Scientology: A Religion in South Africa David Chidester University of Cape Town South Africa        In the twentieth century, the terms “religion” and “religions” have continued to be entangled in religious conflict. In response to the emergence of “new religious movements” in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, anti-cult propaganda denied the religious status of these movements by labelling them as entrepreneurial businesses, as subversive political organisations, or as brainwashing “cults.” Anti-cult polemic along these lines even seemed to influence the academic analysis of new religions.10      Although it was informed to a certain extent by anti-cult propaganda, the South African Commission of Inquiry that tried to deny the religious status of Scientology in its 1972 report seemed more concerned with reinforcing certain Christian assumptions about what ought to count as legitimate religion in South Africa. According to the commission, the Church of Scientology was not a religion because it did not observe the proper worship of a personal God. “Although Scientology professes to recognize a Supreme Being,” the commission asserted, “it never mentions it as a controlling power or a personal God entitled to obedience and worship.’’11 Recalling the Christian missionary’s nineteenth-century denial of African religion, this denial of religious status to Scientology was based upon a specific Christian assumption about the proper form of worship that is supposedly necessary for beliefs and practices to count as authentic religion.      In a detailed rebuttal published in 1975, the distinguished South African Professor of Science of Religion, G. C. Oosthuizen, wryly observed that Scientologists could have gained recognition as a religion by the commission more easily “if they bowed before a holy cow or a monkey god or an elephant god or a snake or a frog.”12      Since a religious way of life can be regarded as a way of being human, this denial of the religiosity of others has also been a denial of the full humanity of other human beings. The question of the definition of religion, therefore, is not merely an academic issue. It is as basic as the question: What counts as a human being?

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