A-list star Tom Cruise and his daughter Isabella climbing Scientology ranks

He’s long been associated with Scientology, but now an insider has lifted the lid on just how high up Tom Cruise is in the secretive church.

Tom Cruise and his daughter Isabella Cruise continue to move up in Scientology, both taking more powerful positions in the secretive church — where the lower ranks are apparently ordered to see the actor’s movies multiple times.

Cruise is said to be “considered a deity within Scientology”, according to the New York Post.

Former church member Leah Remini said: “He is second to David Miscavige — the saviour of the free world.”

Cruise was seen on March 9 at the front of a celebration of the holiest day of the Scientology calendar — L. Ron Hubbard’s March 13 birthday — at the church’s spiritual mecca in Clearwater, Florida, according to journalist Tony Ortega’s blog The Underground Bunker.

It was just reported that lower-ranking Scientologists are sent to see Cruise movies, often multiple times by their leaders, who buy thousands of tickets for his Mission: Impossible and Jack Reacher franchises to boost the actor’s box office.

Tom Cruise has long been linked to Scientology. Picture: Emmanuel Wong/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

Ex-Scientologist Bree Mood — who left the church a few months ago — said in an interview: “Tom Cruise was a god in the lower ranks … Every time a Tom Cruise movie came out they’d buy all his tickets. It could be 500, 1000, up to 2500 people. I’m not kidding.”

Now the actor’s adopted daughter with Nicole Kidman, Isabella, 26, has for the first time stepped out publicly for Scientology, as the face of a March 19 recruiting email, in which she extols her experience of completing an “auditing” internship at Scientology London.

Auditing is a form of therapy where a low-level person, called a “pre-clear,” holds onto electrodes that direct electricity through the body, moving a needle on a machine called an E-meter that supposedly registers harmful energy related to painful experiences.

The auditor — a more senior Scientology member — asks the “pre-clear” questions to help them reach “new realisations about existence.”

Isabella, who previously shunned the spotlight, gushed of her auditor training: “This IS what I had been searching for. The missing piece. Suddenly everything began to make sense … I became that annoying girl in the org who would just talk endlessly about how incredible training is … now I KNOW. We all need to do this … This is a gift to yourself and so many others … If you are going to make it as a being for the long run you NEED this.”

Scientologists believe we have all lived many past lives and are actually millions of years old. A link at the end of Isabella’s message takes readers to an auditing recruitment page.

This story originally appeared in the New York Post and has been republished with permission.