chuckbeatty
Patron with Honors
[From Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, eds. The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements. Cambridge University Press 2012, pp. 133-149]
Scientology: Up Stat, Down Stat
James R. Lewis
Scientology has probably received the most persistent criticism of any church in America in recent years. But…Scientologists bear some of the responsibility…. ‘They turn critics into enemies and enemies into dedicated warriors for a lifetime.’
Introduction
The Church of Scientology is a psychotherapeutically-oriented religion founded in the mid-twentieth century by L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Hubbard’s extensive writings and taped lectures constitute the beliefs and the basis for the practices of the Church. Hubbard was a talented fiction writer and adventurer deeply interested in the human psyche. Scientology grew out of Dianetics, a popular therapy movement founded by Hubbard in the early 1950s.
Rather like ancient Gnosticism, Scientology views human beings as pure spirits (‘Thetans’) trapped in MEST (the world of Matter, Energy, Space and Time). Humanity’s ultimate goal is to achieve a state of total freedom in which—rather than being pushed around by external circumstances and by our own subconscious mind—we are ‘at cause’ over the physical universe. Unlike traditional Gnosticism, achieving this exalted state of total freedom does not require that we distance ourselves from everyday life. Instead, the greater our spiritual freedom, the more successful we will be at the “game of life.”
Though other non-traditional religious groups that have been involved in dramatic incidents have attracted more public attention for short periods of time, the Church of Scientology is arguably the most persistently controversial of all contemporary New Religious Movements (NRMs). As a consequence of its involvement in numerous legal conflicts, Scientology has acquired a reputation as a litigious organization, ready to sue critics or anyone else who portrays the Church in an unfavorable light. Partly as a consequence of this fierce reputation, academicians have tended to avoid publishing studies about Scientology outside the esoteric realm of scholarly journals.
Thus, at present, there exist only a handful of scholarly, English-language books about the Church, Roy Wallis’s The Road to Total Freedom (1976), Harriet Whitehead’s anthropological study, Renunciation and Reformation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect (1987), J. Gordon Melton’s short (80 pages) treatment, The Church of Scientology (2000), and James R. Lewis’s anthology, Scientology (2009). The church has generally not interfered with the publication of academic papers, and the bulk of the scholarly literature on Scientology is in the form of articles.
The Founder and the Early History of the Church
L. Ron Hubbard grew up mostly in Montana, but also lived in Nebraska, Seattle, Washington, and Washington, D.C. According to his official biography, he informally studied psychology, philosophy, and religion during his youth. In 1929 he enrolled in George Washington University, studying mathematics and engineering. The Church of Scientology often calls attention to the fact that Hubbard took one of the first courses in nuclear physics, but neglects to mention that he failed the course and dropped out of college before receiving a degree.
He began a literary career in the early 1930s. He published numerous stories and screenplays in various genres, including adventure, mystery and science fiction. Hubbard served in the United States Navy during World War II. He was injured during the war, and it is claimed the he used some of his own theories concerning the human mind to assist in his healing.
Scientology has its roots in the “cultic milieu” of the mid-twentieth century industrialized West (the milieu that later evolved into the New Age Movement) and draws on certain themes in American popular culture. It clearly bears the imprint of American culture’s interest in self-help psychology and popularized psychoanalysis. Though the Church asserts that its closest relative among the world religions is Buddhism, Scientology is more indebted to the New Thought movement for its focus on the solution of practical problems. Hubbard was also influenced by Will Durant’s popularized history of Western philosophy, The Story of Philosophy (1926), particularly Durant’s presentation of Spinoza’s psychology. Though critics have accused Hubbard of having been influenced by the controversial occultist Aleister Crowley, Hubbard’s teachings bear little resemblance to Crowley’s.
In 1950, Hubbard published Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health. This book presented techniques aimed at ridding the “reactive mind” (Scientology’s term for the subconscious) of the residues of traumas that Hubbard postulated lie at the source of irrational behaviors and psychosomatic illnesses. Dianetics quickly became a bestseller, and groups were soon formed to practice Hubbard’s techniques. He lectured extensively and wrote more books. In 1951 he announced Scientology, described as different from Dianetics because it dealt not only with the mind (the focus of Dianetics), but also with humanity’s spiritual nature.
In 1954, the first Church of Scientology was established in Los Angeles, California. In 1959 Hubbard moved to Saint Hill Manor, in Sussex, England, and the worldwide headquarters of Scientology was re-located there. In 1966, Hubbard resigned his position as Executive Director of the Church and formed the Sea Organization (often referred to as the “Sea Org”; upper level Scientology Organizations are referred to as “Orgs”), a group of dedicated members of the Church who lived aboard large, ocean-going ships. In 1975 these activities outgrew the ships, and were moved onto land in Florida and California. From this time forward until his death in 1986, Hubbard continuously wrote and published materials on the subjects of Dianetics and Scientology, as well as a number of works of science fiction.
Hubbard has the distinction of being the world’s most translated author. His publications number over a thousand (all of his lectures were recorded and later transcribed into publications). They cover a wide variety of subjects from communication and the problems of work to past lives. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health has continued over the years to be a best seller.
Hubbard was a complex character. On the one hand, he was brilliant and charismatic. On the other hand, he was controlling and overly sensitive to criticism. He has often been accused of being a power- and money-hungry charlatan. In response to the oft-cited but probably apocryphal Hubbard remark—about how, “If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion”—Harriet Whitehead offered the observation that:
Elements of hype and razzle-dazzle, however, do not necessarily a con artist make. Taken in the context of Hubbard’s long-term commitment to the elaboration, promulgation, and defense of his idea system, even during financially unrewarding years, and also in light of the barricades of secrecy, conspiracy theory, and defensive litigation with which he surrounded his embattled organization (see Wallis 1976:190-241), these traits seem less indicative of greed for gain than part of an egoistic complex that often characterizes visionaries, cranky or not.
Beliefs and Practices
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, most people accorded science and science’s child, technology, a level of respect and prestige enjoyed by few other social institutions. Thus any religion claiming to be scientific drew on the prestige and perceived legitimacy of natural science. The appropriation of the term “science” by groups such as Christian Science and Science of Mind embody this pattern. The Church of Scientology is in this same lineage, though Scientology takes the further step of explicitly referring to their religio-therapeutic practices as religious technology—in Scientology jargon, the “tech.” In much the same way as the 1950s viewed technology as ushering in a new, utopian world, Scientologists see their psycho-spiritual technology as supplying the missing ingredient in existing technologies—namely the therapeutic engineering of the human psyche
The Church of Scientology believes that “Man is basically good, that he is seeking to survive, (and) that his survival depends on himself and upon his fellows and his attainment of brotherhood with the universe.” This is achieved in Scientology by two methods, referred to as “auditing” and “training.” Dianetics and Scientology auditing (counseling of one individual by another) consists of an “auditor” guiding someone through various mental processes in order to first free the individual of the effects of the “reactive mind,” and then to fully realize the spiritual nature of the person. The reactive mind is said to be that part of the mind that operates on a stimulus-response basis, and is composed of residual memories of painful and unpleasant mental incidents (termed “engrams”) that unconsciously exert control over the individual. When the individual is freed from these undesired effects, s/he is said to have achieved the state of “Clear,” which is the goal of Dianetics counseling. An individual can then go on to higher levels of counseling dealing with his or her nature as an immortal spiritual being, referred to in Scientolgy as a “Thetan,” and eventually achieve the state of “Operating Thetan” (usually abbreviated “OT”). Scientologists believe in reincarnation—specifically, that a Thetan has lived many lifetimes in a human body before this one and will live more lifetimes in the future.
Scientology training consists of many levels of courses about: 1) improving the daily life of individuals by giving them various tools (e.g., concerning communication), and 2) learning the techniques of auditing so that one can counsel others. Scientology teaches people enrolled in its courses a rather elaborate system of practical psychology, along with a new vocabulary involving such notions as the “tone scale” (which arranges various emotional states into a hierarchy), the “eight dynamics” (a hierarchy of increasingly more general levels of the urge to survive), the “e-meter” (a device based on lie-detector technology that helps auditors locate a client’s psychological and spiritual issues), to the “ARC” triangle (affinity, reality, and communication), and the like. Progress along the Bridge—Scientology’s spiritual path—is also arranged into a hierarchy of levels, from pre-Clear, to Clear, to eight Operating Thetan levels (Hubbard actually delineated more than eight levels, but these higher levels were never released).
Unlike many other NRMs, its membership includes people from a wide variety of ages and backgrounds. There are also numerous community action and social reform groups affiliated with Scientology that concern themselves with literacy (the World Literacy Crusade), education (the Study Tech), drug rehabilitation (Narconon), the rehabilitation of criminals (Criminon), and other issues.
Scientologists refer to a Supreme Being, but do not worship any deity as such, instead focusing on the application of Scientology principles to daily life. One unusual aspect of the Church is that members are not discouraged from actively participating in other religions, though few upper level Scientologists or full-time staff actually do so.
Many critics have focused on the so-called “space opera,” which involves secret teachings only revealed to Scientologists at the OT III level. The reasoning behind these critics’ focus appears to be that—as captured in Mikael Rothstein’s words—it seems “so utterly stupid that it unwittingly provides the best argument why people should denounce L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings and altogether avoid the organization he founded.” Another sore point for critics is that Scientologists who have reached the OT III level routinely deny the existence of these inner teachings (what has been referred to as the Xenu narrative) rather than simply stating that they are not permitted to discuss it.
Part of the problem appears to be that upper level Scientologists take these teachings literally, as potent information that must be kept secret from the uninitiated. However, as Whitehead points out, “Hubbard was careful to emphasize that these accounts are speculation, not established fact,” and that he often presented this information in a “tongue-in-cheek tone….Hubbard’s interest in the universal incidents was less in their character of unalterable revelation than in their usefulness as a springboard for his technical abstractions.” In the case of the Xenu narrative, Hubbard’s purpose was likely to provide an etiology for the “body thetans” that are exorcised during OT III processing rather than to reveal timeless truths.
Controversy
One of the first new religions in the second half of the twentieth century to be embroiled in controversy, Scientology eventually prevailed in the majority of its legal suits in North America and played a leading role in destroying the Cult Awareness Network, the most important anti-cult organization in the United States. While earlier controversial religions like the Jehovah’s Witnesses had attracted controversy as a consequence of their very public proselytizing, Scientology’s initial point of friction with the larger society was its challenge to the medical and psychotherapeutic establishments.
During the initial stages of the Dianetics movement, Hubbard naively contacted medical and psychiatric associations, explaining the significance of his discoveries for mental and physical health, and asking that the AMA and the APA investigate his new technique. Instead of taking this offer seriously, these associations responded by attacking him. The subsequent popular success of Dianetics did nothing to improve the image of Hubbard in the collective mind of the medical-psychiatric establishment, and was likely instrumental in prompting an FDA raid against the Church.
On 4 January 1963, the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, DC, was raided by United States marshals and deputized longshoremen, acting in behalf of the Food and Drug Administration. Five thousand volumes of Church scriptures, 20,000 booklets and 100 e-meters were seized. In 1971, after years of litigation, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued the Founding Church of Scientology v. United States decision. The Food and Drug Administration was ordered to return the books and e-meters that had been taken in the 1963 raid. In its decision, the court recognized Scientology’s constitutional right to protection from the government’s excessive entanglement with religion. Though the raid was declared illegal, the seized documents remained in government possession and were open to public scrutiny. According to these documents, the Church was keeping files on people it considered unfriendly. The documents also revealed that there had been various attempts by Scientology to infiltrate anti-cult organizations.
After the raid, the Church’s Guardian’s Office sent a number of top officials incognito into selected government agencies that were collecting data on Scientology. Several members were eventually indicted and convicted for theft of government documents. The convicted members were released from their positions within the Church. The Church of Scientology then closed the Guardian’s Office, which had been responsible for initiating illegal activities. It was thus made to appear that the Church of Scientology had disbanded a rogue office. However, the Church’s Office of Special Affairs, which was the organizational successor to the Guardian’s Office, has subsequently been accused of continuing most of the objectionable practices of the Guardian’s Office.
In 1991, Time magazine published a front-page story attacking Scientology, which subsequently responded with a massive public relations campaign and with a lengthy series of full-page ads in USA Today. Early in 1992 the Church filed a major lawsuit against Time, after discovering that the maker of Prozac—a psychiatric drug Scientology had been active in opposing—had been the ultimate prompter of Time’s assault on the Church. This suit was eventually dismissed.
The Church of Scientology was also involved in extended conflicts with the Australian, French, and German governments, and problems with the IRS through the 1980s and 1990s. Hubbard was charged with criminal tax evasion, and the IRS often moved against the Church in ways that questioned its tax-exempt status. These problems terminated in a landmark decision in 1993, when the IRS ceased all litigation and recognized Scientology as a legitimate religious organization. Following this decision, the Church redirected its legal resources against the Cult Awareness Network, and managed to sue the group out of existence by 1996. Scientology in North America then entered a period of relative calm, but more recently the Church has been in the news again because of the public activities of Scientologist Tom Cruise, a high-profile episode of the TV show “South Park” that led to the resignation of the late Isaac Hayes (another celebrity Scientologist) from South Park, and an exposé article that appeared in Rolling Stone in early 2006.
In 2008, an Internet group calling itself Anonymous began a campaign against the Church of Scientology that involved, among other strategies, picketing Church facilities and harassing Scientologists. The most recent controversy involves Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, who has been accused of abusing Church members. The source of these accusations has been numerous high-level defectors who have taken their stories to the press. There was a particularly notable series of articles based around interviews with these ex-members published in the St. Petersburg Times in 2009. The St. Petersburg Times exposé subsequently prompted a number of TV news programs—BBC’s Panorama and CNN’s AC360—to air special programs based around the physical and psychological abuse of these ex-members.
Patterns of Organizational Self-Sabotage
In the majority of conflicts, the Church of Scientology has proven to be its own worst enemy. Thus, for example, the covert infiltration of U.S. government agencies has been responsible for generating some of the Church’s worst publicity. The Church has also frequently employed the strategy of attempting to block publications—both popular and scholarly—judged to be critical of Scientology. Once again, this aggressive tactic has produced far more negative publicity than if the Church had simply ignored these publications.
One of the more heavy-handed practices has been to declare anyone who criticized Scientology a “suppressive person” (S.P.). As originally formulated, suppressive persons were “fair game,” meaning, among other things, that they could be “Tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” The fair game policy was terminated only after Hubbard concluded that it resulted in “bad public relations,” though he added that this does not “cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an S.P.”
In more recent years, the Church of Scientology has waged a vigorous campaign against online critics, which has led Scientology to become one of the most attacked religions on the Internet. Church leaders appear to believe that they can use the same unproductive tactic they have used over and over again in the past to obtain a different result in the present. Whitehead observes that distortion often enters into the Church’s conflicts as a result of its “overreaction to threat and its unwillingness to examine its role in provoking or exacerbating hostile reactions. Conflicts, rather than being defused, are often escalated.”
In addition to attacking the Church’s critics, Hubbard also adopted harsh policies regarding ex-members. As part of declaring a former member to be an S.P., individuals who had been personally close to the ex-member (e.g., family members, close friends, or even a spouse) were required to cut off all communication. Though comparable to the Amish practice of “shunning,” Scientology disconnections involve additional practices, such as former associates sending “disconnection letters” to ex-members. In recent (2011) media interviews, current members of the Church of Scientology have adamantly denied the existence of the Church’s disconnection policy.
This ill-advised policy has helped transform many otherwise neutral-to-moderately-critical ex-members into devoted enemies of the Church. Research on apostates from other alternative religions has demonstrated that, on the whole, ex-members generally tend to be at least mildly positive about their membership years. In my own research, I have also observed that many individuals who drop out of full-time involvement in a new religion would prefer to remain linked to the group as a part-time participant—if that option is available to them—and sometimes will later rejoin as a full-time member after a longer or shorter period of reflection outside of their former group. This scenario is obviously far less likely in a religious organization that adopts an attitude of sustained hostility toward former participants.
These policies help to explain the emergence and growth of the “Free Zone.” The Free Zone refers to the large, but loosely-organized community of people who consider themselves Scientologists, but who are not members of the Church of Scientology. Across the course of the sixty years of the Church’s existence, tens of thousands of Scientologists have left the fold. Many of these former members left for personal or for organizational reasons, and continue to believe in Scientology as a religious philosophy. Because of Church policies toward ex-members, rapprochement with the Church of Scientology is extremely difficult, creating the conditions for the emergence of an independent Scientology community.
Over the years there have been numerous schisms and alternative organizations, some of which have been sued out of existence by the Church. At one point, Hubbard’s own son left the Church to set up a more profitable private practice. This led Hubbard to begin utilizing e-meter technology for “security checks” that identified potentially disloyal staff members. Hubbard also regularly sacked high-ranking Scientologists (most of whom subsequently left the Church) who he thought might one day challenge his authority. One result of this preemptive policy—in combination with certain other ill-considered actions, such as the Mission Holder’s Conference that led to the schism of 1982/3 —was to place numerous highly-trained, upper level Scientologists outside of Church control.
The emergence of the Internet within the past couple of decades has been a boon to the Free Zone. It has not only provided Freezoners with a forum for airing grievances against the Church, but the Internet has also provided more recent ex-members with points of contact for becoming affiliated with the Free Zone. Given the decline of the Church in recent years, it may well be that independent Scientologists will one day outnumber members of the Church of Scientology.
NRM Scholarship on Scientology
The field of NRM studies as we know it in Western countries came into its own in the 1970s, though NRM studies had emerged several decades earlier in Japan in the wake of the explosion of religious innovation following the end of the second world war. Even the name “new religions” is a direct translation of the expression shin shukyo that Japanese sociologists coined to refer to this phenomenon. Though the generation of new religious groups has been an ongoing process for millennia, the study of such groups and movements was the province of pre-existing academic specializations (e.g., social anthropology) in the West until the Seventies.
However, when a wave of non-traditional religiosity emerged out of the declining counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, academicians at first perceived it as representing a different phenomenon from prior cycles of religious innovation, and NRMs initially attracted scholars from a wide variety of disciplines who were interested in assessing the broader cultural significance of New Religions. It was at this juncture that the study of NRMs began to develop as a distinct field of scholarship in Western countries.
This academic landscape changed over the course of the Seventies. By the latter part of the decade, it had become clear that new religions were not indicative of a broader social transformation—or at least not the kind of transformation observers had anticipated. Also during the Seventies, issues raised by the cult controversy—issues like conversion and ‘brainwashing’—gradually came to dominate the field. Because social conflict and social control are bread-and-butter issues for sociology, more and more sociologists were drawn to the study of new religions. By the end of the decade, the study of NRMs was a recognized specialization within the sociology of religion.
The Church of Scientology was one of the first modern NRMs to be utilized as a case study in this new field. Some of the earliest serious research was carried out by Roy Wallis. In his classic The Road to Total Freedom, and in some of his articles, Wallis used his research on Scientology as the basis for his theory of ‘sectarianization,’ which was a way of interpreting Scientology’s transformation from an individualistic cult to an authoritarian sect. Wallis was also interested in developing a new typology for NRMs. In his schema, Scientology was a prominent example of a “world-affirming” (as opposed to a “world-rejecting” or a “world-accommodating”) movement.
In their “Of Churches, Sects and Cults,” Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge put forward another influential typology that classified cults into audience cults, client cults, and cult movements. Comparable to Wallis’s use of the cult-sect distinction, Stark and Bainbridge’s tripartite classification was utilized by Paul Schnabel to describe the evolution of Scientology from the period of Hubbard as an audience cult leader (when his following was confined to readers of Dianetics and other early titles), to the formation of his fully-blown cult movement—the Church of Scientology. More recently, David G. Bromley has utilized the Church of Scientology to exemplify a ‘prophetic, contractual religion,’ which is a classification in his typology of religions.
When new religious movements first became the subject of serious social-scientific inquiry in Western countries in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers initially focused on trying to understand how and why members became involved. Though the topic of conversion was gradually displaced from the center stage of NRM studies, it is still the single most discussed subject in the field. There is general agreement among researchers that such converts are disproportionately young. In Lorne Dawson’s survey of NRM conversion studies, he briefly covers the psychology of why people join alternative religions. Both of the studies he summarizes—Eileen Barker’s study of the Unification Church and Saul Levine’s longitudinal study of NRM members —portray involvement as a crisis of youth. However, data from James Lewis’s and Nicholas Levine’s recent (2010) study of a high-demand group indicating that the average recruit is middle-aged calls this generalization into question. There were, however, much earlier studies which should have prompted researchers to question the youth-crisis model decades ago, particularly the research reported in Wallis’s Road to Total Freedom, which determined that the average age at which people joined Scientology was 32 years old.
As a major new religion that neither claims continuity with any prior religion (except for a tenuous parallel with Buddhism) nor asserts that it grows out of a special revelation, Scientology is an especially interesting case study for researchers analyzing this movement’s claims to authority. Some observers have examined Scientology’s appeal to the charismatic status of L. Ron Hubbard as a uniquely gifted individual. A number of other observers have pointed out how Scientology appeals to the authority of science rather than to a religious tradition. This mode of analysis has been brought to bear on the question, hotly debated in some countries, of whether or not Scientology should be regarded as a religion. Additionally, the Church of Scientology is an obvious case study for the analysis of ‘invented traditions.’
Because it is so often embroiled in conflict, Scientology is also a useful case study for analyses of the ‘cult’ controversy. As part of a larger effort to discredit Scientology, critics have, as mentioned earlier, called attention to what they regard as the transparent absurdity of the Church’s secret teachings. Scholars of religion normally feel bound to respect such prohibitions, but the fact that Scientology’s “secret” teachings are now widely available on the Internet places them in a unique category. Mikael Rothstein has recently put forward an argument for why researchers should make the Church of Scientology an exception in this regard. Additionally, the Church’s efforts to control its own image have extended to academicians, which has provoked resentment and influenced at last some scholars to avoid researching Scientology—and even, in a few cases, to become dedicated critics of Scientology.
The Future of Scientology and the Future of Scholarship on Scientology
Prediction is always a problematic business, especially with regard to dynamic situations in which many variables can affect outcomes. Yet it is probably safe to assert that the quantity of scholarship on Scientology will increase. Scholars avoided undertaking extensive research projects on the Church for many years, in large part because of the kinds of interference Wallis and others encountered during their research. However, Church officials finally seem to have realized that their efforts to control what academicians write about Scientology does them more harm than good. Thus, for example, the most recent book-length treatment of the Church—my edited volume, Scientology (2009)—contained material judged to be ‘blasphemous’ by members, yet neither I nor my publisher were threatened with legal action. This bodes well for the future of research on Scientology.
The future of the Church itself is less certain. I have observed this organization for over two dozen years. For most of that time, it seemed Scientology confronted every challenge, emerged victorious more often than not, and continued to grow and even thrive in the face of adversity. However, the relatively recent defection of large numbers of long-time, high-level Scientologists—some of the most experienced administrators and others with expertise in the highest levels of Scientology technology—bodes poorly for the future of the Church. In particular, the pattern of solid growth I analyzed just a few years ago seems suddenly to have ground to a halt.
Based on the upgrading and expansion of its various worldwide centers over the past several years, the organization appears to be healthy from the outside. But funds for the upgrading of Church facilities (for the so-called “Ideal Orgs”) have been generated almost entirely from new strategies for amplifying donations from current members. For instance, new, slightly “corrected” editions of Hubbard’s basic books have been issued, and Scientologists have been asked to purchase as many sets of volumes as they can afford so that complete sets can be donated to libraries across the globe. This has all been done in the name of the utopian ideal of “clearing the planet.” But placing books in public libraries is a poor strategy for spreading any sort of message in a digital age.
Unless the Church is able to stop hemorrhaging top talent, stop burdening its congregants with increasingly heavy donations, and, more positively, develop better strategies for reaching new clients for Scientology services, it appears to be headed for a sharp decline in strength and numbers.
Suggested Readings
James R. Lewis, ed., Scientology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
J. Gordon Melton, The Church of Scientology. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books 2000.
Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1
During his tenure as organizational head, L. Ron Hubbard established the tradition of each branch of the Church sending in reports on Thursdays. He then spent Fridays reading them. This is the origin of the “Thursday Report” that is the bane of many staff members. The ideal Thursday Report embodies a measurable increase over the preceding week’s report, which is referred to as being “Up Stat.” A decrease is referred to as “Down Stat.”
Douglas Frantz, “Boston Man in Costly Fight with Scientology,” New York Times, 21 December 1997, 24. Cited in Douglas Cowan, “Researching Scientology: Perceptions, Premises, Promises, and Problematics.” In James R. Lewis (ed.), Scientology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 73. The quote is from an interview with J. Gordon Melton.
For general information, refer to J. Gordon Melton, The Church of Scientology (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books 2000); Lewis, Scientology; Dorthe Refslund Christensen, “Rethinking Scientology: Cognition and Representation in Religion, Therapy and Soteriology.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aarhus, Denmark 1999; Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Harriet Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Hubbard likely drew this expression from the title of Florence Scovel Shinn’s 1925 popular New Thought book, The Game of Life and How to Play It, though his notion was significantly different than Shinn’s. For an overview of Hubbard’s notion, refer to Harriet Whitehead, “Reasonably Fantastic: Some Perspectives on Scientology, Science Fiction, and Occultism.” In Religious Movements in Contemporary America, ed. Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone, pp. 547-87. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974) and Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation.
Cowan, “Researching Scientology.” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 52-79.
Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, 21, footnote #1.
Colin Campbell, "The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization." In A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 119-136.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926).
Gerald Willms, “Scientology: ‘Modern Religion’ or ‘Religion of Modernity’?” In James R. Lewis (ed.), Scientology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 245-265.
L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. (New York: Paperback Library, 1950).
Many critics, including certain national governments, have rejected Scientology’s status as a religion. In part, this seems to be based on the “misunderstanding that once the label is granted to Scientology, then somehow one has approved of its basic goodness.” (Andreas Grünschloß, “Scientology, a ‘New Age’ Religion?” In James R. Lewis (ed.), Scientology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 227. Once the “goodness” issue is set aside, it is obvious that Scientology is a religion – and it certainly functions as a religion in the lives of most members of the Church of Scientology (refer to the discussion in Ibid., p. 227). On the other hand, Hubbard regarded Dianetics-Scientology as a science rather than as a religion (as discussed in Willms, “Scientology”), meaning that Scientology was incorporated as a religion for pragmatic purposes.
Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformation, pp. 53-54.
Mikael Rothstein, “‘His name was Xenu, He used renegades’: Aspects of Scientology’s Founding Myth,” In Lewis, Scientology, p. 383.
Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation, p. 170.
Ibid,, p. 172.
Ibid., p. 185.
James R. Lewis, Cults: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, California, 2005).
John Bowen Brown, “The Scientology Critic Group Anonymous: A Research Paper.” A paper presented at The CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 11-13, 2009.
L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Policy Letter, 18 October 1966. Cited in Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, p. 144.
Sir John G. Foster, Enquiry into the Practice and Effects of Scientology (London: HMSO, 1971), p. 129. Cited in Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, p. 144.
Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation, p. 223, footnote #3.
As discussed in Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, pp. 144-145.
James R. Lewis, Seeking the Light (Mandeville Press, 1998); James R. Lewis and Nicholas M. Levine, Children of Jesus and Mary: A Study of the Order of Christ Sophia. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, p. 148.
Ibid., pp. 154-5.
Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Lyle Stuart Books, 1990), part 7, chapter 1. It is generally agreed that it was the fallout from the Mission Holders’ Conference that led to the emergence of Free Zone Scientology.
James R. Lewis, ed. Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Wallis, Road to Total Freedom; Roy Wallis, “Scientology: Therapeutic Cult to Religious Sect.” Sociology, Vol. 9, No. 1, (1975), pp. 89-100; Roy Wallis “A Comparative Analysis of Problems and Processes of Change in Two Manipulationist Movements: Christian Science and Scientology.” In Contemporary Metamorphosis of Religion: Acts of the Twelfth International Conference for the Sociology of Religion, pp. 407-422.( Lille, France: Edition du Secrétariat CISR, 1973).
Inspired by Richard Niebuhr’s theory of ‘denominationalism’ as presented in Niebuhr’s classic study, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: H. Holt and Company 1929).
Roy Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, "Of Churches, Sects and Cults," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18 (1979), pp. 117-133.
Paul Schnabel, “Tussen stigma en charisma: nieuwe religieuze bewegingen en geestelijke volksgezondheid/Between stigma and charisma: new religious movements and mental health.” Erasmus University Rotterdam, Faculty of Medicine, Ph.D. Thesis. (Deventer, Van Loghum Slaterus, 1982, p. 82 & pp. 84-88).
David G. Bromley, “Making Sense of Scientology: A Prophetic, Contractual Religion.” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 83-101; David G. Bromley, “A Sociological Narrative of Crisis Episodes, Collective Action, Culture Workers, and Countermovements,” Sociology of Religion 58 (1997), pp. 105-140.
Lorne L. Dawson, “Who Joins New Religions and Why: Twenty Years of Research and What Have We Learned?” In Lorne L. Dawson, ed. Cults and New Religions: A Reader. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell 2003), pp. 116-130.
Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1984.
Saul V. Levine, “Cults and mental health: Clinical conclusions.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 26:8 (1981), pp. 534-539; Saul V. Levine, Radical Departures: Desperate Detours to Growing Up. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
Lewis and Levine, Children of Jesus and Mary.
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, “Inventing L. Ron Hubbard: On the Construction and Maintenance of the Hagiographic Mythology on Scientology’s Founder,” In James R. Lewis. & Jesper Aagaard Pedersen, eds., Controversial New Religions (New York: Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 227-259.
E.g., William Sims Bainbridge, “Science and Religion: The Case of Scientology.” In The Future of New Religious Movements, edited by David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 59-79; Lewis Legitimating New Religions; Mikael Rothstein, “Science and Religion in the New Religions.” In Lewis The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements; James R. Lewis, “The Science Canopy: Religion, Legitimacy, and the Charisma of Science.” Temenos 46:1, 2010; Régis Dericquebourg, “Legitimizing Belief through the Authority of Science. The Case of the Church of Scientology.” In James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, eds. Religion and the Authority of Science. (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
E.g., Gerald Willms, “Scientology: ‘Modern Religion’ or ‘Religion of Modernity’?” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 245-265.
Mikael Rothstein, “Scientology, Scripture, and Sacred Tradition.” In James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, eds. The Invention of Sacred Tradition (Cambridge University Press 2007), pp. 18-37.
E.g., Anson Shupe, “The Nature of the New Religious Movements - Anticult ‘Culture War’ in Microcosm: The Church of Scientology versus the Cult Awareness Network.” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 269-281; James T. Richardson, “Scientology in Court: A Look at Some Major Cases from Various Nations,” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 283-294; Susan J. Palmer, “The Church of Scientology in France: A History of Legal and Activist Responses to the Forces of Anti-cultism and the Government-sponsored ‘War on Sectes’.” In Lewis, Scientology, pp. 295-322.
Rothstein, “His name was Xenu,” pp. 365-387.
Cowan, “Researching Scientology.”
Lewis “The Growth of Scientology.”
Geir Isene, a Norwegian OT VIII who left the Church not too many years ago, has been highly critical of the emphasis on new buildings that constitute the centerpiece of the Ideal Org program, accusing the new building program of being itself a covert strategy for enriching the Church. In Isene’s words, “I find the Ideal Org program to be a scam where the church tries to add to its value of assets by pressuring its public for money with no exchange back.” (http://www.isene.com/GeirIseneDoubtCoS.pdf.) He cites L. Ron Hubbard in support of his critique: “When buildings get important to us, for God’s sake, some of you born revolutionists, will you please blow up central headquarters.” Hubbard Tape: The Genus of Scientology, 31 December 1960 (from: The Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress).
According to the pseudonymous ‘Plockton,’ who contacted the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) researchers directly, the ARIS estimate for the number of Scientologists in the U.S. for 2008 was 25,000. This contrasts sharply with the 55,000 figure from the 2001 ARIS survey. (“2008 ARIS Study on Scientology Membership in US – Important Data.” Posted March 28, 2009 at: http://ocmb.xenu.net/ocmb/viewtopic.php?t=30372.) The drop in total numbers was likely less dramatic than these figures indicate (due to sampling issues discussed by Plockton in his posting). In 2011, there will be national censuses in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, all of which will produce figures for total numbers of self-identified Scientologists. It will thus be relatively simple to contrast these numbers with comparable data from the 2001 censuses (for Canada and the UK) and from the 2006 censuses (for Australia and New Zealand). The net figures derived from these comparisons should indicate decisively whether membership in the Church of Scientology is growing, declining, or stagnating.
Scientology: Up Stat, Down Stat
James R. Lewis
Scientology has probably received the most persistent criticism of any church in America in recent years. But…Scientologists bear some of the responsibility…. ‘They turn critics into enemies and enemies into dedicated warriors for a lifetime.’
Introduction
The Church of Scientology is a psychotherapeutically-oriented religion founded in the mid-twentieth century by L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Hubbard’s extensive writings and taped lectures constitute the beliefs and the basis for the practices of the Church. Hubbard was a talented fiction writer and adventurer deeply interested in the human psyche. Scientology grew out of Dianetics, a popular therapy movement founded by Hubbard in the early 1950s.
Rather like ancient Gnosticism, Scientology views human beings as pure spirits (‘Thetans’) trapped in MEST (the world of Matter, Energy, Space and Time). Humanity’s ultimate goal is to achieve a state of total freedom in which—rather than being pushed around by external circumstances and by our own subconscious mind—we are ‘at cause’ over the physical universe. Unlike traditional Gnosticism, achieving this exalted state of total freedom does not require that we distance ourselves from everyday life. Instead, the greater our spiritual freedom, the more successful we will be at the “game of life.”
Though other non-traditional religious groups that have been involved in dramatic incidents have attracted more public attention for short periods of time, the Church of Scientology is arguably the most persistently controversial of all contemporary New Religious Movements (NRMs). As a consequence of its involvement in numerous legal conflicts, Scientology has acquired a reputation as a litigious organization, ready to sue critics or anyone else who portrays the Church in an unfavorable light. Partly as a consequence of this fierce reputation, academicians have tended to avoid publishing studies about Scientology outside the esoteric realm of scholarly journals.
Thus, at present, there exist only a handful of scholarly, English-language books about the Church, Roy Wallis’s The Road to Total Freedom (1976), Harriet Whitehead’s anthropological study, Renunciation and Reformation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect (1987), J. Gordon Melton’s short (80 pages) treatment, The Church of Scientology (2000), and James R. Lewis’s anthology, Scientology (2009). The church has generally not interfered with the publication of academic papers, and the bulk of the scholarly literature on Scientology is in the form of articles.
The Founder and the Early History of the Church
L. Ron Hubbard grew up mostly in Montana, but also lived in Nebraska, Seattle, Washington, and Washington, D.C. According to his official biography, he informally studied psychology, philosophy, and religion during his youth. In 1929 he enrolled in George Washington University, studying mathematics and engineering. The Church of Scientology often calls attention to the fact that Hubbard took one of the first courses in nuclear physics, but neglects to mention that he failed the course and dropped out of college before receiving a degree.
He began a literary career in the early 1930s. He published numerous stories and screenplays in various genres, including adventure, mystery and science fiction. Hubbard served in the United States Navy during World War II. He was injured during the war, and it is claimed the he used some of his own theories concerning the human mind to assist in his healing.
Scientology has its roots in the “cultic milieu” of the mid-twentieth century industrialized West (the milieu that later evolved into the New Age Movement) and draws on certain themes in American popular culture. It clearly bears the imprint of American culture’s interest in self-help psychology and popularized psychoanalysis. Though the Church asserts that its closest relative among the world religions is Buddhism, Scientology is more indebted to the New Thought movement for its focus on the solution of practical problems. Hubbard was also influenced by Will Durant’s popularized history of Western philosophy, The Story of Philosophy (1926), particularly Durant’s presentation of Spinoza’s psychology. Though critics have accused Hubbard of having been influenced by the controversial occultist Aleister Crowley, Hubbard’s teachings bear little resemblance to Crowley’s.
In 1950, Hubbard published Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health. This book presented techniques aimed at ridding the “reactive mind” (Scientology’s term for the subconscious) of the residues of traumas that Hubbard postulated lie at the source of irrational behaviors and psychosomatic illnesses. Dianetics quickly became a bestseller, and groups were soon formed to practice Hubbard’s techniques. He lectured extensively and wrote more books. In 1951 he announced Scientology, described as different from Dianetics because it dealt not only with the mind (the focus of Dianetics), but also with humanity’s spiritual nature.
In 1954, the first Church of Scientology was established in Los Angeles, California. In 1959 Hubbard moved to Saint Hill Manor, in Sussex, England, and the worldwide headquarters of Scientology was re-located there. In 1966, Hubbard resigned his position as Executive Director of the Church and formed the Sea Organization (often referred to as the “Sea Org”; upper level Scientology Organizations are referred to as “Orgs”), a group of dedicated members of the Church who lived aboard large, ocean-going ships. In 1975 these activities outgrew the ships, and were moved onto land in Florida and California. From this time forward until his death in 1986, Hubbard continuously wrote and published materials on the subjects of Dianetics and Scientology, as well as a number of works of science fiction.
Hubbard has the distinction of being the world’s most translated author. His publications number over a thousand (all of his lectures were recorded and later transcribed into publications). They cover a wide variety of subjects from communication and the problems of work to past lives. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health has continued over the years to be a best seller.
Hubbard was a complex character. On the one hand, he was brilliant and charismatic. On the other hand, he was controlling and overly sensitive to criticism. He has often been accused of being a power- and money-hungry charlatan. In response to the oft-cited but probably apocryphal Hubbard remark—about how, “If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion”—Harriet Whitehead offered the observation that:
Elements of hype and razzle-dazzle, however, do not necessarily a con artist make. Taken in the context of Hubbard’s long-term commitment to the elaboration, promulgation, and defense of his idea system, even during financially unrewarding years, and also in light of the barricades of secrecy, conspiracy theory, and defensive litigation with which he surrounded his embattled organization (see Wallis 1976:190-241), these traits seem less indicative of greed for gain than part of an egoistic complex that often characterizes visionaries, cranky or not.
Beliefs and Practices
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, most people accorded science and science’s child, technology, a level of respect and prestige enjoyed by few other social institutions. Thus any religion claiming to be scientific drew on the prestige and perceived legitimacy of natural science. The appropriation of the term “science” by groups such as Christian Science and Science of Mind embody this pattern. The Church of Scientology is in this same lineage, though Scientology takes the further step of explicitly referring to their religio-therapeutic practices as religious technology—in Scientology jargon, the “tech.” In much the same way as the 1950s viewed technology as ushering in a new, utopian world, Scientologists see their psycho-spiritual technology as supplying the missing ingredient in existing technologies—namely the therapeutic engineering of the human psyche
The Church of Scientology believes that “Man is basically good, that he is seeking to survive, (and) that his survival depends on himself and upon his fellows and his attainment of brotherhood with the universe.” This is achieved in Scientology by two methods, referred to as “auditing” and “training.” Dianetics and Scientology auditing (counseling of one individual by another) consists of an “auditor” guiding someone through various mental processes in order to first free the individual of the effects of the “reactive mind,” and then to fully realize the spiritual nature of the person. The reactive mind is said to be that part of the mind that operates on a stimulus-response basis, and is composed of residual memories of painful and unpleasant mental incidents (termed “engrams”) that unconsciously exert control over the individual. When the individual is freed from these undesired effects, s/he is said to have achieved the state of “Clear,” which is the goal of Dianetics counseling. An individual can then go on to higher levels of counseling dealing with his or her nature as an immortal spiritual being, referred to in Scientolgy as a “Thetan,” and eventually achieve the state of “Operating Thetan” (usually abbreviated “OT”). Scientologists believe in reincarnation—specifically, that a Thetan has lived many lifetimes in a human body before this one and will live more lifetimes in the future.
Scientology training consists of many levels of courses about: 1) improving the daily life of individuals by giving them various tools (e.g., concerning communication), and 2) learning the techniques of auditing so that one can counsel others. Scientology teaches people enrolled in its courses a rather elaborate system of practical psychology, along with a new vocabulary involving such notions as the “tone scale” (which arranges various emotional states into a hierarchy), the “eight dynamics” (a hierarchy of increasingly more general levels of the urge to survive), the “e-meter” (a device based on lie-detector technology that helps auditors locate a client’s psychological and spiritual issues), to the “ARC” triangle (affinity, reality, and communication), and the like. Progress along the Bridge—Scientology’s spiritual path—is also arranged into a hierarchy of levels, from pre-Clear, to Clear, to eight Operating Thetan levels (Hubbard actually delineated more than eight levels, but these higher levels were never released).
Unlike many other NRMs, its membership includes people from a wide variety of ages and backgrounds. There are also numerous community action and social reform groups affiliated with Scientology that concern themselves with literacy (the World Literacy Crusade), education (the Study Tech), drug rehabilitation (Narconon), the rehabilitation of criminals (Criminon), and other issues.
Scientologists refer to a Supreme Being, but do not worship any deity as such, instead focusing on the application of Scientology principles to daily life. One unusual aspect of the Church is that members are not discouraged from actively participating in other religions, though few upper level Scientologists or full-time staff actually do so.
Many critics have focused on the so-called “space opera,” which involves secret teachings only revealed to Scientologists at the OT III level. The reasoning behind these critics’ focus appears to be that—as captured in Mikael Rothstein’s words—it seems “so utterly stupid that it unwittingly provides the best argument why people should denounce L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings and altogether avoid the organization he founded.” Another sore point for critics is that Scientologists who have reached the OT III level routinely deny the existence of these inner teachings (what has been referred to as the Xenu narrative) rather than simply stating that they are not permitted to discuss it.
Part of the problem appears to be that upper level Scientologists take these teachings literally, as potent information that must be kept secret from the uninitiated. However, as Whitehead points out, “Hubbard was careful to emphasize that these accounts are speculation, not established fact,” and that he often presented this information in a “tongue-in-cheek tone….Hubbard’s interest in the universal incidents was less in their character of unalterable revelation than in their usefulness as a springboard for his technical abstractions.” In the case of the Xenu narrative, Hubbard’s purpose was likely to provide an etiology for the “body thetans” that are exorcised during OT III processing rather than to reveal timeless truths.
Controversy
One of the first new religions in the second half of the twentieth century to be embroiled in controversy, Scientology eventually prevailed in the majority of its legal suits in North America and played a leading role in destroying the Cult Awareness Network, the most important anti-cult organization in the United States. While earlier controversial religions like the Jehovah’s Witnesses had attracted controversy as a consequence of their very public proselytizing, Scientology’s initial point of friction with the larger society was its challenge to the medical and psychotherapeutic establishments.
During the initial stages of the Dianetics movement, Hubbard naively contacted medical and psychiatric associations, explaining the significance of his discoveries for mental and physical health, and asking that the AMA and the APA investigate his new technique. Instead of taking this offer seriously, these associations responded by attacking him. The subsequent popular success of Dianetics did nothing to improve the image of Hubbard in the collective mind of the medical-psychiatric establishment, and was likely instrumental in prompting an FDA raid against the Church.
On 4 January 1963, the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, DC, was raided by United States marshals and deputized longshoremen, acting in behalf of the Food and Drug Administration. Five thousand volumes of Church scriptures, 20,000 booklets and 100 e-meters were seized. In 1971, after years of litigation, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued the Founding Church of Scientology v. United States decision. The Food and Drug Administration was ordered to return the books and e-meters that had been taken in the 1963 raid. In its decision, the court recognized Scientology’s constitutional right to protection from the government’s excessive entanglement with religion. Though the raid was declared illegal, the seized documents remained in government possession and were open to public scrutiny. According to these documents, the Church was keeping files on people it considered unfriendly. The documents also revealed that there had been various attempts by Scientology to infiltrate anti-cult organizations.
After the raid, the Church’s Guardian’s Office sent a number of top officials incognito into selected government agencies that were collecting data on Scientology. Several members were eventually indicted and convicted for theft of government documents. The convicted members were released from their positions within the Church. The Church of Scientology then closed the Guardian’s Office, which had been responsible for initiating illegal activities. It was thus made to appear that the Church of Scientology had disbanded a rogue office. However, the Church’s Office of Special Affairs, which was the organizational successor to the Guardian’s Office, has subsequently been accused of continuing most of the objectionable practices of the Guardian’s Office.
In 1991, Time magazine published a front-page story attacking Scientology, which subsequently responded with a massive public relations campaign and with a lengthy series of full-page ads in USA Today. Early in 1992 the Church filed a major lawsuit against Time, after discovering that the maker of Prozac—a psychiatric drug Scientology had been active in opposing—had been the ultimate prompter of Time’s assault on the Church. This suit was eventually dismissed.
The Church of Scientology was also involved in extended conflicts with the Australian, French, and German governments, and problems with the IRS through the 1980s and 1990s. Hubbard was charged with criminal tax evasion, and the IRS often moved against the Church in ways that questioned its tax-exempt status. These problems terminated in a landmark decision in 1993, when the IRS ceased all litigation and recognized Scientology as a legitimate religious organization. Following this decision, the Church redirected its legal resources against the Cult Awareness Network, and managed to sue the group out of existence by 1996. Scientology in North America then entered a period of relative calm, but more recently the Church has been in the news again because of the public activities of Scientologist Tom Cruise, a high-profile episode of the TV show “South Park” that led to the resignation of the late Isaac Hayes (another celebrity Scientologist) from South Park, and an exposé article that appeared in Rolling Stone in early 2006.
In 2008, an Internet group calling itself Anonymous began a campaign against the Church of Scientology that involved, among other strategies, picketing Church facilities and harassing Scientologists. The most recent controversy involves Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, who has been accused of abusing Church members. The source of these accusations has been numerous high-level defectors who have taken their stories to the press. There was a particularly notable series of articles based around interviews with these ex-members published in the St. Petersburg Times in 2009. The St. Petersburg Times exposé subsequently prompted a number of TV news programs—BBC’s Panorama and CNN’s AC360—to air special programs based around the physical and psychological abuse of these ex-members.
Patterns of Organizational Self-Sabotage
In the majority of conflicts, the Church of Scientology has proven to be its own worst enemy. Thus, for example, the covert infiltration of U.S. government agencies has been responsible for generating some of the Church’s worst publicity. The Church has also frequently employed the strategy of attempting to block publications—both popular and scholarly—judged to be critical of Scientology. Once again, this aggressive tactic has produced far more negative publicity than if the Church had simply ignored these publications.
One of the more heavy-handed practices has been to declare anyone who criticized Scientology a “suppressive person” (S.P.). As originally formulated, suppressive persons were “fair game,” meaning, among other things, that they could be “Tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” The fair game policy was terminated only after Hubbard concluded that it resulted in “bad public relations,” though he added that this does not “cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an S.P.”
In more recent years, the Church of Scientology has waged a vigorous campaign against online critics, which has led Scientology to become one of the most attacked religions on the Internet. Church leaders appear to believe that they can use the same unproductive tactic they have used over and over again in the past to obtain a different result in the present. Whitehead observes that distortion often enters into the Church’s conflicts as a result of its “overreaction to threat and its unwillingness to examine its role in provoking or exacerbating hostile reactions. Conflicts, rather than being defused, are often escalated.”
In addition to attacking the Church’s critics, Hubbard also adopted harsh policies regarding ex-members. As part of declaring a former member to be an S.P., individuals who had been personally close to the ex-member (e.g., family members, close friends, or even a spouse) were required to cut off all communication. Though comparable to the Amish practice of “shunning,” Scientology disconnections involve additional practices, such as former associates sending “disconnection letters” to ex-members. In recent (2011) media interviews, current members of the Church of Scientology have adamantly denied the existence of the Church’s disconnection policy.
This ill-advised policy has helped transform many otherwise neutral-to-moderately-critical ex-members into devoted enemies of the Church. Research on apostates from other alternative religions has demonstrated that, on the whole, ex-members generally tend to be at least mildly positive about their membership years. In my own research, I have also observed that many individuals who drop out of full-time involvement in a new religion would prefer to remain linked to the group as a part-time participant—if that option is available to them—and sometimes will later rejoin as a full-time member after a longer or shorter period of reflection outside of their former group. This scenario is obviously far less likely in a religious organization that adopts an attitude of sustained hostility toward former participants.
These policies help to explain the emergence and growth of the “Free Zone.” The Free Zone refers to the large, but loosely-organized community of people who consider themselves Scientologists, but who are not members of the Church of Scientology. Across the course of the sixty years of the Church’s existence, tens of thousands of Scientologists have left the fold. Many of these former members left for personal or for organizational reasons, and continue to believe in Scientology as a religious philosophy. Because of Church policies toward ex-members, rapprochement with the Church of Scientology is extremely difficult, creating the conditions for the emergence of an independent Scientology community.
Over the years there have been numerous schisms and alternative organizations, some of which have been sued out of existence by the Church. At one point, Hubbard’s own son left the Church to set up a more profitable private practice. This led Hubbard to begin utilizing e-meter technology for “security checks” that identified potentially disloyal staff members. Hubbard also regularly sacked high-ranking Scientologists (most of whom subsequently left the Church) who he thought might one day challenge his authority. One result of this preemptive policy—in combination with certain other ill-considered actions, such as the Mission Holder’s Conference that led to the schism of 1982/3 —was to place numerous highly-trained, upper level Scientologists outside of Church control.
The emergence of the Internet within the past couple of decades has been a boon to the Free Zone. It has not only provided Freezoners with a forum for airing grievances against the Church, but the Internet has also provided more recent ex-members with points of contact for becoming affiliated with the Free Zone. Given the decline of the Church in recent years, it may well be that independent Scientologists will one day outnumber members of the Church of Scientology.
NRM Scholarship on Scientology
The field of NRM studies as we know it in Western countries came into its own in the 1970s, though NRM studies had emerged several decades earlier in Japan in the wake of the explosion of religious innovation following the end of the second world war. Even the name “new religions” is a direct translation of the expression shin shukyo that Japanese sociologists coined to refer to this phenomenon. Though the generation of new religious groups has been an ongoing process for millennia, the study of such groups and movements was the province of pre-existing academic specializations (e.g., social anthropology) in the West until the Seventies.
However, when a wave of non-traditional religiosity emerged out of the declining counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, academicians at first perceived it as representing a different phenomenon from prior cycles of religious innovation, and NRMs initially attracted scholars from a wide variety of disciplines who were interested in assessing the broader cultural significance of New Religions. It was at this juncture that the study of NRMs began to develop as a distinct field of scholarship in Western countries.
This academic landscape changed over the course of the Seventies. By the latter part of the decade, it had become clear that new religions were not indicative of a broader social transformation—or at least not the kind of transformation observers had anticipated. Also during the Seventies, issues raised by the cult controversy—issues like conversion and ‘brainwashing’—gradually came to dominate the field. Because social conflict and social control are bread-and-butter issues for sociology, more and more sociologists were drawn to the study of new religions. By the end of the decade, the study of NRMs was a recognized specialization within the sociology of religion.
The Church of Scientology was one of the first modern NRMs to be utilized as a case study in this new field. Some of the earliest serious research was carried out by Roy Wallis. In his classic The Road to Total Freedom, and in some of his articles, Wallis used his research on Scientology as the basis for his theory of ‘sectarianization,’ which was a way of interpreting Scientology’s transformation from an individualistic cult to an authoritarian sect. Wallis was also interested in developing a new typology for NRMs. In his schema, Scientology was a prominent example of a “world-affirming” (as opposed to a “world-rejecting” or a “world-accommodating”) movement.
In their “Of Churches, Sects and Cults,” Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge put forward another influential typology that classified cults into audience cults, client cults, and cult movements. Comparable to Wallis’s use of the cult-sect distinction, Stark and Bainbridge’s tripartite classification was utilized by Paul Schnabel to describe the evolution of Scientology from the period of Hubbard as an audience cult leader (when his following was confined to readers of Dianetics and other early titles), to the formation of his fully-blown cult movement—the Church of Scientology. More recently, David G. Bromley has utilized the Church of Scientology to exemplify a ‘prophetic, contractual religion,’ which is a classification in his typology of religions.
When new religious movements first became the subject of serious social-scientific inquiry in Western countries in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers initially focused on trying to understand how and why members became involved. Though the topic of conversion was gradually displaced from the center stage of NRM studies, it is still the single most discussed subject in the field. There is general agreement among researchers that such converts are disproportionately young. In Lorne Dawson’s survey of NRM conversion studies, he briefly covers the psychology of why people join alternative religions. Both of the studies he summarizes—Eileen Barker’s study of the Unification Church and Saul Levine’s longitudinal study of NRM members —portray involvement as a crisis of youth. However, data from James Lewis’s and Nicholas Levine’s recent (2010) study of a high-demand group indicating that the average recruit is middle-aged calls this generalization into question. There were, however, much earlier studies which should have prompted researchers to question the youth-crisis model decades ago, particularly the research reported in Wallis’s Road to Total Freedom, which determined that the average age at which people joined Scientology was 32 years old.
As a major new religion that neither claims continuity with any prior religion (except for a tenuous parallel with Buddhism) nor asserts that it grows out of a special revelation, Scientology is an especially interesting case study for researchers analyzing this movement’s claims to authority. Some observers have examined Scientology’s appeal to the charismatic status of L. Ron Hubbard as a uniquely gifted individual. A number of other observers have pointed out how Scientology appeals to the authority of science rather than to a religious tradition. This mode of analysis has been brought to bear on the question, hotly debated in some countries, of whether or not Scientology should be regarded as a religion. Additionally, the Church of Scientology is an obvious case study for the analysis of ‘invented traditions.’
Because it is so often embroiled in conflict, Scientology is also a useful case study for analyses of the ‘cult’ controversy. As part of a larger effort to discredit Scientology, critics have, as mentioned earlier, called attention to what they regard as the transparent absurdity of the Church’s secret teachings. Scholars of religion normally feel bound to respect such prohibitions, but the fact that Scientology’s “secret” teachings are now widely available on the Internet places them in a unique category. Mikael Rothstein has recently put forward an argument for why researchers should make the Church of Scientology an exception in this regard. Additionally, the Church’s efforts to control its own image have extended to academicians, which has provoked resentment and influenced at last some scholars to avoid researching Scientology—and even, in a few cases, to become dedicated critics of Scientology.
The Future of Scientology and the Future of Scholarship on Scientology
Prediction is always a problematic business, especially with regard to dynamic situations in which many variables can affect outcomes. Yet it is probably safe to assert that the quantity of scholarship on Scientology will increase. Scholars avoided undertaking extensive research projects on the Church for many years, in large part because of the kinds of interference Wallis and others encountered during their research. However, Church officials finally seem to have realized that their efforts to control what academicians write about Scientology does them more harm than good. Thus, for example, the most recent book-length treatment of the Church—my edited volume, Scientology (2009)—contained material judged to be ‘blasphemous’ by members, yet neither I nor my publisher were threatened with legal action. This bodes well for the future of research on Scientology.
The future of the Church itself is less certain. I have observed this organization for over two dozen years. For most of that time, it seemed Scientology confronted every challenge, emerged victorious more often than not, and continued to grow and even thrive in the face of adversity. However, the relatively recent defection of large numbers of long-time, high-level Scientologists—some of the most experienced administrators and others with expertise in the highest levels of Scientology technology—bodes poorly for the future of the Church. In particular, the pattern of solid growth I analyzed just a few years ago seems suddenly to have ground to a halt.
Based on the upgrading and expansion of its various worldwide centers over the past several years, the organization appears to be healthy from the outside. But funds for the upgrading of Church facilities (for the so-called “Ideal Orgs”) have been generated almost entirely from new strategies for amplifying donations from current members. For instance, new, slightly “corrected” editions of Hubbard’s basic books have been issued, and Scientologists have been asked to purchase as many sets of volumes as they can afford so that complete sets can be donated to libraries across the globe. This has all been done in the name of the utopian ideal of “clearing the planet.” But placing books in public libraries is a poor strategy for spreading any sort of message in a digital age.
Unless the Church is able to stop hemorrhaging top talent, stop burdening its congregants with increasingly heavy donations, and, more positively, develop better strategies for reaching new clients for Scientology services, it appears to be headed for a sharp decline in strength and numbers.
Suggested Readings
James R. Lewis, ed., Scientology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
J. Gordon Melton, The Church of Scientology. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books 2000.
Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1
During his tenure as organizational head, L. Ron Hubbard established the tradition of each branch of the Church sending in reports on Thursdays. He then spent Fridays reading them. This is the origin of the “Thursday Report” that is the bane of many staff members. The ideal Thursday Report embodies a measurable increase over the preceding week’s report, which is referred to as being “Up Stat.” A decrease is referred to as “Down Stat.”
Douglas Frantz, “Boston Man in Costly Fight with Scientology,” New York Times, 21 December 1997, 24. Cited in Douglas Cowan, “Researching Scientology: Perceptions, Premises, Promises, and Problematics.” In James R. Lewis (ed.), Scientology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 73. The quote is from an interview with J. Gordon Melton.
For general information, refer to J. Gordon Melton, The Church of Scientology (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books 2000); Lewis, Scientology; Dorthe Refslund Christensen, “Rethinking Scientology: Cognition and Representation in Religion, Therapy and Soteriology.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aarhus, Denmark 1999; Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Harriet Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Hubbard likely drew this expression from the title of Florence Scovel Shinn’s 1925 popular New Thought book, The Game of Life and How to Play It, though his notion was significantly different than Shinn’s. For an overview of Hubbard’s notion, refer to Harriet Whitehead, “Reasonably Fantastic: Some Perspectives on Scientology, Science Fiction, and Occultism.” In Religious Movements in Contemporary America, ed. Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone, pp. 547-87. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974) and Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation.
Cowan, “Researching Scientology.” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 52-79.
Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, 21, footnote #1.
Colin Campbell, "The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization." In A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 119-136.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926).
Gerald Willms, “Scientology: ‘Modern Religion’ or ‘Religion of Modernity’?” In James R. Lewis (ed.), Scientology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 245-265.
L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. (New York: Paperback Library, 1950).
Many critics, including certain national governments, have rejected Scientology’s status as a religion. In part, this seems to be based on the “misunderstanding that once the label is granted to Scientology, then somehow one has approved of its basic goodness.” (Andreas Grünschloß, “Scientology, a ‘New Age’ Religion?” In James R. Lewis (ed.), Scientology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 227. Once the “goodness” issue is set aside, it is obvious that Scientology is a religion – and it certainly functions as a religion in the lives of most members of the Church of Scientology (refer to the discussion in Ibid., p. 227). On the other hand, Hubbard regarded Dianetics-Scientology as a science rather than as a religion (as discussed in Willms, “Scientology”), meaning that Scientology was incorporated as a religion for pragmatic purposes.
Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformation, pp. 53-54.
Mikael Rothstein, “‘His name was Xenu, He used renegades’: Aspects of Scientology’s Founding Myth,” In Lewis, Scientology, p. 383.
Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation, p. 170.
Ibid,, p. 172.
Ibid., p. 185.
James R. Lewis, Cults: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, California, 2005).
John Bowen Brown, “The Scientology Critic Group Anonymous: A Research Paper.” A paper presented at The CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 11-13, 2009.
L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Policy Letter, 18 October 1966. Cited in Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, p. 144.
Sir John G. Foster, Enquiry into the Practice and Effects of Scientology (London: HMSO, 1971), p. 129. Cited in Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, p. 144.
Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation, p. 223, footnote #3.
As discussed in Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, pp. 144-145.
James R. Lewis, Seeking the Light (Mandeville Press, 1998); James R. Lewis and Nicholas M. Levine, Children of Jesus and Mary: A Study of the Order of Christ Sophia. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, p. 148.
Ibid., pp. 154-5.
Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Lyle Stuart Books, 1990), part 7, chapter 1. It is generally agreed that it was the fallout from the Mission Holders’ Conference that led to the emergence of Free Zone Scientology.
James R. Lewis, ed. Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Wallis, Road to Total Freedom; Roy Wallis, “Scientology: Therapeutic Cult to Religious Sect.” Sociology, Vol. 9, No. 1, (1975), pp. 89-100; Roy Wallis “A Comparative Analysis of Problems and Processes of Change in Two Manipulationist Movements: Christian Science and Scientology.” In Contemporary Metamorphosis of Religion: Acts of the Twelfth International Conference for the Sociology of Religion, pp. 407-422.( Lille, France: Edition du Secrétariat CISR, 1973).
Inspired by Richard Niebuhr’s theory of ‘denominationalism’ as presented in Niebuhr’s classic study, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: H. Holt and Company 1929).
Roy Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, "Of Churches, Sects and Cults," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18 (1979), pp. 117-133.
Paul Schnabel, “Tussen stigma en charisma: nieuwe religieuze bewegingen en geestelijke volksgezondheid/Between stigma and charisma: new religious movements and mental health.” Erasmus University Rotterdam, Faculty of Medicine, Ph.D. Thesis. (Deventer, Van Loghum Slaterus, 1982, p. 82 & pp. 84-88).
David G. Bromley, “Making Sense of Scientology: A Prophetic, Contractual Religion.” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 83-101; David G. Bromley, “A Sociological Narrative of Crisis Episodes, Collective Action, Culture Workers, and Countermovements,” Sociology of Religion 58 (1997), pp. 105-140.
Lorne L. Dawson, “Who Joins New Religions and Why: Twenty Years of Research and What Have We Learned?” In Lorne L. Dawson, ed. Cults and New Religions: A Reader. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell 2003), pp. 116-130.
Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1984.
Saul V. Levine, “Cults and mental health: Clinical conclusions.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 26:8 (1981), pp. 534-539; Saul V. Levine, Radical Departures: Desperate Detours to Growing Up. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
Lewis and Levine, Children of Jesus and Mary.
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, “Inventing L. Ron Hubbard: On the Construction and Maintenance of the Hagiographic Mythology on Scientology’s Founder,” In James R. Lewis. & Jesper Aagaard Pedersen, eds., Controversial New Religions (New York: Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 227-259.
E.g., William Sims Bainbridge, “Science and Religion: The Case of Scientology.” In The Future of New Religious Movements, edited by David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 59-79; Lewis Legitimating New Religions; Mikael Rothstein, “Science and Religion in the New Religions.” In Lewis The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements; James R. Lewis, “The Science Canopy: Religion, Legitimacy, and the Charisma of Science.” Temenos 46:1, 2010; Régis Dericquebourg, “Legitimizing Belief through the Authority of Science. The Case of the Church of Scientology.” In James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, eds. Religion and the Authority of Science. (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
E.g., Gerald Willms, “Scientology: ‘Modern Religion’ or ‘Religion of Modernity’?” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 245-265.
Mikael Rothstein, “Scientology, Scripture, and Sacred Tradition.” In James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, eds. The Invention of Sacred Tradition (Cambridge University Press 2007), pp. 18-37.
E.g., Anson Shupe, “The Nature of the New Religious Movements - Anticult ‘Culture War’ in Microcosm: The Church of Scientology versus the Cult Awareness Network.” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 269-281; James T. Richardson, “Scientology in Court: A Look at Some Major Cases from Various Nations,” In Lewis Scientology, pp. 283-294; Susan J. Palmer, “The Church of Scientology in France: A History of Legal and Activist Responses to the Forces of Anti-cultism and the Government-sponsored ‘War on Sectes’.” In Lewis, Scientology, pp. 295-322.
Rothstein, “His name was Xenu,” pp. 365-387.
Cowan, “Researching Scientology.”
Lewis “The Growth of Scientology.”
Geir Isene, a Norwegian OT VIII who left the Church not too many years ago, has been highly critical of the emphasis on new buildings that constitute the centerpiece of the Ideal Org program, accusing the new building program of being itself a covert strategy for enriching the Church. In Isene’s words, “I find the Ideal Org program to be a scam where the church tries to add to its value of assets by pressuring its public for money with no exchange back.” (http://www.isene.com/GeirIseneDoubtCoS.pdf.) He cites L. Ron Hubbard in support of his critique: “When buildings get important to us, for God’s sake, some of you born revolutionists, will you please blow up central headquarters.” Hubbard Tape: The Genus of Scientology, 31 December 1960 (from: The Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress).
According to the pseudonymous ‘Plockton,’ who contacted the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) researchers directly, the ARIS estimate for the number of Scientologists in the U.S. for 2008 was 25,000. This contrasts sharply with the 55,000 figure from the 2001 ARIS survey. (“2008 ARIS Study on Scientology Membership in US – Important Data.” Posted March 28, 2009 at: http://ocmb.xenu.net/ocmb/viewtopic.php?t=30372.) The drop in total numbers was likely less dramatic than these figures indicate (due to sampling issues discussed by Plockton in his posting). In 2011, there will be national censuses in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, all of which will produce figures for total numbers of self-identified Scientologists. It will thus be relatively simple to contrast these numbers with comparable data from the 2001 censuses (for Canada and the UK) and from the 2006 censuses (for Australia and New Zealand). The net figures derived from these comparisons should indicate decisively whether membership in the Church of Scientology is growing, declining, or stagnating.