Counting Scientology 6: IAS membership
Tracking the International Association of Scientologist numbers gets us closer to a sense of the movement’s true size.
Back in 1992, when the Internet had not yet blunted Scientology’s considerable talent for harassing its critics, Jon Atack was fighting off attacks on several fronts.
He had already published the first edition of what would eventually become Let’s Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky, the definitive history of Scientology’s first four decades.
And he was still based in East Grinstead, on the doorstep of the movement’s main centre in Britain, Saint Hill.
That made it easier for him to help Scientologists in the process of quitting the movement — but it also meant that true believers would regularly turn up on his doorstep to harass and abuse him.
“All of the meetings started with my attempt at reasoned dialogue and finished with screaming scientologists parroting drilled phrases,” he recalled in a talk a few years later.
Scientologists were also denouncing him in the letters pages of the local press — though at least there he could respond without being shouted down.
It was in one such letter, published in the Chichester Observer, on December 17, 1992, that he made a startling claim.
Scientology is well-known for its exaggeration of statistics, for example publicly claiming six million members when internal membership reports show only 40,000
By internal membership reports he meant those relating to the International Association of Scientologists, or IAS. Founded back in 1984, all practising members were expected to join up.
This is the document Atack had in mind, which he has been good enough to share.
It was published in 1987, three years after the IAS was founded. AD refers to After Dianetics, Hubbard’s first experiment in self-help and the precursor to Scientology.
Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health, the book that launched the movement, came out in 1950, so 37 AD means 1950 + 37 years— 1987.
The IAS charts
A series of graphs inside the booklet shows the progression for the different membership categories from October 1986 to September 1987.
Here’s how the numbers break down.
- Lifetime: ~12,000
- Annual: ~12,000
- Combined Lifetime and Annual: ~24,000
- 6-month total: ~15,000
A chart on the following page gives the total membership — and it does seem to correspond with what you get when you add up the previous graphs.
That total looks to be a little over 40,000 members in all.
Let’s be charitable and assume that Scientology was busy signing up existing followers to what was still a relatively new membership system — hence the sharp rise in the figures over the year.
Nevertheless, the numbers are revealing.
In 1986, a year before this IAS document was published, journalist Richard Behar noted in Forbes magazine:
The church claims more than 6 million active members, a figure it has used for 15 years.
Yet here we have an internal Scientology publication celebrating a total IAS membership of little more than 40,000 in 1987.
Are the IAS numbers the best indicator of Scientology’s true size? Many of those tracking the movement’s members seem to think so.
The ‘only reliable’ indicator
Former member Mick Wenlock had access to the key numbers during his time inside Scientology.
“In 1985 I wrote the software for the free six-month membership database,” he explained.
He recalls, too, how the movement tried to drum up support for the 1984 launch of the IAS.
He was the one who sent officers out from Los Angeles to every major Scientology centre to organise events not just in the main U.S. centres but in Australia, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Denmark, England and Toronto.
Even celebrity members were roped in.
“The total attendance at all the events was approximately 30,000,” he said.
So far as he knows, no one in Scientology’s management has ever tried to carry out a proper count of the membership numbers — at least not publicly.
He even wrote a memo to the top executives arguing for realistic figures. “Got shot down,” he recalled.
Mike Rinder, a former senior executive in the movement, swears by the IAS numbers as the “only reliable” indicator of Scientology’s true size.
“Everyone who is a scientologist must be a member.
“After your initial free six-month membership, if you do not pay for annual membership you will have to pay considerably more for all goods and services.
“The number of IAS members is an intensely guarded secret. That tells you everything you need to know.
“If they were expanding and if they had millions of members they would tout the ‘membership numbers’. But they do not.
“The IAS members actually have to make a knowing step and pay money to be a member.
“I think it is safe to say there have never been more than 50,000 IAS members. The actual number of current members is significantly less than that.”
Rinder is probably right about management’s decision to keep a lid on the IAS numbers.
The 1987 document appears to be an anomaly; the exception rather than the rule.
It is not widely known even among the cognoscneti — and if Scientology ever did update these figures, the relevant documents have yet to come into the public domain.
Membership targets
Martin Ottmann dug up further evidence evidence that any claims of millions of members were strictly for journalists too lazy to check.
Ottmann points to two issues of Impact, the magazine produced for IAS members.
Both are from the 1980s; and both set targets for the growth of the IAS. The first, is from 1985.
As you can see, the target here was for 200,000 active paid-up Scientologists by 1985.
The 1987 IAS figures supplied by Jon Atack — from an official Scientology publication — demonstrate that they completely missed that target.
Note too, the announcement on the right-hand page that they were computerizing their membership data — so they know perfectly well what their real numbers are, even if they are not saying.
The second set of cuttings come from 1988.
The 1989 target then, was for 250,000.
So far as Ottmann is aware, that is the last time they mentioned membership numbers in official publications — and he has made it his business to obtain and analyse such material for years now.
That does rather suggest they weren’t making those targets.
Figures from another former insider suggest that if they ever did hit that 1989 target, they didn’t hold on to their recruits.
Jeff Hawkins was a senior Scientology executive until quitting the movement in 2005.
In a 2010 post, he gave an informed estimate of what he thought Scientology’s real numbers were at that point, while setting out his credentials to speak on the subject.
I used to work for Scientology’s Central Marketing Unit, and had access to all of the actual lists and statistics. I know that event attendance internationally was somewhere in the region of 25,000 to 35,000.
The International “Bodies in the Shop” (people actually in the orgs that week for service) was 16,000 to 18,000. IAS was struggling to get 40,000 members.
Based on this and a lot of other information I was privy to, I estimate the actual number of Scientologists at a maximum of 40,000. That’s on the high side.
In response to comments from his readers, he added that those other sources included the international mailing lists. And as the years went by, he said, there were more and more “address unknown” entries.
Hawkins has since revised his membership estimated downwards — but we’ll get to that in the article that follows.
For the moment, look how these figures compare with those from the 1980s.
Nearly 20 years on, attendance at events was not much better than 30,000 Mick Wenlock reported from the 1984. Nor had the IAS numbers moved much since 1987.
So, while Scientologists continue to speak of millions of members, the movement’s own numbers suggest only tens of thousands.
These more modest figures of course are far closer to the scale suggested by the religious surveys and census data we examined in Part 5.
But there are other ways of getting at the true figures — and we will examine those in the next instalment of the series.
