Professor Hugh Urban Responds to Tony Ortega’s Stereotyping of “Religious Studies Types”

I’ll hand this to Tony, whenever it is to his own advantage, he does make stabs at being intellectually honest. In this case, he published a response to his criticism of professor Hugh Urban and his stereotyping of all social scientists who study religion as “religious studies types”.

Professor Hugh Urban is the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Ohio State University and Professor at the Department of Comparative Studies there. He holds a Ph.D in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago. Here’s Dr. Urban’s response to Tony’s earlier take-down of him and all other “religious studies types”.

I guess I should be flattered that Tony Ortega has taken the time to read and comment on my work. However, I also found many parts of this piece problematic, and I would like to respond briefly to several points that are inaccurate and misleading. For the sake of space, I will limit my comments to the following three.

1. Let’s begin with the title and my alleged search for Scientology’s “warm and fuzzy side.” Anyone who has read my book and the ten or so articles I’ve written on Scientology knows this is pure nonsense. There is neither fuzz nor warmth in anything I’ve written about the church – if anything, I’m usually accused of the opposite. After writing a very positive review of my book, interviewing me at length, and extensively discussing my article on Scientology and the occult, Ortega obviously knows this. I can only conclude that the title here is purely a means of attracting readers with a provocative, titillating headline. But it is extremely misleading and (it would seeming) knowingly so.

2. Ortega took issue with my review of Lawrence Wright’s “Going Clear,” particularly my suggestion that the book focuses too heavily on celebrities and doesn’t discuss the lives of ordinary, non-celebrity Scientologists. He writes: “we find that religious studies academics tend to fetishize the idea of a mythic ‘ordinary’ Scientologist who isn’t caught up in the craziness of David Miscavige and his ruinous campaigns of intense fundraising and terroristic disconnection. Somewhere, these academics assert, there must be examples of simply content Scientologists who are the real, pure example of the faith. ” I’m not sure which academics Ortega is talking about here, but it is not me (this also reflects a common pattern in Ortega’s article, which is to lump all academics together, as if we are all the same and all think the same way). To say that there exist non-celebrity Scientologists is surely not the same as saying that they are more “real or pure” than celebrities. They are roof contractors in Columbus and insurance salesmen in Cincinnati, with as many problems and failings as anybody else. If anything, a genuinely critical analysis of Scientology would want to spend more time on the question of why these types of individuals become involved with and remain in Scientology – even in spite of its increasingly problematic activities and controversial reputation.

(Side note: If he hasn’t already, Ortega should read Donald Westbrook’s recent dissertation, “A Peoples’ History of the Church of Scientology” [2014], which interviews 69 such “ordinary,” non-celebrity Scientologists, most of whom have not progressed to the OT levels).

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why John Travolta would be drawn into and spend millions on the church; but why would a slate-roof contractor in central Ohio? This is not to gloss over the problematic aspects of the church or KSW or any of the rest of the awful stuff that is now well-known; on the contrary, it is to ask the more difficult and complicated question of why this movement has attracted those who are not super rich or famous and has managed to keep them involved for decades, despite a history of extremely problematic behavior?

3. The last section of Ortega’s piece is a critique of my article on the OT VIII materials. Here, I think there is simply some misunderstanding that is based either on a superficial reading of the article and/or on a misleading presentation of short sections that don’t reflect the broader argument. He (mis)characterizes my argument as follows: “But then Urban goes further and says that the upper OT levels are now ‘irrelevant’ as the church no longer really promotes them.” This does not accurately reflect what I said. My point was not that the OT levels are no longer important – of course they are – but rather that, since their leak in the 1990s due to the Fishman case, they have become an increasing source of embarrassment for the church. When I said that the OT levels were downplayed, I said explicitly that they were downplayed in the church’s more “exoteric” materials such as websites and documents meant for public consumption: “In its promotional materials and websites, Scientology now typically emphasizes the more public and ‘exoteric’ aspects of the Church, such as its ability to help personal lives, build families and further careers, as well as its outreach and charitable work.” Obviously, the OT levels are still important for upper-level Scientologists and are still part of the church’s financial bread and butter. But my point was that the public rhetoric surrounding them has shifted due to the history of litigation, exposé, and satire (“South Park,” etc) that they have generated since the 1990s.

Ortega makes the valid observation that the OT VIII text with the controversial “anti-christ” material was released only for a brief period before being withdrawn and replaced by the more innocuous OT materials. This is a good point to highlight, but it only confirms the larger argument of my article – which is that there has been intense controversy and debate surrounding OT VIII from the very beginning, and it has undergone numerous revisions, reframings, obfuscations, and rhetorical maneuverings over the last 30 years. That’s really the whole point about the complex “history of a secret” that is at the heart of my article.

One final and perhaps most important observation: In general, it seems to me that journalists and academics have a mutual interest in providing as much accurate, detailed, and nuanced information as possible about problematic movements such as Scientology. I don’t think it’s productive to that larger end to attack one another, particularly based on misleading and inaccurate characterizations of one another’s work.

— Hugh Urban

Here’s more on Professor Hugh Urban, another social scientist who studies and publishes about religion in general, and Scientology in particular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Urban

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Scientology:_A_History_of_a_New_Religion

One of the good guys.

Added Note: As I looked around on the Internet for the paper from Donald Westbrook that professor Urban mentioned above I found this comment from Tony Ortega on the UCLA Facebook Page for the Study of Religion featuring a lecture by Donald Westbrook:

And Tory Christman pipes in and calls him a “quack”.

This is the kind of hysterical stereotyping and personal attacks that anti-cultists generate for any reasoned discourse on Scientology.

So much for the intellectual honesty of Tony Ortega, I guess.