The organized opposition to “cults” is diverse in different countries. Yet, common themes and features emerge.
Rosita Šorytė*
*A paper presented at the conference “Discrimination and Criminalization for Religious and Spiritual Reasons in Argentina: Legal Challenges in a Diverse Democratic Context,” Legislature Palace, Buenos Aires. July 19, 2024.
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The opposition against groups stigmatized as “cults” manifests itself in countries as diverse as Argentina, France, Russia, Japan, and China. This paper examines the question whether this “anti-cult movement” is international, and organized as such, or is governed by national logics only.
In the first part, I will present six national examples—the United States, Russia, China, France, Japan, and Argentina—which show that there are obvious differences. In the second part, I will argue that these differences are compatible with the existence of an international cooperation and coordination.
Table of Contents
The United States
The anti-cult movement was born in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. These were the years in which many in the younger generations, for different reasons, rebelled against the dominant values. Some expressed their rebellion by embracing new religions very different from the Christianity or Judaism of their parents, both Asian such as the Unification Church or the Hare Krishna movement and indigenous to America such as the Church of Scientology.
To thousands of young Americans, primarily college students, these movements appeared exotic, new, and exciting. To their parents, they looked dangerous, sinister, and incomprehensible. Why would reasonable boys or girls abandon the university to serve as full time volunteers for a controversial group? Some psychologists and lawyers had an answer. The choice of these young men and women, they said, had not been free, no matter what they told their parents. They had been “brainwashed” by “cults.”
What could the parents do? It soon became clear that the American legal system would resist proposals for new laws against “cults” and lawsuits based on the dubious theories of “brainwashing.” Deprogramming was also declared illegal. Thus, the American anti-cult movement moved from courts of law to the court of public opinion, as it managed to persuade hundreds of journalists that stories about evil “cults” “brainwashing” their followers were sexy and would sell well.
Recently, cable TV has emerged as the media most interested in an alliance with anti-cultists, since its market is highly competitive and needs scandals to sell. Netflix in particular has become specialized in producing lurid series about “cults” and their sins.
At the core of this version of anti-cultism is an individualistic idea of freedom. Surrendering a substantial part of our liberty to a religious organization or leader is not regarded as an admissible choice. It is denounced as a “bounded choice” from which “cultists” should be “liberated,” that they want it or not. The American model wants to protect “cultists” from themselves.
China
China boasts that it has the largest anti-cult movement in the world. Indeed, the China Anti-Cult Association has local organizations and representatives in every area of the country, including remote villages, and millions of members. However, it is not really a voluntary or private group. It is a branch of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, directly organized and controlled by Party bureaucrats.


“Cult” in the English official name “China Anti-Cult Association” translated the Chinese “xie jiao.” In fact, “xie jiao” since the Middle Ages is an expression used in the Chinese Empire to indicate “heterodox” religious movements. “Heterodox” always had a political meaning, to designate an organization that does not support the state and its leadership, the latter being incarnated as the emperor in past centuries and as Xi Jinping today.
Thus, the Chinese model, while borrowing from the Western anti-cult rhetoric, does not protect the individuals from themselves but the state from the “cults” or “xie jiao.” If you are active in any capacity in a movement listed as a “xie jiao” in China you go to jail. While the anti-cult association organizes massive propaganda campaigns, ultimately the main tool China relies on to eradicate “cults” is not propaganda but the police: in fact, a specialized anti-xie-jiao police with more than 6,000 agents.
Russia
The Russian model of anti-cultism has in common with its Chinese counterpart the use of the police to crack down on “cults” but there is an important difference. The leaders of the China Anti-Cult Association are atheists. The leaders of the Russian anti-cult movement are Orthodox priests or laypersons employed and paid by the Russian Orthodox Church.


“Cults,” as it has already happened in 2017 to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are raided by the police, declared “extremist,” and “liquidated” by courts of law, which play the key role in the anti-cult fight in Russia. Their properties are confiscated. While the latter measure can hide the transfer of prime real estate from “cults” to government-connected oligarchs, or even relatives of the top leaders, what the laws protect is the religious monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn lives in a symbiotic situation with the Putin regime.
France
This year 2024 France made its bad law of 2001 against the “cults” worse, making “psychological subjection” allegedly practiced by the “cults” a crime punished with heavy jail penalties. The new law also reinforces the role of the MIVILUDES, the governmental agency whose mandate is to combat “cultic deviances” and that also acts as an ATM machine distributing taxpayers’ money to private anti-cult organizations.
Followed on a smaller scale by Belgium, France is one of the rare countries that uses as its main weapon against the “cults” a specialized governmental agency. What France wants to protect is clearly indicated by another law passed in 2021 against “separatism.” Although the law primarily targeted Islam, the government explained it also offered a framework to fight the “cults.” As its final name indicated, the law wants to protect the “republican values” against those who would deny them, at least implicitly, by joining a “separatist” organization, i.e., one that lives “separately” from the majority and according to different values. This is regarded as not tolerable in France.
Japan
In 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a man who had a personal grudge against the Unification Church (now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification), with which Abe had cooperated through the years. The assassin’s mother, a member of the Unification Church, went bankrupt in 2002, allegedly for her excessive donations to the movement. A campaign against “cults” followed the assassination, targeting both the Family Federation, which the government is now seeking to dissolve, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had nothing to do with the Abe assassination but are a typical target of anti-cult campaigns.


As a statement by four Special Rapporteurs on human rights of the United Nations on the issue, unusually strong worded considering that it criticized a democratic country, has recently noted, the campaign against the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Unification Church reveals the reluctance of Japanese society and politics to fully accept international standards of freedom of religion or belief. In Japan, the notion of religious liberty was imposed as part of the Constitution and of the laws by the legal experts that came with American General Douglas McArthur after World War II. Despite these laws, the idea that religion should conform to the prevailing social mores and that those who live differently from the majority threaten the all-important value of social harmony remains very strong in Japan. Every time an incident reveals that something connected with religion can disrupt social harmony, as it happened with the terrorist sarin gas attacks by the new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo in 1995 or the Abe assassination in 2022, draconian measures are introduced to expel from society what are perceived as “foreign” religious bodies threatening stability.
Argentina
As far as I know, in Argentina an anti-cult movement existed for decades but remained comparatively small and not very influential. It suffered a crucial defeat when the first case against the Buenos Aires Yoga School collapsed in 2000. However, more recently Argentina has emerged as a laboratory where a new strategy is being tested. “Cults” are attacked through the use of laws against trafficking. It is argued that just as prostitutes and immigrant slave laborers are victims of traffic even if they may not realize it, so are “cultists.” The fact that “victims” deny that they are victims is thus regarded as irrelevant. Based on these theories, the Buenos Aires Yoga School was raided again in 2022.


Although in some anti-trafficking cases connected with religion courts have ruled against the prosecutors, the model is tested in Argentina with a strong support of international anti-cultists. They have started cases claiming that all “cultists” are “trafficked” in several other countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, and are very interested in the outcome of the Yoga School case in Buenos Aires.