Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [94]
While many other religious groups in America have been given sweeping exemptions, no organization with the contentious history of the Church of Scientology has ever been exempted in such an overarching manner. In 1994, one year after Scientology's tax exemption was announced, an Orthodox Jewish couple from Los Angeles, Michael and Marla Sklar, tested the fairness of this agreement by suing the IRS for the right to deduct their children's religious education from their taxes just as Scientologists were allowed to deduct the price of auditing.* The Sklars lost and appealed, and ultimately took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. In October 2009, the justices refused to hear the case, without comment.†
"The power of our group is greater than you can imagine," Miscavige, in his victory speech, told his flock, who had met his announcement with almost ten minutes of uninterrupted applause. Scientology was now a religion, protected by the laws of the U.S. government. Those Scientologists who'd ever doubted the mission, or Miscavige, had long since departed. Those who remained were the truest of believers, and David Miscavige, the young disciple of L. Ron Hubbard, was unequivocally their leader. Scientologists would follow him anywhere, unquestioningly, from now on.
"What exactly does this [exemption] mean?" Miscavige said. "My answer is: everything. The magnitude of this is greater than you may imagine ... The future is ours."
Not a soul in the audience had reason to doubt him.
PART III
Chapter 9
Lisa
TRY TO DEFINE Scientology, and even those who understand its basic concepts will inevitably come up with a multiplicity of descriptions: alternative to psychotherapy, social movement, transnational corporation, cult, religion. One of its essential characteristics is its aggressive response to challenges, whether they arise from within the movement or outside it. Some journalists have referred to Scientology as a hydra for this uncanny ability to restore itself despite numerous blows to the head. This power to reinvent itself lies at the heart of the church's business plan.
Scientology means different things to different people; simultaneously its essential qualities remain hidden from public view. This combination of flexibility and mystery has allowed church leaders to turn Scientology into whatever they want it to be, depending on time period and need. In the sixty-plus years since it was founded, Scientology has changed its image over and over through a savvy marketing strategy that has presented the church as forever new and improved and, in some cases, as transformed altogether. At no time was this more obvious, or necessary, than during the late 1970s and early 1980s when, fresh from the ignominy of Operation Snow White, Scientology needed to rebrand itself almost entirely.
The Scientology name had been tarnished by scandal. And the product, which had been continuously refreshed by Hubbard during his twenty-five years at the helm, was beginning to stagnate, thanks to the Founder's increasing isolation. But the packaging, church officials realized, could still be vibrant. Which is how it came to be that Scientology was suddenly reimagined as a self-help movement.
The 1970s, as the conservative journalist David Frum points out, have often been overlooked in favor of the far more colorful, and seemingly more influential, 1960s. But as he notes in his book How We Got Here, an engrossing analysis of the 1970s, it was those "strange feverish years" following the sixties, the years when