The media atmosphere surrounding new religious movements bore all the hallmarks of a moral panic – a phenomenon characterised by rapidly spreading, exaggerated anxiety, in which a particular group is portrayed as a threat to social values and order. It was precisely these ‘sects’ that, in the words of Stanley Cohen, a researcher of this phenomenon, became folk devils or public enemies in much of the media coverage during the transition period. In the hunt for spiritual threats lurking to prey on the naive and innocent, echoes of the satanic panic that swept through the US during the Reagan presidency were discernible.
This does not mean, however, that there were no shady and dangerous para-religious organisations at that time that exploited people or appropriated their assets. Indeed, there were, although – without denying the harm suffered by their victims – they remained a marginal phenomenon on a societal scale. In particular, two home-grown movements (though not the only ones), ‘Niebo’ and Antrovis, which were the subject of police investigations and whose eccentric practices provided excellent fodder for sensationalist articles, fostered an atmosphere of fear.
Antrovis’s mythology was a weird mix of UFO beliefs, Pan-Slavism, biblical apocrypha, and anti-Semitic prejudices – the sort of story that could form the basis for a film in the style of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. In short, the gist was that the end of the world is approaching, an interplanetary conflict between the Polans and the Hebrews is underway, the cycle of reincarnation has ended (which is why people born after 1983 have no soul), and a group of the chosen ones will be evacuated by spaceships from Ślęża to the planet Mirinda.
As for Bogdan Kacmajor’s ‘Niebo’ Holy Spirit Healing Church, it seems that, following the premiere of the recent TV series starring Tomasz Kot, based on Sebastian Keller’s book, Polish media have covered every aspect of this sect. Admittedly, the market for healers was rife with impostors, charlatans and manipulators, as depicted in the song Kuracja Doktora Granata (Dr Granat’s Treatment) by the band Bielizna.
The ‘chief cowboy of Poland’, Wojciech Cejrowski, warned in an episode of WC Kwadrans that cults posed as great a threat to young people as drug addiction and alcoholism, and called for stricter regulation of all new religious movements. He then interviewed a ‘survivor of the Hare Krishna sect’ (thanks to Mother Teresa). In Mariusz Szczygieł’s programme Na Każdy Temat, the topic of cults came up repeatedly: the presenter spoke, among others, with former members of Antrovis, the ex-wife of the leader of ‘Niebo’, and followers (both former and current) of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
Cults and new religious movements were also mentioned in the 1995 Report on the State of National Security. At the initiative of church circles, politicians seeking a catchy issue, and ‘concerned parents’, anti-cult organisations were established to track down the gurus’ tentacles. In Agnieszka Kościańska’s book Potęga Ciszy (The Power of Silence), a research study devoted to the Brahma Kumaris movement, a situation is described in which the media and anti-cult organisations became involved in ‘rescuing a child from a cult’, only for the child to turn out to be an adult man who was living in the community of his own free will.
Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska, a religious studies scholar at the Jagiellonian University, stated in a 1995 interview with Polityka that the strong reactions to the emergence of new religious movements in Poland were, in essence, a response to the ‘breaking down of the deeply ingrained stereotype of the Polish Catholic’. As she commonsensically observed:
The only way to preserve religious purity in Poland would be to close the borders again. If we decide to keep the borders open, we will end up with every religious phenomenon found in the world.
Unwitting heretics
