"Brainwashing" Claims and Minority Religions Outside the United States: Cultural Diffusion of a Questionable Concept in the Legal Arena

James T. Richardson

The use of legal claims based on so-called brainwashing of potential participants by some minority religions has been common in the United States for years, attracting much commentary by scholars. (1) This Article will first summarize the origin of brainwashing ideas as applied to religious groups and will offer critiques of such claims. The Article will then discuss some of the ways such claims have been used within the American legal context, including both criminal and civil actions. Evidence will be presented that such ideas have become an important cultural export, affecting foreign social policy development and specific legal actions around the world.

Why "Brainwashing?" (2)

Many relatively well-educated and affluent young people have been involved with new religious movements-sometimes pejoratively called "cults"—over the past two or three decades in America and other Western countries. Controversy has erupted about the meaning of this participation, as parents, friends, political leaders, and others have attempted to understand why this has occurred.

One appealing explanation for participation has been so-called brainwashing, mind control, or thought reform theories. (3) According to those espousing these ideas, youth have not joined the new religions volitionally, but have instead been manipulated into participating by groups using powerful psychotechnology practiced first in Communist societies. This psychotechnology allegedly traps people in new religions, allowing subsequent control of their behavior by the groups' leaders. (4) According to these claims, the techniques were originally developed for use in the Russian purge trials of the 1930s, later refined by the Chinese Communists after their assumption of power in China in 1949, and then supposedly used against POWs during the Korean War of the 1950s. These techniques included physical coercion and, taken together, can be labeled "first generation" brainwashing. Now these techniques are being used, it is claimed, against young people in Western countries by unscrupulous cult leaders.

When questioned about the obvious logical problem of applying these theories to situations lacking physical coercion, proponents have a ready, if problematic, answer. They say that physical coercion has been replaced by "psychological coercion," which they claim is actually more effective than simple physical coercion. According to brainwashing proponents, this "second generation" brainwashing theory incorporates new insights about manipulation of individuals. (5) The assumption is that it is not necessary to coerce recruits physically if they can be manipulated by affection, guilt, or other psychological influences. Simple group pressures and emotion-laden tactics are revealed as more effective than the tactics used in the physically coercive Russian, Chinese, and Korean POW situations.

These theories might be thought of as quaint ideas developed for functional reasons by those who have an interest in their being accepted. They plainly are a special type of "account" developed to "explain" why people join the groups and why they stay in them for a time. (6)

Whatever the origin, and no matter that the veracity of such accounts is questionable, these ideas have become commonly accepted among the general public in the United States. For instance, one study found that seventy-eight percent of a randomly drawn sample of 383 individuals from an urban county in a western state said that they believed in brainwashing, and thirty percent agreed that "brainwashing is required to make someone join a religious cult." (7) A similar question asked of a random sample of one thousand New York residents prior to the tax evasion trial of Reverend Moon revealed that forty-three percent agreed that "brainwashing is required to make someone change from organized religion to a cult." (8) Results from a random sample of Oregon residents who were asked about the controversial Rajneesh group centered for a time in Eastern Oregon revealed a similar pattern. (9) Sixty-nine percent of respondents in that poll agreed that members of the group were brainwashed.

These notions about brainwashing and mind control have pervaded our society's institutional structures as well. Such views have influenced actions by governmental entities and coverage of new religions by the media. (10) The legal system has also seen a number of efforts to promote brainwashing theories as explanations of why people might participate in new religions.

Footnotes

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1. For explicit discussions of brainwashing-based claims, see Dick Anthony, Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation: Evaluating Key Testimony, in IN GODS WE TRUST 295 (Thomas Robbins & Dick Anthony eds., 2d ed. 1990); Dick Anthony & Thomas Robbins, Law, Social Sciences and the "Brainwashing' Exception to the First Amendment, 10 BEHAV. Sci. & L. 5 (1992) [hereinafter Anthony & Robbins, First Amendment); James T. Richardson, Cult/Brainwashing Cases and Freedom of Religion, 33 J. CHURCH & ST. 55 (1991) [hereinafter Richardson, Freedom of Religion]; and James T. Richardson, A Social Psychological Critique of "Brainwashing" Claims About Recruitment to New Religions [hereinafter Richardson, Recruitment to New Religions], in HANDBOOK OF SECTS AND CULTS IN AMERICA 75 (Jeffrey K. Hadden & David G. Bromley eds., 1993).

For broader discussions of the legal status of minority religions, which include specific discussions of brainwashing-based legal claims, see Dick Anthony & Thomas Robbins, Negligence, Coercion, and the Protection of Religious Belief, 37 J. CHURCH & ST. 509 (1995) [hereinafter Anthony & Robbins, Negligence); W. Cole Durham, Jr., Treatment of Religious Minorities in the United States, in EUROPEAN CONSORTIUM FOR CHURCH AND STATE RESEARCH, THE LEGAL STATUS OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN THE CO OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (1994); and James T. Richardson, Legal Status of New Religions in the United States, 42 Soc. COMPASS 249 (1995) [hereinafter Richardson, Legal Status of New Religions].

2. Much of Parts I and II are taken from Richardson, Recruitment to New Religions, supra note 1.

3. See THE BRAINWASHING/DEPROGRAMMING CONTROVERSY (David G. Bromley & James T. Richardson eds., 1983).

4. For sympathetic presentations of brainwashing claims, see Richard Delgado, Religious Totalism: Gentle and Ungentle Persuasion Under the First Amendment, 51 S. CAL. L. REV. 1, 3 (1977); and Margaret T. Singer, Coming Out of the Cults, 12 PSYCHOL. TODAY 72, 72 (1979).

5. See generally Singer, supra note 4. For critiques of Singer's ideas, see Anthony, supra note 1; and Richardson, Freedom of Religion, supra note 1, at 59-65.

6. See James A. Beckford, Accounting for Conversion, 29 BRIT. J. Soc. 249 (1978) (applying an 'accounts" perspective to conversion stories of Jehovah's Witnesses); James T. Richardson et al., Problems of Research and Data in the Study of New Religions, in HANDBOOK OF SECTS AND CULTS IN AMERICA, supra note 1, at 213 (critiquing such accounts).

7. John S. DeWitt, Novel Scientific Evidence and the Juror (1991) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nevada (Reno)) (on file with author).

8. James T. Richardson, Public Opinion and the Tax Evasion Trial of Reverend Moon, 10 BEHAV. Sci. & L. 53 (1992).

9. Carl Latkin, Seeing Re& A Social-Psychological Analysis of the Rajneeshpuram Cont7ict, 53 Soc. ANALYSIS 257, 261 (1992).

10. See David G. Bromley & Thomas Robbins, The Role of Government in Regulating New and Nonconventional Religions, in THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN MONITORING AND REGULANNG RELIGION IN PUBLIC LIFE (James E. Wood & Derek Davis eds., 1993); James T. Richardson et al., Alternative Religions and Economic Individualism, in RESEARCH IN THE SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION 39-40 (Monty L. Lynn & David 0. Moberg eds., 1989) (noting the media's bias toward sensationalistic reporting of brainwashing techniques); Richardson, Legal Status of New Religions, supra note 1; B. van Driel & James T. Richardson, Print Media Coverage of New Religious Movements, 36 J. Comm. 37 (1988).