Scientology has posed an interesting challenge to the West’s concept of freedom of religion. Perhaps we wouldn’t even know about it if it weren’t for its most famous and strange members. That is somewhat troubling but, ultimately, it does get the job done.

Scientology has a legal status in the US that gives it lots of room to maneuver as a protected religion — many say excessively, problematically so. It is strange to have a religion whose “scriptures” are protected vigorously by copyright; most religions seek the maximum distribution of their fundamental texts. But Scientology continues to have bad luck in Europe. In Germany they’re pretty much outlawed:

The German government considers the Scientology organization a commercial enterprise with a history of taking advantage of vulnerable individuals and an extreme dislike of any criticism. The government is also concerned that the organization’s totalitarian structure and methods may pose a risk to Germany’s democratic society. Several kinds of evidence have influenced this view of Scientology, including the organization’s activities in the United States.

It’s an interesting twist by the Germans: They say it’s a cult and can’t be unleashed on their “special case” democracy, even in the name of religious freedom (the very fulcrum of its claim to special treatment) precisely because of its “totalitarian structures and methods.” France too has a long-running battle with the group.

The fact is, you’d have a hard time distinguishing between the accusations against Scientology and those that could have been made against much older religions, which were far more totalitarian, violent and irrational in their heydays than Scientology is today. It could be, and has been, suggested that Scientology isn’t being allowed to do what other religions have done in establishing themselves in their heyday. Some people thank that’s exactly as it should be. Let’s stick to Western history: After all, the world of medieval Europe during the high water mark of the Catholic Church — i.e., the Dark Ages — and arguably that of, say, Utah in the early days of the Mormons, were hardly models of free and open societies. They were theocratic tyrannies. Let’s not even get into the problematic definitional debate about what is a religion and what is a cult. It seems odd to afford the mature versions of these religions grandfather status, yet they are largely defanged; does the fact that they were tyrannical in their times, in places where democracy and religious freedom had not taken hold, mean that everyone who wants to start a new religion is entitled to be now that they have?

Now it’s being reported that the BBC, despite a messy outburst by a “presenter” who claims he was essentially driven up the wall by Scientologists while filming a documentary about them, is going ahead with its broadcast.

The Scientology question is an odd breach in a fairly consistent transatlantic approach to religion which features only occasional meaningful divergences. What seems particularly odd, and troubles a lot of people, is just how wide a swath the U.S. government has given Scientology, to the extent even of taking the up the group’s cause as a religious freedom issue on which the Europeans are said to be acting oppressively. This 2001 article, by a Canadian — quite appropriate; they are like the Europeans of North America, after all — attempts to address the issue, and argues “American officials appear to be poorly informed about the bases for the Europeans’ critical positions, and … have been the recipients of selective information provided by Scientology itself along with Scientology’s supporters.” I don’t know enough to say if that’s true, but I can say that the accomodation between the U.S. government and the group, especially as regards its tax status and the extent of its tax privileges, raises many eyebrows.

Doing research for this post, I found most of the reporting about the Scientologists to be on offbeat, personal websites, ones that I would normally be reluctant to link to without doing more investigation than I, as a part-time blogger, am prepared to do. We wouldn’t hear much about Scientology at all in the mainstream press, besides the rare public high-profile litigation such as the IRS cases, if it weren’t for famous, loopy and aggressively loyal Scientologists such as actors John Travolta and Tom Cruise. We probably should — win, lose or draw, their activities, and the reactions of democratic governments to them, raise issues of importance. Perhaps, then, there is something positive in our culture’s celebrity obsession after all.