Scientology: A Religion in South Africa David Chidester University of Cape Town South Africa        In the production of sacred space, the Church of Scientology has established places of worship in most of the major metropolitan centres of the country. Following the lead of the first church in Johannesburg, Scientology churches were founded in Cape Town in 1961, in Port Elizabeth in 1962, in Durban in 1963, and in Pretoria in 1968. Another church was founded in Johannesburg, serving Johannesburg North, in 1981. Like any sacred place, these churches are sites for special kinds of religious activity. Ordained ministers at these churches offer a wide range of religious services, including Sunday sermons, pastoral counselling, and rituals for marriages, christenings, and funerals, that make these sites vital centres of Scientology religious life.      Like any other religion, therefore, Scientology is a distinctive human experiment in the production of sacred time and sacred space. However, also like any other religion, Scientology is a distinctive human experiment in being human. By the church's own definition, Scientology is an "applied religious philosophy. Its goal is to bring an individual to an understanding of himself and his life as a spiritual being and in relationship to the universe as a whole.''1 In other words, the Church of Scientology develops a religious way of being human that is realized in relation to sacred and superhuman dimensions of life.      Standard academic definitions of religion tend to focus on either the superhuman or sacred features of religious worlds. In an approach to defining religion that can be traced back to the nineteenth-century anthropologist, E. B. Tylor, religion is essentially an engagement with superhuman transcendence. In these terms, religion is a set of beliefs and practices in relation to spiritual, supernatural, or superhuman beings that rise above and go beyond the ordinary level of human existence. In another approach to defining religion, which can be traced back to the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim, religion is a set of beliefs and practices related to a sacred focus that unifies a human community. From this perspective, religion invests life with sacred meaning and power through beliefs in myths and doctrines, through the practices of ritual and ethics, through personal experience, and through forms of social organisation.2      Certainly, the Church of Scientology, which grew out of the spiritual healing techniques of Dianetics that had been formulated by 1950 by its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, can be defined as a religion in terms of the standard definitions. However, academic discussions tend to ignore the political dynamics of denial and recognition that are involved in defining religion. Before outlining the basic features of the religion of Scientology, therefore, it will be necessary to reflect briefly here on the contested history of recognizing religion in South Africa.

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