A Defense of Sects
In 1983 I attended a conference on the media in Cartagena, Colombia, presided over by the respected intellectuals Germán Arciniegas and Jacques Soustelle. There were at this conference, besides journalists from all over the world, some tireless young people endowed with the fixed and smoldering gaze of those who believe themselves to be in full possession of the truth. At a given moment, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, the organization that was sponsoring the congress through a front, made his appearance, causing a huge commotion among the youths. A little later, I realized that the progressive mafia had added to my roster of sins that of having sold out to a sinister sect, the Moonies.
Ever since I lost my faith, I’ve been in search of another to replace it, so I rushed with great excitement to see if the one espoused by that round and smiling Korean with his mangled English might be up to the task. This led me to read the magnificent book on the Unification Church by Eileen Barker, a professor at the London School of Economics who has probably studied the phenomenon of the proliferation of religious sects at the end of the millennium more seriously and responsibly than anyone else (I met her at that conference in Cartagena). From her I learned, among many other things, that the Reverend Moon not only considers himself assigned by the Creator to the trifling task of uniting Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism in a single church but also believes himself to be a hypostasis of Buddha and Jesus Christ. This, naturally, utterly disqualifies me from joining his ranks: if, despite the excellent credentials that two thousand years of history have conferred on him, I am totally incapable of believing in the divinity of Christ, it would be hard for me to accept him in the form of a North Korean evangelist who couldn’t even beat the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (which sent him to jail for a year for tax evasion).
However, if the Moonies (and the sixteen hundred other religious groups and factions registered by INFORM, which is headed by Professor Barker) leave me skeptical, I feel the same way about those who for some time have devoted themselves to harassing these groups and petitioning governments to outlaw them, arguing that they corrupt youth, destabilize families, swindle their own members, and infiltrate state institutions. What is happening these days in Germany with the Church of Scientology gives this subject a troubling immediacy. The authorities of some states of the Federal Republic—Bavaria, especially—intend to exclude Scientologists from administrative posts, and they have organized boycotts of films featuring John Travolta and Tom Cruise because they belong to the Church of Scientology, and have banned Chick Corea from giving a concert in Baden-Wiirttemberg for the same reason.
Although it is an absurd exaggeration to compare this harassment to the persecution suffered by the Jews under Nazism, as was done in a declaration signed by thirty-four Hollywood personalities in a paid advertisement in The New York Times protesting the German initiatives against Scientology, such acts do constitute a flagrant violation of the democratic principles of tolerance and pluralism and set a dangerous precedent. It’s fine to accuse Tom Cruise and his beautiful wife, Nicole Kidman, of impoverished sensibilities and terrible literary taste if they prefer reading the scientific-theological productions of L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology four decades ago, to the Gospels. But in a country whose constitution guarantees its citizens the right to believe in whatever they like, or not to believe in anything at all, why should the authorities feel that they may stick their noses into the matter?
The only serious argument for prohibiting or discriminating against religious sects lies outside the reach of democratic regimes; it is viable in those societies where religious power and political power are one and the same and where, as in Saudi Arabia or Sudan, the state determines which is the true religion, thereby assuming the right to prohibit false ones and to punish heretics, heterodoxy, sacrilege, and enemies of the faith. In an open society, this isn’t possible: the state must respect individual beliefs, as wild as they may seem, and must not identify itself with any church, since if it does it will inevitably end up riding roughshod over the beliefs (or lack of beliefs) of a large number of its citizens. We have seen this recently in Chile, one of the most modern states in Latin America but nevertheless little better than the Stone Age in some respects, since it still hasn’t passed a divorce law, owing to the opposition of the influential Catholic Church.
The contentions wielded against sects are often correct. Their converts are frequently fanatics, their methods of proselytizing are intrusive (one Jehovah’s Witness besieged me for a long year in Paris, trying to convince me to take the redemptive plunge and driving me into a frenzy of exasperation), and many of them literally empty their members’ pockets. Couldn’t one say exactly the same thing, though, about many extremely respectable offshoots of traditional religions? Are the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, who come out on Saturdays to stone cars driving through their neighborhood, a model of flexibility? Is Opus Dei by any chance less demanding in the commitment it requires from its full-fledged members than the most intransigent evangelical operations? These are examples selected at random, out of many others, which prove many times over that all religions—from those validated by the patina of centuries and millennia, a rich literature, and the blood of martyrs, to the most incredibly flamboyant, based in Brooklyn, Salt Lake City, or Tokyo and promoted on the Internet—are potentially intolerant and by nature monopolistic and that the justifications for limiting or prohibiting the functioning of some of them are just as valid when applied to any other. In other words, one is left with two options: either all are prohibited without exception, as has been attempted by some naïve regimes—the French Revolution, Lenin, Mao, Castro—or all are authorized, with the sole stipulation that they obey the law.
It hardly bears saying that I am a firm believer in this second option. And not just because the ability to practice a religion without facing discrimination or persecution is a basic human right. For the vast majority of human beings, religion is the only path leading to a spiritual life and an ethical conscience. Without religions there would be no such thing as human coexistence or respect for the law or any of the essential covenants that sustain civilized life. One very great mistake, repeated many times over in the course of history, has been the belief that knowledge, science, and culture would eventually liberate man from the “superstitions” of religion, until progress made religion obsolete. Secularization has not replaced our gods with the ideas, knowledge, or convictions that might have taken their place. It has left a spiritual void that human beings fill as best they can, sometimes with grotesque substitutes or multiple forms of neurosis or by heeding the call of those sects which, precisely because of their welcoming and tight-knit nature and their meticulous plan for all the instants of physical and spiritual life, offer balance and order to those who feel confused, lonely, or lost in today’s world.
In this sense they are useful and should be not only respected but encouraged. Certainly not, however, with subsidies or taxpayers’ money. The democratic state, which is and may only be secular or neutral in matters of religion, gives up that neutrality if it exempts one religion from paying taxes and allows it other privileges which are not extended to minority faiths by arguing that the majority or a considerable percentage of the country’s citizens profess the same faith. This is a dangerous policy, because it discriminates in the subjective sphere of beliefs and promotes institutional corruption.
The furthest one should go in this regard is to do what Brazil did when it built Brasília, its new capital: donate a stretch of land along an ad hoc avenue and allow any church in the world to build a house of worship on it if it likes. Several dozen stand there, if my memory doesn’t deceive me: big, ostentatious buildings, pluralistic and idiosyncratic in design, among which thunders, proud and bristling with cupolas and indecipherable symbols, the Rosicrucian Cathedral.