What are ‘Scientology Runs’ and why is Gen Z so obsessed with them?
If you’ve spent more than five minutes on TikTok lately, you might think there’s a nationwide movement of people sprinting into Scientology centers. People artfully dodge and weave their way around the oddly lacking and rather rigid security, joke around stuffy employees, and try their best to plunge beyond the depths of a pseudo-holy religious house to collect as many social media validation points as they can.
I’ve seen talk about it spread to a few publications now, so before it gets too big, I think we should clarify that the clips circulating make it seem like a very greater tendency than it actually is. From the looks of it, it looks like it’s actually built from a handful of clips that are recycled endlessly, stitched together into compilations, and reacted to by others, all to the point where it now feels borderline ubiquitous.
It isn’t. Like many trends, it is the handiwork of only a handful of people that is now being extrapolated to many more than actually participate.
Gen Z is strangely obsessed with ‘Scientology Runs’. Here’s why.
In case you’re still confused as to what the hell is going on, a Scientology Run is when people film themselves charging into a Church of Scientology building to see how far they can get before being caught and kicked out. It’s a notoriously secretive religion, so it turns the whole place into an action movie set piece, with the main character trying to infiltrate a compound while fending off his legion of foot soldiers, dressed in intimidating white button-downs with black vests. Because I guess the deeper you go into a Scientology center, the more all the valets who should be greeting you look like the outside of it?
On the one hand, this is a lot of fun. On the other hand, it’s still a lot of fun, but maybe we shouldn’t make running at full speed to a house of religion, however hokey that religion may be, a trend either? Yeah, the whole company is shady at best and they believe in some weird alien magic. They also have a history of harassing former members and anyone who dares to pull back the veil on the secretive organization’s scare tactics. But perhaps a better use of Scientology’s infiltration tactics would be an investigative piece rather than a viral speed race.
