We had a big thread on this a while back. Personally, I don’t see anything preventing Scientology from becoming more mainstream like Mormonism has, once a century or two has passed. Lots of people in the other thread disagreed, though.
Mormons caught a lot of crap in their early days, including being seen as a bunch of thugs – I don’t think Scientology has anything comparable to the polygamy or the Mountain Meadows Massacre in their history, so they may have an even easier time of it. Although as Der Trihs and others pointed out, Mormonism does have a Christian basis and shares most of the same beliefs as orthodox Christianity, so Scientology does have that disadvantage.
Put another way: All Orthodox, all Catholic, and most Protestant* Christians follow the trinitarian Christianity of the Nicene Creed. Mormons are at least as far out of that mainstream as the ancient Arians and the surviving Monophysite sects.
*Jehovah’s Witnesses deny Christ’s divinity, at least as being coequal with Jehovah’s – and it is for that reason debatable whether they count as “Protestant Christians” at all; they certainly come out of the Protestant Christian tradition, but so do we Unitarians.
Yeah. B.H. Roberts was actually the first Mormon elected to Congress (the House of Representatives) but he was denied his seat because we was, in fact, practicing plural marriage. Reed Smoot himself wasn’t, which is why he was eventually allowed to become a Senator. They were worried that the church’s official renunciation of polygamy in 1890 was just a cover to attain statehood, which was apparently justified; the church actually had to issue another “manifesto” in 1904, stating that they really meant it and polygamy was over, and even then there are records of plural marriages being performed up until about 1920 when the mainstream LDS church finally got everybody to understand that they really, really meant it … thus kicking off the fundamentalists.
Re: paragraph (1). You should come here to South Korea, the home of the World Mission Society Church (also known here as the Heavenly Mother Church). Not only are they BSC, but they send out incredibly gorgeous–and I mean drop-dead, you’d walk a hundred miles barefoot on broken glass to see gorgeous–college-aged single spokeswomen well-trained in English to try to convert us foreign teachers here. So far, as the Wiki says, their success in that effort is mostly on Korean-Americans (aka Gyopo).
Lisa McPherson? Mormonism had much worse accusations directed against it, like blood atonement and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where 120 defenseless men, women, and children were slain. Yet they’ve overcome all that in just a century.
You know, this could well be the defining factor. Scientology will lever live THAT down.
Well, Orson Scott Card of Ender’s Game fame … and there’s always Battlestar Galactica …
There is a kind of sociological growth pattern as cults become religions. If you look at the history of Mormonism, 50 years into their life cycle they WERE treated like loons.
The single word that answers the OP is nothing more than:
Gentrification
Scientology is making the transition from cult to religion, and people are currently resisting it. In 75 years, no one will care about Scientologists either.
