Scientology is like any other religion except for being younger by a fair bit, thus rawer, less steeped in tradition, and more transparent in its aims. Mormonism, Presbyterianism, Hinduism…the further back in time you go, the more trappings of legitimacy a religion seems to accumulate. In the end, it’s all the same game.
Only in the apparent sense is there any difference. The particulars of Scientology are more aggressive and conspiratorial than other relatively young religions, like Wicca, which leads to more, and harsher, confrontations between the conventions of Scientology and those of society at large. Thus, Scientology is more of an apparent problem than something like Wicca, even though the problems produced by both religions are fairly similar.
Anyhow, you might be surprised to hear this from me, but I don’t like the motives of the people doing these “raids,” and I certainly don’t like their methods. Law and order isn’t just a television show. It is one of the stabilizing pillars of society. Vigilante “justice” might be appropriate in times of extreme crisis, but never in a stable, developed society. Scientologists have plenty to be held accountable for, just like all religious people, but for a bunch of fools to be going after them with the coward’s equivalent of torches and pitchforks is, in my assessment, an even worse transgression.
The only wise thing I have heard from a Republican’s mouth in the past several years came from Senator John McCain, likely to be the Republican presidential nominee this year, who, when it came out that America was torturing its prisoners, said to the nation that torturing is wrong, that America should not torture, and that this has to do not with the fiber of the prisoners, but with the fiber of Americans. I believe his exact words were: “It’s not about them; it’s about us.” The very same principle holds true when considering these Scientology raids: Even if Scientology is a scourge—which I freely grant—there are ethical ways to confront the problem, and then there are the (far more numerous) unethical ways.
It doesn’t take much to judge these raids as belonging to the latter. If Scientology is guilty of wrongs that require immediate action, then the correct course of action is through peaceable resistance combined with legislative and judicial recourse.
