I’ve just read 2 books: Beyond Belief; My Secret Life Inside
Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, by the current leader’s niece, Jenna
Miscavige Hill (co-written with Lisa Pulitzer); and Going Clear; Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by
Pulitzer Prize winning author, Lawrence Wright. I bought both these books after
reading reviews in Rupert Murdoch’s paper, The
Weekend Australian Review (Rupert’s Australian publications are a lot more
left-leaning than his American counterparts I suspect). Previously, I had just
finished reading a Scottish crime thriller, but both of these books were a lot
harder to put down.
I should disclose that I had my own brush
with Scientology a few years before Jenna Miscavige Hill was born, when I was
around 30 (sometime between 1978 and 1983) when I was solicited in a Sydney
street, along with a friend, and invited to take part in a ‘session’, but I’ll
talk about that later.
There are many different ways one can
define religion – to me it’s part of a personal internal journey: very
introspective, self-examining and impossible to share. But the public face of
religion(s) is often something different: judgemental, proselytising and mentally
claustrophobic. I suspect that many followers of Scientology see themselves in
the first category, but the institution itself falls squarely into the second.
Religion, in the context of historical
Western civilization, has been predominantly about mind control, and it was
largely successful up until the Enlightenment, when novels, new scientific
discoveries (in all fields) and Western philosophy all made inroads into the
educated Western psyche. In the 20th Century, mind control appeared
to be the principal political tool of totalitarian regimes like the former USSR
and China. It’s not something one would expect to find in an American
institution, especially one tied to the celebration of celebrity, but that’s
exactly what Scientology is if one believes the accounts revealed in these 2
books.
I defy any normal sane person to read
Micavige Hill’s book without getting angry. I imagine a lot of high-level
people with the Scientology Church would also get angry, but for different
reasons. Of all the events that she recounts from when she signed her ‘billion
year contract’ at the age of 7 (she tried to run away a year later) to when she
finally left under enormous duress as a married adult (after threatening to
jump off a 5 storey ledge), what made me most angry was something that was at
once petty and unbelievably controlling and intrusive. As a teen she received
letters sent by her estranged mother, but she could read them only after they
were already opened and she was never allowed to keep them. At the age of 10
she had to fill out a form so she could visit her parents for her 10th
birthday. Yet this is nothing compared to the alleged abuses by the
organisation that Lawrence Wright documents in his carefully researched and
fully referenced book.
Stalin was infamous for creating a culture
where people reported on their neighbours thus creating fear and mistrust in
everyday interactions. China had a similar policy under Mao and during the
cultural revolution families were split up and sent to opposite sides of the
country. According to Miscavige Hill, both these policies were adopted by
Scientology, as it happened to her own family. According to her, all her
friends were estranged from her, especially in her teens, and the Church even
attempted to separate her from her recently wedded husband (also a ‘Sea Org’
member in the organisation) which culminated in her threatening suicide and
eventually leaving, totally disillusioned with her lifetime religion but with
her marriage intact.
The Catholic Church has the confessional
and Scientology has ‘auditing’ and ‘sec-check’, both using their famous
‘E-Meter’. In the comprehensive glossary at the back of her book, Miscavige
Hill defines ‘Sec Check’ as “A confessional given while on the E-Meter.
Sec-checks can take anywhere from three weeks to a year or longer.” But unlike
the Catholic Church confessions, the Scientology equivalent are not
confidential, according to those who claim to have been blackmailed by them,
but are according to the Church. According to Scientology’s doctrine the
e-meter never lies so people being audited, including Miscavige Hill, quickly
learn to confess what the auditor wants to hear so they can get it over with.
Later, if they try and leave the Church, as she did, these confessions can be
held over them to stop them publicly denouncing the Church. Some of these
confessions are of a highly personal nature, like the intimate details of
sexual relations.
Naturally, the Church denies any of these
allegations, along with the practice of ‘disconnection’ (denying access to family
members) and child labour, which Miscavige Hill experienced first hand from the
age of 7. Allegations of basic human rights abuse are predominant in both
books, yet all legal proceedings against the Church seem to eventually be settled
out of court (according to Wright’s account).
Miscavige Hill also provides insight into
the conditioning of both receiving and giving instructions without question. In
principle, this is one of the biggest philosophical issues I have with a number
of religious educations, including my own, whereby one doesn’t question or one
is discouraged from thinking for oneself. Part of an education I believe,
should be the opposite: to be exposed to a variety of cultural ideas and to be
encouraged to argue and discuss beliefs. Teenagers are at an age where they
tend to do this anyway, as I did. Reading Albert Camus at the age of 16 was
life-changing at an intellectual level, and deepened my doubts about the
religion I had grown up with.
Wright’s book is a good complementary read
to Jenna’s autobiography, as he provides a history lesson of the whole Church,
albeit not one the Church would endorse. The book contains a number of
footnotes that declare the Church’s outright disagreement on a number of issues
as well as numerous disclaimers from Tom Cruise’s attorney, Bertram Fields.
Wright is an acclaimed author, with a number of awards to his name, and is
staff writer for The New Yorker. His
book arose from a feature story he wrote on Paul Haggis (a disillusioned Scientologist)
for that magazine. The book starts and ends with Haggis, but, in between,
attempts to cover every aspect of the religion, including a biography of its founder,
testimony from many of its disaffected members, and its connection to Hollywood
celebrity.
Paul Haggis is a successful screenwriter
and his credits include some of the best films I’ve seen: Million Dollar Baby, The
Valley of Elah (which he also directed) and Casino Royale. His career-changing movie was Crash, which I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen. I remember when it
came out, it was on my must-see list, but it never happened. He also wrote Flags of Our Fathers, which Eastwood
directed following Million Dollar Baby.
In The Valley of Elah is a little known movie starring Charlize Theron
(I believe it’s one of her best roles) and Tommy Lee Jones; part crime
thriller, part commentary on the Iraq war. I saw it around midnight in a
Melbourne arthouse cinema, such was its low profile. He also made The Next 3 Days with Russell Crowe,
which I haven’t seen. We never know screenwriters - they are at the bottom of
the pecking order in Hollywood - unless they are writer-directors (like Woody
Allen or Oliver Stone) so no one would say I’d go and see a Paul Haggis film,
but I would.
Haggis campaigned against Proposition 8 in
California (a bill to ban same-sex marriage) which I’ve written about myself on
this blog. His disillusionment with Scientology was complete when he failed to
get the Church to support him.
Scientology promotes itself as a science,
and, in particular, is strongly opposed to psychiatry. But at best, it’s a
pseudo-science; a combination of Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist
philosophy. The e-meter auditing, which supposedly gives it its scientific
credibility has never been accepted by mainstream science or psychology. L Ron
Hubbard, before he started Dianetics, which became Scientology, was a highly
prolific pulp sci-fi writer and best friend of Robert Heinlein (a famous sci-fi
author with right-wing politics). But while Hubbard lived and wrote during the
so-called ‘golden era’ of science fiction, his name is never mentioned in the
same company as those who are lauded today, like Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur
C Clarke or Ursula Le Guin (still alive, so possibly later) and I’ve never seen
or heard his name referenced at any Sci-Fi convention I’ve attended.
When it comes to psychological manipulation,
Scientology excels. In particular, the so-called ‘Bridge to Total Freedom’, aka
‘the Bridge’, which is effectively a sequence of stages of spiritual
enlightenment one achieves as a result of courses and ‘sessions’ one completes.
At the end of this process, usually taking many years and costing thousands of
dollars, one is given access to ‘OT III’ material, the end of the journey and
one’s ultimate spiritual reward. According to Miscavige Hill, people ‘on the
Bridge’ are told that given early access to OT III would cause serious injury,
either mental or physical, such is its power. Now, common sense says that
information alone is unlikely to have such a consequence, nevertheless this was
both the carrot, and indirectly, the stick, for staying with the course. As
revealed, in both of these books, OT III is in fact a fantastical science
fiction story that beggars credulity on any scale. It’s effectively an origins
story that could find a place in Ridley Scott’s movie, Prometheus, which is better rendered, one has to say, in its proper
context of fiction.
In my introduction, I mentioned my own very
brief experience with Scientology in Sydney (either late 1970s or early 1980s)
when I was interviewed and offered an ‘e-meter’ session. Something about the whole
setup made me more than suspicious, even angry, and I rebelled. What I saw were
basically insecure people ‘auditing’ other insecure people and it made me
angry. I had grown up in a church (though my parents were not the least religious) where once we were called to stand up and declare ourselves
to Jesus in writing. I remember refusing as a teenager, mainly because I knew my father
opposed it, but also the sense of being pressured against my will. This feeling returned when I was in the Scientology centre in
Sydney, or whatever it was called. Interestingly, they took me upstairs where I
met some people about my own age who were very laid back and surrounded by a
library of philosophical books. I said I would prefer to explore their ideas at
my own leisure and so I bought a copy of Dianetics and had nothing more to do
with them. I never read Dianetics, though I’ve read the complete works of Jung
and books by Daisetz Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, so I was very open to religious
and philosophical ideas at that age. Likewise, I’ve never read any of Hubbard’s
fiction, though I once tried and gave up.
