going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

Scientology. From now on, he would exercise total control. His word was law. He was
not just the founder, he was “Source”—the last word, whose every pronouncement was
scripture.
In the evolution of Dianetics to Scientology, however, there was a larger wheel
turning inside Hubbard’s protean imagination. Until now, religion had played little or
no part in his life or his thought—except, perhaps, as it was reected in the cynical
remark he is reported to have made on a number of occasions, “I’d like to start a
religion. That’s where the money is.” One of the problems with Dianetics, from a
moneymaking perspective, was the lack of a long-term association on the part of its
adherents. Psychotherapy has a theoretical conclusion to it; the patient is “cured” or
decides that the procedure doesn’t work for him. In either case, the revenue dries up.
Religion solves that problem. In addition to tax advantages, religion supplies a
commodity that is always in demand: salvation. Hubbard ingeniously developed
Scientology into a series of veiled revelations, each of which promised greater abilities
and increased spiritual power. “To keep a person on the Scientology path,” Hubbard
once told one of his associates, “feed him a mystery sandwich.”
It may be true that his decision to take his movement in a new direction had more to
do with the legal and tax advantages that accrue to religious organizations than it did
with actual spiritual inspiration. He was desperate for money. The branches of his
Dianetics Foundation were shuttered, one after another. At one point, Hubbard even lost
the rights to the name Dianetics. The trend for his movement was toward disaster.
A letter Hubbard wrote to one of his executives in 1953 shows him weighing the
advantages of setting up a new organization. “Perhaps we could call it a Spiritual
Guidance Center,” he speculates. “And we could put in nice desks and our boys in neat
blue with diplomas on the walls and 1. knock psychotherapy into history and 2. make
enough money to shine up my operating scope and 3. keep the HAS [Hubbard
Association of Scientologists] solvent. It is a problem of practical business.
“I await your reaction on the religion angle.”
In the anti-Scientology narrative, this is one of several clear statements of Hubbard’s
calculations and proof that the “church” was nothing more than a moneymaking front.
But Hubbard follows this with the observation, “We’re treating present time beingness,
psychotherapy treats the past and the brain. And brother, that’s religion, not mental
science.” At the end of that year, Hubbard incorporated three dierent churches: the
Church of American Science, the Church of Spiritual Engineering, and the eventual
winner in the brand-name contest, the Church of Scientology. The Church of Scientology
of California was established on February 18, 1954, quickly followed by another in
Washington, DC.
The fields of psychotherapy and religion have bled into each other on many occasions.
They have in common the goal of reshaping one’s view of the world and letting go of, or
actually renouncing, one’s previous stance. 1 Hubbard said there were “many, many
reasons” to ally Scientology with religion. “To some this seems mere opportunism,” he
later admitted to a reporter. “To some it would seem that Scientology is simply making
itself bulletproof in the eyes of the law.”