Last week, the Associated Press asserted that The Church of Scientology has ten million members worldwide. Ten million? TEN MILLION???

For crying out loud, that is such obvious rubbish. Think about it: Jews worldwide number 13.42 million, or .02% of the population. No way are there nearly as many Scientologists.

How many Scientologists do you personally know? I live in Los Angeles and I am not acquainted with even one single Scientologist (at least not that I am aware of). That we are meant to believe that there are ten million of them is, of course, ludicrous. It’s unusual that AP wouldn’t do any fact checking on a matter like this—rather than just accept the numbers Scientology tells them—because the real numbers, well, the real numbers are jes’ a lil’ south of ten million…

Tony Ortega writes at The Village Voice:

According to the latest [ARIS or American Religious Identification Survey] survey, the total number of people who identify as Scientologists is just 25,000 in this country of more than 300 million human beings.

That’s one Scientologist for about every 12,000 Americans.

In other words, the total number of active U.S. Scientologists is about the size of your run-of-the-mill local credit union.

But there’s more. As paltry as that number is, the news is even worse for Scientology, because previous surveys by the same researchers show a steep drop in membership in recent years, reflecting anecdotal evidence that there’s been a “mass exodus” (as Reitman calls it) under the leadership of David Miscavige.

In 1990, ARIS had found about 45,000 Scientologists. In 2001, it found 55,000, and in 2008, it found 25,000.

Yikes, that is some steep seven year drop-off in Scientologists, ain’t it?

As Ortega goes on to point out, there are more people who self-identify as Rastafarians than as Scientologists. (I’m one of them: Rastafarian is what I always pick as my religious affiliation, btw)

Jeff Hawkins, once Scientology’s head of public relations, now an anti-Scientology blogger and author, estimates that there are no more than 40,000 Scientologists worldwide, at the high end. England and Canada both have fewer than two thousand adherents to the gospel of L. Ron Hubbard. Most of the rest of them have got to live right here in Los Angeles. Their real estate is highly visible, their members less so.
 
Via Exile on Moan Street