked [inaudible ?].)

[Interviewer]: Raphaël Liogier is director of the Observatoire du religieux and a university professor at the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence. His various interventions in the media are carried by the researcher’s passion. They move without rupture between the general and the anecdotal, upsetting many received ideas about laïcité, French institutions and their relation to the religious. He is the author of several books, notably Le bouddhisme mondialisé and Une laïcité légitime. La France et ses religions d’État. The talk he gave at this colloquium dealt with the new religious minorities commonly called “cults”. We present it in two videos, of which this is the first.

[Liogier]: At the origin of my research, I worked on Buddhism. And quite naively, in studying Buddhism, I stumbled upon the relation between Buddhism and the public institutions and the dominant imaginary in French society. I asked myself the question: why is it that Buddhism — which in the West, in Europe, in France in particular, is a new religion; it is not essentially a new religion, it is a religion that has nevertheless been reconstructed in the West, that is westernized; that was in fact the title of my thesis, westernization — how did it become westernized, why did it become a good religion? And then, in negative, through the filter of this good religion — a new religion, however, in our context —, I tried to understand what made it that other religiosities, for their part, did not manage to become good religions. So that is the work I did. And even within Buddhism, for example: why is it that certain movements within Buddhism, which are nevertheless movements that are numerically among the largest within Buddhism — I am thinking of Soka Gakkai —, are for their part considered bad movements? Well, to come back to what Jean Baubérot was saying, there is a connection: Soka Gakkai is the only Buddhist movement in France that officially claims — that claimed, because now they are a little more… — that officially claims the fact of setting up schools, even of making universities. In Japan there is a Soka university; in the United States there is a university perfectly accepted within the American university system. And so, indeed, there is a contradiction there with the monopoly that laïcité, as a symbolic system and a political system of State, grants to itself.

Originally, the use of the word cult was not necessarily tied to religion in particular. It merely meant a group of individuals who separated from a common trunk, as displayed by the philosophical school of a Pascal [inaudible ?] — if I am not mistaken — in speaking of the cult of the “sept piques” [inaudible ?]: individuals who were separated by their thought, by their way of seeing the world. And indeed, by dint of being separated, they ended up having somewhat strange, bizarre behaviours — whence, there, for once, the ideological drift that presents them as so different that they end up being abnormal, and one may suppose them dangerous, suppose that they are plotting. At the start, the word cult is not necessarily tied to religion in particular.

Second definition of the word cult: the sociological definition — the definition given by a certain number of sociologists, the great forebears, and in particular there is Max Weber. There are religious movements that possess what he calls the hierocratic monopoly. To be quick: the hierocratic monopoly is the monopoly of the goods of salvation — that is, so to speak, the church’s monopoly of meaning. And that is what is called the church type: over a given territory, a monopoly. And then, beside that, there are movements that do not possess this monopoly and that exist in competition — for this monopoly of meaning, if you will, in fact, of the goods of salvation. Those are what are called cults. In general, when one does not have the monopoly, it means one has been implanted for less time; it therefore means the weight of tradition is weaker. And a tradition — what is it? A tradition is also a constraint — a constraint that weighs on the clerics who represent that tradition. Because if the position of a bishop, his function, his role, the limits of his acting, is defined by the tradition, the bishop can less easily play the charismatic leader, since it is defined by a tradition: there is a sort of traditional inertia. So, indeed, in a new religious movement in competition, a charismatic legitimacy arises more easily. There is a charismatic legitimacy that can develop, for the good reason that the weight of tradition is weaker, so there is a weaker inertia in the definition and the limits of the role assigned to the clerics. Now, it is true that in countries of Protestant tradition, the cult, the cults — it is much less pejorative, a notion much less pejorative than in France, because it is also part of the very dynamism of the cultural space.

Then, the French definition of the cult: it is, broadly, a menace to public order — indeed a movement considered objectively criminal. That is what a cult is, when the word cult is pronounced. Whence, moreover, the debate over the very definition of the word cult — a debate found again in the evolution of the names of the organizations that are supposed to observe the cults. In France, I am thinking of the passage, indeed, from the observatory to the Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Cults. The cult is necessarily negative — that is, it is a scourge, it is a cancer; one fights a cancer, whatever it may be, because it is a cancer; in itself, that is what it means. Then, little by little, one says: ah no — interministerial mission of fight and of vigilance: this time one is merely vigilant, because one is not necessarily… So: war on all fronts — and against dérives sectaires: only when it goes astray, which means there could, a priori, be cults that do not go astray and that remain legitimate religious movements. One sees a sort of evolution — a symbolic evolution, evidently — which has not managed, how to put it, to inscribe itself in practice, in the real.

We are obliged to speak of the French notion of laïcité. Because there, in a way, what is called a cult is somewhat a negative image of what French laïcité is. Now, French laïcité — I do not want to develop this, because Jean Baubérot has touched on it — is indeed the heir, in the republican, indeed republicanist, version, of a certain monopolistic tradition of the Catholic Church associated with the French State, in what was called Gallicanism. And it is true that there was, in a way, a transfer, even if one had the feeling it was a revolution. Is laïcité separation, as the title of the 1905 law indicates — separation of the Churches and the State? I do not believe so… Well, most serious researchers know today that, concretely, laïcité is not that. Then what is it? Is it neutrality? Well yes, it is neutrality — but the whole problem, there, is a problem of definition. And definitions are not merely theoretical: they have extremely important practical consequences. Because when one says neutrality, what does that mean? If I tell you: I am going to drink a liquid, and it has a neutral taste — is it possible for that liquid to have a neutral taste? What has a neutral taste is what is nowhere, what is everywhere, what is not situated, what has no opinion. It is odd, because we are approaching, little by little, with this whole definition: ubiquity — it is everywhere, it has no opinion, but it can say everything, it is universal… It is rather close to the definition of God, in the end — if one stays all the while within the structure, from the merely linguistic point of view. In reality, this neutrality, since it is in a way an empty space, has been the object of struggles over the definition of what neutrality is. That is what is very interesting. So the sociologist — in particular the sociologist of public action — what does he try to see? He says to himself: who are the symbolic operators — that is, the people who impose a meaning, who at a given moment are strong enough to impose a meaning, that is, a definition of what this neutrality is and of what it is not?

Now, it must be seen that, to my mind, there was a reversal in the political life, the public life, of what is called laïcité, in the 1980s. There again, Jean Baubérot evoked a series of events, so I shall not go back over them — I had planned to speak of them, but I shall not go back over them. But it is true that, for me, the period of the 1980s corresponds rather closely to that period, in the 19th century, when the notion of the republic was the object of a struggle between right and left. That is to say: if you were on the right, you were conservative, you were for a return to the Ancien Régime; if you were on the left, you were rather for the republic. And then, at a given moment, there was a reversal: everyone was for the republic. From then on, we were in a redefinition, within right and left themselves, of a certain definition of what the republic is, but within a consensus — that is, it had become a necessary frame. No one stepped outside that frame any more. Almost — not quite everyone —, but everyone was becoming republican, though with the redefinition of the orientations within it. Well — before the 1980s, if you look — there was some analysis of magazines, of newspapers, doing content analyses, sometimes, indeed —, I realized that before the 1980s one was, roughly speaking, either for or against. Indeed, when one was against laïcité, it was a rather conservative orientation — rather right-wing, rather Catholic, rather a certain number of things. One could draw up a sort of quick identikit portrait, an ideal type in Weber’s sense — that is, one that does not exist in reality but that nevertheless allows us to measure it; one puts in all the caricatures, if you will. And then, facing them, one had rather those who were for laïcité — who saw themselves as republicans, republicanists, rather on the left, etc.

But from the 1980s on, that would evolve. Publication of the parliamentary report [FR: « Pause du rapport parlementaire », as machine-heard]. There was ‘89 — the first headscarf affairs, a whole series of things. And from those years on, laïcité became what I call a frame-image, like the Republic. That is to say, people fought more and more over what laïcité was, but everyone had become laïc. “But of course I am laïc” — you ask a woman [as machine-heard]: no problem, laïcité is perfect, etc. Except that everyone had a particular definition. And when the veiled young women were questioned recently, in the affairs, they said: but we — it is to defend laïcité — with an entirely coherent discourse, but with a definition of laïcité. So then we had struggles — over what I called a neutrality that was a neutralizing neutrality, a neutrality that claims itself as differentiating. And we had this type of conflict, with a very strong symbolic struggle — or, what Bourdieu calls, and it applies perfectly well to the situation of the religious, a struggle of classifications. A struggle of classifications: that is, the struggle in the religious field today is about how one is classed. So there are those classed as cults, those classed as this, those classed as historical religion, great religion. A struggle of classifications taken up again in the reports: because in theory the Republic recognizes no religion — but there are recognized religions; in the parliamentary reports there are recognized religions. Then: what difference between religion and worship (culte)? How does it work — the practice of worship and the definition of the religious? No: the practice of worship is not the same thing as the definition of the religious. You have struggles of definition that have extremely strong consequences. And in these struggles of definition — these struggles of classification —, individuals class themselves as good people, in general, rather, and class the others as less good people; but the others try to defend themselves by re-classing themselves. And we have these sorts of power relations.

Now, what was rather exceptional in the French situation is that, in the middle of these power relations, we had a lobby — how to say, a sort of… We have different operators, and one of the operators — one symbolic operator group — has been the academics and the researchers, and it still is in France, who have tried to make heard… One sees it through colloquia, through a whole series of… I am thinking of a book, Sectes et démocratie, which came out — there it is — and which was part of that sort of symbolic struggle to say: we researchers do, after all, have something to say. In a sense, it is not very normal — it is not very normal that there is not a single researcher, hardly a single researcher, recruited by the French Republic, one and indivisible — researcher, or university professor, or lecturer, or, I don’t know, an ATER, a temporary teaching and research fellow —, who is engaged by the MIVILUDES as an expert. Because each time, they say: “Hm, these are shady people.” But — me, I am quite willing to believe it; I am quite willing to believe it, because I am not saying there are no dangerous movements; because there are always dangerous movements, charismatic movements; there is a fight for public order — tranquility, salubrity, public safety; there are certainly things to be done, etc. But there, I say to myself that there is perhaps a problem. That is… would there not all the same be one or two of them who would be there to defend… It is not a generalized plot, after all: not all researchers are bought by the new religious movements. That is more or less what one can reproach the system with. That is, to say: why can we not listen to an ethnographic study that has been made of such-and-such a movement? Afterwards, you take whatever decision you want, if you decide this or that.

Well — that, we have found again, because things are evolving. They are evolving — not in appearance, for the people who feel themselves victims of this system, but they are evolving all the same, if only because the struggle is becoming radicalized; it is agonistic, if you will. It is a struggle that is becoming radicalized because, precisely, the debate can no longer be completely evaded, owing to the European constraint. And I would point out to you that within the very power of the government there are internecine struggles. I am thinking of the difference there is between the position of the Ministry of the Interior — which has always been that position, the position of the Ministry of the Interior — and the position, shall I say, rather on the Prime Minister’s side, with the MIVILUDES. Because what must be… Let me take the example of what happened with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. With the Jehovah’s Witnesses there was a sort of imaginary, of generalizing: the Jehovah’s Witnesses absolutely had to be attacked — it’s horrible, they refuse blood transfusions, etc. It is true that, doctrinally, one may say — if one reads only what is said in the doxa of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — that there are perhaps problems, etc. Only, from the practical point of view, the Ministry of the Interior underlined that there were no reports of problems coming up. That is to say that, globally, even if their religion perhaps tells them that, etc., the Jehovah’s Witnesses who have a problem with their child, etc. — they let things take their course. They let things take their course because they want, like all parents, their children to survive, etc. There is a sort of compatibility, an evolution taking place. Can one condemn people solely on what is said in the doctrine? I do not believe that is the role of the French Republic.