Scientology stats: big list -- supplemental
Piltdown Man
Sorry, this was meant to be a follow-up to the earlier thread started by
Dave Touretzky, but for some reason my news server seems to have forgotten
it ever existed, so I'm having to start a new one.
I thought this list was really interesting, because for one category of IAS
donors, "Patrons" and "Patrons With Honours", it gives a country-by-country
breakdown. Now it seems a fair assumption to make that the percentage of
such people to the overall number of active CoS members would be fairly
constant worldwide -- after all, one assumes they're all subjected to
pretty much the same intensity of regging. So without any pretense to
scientific accuracy, here are some back-of-an-envelope estimates I've
arrived at (with the help of a calculator, of course).
First of all, the distribution of US vs. the rest of the world is pretty
much what I'd always guesstimated it at: about 60 / 40. I've also always
wondered just how well Scientology travels outside of English, and adding
up the numbers for English-speaking countries (I've included South Africa
among them), gives them about 70% of total membership.
But then I thought: maybe we can get a bit closer to real figures. There
are four countries where, thanks to the census, we know exactly how many
self-professed Scientologists there are, namely:
Australia (2001 census): 2032; New Zealand (1996 census): 213; Canada (2001
census): 1525; UK (apparently without Northern Ireland) (2001 census):
1839. These numbers are taken from Hartley Patterson's CoS demographics
page.
Now let's see what percentage of those are Patrons or Patrons With Honours,
based on the numbers from Impact #115:
Australia: 112 - 5.5%; New Zealand: 12 - 5.6%; Canada: 88 - 5.8%; UK: 246 -
13.4%.
Now the UK figure seems anomalously high, but the one for the other three
are remarkably similar. The UK has Saint Hill, and we know from earlier
completion lists that a lot of non-British people go there for services, so
maybe the exceptionally high number is what one might call the "Saint Hill
Effect". For the same reason, I would assume the number for Denmark isn't
representative. (I have no idea why the number for Switzerland is so
freakishly high, though -- over 1 in 6 of all Patrons outside the US come
from there. Spooky.)
So let's assume that the number for the first three countries is pretty
close to the average worldwide level. The irony is: the higher the
percentage one assumes, i.e., the more successful one assumes Scientology
is at regging people to become Patrons, the worse the overall
numbers become for Scientology.
Just so I'd have to press fewer keys, and because this is nothing more than
an attempt at a rough approximation anyway, I've rounded the number up to
6%. For the United States, with 2721 Patrons, that gives us a total number
of 45,350 members. That seems to tally quite nicely with other estimates.
For Germany, with 197 Patrons, it gives us 3283 members. Again, that seems
to tally with recent estimates. For Belgium, with 28 Patrons, it gives us
466 members -- that's more than double than what I would have guessed until
now, but still, not too far from the 300 number Scientology itself claims,
and anyway, we're dealing with the statistics of very small numbers here,
they always show odd spikes.
So, overall, I'm pretty happy with my non-statistician's attempt at
extrapolation, and feel confident in stating that, IMO, these numbers point
to there probably being about 75,000 active CoS members worldwide, with
45,000 of them in the United States. Any corrections of my arithmetic or
reasoning are welcomed.
R. Hill
Good analysis, which results in a estimate that is well within the
ballpark of 100,000 scientologists *at most* from a number of critical
sources. Here is a similar analysis using Scientologists On-Line. By
the way, you might want to use the 2001 census for New Zealand which
reports 282 scientologists.
[See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology#Membership_statistics
]
US
ARIS 2001: 55,000
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 8685 or 15.8% of ARIS 2001
Australia
Census 2001: 2,032
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 756 or 37.2% of Census 2001
NZ
Census 2001: 282
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 105 or 37.2% of Census 2001
Canada
Census 2001: 1,525
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 441 or 28.9% of Census 2001
UK
Census 2001: 1,781
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 1079 or 60.6% of Census 2001
Germany
German Office for the Protection of the Constitution 2005: 5,500
(estimate)
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 590 or 10.7% of German Office's estimate
All combined (ARIS + census + German estimate): 66,120
Scientologists On-Line 2002: 11,656 or 17,6% (for countries above
only)
Extrapolation from U.S. number
Total Scientologists On-Line 2002: 15,871
Total Scientologists extrapolated from U.S. number: 15,871 / 15.8% =
100,507
Extrapolation from combining all numbers above
Total Scientologists On-Line 2002: 15,871
Total Scientologists extrapolated from all numbers combined: 15,871 /
17,6% = 90,030
As reported by Jeff J. in a previous post, in a Flag letter dated 30
July 1998 the Church of Scientology wanted to have 100,000
scientologists on-line by New Year 1999 -- which I think is possibly
another hint at their membership count -- and certainly not all of
those who received the letter were 'active' scientologist (according
to Jon Atack, Mark Plummer and Martin Ottman writings on the topic.)
Ray.
antisectes
> Sorry, this was meant to be a follow-up to the earlier thread started
> by Dave Touretzky, but for some reason my news server seems to have
> forgotten it ever existed, so I'm having to start a new one.
>
> I thought this list was really interesting, because for one category
> of IAS donors, "Patrons" and "Patrons With Honours", it gives a
> country-by-country breakdown. Now it seems a fair assumption to make
> that the percentage of such people to the overall number of active
> CoS members would be fairly constant worldwide -- after all, one
> assumes they're all subjected to pretty much the same intensity of
> regging. So without any pretense to scientific accuracy, here are
> some back-of-an-envelope estimates I've arrived at (with the help of
> a calculator, of course).
>
> First of all, the distribution of US vs. the rest of the world is
> pretty much what I'd always guesstimated it at: about 60 / 40. I've
> also always wondered just how well Scientology travels outside of
> English, and adding up the numbers for English-speaking countries
> (I've included South Africa among them), gives them about 70% of
> total membership.
It does never travel well, even when people are translating it correctly
or almost correctly, like to german. The cult has NEVER translated the
two main dictionaries; it translates only the few technical words in the
various courses and transcripts of tapes.
It's incredible for scn, since it insists so much on using dictionaries.
It does not even sell the two large dictionaries on its last brochure
from New Era, and does not sell them on Bridge publications site; see:
http://www.scientology.org/html/en_US/istore/section/index.html?minisite=10041§ion=10423
or
http://www.scientology.org/html/en_US/istore/item/index.html?minisite=10041§ion=10322&item=2033
which are the main locations where such books should be found.
You've done a great homework, sure.
I've often done rough estimates of the nbumbers of scientologists; I'd
say that for old infiltrated countries like european, and moreover,
english speaking ones, you're right.
For other countries, where scn tries to install its scam, or where the
level of poverty is high, it's different: I'd say that the number of
beginners is relatively high there, perhaps 50 times or 100 times the
number of patrons, but such clientele is fleeing as fast or faster than
the wind over hubbard's ashes during Xenu's Bombing Vulcanoes.
So, We could add a bit of active members, but we could also add that
those from such counties as Russia, India, Taiwan, etc could be rather
difficult to retain, and very improbably ever going to Flag to become
OTs.
r