Presentation by Rev. Heber C. Jentzsch, President of the
Church of Scientology International
to the
Discussion in Congress held by
The Institute on Religion and Public Policy
The State vs Religion in France
July 13, 2000
Ladies and gentlemen:
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I will begin by describing the background to the alarming religious intolerance existing in France today. I will then give specific examples of discrimination, and even persecution, that members of my religion, and indeed, a wide range of faiths are experiencing.
France is the only western European nation to have created a government panel, at cabinet level, unabashedly entitled the “Interministerial Mission to Combat [“lutte”] Sects.” Known by the acronym of MILS, the panel is headed by Alain Vivien, a French official whose role in modern France is, in a sense, not unlike that of a medieval despot whose arbitrary edicts determined life or death for the religiously devoted. In the end, all religions are targeted by his intolerance.
In addition to being president of MILS, a government body, M. Vivien is himself the president of one such French anti-religious group – known as CCMM. In 1993, he was one of the main speakers at a conference in Barcelona, Spain, co-sponsored by the American Cult Awareness Network, or CAN. Vivien maintained his relationship with CAN until that organization became defunct after being found liable in a multi-million dollar judgement. CAN and one of its deprogrammers had abducted and abused a Pentecostal Christian in an effort to force him to abandon his religion. That judgement against CAN was upheld all the way to the Supreme Court. It effectively ended, in the United States, the criminal practice of deprogramming.
Despite his affiliation with the American anti-religious movement, M. Vivien is in fact unashamedly anti-American. In June last year, he told the French news agency, Agence France Presse:
“In the United States, freedoms are crazy. In the name of the First Amendment of the American Constitution which forbids legislation on religious matters, one can say and do anything.”
Soon after being appointed president of MILS in 1998, he told the Protestant newspaper Reforme:
“[religion] should be the very field legislators should regulate.”
Thanks to the First Amendment, the anti-religious movement in this country has never acquired influence with the U.S. government. That is unfortunately not true in France. In 1998, a Swedish government commission concluded that “In France, the state has on the whole made common cause with the anti-cult movement.”
Religious freedom in France suffered a serious decline following a 1996 parliamentary commission Report. The Report produced a virtual blacklist of 173 so-called “sects”, among them Baptists, Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists and Scientologists. Expert scholarship was not consulted by the members of the Commission, and they relied on propaganda and false rumors provided by the Renseignements Generaux, the French intelligence police. The RG, in turn, had received its information from the French anti-religious movement.
The U.S. State Department’s Report on International Religious Freedom, published last September, criticized the parliamentary commission’s report on the grounds that, “[it] was prepared without the benefit of full and complete hearings regarding the groups identified on the list. Groups were not told why they were placed on the list, and, because the document exists as a commission report to the National Assembly, there is no mechanism for changing or amending the list short of a new National Assembly Commission inquiry and report.” The State Department noted that following publication of the Report, “the ensuing publicity contributed to an atmosphere of intolerance and bias against minority religions.”
