Cults

A Reference and Guide

James R. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317545125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Cults examines the history and current status of cults across the United States, Europe, and East Asia. Focusing on the principal controversial religions and movements that have attracted major media attention, the book also includes profiles of hundreds of minority religions, from Jesus People and Rastafarians to voodoo practitioners and the human-cloning Raelians. All the issues central to the practice and the fear of cults are examined - apocalypticism, deprogramming, social isolation, cults and the media, the use and threat of violence, child custody, libel, tax evasion, solicitation, and the techniques of persuasion and conviction - as are the many charismatic cult leaders. Cults presents a comprehensive and authoritative reference, offering a balanced view of the controversy surrounding these new religious movements, assessing the movements themselves as well as the legal and governmental responses to them, including attempts to quantify membership.

CHAPTER 1

OVERVIEW

NEW RELIGIONS EAST AND WEST

The controversy over new religions is a complex social issue that has engendered an emotional and often mean-spirited debate. At the center of this debate is a wide variety of diverse groups that often have little in common. Most embrace belief systems at odds with mainstream religion, though some are quite orthodox. Also, while they are usually relatively small, new organizations, almost always have roots in older, larger traditions. The one trait these groups share is that they have been controversial at one point or another in their existence. Decades of social conflict have left their impress on the term “cult,” which, to the general public, indicates a religious group that is false, dangerous, or otherwise bad.

The sharpness of this controversy has tended to polarize participants into extreme positions, making it difficult to find a middle ground from which to approach the issue. Hence, rather than tackling the problem directly, it might well repay our efforts to work our way into the debate indirectly through the stories of two contrasting religious groups that will serve to highlight some of the dilemmas associated with the cult controversy.

In the following sections, the story of the Solar Temple, the group involved in a series of murder/suicides in 1994, 1995, and 1997, will be used to exemplify the concerns that “anti-cultists” bring to the controversy. Falun Gong, the physical culture (Qi Gong) group that has been heavily persecuted in China since 1999, will, on the other hand, be used to exemplify the concerns of religious libertarians.

A. The Solar Temple

In October 1994, 53 members of the Solar Temple in Switzerland and in Québec were murdered or committed suicide. On 4 October, a fire destroyed Joseph Di Mambro’s (the group’s primary leader) villa in Morin Heights, Canada. Police found five charred bodies in the ruins. Three had been stabbed to death before the fire. At 1:00 a.m. on 5 October, a fire started in Ferme des Rochettes, near Cheiry, in the Canton of Fribourg, one of the centers of the Solar Temple in Switzerland. Police found 23 bodies in a room that had been converted into a temple. Some had been shot; many others were found with their heads inside plastic bags. At 3:00 a.m. the same day, three chalets inhabited by members of the Solar Temple caught fire almost simultaneously at Les Granges sur Salvan, in the Valais Canton. Police found 25 bodies, along with the remains of the devices that had initiated the fires and the pistol that had shot the people near Cheiry.

For many months prior to the initial spate of murder/suicides, rumors of financial mismanagement had been circulating among Solar Temple members. A few days before their dramatic final “transit,” a three-month-old infant had been killed at their Canadian site by driving a wooden stake through its heart. Surviving members explained that Di Mambro had ordered the killing because the baby was the Antichrist. Several days later, Di Mambro and 12 followers convened a ritual Last Supper together. The suicide/murders took place a few days following this meeting. Fifteen members of the inner circle—referred to as the “awakened”—took poison. Thirty others—the “immortals”—were shot or smothered to death. Eight others—termed “traitors”—were also murdered.

Subsequently, sixteen members of the Temple died in France in December 1995 and five more in Québec in March 1997. On 16 December 1995, sixteen of the remaining European members disappeared from their homes in France and Switzerland. Four left notes hinting at a second mass suicide. Thirteen adults and three children were later found dead in a remote forest in southeast France. Investigators concluded that at least four of the sixteen did not die willingly. Most had been drugged. Two of the sixteen shot the others, poured gasoline over their bodies, set them on fire, and then shot themselves so that they would also fall into the flames.

Finally, five additional adult members and three teenage children apparently tried to commit suicide on the spring equinox of 20 March 1997, in Québec, Canada. The attempt failed due to faulty equipment. The teenage sons and daughter of one of the couples convinced their parents that they wanted to live. They were allowed to leave, and the adults subsequently succeeded in burning down their house with themselves in it. Four of the bodies were arranged to form a cross. The teens were found drugged and disoriented, but otherwise safe, in a nearby building. A note was found which described the group belief that death on earth leads to a transit to a new planet where their lives would continue.

Di Mambro had been fascinated with esotericism from a young age. He joined the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) in 1956, and was a member until at least 1968. In the1960s, he came into contact with several persons who would later play a role in Solar Temple history, including Jacques Breyer, who had initiated a “Templar resurgence” in France in 1952. Several groups, including Di Mambro’s, trace part of their roots to Breyer’s work. “Templar” in this context refers to the Knights Templar, the medieval order to which groups in the Neo-Templar tradition ultimately trace their lineage. (This claimed lineage is almost certainly spurious; instead, Neo-Templar groups are esoteric organizations loosely in the larger theosophical tradition.) Several major points of doctrine, as well as an initial group of followers, began to come together in the 1960s. In 1971, after dealing with some legal problems in Nîmes connected with a number of petty crimes such as writing bad checks, Di Mambro established himself in Annemasse, near the Swiss border. In 1978, he founded the Golden Way Foundation in Geneva, the predecessor organization to the Solar Temple.

Recognizing him as a man of intelligence and charisma, Di Mambro brought Luc Jouret in to become the public face of his organization. Jouret was trained as a medical doctor and was an accomplished practitioner of homeopathy. He also lectured on naturopathy and ecological topics, and was active in the wider circuit of the French-speaking New Age movement. He spoke in New Age bookstores and to eclectic esoteric groups in France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada.

The International Chivalric Order Solar Tradition (Solar Temple) was founded in 1984. It absorbed the Golden Way Foundation. Jouret claimed that he had been a member of the fourteenth-century Christian Order of the Knights Templar during a previous incarnation, that his daughter Emanuelle was “the cosmic child,” and that after death he would lead them to a planet which revolves around the star Sirius. Jouret also believed himself to be Christ. Solar Temple groups were organized in Québec, Canada, as well as in Australia, Switzerland, France, and other countries. The leadership saw themselves as playing a pivotal role on the world stage. Partially as a consequence of this view, they felt that the Solar Temple was being persecuted by the various governments with whom they had problems.

Temple teachings emphasized apocalyptic themes drawn from certain elements of extremist survivalist thinking, from the New Age notion of an imminent end of the world due to an environmental catastrophe, and from other sources. The group felt that they were to play a major role in this collapse. It seems that in the years 1986 to 1993, Jouret received a series of revelations until it was revealed to him that between the end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994 the Earth would be forsaken by its last “guardians.”

On 8 March 1993, two Canadian members were arrested while attempting to buy three semiautomatic guns with silencers (illegal in Canada). Although committed to trial, they were freed on bail the next day. Because Jouret had prompted them to buy the weapons, he was also committed to trial (he was in Europe at the time), and an arrest warrant was issued against him. This seems to have been the critical event precipitating the leadership’s decision to make their final dramatic “transit”

B. The anti-cult movement: a response to the anti-social actions of extreme groups

The deaths of Solar Temple members were part of a series of dramatic incidents involving members of non-traditional religions. Other incidents include the Jonestown murder/suicides (1978), the ATF/FBI raid on the Branch Davidian community (1993), the Tokyo subway poison gas attack (1995), the Heaven’s Gate suicides (1997), and the deaths of members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (2000). In the wake of these events, the mass media sought out a variety of “cult experts” in an effort to make sense of seemingly irrational behavior. Most of these experts offered the public an explanation in terms of the notion of cultic mind control, colloquially known as “brainwashing” The seemingly crazy actions of “cult” members were not difficult to explain, this group of experts claimed, as long as one understands that megalomaniacal cult leaders are able to control the thought processes of their followers: under the influence of mind control, members of such groups are capable of anything because they have given up their wills to the leader.

According to spokespeople for “cult watchdog” groups, our society is populated by hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of cult groups, many of which are capable of extreme actions. Beyond mind control and the imputation of sinister motives to the leader, standard accusations leveled against minority religions unfortunate enough to be labeled cults include: deceptive recruiting practices, financial and sexual exploitation, food and sleep deprivation of members, various forms of illegal activities, child abuse, ritual abuse, and so forth. Because of the interest the mass media have taken in this issue, this stereotype has become widely accepted in contemporary society.

Putting aside the problematic notion of “cultic brainwashing” for the moment, there are or have been groups for which some of these accusations are or were appropriate. In particular, children have been abused within a few religious communities. Members of certain organizations have been financially and/or sexually exploited by the leadership. A handful of minority religions have taken the law into their own hands. And at least one group consciously deceived potential recruits by systematically hiding their identity until after workshop attendees had become de facto members.

There are, however, obvious dangers in unreflectively applying the cult stereotype to every religious group that strikes one as strange or different. The situation is not unlike that of viewing a race or an ethnicity in terms of a generalization derived from the minority group’s least reputable members. The types of problems that can be generated by jumping to the conclusion that all unusual religious communities must be guilty of misdeeds simply because extreme accusations are leveled against them are well exemplified in the campaign against Falun Gong that is being carried out by the People’s Republic of China.

C. Falun Gong

In 1999, the Chinese regime launched a new campaign against spiritual and religious groups. Falun Gong was one of the groups targeted as superstitious and reactionary by a press campaign. Unlike other targets of this campaign, the 10,000 members of Falun Gong, which is a Qi Gong physical culture movement, reacted by staging a peaceful demonstration on 25 April 1999, outside Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, the residence of China’s top leaders. This was the largest such demonstration in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The regime seemed to be especially frightened by the failure of its intelligence service to prevent the demonstration, and by membership in Falun Gong of some medium-level political and military leaders.

In subsequent months, practitioners were harassed in various areas of the country. Some practitioners were told that their phones were being monitored and that, if they continued, their retirement pensions would be terminated. Police and other officials began breaking into practitioner’s homes and confiscating Falun Gong material. Some followers were arrested and disappeared from sight. Thousands of members demonstrated peacefully in about thirty Chinese cities to protest these actions.

Qi Gong is the generic name of a complex of techniques aimed at attaining physical and spiritual well-being, with a tradition in China predating the Christian era. It is often referred to as Chinese yoga. Although spiritual and religious activities in general are viewed with suspicion in Communist China, Qi Gong has been tolerated as a traditional set of physical exercises. A semiofficial National Qi Gong Federation has never been seriously disturbed by the regime. The situation is different, however, with respect to Qi Gong groups who strongly claim the primacy of the spiritual element, and who recognize a charismatic living leader.

The largest (but by no means the only) such Qi Gong group is Falun Gong. Its founder, Li Hongzi, established his peculiar brand of Qi Gong in 1992, after having left the semi-official Federation. In 1998, Li moved permanently to New York City, from where he oversees the expansion of Falun Gong internationally. Small groups exist in the main metropolitan areas of the USA and Canada, and in some thirty other countries.

Although the persecution has scared many followers and driven them underground, millions remain in China and several thousand abroad. Exactly how many members Falun Gong has is a matter of dispute (the government uses a figure of 2 million; Li claims 100 million), and “membership” may not be an entirely applicable concept. In fact, although the movement recommends a nine-day introduction course and frequent contacts with local centers, it also states that everybody can simply start practicing Falun Gong by following the instructions from one of the many books, cassettes, and websites (the principal site being www.falundafa.org) quickly available in a variety of languages. The possibility of such a self-initiation, without a master and a lengthy discipline, is at the core of the criticism by other Qi Gong groups against Li and his movement.

The group was officially outlawed on 22 July 1999. The government accused it of “spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and jeopardizing social stability” (cited in Associated Press 1999). On 29 July, Chinese authorities issued an arrest warrant for Master Li. The government arrested hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners and proceeded with show trials. Some were sent directly to labor camps without trials. A spokesperson for Falun Gong Practitioners in North America asserted that “lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda. Also, no legal representation on behalf of them from the concerned international community is allowed to be present at the trial” (cited in Robinson 1999).

The US House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 18 and 19 November 1999 that criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi responded by asserting that Falun Gong is not a religious organization. Nor is it simply a Qi Gong group. Rather, it is a destructive cult that harms Chinese society and its people. In describing Falun Gong as a dangerous “cult,” the Chinese government drew heavily upon the cult stereotype that has been circulating in Western countries for the prior three decades. For example, authorities accused the group of:

• Brainwashing its members.

• Practitioners are said to worship Mr Li.

• They turn Communist officials into cult members in order to learn state secrets.

• Falun Gong suggests that their followers not take any medication.

• Some members have become paranoid and suffered from hallucinations.

Ignoring international pressure, authorities responded with an unprecedented public campaign against the movement propagating anti-Falun Gong propaganda via the media of tracts and comics. China also asked the USA to arrest and extradite Li, a request the USA quickly turned down, inviting the Chinese instead to stop what the outside world perceived as an obvious instance of religious persecution.

The Chinese government’s campaign against the group is the most serious government crackdown since Tiananmen Square, which took place over a decade prior. Falun Gong has received global political attention as other nations specify this incident of China’s religious intolerance as grounds to limit trade and normal relations. The proliferation of Falun Gong websites and information on the internet quickly expanded international awareness. Also, the free access to Li Hongzhi’s teachings via the internet have aided the spread of the practice, promoting a global movement.

Several scholars have advanced hypotheses to explain China and Falun Gong’s turbulent interactions. In The Mystery of China’s Falun Gong: Its Rise and Its Sociological Implications, National University of Singapore sociologists John Wong and William T. Liu hypothesize that China’s fear of Falun Gong reflects their anxieties over the power of the internet. The authors forecast the group’s survival in and outside of China, concluding that the Chinese government’s crackdown has been ineffective. Wong and Liu investigated the movement’s tremendous popularity, identifying China’s growing elderly and retired population seeking cheaper health care alternatives to the state system as a factor in its growth.

Authorities may perceive the Falun Gong as a political threat for several reasons. The Ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Overview
• 2. Court Decisions, Legislation, and Governmental Actions
• 3. Controversial Groups and Movements: An Expanded Glossary
• 4. Documents and Data
• 5. Organizations and Websites
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index