cult recovery 101

Greeks Seek Strength in the Powers of a Revered Monk to Predict Events


Wall Street Journal
Gordon Fairclough

Elder Paisios Expected Travails; A Skeptical Facebook Page Draws Ire

December 3, 2012


SOUROTI, Greece—Legend has it that nearly three decades ago, a bearded Orthodox Christian mystic visiting here made an unsettling prediction: Greece in the future would experience a “great disruption and confusion,” followed by hunger and political turmoil.


Believers say this grim vision of Elder Paisios, an ascetic monk who died in 1994, was actually a prescient glimpse of the upheaval now gripping this debt-racked country—helping fuel a surge of interest in the Orthodox holy man by Greeks struggling to make sense of a brutal financial crisis.


Elder Paisios, who spent much of his adult life as a hermit on the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos in northeastern Greece, has become a popular sensation—with tales of his prognostications and miracles he is said to have performed posted online and recounted in popular books.


On Saturdays, hundreds of pilgrims line up at Elder Paisios’s gravesite here, waiting their turn to kneel, pray and kiss the wooden cross that marks his final resting place. They ask for help finding jobs, paying bills and surviving a downturn that has upended their lives.


“Paisios predicted many things, and his prophecies are now coming true,” said Costas Katsaounis, a 41-year-old military officer on a visit to the shrine. “He foresaw the crisis. But he also said it would get better, that we will overcome and prosperity will return. He’s helped a lot of people.”


Elder Paisios’s fame in some ways echoes that of Michel de Notredame, better known as Nostradamus, a 16th-century French apothecary who believers say foretold everything from the rise of Hitler to the terror attacks of Sept. 11.


“Figures like Paisios represent the shaman, the magician of the tribe,” said Alexandra Koronaiou, a sociologist at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. “They are the incarnation of a transcendental, invisible power.”


With Greece’s economy in the fifth year of a grinding recession that is expected to deepen further in 2013, unemployment above 25% and even middle-class families struggling to feed their children, many Greeks feel like their society is teetering on the brink of collapse, and they are seeking solace.


“When there is an event that brings an entire country to its knees, people look for a religious explanation,” said Vasilios Makrides, a religious-studies professor and specialist on Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. “They are seeking support from the supernatural.”


That is driving a fresh boom in all things Paisios. The elder’s wizened and bearded face, peering out from below a black cap, adorns devotional banners and cards inscribed with inspirational messages.


Bookstores stock dozens of Paisios-related titles, from books detailing his spiritual teachings to volumes filled with his commentary on everything from the coming of the apocalypse to Greece’s retaking of Constantinople, once the seat of Byzantine emperors and now Istanbul.


A woman prayed at the mystic’s grave in Souroti.

“They sell like crazy,” said Ionnis Aivaliotis, who works at the Zoe religious bookstore in downtown Athens. “Even nonbelievers are starting to read them. It gives people courage to withstand what’s coming.”


There is a Paisios diet guide—he was very thin—and a kids’ book, “Once Upon a Time, Children, There Was Elder Paisios.”


Over the past two years, conservative newspaper Dimokratia has sold 350,000 copies of Paisios-related titles—from compilations of his prophecies to his views on education. Other newspapers carry accounts of his reputed miracles.


Elder Paisios, born Arsenios Eznepedis in central Anatolia in 1924, is part of a long tradition of monastic spirituality that believers say confers a power of divination—to see things others cannot, to interpret signs and predict the course of events.


Even before his death in 1994, he was well known in religious circles, drawing the faithful to Mount Athos for spiritual guidance and advice. Many expect that he will eventually be canonized. (A church spokesman declined to comment.)


But the recent increase in attention has prompted a backlash from skeptics and drawn cautions from some in the Greek Orthodox Church hierarchy.


“People are looking for somewhere to turn,” said the Rev. Vasilios Havatzas, head of the church’s charitable operations in Athens. “But some are overreacting. They are making him into some kind of prophet,” he said, adding: “That doesn’t mean everything he said is right.”


But in a sign of the broad support for Elder Paisios, Greek police arrested 27-year-old Phillipos Loizos for creating a Facebook page that poked fun at Greeks’ belief in the miracles and prognostications of the late monk. He was charged with blasphemy and insulting religion. The blasphemy charge was later withdrawn.


Police received thousands of complaints about the page on the social-networking site for Elder Pastitsios, a play on the monk’s name. Pastitsio is a traditional baked pasta dish similar to lasagna. An ultranationalist lawmaker condemned the page in Parliament.

Mr. Loizos said he was using satire to criticize the commercialization of the monk and his message.


Many of Elder Paisios’s purported prophecies resonate. “The people will be so disappointed by the politicians of the two big parties, that they will get sick of them,” is one that rings true in an era when voter support for the country’s two mainstream parties, blamed for the crisis, has dropped sharply.


Some of the elder’s reported remarks hint at dark conspiracies—among them that the world is ruled secretly by a cabal of five people. He also predicted national triumphs for Greece, saying that Greeks would defeat Turkey, rule Constantinople and take part of Albania.


“Holy people like Elder Paisios are born once in a thousand years,” said Nikolaos Zournatzoglou, who has compiled three books of the elder’s pronouncements. “He was a gift from God and the Virgin Mary for humanity.”


In Souroti, about 20 miles from the northeastern Greek city of Thessaloniki, busloads of pilgrims arrived one Saturday recently to see the elder’s grave. Young and old, they prayed and took pictures. Some plucked a leaf of basil from a plant growing near the simple cross at his head.


Afterward in a gift shop in the basement of the rough-hewn stone church, visitors bought postcards, plaques with images of Elder Paisios and books by and about him, along with icons, crosses and other religious paraphernalia.


“There’s a lot of uncertainty now. We don’t know what is going to happen,” said Anastasia Constantinou, a waitress visiting the shrine who said her family has had to cut back on meat, on driving their car and on other normal activities as their income has fallen amid the downturn.


“People find consolation in faith,” Ms. Constantinou, 32, said. “Even though everyday life is difficult, Paisios gives strength to people. He helps them hold on.”


Write to Gordon Fairclough at gordon.fairclough@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared December 3, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Greeks Seek Strength in the Powers of a Revered Monk.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578143271912956476.html?KEYWORDS=paisios

Re-Entry Therapy, Information & Referral Network (RETIRN)

Since 1983, the Re-Entry Therapy, Information & Referral Network (RETIRN) has been providing counseling, forensic (legal), consultation, information and referral services to individuals and families adversely affected by high demand groups, manipulative and totalistic social, political, transformational and/or religious movements, such as: destructive cults  (e.g., religious, political, therapy, marketing cults).…

Christian group makes legal appeal for charity status

Guardian
James Gray

A legal appeal will decide if the Charity Commission was right to deny charitable status to the Brethren movement – the case hinges on whether its doctrine and practices are compatible with public benefit

January 3, 2013

Last month saw the formal start of a charity tribunal appeal that could redefine the place of religion in the charity sector. The case – which has been the subject of increasingly acrimonious debate in parliament and the media – concerns the Charity Commission’s decision not to grant charitable status to the Preston Down Trust, which runs a meeting hall for south Devon’s Plymouth Brethren community.

Founded in the 19th century, the Brethren are a Christian movement whose lifestyle is characterised by daily bible study, an emphasis on traditional family roles and a rejection of radio, TV and cinema. Their doctrine of “separation” limits time spent with outsiders, but adherents say the popular perception that the community lives in isolation, severing all ties with those who choose to leave – hence the “Exclusive Brethren” epithet – is an outdated stereotype.

The case hinges on whether the doctrine and practices of the Brethren are compatible with the public benefit requirement of charity law. Until the Charities Act 2006 there was a presumption that “advancement of religion” was in itself a public benefit, but the act removed that presumption and required religious charities – just like those with other legally defined charitable purposes – to demonstrate explicitly how their activities made a positive contribution to the community.

In a recent letter to the Commons public administration select committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the regulation of the charity sector and the 2006 act, the commission was forced to explain why the Druid Network had charitable status while the Brethren did not. The commission said this was because the former did not support events or organisations that were “exclusive”.

The commission has previously drawn on case law developed before 2006 to resolve such questions. But in its letter to the trust, the regulator said the act’s introduction – and the tribunal’s recent assessment of public benefit in relation to private schools – meant this aspect of charity law was now unclear. “The evidence is relation to any beneficial impact on the wider public is perhaps marginal and insufficient to satisfy us as to the benefit to the community,” it said.

The letter outlined two specific concerns: first, that the trust may not provide “meaningful access to participate in public worship” and secondly, that the supposedly rigid disciplinary practices of the Brethren, and the “effects of the doctrine and practice of separation on family, social and working life”, may negate potential public benefit. The letter stresses, however, that the latter is based on “public criticism” rather than solid evidence.

The commission considered referring the matter to the charity tribunal for clarification but decided not to. And as it deemed an internal decision review to be “inappropriate”, the trust’s only option – apart from accepting the decision – was to appeal to the tribunal and become a test case for other Brethren congregations, and potentially for other religious groups too.

When parliamentarians and parts of the media found out about its decision, they were quick to accuse the commission of “anti-Christian” bias. Brethren elders were invited to give evidence to the public administration select committee, during which Charlie Elphicke MP claimed the regulator was “committed to the suppression of religion”. The case also dominated last month’s Westminster Hall debate on charity registration, with some MPs calling for a full parliamentary inquiry.

To the surprise of many, the Brethren have run a tight public relations campaign – not that they’re relishing the attention. “It’s a feeling of puzzlement and great sorrow to us that we’re having to go through this battle,” says Rod Buckley, a member of the Preston Down congregation. “I don’t quite understand it. We do a lot in the community and people that know us, know that.”

Buckley points to the Brethren’s soup kitchens, food parcel collections and the help they gave to those affected by the recent floods as clear examples of their positive impact on the community. He adds that while holy communion – the “Lord’s supper” in Brethren parlance – is accessible only to members, other events are open to all. No different, he says, to many mainstream religious groups.

The commission stresses that it does not have general concerns about religious charities, but those following the case have warned it could have wider ramifications. “It does potentially impact on other organisations, particularly where they restrict access to participation in religious services, meetings or activities, or where there’s an emphasis on an enclosed community,” says Stephanie Biden, a senior associate at charity solicitors Bates Wells & Braithwaite.

In an unprecedented move, the tribunal has allowed the commission to file anonymous witness statements and for witness protection measures to be put in place. The decision is in response to evidence received by the commission from former Brethren members, whose relationships with family members still in the group are particularly sensitive.

If these witnesses do testify at the full hearing in March 2013, the tribunal may have to answer a question that could have far-reaching consequences: when do allegations of harm against a particular religion or denomination outweigh potential public benefit? There is no shortage of controversial religious groups on the register, after all.

Despite the commission’s protestations, the case is unlikely to be seen merely as a clarification of charity law. The regulator has found itself at the centre of a row about religious freedom – and with the Brethren vowing to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary, it’s a row that’s likely to get even more heated in the coming months.

James Gray is an independent campaigns adviser and writer with a particular interest in education. His Twitter username is @james_gray_

Beyond belief

The Observer, Saturday 11 December 2004 With the likes of Madonna and Guy Ritchie giving celeb cred to Kabbalah, cults have never been more fashionable, nor more contentious. Nick Johnstone meets US cultbuster Rick Ross who, for a fee of $5,000, offers to deprogramme ‘victims’ and return them to their families…

"Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work?

Excerpts from the book by Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich The Therapeutic Relationship                The relationship between patient and therapist is unique in important ways when compared to relationships between clients and other professionals such as physicians, dentists, attorneys, and accountants. The key difference is present from first…

James Ray’s attorneys seek to exclude witnesses

Arizona Family, January 26, 2011

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Defense attorneys for a self-help guru facing manslaughter charges are asking a judge to keep two of the state’s witnesses from testifying at trial.


James Arthur Ray’s attorneys say the testimony of a man who studies cult behavior and a corporate risk management expert is irrelevant and would distract the jury.



Ray has pleaded not guilty to three counts of manslaughter stemming from the deaths of three people following a sweat lodge ceremony he led near Sedona in 2009.



Prosecutors say Ross will explain why participants felt they couldn’t leave the ceremony, and Steven Pace will speak to safety measures.



If Ross’ testimony is allowed, prosecutors want the judge to prohibit the defense from bringing up his criminal history or cult deprogramming practices.


Ray’s trial is set to begin Feb. 16.



Scientology and Its Discontents

October 2, 2011


Scientology and Its Discontents 1

Scott Lauder, Hulton Archive, Getty Images
In 1968, L. Ron Hubbard used his Electrometer to determine whether tomatoes experience pain. He concluded that they “scream when sliced.”

Enlarge Image

By Seth Perry
This past spring, in a course I called “American Scriptures,” my students and I listened to excerpts of a recording of L. Ron Hubbard lecturing on a boat in 1968. I had obtained the recording—which the Church of Scientology, the religious organization Hubbard founded, considers not for public circulation—from WikiLeaks, along with a transcript. I photocopied the relevant portions of the transcript and handed them out in class as aids to listening. The transcripts helped enable discussion of particular passages and allowed students to follow Scientology’s famously idiosyncratic lingo—”squirreling,” “ARC break,” “F/N.”
We did something similar with media productions of various other American religious movements, but what inevitably set Scientology’s apart was that as I handed out the transcripts, I told the students that I would have to ask for them back at the end of class. I explained that I did not want to be accused of having reproduced Scientology materials for circulation, thereby risking a lawsuit. My students, with some mirth, thought I was being a little dramatic, and maybe they were right—but I took the transcripts back all the same.
This classroom moment exemplifies the tensions inherent in studying and teaching Scientology. Hubbard’s teachings contain fascinating religious content that demands serious study—by those interested in religion writ large, and by those, like me, who study its American iterations. The organization that Hubbard created, however, frustrates that study.
The Church of Scientology has sought—through litigation and through extralegal harassment—to limit access to its materials and to discourage outsiders’ discussion of its teachings. Moreover, the church’s public profile—that of a belligerent, mendacious institution that produces couch-jumping celebrities—shadows the study of Scientology in the classroom. Students who are trying to take Scientology seriously as a religion worthy of study must come to terms with stories such as that of David Miscavige, the worldwide leader of the Church of Scientology, forcing his subordinates to compete to keep their jobs in a violent game of musical chairs set to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Two new books will make analysis of the Church of Scientology’s history and character easier. Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) is, as she intended it to be, “the first objective modern history of the Church of Scientology.” A careful, tireless reporter—she first wrote about Scientology forRolling Stone, in 2005—Reitman elaborates a more thorough and more human account of Scientology’s complicated history than has ever been available. Hugh Urban, a professor of religious studies at Ohio State University, has written an equally essential work in The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011), which is more concerned with the questions Scientology raises than about Scientology itself.
Urban’s interest is in using the church as “a critically important test case for thinking about much larger legal and theoretical issues in the study of religion as a whole.” “Religion,” he observes, as an academic area of study and as a label with moral, legal, and financial implications, does not have a static definition. In the 20th century, Scientology claimed the status of a religion over the objections of government agencies and public critics, and the ensuing process of negotiation allows us to watch the questions of religion being worked out with a unique level of transparency. “Which groups do we privilege with the label ‘religion,’ and which do we exclude?” Urban wonders. “More important, what are the stakes—legal, financial, and political—in laying claim to the status of religion?”
The two authors agree that Lafayette Ronald Hubbard understood those stakes. He was born in Nebraska in 1911, and his early life is the subject of two very different narratives. According to the church, he was an intrepid explorer, a war hero, a scientist, “the most published and translated author of all time”; to critics, he was a ne’er-do-well, a Navy junior officer who opened fire on some Mexican islands during World War II, a college dropout, a hack. The two narratives come together, though, around the publication of Dianetics,in 1950. Presented as the fruit of Hubbard’s research into the workings of the human mind, Dianetics had nothing religious about it. It is a self-help book based on the idea that traumatic events in one’s past are the source of all mental and most physical ills. By reviewing those events with the help of an auditor trained in Dianetics, those events could be cleared, Hubbard wrote—dissolved, their negative effects eliminated.
Despite criticisms from mental-health professionals, the Dianetics movement took off in 1950, spawning a network of loosely affiliated foundations. By one estimate, the foundations took in over a million dollars in the first year—and spent it all. As initial interest in the movement waned, Hubbard accepted funds from a wealthy supporter, effectively ceding control of his creation. In 1952 the remnant organization declared bankruptcy, and Hubbard was essentially back where he had started.
Spinning personal authority out of nothing more than one’s own assertions of special knowledge—the defining and most elusive ability of a prophet—is a supremely difficult thing. Hubbard did it not once but twice. He rebuilt around what he called, in an internal letter in 1953, “the religion angle.” Hubbard’s move into religious territory is typically thought of as a bald-faced strategy for tax evasion, but Urban demonstrates that the shift happened “in fits and starts” and was motivated by a number of concerns, perhaps not all of them financial. During “auditing”—Hubbard’s counseling method— Hubbard said he had found that many subjects spoke of traumatic events in their pasts which could not have happened to them—could not, that is, have been events of their current lives. Hubbard’s research, he said, led him into past lives and reincarnation—clearly, he felt, religious subjects. His thought expanded to contemplate his subjects’ past lives as other beings, as other forms of being, on other worlds, across a vast expanse of time. The methods and principles of Dianetics (Hubbard came to refer to the book itself as “Book One”) are still essential to Scientology—your past is still the source of the problems of your present. That past, though, now extends 76 trillion years. You have a lot of problems.
For the Church of Scientology, Hubbard wrote a creed, mandated that his officials dress like ministers, designed a cross, and created ceremonies for births, weddings, and funerals. Stung by the collapse of the decentralized movement that had grown up around Dianetics, he placed a powerful institution at the center of everything—auditor training and all publications flowed from it, and money flowed in, from individuals and from subsidiary organizations set up on a strictly controlled franchise model. Along with most previous works on Scientology, the two new books share a preoccupation with this institution.
Urban defines Scientology by the transparency of the institution’s adoption of religious trappings—”Scientology is a self-conscious attempt to make a religion, that is, a concerted effort to use explicitly religious sorts of discourse to describe, defend, define, and redefine itself,” he writes—and makes the process of this reimagination the centerpiece of his book, using it to talk about how claims to religious status are adjudicated in American law and public culture. He contextualizes Scientology’s birth in the mid-20th century—focusing, for instance, on the cold-war mentality behind the church’s constant suspicions and various CIA-like operations against perceived critics—and its future in the 21st, thinking through the significance of the Internet age for a religion that has depended on the modulated release of secrets.
For her part, Reitman is most concerned with the abuses that have been perpetrated by the institution. She spends no fewer than four chapters on the case of Lisa McPherson, the young woman who died in the care of Scientologists in 1995 after declining conventional medical care on their advice. Operation Snow White—the Church’s shockingly successful attempt to infiltrate the IRS, the FBI, the Justice Department, and other government agencies in the 1970s—looms large.
Reitman carefully relates stories from former Scientologists about life in the Sea Org, Scientology’s elite management corps, and these range from the frightening (accusations of forced labor and imprisonment) to the surreal: For much of his career, Hubbard gave orders through what he called his Messengers—mostly adolescent girls who were required not only to convey his words verbatim, but to imitate his voice while doing so. Her final chapter opens with the story of Miscavige’s game of musical chairs and continues with one couple’s harrowing story of escape from the church’s inner sanctum.
The unearthing of the church’s complicated, often ugly history is an essential part of the study of Scientology, but it does not need to be the sum total of that study. In both books, the religion that is Scientology is inseparable from the institution that is the Church of Scientology. Reitman takes some important steps in the direction of distinguishing the two, but with the exception of her interviews with one young woman, neither she nor Urban has significant material from current members of the church, and neither is able to present a clear idea of what it actually means for an average person to be a Scientologist. Urban asks what it means for Scientology to be regarded as a religion by various outsiders, but no study has yet answered the question of what it means for Scientology to act as a religion for its adherents.
A collected volume, Scientology, edited by James R. Lewis, published by Oxford in 2009, contains some essays that attempt to bring discussion of Scientology to this level—thinking through, for example, “The Development and Reality of Auditing,” as one essay is titled—but much work remains to be done.
Future research will need to populate the world of Scientology with the range of characters that populate studies of other religions—from the militant and evangelistic to the lukewarm, the familially obligated, the dissenting. These people are the texture of a religion, and they participate primarily at local levels, far removed from the inner workings of the Sea Org and the behavior of David Miscavige.
To bracket the institutional presence and look instead at the content of Scientology opens up the possibility of looking at how individuals have understood and applied Hubbard’s writings in their own lives. The material is rich—whatever else he was, Hubbard was an accomplished writer, and his texts exhibit a complexity at odds with his own demand that they be understood and applied in exactly one, officially approved way.
There is more to Scientology’s appeal, perhaps, than an aggressive sales pitch. Extracted from their smothering institutional context, the faith commitments of Scientology have an aesthetic depth that has not been explored by commentators outside the church. “Pain is extremely perishable. Pleasure is recorded in bronze,” Hubbard wrote in Dianetics. The Hubbard of Book One has an often graphic contempt for violence against women—an attitude that the world could certainly use more of—as well as a special concern for the well-being of children. Scientology’s ideal state of “clear,” Hubbard wrote, is, among other things, a return to childlike wonder:
“The glory and color of childhood vanishes as one progresses into later years. But the strange part of it is that this glamour and beauty and sensitivity to life are not gone. They are encysted. One of the most remarkable experiences a clear has is to find, in the process of therapy, that he is recovering appreciation of the beauty in the world.”
In the light of such a sentiment, Tom Cruise’s erratic behavior on Oprah’s couch is maybe not so strange after all.
The precise methods of auditing, moreover, might appear odd, possibly even harmful, but the goal—to identify emotional hang-ups and face them as a means of eliminating them—is hardly unique to Scientology. Nor is the idea that your past is holding you back. Portions of Hubbard’s teachings that were once secrets now circulate widely online, drawing laughs (the famous intergalactic-war narrative; the belief that we all share an evolutionary memory of having once been a clam). The church bristles at discussion of such things, quite often to the extent of bringing in its lawyers.
At his best, though, Hubbard was unconcerned with ridicule. “Tell people who want to invalidate all this, ‘Your criticism is very just. It’s only fantasy,'” he wrote in A History of Man, in 1952. Urban quotes a fascinating line from an early lecture in which Hubbard leaves the door open for an expansive, playful understanding of his thought. “I’m just kidding you mostly. … I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them. … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and then go through a series of class-assigned exercises. … Let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.”
At the same time, the church’s strict enforcement of discipline and its aggressive attitude toward outsiders is directly traceable to Hubbard. In journalism and scholarship, the relentless focus on its institutional history reflects, oddly, an acceptance of the church’s own stance that the religious content of Scientology is inseparable from the institution. Hubbard infused the Church of Scientology with an authoritarianism unrivaled even in the realm of religious organizations.
Hubbard’s attitude toward his own and the church’s authority is crystallized in a 1965 missive known as “Keeping Scientology Working,” which he periodically rereleased and relentlessly emphasized until his death. “KSW,” in Scientology’s ubiquitous shorthand, makes plain that “standard tech”—Hubbard’s term for his own teachings—always works. In cases where a subject is not getting better through auditing, whatever is being applied is by definition not standard tech but something broken, either through misapplication of Hubbard’s methods or—much worse—through the personal innovations of the auditor. Hubbard called this “squirreling”—”going off into weird practices or altering Scientology.” Moreover, any attempt to apply the principles of auditing beyond the auspices of the church is by definition squirreling.
Such thinking, however, is always misguided—ideas and practices never stay in the boxes that authorities build for them. Squirreling is the rule of religion, not the exception. Reitman interviewed a number of people who have left institutional Scientology but still find value in Hubbard’s teachings, and she goes the farthest in positing that “Scientology as a philosophy” may have a future beyond the church as it has been known, offering an endorsement in her acknowledgments. If there is an argument to her book, it is that Scientology is due for its Reformation. “That a number of [ex-Scientologists] still value L. Ron Hubbard’s technology, if not the organizational management of the Church of Scientology, … is a testament to the growing number of Scientologists who hope to form an independent, and free, movement. I wish them all the best of luck in doing so.”
Scholars will remain indifferent to such endorsements, but the growth of Scientology outside of the church’s auspices would be an interesting thing to observe. Reitman and Urban have brought the study of Scientology to a crucial, long-delayed point—their work will allow for more critical reflection on an important part of 20th-century American religion. With this history available as a resource, scholarship on Scientology will be able to move away from obsession with the checkered history of a single institution and encompass the variety of ways in which individual Scientologists have lived their faith both within that institution and outside of it.
Seth Perry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Mellon Dissertation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.