Brainwashing’s second act still targeting religion
A new kind of “brainwashing” theory is making the rounds in anti-cult groups and even being employed by governments and courts to target new religious movements (NRMs), write Marco Respinti and Massimo Introvigne in the newsletter Bitter Winter (July 2). The brainwashing charge against NRMs, stating that believers’ free will has been violated in these groups, had faded since the peak of “cult” activity and controversy in the 1990s. But Respinti and Introvigne write that “brainwashing” rhetoric is now influencing the interpretation of human‑trafficking statutes. “Trafficking law carries immense moral authority, and to be accused of trafficking is to be placed among the most serious criminals. Critics of new and conservative religious groups realized that trafficking frameworks offered a promising new terrain.”
Respinti and Introvigne write that this trajectory is already visible in Argentina, in the United States, and in the growing influence of activists within institutions that shape global trafficking policy. Just as anti-cult activists and scholarly defenders of NRMs and religious freedom clashed in the 1990s, the new trend has resulted in a manifesto issued by Respinti, Introvigne and other NRM scholars and religious freedom activists. Argentina became the first major testing ground for this strategy, with its special prosecutorial office for human trafficking establishing ties with anti‑cult activists and beginning to prosecute groups stigmatized as “cults,” later applying its theory to mainstream churches. Volunteer work within religious communities was reinterpreted as forced labor obtained through psychological coercion.
“If members denied being victims, this was taken as evidence that they had been manipulated,” Introvigne writes. Groups targeted included the Christian new religious movement Cómo vivir por Fe, and Iglesia Tabernáculo Internacional faced prosecutions, although courts rejected these accusations (others are pending). Opus Dei and large evangelical charities also faced accusations of slave labor. In the U.S., the Biden administration opened the door to this drift regarding human trafficking when the courts and the FBI broadened their definitions to include psychological concepts implying that intense commitment, volunteer labor, or deference to leaders constitute evidence of emotional manipulation. Veteran anti-cult activist Steven Hassan’s influence has expanded through federal anti‑trafficking training programs in the FBI, and since 2023 the agency has targeted groups as different as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints, the sexual therapeutic group One Taste, and the Community of Jesus.