Reactions to the Law by Minority Religions

Eileen Barker, James T. Richardson, Eileen Barker, James T. Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000333367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Much has been written about the law as it affects new and minority religions, but relatively little has been written about how such religions react to the law. This book presents a wide variety of responses by minority religions to the legal environments within which they find themselves.

An international panel of experts offer examples from North America, Europe and Asia demonstrating how religions with relatively little status may resort to violence or passive acceptance of the law; how they may change their beliefs or practices in order to be in compliance with the law; or how they may resort to the law itself in order to change their legal standing, sometimes by forging alliances with those with more power or authority to achieve their goals. The volume concludes by applying theoretical insights from sociological studies of law, religion and social movements to the variety of responses.

The first systematic collection focussing on how minority religions respond to efforts at social control by various governmental agents, this book provides a vital reference for scholars of religion and the law, new religious movements, minority religions and the sociology of religion.

1 Fight, flight or freeze?

Reactions to the law by minority religions

Eileen Barker

Introduction

While much has been studied about how the law affects minority religions (e.g., Barker 2004; Bielefeldt 2012; Durham and Ferrari 2004; Richardson 2004; Sandberg 2014), relatively little has been written on how the religions react to their legal environments. In most Western democracies, international, constitutional and national laws tend to enable minority religions to believe and practise in relative peace – so long as they do not indulge in criminal behaviour; but, even in such countries, many of the religions find aspects of one law or another interfering with their lives. As one moves eastward, the situation can become more fraught with difficulty until, in extremis, merely belonging to a minority religion can be punishable by death.

As part of the Routledge/Inform Series,¹ this volume complements several others in the collection, perhaps especially Legal Cases, New Religious Movements, and Minority Faiths (Richardson and Bellanger 2014) and State Responses to Minority Religions (Kirkham 2013). As is policy for the series, each volume approaches a particular issue concerned with minority religions by including authors who come from a wide range of perspectives. This entails inviting not only scholars and other professionals to contribute but also those who have a personal interest in the topic, such as members and former members of a variety of religions. Obviously enough, those who have been deeply involved with the issue in question are liable to have a more subjective approach than that of the professional. This, we believe, can enhance the understanding that the reader may gain about the different ways different people and organisations perceive and react to the social world. It might, moreover, be added that we have found that many of those who are or were in a minority religion are more than capable of expressing themselves in a scholarly manner. In this volume, as can be seen from the short biographies, we have included several current members. Unusually for the series, we have included two from the same movement – the Unification Church. They have, however, approached the topic from very different starting points, although both belong to the largest of the three movements that have followed different paths since the death of the Church’s founder, the Rev Sun Myung Moon.²

Any attempt by the editors to produce coherent answers to questions raised by the topic in this or any other volume in the series would be counter-productive. The whole point of the exercise is to present readers with an (inevitably limited) selection of the many perspectives that interested individuals can have on a topic. Inform itself does not necessarily endorse any of the divergent opinions. No claim is made to exhaust the full range of possible responses. At least a dozen further volumes would be needed to attempt such an enterprise. This opening chapter merely considers, with examples, something of the variety of ways in which religions might adopt ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ responses, or combinations of such responses, to the law.

Violent reactions to the law

Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of minority religions that exist at any one time will turn to violence,³ and those that do are more likely to direct their violence towards their own members than the rest of society. On the rare occasions when they do resort to violence, however, they are likely to make headline news and, all too often, it is assumed that this is a typical characteristic of minority religions (Barker 2010; Richardson 2001).

In his book, Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer argues that, while religions are not always innocent, they do not normally lead to violence – that, he states, “happens only with the coalescence of a peculiar set of circumstances – political, social, and ideological – when religion becomes fused with violent expressions of social aspirations, personal pride, and movements for political change” (2004: 10). Juergensmeyer might have added ‘legal’ to his list of circumstances, especially when the distinction between the law and the state has become blurred, and/or a religious minority entertains a political agenda of overthrowing the entire legal apparatus. Several jihadist terrorist movements, such as ISIS (Roy 2017) or Boko Haram (Thurston 2018), have been using violence to overthrow the present system in order to replace it with a caliphate ruled by sharia law. Another example could be The Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been committing horrific atrocities in northern Uganda and South Sudan with the aim of restoring rights taken away from the Acholi people and establishing a theocracy (Allen and Vlassenroot 2010).

With a more focused objective, the Ku Klux Klan, originally formed in response to antislavery legislation in late eighteenth-century America, renewed its violence following the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Ridgeway 1990). There are some Christian minorities that have responded with violence to what they consider to be immoral laws; several religions objected strongly to the 1973 Roe v Wade court case legalising abortion in the United States (Bader and Baird-Windle 2001) – most notably, perhaps, the loosely structured Army of God, which claimed biblical rationalisations for kidnapping, attempted murder and murder (Jefferis 2011).

Occasionally, methods involving violence or potential violence have targeted those attempting to apply the law – that is, the violence is directed against its implementers rather than the law itself. In a near-lethal example from 1978, members of Synanon put a four-foot rattlesnake in the letter box of a lawyer investigating the movement (Morantz c.2009). Examples resulting in deaths include Aum Shinrikyo’s murder in November 1989 of Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a lawyer working on a class action lawsuit against the movement (Reader 2000).⁴ Jim Jones ordered the murder of Congressman Ryan, who had arrived to investigate the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, before ordering the suicides/deaths of the entire membership of over 900 (Hall 2004; Moore 2009).

When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) attempted a botched, no-knock ‘dynamic entry’ of the Branch Davidians’ compound near Waco, Texas on 28 February 1993, the Davidians’ immediate reaction was to shoot back, resulting in the deaths of four agents and six Davidians. The next day, FBI agents took charge of the case, which, because of the ATF agents’ deaths, they called WACMUR (Waco Murder) (Wessinger 2017: 203). The movement’s reaction to this resulted in a 51-day standoff, with their leader, David Koresh, refusing to surrender until he had finished writing out the message that God had revealed to him concerning the seven seals in the Book of Revelation (Tabor and Gallagher 1995). The FBI’s subsequent storming of the Waco compound on 19 April 1995 provided Timothy McVeigh with a motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing, which resulted in the death of at least 168 men, women and children, exactly two years later (Wright 2007).

When the followers of Bhagwan Rajneesh bought a large property in Oregon, they reacted to local resistance against them, first, by taking over the adjacent town of Antelope (which had around 50 residents) and incorporating it as a city, so that they could have their own police force and pass local laws. They then tried to take over Wasco county to gain further legislative power by various means that included increasing the population of voters by inviting homeless people from around the country to the ranch, Rajneeshpuram, and then by sprinkling salmonella poisoning in the salad bars of restaurants, causing over 700 potential town voters to fall sick. There was also an unsuccessful plot to assassinate the Oregon State Attorney, Charles Turner, who had been investigating suspected sham marriages and immigration fraud by the Rajneeshees (Carter 1990). The documentary Wild Wild Country⁵ presents a convincing picture of the gradual escalation of antagonism between the Rajneeshees and the local law makers at increasing levels. It also demonstrates how there were fears that the Rajneeshees would take over the whole state of Oregon and that there would be ‘another Jonestown’.

It might be added that there are other examples when the expectation of violent reactions from a religious group can be used by law enforcers to justify their responding to the religion with what could appear to be a totally disproportionate act of violence. Following a siege lasting several months, on 8 August 1978 Philadelphia police entered the house of members of the MOVE, a black liberation group founded as the Christian Movement for Life by John Africa in 1972. In the confusion, a police officer was shot dead, and several other police and firefighters were wounded. Nine members of the MOVE were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years for the murder of the officer, although there is credible evidence suggesting that he was accidentally shot by another officer (Pilkington 2018). Nonetheless, according to the Philadelphia Special Investigation Committee Final Report, the death and reports that MOVE members were armed and dangerous had terrified their neighbours and threatened violence against public officials, and confirmed the belief that they would react with “deadly force when confronted” (Boyette and Boyette 2013: 318). This, the Report claimed, provided sufficient justification in 1985 for a police helicopter to bomb the MOVE house, killing 11 MOVE members, including five of their children, and destroying 65 houses in the neighbourhood (Bo...