In 1955 the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International claimed it had obtained a secret Soviet brainwashing manual, and then published it. Based on that text, and other information he claimed to have received on Communist mind-control techniques, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard mentioned brainwashing in several lectures. In this article, I discuss the contested authorship of this manual and conclude that it probably was written by Hubbard, although other hypotheses cannot be entirely dismissed. I also distinguish between the Communist brainwashing Hubbard described within a Cold War context, and anticultists’ claims that brainwashing is practiced by “cults,” including Scientology.

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.

The role of communications and information media long has been acknowledged as a key factor in religious controversy. Since the 1970s “cult wars,” new religions scholars have focused considerable attention on how the media communicate, influence and frame public perception of new religious movements. In this article, I briefly survey ways in which constant changes in communications media and consumption require scholars to reassess interaction between the media and new religious movements. Using as a test-case the Church of Scientology’s interaction with Australian “tabloid television” programs in a series of heavily publicized controversies, I outline some traditional journalistic practices and media constraints, identified by scholars, in television coverage of Scientology in Australia. I will introduce a series of additional practices and contingent factors dealing specifically with tabloid television which may assist scholars in assessing the complex relationship between the media and new religions.

The Church of Scientology remains one of the most controversial and poorly understood new religious movements to emerge in the last century. And among the most controversial questions in the early history of the Church is L. Ron Hubbard's involvement in the ritual magic of Aleister Crowley and the possible role of occultism in the development of Scientology. While some critics argue that Crowley's magic lies at the very heart of Scientology, most scholars have dismissed any connection between the Church and occultism. This article examines all of the available historical material, ranging from Hubbard's personal writings, to correspondence between Crowley and his American students, to the first Scientology lectures of the 1950s. Crowley's occult ideas, I argue, do in fact represent one—but only one—element in the rich, eclectic bricolage that became the early Church of Scientology; but these occult elements are also mixed together with themes drawn from Eastern religions, science fiction, pop psychology, and Hubbard's own fertile imagination.