OPINION:
At a recent Washington seminar organized by the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz and I warned that a climate of suspicion was spreading across democracies.
In this climate, prosecutors and politicians treat religious minorities as groups capable of controlling minds and directing followers through invisible psychological techniques.
As a scholar of religion, I am surprised to see theories of brainwashing resurface. Academia and the courts dismissed them in the 20th century as pseudoscience no more respectable than flat-Earth theory.
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The revival of these theories began years ago in Argentina, where prosecutors experimented with trafficking legislation in cases involving volunteer labor performed for religious organizations. Proceedings are still pending against Opus Dei and large evangelical charities.
These groups rely on volunteers who offer their time as an expression of faith. Prosecutors argued that spiritual commitment created a form of psychological pressure and that this pressure amounted to coercion.
This trend has advanced most visibly in the United States. A joint written statement filed Aug. 10 at the United Nations Human Rights Council by two accredited nongovernmental organizations, Citoyens en Action pour la Democratie et le Developpement and the Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberte de Conscience, warns that applying the Trafficking Victims Protection Act to religious and spiritual groups places these communities at risk through theories of psychological domination that courts rejected decades ago.
The OneTaste case illustrates the problem. OneTaste is a California-based company that promotes female spirituality and sexual awareness. This year, the founder and an associate were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for conspiracy to force labor.
The prosecution argued that OneTaste exerted psychological pressure so intense that followers lost the ability to resist. No physical restraint was alleged. Participants were informed that they were free to leave. The argument rested on claims that members feared exclusion from their community and spiritual consequences. Prosecutors presented these elements as sufficient to constitute forced labor.
The OneTaste case matters even for those who regard its teachings as not to their taste. It shows how prosecutors can use theories of psychological manipulation to construct charges that treat adults as victims of invisible influence. This principle endangers all religions and has been applied in American civil and criminal cases involving Pentecostal churches and even the Catholic Maryknoll Sisters.
Spiritual life often involves strong communal ties, moral obligations and disciplines that believers freely accept. These elements are part of religious identity. Treating them as coercive creates a path that leads to criminalizing ordinary religious practice.
Activists hostile to certain religions have encouraged this trend. Deprogrammer Steven Hassan promotes the idea that certain communities exercise a form of psychological domination that removes autonomy. He has gained a following in political circles by advancing the claim that President Trump’s supporters are brainwashed and trafficked by a “MAGA cult.”
Quoting his theories, activist Be Scofield recently published a book claiming that Jesus “brainwashed” and “trafficked” his followers and that Christianity in general is one large “cult.”
The Trojan horse used to reintroduce discredited brainwashing theories is a new interpretation of trafficking laws. Legislation originally conceived to fight the exploitation of prostitutes and slavelike immigrants by organized crime is now applied to religious and spiritual groups that rely on volunteer labor.
This expansion creates risks for communities whose activities depend on voluntary service. The nongovernmental organizations that filed the Aug. 10 statement warn that the definition of serious harm has drifted into areas that Congress did not intend to reach.
Congress should consider this issue when reauthorizing the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. A clause protecting the freedom of religious and spiritual organizations is needed to prevent misuse of trafficking laws. Such a clause would preserve the law’s essential mission by ensuring that genuine trafficking involving force, fraud, physical restraint, document servitude and exploitation continues to be prosecuted.
It would also prevent the statute from being used to target religious commitment.
Democracies depend on the idea that citizens make choices through reason and conscience. Legal systems that treat them as subjects of invisible psychological forces weaken the foundations of freedom. The return of these theories places entire communities at risk and invites governments to expand their authority into citizens’ inner lives, a threshold no democracy should cross.
• Massimo Introvigne is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions, an international network of scholars who study new religious movements, and the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion.
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