A Dutch success and a French defeat for a group that poses hard questions about the definition of religion and freedom
By B.C.
SINCE it was founded in the 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer, the Church of Scientology has fought legal battles across the world for acceptance as a legitimate religion that deserves to enjoy the same legal and tax status as more traditional faiths. This has been a roller-coaster month for the movement, which invites people to take psychological tests and then undergo mind-expanding forms of "training" which are said to be tailored to their personalities.
On October 16th the movement suffered a severe blow in the highest appeals court in France, which upheld the 2009 conviction for fraud of Scientology's main institutions in the country, and of five of the group's leaders. The institutions, including a bookstore, have been fined €600,000 ($827,000) and two prominent figures received suspended prison terms of two years each. The Church of Scientology, which claims more than 10m worldwide members including film stars John Travolta and Tom Cruise, said the verdict was a blow to religious freedom and vowed to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
But significantly, the French court verdicts, including the latest one, find that Scientology's normal activities—offering character tests and then treatment, including medicaments—amount to a form of unfair manipulation. The case started when a group of people in France underwent personality assessments and were told that serious problems had been uncovered which would cost money to remedy. Lawyers for Scientology argued that the 2009 verdict was unfair because the judiciary was biased thanks to propaganda against the movement which had circulated in French officialdom. This argument was firmly rejected.
The following day, a court in Amsterdam brought much better news for the group; it accepted Scientology's bid for the status of a public-benefit organisation, similar to longer-established religions. This followed an investigation of the courses offered by the organisation and the fees charged. The Dutch verdict accepted Scientology's claim that "auditing" and "training" sessions were not commercial operations but part of the activity of a religious group. This reversed the finding of a lower court that a form of commercial business was indeed being practised.
According to Marco Ventura, a professorof law and religion at the Universities of Louvain and Siena, much broader principles are at stake in these cases than the fortunes of one idiosyncratic organisation. The Dutch verdict represents a relatively purist and invidualistic approach to religious freedom which brings the commercial principle of caveat emptor—let the buyer beware—into the realm of belief. From this point of view, any religion can be seen as a form of cult (in that it invites people to join and discourages them from leaving) and any cult can aspire to be a religion, as long as it doesn't physically harm people. The French decision reflects a more prescriptive stance, which feels able to distinguish with confidence between religions and cults. In the same spirit, there is a high-level French government agency which watches new religious groups and offers advice to people who feel they have become entrapped.
There's an irony here, one which crops up again and again when discussing religious freedom. The French state, like the American one and perhaps a bit more fiercely, aspires to be religion-neutral. It refuses to affirm or deny the truth-claims of any religion. Yet in order to police such a regime, judges and sometimes bureaucrats have to make assessments—about the difference between a religion and a cult, for example—which require them to delve deep inside the cognitive and psychological world of a faith and its adherents. Even for a secular state, enforcing liberty of conscience can be a "religious" question.
