Counting Scientology 2. Another Fine Mess

Some media reports, then things fall apart

Stan presses the Outliers button…

We launched this series with a look at Scientology’s membership as set out in official Scientology publications over the years.

Here is the chart we finished with (from this sample of data):

Chart One: figures from official Scientology literature

I excluded one item: publicity inside a 1970 edition of one of L. Ron Hubbard’s pulp fiction books, claiming 15 million Scientologists worldwide. (Hubbard founded Scientology in the early 1950s.)

I set it aside because it was not from an official Scientology publication like the other documents: that meant I got to keep the nice, clean line on my graph,

But there are still plenty of gaps between the handful of points on my graph, and I still need to fill in some of those “null values”. So, if you have entries for worldwide membership from any official publications, send them in.

In the meantime, here’s our next category of data.

A Goldilocks sample

These are media reports of Scientology’s membership claims, in some cases including direct quotes from spokesmen for the movement.

In theory then, they should not be a million miles away from the official data we started with.

Let’s see if they tell the same story.

I started by gathering material from a variety of sources: Nexus, the online news archive; a private collection down in London; and the odd Scientology-related website.

Then I remembered the Scientology Critical Information Directory.

The Scientology Critical Information Directory

This site is a goldmine. Curated by veteran Scientology-watcher Raymond Hill, it hosts information compiled by several different researchers over the years.

What I needed this time was its terrific archive of press cuttings on the movement. Although it doesn’t go much beyond 2010, it still counts more than 6,000 entries, some dating back to the early 1950s and ’60s.

Several researchers built up this archive, but it tails off beyond 2010. Anyone want to bring it up to date?

I started by searching the library using keywords such as “members” or “followers”. It was only after a few hours that I stumbled on the Membership section of the site.

Someone had already done a lot of the heavy lifting for me. I found a spreadsheet of media sources, either reporting Scientology’s official membership claims or directly quoting the movement’s spokesmen.

I’d been working on this project for weeks before I stumbled on this ready-made database.

I stripped their entries into my data sheet, merging them with my own findings. Then I trimmed out the ones that were too vague (“several million”); too specific (U.K.-only); or too crazy (we’ll get to them later).

That left me with a manageable “Goldilocks” sample: a set of 21 media reports, running from 1977 to 2007:

Data Set 2: media reports (and here’s the complete list).

Add that to the first set of data and we’ve got our second chart: