Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [28]
Hubbard spent the next six months laying the groundwork for Scientology's evolution as a religion. On February 18, 1954, a Scientologist named Burton Farber filed incorporation papers in Los Angeles for the Church of Scientology of California, considered by Scientologists to be the first official Scientologist church. L. Ron Hubbard, the adventurer and science fiction writer turned scientist and philosopher, was now the founder of his own church.
Hubbard then set about creating a worldwide spiritual corporation. Individual Scientology organizations, or franchises, would become churches (though members would refer to them as "orgs"). Every church would cede 10 percent of its gross income to a larger organization, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI), also known as the Mother Church, a so-called religious fellowship, according to its incorporation papers, which also sold to the franchises books, E-meters, and tapes of Hubbard's teachings. The HASI was incorporated in England and controlled by L. Ron Hubbard—who also controlled every church of Scientology, in practice. But each separate org had its own shadow president and board of directors, which allowed them to appear, at least on paper, independent. "Hubbard had learned from his mistakes," wrote the former Scientologist Jon Atack in his 1990 history of the Church of Scientology, A Piece of Blue Sky. "He was not on the board of every corporation, so a check of records would not show his outright control. He did, however, collect signed, undated resignations from directors before their appointment." Perhaps more significant, Hubbard also controlled the bank accounts of these organizations.
Hubbard presented Scientology to the public as a true religious movement—complete with an eight-pointed Scientology cross, wedding and funeral rites, and an ever-growing catalog of "scripture," which according to Hubbard's decree was the true status of his writings. Auditing sessions were often referred to as "confessionals." In future years, Scientology officials would be referred to, and ordained, as "ministers," complete with clerical collars.
To sell his new faith, Hubbard used the techniques of modern marketing and advertising; from his newly created Hubbard Communication Office, he directed his followers to aggressively spread the word. "If advertised products don't have good word-of-mouth they don't sell," Hubbard admonished them. How that word-of-mouth was created changed, depending on the locale. To tap into the loneliness and disconnectedness of city dwellers, Hubbard instructed one of his British followers, Ray Kemp, to advertise this offer, together with a phone number, in the London evening newspapers: "I will talk to anyone about anything." "We were inundated with calls," Kemp later recalled. "Everyone from potential suicides to a girl who couldn't decide which of three men to marry."
In both England and the United States, Hubbard exploited fear and concern about polio by encouraging his followers to run ads in the paper stating that a "research foundation" was looking for polio victims willing to try out a new cure. A similar ad was used to attract those suffering from asthma and arthritis.
Another technique Hubbard advocated was scanning the daily papers to find anyone who'd been recently "victimized one way or the other by life" and then, "as speedily as possible [to make] a personal call on the bereaved or injured person." Auditors, Hubbard said, were perfectly within their rights to call themselves either "researchers" or "ministers."
Once a person arrived at the