At an international religious liberty conference, panelists insisted that different incidents are not isolated but should be confronted in a comparative perspective.
by Massimo Introvigne
An article already published in Bitter Winter on May 10th, 2024.
The 4th international conference of the ISFORB (Institute for the Study of Freedom of Religion and Belief) was held at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven, Belgium, on May 2 and 3, 2024. I had attended two of the three previous conferences and had always appreciated the congenial and friendly atmosphere of these comparatively small gatherings of scholars, activists, and religionists concerned with religious liberty.
One of the final sessions of the conference was devoted to “State Obstacles to Propagation [of religion and spirituality]: A Comparative View of France, Japan and Taiwan.” Rosita Šorytė, associate editor of “Bitter Winter,” chaired the session and explained its rationale. She was a diplomat for twenty-five years and the situation of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) seemed for decades to be clear enough. Non-democratic regimes denied FoRB. Democratic states granted it. However, she and many others gradually had to realize that serious FoRB violations also occur in democratic regimes. Through case studies of France, Taiwan, and Japan, the session aimed at answering why this is possible.
I offered an introduction with a tentative general answer, which of course indicated one of the possible reasons but did not exclude that others were at work as well. With the end of the Cold War, and even earlier with the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, many believed that in the Global West (which included Westernized and economically advanced Asian countries such as Taiwan and Japan) “the history had ended,” as American scholar Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed. The Soviet enemy was no longer, and all the world will gradually embrace the dominant liberal, progressive, and secular values. Religion, it was argued, was a needed resource when the Global West had to affirm its identity against the atheistic Soviet bloc but had now become much less necessary and will unavoidably decline.
Although in fact mainline religions did decline in the Global West, I explained, probably for reasons different from the end of the Cold War, new spiritual and religious movements—some of them “new-old” as they had existed for several decades, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but were still not considered mainstream—experienced a sustained growth, either in number of followers, or influence, or both.
Confronted with this phenomenon, which went against their predictions, many ideologically biased journalists, politicians, and prosecutors claimed that the successful new religious and spiritual movements were not really religions but “cults” or “frauds.” As such, provisions on religious liberty and even tax exemptions for gifts they received could not be applied to them. This was a faulty theory, as there is no accepted scholarly distinction between “religions” and “cults,” but suited both the ideologists and those in power who wanted to discriminate against certain movements they did not like.
Eric Roux, a representative of the European Office of the Church of Scientology, discussed the new French law against “cults,” which has been recently passed. Roux focused on the new crime of “psychological subjection,” which is now punished per se and no longer only if it targets “victims” in situation of weakness. It is based on yet another incarnation of the discredited theory of “brainwashing.”
Although introduced to fight “cults,” Roux noted, the new crime could be applied to a variety of situations where those who made choices they now regret could claim that they were “victims” of a “psychological subjection” and file criminal chargers against those who persuaded them.
Liu Yin-Chun is the General Manager of an Amsterdam biotechnology company and a dizi (disciple) of Tai Ji Men, an ancient menpai (similar to a “school”) teaching martial arts, Qigong, and self-cultivation. With the help of slides, she presented Tai Ji Men’s founder Dr. Hong Tao-Tze as both an eminent teacher of high moral values and practices helping the physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being of his dizi, and the founder of FOWPAL, the Federation of World Peace and Love, which has organized events in more than one hundred countries spreading everywhere a culture of love, peace, and conscience.
Liu then presented the Tai Ji Men case, which originated in post-authoritarian Taiwan when in 1996 the leaders of religious and spiritual movements accused of not having supported the ruling party in that year’s presidential elections, including Dr. Hong, and some of their followers were detained. Dr. Hong and the other Tai Ji Men defendants were declared innocent of all charges, including tax evasion, by a final decision of Taiwan’s Supreme Court in 2007. However, as a by-product of these events, ill-founded tax bills continued to be issued. Although Tai Ji Men won most of its tax cases as well, the tax bill for one single year, 1992, was maintained based on a technicality rather than on subtantial reasons. Because of that fabricated tax bill, land regarded as sacred by Tai Ji Men was seized, unsuccessfully auctioned off, and confiscated in 2020. Attempts at getting it back, based on the obvious injustice of the corresponding administrative decisions, have so far not been successful.
Liu concluded with a loving remembrance of Madam Yu Mei-Jung, Dr. Hong’s wife, who passed away three years ago. She was detained with him at the beginning of the Tai Ji Men case and suffered various forms of injustice, Liu said, yet never expressed resentment and continued to work to spread the movement’s message of peace and love.
Another Tai Ji Men dizi, Arthur Hsieh, who works as product manager in a technology company, discussed two further aspects of the Tai Ji Men case. The first was the saga of the Swiss Mountain Villa, a beautiful property near Taipei also intended for a Tai Ji Men cultural and spiritual center and not to be confused with the land confiscated in 2020, which is situated in Miaoli, more than 100 kilometers out of Taipei. Due to the Tai Ji Men case, the Swiss Mountain Villa was banned from disposing, then used as a collateral in the tax case. Only when the National Taxation Bureau confiscated the land in Miaoli was the Swiss Mountain Villa returned to Tai Ji Men’s full disposal, but by then it was ruined and dilapidated. Today, it serves as an eloquent memorial of the injustice suffered by Tai Ji Men.
Hsieh also discussed the question what can be done today to solve the Tai Ji Men case. The National Taxation Bureau claims that the decisions about the 1992 tax bills are “final” and cannot be changed. This is not true, countered Hsieh, as Article 117 of the Administrative Procedure Act of Taiwan allows to annul an erroneous or unjust administrative decision at any time. Thus, all the decisions leading to the confiscation of the sacred land of Tai Ji Men in Miaoli can be annulled, and this land can be returned to its legitimate owners. This did not happen so far for political rather than legal reasons, Hsieh concluded.
A third democratic country currently experiencing a witch hunt against several religious minorities is Japan. Yvo Bruffaerts, the President of the Belgian branch of the Universal Peace Federation, an NGO connected with the Unification Church, now called the Family Federation of World Peace and Unification, explained the events set in motion by the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022 by a man who wanted to punish him for his cooperation with the Unification Church. The assassin claimed he hated the church since his mother, a member of the movement, went bankrupt in 2002 allegedly because of her excessive donations to the group. Rather than blaming the assassin, a pre-existing and politically motivated anti-cult lobby launched a campaign against the Unification Church that quickly dominated the media. It escalated in 2023 to the government’s request to the District Court of Tokyo to pronounce the legal dissolution of the movement.
The campaign in Japan did not stop at the Unification Church but continued by passing regulations making it more difficult for many religions, particularly those with a conservative theology, to solicit donations and to transmit their faith to their children. The second problem was discussed by Michal Jerczyński, a representative of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who noted that documents published by the Japanese authorities in the form of Questions and Answers and so-called independent reports, in fact either heavily influenced or directly written by anti-cultists, have created in Japan a new category of “religious child abuse.” In fact, this is a way of criminalizing normal religious behavior by parents who, for example, take their children to religious services or teach them conservative religious doctrines. One result is a dramatic increase in hate crimes and instance of discrimination of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Japan, paralleling similar problems experienced by the Unification Church/Family Federation.
The discussion that followed emphasized that it is a mistake to regard each of these incidents as isolated. They are poisonous fruits of the same ideology. The new French law, the Tai Ji Men case in Taiwan, the post-Abe-assassination witch hunt in Japan should be studied in comparative perspectives. This would also help those who want to support discriminated religious and spiritual minorities and help them resisting injustice.