Cults and freedom

This book addresses a highly controversial issue, that of the policy adopted by France in the face of sectarian phenomena, that is to say in the face of these religious groups or so-called religious groups which, considered dangerous, would justify the intervention of public authorities. A controversial issue not only in France but also in other countries, and which was the subject of strong diplomatic tension between France and the United States at the turn of the 2000s, the latter accusing France of infringing on religious freedoms in the way it approached the issue of sects and implemented a vigorous policy of combat aimed at neutralizing them. Strongly demanded and supported by anti-sect associations, this policy was obviously contested by the religious groups it targeted, in particular by the Church of Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses, groups which mobilized, including on the legal level, to denounce the stigmatization to which they were subjected and to defend their rights to profess and practice their religion.

State policy towards “sects” was also contested by sociologists of religions who, while insisting on the need, from a socio-historical point of view, to strongly relativize the notion of “sect”, saw in this repressive policy the manifestation of French reluctance both with regard to pluralism (cultural and religious particularities perceived as a threat to the unity of the nation) and with regard to religion (perceived as a generator of communitarianism and as a threat to republican secularism).

The myth of a France eaten away by the sectarian phenomenon

Attentive to the chronology and determinants of France’s public policy, Etienne Ollion’s study is based on an empirical survey conducted from 2007 to 2012 (mainly in France but also in the United States) which made it possible to mobilize four sources of data: interviews (80 with 65 people), archives (from ministries and associations), observations and press data. The study is very well documented and the author validly restores the history of this fight against sects in France. He deflates the media hype describing a France invaded by sects by noting for example that by cross-referencing different sources, we can conclude that the Moon movement never had more than 200 members in France.

Chapter 3, “When Sects Become a Problem,” describes and analyzes in detail the gestation of French policy, emphasizing the conjunction in 1995 of the submission of a parliamentary report and an event: the massacres of the Order of the Solar Temple.

In Chapter 4, “State Effects,” the author establishes a very clear correlation, with regard to Jehovah’s Witnesses, between the explicit denunciation of this group by the public authorities and the number of acts of vandalism targeting them, in particular attacks on their places of worship (“the halls of the kingdom”). This illustrates the fact that “the State plays a central role in structuring social problems,” the author concludes (p. 137). A fine demonstration showing that the very policy of the public authorities could contribute to generating social violence! But did the neutrality of the researcher prohibit questioning the relevance of such a policy? I don’t think so. In 2011, it was for violation of Article 9 concerning religious freedom that France was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for the actions of its tax administration with regard to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Chapter 5, on “the export-import of a controversy”, shows very well “the local determinants of a diplomatic crisis”. Local actors contesting France’s fight against sects went to the international scene to seek resources to validate their thesis. Chapter 6 “Discreet mobilizations” is also particularly successful: it immerses us in the European scene in Brussels and makes us discover the mysteries of advocacy, these advocacy practices that border on lobbying without wanting to admit it and which also mobilize people defending religious freedom and the interests of different religious movements. With a very limited impact according to our author. In a final chapter “Governing from a distance”, Etienne Ollion shows that the State now tends, in this area of ​​sects, to “have things done” rather than to take charge itself, and therefore to expose itself less.

The limits of a critique

By placing the State at the heart of the analysis, the author has undoubtedly developed an original and welcome analysis of a very particular public policy: one that targets a very controversial social object, “sects”. He does so on solid empirical bases and takes great care to distance himself from all the actors’ discourses. While recognizing the quality of this study and the convincing nature of several of its demonstrations, the author is, in our opinion, too exclusive in presenting his approach as an alternative to those implemented in France by several sociologists of religions (Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Françoise Champion, Martine Cohen, Bruno Étienne, Raphaël Liogier, Nathalie Luca). By showing that France, by particularly targeting certain groups, tended to call into question the neutrality of the State in religious matters, by analyzing the fragility of the arguments invoked and their lack of legal basis, Belgian, Swiss, English, American sociologists (Karel Dobbelaere, Roland Campiche, Jim Beckford, Eileen Barker, James Richardson, etc.) went in the same direction as their French colleagues.

Étienne Ollion criticizes these sociologists of religions for explaining French activism in the fight against sects by a “French religious culture” marked by “Catholic monotheism and the original hostility between temporal and spiritual power” (p. 13). To claim that these different sociologists of religions would explain the zeal of the French state against sects by national religious culture, to claim that they would resort to “a generalizing cultural analysis”, is not to do justice to their work (it is also to amalgamate them in a generalizing way without taking into account the differences between them). To take into account, as they do, the singularities of the political and religious history of a country, France, which, since the French Revolution and the civil constitution of the clergy, has experienced a lively and lasting conflict over religion – we have spoken of the “war of the two Frances” – which resulted in 1905, in a very controversial context, in a separation of Church and State and in “school wars” between the public and the private confessional, is not to resort to “a specific religious culture” but to register the analysis of the present without ignoring the past.

In our opinion, it was not necessary, in order to understand the treatment reserved for sects in France, to present his thesis in such an exclusive way, as Étienne Ollion does on p. 15: “rather than towards religious culture, it is towards the State that we must turn”. This was all the less necessary since it is also towards the State that the aforementioned sociologists of religion turn, a centralizing and republican State that has been the bearer of ideals of emancipation, notably through schools, which have led it to want to exercise a spiritual power that directly clashed with the educational pretensions of the Catholic Church and other religious groups. It is indeed the form taken by the State in France that explains the liveliness of the fight against sects in France, its ambitions, as Étienne Ollion says very well, in the areas of education, health, and life in society. In other words, it was not necessary for Etienne Ollion’s study to culturalize the approach of sociologists of religions in order to better promote his thesis! If the author had introduced some elements of comparison with the public policies implemented by other European countries, this would also have contributed to better understanding the singularity of the French case. In Great Britain, for example, the public authorities, with the strong involvement of sociologist Eileen Barker, a world-renowned specialist in “new religious movements”, have implemented a much less aggressive approach to sectarian phenomena. Taking into account legal aspects (see the book “Sects” and the law in France under the direction of Francis Messner, Puf, 1999) would also have made it possible to highlight the recurring tensions between a public policy with a repressive tendency and the legal system protecting public freedoms.

An ethereal approach to religion?

Etienne Ollion’s approach in terms of public policy therefore seems to me to be more complementary than anything else. He hits the nail on the head when he notes that the French authorities reacted much later than other countries to the problems of sects (notably the United States, where there were various mobilizations in the 1970s). If it were a national culture resistant to religious minorities that explains France’s anti-sect policy, it would be difficult to understand, argues Ollion, why it did not react sooner. One could object that it is specific events that trigger the reaction of the public authorities and that the United States was alerted to the problem earlier than France. A second argument put forward is that the public authorities would have mobilized more against transgressions of norms in secular areas: education, health, life in society, than against unaccepted religious minorities. To which one can respond that the State and the public authorities do not care about the more or less strange beliefs and practices of these groups as long as these remain in the realm of imaginary representations and the practices are harmless. But many religious groups have pretensions in the field of health and education! The non-conformist behaviors that they can encourage in these areas result in transgressions of secular norms motivated religiously.

So, would the author not have an ethereal conception of religion that does not take sufficient account of the fact that for religiously engaged people, this commitment concerns all aspects of their lives? He maintains that the fight against sects is less a religious question than “a controversy around good self-practices, these standards relating to individual behavior and life in society”, standards which, in France, are largely shaped by the State. Why, even though the State is central to the analysis, not have spoken of secularism? As Philippe Portier shows in The State and Religions in France. A Historical Sociology of Secularism (PURE2016, p. 292-295), it is nevertheless within the framework of a “security-based shift in secularism” that France’s anti-sect policy in the 1990s and 2000s fits. Since this policy does not escape changes in the way secularism is understood and applied, a historical sociology of secularism combined with a historical sociology of the State would have been useful. An example of a significant development that Etienne Ollion does not mention: after a time when the body set up by the State to combat sects tended to ignore or even devalue the analyses of academics, in 2003-2004, a university seminar was held jointly organized by the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combating Sectarian Abuses (MIVILUDES) and the School of Advanced Studies (EPHE). The 47 contributions were published in the French documentation in 2005 under the equally significant title of “Sects and secularism”. By turning to academics who placed the problem of sects within the framework of a vigilant but respectful secularism of religious practices within the framework of the laws of the Republic, the MIVILUDES At the same time, it demonstrated a distancing from the anti-cult associations that had previously been well-established.