This organisation's legal standing is not a single fact but a patchwork, and the patchwork is itself the informative thing.
The United States Internal Revenue Service withdrew tax exemption in 1967 and restored it in 1993, a reversal that followed years of litigation and that the agency has never explained in detail on the public record. Australia's High Court granted religious status in the 1983 Church of the New Faith decision, a judgment still cited internationally for its reasoning on what makes a belief system a religion. Italy and Spain have recognised it. Germany has not, treating it in several states as a commercial enterprise and placing it under observation by internal security authorities. France has prosecuted corporate entities associated with it for organised fraud, with convictions upheld in 2013. The United Kingdom refused registration of its chapels for the solemnisation of marriage until the Supreme Court decided otherwise in 2013 on the ground that the lower courts had applied too narrow a definition of religious worship.
Hugh Urban's history treats this divergence as the central analytical problem rather than an administrative curiosity. His argument is that the disagreement is not really about this organisation. It is that the legal definition of religion differs sharply between states, some asking about sincerity of belief, others about organisational form, others about commercial character, and that a movement sitting near the boundary makes the differences visible.
The organisation disputes the characterisations made against it in the jurisdictions that have refused recognition, and has litigated extensively, often successfully. Critics, including many former members, describe practices around disconnection from family and the treatment of those who leave. Those accounts are numerous and consistent with one another; they are also contested by the organisation, and they have been tested in court in some jurisdictions and not others.
The accurate statement is that no settled international answer exists, that the question has been decided differently by competent courts applying different tests, and that this is a genuine legal disagreement rather than a matter awaiting discovery of a missing fact.