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CESNUR (English: Center for Studies on New Religions, Italian: Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni), is a non-profit organization based in Turin, Italy that studies new religious movements and opposes the anti-cult movement. It was established in 1988 by Massimo Introvigne, Jean-François Mayer and Ernesto Zucchini. Its first president was Giuseppe Casale. Later, Luigi Berzano became CESNUR's president.

CESNUR has been described as "the highest profile lobbying and information group for controversial religions". CESNUR's scholars have defended such diverse groups as the Unification Church ("Moonies"), the Church of Scientology (responsible for single largest infiltration of the U.S. government in history), Chinese sect Eastern Lightning (accused of ties to the 2014 murder of Wu Shuoyan), the Order of the Solar Temple (responsible for 74 deaths in mass murder-suicide), Aum Shinrikyo (responsible for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack). and Shincheonji Church of Jesus, accused of having favored with its behavior the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea.

CESNUR describes itself as an independent scholarly organization, but the organization has met with criticism for alleged personal and financial ties to the groups it studies; anthropologist Richard Singelenberg questioned in 1997 whether CESNUR is "too friendly and does not make enough critical comments about new religious movements and sects". According to sociologist Stephen A. Kent, "many scholars, however, see both CESNUR and INFORM in a favourable light, and they share its criticism of the 'sect-monitors' in France, Germany, and Belgium."

CESNUR publishes The Journal of CESNUR, a journal on new religious movements, and Bitter Winter, an online magazine about religious issues in China. CESNUR sponsors annual conferences; its 2019 conference was attended by over 200 individuals.

History

CESNUR was founded in 1988 at a seminar organized by Massimo Introvigne, Jean-François Mayer, and Ernesto Zucchini in Italy. Introvigne is an Italian intellectual-property attorney and sociology lecturer who also serves as the group's director. A member of the Catholic conservative organization Alleanza Cattolica since 1972, Introvigne served as that group's vice-president until 2016. Mayer is a Swiss historian specialized in new religious movements. He was for a time a lecturer at University of Fribourg and in 2012, he was appointed by the Canton of Fribourg to prepare a report on the situation of religious communities there. Zucchini is a Roman Catholic priest, who became in 2009 professor of theology in the Theological School of the Italian Roman Catholic Diocese of Massa Carrara-Pontremoli and published and lectured about the Italian mystic Maria Valtorta, and about the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Giuseppe Casale, a Catholic historian and Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Foggia-Bovino, was appointed as the first president of CESNUR. Reviewing the proceedings of one of the first CESNUR conferences, French sociologist Jean Séguy wrote in 1988 that most participants were Catholic, and presented the traditional Catholic view of phenomena such as Spiritualism and the New Age.

Other members of CESNUR's board include Luigi Berzano, Gianni Ambrosio, Reender Kranenborg, Eileen Barker and J. Gordon Melton. Berzano, who later became CESNUR's president, is a professor of Sociology at the University of Turin. Ambrosio is an Italian sociologist who became in 2007 bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio. Kranenborg is a Dutch Reformed theologian. Barker is a sociologist who wrote The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (1984), and formed the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (INFORM) in 1988. Melton is Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

In 1995 the French Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France, after the events of the Order of the Solar Temple, published a critical report on cults. This was followed by similar reports by other governments. CESNUR claimed these texts relied excessively on information supplied by the anti-cult movement and criticized them publicly, particularly through a book called Pour en finir avec les sectes. Canadian scholar Susan Jean Palmer wrote that the title, translated as "To Put and End to the Sects", had a double meaning and was "deliberately misleading", as, rather than to sects of cults, the authors wanted to put an end to governmental criticism of them. French sociologists Jean-Louis Schlegel and Nathalie Luca reviewed critically the book, noting that while the authors were right in criticizing some mistakes of the Parliamentary report, CESNUR had moved with the volume from a scholarly to a militant advocacy position and to a one-sided defense of cults. According to Palmer, the book so upset the French authorities that one of its co-authors, French historian Antoine Faivre, was placed by the police under temporary arrest (garde à vue), accused of having disclosed confidential details about the persons interviewed by the Parliamentary Commission, although he was detained for a few hours only and a judge later dropped the charges.

In 2001 and 2006 CESNUR published two editions of its encyclopedia of religions in Italy.

Organization

According to its official website, CESNUR "is a network of independent but related organizations of scholars in various countries, devoted to promote scholarly research in the field of new religious consciousness, to spread reliable and responsible information, and to expose the very real problems associated with some movements, while at the same time defending everywhere the principles of religious liberty."

While established by a group of scholars who were mostly Roman Catholics, CESNUR is not affiliated with any religious group or denomination and has from the outset included scholars of various religious persuasions.

CESNUR is critical of concepts like mind control, thought reform and brainwashing, asserting that they lack scientific and scholarly support and are mainly based on anecdotal evidence.

In a 2018 history of the academic study of new religious movements, American scholar W. Michael Ashcraft described CESNUR as "the largest outlet currently supporting research on NRMs."

In 2018, The Korea Times described CESNUR as "the largest international association of scholars specializing in the study of new religious movements."

Funding sources

The Italian authorities recognized CESNUR as a public non-profit organization in 1996 and were contributors to CESNUR projects. Other sources of income include book royalties and member contributions.

Activities and publications

Since 2017, CESNUR has published The Journal of CESNUR. CESNUR sponsors yearly conferences in the field of new religions. The 2019 conference at the University of Turin included over 200 attendees.

Introvigne has spoken before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He testified on behalf of Scientologists in a criminal trial in Lyon. In 1995, Introvigne argued that Order of the Solar Temple members who died by mass suicide had acted on their own initiative as opposed to being victims of the leader's manipulations. In 1997, Melton appeared as an expert witness on behalf of the Singapore branch of the International Churches of Christ, arguing that the group was not a "cult"; The testimony garnered attention for Melton's admission on cross-examination that he had publicly made similar claims about Peoples Temple, responsible for 918 deaths in Jonestown, Guyana.

Bitter Winter

Bitter Winter was launched in May 2018 as an online magazine which covers religious freedom and human rights in China. According to the magazine it is supported by volunteer contributions and is published daily in five languages.

Some of the magazine's correspondents were arrested in late 2018 by the authorities for their work documenting and publicizing antireligious campaigns in China. The United States Department of State in the chapter on China of its 2019 Human Rights Report noted that, among 45 Bitter Winter contributors the magazine reported had been arrested in 2018, in 2019, 4 of the 22 detained in Xinjiang were released, and among the 23 detained in Henan, Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanxi, "several had been released after indoctrination training," while "online media reported that police tortured" those arrested in Fujian.

The same United States Department of State quoted repeatedly Bitter Winter as "an online magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China" in the China section of its 2018 International Religious Freedom Report. The American Evangelical magazine World called Bitter Winter "a thorn in the side" of the Communist Party of China, and reported that, "The Chinese government has called Bitter Winter an 'overseas hostile website' and instructed its intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, to investigate the group."

Criticism

In a 1996 piece in Charlie Hebdo, French essayist Renaud Marhic accused CESNUR of being "a scientific screen used to relay theses to the complacent media".

Scholars Stephen A. Kent and Raffaella Di Marzio have argued that CESNUR's representation of the brainwashing controversy is one-sided, polemical and sometimes without scholarly value. Kent further observed: "Many German and French officials working on issues related to religious 'sects' and human rights do not see CESNUR and Introvigne as neutral parties in the ongoing debates ... Consequently, other people and organizations have damaged their reputations (rightly or wrongly) among these officials by associating too closely with CESNUR".

In 2001, French journalist Serge Garde criticized CESNUR: "Created in 1988 in Turin by the lawyer Massimo Introvigne, he distinguished himself in France by his systematic interventions in favor of sects brought to justice: Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Order of the Solar Temple, etc. Moon , AUM sect (responsible for a deadly attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995), all the sects know they can count on CESNUR".

CESNUR again met with controversy when one of the scheduled speakers at the 1997 CESNUR conference, who was to present scholarship on the religious group New Acropolis, was discovered to be a member of the very group she purported to study. Michiel Louter writing for Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer opined: It is difficult to believe that CESNUR-director Introvigne was not up-to-date on her membership in the group. The participation of the New Acropolis speaker to the conference was cancelled after the connection was publicly reported by Dutch publication Trouw.

Melton, CESNUR, and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack of 1995

In May 1995, Aum Shinrikyo contacted an American group known as AWARE (Association of World Academics for Religious Education), founded by American scholar James R. Lewis, claiming that the human rights of its members were being violated during the investigation about the gas attack members of the movement had perpetrated on March 20. Lewis, who had been an occasional speaker at CESNUR conferences, recruited human rights lawyer Barry Fisher, scholar of religion and CESNUR board member J. Gordon Melton, and chemical expert Thomas Banigan. They flew to Japan, with their travel expenses paid by Aum, and announced that they will investigate and report through press conferences at the end of their trip.

In the press conference they held, Fisher and Lewis announced that Aum could not have produced the sarin with which the attacks had been committed. They had determined this, Lewis said, with their technical expert, based on photos and documents provided by the group. The press conference surprised the reporters who attended it, as the Japanese police had already released massive evidence of Aum's production of the gas.

British scholar of Japanese religions Ian Reader, in a detailed account of the incident, reported that Melton claimed he "had few doubts by the end of his visit to Japan of Aum's complicity" and eventually "concluded that Aum had in fact been involved in the attack and other crimes" In fact, the Washington Post account of the final press conference mentioned Lewis and Fisher but not Melton. A Christian anti-cult Web site called Apolegetic Index quoted the Washington Post article and implied that Melton had spoken in the press conference. Melton was, however, not mentioned in the Washington Post original account of the event. Lewis, on the other hand, maintained his opinion that Aum had been framed even after the trip.

CESNUR entered the controversy by mentioning it in a speech by Introvigne during the 1997 CESNUR conference, which was later published as an article in Nova Religio. Introvigne wrote that the "much maligned investigation" was "cited by anti-cultists in the European debate as the ultimate evidence that scholars are hired guns for the cults" but "proved in fact quite the opposite. The fact that two scholars , both with return tickets to Japan paid for by Aum, reached opposite conclusions on Aum's involvement in terrorist and criminal activities is strong evidence that funding from the movements may influence but does not necessarily control the results of research."

Reader, writing in a subsequent issue of Nova Religio, stated that, while he might agree with Introvigne on the general principle, Aum's was a special case of a criminal group, on which Introvigne's conclusion was not "especially plausible: the case in hand certainly shows that some scholars are capable of saying what those who call on them want them to say, even when the evidence points the other way."

Reader stated that, "The visit was well-intentioned, and the participants were genuinely concerned about possible violations of civil rights in the wake of the extensive police investigations and detentions of followers." However, it was ill-fated and detrimental to the reputation of all those involved. While distinguishing between Lewis' and Melton's attitudes, Reader observed that Melton was criticized as well by both Japanese media and some fellow scholars. Using stronger words, Canadian scholar Stephen A. Kent chastised both Lewis and Melton for having put the reputation of the whole category of scholars of new religious movements at risk.

CESNUR and Eastern Lightning

In 2018, Bitter Winter was criticized for its sympathetic coverage of Eastern Lightning, also known as the Church of Almighty God, a group regarded as a cult in China. Introvigne discussed in Bitter Winter the 2014 murder of Wu Shuoyan, attributed by Chinese authorities to Eastern Lightning. He supported the position first presented in articles of the Chinese daily The Beijing News in 2014, then advocated in 2015 by Australian scholar Emily Dunn, that the perpetrators were not members of Eastern Lightning at the time of the murder. This position was described in 2020 by reporter Donald Kirk as common among scholars. However, while Dunn wrote that the two leaders of the group that committed the murder "started out as members of Eastern Lightning (in 1998 and 2007 respectively), they had outgrown it" and were no longer part of the sect in 2014, Introvigne, based on a different interpretation of the same Chinese sources quoted by Dunn, argued, both in Bitter Winter and in his 2020 book Inside The Church of Almighty God, that they had never been members of Eastern Lightning.

Mainstream reporting held that in 2002, members of Eastern Lightning kidnapped 34 members of the China Gospel Fellowship and held them captive for two months, with the aim of coercing them to join Eastern Lighting; Introvigne, however, suggested in 2018 that China Gospel Fellowship invented the story of the kidnapping as justification for the fact that many of its members, including national leaders, had converted to Eastern Lightning. In his 2020 book, he adopted a more nuanced position, suggesting that China Gospel Fellowship members described as "kidnapping" what was in fact "deception," as they were invited, and went voluntarily, to training sessions without being told that they were organized by Eastern Lightning.

In 2019, CESNUR's Bitter Winter co-hosted in Seoul with Human Rights Without Frontiers a conference supporting the right of asylum of Eastern Lightning and Uyghur refugees from China living in South Korea. Members of Eastern Lightning and the Uyghur diaspora also spoke in the conference.

CESNUR and Shincheonji

On November 29, 2019, CESNUR co-organized in Seoul a seminar denouncing that thousands of members of Shincheonji, a group many in South Korea regard as a cult, had been subject to forcible deprogramming. Introvigne was among the speakers.

In 2020, Shincheonji was accused by some Korean authorities and media of having favored with its behavior the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea. CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers released a "White Paper" claiming that, although it did make "mistakes" in its management of the crisis, Shincheonji had also been discriminated because of its status as an unpopular group in South Korea.

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Bibliography

• Introvigne, Massimo (2016). CESNUR: a short history. In: Gallagher, Eugene V, (ed.), 'Cult Wars' in Historical Perspective: New and Minority Religions. Routledge. pp. 23–31. ISBN 978-1-317-15666-6.

External links

• CESNUR official site

• CESNUR
• Research institutes in Italy