Scientology down 23 PERCENT from 2011 to 2021 in England census data released today

[London’s swinging Scientology hipsters]

We knew Scientology was hurting in England, but this is really something.

In 2011, the census of England and Wales counted only 2,418 people who identified themselves as Scientologists.

This morning, results were released for religion data in the 2021 count, and the number of Scientologists in the same area is down to 1,854.

That’s a 23-percent drop in ten years.

In that same time, England and Wales grew by 3.5 million people in overall population to 59.6 million people.

So that makes Scientology’s share .003 percent.

And remember, during these years Scientology has been unashamedly calling itself the “world’s fastest growing religion.”

Once again, real government data shows that our estimates of about 20,000 active Scientologists around the world as much closer to the truth than the “millions” that Scientology claims.

2021 England and Wales: 1,854
2021 Canada: 1,380
2018 New Zealand: 321
2016 Australia: 1,684
2016 Ireland: 87

And the England census data drills down into local municipalities, which allows us to see how many people identified as Scientologists in places like Birmingham (43), Manchester (22), and Plymouth (13), places were Scientology is spending millions in order to put up gleaming new cathedrals it calls “Ideal Orgs,” as if there were a demand for those new facilities.

The truth, of course, is that there is no local interest in Scientology in those places, but church leader David Miscavige demands that huge amounts be raised and spent on those facilities so he can convince his wealthy donors that Scientology is a going concern.

Don’t expect a peep out of Scientology regarding these new census numbers. The last thing they want is for their own members to have their suspicions confirmed: Scientology is dying, gradually, around the globe.

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Jury has started over in Danny Masterson trial

Although we spent much of yesterday sitting around in a courtroom with nothing going on, it still turned out to be one of the wildest days of the Danny Masterson trial for us.

After a week off for the Thanksgiving break, we learned that two jurors were feeling ill and had tested positive for Covid.

Judge Charlaine Olmedo made her intentions clear — she wanted to replace the two Covid-positive jurors with alternates — and it didn’t surprise us too much that defense attorney Philip Cohen raised an objection.

What did surprise us was what Cohen objected to: He wanted to roll things back and argue about Judge Olmedo letting the jurors have the entire Thanksgiving week off. He said that over the week off, the defense team had looked back through transcripts and decided that none of the jurors had said anything about needed Thanksgiving week off when they were going through the jury selection process.

In other words, he was calling Judge Olmedo a liar. She had said that four or five of the jurors had travel plans on Thanksgiving week, and so she was unable to bring them back on Monday and Tuesday for more deliberations. But now Cohen was questioning if that had ever happened.

Judge Olmedo didn’t blink. She said that the jurors had communicated their travel plans to the clerk, and she asked him to put those communications in the record.

Cohen was clearly unhappy that Judge Olmedo was planning to keep things going, despite the illnesses. But after two alternates were chose to join the main jury, they went back to work on deliberations.

Before they did, Judge Olmedo admonished them to disregard all of the work they had done up to that point (about 2.5 days of deliberations before the Thanksgiving week) and to start over from the beginning.

After that, we noticed that the jury seemed more determined than it had been before the week off. The jury not only worked a little into the lunch hour, but didn’t break for the day until they hit 4 pm.

Does that new urgency suggest that we might get verdicts today? We don’t know, but we’ll be in the courtroom ready to send you dispatches on the latest.

Yesterday, we put out two short video reports, one at the lunch break and one at the end of the day. And here they are at our YouTube channel as well.

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Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:

Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

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