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Cults and Human Rights
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
| By:
Eileen Barker |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 What is a cult? Is a cult a group that commits mass suicide, brainwashes its members and commits financial skulduggery? Or is it, as Eileen Barker (right), an expert in the field of new religious movements, argues, simply a pejorative term often used to negatively label organisations that could be quite innocent of such serious allegations. In an interview with Fathom, Barker reflects on the accusatory language of cult and non-cult which masks a deeper malaise in societies around the world: the tendency to at worst persecute such movements and at best deny them basic rights of passage and movement. |
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| Eileen Barker discusses the controversial label of 'cult'. | |
Fathom: How would you define a cult? |
Eileen Barker: There is a technical way in which it is used in the sociology of religion, when a distinction is made between church, denomination, cult and sect, but in popular parlance "cult" just means a minority religion we don't like. Because the concept has this negative evaluative overtone, it has come to imply that a cult is a group which commits mass suicide, exploits its members, brain-washes them, and carries out child abuse, financial skulduggery and political intrigue. |
The trouble with this is that there is this label of "cult" which means a group becomes dangerous by definition, so you cannot discover anything, because, by definition, a movement, once it has been labelled a cult, must do all these bad things. You will hear the anti-cultist using this circular argument and saying, "Well, this is a cult," and you say, "Well, it is quite benign." And they respond, "No, it can't be, because it is a cult." |
Among the scholars who study such phenomena, there is a preference for the term "new religious movement"--though that too has got a whole lot of problems associated with it. It is, of course, quite true that some of the new religions do some very nasty things, but let us discover that, not label them in the first place unless we are using the term in its more technical sense--but even that is fairly ethnocentric and is not always helpful. A couple of sociologists from the United States, Rodney Stark and Bill Bainbridge, will talk about a cult as something new and a sect as a schism from a traditional religion. There are in fact various different ways in which "cult" is defined, but if you see the term used in the papers that means something bizarre, sensational, sexy and something that is going to be a good story because it is bad--and a bad story is usually a good story for the mass media. |
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| Eileen Barker explains why 'cults' attract controversy | |
Fathom: Why and how do cults attract controversy? |
Barker: Well, they present an alternative to conventional wisdom. They are offering something which is different from mainstream beliefs and traditions. It would be rather surprising if they didn't attract controversy. They are redefining a whole lot of our most sacred beliefs. I don't mean sacred necessarily in the religious sense; they are offering an alternative lifestyle as well. They very often do silly things because the members are inexperienced and overenthusiastic. They are worrying to us because they are unknown, and we are usually frightened of the unknown. And they can provide very good scapegoats. Then, once the stories start to circulate, there is a lot of generalisation. If you read a story about cults in the newspapers, they are pretty well bound to include something on Jonestown or Aum Shinrikyo, although the actual movement that is being talked about may never have harmed even a fly. Nonetheless, we get this generalised picture that comes up over and over again. |
Then a lot of the new religions do actually do things that are genuinely worrying. I mean, if my children were to disappear into a bizarre strange cult, I would be very worried until I found out about it, and perhaps when I found out about it. One reason for worry might be a charismatic leader who is not accountable to anyone. You cannot take it for granted, because of this lack of accountability, that you can trust such a leader. Then there are probably inexperienced young followers in leadership positions and even older followers who may have some rather dubious motives. It is, however, important to recognise that worrying behaviour becomes far more visible if it is found to take place in a cult. If you see a headline that says "Cult Member Commits Suicide," this could be perfectly true, and if it happens three or four times and you keep seeing this reported, then you are inclined to think all cult members are likely to commit suicide. However, we need to recognise that we never see a headline that says "Church of England Member Commits Suicide"--it just isn't news, so we don't build up a picture of the Church of England as a religion in which the members are going to commit suicide. |
To take another example, consider the sexual abuse that has been carried out by Catholic priests and has come to the notice of the public recently. Now, that has made a "good story." But, generally speaking, we tend to notice the bad things and assume they are typical of cults and not of the population at large. So one of the things that scholars have to do is to compare the rates of particular kinds of behaviour, notwithstanding whether it is good or bad. Comparison is the basis of all social science, and if you see how much the variables of child abuse, suicide or what have you are associated with "cult" or "not cult," then you may find that cults actually have a lower rate of suicide than the population at large. Then our question might become: Why do people not commit suicide in cults? Of course, it might be because people who aren't going to commit suicide join cults and it isn't that joining a cult stops you committing suicide--though lots of people have said that it has stopped them when they joined. The point is, however, that at least the question is being asked, and it isn't just being assumed that suicide is typical of cult members and atypical of non-members of a similar age and social background. |
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| Eileen Barker discusses the insight on society we gain from its 'cults'. | |
Fathom: To what extent do cults reveal the limits of normality in a society, or what society will tolerate? It must vary from country to country. |
Barker: Yes, it is the Durkheimian thing about boundaries, and recognising what is normal when you see what isn't normal. But, of course, what is normal in one society is abnormal in another. Thus, the Russians can be worried about the Catholics and Catholic societies about Hindus. It is difficult to draw very clear boundaries in modern society, because it is so diverse itself. There are so many different things going on, but undoubtedly alternative religions do highlight certain aspects of society so that one can see what is not considered to be normal or tolerable. |
I took my students yesterday to the Black Lesbian and Gay Christian Fellowship (we go on a number of field trips to various places). The members of the congregation were telling us that in the black churches to be gay is really very much frowned upon--far more than in the white churches, where it is more accepted and taken for granted. In quite a few groups and societies, it doesn't really matter whether you are straight or gay, and in other ones it matters very much. I learned quite a bit about the black community and black Christianity yesterday by talking to them, because they are slightly different from what you would hear in a white Church of England congregation; though, of course, you can get quite a lot of discussion about such matters in parts of the Church of England and elsewhere. |
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| Eileen Barker disentangles the truth and fiction behind brainwashing | |
Fathom: In your experience, has brainwashing ever been a reasonable allegation? |
Barker: In the 1970s when this allegation was being plastered everywhere, particularly about the Unification Church, which was seen as the brainwashing cult par excellence, I decided that I would try to do a study that actually looked to see what happened when someone joined the Unification Church. The anti-cultists were saying, "Oh, you're brainwashed!" to the Moonies, and the Moonies were responding, "We're not brainwashed," and the anti-cultists then said, "You have been brainwashed to believe you were not brainwashed." In other words, each side would keep to their own position and hold on to it with no chance of trying to resolve the issue. I thought, as a social scientist, that I must try to do some research designed in such a way that anybody else repeating the study would come up with the same result, whatever their presuppositions may have been. |
Now, of course, brainwashing is a metaphor. I mean, nobody stands there, takes the brain out and washes with Persil or Daz and then puts it all back again. In fact, Moonies sometimes say "We are brainwashed, because our minds are cleaner and less full of garbage than yours." |
What I did was to look at more than 1,000 people who got interested enough in the Unification Church to agree to go to the residential workshop (which was just a tiny proportion of the numbers that had been approached on the streets and invited back to a Unification centre). The workshops were where the so-called irresistible and irreversible brainwashing or mind control was meant to take place, so that you went in one end and then you came out at the other end of the sausage machine as a brainwashed robot Moonie. (Also, I myself attended the workshop several times, so you might argue that I am a brainwashed Moonie). |
Well, to cut a very long story short, out of that 1,000, well over 90 percent said, "Thanks very much, we don't want to be a Moonie" at the end of the workshop. Of those who did join, the majority left of their own free will within a comparatively short time, so one had to conclude that the brainwashing was actually not nearly as effective as if someone had been born into an old religion where they manage to keep far more potential members. The Unification "technique" certainly wasn't irresistible and it certainly wasn't irreversible, so that theory just didn't fit the facts. |
Another thing that was said about people who did join the movement was that they must be particularly pathetic people who have had an unhappy childhood, etc. So I took a number of independent criteria, such as whether they'd attempted to commit suicide, had a miserable childhood, or were slightly "peculiar" in some way or another (using a number of variables to operationalise the concept "peculiar"). I then compared (a) a sample of the population of people of roughly the same background and age with (b) the people who went to these residential workshops and didn't become Moonies, and with (c) those who did become Moonies. |
Now, the hypothesis was that the "pathetic" or "suggestible" people would be those who became Moonies. What I actually found, however, was that it was a small subgroup of those who went to the workshop and either didn't join or joined for a very short time and then left who fitted into this category. |
These findings led me to the conclusion that if we wanted to understand why people were converting, then we had to understand something about what the converts were looking for and how this fitted in with what the movement was offering. You couldn't just look at the techniques, because they wouldn't explain the differences between the joiners and non-joiners, and I found quite a few things that the Unification Church seemed to be offering to those who did join. After some time, I started to find that I could pick out those who would be likely to join from those who wouldn't, and, on the whole, those who joined did so for positive, idealistic reasons. However, I also found that after they had been in the movement for a short time they might find that they weren't getting what they wanted and then they would leave. In other words, they not only could leave, they did so. |
My conclusion was, therefore, that brainwashing is not a very helpful explanation. It sometimes helps parents in the short run, and it can help people who think it is incredible that somebody could believe the sorts of things that people in new religions believe or do the sorts of things they do, but using the concept of brainwashing is saying more about the people who find joining the Unification Church incredible than it is about the actual processes that go on--and it helps to conceal several important processes from further scrutiny. |
Also, of course, the concept of brainwashing has been used as a justification for the illegal practice of deprogramming. Deprogrammers and their associates will say, "If you really love little Johnny or big Johnny and you want to see him again, you should pay us tens of thousands of pounds, and we'll go and kidnap him and get him back and make him ordinary again." That has had disastrous effects on individuals. Some of them escape and go back into the movement far more fanatical than they were before. Others come out and they are taught, "Well, it wasn't your fault, you were brainwashed." But imagine what that does for someone's sense of identity and self-assurance if they are taught that it wasn't that they made a mistake--all of us make mistakes--but that they were incapable of even making a mistake because these people had had complete control over them. |
Deprogramming doesn't happen so much now. There are now methods called exit-counselling and thought-reform counselling, which are a bit more civilised and certainly more legal than deprogramming, but the concept of brainwashing is still widely used, despite the fact that almost all social scientists in the field have said it just does not provide an adequate explanation. In fact, it is wrong. |
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| Eileen Barker points out that Christian beliefs can be bizarre in themselves | |
Fathom: Do you find that millenarianism has been rife this year? Have groups had to adjust beliefs in accordance with the onset of the millennium? |
Barker: Of course, in recent months we have been seeing quite a few adjustments in millennial expectations. At the same time, there are still several millennial groups who have seen the "signs and wonders" and they continue to interpret all sorts of things that have been happening as meaning these are the Last Days; Armageddon is about to come; the Lord of the Second Advent is going to return on a white charger with a sword. There are the earthquakes; there is the nuclear bomb; there are the bar codes with 666 in them; there are UFOs from outer space; there is the takeover for a world government by the United Nations; and all manner of other conspiracy theories and other happenings that are interpreted to show that these are the Last Days. I'm sure the floods that we are having at the moment will be seen as part of it. In fact, I have got a couple of my favourite millenarians from a Christian millenarian cult coming to see me tomorrow, so I shall ask them about the meaning of Uckfield getting so swamped and what's happening at York, and I've no doubt I'll be given a biblical interpretation from the Book of Revelation. |
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| Eileen Barker talks about millenarian beliefs | |
Fathom: What kind of measures have been taken against cults by governments and by popular public action? |
Barker: There is an enormous amount of difference, of course. If, for example, you go to some of the Islamic countries where the Shari'ah is the law, people who belong to and try to propagate any religion other than Islam or violate the Islamic law are in trouble. A whole lot of the new religions have sent missionaries who would try and work underground in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, and they might well end up in prison. And the Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to the gas chambers in large numbers during the Nazi period. |
Nowadays in Christian-based societies control is frequently operated through registration. New religions may not be allowed to register, because registration can depend on how many members you have got and how long you have been in the country or even whether you have got the "right" beliefs--which is quite difficult to defend, given that the country may be a signatory of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which says that anybody can believe what they want and manifest their religion as long as they don't interfere with the rights of anybody else. But undoubtedly a lot of countries do make very strong distinctions between religions and don't allow people to practise, to go to schools with other people, to have certain jobs. It does not have to be new religions--the Jews during the Nazi period present an example of an old religious movement suffering horrific persecution. In Armenia a few years ago, some paramilitaries descended on all the non-Orthodox or apostolic religions and beat them up. The Hare Krishna temple was desecrated and the devotees were beaten up. None of them died (as they had during the Soviet period), but there was blood streaming everywhere. The American Embassy actually interfered at some point. The Baptists were invaded as well, so it wasn't just new religions but religions new to the area. However, the Mormons were not attacked in this instance. When I asked the Mormons how they had managed to escape, they said it was because God was on their side, but I think the fact that they own a rather large cement factory which employs quite a large number of people may have had something to do with it. Now, that was a one-off and I do not think it is likely to happen again; but it was not prevented by the authorities, even if they were not directly associated. Nevertheless, there is quite a lot of evidence that, indirectly, some government members were associated with these attacks. |
In some Western countries, too, it is very difficult belonging to a minority religion. Government reports containing lists of "cults" in France and Belgium have given rise to a lot of problems--you can get vigilante groups who are, as it were, given permission to behave badly towards the new religions, beating them up or doing things that they wouldn't do to older traditional religions, because of the generally accepted knowledge which people have that members of cults are bad and evil people. Politicians are not going to gain votes by defending new religions. A popular attitude is that something ought to be done to them because they are different; they are scapegoated the whole time. But we aren't so likely to throw them to the lions or burn them at the stake as we have been in the past. |
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| Eileen Barker discusses punitive measures against new religious movements | |
Fathom: What is the nature of legislation to deal with and regulate new religions and also to protect them? |
Barker: I was talking to somebody in the Czech Republic government the other day, and he was saying that he didn't want to stop some of the new religions getting registered, because then you couldn't see what they were up to so easily; and some of the new religions have told me that they don't want to get registered, because they feel they will then be controlled. But there might be a number of disadvantages in not being registered. There can be problems related to schooling, or about whether you should have modern medical treatment or use your own medicine and faith healing. What happens when a child isn't allowed to take blood transfusion? Or when Christian Scientists don't believe you should go to a doctor? There was a case in France recently about a new religious movement, the Twelve Tribes, aka the Messianic Community, where a child was probably going to die unless it had an operation which probably wouldn't work and which would cause a lot of suffering for the child. The parents decided that they would just let the child die and ended up in prison. This might not have happened in some other countries. |
Another thing that happens is that a lot of religions have missionaries that travel around the world, but they are not being given visas to enter certain countries. If they have got visas, they may have to go home after a short time; they can't settle there. Then there are special rules about gathering together for religious services; more than a certain number of people meeting in a house may be told that they cannot do this, because it goes against zoning rules in a residential area. This can happen in the most liberal of countries. Recently a mosque was going to be set up in the road that I live in, and my husband and I were the only people who wouldn't sign a petition saying the Muslims couldn't meet there because it is a nice leafy suburb that shouldn't have its character changed. |
It is probable that the refusal to issue visas and the use of registration laws are the most common ways in which new religions are controlled in democratic societies today--that and the publication of reports. In the mid-1990s, there was a teport put out by the Russian Ministry of Public Health and Medical Industry which was absolutely outrageous to anybody who had a minimum of logic and rational sense. It stated all kinds of things that were contradictory and non sequiturs, quite apart from things that were totally untrue about the new religions. I get my graduate students every year to write a critique of it to see if they can point out the ways in which it is so abysmal. Again, this sort of publication gives permission to the general population to discriminate and say that these people are wicked and terrible and are doing all sorts of criminal activities without allowing us to find out who is really doing bad things. In other words, by producing such unreliable information those who wish to attack new religions may well be preventing us from being able to recognise some of the very real problems that can arise as a result of the existence of some of the movements. |
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