Religion: Cult Wars on Capitol Hill

Dire warnings, and First Amendment pleas

The Moonies were out in force on Capitol Hill last week. Outside the Russell Building the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's disciples had a band oompahing in protest; inside, they packed the gallery, unleashing standing ovations, boos and shouts of "Liar!" as they thought the testimony warranted. The occasion was an unofficial hearing on "cults," presided over by Republican Senator Robert Dole.

The cults issue was thrust into harsh focus by last November's carnage at the Peoples Temple commune in Jonestown, Guyana. The most dramatic moments of the four-hour hearing came from Jackie Speier, a legislative counsel who accompanied the late Congressman Leo Ryan on his fatal visit to the Rev. Jim Jones' headquarters and survived gunshot wounds. Speier stated that there are 10 million cult members in the U.S. and warned: "The most important fact about Jonestown is, it can happen again!"

As an afterthought, Dole included several witnesses who held, in line with First Amendment principles, that Government should not crack down on religious organizations unless they break the law. The bulk of the witnesses were anticult, however, and though they were openly, and understandably, hostile to the Moonies and other groups under discussion, they were unable to offer hard evidence of criminality, much less Jones-type mass murder. Nor did they define precisely what distinguishes a "cult" from an acceptable religion.

The main academics in the anticult lineup were Harvard Psychiatry Professor John Clark and University of Washington Law Professor Richard Delgado. Clark raised frightening specters of suicide, "uncontrolled violence," trances and total loss of memory, even distorted sense of smell (unexplained), among cultists. He made it clear that he saw the cultists as mindless zombies who pose a clear threat to democratic societies. "There are armies of willing, perfectly controlled soldiers," he told the assorted Senators and Representatives. "The level of public nuisance is so high that Government must act before it is too late."

But act how? Delgado offered five proposals: 1) laws forcing proselytizers always to identify their organizations; 2) a required "cooling-off period" before deciding whether to convert; 3) spiritual "living wills" to forestall future conversion; 4) licensing of high-pressure recruiters; and 5) as a last resort, court-ordered psychiatry for converts.

Jeremiah Gutman of the American Civil Liberties Union called this "impossible constitutionally." In his view the Government simply cannot monitor voluntary private conversations aimed at persuading people to change their beliefs, or attempt to control what religions people adopt. He said that "forced psychotherapy" to attack unwanted belief is "precisely what is going on in the Soviet Union today and precisely what Ted Patrick does on a smaller scale. It is already against the law."