The White House is going after 'anti-Christian bias' — should Scientology worry?

[Scientology donors Trish Duggan and Grant Cardone]

“There was no Christ.”

It’s right there in an audio recording from a 1968 lecture that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard gave aboard the yacht Apollo to his most trusted followers when he let them in on a bizarre discovery he claimed to have made while investigating this planet’s remote past.

Some 75 million years ago, Hubbard said, a galactic overlord named Xenu had solved an overpopulation problem by trapping billions of his subjects and bringing them to a planet he called Teegeeack, which today we call Earth. After vaporizing his victims with H-bombs, Xenu collected their disembodied souls — which Hubbard called “thetans” — and then subjected them to weeks of 3D movies, implanting them with false memories of what would become the world’s religions.

Jesus Christ, in other words, was simply a figment that Xenu had implanted in these invisible souls that are still floating around and infest each one of us today. The aim of Scientology’s most expensive upper-level counseling — called “auditing,” at about $1,000 an hour — is to rid yourself of those victims of Xenu’s genocide so that you can recover your own god-like powers as an “Operating Thetan.”

Nowhere in that picture Hubbard painted was any room for the story of Christianity or any of the world’s other major religions, which he said were just fakery from Xenu. In Scientology, you are a fallen god, and one day you can rule the universe again, with the help of Hubbard’s “technology.”

We thought about Hubbard’s denial that Jesus ever existed when we read that the White House announced on Thursday that President Donald Trump had signed an executive order to eradicate “anti-Christian bias.”

The executive order charged the Attorney General with creating a task force made up of other cabinet members who would investigate the ways Christians in this country were being persecuted and disrespected.

Could a Christianity-denying organization like the Church of Scientology be in trouble?

Probably not.

As Politico pointed out in August, and then the New York Times in October, while the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 tend to get more media attention, it's the America First Policy Institute that was becoming more central to planning for the second Trump administration.

The AFPI didn't even exist until 2020, when it was created by three wealthy Texas Trump supporters. But since then, the Times said, it had become “a right-wing think tank that has, with little fanfare or scrutiny, installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again.”

The dark money group is led by Linda McMahon, who was named by President Trump to be his next Education Secretary, and by CEO Brooke Rollins, who is Trump's nominee for Agriculture Secretary.

If you take a look at AFPI’s 990 tax forms that are available, for the years 2021 and 2022, one of its directors is Trish Duggan, the wealthiest of Scientology’s major donors and one of the biggest individual donors to President Trump’s 2024 campaign. (Another major Scientology donor with close ties to the president is Grant Cardone, who spoke at the Madison Square Garden rally about a week before the election.)

We also found something else interesting in AFPI’s 990 report from 2022. That year, the organization paid $251,338 in “advisory services” to none other than Pam Bondi, the former Florida AG who is now the US Attorney General for Trump’s second term.

Also, if you go to the AFPI’s website and look at its list of “chairs,” one of the people you will find is Paula White-Cain, AFPI’s chair for its “Center for American Values.”

The day after the White House announced the executive order to eradicate anti-Christian bias, it announced the formation of the White House Faith Office, to be led by Paula White-Cain.

So, with three of Trump’s current or prospective cabinet members — and the leader of the White House Faith Office — all having such tight connections through the America First Policy Institute with Trish Duggan, Scientology’s biggest funder, we tend to think that Mike Rinder was right when he said after the November election that he didn’t expect the Department of Justice to have much interest in investigating Scientology in the next four years.

We will be interested, however, to see if Pam Bondi’s task force, or Paula White-Cain’s Faith Office, say anything about Scientology at all.

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Bonus items from our tipsters

Our thanks to the reader who sent in this page from a Saint Hill calendar — to show us that the holiest day of the week in Scientology is, of course, Thursday, when stats are due.

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Chris Shelton is going Straight Up and Vertical

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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

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