After the United Nations intervention caused the end of large-scale deprogramming, Japan invented new ways to destroy the Unification Church, endangering other religions in the process.
February 8, 2025
*A paper presented at the event “Helping Japan Overcome Their Religious Freedom Crisis” at the International Religious Freedom Summit 2025 in Washington DC, February 4, 2025.
When I started defending the Japanese Unification Church some twelve years ago, I was told about the “deprogramming” of its believers that was recurrently occurring in Japan.
Numerous accounts were given of families abducting and confining their kin until they would recant their faith, for months, sometimes for years. Some professional deprogrammers would step in during confinement to forcefully “persuade” the believers that the Unification Church beliefs were contrary to the Bible.
This practice, which reminds us of heresy trials and persecutions, was done with the tacit approval and refusal to intervene from the authorities, be it police or justice. Around 4,300 believers were subjected to deprogramming for over forty years in Japan.
After being requested by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in 2014 to put an end to this practice, Japan pursued its fight against the Unification Church in a reinvented form.
The fruits of deprogramming are now being harvested by state authorities through the accumulation of tort cases initiated by deprogrammed members against the church to reach the final goal of its dissolution.
Who made all that happen? The National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, an association of far-left and atheistic obedience lawyers, with the stated purpose of eliminating the Unification Church due to its early stands against Communism. Those lawyers, who were sometimes advising families to resort to deprogramming in the first place, incited the members who finally recanted their faith and their families to sue the church for damages.
With their reasoning based on consumer law, they persuaded the courts to consider religious donations as commercial matters and the soliciting of donations as “evangelical brainwashing.”
Following the shooting of Prime Minister Abe in July 2022 by a man who resented Abe’s sympathy for the church, scapegoating and hate speech flourished in the media.
Riding this wave, the Government filed for dissolution of the church, alleging that it had caused serious harm to public welfare due to the various tort cases it had lost. In all these adverse tort rulings, the courts based their decisions on an alleged violation of social norms.
But what are social norms in the area of religious beliefs and practices, in a country where materialistic and atheistic lobbies are at work?
Well, those social norms in Japan today include official guidelines issued for the protection of children, which mention that making a child participate to religious activities is a form of child abuse.
Alerted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, four UN Special Rapporteurs have issued an open letter to the Japanese authorities to express their concern about those guidelines.
Now, based on biased tort cases, the Japanese authorities filed for dissolution of the Church accusing it of having seriously harmed “Public Welfare”.
But the UN Human Rights Committee has consistently urged Japan to stop using Public Welfare as a justification to limit freedom of religion or belief.
The Government went further to enact a new law to criminalize so-called “unjust solicitation” of donations, which sanctions the vague and arbitrary concept of infringement of free will.
This law has been announced as being especially designed for the Unification Church but it could undoubtedly be applied against other targeted religious denominations in the future.
This situation needs urgent attention. Japan is a beautiful and liberal country but it needs to be reminded of its commitments to respect freedom of religion or belief.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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