Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on April 26, 2006
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2006 74(2):356-389; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj084
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Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America
Hugh B. Urban is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, 431 Hagerty Hall, Columbus, OH 43210.
From Tom Cruise’s wedding to South Park’s scathing cartoon parody, the Church of Scientology has emerged as one of the wealthiest, most powerful but also most controversial new religious movements of the last fifty years. Remarkably, however, it has rarely been subjected to serious, critical study by historians of religions, in large part because of the intense secrecy that has surrounded the movement from its origins. This paper examines the role of secrecy in the early Church of Scientology, placing it in the historical and cultural context in which it emerged: Cold War America of the 1950s and 60s. Far from a strange aberration, Scientology in fact embodies many of the obsessive concerns with secrecy, information-control, and surveillance that ran throughout Cold War America. Indeed, with its policies of "security checks" and "fair game," Scientology developed an apparatus of secrecy and surveillance that rivaled and in fact mirrored that of the FBI. As such, Scientology raises profound questions for the study of religion today, particularly in a post-9/11 context, where the questions of religious privacy and government surveillance have re-emerged in ways that eerily echo the height of the Cold War.