Scientology is an "applied religious philosophy" so it's possible to be both a Scientologist and any other religion, he says. Hubbard's credo on integrity reminds that "nothing in Dianetics and Scientology is true for you unless you have observed it and it is true according to your observation." Members can decide for themselves whether they believe in God — what Scientologists typically refer to as a Supreme Being. The Rev. Parke guesses that more do believe than don't.

Where most Western religions are about faith, church member Magiera says, Scientology is about "bringing change through doing and applying." Some have argued that this makes Scientology not quite a religion, but several courts have disagreed, and in 1993 the IRS recognized the tax-exempt status of the church.

A religion, says local church member Lora Mengucci, director of Special Affairs, is an entity that has "a belief in some Ultimate Reality" that transcends the here and now of the secular world; religious practices directed toward "understanding, attaining or communing with" this Ultimate Reality; and a community of believers who join together in pursuing this Ultimate Reality.

Fifty years after its founding, the Church of Scientology continues to inspire controversy. In California earlier this summer, the head of the state's public schools hired a research group to evaluate the Narcanon anti-drug program, in use in some of the state's schools. School officials worry that the program is scientifically unsound and that it is tied too closely to Scientology teachings. Church officials say that Narcanon is a non-sectarian program but do acknowledge that Narcanon employees tend to be Scientologists and that the curriculum was developed by Hubbard. That curriculum includes Hubbard's beliefs that drugs accumulate indefinitely in body fat and thus must be detoxified by saunas and doses of niacin.

"The drug program is quite successful," argues Dr. J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and considered an expert on new and non-conventional religions. "It has a very high non-recidivism rate. And their literacy program changes the life of the people who go through it," says Melton, the author of "The Church of Scientology," published in 2000 by Signature Books of Salt Lake City.