While there are other critical situations, including in France, what is happening in Japan is unprecedented in a democratic country in our century.
by Massimo Introvigne
On April 11–13, 2024, New York’s HJ International Graduate School of Peace and Public Leadership (HJI), which is connected with the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU, formerly known as the Unification Church), organized a conference on “Peace and Public Leadership: Addressing the Challenges of Our Times.” On April 12, a session was devoted to “New Religious Movements and Contemporary Threats to Religious Freedom,” chaired by Michael Mickler, Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at HJI, and Franco Famularo, Board Chair at the same HJI and President of the Canadian branch of the FFWPU.
Katrina Lantos Swett, President of the Lantos Foundation, who was twice Chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, spoke on the theme “The Global Forecast for Religious Freedom: Stormy Skies Ahead.” The gloomy title, she explained, first refers to the fact that billions of human beings live in countries where religious liberty is severely restricted, such as “China, Nigeria, Iran, Russia, North Korea, to name just a few.” Sometimes, governments themselves persecute religious minorities, including the Uyghurs, House Church Christians, and many others in China. In other cases, authorities are not able to control non-state actors that terrorize religions they do not like, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, whose very name proclaims that “education, or Western education, is forbidden,” Lantos Swett said. In Russia, she added, “an authoritarian government has co-opted and corrupted the social influence and credibility of the majority faith to serve the government’s goals,” including by “blessing Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
After mentioning the persecution of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, Lantos Swett focused on an egregious case of violation of religious freedom in a democratic country, Japan, where a “determined assault on the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification” is being conducted by the government. She reflected on “how troubling and quite frankly, profoundly undemocratic are the multi-pronged efforts we see in Japan to dissolve and eliminate an entire belief community. This is not how a rights-respecting and confident democracy treats minority faith, and Japan is fairly close to undermining its claims to be a nation that honours human rights, including, very importantly, article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
“Those of us who view Japan as a democratic ally, an important counterweight to China,” Lantos Swett added, “can’t really stay silent while a country that in many respects does a good job defending democracy, and defending human rights, is going seriously and perilously close to running off the rails when it comes to their treatment of the Family Federation.”
Lantos Swett compared what is happening in Japan to the attitude of those who in American popular culture are called “mean girls,” the high school girls who believe they represent the elite and engage in “social bullying” of those who are not part of their group. Japan “targets a faith community in this way,” and this is “just wrong,” Lantos Swett concluded.
Eileen Barker, Professor Emerita of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and arguably the world’s most senior scholar of new religious movements, explained to the audience that there is a difference between the role of a sociologist of religion and the role of an advocate. To stress that you look at a religion with the neutral gaze of the social scientist is “the best way you can be an advocate,” Barker said. This does not mean, she added, that sociologists cannot have strong feelings for religious liberty, and they can help protecting it by debunking misinformation about religious minorities.
“One of the things that is very important is the comparative method, putting new religions in context,” Barker explained. For example, “if you are reading in the papers that a certain ‘cult’ member has committed suicide, and this is perfectly true, and you read the next day that another ‘cult’ member has committed suicide, you might start thinking, well, what is it about the ‘cults’ that makes people commit suicide? However, if you are a social scientist, what you might do is compare the rate of suicide in the new religions with the rate of suicide in the general population, or even better population that is matched with the members of the new religions for things like socioeconomic status, etc. And if you find that the rate of suicide in the general population is twice that of the new religious movement, then you might say, well, what is it about the ‘cults’ that stops people committing suicide?” The question would thus be reversed.
Barker took another example from her early study of the Unification Church, reported in her landmark 1984 book “The Making of a Moonie.” At that time, the excuse for what she called the “horrific” practice of deprogramming was that the Unification Church converted its “victims” through the “irresistible” technique of “brainwashing,” which only deprogrammers claimed they were able to reverse. Barker’s research found that more than 90% of those who attended a Unification Church seminar, where they were allegedly “brainwashed,” did not join the Church and “most of those who did had left within a couple of years.” “So, this meant that the techniques were not all that efficient or effective,” she concluded.
Barker added that several questions remain for further discussion: how social scientists can effectively explain to the general public that “brainwashing” is a myth and that the “bad” behavior of some new religious movements (NRMs) should not be generalized to criticize all NRMs, and how they can “translate” the experiences of those who are happy to join and remain in the NRMs in terms understandable to those who regard them as “strange” and threatening.
I discussed in more detail the crisis of religious liberty in Japan after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. July 8, 2022, was a morning like many others. As scholars, human rights activists, politicians, women and men concerned for freedom of religion or belief, we woke up knowing that as in any other day believers will suffer for their faith in several parts of the world. Some will go to jail in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. Perhaps some will be tortured and killed. Perhaps devotees of religious minorities will be attacked by mobs once again in Pakistan or Nigeria. What we did not know is that one of the worst religious liberty crises, certainly the most dangerous in a democratic country in our century, was about to erupt in a most unlikely place, Japan, a country renowned for its defense of human rights in international fora.
All, however, started changing on July 8, 2022, when Abe was assassinated by a man called Tetsuya Yamagami, who claimed he wanted to punish him for his cooperation with organizations connected with the Unification Church. The assassin said he hated the Unification Church because his mother, a member, had gone bankrupt in 2002 as a consequence of her excessive donations to her religion. Forces that had fought the Unification Church for decades, including the Japanese Communist Party and its allies, which resented its successful anti-Communist political activism, saw in the tragedy an opportunity to launch a national campaign—not against the assassin, or those who might have excited him to act twenty years after his mother’s bankruptcy, but first against the Family Federation, then against the Jehovah’s Witnesses too and all kinds of conservative religion, seen as an antisocial force.
I mentioned three developments in Japan, which in fact threatens all religions. First, in seeking the dissolution of the Family Federation the government has reversed what has been its own interpretation of the law on religious corporations for decades. Now the government claims that a religious organization can be dissolved, with drastic consequences, even if it has not been found guilty of any crime, based simply on the fact that it has lost some civil (as opposed to criminal) cases. Second, legislation has been passed limiting the possibility of religious groups to solicit donations, and allowing those who have left a religion to recover the amount of what they donated many years after the donation happened.
Third, through regulations, directives in form of Questions & Answers, and even brochures distributed in schools, a new notion of “religious abuse of children” has been introduced. Forms of “abuse” mentioned in these texts include involving children in religious activities, exposing them to conservative moral beliefs and trying to protect them from brands of entertainment their parents object to for religious reasons, and even teaching them that those who transgress moral rules may go to hell. The Questions & Answers and the brochures also qualify as “sexual abuse” hearing confessions where minors are counselled on issues related to sexuality, which is of course common in most religions with confessional practices.
I mentioned that in 2022 I called the assault against the Unification Church/Family Federation in Japan the worst religious liberty crisis in a democratic country in the 20th century. In 2024, I not only maintain this opinion but note that the situation has become even worse. Of course, Japan is not alone. Lantos Swett, the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who became a U.S. congressman, noted an alarming resurgence of anti-Semitism in several countries. I and others compared the campaigns against “cults” in Japan and in France, where a dangerous new anti-cult law has just been passed punishing “psychological subjection” by “cult leaders” with heavy jail penalties. In fact, there is evidence that anti-cult organizations and governmental agencies in France and Japan are working together.
By the end of the 20th century, scholars believed that they had finally debunked the pseudo-scientific theory that “cults” use “brainwashing” and are intrinsically different from genuine religions. What were called the “cult wars” had ended, at least in democratic countries and with the possible exception of France. It looks like “cult wars 2.0” are coming, with new characters involved such as the anti-human-trafficking agencies that try to expand their power and funding by claiming that recruiting “victims” into “cults” is a form of trafficking. As we won the “cult wars” once, we can win them again. Often in history liberty, not tyranny, emerges victorious, unless its defenders withdraw from the fight.