That Cold-Time Religion

BRIAN: We’re going to turn now to a movement that you might be familiar with from newspaper headlines, not history books. The Church of Scientology.

PETER: Scientology has attracted Hollywood celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta. Several high-profile defectors and an HBO documentary alleging systematic abuse of church members have also garnered attention in recent years. But religious scholar Hugh Urban says that the tabloid version of Scientology often misses a key fact about the religion. It is, in many ways, a product of the Cold War.

HUGH URBAN: It emerges in the years after World War II and it really reflects the combined sense of tremendous optimism, hope, excitement, energy, but the same time there’s also the underlying fear in the 1950s of nuclear war, of Communism.

PETER: More on that in a moment, but first some background. Scientology’s founder, L Ron Hubbard, made his name as a science fiction writer. Then in 1950, he penned a wildly popular self-help book called Dianetics. Hubbard claimed that he could teach readers how to control their own minds and erase negative memories, and many gave it a try.

HUGH URBAN: There are little Dianetics clubs that spread all over the United States and England, and it was really a fad that caught on like wildfire. But it was also a decentralized movement, and so the revenue wasn’t always coming back to Hubbard.

PETER: Then the movement fizzled, but Hubbard used it as a springboard to create the Church of Scientology. Urban says Hubbard had two reasons for transforming his self-help movement into a religion.

HUGH URBAN: First, Hubbard said that people practicing Dianetics began to remember past lives. And this led him to the belief in an immortal self or spirit or soul, what he came to call the thetan. So that’s one element.

A second is that the FDA began to investigate Dianetics, and so Hubbard realized that if he turned in the religious direction—what he calls at one point the religion angle—then the FDA couldn’t go after him because he wasn’t making claims about physical healing any longer, but was making claim about spiritual healings.

PETER: And that’s really the interesting story that you’re telling, a very savvy move, as you’re suggesting. If we did something so vulgar as refer to a business plan, that was a terrific one.

HUGH URBAN: Well, I don’t think it is vulgar because Hubbard was pretty clear that A, this is a church but also, it has a business component. And he wrote a lot about the business side of things because the higher levels of training or auditing in Scientology become quite expensive.

So basically, they have what’s called the Bridge to Total Freedom, which is a hierarchical road map of the Scientology path. And it begins with the lower level Dianetics training until you get to the state that’s called Clear—when you’ve cleared the negative experiences from this particular lifetime. The estimates that I’ve seen is that to get to level OT VII—the last one that Hubbard finished before his death—would run between $300,000 and $400,000.

PETER: So we think of Scientology as an outlier, as a strange cult—which is what it has frequently been described as. But you argue that it’s actually very American in its history and in its teachings. Maybe you could explain that?

HUGH URBAN: Sure. I would say it’s very American for several reasons. The way in which it picks and chooses and synthesizes components from many, many different traditions, and Hubbard himself was quite upfront about that. He says when he wrote Dianetics that he tried everything—he tried every form of psychoanalysis, he explored every religious option, explored medicine—and basically he came up with this remarkable synthesis.

Then the other thing I would argue is uniquely American about Scientology is the combined sense of optimism that characterizes both Scientology and American life in the years after World War II, but also the sense of unease surrounding the Cold War and Communism. Hubbard himself presented Dianetics and Scientology both as the ultimate solutions to nuclear war. He saw human beings as on the brink of destroying themselves with nuclear weapons, and what we need now, he argued, is for humans to be able to control themselves, control their own minds.

He was also preoccupied with Communism. He wrote multiple letters to J Edgar Hoover in the FBI, identifying Communist threats around him. And then, I would say, the secrecy components that you see throughout Scientology’s history is really a mirror image—in many ways—of the larger concerns with secrecy, information control, surveillance.

Scientology developed its own intelligence bureau called the Guardian’s Office in the mid 1970s when Scientologists infiltrated IRS offices, one of the largest infiltrations in US history that then led the FBI to launch the largest raid in the bureau’s history on Scientology offices. So there’s this funny interplay between Scientology and agencies like the FBI.

PETER: Was the engagement of government and the Church of Scientology an important episode in church-state relations in America? Do you people in religion departments consider it so?

HUGH URBAN: I do. So the 1950s and 1960s was a time of tremendous religious experimentation in the United States. You had new forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, and then you had all these new religions popping up. So it was a time when the very definition and understanding of what religion is was being called into question as we went from a society that just had Protestant, Catholic, Jew, to a society where there’s Hare Krishna, Zen Buddhists, and Raelians and everything else.

And also, I think how government agencies dealt with religion was also changing during that period—particularly controversial new religions. Courts and law enforcement agencies have typically had a very hands-off attitude towards religions because we value religious freedom so much. But at the same time, we have tax exemption for religious and charitable groups which means that, ironically, it has fallen by default to the IRS to make many of those calls about what is and isn’t a religion.

Initially, Scientology had little trouble getting tax exemption in the United States in the 1950s. Then the IRS begin scrutinizing them more closely and determined that most of the revenue was going to Hubbard and his family, and so stripped Scientology of its exemption in the 1960s. And that led to this massive 25-year war between Scientology and the IRS that involved literally thousands of lawsuits.

And then in 1993, Scientology reached a settlement with the IRS where Scientology paid $12.5 million, and then got fairly remarkable blanket exemption from the IRS that covered not only Scientology churches and the religious side of Scientology, but also exempted things that are quite secular like Galaxy Press, which publishes Hubbard’s science fiction.

PETER: So we like to think—in our classic narrative of American history—that church-state relations were resolved by freedom of religion. We go back to Jefferson, but you suggested it’s actually a work in progress and the future is uncertain.

HUGH URBAN: Yeah, I think it’s always a work in progress. And that’s one of the things that has drawn me to the study of new religions, is that they have consistently, repeatedly challenged the way we think about religion and what we understand to be religion. How we draw the boundary between religion and business, for example, in the Church of Scientology. And Scientology is just one example of that ongoing rethinking of religion.

PETER: Hugh Urban is a professor at the Ohio State University, and the author of The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion.

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