The Western anti-cult model is theoretically different from those prevailing in China and Russia. However, a cooperation was established.
by Luigi Berzano (University of Torino, Italy), Boris Falikov (Moscow State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia), Willy Fautré (Human Rights Without Frontiers, Brussels, Belgium), Liudmyla Filipovich (Department of Religious Studies, Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences, Kiev, Ukraine), Massimo Introvigne (Center for Studies on New Religions, Torino, Italy), and Bernadette Rigal-Cellard (University Bordeaux-Montaigne, Bordeaux, France).
Article 3 of 7. Read article 1 and article 2.
Western scholars distinguish between a counter-cult and an anti-cult movement. The old counter-cult movement presents some similarities with the Russian model. Counter-cultists were—and are, since they still exist—Christians who try to get rid of “heresies,” also labeled “cults,” which in their opinion preach a false Gospel and “steal their sheep” by proselyting among mainline Christians. There is a variation of this model in Israel, where Orthodox Jews call “cults” groups that try to convert Jews. The influence of these Orthodox Jews in the main Israeli anti-cult association, and local correspondent of FECRIS, the Israeli Center for Victims of Cults, is important, although the Center also includes some secular humanists.
However, for reasons explained in our first White Paper on FECRIS, since the last decades of the 20th century, a secular anti-cult movement became much more important in North America and Europe than the traditional Christian counter-cult movement. In fact, anti-cultists, sometimes with success, tried to exert their hegemony on religious counter-cultists, and include them in organizations and coalitions where the religionists became the junior partners.
The anti-cult movement built a secular discourse (illustrated in our previous White Paper) that establishes a distinction between “cults” and “religions” based on the pseudo-scientific theory of “brainwashing.” It maintains that “cults” are not religions. One joins a religion through a free choice. One joins a “cult” because of techniques called mental manipulation, mind control, or “brainwashing.” Some anti-cultists would say that the test for them is whether a group causes “harm” to its followers, but the tool for the harm is in fact “brainwashing” or mental manipulation.
We will not repeat in this second White Paper the criticism of “brainwashing” and the Western anti-cult ideology we have proposed in the first White Paper. This criticism is a main theme of the scientific study of new religious movements, as it developed in the late 20th and in the 21st century.
What interests us here is the different origins of the Chinese, Russian, and Western anti-cult models. Chinese anti-cultism wants to protect the regime, the government, and the Communist Party against the threat represented by uncontrolled religion. Russian anti-cultism wants to protect the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church and its alliance with the regime. Western anti-cultism wants to protect individuals from themselves.
As Dutch scholar Wouter Hanegraaff has demonstrated for the opposition to esotericism—but the same is true for opposition to “cults”—this ideology has its roots in a Protestant criticism of both Roman Catholicism and magic, and was developed first by the Enlightenment and later by Marxism. The core idea is that when irrational beliefs are not confined to the periphery of life and become the dominant influence determining the main choices of one’s existence, they are dangerous and harmful.
In particular, strongly held irrational beliefs may lead to the voluntary sacrifice of a part of individual liberty and to a relationship of “voluntary servitude”—to borrow the expression of Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563)—with a religious organization or a religious leader, be this leader an Indian guru or the mother superior of a convent of cloistered nuns. The modern secular society does not believe that a normally rational individual may choose voluntary servitude, hence the belief that this happens because of brainwashing.
“Cultists” do not know that their choices are wrong, harmful, and caused by brainwashing. Anti-cultists supposedly know better, and they see themselves as being on a mission from rationality and the common good. If some do not believe in their idea of freedom, then paradoxically their freedom should be denied and they should be “rescued” and “liberated” both from “cults” and from themselves.
At first sight, the three models of anti-cultism prevailing in China, Russia, and the West are incompatible. The individualistic concept of liberty at the core of Western anti-cultism seems far away from the Chinese totalitarian approach calling for a strict control of religion by the government, and from the Russian theocratic idea that one church represents the national identity and should be protected from competition.
However, slowly but effectively, the three anti-cult movements have decided to cooperate and struck a bargain. The Chinese and Russian anti-cult movements need Western anti-cultists for propaganda purposes. Without this cooperation, their crackdown on groups they decide to label as “xie jiao” or “totalitarian cults” would be seen for what it is, part of a broader brutal repression of any dissident voice.
On the contrary, if the Chinese and Russian regimes may claim that “cults” are an international problem, what they do may seem less unique and even justified. This is the very reason why the Chinese regime, when it publishes documents in English, translates “xie jiao” as “cults,” even if it is told that the translation is wrong by its own scholars.
It is clear why the Chinese and Russian regimes find the support of Western anti-cultists useful. It may appear as less clear why Western anti-cultists believe they have something to gain by associating with disreputable regimes with abysmal human rights records. In fact, there may be different reasons for this unholy alliance.
We would not insist or speculate on possible financial motivations. Although both Russia and China are well-known for their generous support of fellow travelers, as mentioned in our previous White Paper FECRIS is funded by the French government, and some FECRIS affiliates outside of France also receive official support. When somebody in the West roots for totalitarian regimes, money is always a possible hypothesis. In this case, however, it is possible that money is not the main reason for the cooperation.
While anti-cult movements in the West are small, the China Anti-Xie-Jiao Association (again, advertised abroad as the “China Anti-Cult Association”), which is basically a department of the Chinese Communist Party, claims to be the largest anti-cult association in the world. The claim is not false. It has thousands of members and associates in all Chinese provinces and regions. More importantly, local authorities are asked to cooperate with it.
This is also true for the public security, and the association has an important role in designating what groups will be listed as “xie jiao.” Russian anti-cult organizations may have a smaller number of activists, but they also have an important official role. Russia’s most visible anti-cultist, Alexander Dvorkin, a board member and the former Vice President of FECRIS, became at one stage the President of the Justice Ministry’s Expert Council for Conducting State Religious Studies Expert Analysis, a key actor in Russian cases for banning groups and books as “extremist.”
Most Western anti-cult organizations have been able to develop a good relationship with the media, but remain in themselves small and struggling. By arguing that they are part of a larger international coalition including the mammoth Chinese anti-cult organization and its powerful Russian counterpart, they may hope to be regarded as more important than they actually are.
There is also, despite the differences, a common point in the ideology. Even if they occasionally cooperate with American “cult experts,” most anti-cultists are anti-American, and believe there is an American conspiracy to weaken the national identities of secular post-Enlightenment Europe through “cults.”
We find it surprising that after more than 20 years anti-cult and FECRIS publications continue to quote a book written in 1996 and an article published in 2001 by French anti-cult journalist Bruno Fouchereau, whose title says it all: “The Cults, Trojan Horses of the United States in Europe.” The article was published in “Le Monde diplomatique,” a militantly left-wing and sometimes conspirationist magazine that was in 2001, as it is today, independent from the more respected “Le Monde.”
Perhaps the article keeps being quoted because it accused some of us (Introvigne and Fautré) of being part of the alleged American conspiracy, but we are afraid that some if not most FECRIS anti-cultists really believe in the theory. This brings them close to Chinese anti-xie-jiao activists, who believe that “xie jiao” are promoted in China by the United States to undermine the regime, and Russian ideologists, who also claim that Russia’s “spiritual security” is threatened by American conspiracies infiltrating “cults” into the Russian Federation (and Ukraine).
Actually, in Russia this is an old idea. Timothy Snyder has called the attention on how much Putin’s ideology owns to Ivan Ilyn (1883–1954), a well-known Russian philosopher who called himself a “fascist,” and was expelled from the Soviet Union for his monarchist and anti-communist positions. Snyder’s theory has been challenged for insisting too much on a comparison between Ilyn’s fascism and Putin’s anti-democratic ideas.
In fact, it is not Ilyn’s fascism that exerts influence on Putin. It is Ilyn’s vision of Russia as a nation persecuted by the West through its propaganda of democracy, its heresies and “cults,” and its homosexual lobbies, and at the same time as a nation with a mission similar to Jesus Christ: it is persecuted, dies, resurrects, and saves the world. Putin asked for and obtained from Switzerland the remains of Ilyn and had them reburied in Moscow in a tomb in front of which he went to pay his respects and draw inspiration.
The Russian President has also expressed his personal concerns about “cults” that come to steal “the souls and the property” of the Russians, vowing to eradicate them.
The conspirationist belief in parallel American plots against Western European secularism, Russia, and China is probably the main motivation why Western anti-cultist, who claim to be liberal and democratic, are not ashamed to cooperate with the propaganda of totalitarian regimes that regard Western-style democracy and “cults” as twin evils.