The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion

Hugh B. Urban is a scholar of new religious movements, and this Princeton University Press book is his scholarly history of the Church of Scientology, examining it as a new religious movement using the same academic methods applied to any other religious tradition. Its strength is genuinely independent scholarly treatment grounded in documentary and archival research, neither simply repeating the Church's own account of itself nor relying solely on hostile outside sources, a balance that is difficult to strike given how contested the Church's history remains. Its limit is that as an outside academic history it does not have access to all of the Church's internal materials, so a claim resting on specific internal Church teaching or practice not addressed in publicly available sources needs to be checked against what documentation is actually available.