Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

I particularly recall the Dunkin’ Donuts sign over Davis’s shoulder as he began his presentation. First, he ruled out any discussion of the church’s confidential scripture. He compared it to “shoving an image of the Prophet Mohammed in the face of a Muslim” or “insisting that a Jew eat pork.” He then attacked the credibility of some of the sources for the piece, whom he called “bitter apostates.” “They are unreliable,” he said. “They make up stories.”

He passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong “sitting naked” with a giant globe in his lap. “This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money,” Davis said. “He’s not a very sane person.”

If these people were so reprehensible, I asked, how had they all arrived at such elevated positions in the church? “They weren’t like that when they were in those positions,” Davis replied. The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology’s ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested that Scientology didn’t seem to be effective if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, drunks, and embezzlers. “This is a religion,” Davis responded movingly. “It aspires to greatness, hope, humanity, spiritual freedom. To be greater than we are. To rise above our craven, humanoid instincts.” Scientology doesn’t pretend to be perfect, he said, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates.

Davis thought I was making too much out of the issue of Suppressive Persons in the piece. “Do you know how many people, grand total, there are in the world who have been declared Suppressive?” he asked rhetorically. “A couple of thousand over the years. At most.” He said that in fact many had been restored to good standing. “Yet again, you’re falling into the trap of defining our religion by the people who’ve left.” Hubbard had said that only 2.5 percent of the human population were Suppressive, but one of the problems I faced in writing about Scientology, especially its early days, is that the preponderance of people who had been close to Hubbard had either quietly left the church or been declared Suppressive.

He explained that the cornerstone of the faith was the writings of the founder. “Mr. Hubbard’s material must be and is applied precisely as written,” Davis said. “It’s never altered. It’s never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology.” But hadn’t certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard’s books been changed after his death? Davis agreed that was so, but he maintained that “the current editions are one-hundred-percent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.

“No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied. “The point is, it wasn’t Mr. Hubbard.”

“Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked, trying to be clear. “Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said. “And by the way,” he added, referring to Quentin Hubbard, “his son’s not gay.”

“Or what kind of man, like L. Ron Hubbard, would spend an entire lifetime researching, putting together the kind of material, suffer all the trials and tribulations and go through all the things he went through in his life … or even with the things that we, as individuals, have to go through, as part of the new religion? Work seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, fourteen-, fifteen-, eighteen-hour days sometimes, out of sheer total complete dedication to our faith. And do it all, for what? As some sort of sham? Just to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?” He concluded, “It’s ridiculous. Nobody works that hard to cheat people. Nobody gets that little sleep to screw over their fellow man.”

Hmmm. Misdirection

The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds.

In my meeting with Isham, he had asserted that Scientology is not a “faith-based religion.” Leaving aside the question of what religion is without faith, I pointed out that in Scientology’s upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham responded that he wasn’t going to discuss the details of OT III, nor had I asked him to. “You understand the only reason it’s confidential is because in the wrong hands it can hurt people,” he told me, evidently referring to Hubbard’s warning that those who are not spiritually prepared to receive the information would die, of pneumonia.

The reader can compare the two Notices of Separation by going to the New Yorker’s website: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/l-ron-hubbard-leaves-the-navy.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

Amish life has remained essentially unchanged since then, a kind of museum of eighteenth-century farm life.

No, they do change.

The enforced conformity dims the noise of diversity and the anxiety of uncertainty; one feels closer to eternity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARTY RATHBUN DIVIDES the people who leave Scientology into three camps. There are those who reject the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard entirely, such as Paul Haggis; and those who still believe entirely but think that the church under David Miscavige has taken Scientology away from the original, true teachings of the founder. There is a third category, which he has been struggling to define, that includes those people who are willing neither to swallow all the dogma nor to throw away the insights they gained from their experience.

Six weeks before the leader died, Pfauth hesitantly related, Hubbard called him into the bus. He was sitting in his little breakfast nook. “He told me he was dropping his body. He named a specific star he was going to circle. That rehabs a being. He told me he’d failed, he’s leaving,” Pfauth said. “He said he’s not coming back here to Earth. He didn’t know where he’d wind up.” “How’d you react?” I asked. “I got good and pissy-ass drunk,” Pfauth said.

Pfauth’s eyes searched the ceiling as if he were looking for divine help. He explained that Hubbard was having trouble getting rid of a body thetan. “He wanted me to build a machine that would up the voltage and basically blow the thetan away. You can’t kill a thetan but just get him out of there. And also kill the body.” “So it was a suicide machine?” “Basically.”