Interview with Régis Dericquebourg on the Theme of "Cults"

Régis Dericquebourg has studied new religious movements through fieldwork inside the groups themselves: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Scientology, Invitation à la Vie and the Antoinists. He has published several books on what he calls healing churches, including “Croire et guérir”. In this interview with CICNS he describes his field methods, the professional cost of studying stigmatised minorities in France, and his critique of the parliamentary reports and the anti-cult climate of the 1990s and 2000s.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 10 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Régis Dericquebourg is a senior lecturer in social psychology at the Charles-de-Gaulle University of Lille. He is a member of the Group for the Sociology of Religions and Laïcité at the CNRS. For more than 20 years he has been studying new religious movements, favouring immersion in the milieu under study. He has published several books on the subject, notably “Croire et guérir” (Believing and Healing), which studies the link between belief and health in four spiritual minorities. Here he gives us his analysis of the treatment of spiritual minorities in France.

[Dericquebourg]: I come from a town in mining country where there are many Jehovah’s Witnesses. There, it is commonplace to be a Jehovah’s Witness. It is the region around Lens and Liévin. There are many congregations. You meet Jehovah’s Witnesses every Sunday morning, and you play with the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the garden when you are a child. That was my first contact with a religious minority. And the Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed to me at once ordinary and strange. That is perhaps what gave rise to this vocation.

I have indeed studied the Church of Christian Science, the Church of Scientology — which earned me plenty of problems — Invitation à la Vie, and the Antoinists. These are what are called healing churches, or minority religious groups with a therapeutic vocation.

I first spent time in the field. For me, that is the first thing to do. I did as I had done for my thesis on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I go out to meet people; I attended their meetings. I administered questionnaires. In the case of Scientology itself, I administered personality tests to the faithful. I wanted to make sure there was no particular pathology. I also conducted individual interviews. Moreover, I have always — that is the sociologist’s work — gathered the scientific literature on the question, when it existed. It takes time; it requires building relationships in the field. You have to respect people. But I must say I have always met courteous people, committed to a spiritual path. A spiritual path that is not mine, but one I respect. Some refused to answer my questionnaires. That happens. But it is their right.

In the field, what do I encounter? I encounter people like you and me. Leaders who do not seem especially dangerous — in any case, who believe in what they do and believe in what they teach. I reject the idea that at the head of these movements — for example at the head of Jehovism — there is a college of a dozen people who do not believe in the Jehovist doctrine at all and who manipulate six million people. One can leave — because people say you cannot leave a “cult”. But yes, you can leave, and turnover is high among the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are probably at present more former, ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses than Jehovah’s Witnesses. And when you meet former Jehovah’s Witnesses, you meet people who do not necessarily bear any hostility toward the group.

There have been affairs, I know very well — the Order of the Solar Temple, which is not in fact a “cult” but a Templar para-masonry, something like that. And then there have been affairs of the Waco or Guyana type, which certainly pose a problem, but whose causes have not always been correctly elucidated. I do not mean to defend potential dangers here. Quite simply, I find that I start asking myself questions about what people call a dangerous group from the moment I have lived in it and observed it.

At present I am conducting a survey on cancer and spirituality, in view of a colloquium bearing that name. I interview people who have undergone treatment by prayer, but this treatment by prayer for cancer has always been accompanied by chemotherapy, surgery or the like. I do not meet people who have totally renounced medical therapy. Dangerousness, moreover, has to be defined from a legal point of view. What is dangerous? And there, I believe, we face a stumbling block.

I have written several books and many articles on the subject, in scientific journals. For example, “Religions de guérison” (Healing Religions), published by Cerf, sold well. There was curiosity about the subject. The book “Les antoinistes”, with Brepols, still sells, steadily. It is not a simple book; there are not many people interested in the Antoinists, but the book sells. The latest, however, “Croire et guérir”, was boycotted by the booksellers, with the exception of the online booksellers. I took up again the three religions described in “Religions de guérison”, and added one. I believe the climate had hardened and that there was lobbying by actors who are well known in France.

Taking an interest in minority religious groups and being regarded as an indulgent sociologist is obviously harmful; it is noxious. I underwent a tax audit after a journalist from L’Événement du jeudi said on Antenne 2 that I was a notorious Scientologist. The Scientology accusation is the one that comes up most often, and it is the most stigmatising, so I think they go at it full tilt. I have a calamitous file, of course, with the Renseignements généraux. The audience at my lectures is good, since they are curious people who come to learn. They see that I have no religion to defend and that I think I pose the problem [inaudible ?]. In any case, that I describe these religions in a way that is perhaps sometimes a little captivating.

I encourage this type of study. What France needs is a maximum of what are called empirical studies — studies done from the field — on minority religious groups. I am glad when there is a thesis, a new thesis on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, when a DEA student writes a thesis on an evangelical group. That is the material that will allow us to form an accurate idea of the phenomenon. The risk is that one can hardly build a career as a specialist in these groups.

Among colleagues, there are those who know something and those who know nothing. The less people know, the more they criticise. The less they read you, the more they criticise you. For I notice that remarks sometimes fly from people who have never read a line of my work. On the other hand, when you are dealing with people who are themselves confronted with field studies, or with people involved in studies — sometimes very serious ones, scientific studies of the major religious confessions; I am thinking of people who work, for example, on Islam, on Protestantism, on Catholicism — the attitude changes, because they know the difficulties of such a terrain.

Among certain academics who are more cunning, or better manipulated, a famous code of ethics is invoked against researchers [inaudible ?]. There are researchers who would study minority religious groups, as if no code of ethics were needed for the other researchers. So there is already a stigmatisation from the outset. Those who deal with minority religious groups are a priori suspected of non-neutrality. It is very curious since, as I said, no codes of ethics are held up against sociologists working on terrains that are perhaps more controversial or more… well, that would merit a carefully qualified approach. I would recall, moreover, that it is curious, since a code of ethics is meant above all to protect the people one is dealing with. So, if anything, a code of ethics in my case would tend rather to protect — through confidentiality, through the absence of value judgements — the members of the groups I study.

There was an obsession, I would say: to hold the most central point, the most central opinion possible. Which of course led the opponents of “cults” to blacken the picture, and the members of minority religious groups to whitewash the picture, in order to shift the cursor — that is, the central point. It is a futile race. It obviously serves, perhaps, at times, for certain academics, to position themselves as THE reference. But in any case, it is a totally mythical reference. And it can lead to what Jean Baubérot had called, in an article in Le Figaro, a “totalitarianism of the extreme centre”.

I believe the people who wrote, who drew up the parliamentary inquiry reports in France, absolutely avoid mentioning my work, as indeed that of the other researchers. It must be understood that the parliamentary inquiry reports we have had are mendacious. The one on the money of the “cults”, for example, like the 1996 one, was made to support the “social scourge” thesis. The parliamentarians could let anything at all be written, since there was no possible recourse, and not even a possible right of reply, for the groups described, incriminated or defamed or besmirched. The problem with this list is that one can advise against citing it, but there are no penalties provided for those who cite it. As long as there has not actually been a lawsuit won against a person who cited a group as being on the list of dangerous “cults”, there will be no case law.

We ought to work on the populations of people who have stigmatised religious groups. We ought to work on those people. In the end, we do not manage to produce a real psychology, a real sociology of the anti-cult groups, insofar as they refuse to submit to interviews, tests or experiments. But for us, they too are people to be studied. That must never be forgotten. We study the groups, but we can also study the anti-cult groups. Only, they let themselves be approached far less than the minority religious groups do.

These two decades, for me, are sad, dark decades, in which a socialist regime tried to hide all its failures, all its corruption, by taking a scapegoat — the “cults” — and making it the vehicle of every evil, with arguments, I would say, as old as the anti-cult struggle itself, of the type “the cults are the Trojan horse of the United States”. An entire population was allowed to vent itself, with practically an obligation to practise discrimination, ostracisation and, I would even say, racism. And here I am thinking of a Canadian sociologist, Lorraine de Rocher [inaudible ?], who considered that this anti-cult struggle is truly the expression of an ideological totalitarianism. The worst methods were used against individuals who lost their jobs — files kept on people, dramatic accusations against people in the liberal professions, because of their religious affiliation. This has nothing to do with what is called French-style laïcité, which, for its part, permits, I believe, religious pluralism.

We saw journalists — who normally ought to try to establish the truth — go and copy out the pages, the files of the anti-cult groups, or the files the Renseignements généraux gave them, while off they go selling books of Reporters Without Borders calendars, saying: “You see, there are journalists who die because they seek the truth.” They were not capable of seeking it with regard to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with regard to the evangelicals, or with regard to Scientology in France.

In the United States, in England, in Italy, in Latin America and in the Protestant countries of northern Europe, the presence of minority religious groups poses no problem. In those countries there are sometimes opponents of “cults” who form small groups, but in any case those groups — which have the right to exist in any event — receive no subsidies and have no privileged links with the police, such as have been established in France. They do not have that role of public informers.

Nevertheless, throughout the world the question of religious freedom arises. Many minority religious groups are persecuted. One thinks of countries in Asia, of countries in Africa. And it keeps growing. The major confessions that can find themselves in a minority situation — I am thinking of Catholics, for example — are regarded the way we in France regard the “cults”.

In France, it seems to me the situation is improving. You have perhaps seen all the recent statements, starting with that of a MIVILUDES official regarding kinesiology, who said: “Let us stop there — kinesiology is not a religion.” There have been public gestures by Mr Sarkozy, for example [inaudible ?] Tom Cruise. Judges have handed down more and more rulings favourable to religious groups when they go to court. And I believe there is something there that is moving in the right direction.

What advice can one give to people who are caught up like that in an abusive, defamatory, true denunciation? First, make it known. I believe the phenomenon of stigmatisation, of ostracisation, is much harder to sustain when it is known. We had the case of a person whose children had been placed in care because the mother and the grandmother attended the Antoinists at Valenciennes. And the affair stopped quickly as soon as it was on the Internet. It was truly an affair taking place in a little corner of France, with small local notables sure of themselves, who were making themselves a fine “cult” affair out of it.

And then, do not hesitate to lodge a complaint, to contact associations in order to get lawyers, to show their presence — including, where appropriate, by displaying a visibility as persecuted people in certain places. And what is worst is persecution in a quiet corner.