Is Scientology Self-Destructing?

It's cold in Buffalo, and signs of the housing recovery are hard to see. Take the long walk down Main Street and you'll pass foreclosed homes, a shuttered hospice, and more than a few yellowing FOR SALE signs.

But make it downtown, and you'll see something different: a pristine, ornate cathedral, glowing against the parking lot gray. As of this June, central Buffalo has been crowned by a newly opened Church of Scientology: a gleaming, 41,000-square-foot temple, rising from the ruins with "glazed white terra cotta," "limestone trim," and "elaborately sculpted crown moldings," as one lyric church press release described the newly erected "Ideal Organization."

The Ideal Org on Main Street, Buffalo, New York

Jason Safoutin / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: 97663393@N00

On Jan. 14, a widely read (and now removed) sponsored post that appeared on TheAtlantic.com went further, extolling these churches, or Ideal Orgs, as proof of the religion's 2012 "renaissance" — a "milestone year" that saw 12 of these lavish buildings open around the world. "The driving force behind this unparalleled era of growth is David Miscavige, ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion," the advertorial read. "This new breed of Church is ideal in location, design, quality of religious services and social betterment programs."

The Ideal Orgs certainly look great, make headlines, and serve as flashy totems of Scientology's (literally) unspeakable wealth. The Church of Scientology International (CSI) headquarters in Los Angeles says that it has built 34 of these cathedrals worldwide since 2003, with 60 more underway. Almost all were paid for by local parishioners, who had been lobbied by roving teams of fundraisers.

But inside the church, the Ideal Orgs are sparking insurrection. Across the country, donors and high-ranking executives say that the aggressive fundraising and construction scheme is used to enrich the central church at the expense of the rank and file, helping to grow the Scientology war chest to over a billion dollars. Two former members, Mike Rinder and Mark Elliott, went so far as to call the project a "real estate scam." To some of these defectors, the structures are metaphors for the religion itself: garish on the outside, empty on the inside. The irony is that the very expansion that Scientology lauds as its renaissance is actually a symbol of internal dissent and decline.

Bert Schippers and wife Lynne Hoverson

According to ex-executives, the Ideal Org money play is simple: Find beautiful buildings; get local parishioners to foot the bill; keep them closed; keep fundraising; open them; and finally, have the parishioners pay for renovations, buy supplies, and send money to the central church for the right to practice there.

When Bert Schippers forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to help build an Ideal Org in downtown Seattle, he thought he was helping save the world. "I thought I was in the best religion on the planet," he says. But as he gave more and more from 2001 to 2008, the new cathedral's doors remained locked shut: to people, but not to money. Schippers, who had joined the church in 1986 and spent more than a million dollars on donations and courses, started asking questions about what, exactly, he was paying for; church leaders barred him, his wife, and his friends from setting foot inside.

"We gave that money because we wanted our local church to have its own building," says Schippers, who runs a circuit-board company with his wife. "But when I found out the church had changed the original teachings of L. Ron Hubbard to make so much money... I felt absolute, complete, total betrayal." Nonprofits often tell you that a donation can change your life, as well as its recipient's. For Schippers, losing so much for so little was a disturbing wake-up call. "It was around then I realized, I was in a fucking cult." He pauses, can't quite find the words. "It's…a mindfuck. Just a total mindfuck."

He's not alone. With donors bled dry, and ex-executives staging new assaults on the church, Scientology is facing its biggest challenge since it fought for (and won) tax-exempt status in the early '90s. And again, it's over money.

"Scientology was always in it for cash," says Tony Ortega, the former editor of The Village Voice, who has spent almost two decades reporting on the religion. "The difference is, before 10 years ago, the money you were being asked to spend was for your own case. Now, it's all fundraising for the central church. These people are exhausted."

The Church of Scientology's spiritual headquarters, the Flag Service Organization in Clearwater, Florida

Paul J. Richards/AFP / Getty Images

It's no secret that Scientology is pay-to-play; the prices for its services and teachings, from books to audits to seminars, seem to know no ceiling. But this moneymaker is different: The building drives ask for straight-up cash donations of fixed amounts — many times larger than traditional Scientology buy-ins — and, according to former executives, go straight to the central church's kitty. For years, those who've long questioned Scientology's legitimacy mocked the religion's sci-fi-tinged teachings, called Hubbard a fraud, and lampooned those gullible enough to be taken in by its feel-good myths.

But that didn't work. Why? All religions have their Xenus, multi-armed elephants, or magic babies, their morally ambiguous prophets, their tall tales and scandals. They even ask for millions of dollars from the faithful.

But the defectors who claim to have been bilked say this scheme is different, manipulating local parishes for the sake of central church finances. And once you talk to them, the stereotypes start to fade. These donors weren't brainwashed weirdos. They were more average joes than creepy cultists — searching, like the rest of us, for a pew, a community, a how-to guide for life. They're not familiar with corporate intrigue or mass donation drives.

This increasingly public wave of internal strife comes at the worst possible time. Over the past year, the number of vocal and visible Scientology exiles began to increase at a rate that surprised even the staunchest of church critics. TomKat fever boosted news coverage, while Lawrence Wright's sprawling 2011 New Yorker profile of filmmaker Paul Haggis, who split acrimoniously and loudly from the church, gave way to a new book. Along with Janet Reitman's 2011 book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion , investigators and defectors have begun to organize like never before, shining uninvited klieg lights into the church's carefully cultivated shadows. Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master wasn't the thinly veiled exposé some may have clamored for, but it still sparked conversation about Hubbard and the religion's history; sophisticated whistleblower news sites like Mark Bunker's xenutv.com, shared among defectors, did even more.

Back in the '70s, the famously litigious church had time to fight publicly with the novelist William S. Burroughs, himself a Scientology defector — or, in the '90s, with Time magazine. Today, going after every Cruise-bashing blog post would be impossible.

And the ranks of the faithful are dropping. In 2008, there were 25,000 self-identifying American Scientologists, down by over a half from 55,000 in 2001, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. (Over the same time period, the number of Wiccans more than doubled from 134,000 to 342,000.) The 2011 British census showed a total of 2,418 Scientologists across England and Wales; about 73 times as many Brits identified themselves as "Jedi."

Yet the glitz and glamour of the Ideal Org buildings, often erected amid urban squalor, "creates the illusion of growth," says Mike Rinder, an ex-executive who spent almost three decades on the CSI's board of directors, and who was the church's spokesman for several years. The church says the new buildings will "meet the skyrocketing demand for Dianetics and Scientology services" — but by all demographic accounts, demand is plummeting, even as stretched-thin local donors boost supply. In 2005, when Jefferson Hawkins, the church's former head of marketing, left the fold, he estimated there were only 40,000 Scientologists worldwide — a far cry from the "millions" claimed by the CSI.

Mike Rinder and his girlfriend Christie Collbran

Melissa Lyttle/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMApress.com

The change, he says, stems from a crisis of leadership, emerging from five years of high-profile bad publicity. Rinder argues that church leader David Miscavige is using "empty buildings" to "persuade Scientologists and the public at large that the religion is expanding." He speaks dispassionately, without nostalgia, about the internal intrigue of years gone by. You wouldn't know that leaving the church meant leaving his wife of 35 years and his two children, just five years ago.

The church's traditional business model relies on sales of services: religious texts, classes, and emotional counseling. Under Hubbard, the central church marketed its books and seminars directly to parishioners and converts, charging local Scientology franchises a small fee (about 10%) to do business. They also occasionally asked for goodwill donations — for a charity project or a new center. And if you bought enough services and gave enough goodwill, you could climb the "Operating Thetan" ranks, getting closer to the church's vital center and deeper into the more obscure Hubbard literature. By using church "technology," Scientologists believe that they can purge themselves of negative spirits and memories. And selling the tech wasn't a bad way to start a local business. It was a McDonald's model: License the name, sell the food, and the brand will grow organically.

The money is made much differently now. The International Association of Scientologists, a central church organ that works to "unite, advance, support and protect the Scientology religion," has solicited donations of at least $250 million since 2006, according to the Tampa Bay Times . Then there's "Golden Age of Knowledge," an initiative to "correct errors" in the millions of L. Ron Hubbard books sold to parishioners worldwide. In 2005, David Miscavige announced that some of Scientology's sacred texts needed revisions to "recover, verify, and restore the Scripture." According to Mark Bunker, a San Diego–based journalist who has reported on Scientology for over two decades, the corrections were minor: punctuation errors, a misplaced chapter, or a shortened preface. But never fear — updated copies were now available for sale, but not exchange. In 2007, the church released "fully restored" versions of 18 crucial Hubbard books and 280 lectures, according to a Scientology press release. And why take the time to compare the new and old editions? The church asks that you destroy your old books.

"They're selling the same stuff over and over," says Bunker. "Nonstop fundraising from the dwindling pool of parishioners. It's wearing people down."

The Ideal Org project is the most visible project of all, more than doubling Scientology's global real estate portfolio by square footage. But even while raising millions, the scheme is driving what Scientology watchers and defectors describe as a second reformation. Not since the early 1980s — when a young David Miscavige stripped Scientology's local missionaries of their corporate autonomy — have defectors spoken in such hushed, messianic terms, about promises betrayed, parishioners bilked, and an empire, crumbling.

Defectors say that these buildings, already fundraising magnets, become even more valuable as the central church acts as landlord. According to Nancy Many, who ran the church's major central celebrity center from 1980 to 1982, Ideal Orgs have to send lease and mortgage payments to the International Landlord Office in order to earn the right to practice in the building. As Marty Rathbun, second-in-command at the CSI until 2004, explains, "We used rent, lease, and mortgage as justifications for payments to management. That's the philosophy."

Former Scientology executive Debbie Cook and her husband, Wayne Baumgarten

Tampa Bay Times/ZUMAPRESS.com

Early in 2012, Debbie Cook — a church icon and former executive — sent an angry email about the Ideal Orgs to hundreds of parishioners, who forwarded it to thousands of others. She was no bad-apple malcontent: Cook ran the church's spiritual headquarters, the Flag Service Organization in Clearwater, for 17 years. L. Ron Hubbard "never directed the purchase of opulent buildings," Cook protested in her mass missive. "Scientologists and OTs need to be training, auditing, and disseminating to raw public… not [selling services to] each other or holding internal fundraisers." She said that those donations had built up central cash reserves that "have grown well in excess of a billion dollars" — a figure confirmed by Mike Rinder.

After her email, Cook was expelled from the church, which then sued her; she and Scientology reached a settlement, which included a gag order, in April. Her attorney Ray Jeffrey told reporters that fighting the church had destroyed Cook and her husband's business. Two months later, they moved to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. But more voices have entered the fray: former executives and parishioners, organizing together against the church. "There has been a tipping point reached," says Bunker. "A large number of people now are not afraid to speak out. And that's never been the case before."

Hubbard's model — local centers selling books, audits, and seminars — was to be "lean, mean, make a lot of money," says Nancy Many. Now, she says, Miscavige is fighting back with a new approach: "Get a bunch of millionaires, and suck them dry."

But of course, they're not all millionaires.

The grand opening of the Ideal Org in Seattle, July 24, 2010

Scientology Media / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: scientologymedia

"The money and the time we put in were supposed to help people improve their lives," said Mark Elliott, a genial Seattle subcontractor who joined in 1980, worked as the local church's treasurer until 2000 and contributed thousands to the Ideal Org project before leaving the church in 2009. Elliott isn't a John Travolta figure. Like much of the church rank and file, he's just a guy who Hubbard's words helped out in a time of need. "That was the whole idea: not only helping ourselves, but others," he says. He loved the church, and didn't want to doubt the purity of its intentions. "I should have seen things a little sooner."

In 2001, the local Seattle church directors announced a plan to find a new building. The parishioners obliged, and found one they liked. But then, the central church caught wind, and plans changed. According to Elliott and Schippers, a team of CSI fundraising missionaries descended on Seattle, saying they weren't satisfied with the church's plans. They told the locals to find a bigger, glitzier structure, and raise far more money.

In Seattle, a landlord sent from the church's central International Landlord Office began hosting several events. "He wanted to get more rooms here and there," says Elliott. "He kept asking for more money. They said the building had to have this many square feet, this number of offices. All the space planning was his. And now, the place is basically empty." Ideal Org fundraisers, many from the central church, get 10 cents commission on every dollar raised. Elliott sighs. Parishioners "were asked to take out second mortgages on their homes," he said. "The money would come in to my local treasurer's office, then go straight to the International Landlord Office."

Tony and Mary-Joe DePhillips

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