Author Description

The Church of Scientology is one of the most recognizable American-born new religious movements, but perhaps the least understood. Based on six years of interviews, fieldwork, and research conducted among Scientologists in the United States, this groundbreaking work examines features of the new religion's history, theology, and praxis from 1950 to 2018. While academics have begun to pay more attention to Scientology, the subject has received remarkably little qualitative attention in the secondary literature. Indeed, no work has systematically addressed questions such as: What do Scientologists have to say about their religion's history, theology, and practices? How does Scientology act as a religion for them? What does "lived religion" look like for a Scientologist? When Scientology is viewed from the standpoint of its members, how might that perspective inform and modify existing scholarship? In response to these and other questions, this work puts forward an ethnographically informed historical and theological narrative of how and why Scientology functions as a religion in the lives of practicing members of the church, who are usually on the margins of discourse on the subject