What Are Scientologists Not Allowed to Do? The Church’s Rules

Scientologists may not take street drugs or psychiatric drugs, and they may not keep company with anyone their church has expelled as a “Suppressive Person”. Nor may they drink within 24 hours of auditing or training, and members of the Sea Org, the church’s religious order, may not raise children inside it. Beyond these, its published rules are few.

The church explains its rules by what it hopes to give its members, and its word for that gift is freedom. “Freedom of the spirit is only to be found on the road to truth,” it teaches, and it describes auditing as the exact questions “to bring about spiritual freedom.” Christians hear in those words an echo of Jesus, who told those who believed him, “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Whether that freedom is earned or given is where Christians and Scientologists part.

What drugs and medicine can Scientologists take?

Prescribed medicine, yes. “Scientologists seek conventional medical treatment for illnesses and injuries,” the church says, and they “use prescription drugs when physically ill and also rely on the advice and treatment of physicians.” Its answer to whether any other drug is allowed is short: “Except for antibiotics or other medical drugs prescribed by a physician, no. All other drugs including recreational street drugs and psychiatric mind-altering drugs, are forbidden.”

Someone who has been “habitually using drugs” must wait six weeks before auditing, because, the church says, “it takes at least six weeks for the effect of drugs to wear off.” Auditing is Scientology’s central practice: a trained auditor asks “exact sets of questions” and the person being audited, called a preclear, looks at his own life to find the source of his troubles. The church also offers a programme it calls the Purification Rundown, which it says helps people recover from the harmful effects of drugs.

Why are Scientologists against psychiatry?

Because the church holds that psychiatric drugs hide a person’s real trouble and that psychiatry has done great harm. “Despite the claims of psychiatrists that drugs are a ‘cure-all,’ at best drugs only mask what is really wrong; at worst, drugs cause harm,” it says. “The real answer is to handle the source of one’s troubles—and that is done through Scientology.” In 1969 the church and the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which says it works “to expose psychiatric violations of human rights” and runs a museum in Los Angeles called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.

Here Christian teaching runs the other way. The historic churches do not ask believers to choose between prayer and a doctor. The Book of Sirach, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, says it plainly: “Honour the physician for the need thou hast of him: for the most High hath created him,” and “The most High hath created medicines out of the earth, and a wise man will not abhor them” (Sirach 38:1, 4). Jesus likened himself to a physician, who comes for the sick (Luke 5:31). If you take medicine for your mind, brothers and sisters, you take it with the same thanks you would give for any healing. All healing, Sirach says, is from God.

Can Scientologists drink alcohol or smoke?

Yes, outside their religious services. “There are no dietary laws whatsoever and no general prohibitions against smoking or drinking,” the church says. “However, Scientology does have a mandatory rule banning the consumption of any alcohol within 24 hours of or during an auditing session or training.” Smoking is forbidden in the course rooms where Scientologists study and during auditing.

What is disconnection in Scientology?

Disconnection is the church’s word for cutting off communication with someone. The church defines it as “a self-determined decision made by an individual that he is not going to be connected to another.” It says a Scientologist may lose all he has gained if he is “connected to someone who is suppressive or who is antagonistic to Scientology,” and that he should first try to resolve the conflict, then disconnect only “as a last resort when all attempts to handle have failed.” It also says, “There is no Scientology disconnection policy that requires Church members to disconnect from anyone, let alone family and friends who simply have different beliefs.”

Former members tell it differently. The actor Leah Remini, who left the church, told NPR in 2015 that afterwards she could not even invite old friends to her daughter’s birthday party: “She can’t talk to me.” In its statement to NPR the church answered, “There is no policy in Scientology that requires Church members to disconnect from anyone.”

A Suppressive Person, in the church’s teaching, is someone who “seeks to suppress other people in their vicinity” and works against anything that would make people “more powerful or more intelligent.” Being declared one is “extremely rare,” the church says, and it means expulsion. The person “loses both his or her fellowship with the Church as well as with other Scientologists” until restored to good standing. Among the acts that bring expulsion the church names “publicly renouncing the faith.” So a Scientologist may leave quietly, and the church says members “are free to leave,” but one who renounces Scientology in public is cut off from those who stay. What critics and former members say about it is gathered in why some people hate Scientology.

We should be slow to point at another church here. Paul told the Corinthians “not to keep company” with a so-called brother living in open sin, “with such an one no not to eat” (1 Corinthians 5:11), and churches have excommunicated and shunned ever since, not always kindly. But Paul did not leave it there. In his next letter he wrote of a man the church had punished, “ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow” (2 Corinthians 2:7). The shepherd in Jesus’ parable leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one that is lost, “until he find it” (Luke 15:4).

Can Scientologists marry, use birth control or have children?

They marry in the church’s own wedding ceremonies, and on birth control and abortion the church “does not mandate a position.” It calls both “an individual’s personal choice.” It adds that abortion “is therefore rare among Scientologists, who recognize that even an unborn fetus may already be occupied by a spiritual being.”

The rule on children applies to the Sea Organization, the religious order founded in 1967 whose members staff the church’s upper-level centres. About 7,000 of them held such posts, the church said in 2026. They sign a pledge for one billion years, which the church calls “a symbolic document” of “eternal commitment.” Sea Org members may marry, “but if they wish to have children, they do so outside the Sea Organization.” Since 1986, members who want children take a leave of absence from the order “until their children reached majority.”

Can Scientologists celebrate Christmas or vote?

The church keeps its own holidays: L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday on 13 March, the publication of Dianetics on 9 May, Auditor’s Day in September and others. It says Scientologists “also observe traditional national holidays and are additionally respectful of the religious holidays of all other religions.” It gives no rule against Christmas.

The church also says it is “nonpolitical,” and that Scientologists are free to “vote for the candidates of their choice.”

Can a Christian be a Scientologist?

The church says yes, at first. An academic study it publishes on its own website says that “members are not required to abandon other religious beliefs and affiliations on taking up Scientology.” The same study reports what “senior Church officials as well as individual Scientologists” told its author: “while exclusivity is not required, it comes about as a matter of practice.” And then: “as one becomes more involved with Scientology, one inevitably discards one’s prior faith.” Christian writers answer no. Fr John Flader, answering a reader’s question in The Catholic Weekly in 2023, wrote that Scientology’s teachings “are very different from those of Christianity”, and the reasons can be seen in Scientology’s own words.

The church speaks warmly of Jesus. L. Ron Hubbard wrote that Scientology shares “the goals set for Man by Christ, which are wisdom, good health and immortality,” and he named Christ among the great teachers who handed on “a torch of wisdom.” Christians can be glad of that respect. Yet Christian faith says more of him than that he handed on wisdom. It confesses him as the Son of God, who said of himself, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). There is more on this in whether Scientologists believe in God and Jesus.

The deeper difference is how a person is set free. Scientology teaches that “Man is basically good,” that through “many lifetimes” harmful acts have led him into evil, and that through Scientology he “confronts these acts” and comes to know truth again. It offers, in its own phrase, “certainty of eternal salvation now,” reached by auditing and training. The Christian Scriptures tell a different story about us. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27): one life, not many. And the freedom that saves is not reached step by step. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

The church and the Christian both long to be free, and both say the truth leads there. In the same conversation in which he spoke of truth and freedom, Jesus said where that freedom comes from: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).

Related reading

• How many Scientologists are there really?
• Where is Scientology banned, and why?
• Why does the Church of Scientology have a cross?
• Scientology vs Christian Science: what’s the difference?
• Is reincarnation in the Bible?