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

by Lawrence Wright

“At OT III, you find out you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent,” he later recalled. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.”

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.

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 upon 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.

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.

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.