How many Scientologists are there?

How many Scientologists are there in the world? News reports about the Scientology organization's many crimes and unethical practices quite often provide a figure of "8 million," "10 million," "12 million" or even "15 million" when describing how many Scientologists there are in the world.

These numbers are provided to journalists by Scientology spokesmen, but they are very, very far from accurate. Indeed, along with the cult's insistent stories about Scientology's "explosive growth" and "massive expansion" worldwide, these figures are just another example of manufacturing public perception by telling a huge lie, loudly and repeatedly, until everyone believes that "it must be true."

At the end of 2009, the reality is that there are probably only around 50,000 people in the world who would admit to being Scientologists. A series of posts in an excellent blog called "Ask the Scientologist" explains the situation very clearly.

According to an insider, sometime in the 60s or 70s at International Management, top management wanted to issue a press release about Scientology and they wanted to know how many Scientologists there were. Nobody knew. Not only didn't they know, but their records were so messed up there was absolutely no way to find out. What to do?

They just made it up, "Five million Scientologists world wide with more than three million in the U.S." They didn't know, but then, who could prove them wrong? . . . .

The next year, management asked the same question, "How many Scientologists now?"
The insider tells me that the guys looked around and said "Um... five and a half million!" And so it went on, year after year.
Management would come in and ask, "How many now?" and there'd be a small discussion, "How about six million?"
"No, we said that last time, it has to be more!"
"Then, how about six and a half?" "OK!"
Then they'd give top management the answer, "Six and a half million now, sir!"
It's based on nothing.

Eventually, a few journalists began to wonder about such figures.

In 1992, Heber Jentzsch tried to explain how the membership numbers got so badly out of sync with reality. This is from Forrest Sawyer, on ABC Nightline, Feb. 14, 1992 interviewing Heber Jentzsch, President, Church of Scientology:
• Sawyer: How do you get to call them members?
• Jentzsch: Because they joined and they came in and they studied Scientology.
• Sawyer: They took one course, maybe.
• Jentzsch: Well, that's how valuable the course is. Eight million people, yes, over a period of the last - since 1954.

It's possible, I suppose, that millions of people have taken a Scientology course since 1954. It's more likely that these millions have taken a "stress test" or "personality test," or bought one of the cult's books.

There aren't any comprehensive worldwide surveys of what people believe, but there is plenty of other evidence to show that there aren't really very many Scientologists in the world.

• In 2001, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) reported that there were 55,000 adults in the United States who consider themselves Scientologists.
• In 2008, the same survey team estimated there to be 25,000 Americans identifying as Scientologists.
• The 2001 United Kingdom census contained a voluntary question on religion, to which approximately 48,000,000 chose to respond. Of those living in England and Wales who responded, a total of 1,781 said they were Scientologists.
• In 2001, Statistics Canada, the national census agency, reported a total of 1,525 Scientologists nationwide.
• In the 2006 New Zealand census, 357 people identified themselves as Scientologists.
• In 2006, Australia's national census recorded 2,507 Scientologists nationwide.
• In 2008, the Pew Forum's Statistics on Religion in America Report didn't even bother to mention the number of Scientologists they found, though their analysis noted religious affiliations down to less than 0.3%, with such beliefs as "Wiccan" and "Pagan"

Scientology's spokesmen have sometimes attempted to refute the statistical estimates by saying that perhaps the respondents were also Christians or members of other religions, and that it is possible to be both a Scientologist and a member of another religion. Such claims are patently false, both in the essentials of belief as well as in Scientology's explicit declaration that "as a practical matter Scientologists are expected to and do become fully devoted to Scientology to the exclusion of other faiths."[also, see video below]

Despite Scientology's attempts to create a perception of "tremendous planetary expansion," there is an abundance of evidence, even beyond the census and survey data, that the cult has never been particularly large, and is rapidly getting smaller. Journalists tempted to cite Scientology's figures at face value had better brush up on "Fact-Checking 101."

Scientology [part of the Comparison series] a look inside World Religions, by Tim Passmore of Woodland Community Church in Bradenton, Florida.



REFERENCES:

• ARIS 2001
• ARIS 2008 & research on disaggregated 2008 data
• Arnie Lerma's website
• Lewis, James R. "New Religion Adherents: An Overview of Anglophone Census and Survey Data" (PDF). Marburg Journal of Religion 9 (1) September 2004
• Pew Forum: Statistics on Religion in America Report, 2008
• Truth About Scientology: Scientology's "Stats" are down
• Where Are All the Scientologists? Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

SEE ALSO:

• Operation Clambake
• Scientology Critical Directory
• Why We Protest activism