The Church of Scientology
Of all the new religious movements we have discussed thus far, none has aroused as much opposition, or public curiosity, as the movement founded by Lafayette Ron Hubbard (1911- 1986) in 1954.
Hubbard’s personality, as well as the extraordinary claims made on his behalf by his followers, has been the focus of much of the criticism directed at the Church of Scientology. But even if Hubbard had not played such a visible role in the formation of Scientology, its teachings alone would have stirred controversy. At its beginnings, Scientology was presented to the public as a new form of mental healing. Hubbard’s best-known publication, Dianetics: The Modem Science of Mental Health (1950), offered its readers an alternative view of the self and the dynamic forces at work within the subconscious mind. Yet, even at this early stage in the development of his largely esoteric belief system, Hubbard was committed to a view of the “true” self—or thetan as it is called in his writings—that stresses the immaterial nature of what most Western religions would call the “soul.” Thus, even though the thetan inhabits the body during an individual’s lifespan, and even though it interacts with matter and energy, it possesses an eternal and independent reality and can therefore survive death and pass on to other bodies. To attain enlightenment, Hubbard believed, one must first acknowledge the primary reality of the thetan before passing on to higher levels of spiritual understanding.The critical moment, Scientologists believe, in this search for expanded consciousness comes when the presence of “engrams”—traumatic events stored as images in the “reactive” or subconscious mind—is made evident to both the subject of mental analysis and the “auditor” engaged in detecting unsettling memories and deeply irrational feelings. One of the primary purposes of Scientology’s form of counseling is to release the troubled individual—referred to as “pre-clear” in Scientological literature—from emotionally crippling past experiences.
Indeed, once one is declared “clear” of whatever destructive engrams have accumulated in the mind, one’s health (physical and mental) will improve dramatically, and those who have benefited from the process of “auditing” have testified to its liberating effects.But Scientology is more than the sum of its therapeutic promises and procedures. Beginning in the 1950s, Hubbard evolved a complex mythology in which the “thetans”—now thought of as a race of super-beings—were creators of our material universe who gradually lost their creative powers and fell victim to the reactive mind, which grew in influence as their powers waned. To recover the energy and imagination once possessed by these primordial thetans has become the mission of Scientology’s elite cadres, and at the highest levels of spiritual and intellectual development within the movement, the secrets of continued progressive evolution are revealed. Such emphasis on secrecy and hidden truths, disclosed only to the initiated, is one of the persistent characteristics of esoteric movements generally, and it is only within their movement, Scientologists insist, that one can achieve the status of a spiritually evolved individual (or an “Operating Thetan,” in Scientological terminology). Ironically, by tightly controlling the means of progressive self-development, Scientology has committed itself to the same kind of therapeutic monopoly that Hubbard denounced in his attacks on modern psychiatry.
Critics of Scientology have attacked the movement on several fronts.9 The official biography of its founder, they argue, is filled with distortions and lies. In reality, they insist, L. Ron Hubbard was nothing like the hero of the mind portrayed in movement literature but a scheming science-fiction writer whose cravings for power and wealth led him to fabricate a mock religion of mental health. As for the E-meter—used to detect the presence of engrams in the pre-clear mind—it is no more effective, these critics charge, than an ordinary lie detector (which it resembles) in eliminating the reactive mind or in tracing the effects of negative mental energy.
Counseling of practically any kind, they point out, can accomplish much of what Scientologists attribute to their methodology, and without the trappings of a sciencefiction cult. Scientology’s twenty-six-year struggle with the Internal Revenue Service to have itself recognized as a legitimate religious organization was finally resolved in the church’s favor by 1993. Still, the testimonies of former Scientologists to the authoritarian nature of its leadership and to the suppression of criticism within the movement seem to indicate a fundamental discrepancy between the aspirations of the church and its actual policies.
An E-meter and a display of Hubbard’s Dianetics.
In response to such critics, Scientologists point out that apostates from any religious movement often bear tales of deception and mistreatment and just as often misrepresent the very teachings they have come to reject. The ultimate goals of the Church of Scientology, its defenders insist, have not changed in the half-century or so in which the movement has existed. Its goals, they claim, clearly reflect the redemptive mission of its founder: to achieve “a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights/ At present, there are well over 100 Scientology churches worldwide, in at least as many countries. While the precise number of members still actively affiliated with the church is difficult to determine, its presence within the contemporary religious landscape appears to be well established, at least in the United States. In Europe, however, Scientology’s insistence on being seen as an authentic religion—or in Hubbard’s words as an “applied religious philosophy”—has been met with much greater skepticism and resistance.