What about Scientology?

Question 60021.

Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, the litigation and the shopfronts on the high street offering a free personality test, and very little else. What the organisation teaches at its higher levels is not published for enquirers, and members pay a great deal of money over many years to be told it.

That secrecy is itself worth noticing. The gospel was preached in the open air to crowds who had nothing, and Paul could say that he had not spoken in a corner. A message that must be purchased in instalments is a different sort of thing from the beginning.

Where it came from

The founder was L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific American writer of pulp fiction who published Dianetics in 1950 as a system of mental health, and then developed it into a religion, with the Church of Scientology established a few years later. The move from self help technique to religion was deliberate, and the organisation grew rapidly through the second half of the twentieth century.

The system Hubbard built is elaborate, with its own vocabulary, its own hierarchy of training levels, and an internal culture that treats the founder’s writings as authoritative and not to be revised. Scientology has fought long legal battles over its status in various countries, and has been recognised as a religion in some and refused that status in others.

What it teaches about the human person

In this system a human being is a thetan, an immortal spiritual being who has lived through countless past lives and has become trapped in matter and burdened by painful recorded experiences called engrams. These, it is said, are the source of our fears, failures and illnesses. The goal is to be cleared of them and so to regain the abilities the thetan originally had.

The method is auditing, a form of one to one questioning assisted by a device called an E meter, which is said to register emotional charge. Progress is measured in states and levels, culminating in the confidential Operating Thetan grades. At the higher levels members are told a cosmology involving an ancient galactic ruler and the souls of beings destroyed and scattered on this planet, which is why the earlier material is kept back from newcomers.

Underneath the technical language, the diagnosis is that your problem is damage and ignorance, and the cure is technique applied over time by trained practitioners at considerable expense. Scientology does not have a category for sin against a holy God, and therefore it has no need of forgiveness, only of clearing.

Where this collides with the gospel

There is no Creator here in any sense Scripture would recognise. There is no God who made you, no God to whom you are answerable, no God who loves you. There is a supreme concept sometimes gestured at, but nothing personal, nothing that speaks and nothing that saves. That absence is the whole difference. Christianity begins with a God who acts and speaks first.

There is no Saviour either. Jesus, when He is mentioned at all, is an incidental figure rather than the crucified and risen Lord, and the cross has no function in a system where guilt is a technical problem. Peter’s statement that there is salvation in no one else is not an insult aimed at Scientology; it is the plain claim on which the church has always stood.

And the direction of travel is reversed. In Scripture the movement is downward, God stooping to us in the incarnation, and the gift is free. Here the movement is upward, the individual climbing through levels at his own cost. The Greek charis means a gift given to those who cannot pay, and a spirituality with a price list has already told you which religion it is.

The problem of paying for enlightenment

The financial structure is not incidental to Scientology, it is how the system runs. Courses and auditing are charged for, level by level, and long term members commonly spend sums that would buy a house. Anyone who has left the organisation and spoken publicly describes the same pressure to continue up the levels.

Simon Magus offered money for spiritual power in Acts 8 and was rebuked in the strongest terms Peter ever used. The New Testament is consistently hostile to the buying and selling of spiritual benefit, and Jesus told His disciples that they had received without paying and were to give without pay. When any movement makes access to the truth a matter of what you can afford, that alone should stop you at the door.

Past lives and the shape of eternity

The system assumes reincarnation, an endless chain of lives across time and space in which the thetan accumulates damage. Scripture cuts across that with a single line, that it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement. One life, then an accounting before a Person, and no second run at it.

That sounds severe until you see what it protects. If I have unlimited lives, my choices are never final, but neither is any love I am ever offered. Because there is one life, the rescue God has provided has to be real, and it is. I have written more on whether reincarnation is biblical, and this is where every system of many lives finally breaks.

Why people are drawn in

The high street test is offered free, and it will find something wrong with you, because everyone has something wrong with them. Then a course is offered that promises to fix it. People join because they are in pain, or lonely, or ambitious, and because the early stages genuinely do give some of them a feeling of clarity and a community that takes them seriously.

Christians should notice that rather than mock it. If a stranger with a clipboard can offer a lonely person more attention than the church down the road, we have a problem of our own to deal with. The answer to Scientology in any town is not only good arguments but congregations where people are actually known.

Speaking with someone involved

Do not lead with the ridiculous material. It is real, and it is genuinely strange, but mocking it will humiliate your friend and end the conversation, and people do not leave a movement to join the side that laughed at them. Aim instead at the questions the system cannot answer.

Ask what happens if you run out of money. Ask what the organisation does with people who criticise it. Ask whether the deepest thing wrong with us is really damage rather than guilt, and what is to be done about the harm we have caused others. Then speak about a Saviour who charges nothing, hides nothing and forgives fully. That combination is unanswerable, and it is worth learning how to recognise false teachers generally so that the pattern is familiar before you meet it.

Why Scientology guards its secrets

The staged release of doctrine is not incidental to Scientology, it is structural. Newcomers are given self improvement material that sounds like ordinary psychology. The cosmology is withheld until a member has invested years and considerable money, and by then the cost of walking away is not only financial but social and personal.

Set that beside the New Testament and the contrast is stark. Paul told the Ephesian elders that he had not shrunk from declaring the whole counsel of God, and he said in his own defence that none of this had been done in a corner. Jesus told those questioning Him that He had spoken openly to the world and said nothing in secret. There is no tier of Christian teaching reserved for those who have paid enough.

That is a test any enquirer can apply without knowing a word of theology. Ask what the organisation teaches at the top, and see whether you are told. A message that must be earned by instalments has already declared itself to be something other than good news, because news that is good gets shouted in the street.

So, now what?

If you are researching Scientology because someone you love has been drawn in, take the long view. Stay in relationship, avoid ultimatums, and keep asking questions rather than issuing verdicts. People leave slowly, and they leave toward someone who never stopped being kind to them.

And if you are weighing it up yourself, weigh the cost in every sense. What the gospel offers is not another set of levels. It is a Person who has already done the work, who takes the guilt you cannot audit away, and who gives Himself to people with nothing in their hands and nothing in the bank. Everything Scientology sells in instalments, Jesus gives away.

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Isaiah 55:1 (ESV)