Combating “Cults” and “Brainwashing” in the

United States and Western Europe: A Comment

on Richardson and Introvigne’s Report

THOMAS ROBBINS

The surge of harsh anti-cultism in parts of Europe may be generally contextualized in terms of recent spectacular
violence involving new movements as well as globalization, which transplants esoteric, aggressive movements
to societies with antithetical values. The notion of “brainwashing” as an anti-cult rationale was pioneered by
American activists but is now more influential in continental Western Europe than in the United States due in
part to the greater influence of secular humanism, the greater European tendency toward activist, paternalist
government, the shock of the Solar Temple killings, American deference to religious “free exercise,” and problems
of national unity and cultural assimilation in Europe that enhance distrust of what are perceived as alien spiritual
imports. Nevertheless, the legal climate regarding religious movements may conceivably become less favorable
in the United States. In general the “brainwashing” controversy has been characterized by pervasive confusions
of fact and interpretation and of process and outcome.

James Richardson and Massimo Introvigne have written an important and timely report on
alarming developments in continental Western Europe that have a vital significance for religious
liberty and for the legitimation (or, conversely, the constraint) of religious pluralism. The develop-
ments related by the authors should probably be contextualized partly in terms of recent episodes
of extreme violence, which reveal the disruptive potential of apocalyptic religious movements
with charismatic messianic leadership (Hall, Schuyler, and Trinh 2000). While the authors are
surely correct to talk of “moral panic,” exaggeration, and scapegoating, they acknowledge that
there is at least some limited “basis in reality” with respect to the behavior of some excoriated
groups. It is understandable that recent sensational violence associated with Aum Shinrikyo, the
Solar Temple, Heavens Gate, and other groups would augment the stereotypical thinking about
religious movements that Hall et al. (2000:16) has identified as “cult essentialism.”
The developments reported by the authors might also be contextualized in terms of the
ongoing process of spiritual globalization, in which strange and sometimes aggressively expan-
sionist movements are transplanted to different cultures that may enshrine official values such
as nationalism, secularism, or religious orthodoxy, values that are hostile to seemingly alien
“religious multinationals.”1 Globalization facilitates the growth of new movements and spiri-
tual innovation but also encourages the emergence of tensions and conflicts over same and the
mobilization against “cults” (Hexham and Poewe 1997; Beckford 2000).
A follow-up paper by the authors or an extended version of the present report would no doubt
probe further the cultural, historical, and constitutional reasons underlying what the authors
clearly consider to be a more repressive Western European policy toward “cults” compared to the
United States, and more particularly a greater Western European receptivity to “brainwashing”
claims, which, the authors imply, have been somewhat discredited in the United States. In the final
published version of their article, the authors make a limited exploration in this area, which the
present writer will attempt to extend in the latter part of this Comment. However, I will initially
venture some very tentative observations on the validity of parts of their analytical report and on
the brainwashing controversy.

Thomas Robbins is an independent scholar at 427 4th Street, SW, Apt. 8-A, Rochester, Minnesota, 55902. Email:
petersonts@aol.com

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

170 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

BRAINWASHING: LAW AND CLIMATE

Reading the article by Richardson and Introvigne I got a distinct impression that the con-
tinental Western European milieu reported by the authors somewhat resembles an earlier more
alarmist and repressive climate in the United States. Like the Western European climate described
by Richardson and Introvigne, the American anti-cult milieu in the 1970s and early 1980s involved
a number of inflammatory official and semi-official reports and investigations, including Senator
Dole’s “unofficial” 1979 hearings, Congressman Ottinger’s (1980) essay in the Congressional
Record, “Cults and their Slaves” (Ottinger wanted a National Conservatorship Law to facilitate
the forcible retrieval of adult devotees by parents), and Professor Richard Delgado’s highly in-
fluential, nearly 100-page article, “Religious Totalism” in the Southern California Law Review
(1977), which justified court-sanctioned coercive deprogramming. Through most of the 1970s
judges often granted custody orders to parents allowing them to physically remove adult children
from spiritual movements and have them forcibly confined for deprogramming (Robbins and
Anthony 1982).
Today all of this seems to civil libertarians like a bad dream, and the primary vehicle of
anti-brainwashing legal activism in the United States involves civil suits filed by ex-members
of movements claiming past psycho-victimization (Anthony and Robbins 1995). The shocks
associated with Waco, the Solar Temple, Aum Shinrikyo, Heavens Gate, and Uganda have not
(yet) changed the situation in the United States or significantly intensified repression. The most
intense and legally formidable American anti-cultism still appears to have been in the past.
This brings us to the question of whether too sharp an implicit contrast has been drawn be-
tween American freedom and European repression, and especially between American rejection
and European embrace of the notion of brainwashing, that is, the psycho-manipulation of individ-
uals by sinister groups such that volition is overcome, personality disintegrates, and governmental
action in support of victims’ psychological integrity may be warranted. Ironically, anti-cult brain-
washing discourse, just like certain “cults,” is somewhat of an American export to Europe! The
outstanding theorists of cultic brainwashing have generally been Americans (e.g., Delgado 1977).
Yet the ideas of writers such as Margaret Singer, Richard Delgado, Louis West, John Clark, Flo
Conway, and Jim Siegelman may now be having their greatest impact in Europe.2 So far the legal
climate in the United States remains relatively mild.
Will this continue to be the case or will the cumulative impact of recent sensational and
sanguinary disasters lead to “the other shoe” dropping on religious movements, the American
climate becoming more repressive, and the U.S. courts becoming more receptive to claims of
mind control?
In this respect the authors note my reviewer’s comment that one major adverse appellate
court decision could reverse or significantly undermine the American trend in the 1990s toward
excluding “expert” testimony on mind control from civil suits involving religious groups as “more
prejudicial than probative” (Anthony and Robbins 1992, 1995). They feel that this is unlikely.
I unhappily demur. Any appellate court that considers cult/brainwashing issues at this time will
do so in a climate of information and opinion affected by recent spectacular events of collective
suicide-homicide in Uganda, Western Europe, Southern California, Japan, Texas, and elsewhere.
It is worth noting that about a decade intervened between the rejection of the brainwashing notion
by an appellate court in California in Katz v. Superior Court (1977) and the more receptive attitude
evinced by the California Supreme Court in Molko v. Unification Church (1988). In-between these
cases three events involving shocking violence resonated particularly strongly on the West Coast:
Jonestown, Synanon, and Rajneeshpuram. In my view, these well-publicized scandals contextu-
alize the distressing Molko decision. Judges interpret law and precedent partly in terms of their
assumptions about “reality” or their implicit model of “how the world works.” In cases involv-
ing intensive group processes, implicit models of psychological reality or how transformations
of belief and identity can be affected may be significant and may be influenced by spectacular
CULTS AND BRAINWASHING IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE 171

events, especially if not one event but a series of conspicuous events is involved. Future appellate
courts may therefore not necessarily follow past precedents and may not so readily devalue the
scientific status of Cassandra testimony on the menace of mind control as have other courts in
the 1990s. The future problem will be complicated by the fact that the post-Molko victories that
have been won against litigators advancing brainwashing claims have highlighted the issue of
scientific credibility more than the issue of First Amendment rights. Molko remains a notable if
somewhat ambiguous precedent to the effect that under certain conditions brainwashing claims
and supportive expert testimony do not outrage the First Amendment (Anthony and Robbins
1992).

BRAINWASHING: FACT AND INTERPRETATION

Richardson and Introvigne are correct to criticize some of the European reports for their
conspicuous over-reliance on apostate testimony. Such testimony may sometimes be empirically
valid, e.g., Jonestown defectors warning about suicide rehearsal rituals. But such testimony also
frequently features exaggerations and falsehoods, e.g., an ex-Davidian spreading rumors of a
ritual human sacrifice planned by David Koresh (Hall et al. 2000).
It appears to me, however, that a central confusion pervading the evaluation of apostate ac-
counts entails the failure to clearly distinguish between factual and interpretive claims. If, for
example, it is said by an ex-member that he and other devotees participated in all-night self-
criticism sessions or that they were told “thus and so” at a movement seminar, these are claims
that are theoretically subject to verification, although, in practice, actual verification could be
difficult. Suppose, however, an ex-convert states that he was “brainwashed,” or that, having been
“under mind control,” he had not operated as a convert under his own free will, or that he never
really wanted to be a devotee but he was just “at the wrong place at the wrong time” when he was
inveigled into the group. These are interpretive statements that are not, strictly speaking, true or
false, factual or counterfactual. Such assertions represent a person’s retrospective perspective on
his or her involvement in a social movement and as such they inhabit a different epistemologi-
cal plane than factual/counterfactual statements. (Of course interpretations may include factual
or counterfactual assertions as components.) Both sides in the brainwashing debate sometimes
confuse interpretive and factual/counterfactual statements, but particularly guilty of this are the
advocates of mind control claims who frequently treat ex-converts’ interpretive statements as
directly factual. However, critics of mind control claims may sometimes treat the interpretive
statements of apostates as simplistically counterfactual.
Perhaps it is possible to tentatively consider the basic brainwashing concept, particularly
as applied to formally voluntary associations, as fundamentally interpretive rather than fac-
tual/counterfactual although brainwashing-victimization narratives may contain specific, empir-
ically true (or false) auxiliary assertions. Interpretive assertions should not, in this writer’s view,
provide the basis for legal action, although factual components of an interpretive schema may
imply actionable offenses. I therefore take a somewhat dim view of legislation and litigation
rationalized in terms of general claims of brainwashing or “mental manipulation,” etc. But I also
believe that making such claims should not itself be an actionable offense, i.e., an individual should
not have to pay civil damages for making an essentially interpretive claim that the conversion-
commitment process in a certain group amounts to sinister brainwashing. When a statement is
essentially interpretive, the notion of libel should not apply, and the norm of free speech should
be controlling.
My view of mind control assertions as basically interpretive rather than straightforwardly
factual or counterfactual is partly convergent with the formulation of Bromley (forthcoming) who
sees the whole brainwashing controversy as essentially ideological and political and thus not
really subject to decisive empirical resolution. I do not want to be dogmatic about this, because
I am also impressed with the argument of Anthony (forthcoming) that there is no evidence
172 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

to support the notion that persons can be quickly and involuntarily reprogrammed in terms of
their basic beliefs and identity through a process of coercive or manipulated persuasion. I also
note an argument by Kent (forthcoming) who identifies a process of brainwashing that, unlike
the authors of the documents reported on by Richardson and Introvigne, he defines clearly and
restrictively, and that he feels may have existed in two groups. His definition requires physical
coercion and intimidation, which Kent forcefully argues is insupportable and society should
not tolerate. Although the term “brainwashing,” with its varying denotations and sensational
connotational baggage, should be excluded from social science (Anthony, forthcoming), it might
be possible to clearly and restrictively conceptualize a manipulative, coercive, or exploitative
process present in some groups that might have actionable subcomponents such as physical
intimidation or constraint. But it is interesting to note a pervasive ambiguity concerning whether
brainwashing is thought of as a process or as an outcome, i.e., is a brainwashed person one who
has lost his or her free will and autonomy and become “involuntarily” locked into an “imposed”
belief system or self-identity, or is he or she merely someone who has undergone an intensive
training or indoctrinational process that may allegedly be intended to produce a nonautonomous
outcome?
As a process, brainwashing (although I don’t like the term) is, in my view only insupportable
if its individual tangible components are outrageous. In contrast, the Swiss Canton of Ticino report
speculates favorably about a law that would punish behaviors tending to “destabilize” the person,
including “those behaviors that are not punishable in themselves but that are punishable when
they exist in combination.” A vague notion of “destabilizing the person” is thus used to justify
a criminal sanction in which individually legal acts can additively become a criminal offense.
Individual behavioral components of “mind control” actually sometimes appear mundane and
only seem sinister when their aggregate is interpretively and alarmingly labeled.

BRAINWASHING: LAW AND CULTURE

Clearly some of the legislative proposals suggested in the European reports such as fines
or jail (or organizational dissolution) for a “crime” such as “mental manipulation” or system-
atically (and possibly only psychologically) “impairing the capacity of another person to make
autonomous judgements” seem alien to American traditions. Why are European officials seem-
ingly less inhibited than American counterparts in going after “cults,” and why do they seem to be
harsher and more dynamic in their remedial recommendations as well as more willing to frame
the role of the state in terms of forcefully acting to counteract alleged psychological harms?
This is a particularly vexing issue because most of the movements involved in cataclysms
such as the People Temple, Branch Davidians, and Heavens Gate are American; moreover, the
psychologistic Cassandra discourse about cults and mind control was pioneered in the United
States! The greater decentralization of our system should also be noted: in the 1970s and 1980s
investigations and inflammatory reports issued from state legislatures, e.g., between 1979 and
1981 both houses of the New York State Legislature twice passed a bill that more or less legalized
coercive deprogramming (the governor vetoed the bill each time).
In the final published version of their paper, Richardson and Introvigne take a stab at contex-
tualizing the developments they describe. They hint that European governments generally tend to
be more activist, omnicompetent, and paternalist relative to the United States, where the notion
of “limited government” is (or used to be) an icon. From a politically liberal standpoint European
governmental dynamism is admirably compassionate and produces, for example, a more extensive
social safety net for individuals at risk for poverty and hunger. One drawback from a libertarian
standpoint is the state’s proclivity to take responsibility for the citizens’ psychological as well as
economic welfare and to act vigorously when a citizen’s psychological integrity seems threatened
by unpopular sectarian influences. Thus the German state, as the authors note, has a “tendency
to assume a duty to protect the individual against exploitation and harm, or more boldly put, to
CULTS AND BRAINWASHING IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE 173

protect the individual from himself or herself as the individual makes spiritual decisions.” The
United States, however, is traditionally more hostile to “Big Government.” Even in the period of
the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, which in some respects seems to resemble the
current climate in continental Western Europe, the American emphasis was not on forceful state
action to combat cultic brainwashing through criminalization and direct prosecution but rather
on encouraging the courts to facilitate citizens’ self-help activism in the areas of deprogramming
and ex-member civil suits. Indeed, the surge of coercive deprogramming in the 1970s was in part
a response to the difficulty of directly prosecuting alleged cultic mind control.
Interestingly it is the socialists who have introduced dynamic anti-brainwashing legislation
into the French National Assembly. I have been informed by a knowledgeable, academic observer
that in Japan and elsewhere it is often the Left and Marxists who are spearheading the mobiliza-
tion against cults. This is somewhat ironic because for several decades beginning in the 1960s
there existed in Europe and the United States Marxist communal groups and “collectives” in
which strong indoctrination as well as a dogmatic restriction of internal ideational diversity and
strong forces for conformity probably prevailed. Quite possibly plausible (by anti-cult standards)
claims about mind control could have been leveled against such groups but generally were not,
notwithstanding some episodes of violence albeit on a smaller scale and nonsuicidal compared to
some recent “cult” events. Any communal or close-knit group united by a fervent ideology can
probably be accused of some pattern of mind control or mental manipulation. However, from a
legal standpoint it is difficult to “draw the line” between groups that should be legally chastised
for brainwashing and many other fervent and dogmatic sectarian groups without a parameter of
physical restraint, drugging, etc. (Anthony and Robbins 1994).3
The authors evoke the strength of secular humanism and anti-religious attitudes in Western
Europe and, particularly, in France, which has strong enlightenment and revolutionary tradi-
tions. Suppressing religious groups is not always viewed as antithetical to freedom. When the
government of Louis XV suppressed the Jesuits, D’Alembert and other philosphes dedicated to
liberty cheered—the Jesuits were supposed foes of liberty—although Voltaire protested. The in-
dividualism that enlightenment and revolutionary traditions support is not so much a freedom to
be religious—American “free exercise”—but rather the individual’s right to freedom from reac-
tionary and constraining religious influences. European anti-clericalism was once directed against
dominant, established churches, but as the latter are now much less powerful and oppressive, anti-
clericalism and aggressive secularism have become redirected toward cults, which may appear to
be the more plausible threats to enlightenment and revolutionary values in the sense of their being
strongly supernaturalist, fervent, aggressively proselytizing, manipulative, and sometimes totalist.4
The totalism of some movements may recall the sins of the old established Church in attempting
to dominate secular life. A de facto collaboration against cults may even emerge between secular
humanists and the more traditional, dominant churches. The latter are sometimes miffed at the
faster growth and greater fervor of new movements and independent (e.g., pentecostal) fellow-
ships that don’t accept state support (Joffe 1997). Both parties may sometimes support state action
against high-commitment interlopers.
It may also be relevant that many unpopular groups such as Scientology, the Unification
Church, the Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, are perceived as American (or at least foreign)
imports. Cults are alien! Latent anti-Americanism may play a role, as may a more generalized
xenophobia. This argument was made a few years ago by Beckford (1998), who “found it sig-
nificant that the German parliamentary inquiry into So-called Cults and Psycho-Groups seems
to be especially concerned with evidence of the international operations of NRMs. . . . it would
be a serious mistake to overlook the fact that xenophobic sentiment is also growing in Europe
at the same time, especially in France, Belgium, Germany, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe”
(Beckford 1998:181, emphasis in original). “It is no accident,” in Beckford’s view, “that France and
Germany are the two countries which are most enthusiastic about European integration, and they
are also the countries where the threat to the freedom of NRMs is most serious” (1998:181). Both
174 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

countries are struggling with problems of national unity and assimilation. “The arrival of ‘alien’
and, in some cases aggressive NRMs has aggravated French and German fears about national
identity and cultural integrity. Cult controversies are symptomatic of deeper societal problems,”
which is not to say, notes Beckford, “that NRMs are merely scapegoats” (1998:182). Interestingly,
Britain, which, compared to France and Germany has a relatively mild cult policy, clearly has its
share of social problems; but it is also relatively less enthused about Euro-integration. Beckford
seems to imply that a more aggressive anti-cultism represents in part a xenophobic extrapolation
of an emerging broader ideology of European unity. The vague and open-ended quality of notions
such as “mental manipulation,” “alteration and suppression of free will,” or “destabilization” of
the individual may be indicative that such conceptions possibly have a symbolic dimension. But
it is still the United States that pioneered in thematizing mind control and ego-destruction as the
rationales for legal measures against new movements.
Any discussion of Western European attitudes toward new religious movements (NRMs)
must take into account the shock of the lethal Solar Temple “transits,” which transpired in France,
Switzerland, and Quebec (Hall et al. 2000:111–48) in the mid-1990s. A colleague who has studied
the European situation told me that the Solar Temple homicides and suicides have had a traumatic
cultural effect on continental Western Europe. Various esoteric, small groups that my colleague
views as fairly harmless are presently being typified as budding Solar Temples. Perhaps Europeans
were acclimated to such horrors unfolding in the wild and wooly United States where crime rates
are high, firearms are ubiquitous, and extremism and violence seem to run rampant, but not in
their own sedate and moderate haven of secularism and civility. So the Solar Temple killings may
conceivably have shocked continental Western Europe rather more than did Jonestown, Waco,
and Heavens Gate and possibly have had a larger impact. The trauma may be exacerbated by
the fact that it was not marginal misfits but educated and skilled persons—the brightest and the
best—who perished in the “transits.”
Finally, some reference should be made to the American constitutional tradition and legal
support for the free exercise of religion. A European colleague has maintained to me that this is
a declining factor in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1990 Employment Div. v. Smith decision
and its subsequent invalidation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Nevertheless, I would
maintain that the United States, which has in the past 200 years experienced a greater range of
sectarian diversity than has Europe, and in which churches are generally stronger than in Western
Europe, tends to have built in to both its culture and its legal tradition a greater inhibition against
dealing summarily with even fringe religious institutions. This may be good or bad depending on
one’s values. In his essay, “Coercion, Coercive Persuasion, and the Law” (1985:90), philosopher
Herbert Fingarette writes:

Methods of persuasion that might be plainly wrong in law when used in, for example, an economic or domestic
context, may very well be protected by the claim that they are intrinsic to religious worship. Beliefs and tactics that
most people might consider bizarre in any other context may be protected in a religious context. The reluctance
of the [U.S.] courts to interfere—mandated at bottom by our Constitution—places an exceptionally heavy burden
on one who would show the conduct to be unlawful; and this in turn makes a claim of coercion very difficult to
sustain in the religious context.5

NOTES

1. Beckford (1985:218–19) discusses the multinational character of movements such as the Unification Church, Scien-
tology, and Hare Krishna, which he had earlier termed “religious multinationals.”
2. This would also hold for foundational theorists of “thought reform” or “coercive persuasion,” such as Robert Lifton,
whose relation to activist usages of these concepts is contested (Anthony and Robbins 1994).
3. In the context of a spirited defense of the scientific potential of the brainwashing concept, Zablocki (forthcoming)
affirms in a note that only when physical force is involved should brainwashing be an issue for courts.
4. My view of the importance of enlightenment and revolutionary values on French receptivity to anti-cultism has been
influenced by a recent discussion with John Hall.
CULTS AND BRAINWASHING IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE 175

5. Fingarette’s statement may still be particularly valid in terms of criminal prosecution. It remains to be seen whether
civil suits advancing mind-control claims will become easier in the United States as a consequence of the effect on
the general climate of a series of sensational incidents of collective violence.

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