Scientology Is Not a Religion
Germany treats L. Ron Hubbard’s movement as a cult and a threat to democracy. The U.S. should follow its example.
By James Kirchick|July 24, 2012 7:00 AM
“In the 1930s it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists.” So read a full-page open letter, published in the International Herald Tribune on Jan. 9, 1997, to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Signed by 34 prominent figures in the entertainment industry—none of them Scientologists and many of them Jews—the letter went on to accuse the German government of “repeating the deplorable tactics” of Nazi Germany against the self-proclaimed religion started in 1952 by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard.
This initiative, endorsed by the likes of Goldie Hawn, Larry King, Dustin Hoffman, and Oliver Stone, was orchestrated not by the Church of Scientology but by Bertram Fields, lawyer to the sect’s most famous member, Tom Cruise. Yet it conformed to the Church’s campaign, started several years earlier, to brand modern Germany as akin to the Third Reich. A Scientology-sponsored ad that ran on Sept. 29, 1994, in the Washington Post, for instance, declared that 50 years after the Holocaust “neo-Nazi extremism is on the march in a reunited Germany.” In 1996, a Scientology advertisement in the New York Times stated, “You may wonder why German officials discriminate against Scientologists. There is no legitimate reason but then there was none that justified the persecution of the Jewish people either.”
By likening the German government’s treatment of Scientologists to Nazi barbarism, the Church of Scientology didn’t just draw a vulgar comparison: It turned the country’s official anti-Scientology posture on its head. Since the Church established itself here in 1970, the German government has waged a long-running legal and political battle against it. The government makes its logic plain: Because of its history of Nazism, Germany believes it has an obligation to root out extremists, and not just those of a political flavor. In the eyes of most Germans, Scientology is nothing more than a cult with authoritarian designs on the country’s hard-won pluralistic democracy.
While several governments around the world have set up commissions to study Scientology in order to determine whether it qualifies as a religion, Germany broke new ground when, in 1992, the city of Hamburg set up a “Scientology Task Force” to monitor the group, assist members who have left the Church and are thus cut off from their families, and discourage citizens from joining it in the first place. (That office, which maintained a vast and extensive archive of official Scientology documents, many of them classified by the Church, was closed due to government budget cuts in 2010.)
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but since the Scientologist say they are a religion they must be a religion just like if someone calls themself an agnostic and not an atheist they can only be an agnostic and it would be insulting to some people to say otherwise.
I have had difficulty articulating the difference, but this is good.
And I agree that Scientology is a dangerous, destructive cult and that Tom Cruise is an idiot.
See you in church!
I think this will work.....
I tried to get scales close but probably made cults too big
