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By Root 1072 0

barred from holding public office or even joining some political parties. In Great Britain, Scientology is also viewed as something other than a religion, but it is nonetheless protected by a statute that criminalizes hate speech and threatening actions directed against religious groups (in May 2008, for example, a fifteen-year-old boy was arrested in London for holding a picket sign denouncing Scientology). Australia banned the practice of Scientology in the 1960s but reversed this decision and recognized it as a religion in 1983; yet one outspoken member of the Australian government, Senator Nick Xenophon, has denounced Scientology as a "criminal organization." The French Church of Scientology has been under investigation for more than a decade. In October 2009, a French court found Scientology guilty of fraud and imposed a fine of nearly a million dollars. But the judge stopped short of banning Scientology from France, as the prosecution had requested. Scientology celebrated this decision as a victory. "I don't think that's going to have any lasting impact," the former inspector general of the Church of Scientology, Marty Rathbun, told a Canadian radio interviewer, in response to the verdict. The fine, he explained, was "like chump change" to the church.

The United States, where Scientology was born and where a majority of Scientologists live, has legitimized Scientology as a religion and granted it all of the legal protections that such a status confers, including tax exemption. But within the church itself, Scientology is usually defined as an "applied religious philosophy"—a "spiritual science" offering practical solutions to the problems of everyday life. Within every individual, it asserts, is a happier, purer, better self—a "perfect" self—waiting to be realized. Scientology claims that this idealized self can be realized today, in real time, and what's more, that this self can be godlike, immortal, and marked by supernatural powers. The traditional religious bedrock—worship, God, love and compassion, even the very concept of faith—is wholly absent from its precepts. And, unique among modern religions, Scientology charges members for every service, book, and course offered, promising greater and greater spiritual enlightenment with every dollar spent. People don't "believe" in Scientology; they buy into it.

This is a story about a global spiritual enterprise that trades in a product called "spiritual freedom." It is, on many levels, a story about the buying and selling of self-betterment: an elusive but essentially American concept that has never been more in demand than it is today. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, when a New England hypnotist named Phineas Quimby popularized a form of healing he called "mind cure," Americans have yearned for a quick fix for their physical, psychological, and spiritual imperfections. The Church of Scientology is a shape-shifting and powerful organization that promises that fix.

The Scientologists you will read about in these pages are members, or former members, of a wealthy and mysterious organization whose goal, like that of most religions, is to improve human society. The church also aspires to greatly increase its global footprint and, finally, to make money, though members will never say this specifically. Rather, if you were to ask, they would tell you that they want to "clear the planet"—to remove, in a literal sense, the stain of war, insanity, and disease from the world—which, like all worthwhile endeavors, comes at a cost.

The church claims that more than half of its members were introduced to Scientology through family or friends. Indeed, at this point in its development, many current members are second- or even third-generation Scientologists. For example, the actress Priscilla Presley, who joined Scientology in the 1970s, raised her daughter, Lisa Marie, in the church; the British writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, who currently maintains that he is not a practicing Scientologist, was nonetheless brought up in Scientology, at the church's worldwide