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

by Lawrence Wright

The IRS began an audit that would strip the church of its religious tax exemption in 1967. At the same time, an Australian government board of inquiry produced a sweeping report that was passionate in its condemnation. “There are some features of Scientology which are so ludicrous that there may be a tendency to regard Scientology as silly and its practitioners as harmless cranks. To do so would be gravely to misunderstand the tenor of the Board’s conclusions,” the report began, then emphatically added: “Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and often mentally ill.” The report admitted that there were “transient gains” realized by some of the religion’s adherents, but said that the organization plays on those gains in order to produce “a subservience amounting almost to mental enslavement.” As for Hubbard himself, the board described him as “a man of restless energy” who is “constantly experimenting and speculating, and equally constantly he confuses the two.” “Some of his claims are that … he has been up in the Van Allen Belt, that he has been on the planet Venus where he inspected an implant station, and that he has been to Heaven. He even recommends a protein formula for feeding non-breast fed babies—a mixture of boiled barley and corn syrup—stating that he ‘picked it up in Roman days.’ ” Although Hubbard has “an insensate hostility” to psychiatrists and ...