Quick Links: Advance! Analysis | preliminary Celebrity Analysis | Freewinds Analysis | Source Analysis
Source Publications for the Scientology Statistics Project:
Scientology Statistics Project
- the Advance! Analysis page
- analysis of all completions ever listed in AOLA's Advance! (1994-2004); also see the earlier Advance! Analysis
- the preliminary Celebrity Analysis page
- preliminary analysis of completions from Celebrity magazine, covering 40-50% of all completions lists
- the Freewinds Analysis page
- analysis of all completions ever listed in Freewinds (1989-2004); also see the earlier Freewinds Analysis
- the Source Analysis page
- summaries and graphs of completions from the entire history of Source magazine (1976-2004); also see the earlier Source Stats Summary page
These pages are the first results of my project to graph all available Scientology completions statistics. The pages link to the full completions lists so you can view the raw data yourself.
The Church of Scientology typically trumpets "stats through the roof" and "unprecedented growth" at Scientology events. However, a careful look at Scientology's own statistics shows that Scientology's growth is slow ... and some numbers (such as the number of new Clear attests each year) indicate that Scientology is shrinking.
Scientologists learn to look at statistics to gauge an individual's success. What do these numbers say about the Church of Scientology, and about its ability to tell its members the truth about the state of affairs?
To get a more accurate picture of Scientology's health, I am collecting stats, based on the completions lists published in Scientology magazines, and bit by bit, I am graphing them.
The primary sources for these statistics are Scientology's main US magazines:
- Advance!
- Advance! ANZO
- Advance! Europe
- Advance! UK
- Auditor
- Auditor UK
- Celebrity (CC Int)
- Freewinds
- Impact
- Prosperity
- Source
I also have a collection of org magazines from individual Scientology orgs, including Ability, Achievement, Cognition, Enhancement, Gateway, New Era, Purpose, Survive, Success Gazette, and Understand. (Since I live in San Francisco, I am especially interested in Gateway.)
If you have suggestions for this site or would like to contribute information that could be used here - especially additional statistics - please contact the site owner, Kristi Wachter, at [email protected].
Completions
Completions lists from Scientology magazines have been posted to the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup (also on Google), providing something that's often lacking when discussing Scientology's expansion (or lack thereof) - real data.
I am working on compiling these statistics and analyzing them, with the invaluable help of others who are interested in these statistics. I'm also creating an index to the newsgroup messages, making it easier for people to view the raw data and do their own analysis.
If you have any data from old Scientology magazines (or new ones!), your contribution to the data collection would be greatly appreciated. I posted to alt.religion.scientology and alt.clearing.technology requesting any information people have.
Advance! Magazine
From the completions lists posted from Advance! Magazine, we can see that little real expansion has taken place in the last three years. A boom in OT Eligibility completions in the middle of 2001 has fizzled out.
As of this writing (July 2002), Advance! 159 has not appeared yet, even though Advance! 158 came out in April 2002 and that issue covered three months (rather than two), since issue 157 appeared in January.
For numbers and graphs, please see the Advance! Stats page.
An excellent post to alt.religion.scientology by Cerridwen shows that the statistics can be misleading, since the issues do not come out on a regular basis. Source 138, the June 2002 issue, included four months of completions, while issue 137 had only covered two months. While four months of Clear attests may seem higher than two months, once you average the numbers over the reporting period, the picture can change.
Additional Completions Data
I have a motley assortment of Scientology magazines that people have sent me, and I've culled as much information as I could find from completions lists posted on the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup.
I've summarized that completions info on a quick-and-dirty "this is my first attempt" page. As I collect more data, I'll begin creating pages for various subsets of data. The Advance page listed above is one; I'll try to do a page for Freewinds, Source, and Auditor as well - along with some of the org magazines I've gotten. I may also try to do other types of subsets, such as number of Clear attests or number of Purifs.
You Can Help
You can help make this project more useful by
- suggesting additional ways to organize and present the data
- providing data
You're welcome to send me an e-mail with suggestions or information. You can also send me your Scientology mail.
Number of Churches and Missions, Number of Staff, Number of Members
"Scientology's Statistics" from Scientology With(out) An End by Tom Voltz uses Scientology's own published statistics from What Is Scientology? It shows that
Over a 15 year period, the number of churches grew, on average, at the rate of barely 4.8 percent per year. The missions did a little worse. For them the average growth was only 2.6 percent per year.
and
If we take the number of staff on July 31, 1977 as a base, and compare it with that of 1990, which is 10,224, then the number of staff, from the middle of 1977 to 1992 grew at a rate of 3.8 percent.
Number of New Clears Each Year
Cornelius Krasel's Growth of Scientology page cites total numbers of Clears from various Scientology publications between 1966 and 1996.
I have created my own chart, based on his numbers; where there was no specific number available (for example, 1967-1973), I approximated an average number of new Clears based on the next year for which I did have data (so, for 1967-1973, I estimated an average of 500 new Clears a year). Those years are marked below with an asterisk in the last column.
As you can see, at no time in the history of Scientology has the organization been producing so few new Clears a year.
The latest issues of Scientology publications list just a few new Clears:
- Advance 156 lists 12 (Nov 2001)
- Advance 154 lists 7 (July 2001)
- Advance 151 lists 3
Year |
Total Clears |
New Clears |
Data Approximated |
1966 |
1 |
1 |
|
1967 |
500 |
499 |
* |
1968 |
1000 |
500 |
* |
1969 |
1500 |
500 |
* |
1970 |
2000 |
500 |
* |
1971 |
2500 |
500 |
* |
1972 |
3000 |
500 |
* |
1973 |
3500 |
500 |
* |
1974 |
4000 |
500 |
|
1975 |
4648 |
648 |
* |
1976 |
5296 |
648 |
* |
1977 |
5943 |
647 |
|
1978 |
8300 |
2357 |
|
1979 |
21300 |
13000 |
|
1980 |
24050 |
2750 |
* |
1981 |
26800 |
2750 |
* |
1982 |
29550 |
2750 |
* |
1983 |
32311 |
2761 |
|
1984 |
38000 |
5689 |
|
1985 |
41550 |
3550 |
* |
1986 |
45100 |
3550 |
* |
1987 |
48650 |
3550 |
* |
1988 |
52200 |
3550 |
* |
1989 |
55750 |
3550 |
* |
1990 |
59316 |
3566 |
|
1991 |
55591 |
-3725 |
|
1992 |
51866 |
-3725 |
* |
1993 |
48133 |
-3733 |
|
1994 |
48000 |
-133 |
|
1995 |
49656 |
1656 |
|
1996 |
49880 |
224 |
|
Number of New Clears Each Year, 1966-1996