Why has Scientology sometimes been involved in court battles?
To protect the rights of our churches and parishioners. The Church has gone to court a number of times to defend against encroachment of our civil and First Amendment rights. The majority of this litigation, most of which started in the early to mid 1980s, has since concluded. The result has been significant court decisions in the United States and abroad which have fully recognized the religious nature of Scientology and which have upheld the rights of the Church and its parishioners to practice their religion. These are rulings which benefit all religions. A number of cases were brought against the Church by unscrupulous individuals who tried to exploit the fact that the latent prejudices of courts and juries can be inflamed against new and unfamiliar religions and can lead to large, but undeserved sums of cash. A number of people who filed such opportunistic suits later admitted they made allegations just for money or that they were the beneficiaries of covert government support whi
