After Cyclone Nargis left a trail of corpses along Burma’s coast in May 2008, foreign aid workers clamored to enter the military-controlled backwater.
Despite the world’s pleading, Burma’s paranoid generals forbade most foreign relief workers from entering the disaster zone. A frustrated U.K. threatened unauthorized air drops. The U.S. Navy was forced to float vessels loaded with life-saving supplies offshore.
But among the few who managed to access Burma’s worst-hit areas included adherents of the California-based Church of Scientology.
According to the church, miracles ensued after Scientologists touched down. Their team sought out traumatized Burmese for Scientology’s touch-healing techniques, professed to revive the spirit.
The infirm recouped strength, they said, and Burmese kids who’d lost their families regained their smiles. As the church tells it, even the surgeon of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s revered pro-democracy icon, wanted his personal relief troupe to adopt Scientology techniques.
“He goes, ‘This is amazing! I’m a doctor and I can’t even do this!’” said Andy Ponnaz, 57, a Bangkok-born Scientologist of mixed Thai-Swiss blood.
“I said, ‘Sir, I can teach all of your crew tomorrow. How many? 40? OK!’”
The far reach of Scientology
Those who know of Scientology through media exposes, or South Park’s stinging cartoon parody, may wonder what interests Scientology could possibly have in one of Asia’s most remote jungles.
The Western media has largely focused on Scientology’s celebrity followers, its secret scriptures and its costly hierarchy of enlightenment. Defectors’ tell-alls have shaken the religion’s public image. An internet campaign known as “Anonymous” vows to do much worse: destroy the church entirely.
But while Scientology endures scrutiny in America, the faith’s influence is quietly expanding in countries that lie beyond the Western media’s glare. In Burma, there is no South Park. Nor does the din of criticism reach non-English speakers in Indonesian cities ruined by earthquakes. Or poor hamlets in Ghana. Or crumbling city blocks in Chile.
Scientologists reach all these places and more. The faith has dispatched its yellow-clad “Volunteer Ministers” to almost every major global disaster in the last decade: from the 2001 World Trade Center attacks to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Japan’s earthquake-ravaged coast.
Ten years ago, this relief brigade was estimated at 6,000 people. Now, according to church stats, it’s up to 350,000 and growing. Within the past 12 months, the church’s volunteer ministers claim to have treated 3.1 million people in 185 nations and territories.
Scientologists call their volunteer ministers “the largest independent relief force on earth,” an assertion that rivals the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies claim of 97 million volunteers. But this is hardly the two groups’ only point of distinction.
What is an “assist”?
Scientology relief work is largely focused on delivering “assists,” a menu of touch-healing techniques said to reconnect ailing bodies with immortal spirits.
The healing promised by assists is radical: limbs purged of aches in minutes and minds freed from trauma on the spot. Using only their hands, and instructions from the Scientology Handbook, ministers swear they can even render a drunk man sober in minutes.
Is this tent revival-style faith healing? According to Scientologists, no. It’s described as a spiritual science, developed by their founder, the sci-fi novelist-turned-religious leader L. Ron Hubbard.
