Cults: Meddling with Minds

Not many modern religions can claim the distinction of being denounced by a major European government as "socially harmful ... a potential menace to the personality" and "a serious danger to health." Yet those were the words chosen by Britain's Health Minister Kenneth Robinson when he took the floor of the Commons last month to censure the little-known and less understood Church of Scientology.

Dreamed up by L. Ron Hubbard, a onetime science-fiction writer, Scientology originally surfaced as "Dianetics," a pseudopsychological fad that flourished briefly in America in the early 1950s. Dianetics purported to be a quick way to mental health that could clear the mind of "engrams," the mental quirks that, Hubbard alleged, were the cause of all psychic problems.

High Salvation. Though Hubbard claimed near-miraculous results in ridding man of his neuroses, professional psychologists condemned Dianetics as amateurish and potentially dangerous meddling with serious mental problems. Undismayed, Hubbard in 1952 announced the birth of the Church of Scientology, an "applied religious philosophy" which retained most of the basic features of Dianetics. Incorporation as a church offered several built-in advantages—notably tax exemption.

As Hubbard blandly explains it, Scientology offers nothing less than "a philosophy by which a person can live, can work, and can become better." The philosophy that Scientologists are taught is billed as a sort of religion of religions, combining parts of Hindu Veda and Dharma, Taoism, Old Testament wisdom, Buddhist principles of brotherly love and compassion, the early Greeks, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spencer and Freud. Yet fundamental religious doctrines—the existence of God, for example—play no real part in the philosophy of Scientology, which is concerned solely with the here and now and is based on the twin principles that "man is basically good" and that "the spirit alone may save or heal the body."

The cost of salvation is high. While the introductory lesson is only $15, it can cost as much as $5,000 to complete the entire Scientology course. "It's the only church I've ever seen with a cashier's booth," says a secretary from Texas who quit after one session. Those seeking spiritual release must pass through five levels of liberation; in addition to lectures on the glories of Scientology, initiates must answer a long series of questions, often highly personal, while clutching two tin cans wired to an "E-meter," an electrical gadget reputed to be also capable of communicating with inanimate objects (in one such experiment Hubbard was in touch with tomatoes). By watching the fluctuations of a needle, Scientologist "auditors" can supposedly discern when a student has become "clear" and has attained "total awareness and freedom.'' Students attempting to drop out before becoming "clear" have been subjected to hard-sell pitches advising them not to do so.