There are a number of well-known religious movements which show signs of having been founded as an intentional, cynical hoax. And then again, maybe they weren’t.
Hats off to bcflyer for finding a cite about someone claiming to have heard Hubbard’s remark. Numerous stories have circulated about Hubbard having supposedly made the remark to one science fiction writer or another. As noted above, Robert Heinlein is another person often named.
The Church of Scientology, understandably, denies the story. They cite information that George Orwell had made a similar remark years before, and claim that it became misattributed to Hubbard. It is, of course, possible that more than one prominent person has made a remark of this kind.
To insert a note of skepticism, while I have no reason to doubt Ellison’s veracity, people do sometimes remember things which never exactly happened. In fact, it’s rather common. While I am in no way a supporter of Scientology, I have always been a little skeptical of these stories.
This is because Dianetics was not orginally promoted in a religious context. “The new science of mind” only took to calling itself a religion after it had been marketed for a few years. Critics have suggested–quite reasonably I think–that Hubbard started calling it a religion (even though it does not hold worship services), only because if he didn’t hide under the cloak of religious freedom the government would have shut him down as a medical quack.
It has been argued many times that Hubbard’s highly erratic behavior would be consistent with his having been a paranoid schizophrenic. If so, there is a legitimate question as to how much of his stuff he actually believed.
Back in the 1980s–I’m sorry I don’t have a cite handy–a document which had supposedly circulated among the leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was leaked to the press. In it there was a discussion of whether the leadership should announce it had gotten a new revelation from God, altering one of the basic tenets of the faith. A central doctrine among the Jehovah’s Witnesses holds that the world will end before all of the people alive on a certain date in 1914 have died. Citing a kind of built-in obsolesence, it was suggested in the memo that this ought to be changed, and possibly followers should instead be taught that the world would end before everybody who knew somebody who had been alive on that date had died.
Harvard University was in possession for decades of the Scroll of Abraham, a document supposedly delivered to Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) by an angel. After considerable delay, the university released a report giving the unanimous conclusion of its researchers: the scroll was, in fact, a scrapbook made out of fragments of a relatively late copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with one portion of the manuscript pasted in upside-down.
The Church later issued a statement that this was irrelevent, as God could have caused Smith to translate anything as a holy revelation, whether the words were literally there in the original document or not.
In or around 1960 the Hearst newspaper chain published information demonstrating that Wali Fard, founder of The Nation of Islam, was in fact, one Wallace Ford, a con man with an incredibly extensive criminal background. Interestingly, although Fard preached the inherent inferiority of the white race, he was himself a dark-skinned Caucasian. The Nation of Islam promptly offered a substantial reward for anyone who could prove the claims of the Hearst paper, but declined to pay off when Fard’s own widow produced documents substantiating the claim.
As for The People’s Temple, there have been some very interesting allegations but, so far as I know, not much proof to back them up.
Biographers of the Reverend Jim Jones have reported that he consulted early in his career with Father Divine, an African-American preacher in Harlem who claimed to be God incarnate. It is said that among other advice on operating a cult, Divine told him not to feel guilty about using women in the movement for sex. This was dramatized in a made-for-TV movie in which Jones was played by Powers Booth and Father Divine was played by James Earl Jones.
Some conspiracy theorists have made a great deal of the fact that a few members of Jones’ inner circle were supposedly ex-CIA employees. One suggestion has been that the Temple started out as a kind of field experiment in mind control, and got out of hand.
If so, there is a question as to whether Jones was himself a knowing participant in the experiment at the start, and when, exactly, he flipped out.
This points out the ambiguity in all of the cases cited above: in each instance there are abundant reasons for suspecting that the founders of movements were cynics and fakes, but the possibility that they were, instead, suffering from self-delusion also exists. Apparently, it comes down to a matter of faith, even if we regard a religion is bogus.