3. Operation Snow White
The extent of the church’s covert operations are likewise often too shocking to believe. Wright details a church operation known as Snow White, beginning in the 1970s, wherein the Guardians Office, the church’s intelligence agency, infiltrated 136 government organizations across the globe. In the U.S. alone, they penetrated the IRS, the Treasury, the Labor Department and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as newspapers including the Washington Post. “Nothing in American history can compare with the scale of the domestic espionage of Operation Snow White,” Wright writes.

4. Hollywood intrigue 
The fascinating “TC and COB” chapter focuses on the church’s wooing of Tom Cruise, their distrust of Nicole Kidman and their hunt for a new mate for Scientology’s golden child. Even though it’s not new, the extent of Cruise’s commitment is astonishing. In one passage, he sits in a Home Depot parking lot doing “tone drills,” where he tries to intuit the emotional state of random people exiting the store. As Wright puts it, “No other member of the church derives as much material benefit from his religion as Cruise does, and…none bears greater moral responsibilities for the indignities inflicted on members of the Sea Org, sometimes directly because of his membership.” Other important Hollywood figures like John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and Paul Haggis are also major characters in Wright’s story.

5. How insanely science-fictiony it all is
At this point the origin details of Scientology are well-known: 75 million years ago, Xenu, tyrannical leader of the Galactic Confederacy, brought aliens and stacked them around volcanoes before blowing them up, releasing “thetans” that later attached to human bodies. Still, the fact that this is a deeply held religious belief and not just a “South Park” parody never ceases to astonish.