This article analyzes the history and purpose of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology to educate the public on the alleged abuses of psychologists and psychiatrists and advocate for legal reform. Its other founder was Thomas Szasz, a non-Scientologist professionally trained as a psychiatrist who came to disagree with much of his field’s practices and methodologies. Until his death in 2012, Szasz remained supportive of CCHR and its crusade against “coercive psychiatry,” though the atheism, materialism, and libertarianism of his anti-psychiatric worldview remained at odds with Scientology’s anti-psychiatric theology. I examine L. Ron Hubbard’s evolving views on psychiatry and psychology in order to contextualize and outline this theology as it relates to the mission of CCHR as a non-profit organization heavily staffed and supported by Scientologists yet separate from the Church of Scientology International.

Although there has been relatively little scholarly research on Scientology apart from the remarkable works of Roy Wallis, Harriet Whitehead, James R. Lewis, and Hugh B. Urban, that is changing as indicated by the large number of submissions in response to the call for papers for the first international conference on Scientology held in Antwerpen-Wilrijke, Belgium, in 2014. The articles in this special issue of Nova Religio explore what appear to be peripheral aspects of Scientology in order to get at its core. This method of moving from the periphery to the center of this religious tradition and its institutions reflects the difficulty scholars still encounter in obtaining fundamental data relating to the Church of Scientology.

This article examines the role of secrecy in the Church of Scientology, focusing on one of the most confidential and least studied aspects of the Church’s advanced auditing levels—Operating Thetan VIII. I use this example as a way of highlighting the complex ethical and epistemological problems in the study of secrecy in new religions. Here, I suggest an alternative approach to the study of secrecy by shifting our gaze away from the attempt to uncover the content of the secret and instead focusing on the more visible forms and strategies through which secrets are maintained, transmitted, revealed and concealed. I trace the “history of a secret” by examining five periods and five key strategies in the Operating Thetan materials from the late 1960s to the present: the advertisement of the secret; secrecy as an adorning possession; the litigation of the secret; the liability of the secret; and the irrelevance of the secret. Finally, I conclude with reflections on the comparative implications of this example for the study of new religions more broadly.