There is very little evidence that Ron was a Scientologist! This idea usuallly gets mostly ignored by ESMBers.
But where is the evidence that he
actually ran much of scientology on his "case"?
His Grades were certainly "out" almost all the time. So from this I conclude that he never really ran much lower level stuff himself. Even wrongly run in the wrong order the gardes processes would have given him some ease from his out-ruds distress that he manifested!
We don't know if he ran OTIII or GPMs on himself much or whether he just intuited implants etc due to some non-standard, non-scn, "psychic" procedures.
He certainly has a track record of tossing off "tech" without much apparent thought or research.
Refer to Helen O'Brien's "Dianetics in Limbo" where she describes his lecture style and behaviour at the Philadelphia Doctorate course, that she set up for him.
Or refer to the only known recorded "research" procedure of Ron's when Mary Sue "audited" him in 1951 (I think) and he fished around for meter verification of his whole track opera, and when she told him the needle went "pow" on his "discovery" of beings called Targs.
We know David Mayo "developed" NOTs from "auditing" Ron, but we don't know how different the Mayo NOTs processes are to what Ron "ran" in session with Mayo.
We know Otto Roos says Ron's folders were a non-standard mess of "processes". I suspect these were similar fish and fumble techniques that Ron called "research", similar to Mary Sue's squirrel auditing of him on Targs.
This is the only evidence we have as to how "standard" Ron's own application of his tech was.
So my contention is that Ron was not a scientologist in any form that we would recognise as one. Of course, also, many of his SO orders and SO clap-trap are in direct contradiction to scientology basics.
So Ron, the non-scientologist, created an equal non-scientologist called Xenu who had all the promised scientology abilities, just as he himself had, even though neither of them were scientologists!