Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  10 The reader can compare the two Notices of Separation by going to The New Yorker’s posting on DocumentCloud: http://documents.newyorker.com/2011/02/notice-of-separation-l-ron-hubbard/. Gerald Armstrong testified that he had seen a document, “either a fitness report or something similar around the time of the end of the war,” that bore the signature of “a Commander Thompson,” which he believed that Hubbard had actually forged (Church of Scientology California vs. Gerald Armstrong, May 15, 1984).

  Epilogue

  If Scientology is based on a lie, as Tommy Davis’s formulation at the New Yorker meeting suggests, what does it say about the many people who believe in its doctrine or—like Davis and Feshbach—publicly defend and promote the organization and its practices?

  Of course, no religion can prove that it is “true.” There are myths and miracles at the core of every great belief system that, if held up to the harsh light of a scholar or an investigative reporter, could easily be passed off as lies. Did Mohammed really ride into Heaven on the back of his legendary transport, the steed Buraq? Did Jesus’ disciples actually encounter their crucified leader after his burial? Were these miracles or visions or lies? Would the religions survive without them?

  There is no question that a belief system can have positive, transformative effects on people’s lives. Many current and former Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses.

  Hubbard once wrote that “the old religion”—by which he meant Christianity—was based on “a very painful lie,” which was the idea of Heaven. “Yes, I’ve been to Heaven. And so have you,” he writes. “It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints—and electronic implantation equipment.” Heaven, he says, was built as an implant station 43 trillion years ago. “So there was a Heaven after all—which is why you are on this planet and were condemned never to be free again—until Scientology.” He went on: “What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to better man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell.”

  One might compare Scientology with the Church of Latter Day Saints, a new religion of the previous century. The founder of the movement, Joseph Smith, claimed to have received a pair of golden plates from the angel Moroni in upstate New York in 1827, along with a pair of magical “seeing stones,” which allowed him to read the contents. Three years later, he published The Book of Mormon, founding a movement that would provoke the worst outbreak of religious persecution in American history. Mormons were chased all across the country because of their practice of polygamy and their presumed heresy. Smith himself was murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. His beleaguered followers sought to escape the United States and establish a religious theocracy in the territory of Utah, which they called Zion. Mormons were so despised that there was a bill in Congress to exterminate them. And yet Mormonism would evolve and go on to become one of the fastest-growing denominations in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, centuries. Members of the faith now openly run for president of the United States. In much of the world, this religion, which was once tormented because of its perceived anti-American values, is now thought of as being the most American of religions; indeed, that’s how many Mormons think of it as well. It is a measure not only of the religion’s success but also of the ability of a faith to adapt and change.

  And yet Joseph Smith was plainly a liar. In answer to the charge of polygamy, he claimed he had only one wife, when he had already accumulated a harem. A strange but revealing episode occurred in 1835, when Smith purchased several Egyptian mummies from an itinerant merchant selling such curiosities. Inside the mummy cases were scrolls of papyrus, reduced to fragments, which Smith declared were the actual writings of the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Smith produced what he called a translation of the papyri, titled The Book of Abraham. It still forms a portion of Mormon doctrine. In America at the time, Egyptian was still thought to be indecipherable, but the Rosetta Stone had already been discovered, and Jean-François Champollion had successfully rendered the hieroglyphic language into French. In 1966, the Joseph Smith papyri were discovered in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was soon shown that the passages that Smith “translated” were common funerary documents with no reference to Abraham or Joseph whatsoever. This fraud has been known for decades, but it has made little difference in the growth of the religion or the devotion of its adherents. Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.

  The evolution of Scientology into a religion also resembles the progression of Christian Science, the faith Tommy Davis was born into. Like Hubbard, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, experimented with alternative ways of healing. Like Hubbard, she claimed to have been an invalid who cured herself; she, too, wrote a book based on her experience, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which became the basis for the founding of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. Far more than is the case with Scientology, Christian Science stands against mainstream medical practices, even though both organizations lay claim to being more “scientific” than religious. Many religions, including Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even Christianity—have known scorn and persecution. Some, like the Shakers and the Millerites, died out, but others, including Mormons and Pentecostals, have elbowed their way into the crowded religious landscape of American society.

  The practice of disconnection, or shunning, is not unique to Scientology, nor is the longing for religious sanctuary. America itself was founded by true believers who separated themselves from their non-Puritan kinfolk by placing an ocean between them. New religious leaders continually appear, giving expression to unmet spiritual needs. There is a constant churning of spiritual movements and denominations all over the world, one that advances with freedom of expression. One must look at L. Ron Hubbard and the odyssey of his movement against this historical backdrop and the natural human yearning for transcendence and submission.

  In the late 1970s, I lived for several months in an Amish and Mennonite community in central Pennsylvania, researching my first book.1 Their movement had been nearly annihilated in Europe, but in the 1720s they began taking refuge in William Penn’s colony, the “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania. Amish life has remained essentially unchanged since then, a kind of museum of eighteenth-century farm life. The adherents live sequestered lives, out of the drift of popular culture, on a kind of religious atoll. I was moved by the beauty and simplicity of their lives. The Amish see the Earth as God’s garden, and their duty is to tend it. The environment they surround themselves with is filled with a sense of peace and a purposeful orderliness. Individuality is sanded down to the point that one’s opinions are as similar to another’s as the approved shape of a bonnet or the regulation beard. Because fashion and novelty are outlawed, one feels comfortably encased in a timeless, unchanging vacuum. The enforced conformity dims the noise of diversity and the anxiety of uncertainty; one feels closer to eternity. One is also aware of the electrified fence of orthodoxy that surrounds and protects this Edenic paradise, and the expulsion that awaits those who doubt or question. Still, there is a kind of quiet majesty in the Amish culture—not because of their rejection of modernity, but because of their principled non-violence and their adherence to a way of living that tempers their fanaticism. The Amish suffer none of the social opprobrium that Scientologists must endure; indeed, they are generally treated like beloved endangered animals, coddled by their neighbors and smiled upo
n by society. And yet they are highly schismatic, willing to break off all relations with their dearest relatives on what would seem to an outsider to be an inane point of doctrine or even the question of whether one can allow eaves on a house or pictures on a wall.

  As adorable as the Amish appear to strangers, such isolated and intellectually deprived religious communities can become self-destructive, especially when they revolve around the whims of a single tyrannical leader. David Koresh created such a community in the Branch Davidian compound that he established near Waco and aptly called Ranch Apocalypse. In 1993, I was asked to write about the siege that was then under way. I decided not to, because there were more reporters on the scene than Branch Davidians; however, I had been unsettled by the sight of the twenty-one children that Koresh sent out of the compound shortly before the fatal inferno. Those children left behind their parents and the only life they had known. They were ripped out of the community of faith, placed in government vans, and ushered through a curtain of federal agents and reporters onto the stage of an alien world and who knows what future. I thought there must be other children who had experienced similar traumas; what had become of them?

  There is a strangely contorted mound in a cemetery in Oakland, California, close by the naval hospital where Hubbard spent his last months in uniform. Under an undistinguished headstone rest four hundred bodies out of the more than nine hundred followers of Jim Jones who perished in Jonestown in 1978. The caskets had been stacked on top of each other on the side of a bulldozed hillside, then the earth was filled in, grass was planted, and the tragedy of Jonestown was buried in the national memory as one more inexplicable religious calamity. The members of the Peoples Temple, as Jones called his movement, had been drawn to his Pentecostal healing services, his social activism, and his racial egalitarianism. Charisma and madness were inextricably woven into the fabric of his personality, along with an insatiable sexual appetite that accompanied Jones’s terror of abandonment. In his search for a secure religious community, Jones had repeatedly uprooted his congregation. Finally, in May 1977, the entire movement disappeared, virtually overnight. Without warning, leaving jobs and homes and family members who were not a part of the Peoples Temple, they were spirited away to a jungle encampment in Guyana, South America, which Jones billed as a socialist paradise. There he began to school them in suicide.

  I learned that not everyone had died in Jonestown. Among the survivors were Jones’s three sons: Stephan, Tim, and Jim Junior. They had been away from the camp playing basketball against the Guyanese national team in the capital city of Georgetown. These haunted young men had never before told their stories. One of the privileges of being a journalist is to be trusted to hear such memories in all their emotional complexity. One night I went to dinner with Tim Jones and his wife, Lorna. Tim was physically powerful, able to press a hundred pounds with either arm, but he couldn’t fly on an airplane because of his panic attacks. He wanted his wife to come along because he had never given her a full account, and he wanted to be in a public place so he wouldn’t cry. It was Tim who had to return to Jonestown to identify the bodies of everyone he knew, including his parents, his siblings, and his own wife and children, his whole world. He was convinced that, if he had been there, he could have prevented the suicides. He told this story, bawling, pounding the table, as the waiter steered away and the other diners stared at their plates. Never have I felt so keenly the danger of new religious movements and the damage that is done to people who are lured into such groups, not out of weakness in character but through their desire to do good and live meaningful lives.

  SCIENTOLOGY WANTS TO BE understood as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment. It has, really, no grounding in science at all. It would be better understood as a philosophy of human nature; seen in that light, Hubbard’s thought could be compared with that of other moral philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, although no one has ever approached the sweep of Hubbard’s work. His often ingenious and minutely observed categories of behavior have been shadowed by the bogus elements of his personality and the absurdity that is interwoven with his bouts of brilliance, making it difficult for non-Scientologists to know what to make of it. Serious academic study of his writing has also been constrained by the vindictive reputation of the church.

  The field of psychotherapy is Scientology’s more respectable cousin, although it cannot honestly claim to be a science, either. Freud’s legacy is that of a free and open inquiry into the motivations of behavior. He also created postulates—such as the ego, the superego, and the id—that might not endure strict scientific testing, but do offer an approach to understanding the inner workings of the personality. Hubbard’s concept of the reactive and analytical minds attempts to do something similar. Jung’s exploration of archetypes, based on his psychological explorations, anticipates the evolution of Dianetics into Scientology—in other words, the drift from therapy to spiritualism.

  There is no point in questioning Scientology’s standing as a religion; in the United States, the only opinion that really counts is that of the IRS; moreover, people do believe in the principles of Scientology and live within a community of faith—what else is required to accept it as such? The stories that invite ridicule or disbelief, such as Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy, may be fanciful—or pure “space opera,” to use Hubbard’s term—but every religion features bizarre and uncanny elements. Just consider some of the obvious sources of Hubbard’s unique concoction—Buddhism, Hinduism, magic, General Semantics, and shamanism—that also provide esoteric categories to explain the ineffable mysteries of life and consciousness. One can find parallels in many faiths with the occult beliefs and practices of Scientology. The concept of expelling body thetans, for instance, is akin to casting out demons in the Christian tradition. But like every new religion, Scientology is handicapped by the frailties of its founder and the absence of venerable traditions that enshrine it in the culture.

  To an outsider who has struggled to understand the deep appeal of Scientology to its adherents, despite the flaws and contradictions of the religion that many of them reluctantly admit, perhaps the missing element is art. Older faiths have a body of literature, music, ceremony, and iconography that infuses the doctrinal aspects of the religion with mystery and importance. The sensual experience of being in a great cathedral or mosque may have nothing to do with “belief,” but it does draw people to the religion and rewards them emotionally. Scientology has built many impressive churches, but they are not redolent palaces of art. The aesthetic element in Scientology is Hubbard’s arresting voice as a writer. His authoritative but folksy tone and his impressionistic grasp of human nature have cast a spell over millions of readers. More important, however, is the nature of his project: the self-portrait of the inside of his mind. It is perhaps impossible to reduce his mentality to a psychiatric diagnosis, in part because his own rendering of it is so complex, intricate, and comprehensive that one can only stand back and appreciate the qualities that drove him, hour after hour, year after year, to try to get it all on the page—his insight, his daring, his narcissism, his defiance, his relentlessness, his imagination—these are the traits of an artist. It is one reason that Hubbard identified with the creative community and many of them with him.

  Scientology orients itself toward celebrity, and by doing so, the church awards famousness a spiritual value. People who seek fame—especially in the entertainment industry—naturally gravitate to Hollywood, where Scientology is waiting for them, validating their ambition and promising recruits a way in. The church has pursued a marketing strategy that relies heavily on endorsements by celebrities, who actively promote the religion. They speak of the positive role that Scientology has played in their lives. When David Miscavige awarded Tom Cruise the Freedom Medal of Valor in 2004, he praised his effectiveness as a spokesperson, saying, “Across ninety nations, five thousand people hear his word of Scientology every hour.” It is difficult to know how such a figure wa
s derived, but according to Miscavige, “Every minute of every hour someone reaches for LRH technology, simply because they know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.” Probably no other member of the church derives as much material benefit from his religion as Cruise does, and consequently none bears a greater moral responsibility for the indignities inflicted on members of the Sea Org, sometimes directly because of his membership. Excepting Paul Haggis, no prominent Hollywood Scientologist has spoken out publicly against the widespread allegations of physical abuse, involuntary confinement, and forced servitude within the church’s clergy, although many such figures have quietly walked away.

  Since leaving Scientology, Haggis has been in therapy, which he has found helpful. He’s learned how much he blames others for his problems, especially those closest to him. “I really wish I had found a good therapist when I was twenty-one,” he said. In Scientology, he always felt a subtle pressure to impress his auditor and then write up a glowing success story. Now, he said, “I’m not fooling myself that I’m a better man than I am.”

  The same month that Haggis’s resignation from the church had become public, United Artists, Tom Cruise’s studio, terminated Haggis’s development deal. I asked if the break had anything to do with his resignation. Haggis thought for a moment, then said, “You don’t do something that obvious—it’d be a bad PR move.” He added, “They’d run out of money, so we all knew we were being kicked out.”

  Recently, he and Deborah decided to divorce. They have moved to the same neighborhood in New York, so that they can share custody of their son. Deborah has also left the church. Both say that the decision to end their marriage has nothing to do with their renunciation of Scientology.

  On November 9, 2010, The Next Three Days premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre, in Manhattan. Movie stars lined the red carpet as photographers fired away. Jason Beghe was there, and he told me that he had taken in Daniel Montalvo, the young man who lost his finger in the church book-publishing plant. Montalvo had recently blown from the Sea Org. He was nineteen years old. “He’s never seen television,” the actor marveled. “He doesn’t even know who Robert Redford is.” Nazanin Boniadi, who has a small part in the movie, was also there; Haggis had given her the role after learning what had happened to her after the church had engineered her match with Tom Cruise. “Naz’s story was one of those that made me realize I had been lied to for a long time, that I had to leave and do so loudly,” Haggis later confided.