The New York Post is reporting that television’s Leah Remini has broken with Scientology. The schism reportedly “began when Leah questioned the validity of excommunication of people.” (Is it ever a bad idea to question the validity of a practice also popular with the Amish?) A source told the tabloid that the King of Queens star and longtime Scientology practitioner “thinks no religion should tear apart a family or abuse someone under the umbrella of ‘religion’” and is reportedly “weighing going public.”
Practitioners of other belief systems will note that this is yet another way in which Scientology differs from more traditional organizations. In Judaism, for instance, members of the congregation are often known to “break with the temple” after their kids are bar and bat mitzvah’ed because they find themselves suddenly only going to synagogue twice a year (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and how much of a waste of money is that? These apostates are often thrilled for the opportunity to speak publicly—at the friends’ kids’ bar mitzvahs, for example—about the “crazy annual membership of this farkakte place—and oh, the rabbi with that wife of his” but interest in hearing these opinions is often . . . appreciably less than would be given to Scientologists doing the same.
See more: Essential reading for Remini—and everyone else, Scientology or Suppressive Person!—is Maureen Orth’s intricately reported and fascinating October 2012 Vanity Fair exposé on Scientology’s wife-auditions for Tom Cruise: “What Katie Didn’t Know.”