Legal Commentary

I will always be grateful, more or less, to the Church of Scientology for providing me with the fodder for one of my first forays into law and religion -- Scientology in Court: A Comparative Analysis and Some Thoughts on Selected Issues in Law and Religion, 47 DePaul L. Rev. 85 (1997).  (Hein Online version available here.)  One of the issues I wrote about there, which makes a cameo appearance in the book I'm currently writing (hence the long intervals between posts, by the way), is the rather complex question of religious fraud -- what constitutes religious fraud, and how and whether the courts should address it.  It is one thing to say that L. Ron Hubbard was a fraud, quite another to say that whether or not Hubbard was a fraud, some of the current officials of the church are, and still another to ask whether any of this matters to the question of the belief of individual members of the church.  In this, Scientology is not much different from any other church: a religion can be based on false factual premises without its individual priests or believers sharing any awareness of the falsity of those premises, and a single church official can be a fraud without other officials or members of the church community sharing in that fraud.

These thoughts come to mind as I read Sunday's New York Times story titled "Breaking With Scientology."  Much of the story, although distressing, is not new: it's a fairly standard account of members leaving the church and the indignities they have to put up with.  And it's difficult to say that the church's response -- that, for example, shunning of apostates is not unheard of in other religions -- is incorrect, although much depends on how you feel about Scientology as an initial matter.

What's new and interesting about the story is that it reverses the usual assumption -- at least, I take it to be the usual assumption -- that you are either in or out of the church, that you either believe it or consider it to be a fraud.  Some of the former members say in the article that it's not the truth of the church as such that they disagree with; they just believe it has been corrupted by some of its leading officials.  It is not unusual to read a story about Scientology's critics and those who have come to reject it; it is more unusual, and quite interesting, to read about Scientology as undergoing the same process of schism that many other churches experience.