Religious liberty and the dangerous snake of moral panic

Massimo Introvigne

January 25, 2024 3 Reactions

However, spread by the media, these generalisations lead to the third stage of the moral panic. Politicians, who are only too happy to extend their control on religion, intervene and pass laws or create institutions to limit the religious liberty of broader groups that have nothing to do with the crimes some have perpetrated.

Unjust laws

In Australia and Ireland, the cases of pedophile priests led to laws eliminating the confessional privilege and limiting the protection of confidentiality in communications between parishioners and religious ministers, not only in the Catholic Church but in all religions. In France, terrorist attacks by radical Muslims generated laws limiting the rights of all Muslims to display their religious symbols and freely organise their communal life, separated from the mainstream non-Muslim society.

In France and elsewhere, the case of the Order of the Solar Temple offered the opportunity to pass laws instituting governmental agencies whose mandate is to watch and spread propaganda against “cults” in general and incriminating vaguely defined “cultic deviances.”

And in Kenya, after the deaths by extreme fasting in Shakahola, a Senate Committee released a report this year hailing the French model and proposing to put all churches and religions, and their finances, under governmental supervision. The report in Kenya mentions similar proposals in South Africa, where moral panics were created by following the self-same scheme. If a pastor or prophet behaves strangely or asks his followers to eat grass, it is proposed to create a mechanism of state supervision for all pastors and prophets — and their bank accounts.

Two concluding observations. Let me repeat once again that the incidents and crimes leading to the generalisations creating the moral panic are real. Their perpetrators should be punished and cannot invoke freedom of religion as an excuse. But they should be punished individually on a case-by-case basis without cracking down on entire categories and lumping together both the guilty and the innocent.

Second, coming back to the example of the snake, not all the snakes of moral panics are wild. Some come from snake farms, where they are carefully nurtured and unleashed against religious minorities when needed. The scholars of moral panics emphasise the figure of the “moral entrepreneurs” who organise them. In our field, they include groups such as FECRIS, the European umbrella organisation of anti-cult movements.

When they exploit an incident to target a variety of groups and limit religious liberty, it may be too late to oppose them. We should create structures preventing moral entrepreneurs from creating moral panics now.

Massimo Introvigne is an Italian sociologist of religions. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. From 2012 to 2015, he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

This article has been republished with permission from Bitter Winter. It is a paper presented at the founding meeting of the African Forum for Religious and Spirituality Liberty (AFRSL), in cooperation with FOREF, Cape Town, South Africa, on December 8, 2023.

Image: Pexels