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WillowOne's Positions

Scientology

My Positions

  1. Scientology is a religion whose founding is documented within living memory, by a pulp science-fiction writer, and whose cosmology (an intergalactic ruler called Xenu, hydrogen bombs in volcanoes seventy-five million years ago, the disembodied souls of his victims clinging to us all) is sold to members by the hour at prices running into the hundreds of thousands.
  2. It is the most useful control case in the study of religion. Every mechanism by which a religion forms is on film: the prophet, the scripture, the secret doctrine, the persecution narrative, the shunning of apostates, and the tax exemption.
  3. It is also a dangerous organisation, and it should have the legal status of any other business. No religious or charitable privilege should attach to it, and the same applies to the older firms in the same trade.

Notes

  1. How it started. L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics in 1950 as a science of the mind. When the medical profession and the tax authorities declined to treat it as one, he reconstituted it as a church in 1953. Several people who knew him in the 1940s reported him saying that the way to make real money was to start a religion. Whether or not he said it, he did it. The "Bridge to Total Freedom" is a sequence of paid courses and "auditing" sessions with a crude galvanometer, at the top of which the member is told the Xenu story, which the organisation kept secret until it was read into a court record in 1993. Members who reach that level have usually spent more than the price of a house to be told it.
  2. The record. Operation Snow White (1973–77) was the largest infiltration of the United States government ever carried out by a private organisation; eleven members, including Hubbard's wife, went to prison. The IRS granted tax exemption in 1993 after a campaign of litigation and private investigation against its officials. "Fair game" was the written policy that an enemy of the church "may be deprived of property or injured by any means". "Disconnection" requires members to cut off family who criticise the church. The Sea Org signs its members to billion-year contracts and has held some of them in a facility its former executives call the Hole. Lisa McPherson died in 1995 after seventeen days in the church's custody in Clearwater. Germany treats the organisation as a threat to the constitutional order and monitors it accordingly.
  3. The legal position in Britain. The Charity Commission refused Scientology charitable status in 1999 because it could not show public benefit. In 2013 the Supreme Court held that a Scientology chapel was a "place of meeting for religious worship" for the purposes of marriage law, on the sensible ground that the law should not require a god. I agree with the court and draw the opposite conclusion from it: if Scientology is a religion, then "religion" is not a category that should carry privileges, which is the position set out under Religion and Hard Secularism.
  4. Why it matters beyond its size. Scientology has perhaps thirty thousand active members and is shrinking. Its value is as a demonstration. The move from "science" to "religion" when the evidence failed and the tax advantages beckoned; the scripture that cannot be questioned because its author said so; the secret doctrine that would be laughed at if disclosed too early; the apostates who are the most reliable witnesses and are therefore declared the least credible; the sincere, decent members who have given their lives to it and cannot now afford to look. Every one of these can be watched happening, with dates. The older religions did the same things when nobody was taking notes, and the believer who finds Xenu absurd is invited to ask what, apart from the date, makes a talking snake different.
  5. The members. The people in it are mostly victims of it, as the people in any high-control group are. Contempt belongs to the organisation and its leadership, not to the person at the stress-test table on the high street, who is doing what people have always done when offered certainty and belonging at a price they did not yet understand (The human need for religion).

Sources

  • Wright, L., Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013), and the 2015 documentary of the same name
  • Miller, R., Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987)
  • R (Hodkin) v Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages [2013] UKSC 77 — https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2013-0030.html
  • United States v. Mary Sue Hubbard et al., 493 F. Supp. 209 (D.D.C. 1979), on Operation Snow White
  • The Fishman affidavit, Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz (C.D. Cal. 1993), containing the OT III materials

Also see