The Springs of the Anti-Cult Fight in France

The Springs of the Anti-Cult Fight in France

By CICNS (October 2008)

The election of Monsieur Georges Fenech to the Presidency of the MIVILUDES, a partisan of the “hard line” (Le Monde), invites us to recall what the springs of the fight against the cults in France are. The sociologists bring us a necessary light. We reproduce below a few themes developed by a number of them in the interviews they granted us.

Jean Baubérot: On the French secular framework and in particular the law of 1905, Jean Baubérot specifies: “[the law of 1905] asks people to respect tolerance, to respect civil peace, to respect the fact that others do not necessarily think as they do. It establishes the same penalties whether one violates the freedom to believe or the freedom not to believe. There is a very strong reciprocity in the law, so it offers rights to all. But after that, it is social forces, political forces, which apply pressure and which make things go more or less well, more or less calmly, more or less aggressively”. “French laïcité has taken over, in good part, this Gallican tradition of surveillance, of domination of religion by the political”. Questioned on the situation of the spiritual minorities, the sociologist comments: “I see this notably as a reconciliation of the two Frances on the backs of the religious minorities (…) people issuing from the anticlerical force and from the French Catholic force united against minorities (…) These minorities have a bad reputation, rightly or wrongly, and so they can exercise an aggressiveness which is in fact more global and more contained”.

Raphaël Liogier: “France is one of the countries that intervenes the most in the religious domain in Europe, by giving religious definitions, by making religious classifications”. “The French exception is an exception characterised by the obsession with the religious”. “The heart of the problem of the ‘cults’ is a struggle over classification: how to manage to fight against one’s downgrading as a ‘cult’? How to manage to fight to be able to be classified as ‘normal’?” “What one must know is that the problem of the cults is roughly the inverse of the problem of unemployment. Why? Because the problem of unemployment is a real problem (…) It is the opposite of the problem of the cults. Outside all the imaginary, all this generalised diffusion, there is no global social problem linked to the cults” (…) “The advantage of the problem of the cults is that it must remain omnipresent in the background at all times, in case there is a real grave problem and, as a result, one always has this little problem of the cults that one can bring back. The problem of the cults is also very agreeable for the intelligentsia, the organic republican intellectuals, because it allows one to say that one is defending essential values, the values of the Republic, the person, individuality, whatever you like. You can say whatever you like in the matter of cults: it is indeed a diffuse enemy which can present itself anywhere, it is the representation of a permanent aggression which can replace the real underlying problems, the social problems, the economic problems, at every level. That is the conjunctural political interest of the fight against the cults: the fight against the cults gives the feeling that one is doing something useful”.

Anne Morelli: “I think the great religions, and possibly laïcité too, have an interest in keeping a certain monopoly over our societies (…) It is a closed system, which is limited to a few groups that are legally recognised. And so there is a kind of cake, I would say, which is shared among these groups. A cake at the financial level; that is the case in Belgium, for example, since there are subsidies for the religions and for organised secularism, and if one had to admit the Jehovah’s Witnesses among these groups – there are many more Jehovah’s Witnesses in Belgium than Jews –, the cake would have to be shared. Sharing the media cake too, since there are programmes for secular morality, for the Jews, for the Protestants. One would also have to cut in there to give listening time to the Seventh-day Adventists, the Scientologists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. Faced with this eventuality, there is a timid reaction from the religions which hold the high ground and which look rather askance at these new little competitors. And so there is a reaction of withdrawal, and of worry”.

Maurice Duval: “Why is it in the interest of the politicians of this country to continue the fight against what they call the cults, since one sees that there is no object, since the offences are insignificant in number and in quality? It is because the fight against the cults manufactures collective fear. People are afraid of the cults. They have very likeable faces but they are going to wash people’s brains, especially the weakest, the children etc.; it is a ‘terrible’ danger. The manufacture of collective fear is a political ingredient of the first order insofar as, when there is a collective fear, one can manipulate the masses in a manner without equal”.

Michel Maffesoli: “What is certain is that there is, through certain governmental bodies but also more generally at the level of the ‘right-thinking’, of the politically correct or the morally correct which tends to predominate in our societies, a mistrust of those who experiment with other ways of living, of thinking, of praying, or otherwise. What I can say from a sociological or a thinker’s point of view is that it is not good to stigmatise. It is always dangerous to think society as it ‘ought to be’ and not as it is”.

These extracts show that the phenomenon of the exacerbated fight against the cults can be understood with the help of a historical but also a more conjunctural reading grid. One point is common to all these sociologists: for them there exists no social scourge associated with dérives sectaires. The spiritual minorities are not different from other human groups in their behaviour with regard to the law. This absence of specificity is found moreover in the current evolution of the anti-cult fight which, for want of proof against these minorities, now attacks every compartment of society. This generalisation of the fight is deceptively presented as an a posteriori justification of the initial objectives. The criteria of dérives sectaires are no longer anything but a clumsy and confused expression of human deviances (taken into account for a long time in the penal code), doubled with the pejorative and ostracising connotation of the anti-cult terminology. The fight against the cults becomes the alibi of a scarcely democratic fight against the non-conformist citizen.

If the nomination of Georges Fenech, whom one may consider an anti-cult ideologue, was, unsurprisingly, saluted by the anti-cult activists, the validation of this choice by the President of the Republic (one can hardly imagine he did not have his say) is regrettable. The “cults” will thus have paid the price of a stormy debate, which it was thought fitting to calm, over a laïcité the head of State wishes to be “open”: spot the error. Choosing to “free the fight against dérives sectaires of its complexes”, in the expression of the Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie, appears fairly cynical in a country known for its excesses in this domain.

Georges Fenech specified on France 5 (see our communiqué) that 500,000 people were, according to him, touched by the cult phenomenon. It is probable that the number of citizens open to alternative life choices is larger than this figure, and the discredit of which they are the object has lasted only too long. An evolution will doubtless be possible when these citizens have become conscious of the peaceful and electoral force they represent, together.