- Wright, Lawrence.
Going Clear.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-307-70066-7.
-
In 2007 the author won a Pulitzer Prize for
The Looming Tower,
an exploration of the origins, structure, and activities
of Al-Qaeda. In the present book, he dares to take on
a really dangerous organisation: the
Church
of Scientology. Wright delves into the tangled history
of its founder,
L. Ron Hubbard,
and the origins of the church, which, despite having occurred within
the lifetimes of many readers of the book, seem cloaked in
as much fog, misdirection, and conflicting claims as those of
religions millennia older. One thing which is beyond dispute
to anybody willing to examine the objective record is that
Hubbard was a masterful confidence man—perhaps approaching
the magnitude of those who founded other religions. This was
apparent well before he invented Dianetics and Scientology:
he moved into Jack Parsons' house in Pasadena,
California, and before long took off with Parsons' girlfriend
and most of his savings with a scheme to buy yachts in Florida
and sell them in California. Hubbard's military career in
World War II is also murky in the extreme: military records
document that he was never in combat, but he spun a legend
about chasing Japanese submarines off the coast of Oregon,
being injured, and healing himself through mental powers.
One thing which nobody disputes is that Hubbard was a tremendously
talented and productive writer of science fiction. He was
a friend of Robert A. Heinlein and a regular correspondent
with John W. Campbell. You get the sense in this book that
Hubbard didn't really draw a hard and fast line between the
fanciful stories he wrote for a living and the actual life
he lived—his own biography and persona seem to have
been as much a fabrication as the tales he sold to the pulp
magazines.
On several occasions Hubbard remarked that the way to make a
big pile of money was to start a religion. (It is often said
that he made a bar bet with Heinlein that he could start a
religion, but the author's research concludes this story
is apocryphal. However, Wright identifies nine witnesses who
report hearing Hubbard making such a remark in 1948 or 1949.)
After his best-selling book
Dianetics landed him
in trouble with the scientific and mental health establishment,
he decided to take his own advice and re-instantiate it
as a religion. In 1954, Scientology was born.
Almost immediately, events took a turn into high weirdness. While
the new religion attracted adherents, especially among wealthy
celebrities in Hollywood, it also was the object of ridicule and
what Scientologists viewed as persecution. Hubbard and his
entourage took to the sea in a fleet of ships, attended by
a “clergy” called Sea Org, who signed billion
year contracts of allegiance to Scientology and were paid
monastic subsistence salaries and cut off from contact with
the world outside Scientology. Hubbard continued to produce
higher and higher levels of revelation for his followers, into
which they could be initiated for a formidable fee.
Some of this material was sufficiently bizarre
(for example, the
Xenu [or Xemu]
story, revealed in 1967) that adherents to Scientology
walked away, feeling that their religion had become
bad space opera. That was the first reaction of
Paul Haggis,
whose 34 years in Scientology are the foundation of this
narrative. And yet Haggis did not leave Scientology after
his encounter with Xenu: he eventually left the church in 2009 after
it endorsed a California initiative prohibiting same-sex
marriage.
There is so much of the bizarre in this narrative that you
might be inclined to dismiss it as tabloid journalism, had not
the author provided a wealth of source citations, many drawn
from sworn testimony in court and evidence in legal
proceedings. In the Kindle edition,
these links are live and can be clicked to view the
source documents.
From children locked in chain lockers on board ship; to adults
placed in detention in “the hole”; to special minders
assigned to fulfill every whim of celebrity congregants such as
John Travolta and Tom Cruise; to blackmail,
lawfare,
surveillance,
and harassment of dissidents and apostates; to going head-to-head
with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and winning a
tax exemption from them in 1993, this narrative reads like a hybrid
of the science fiction and thriller genres, and yet it is all
thoroughly documented. In end-note after end-note, the author
observes that the church denies what is asserted, then provides
multiple source citations to the contrary.
This is a remarkably even-handed treatment of a religion that
many deem worthy only of ridicule. Yes, Scientologists believe
some pretty weird things, but then so do adherents of
“mainstream” religions. Scientology's sacred texts
seem a lot like science fiction, but so do those of the Mormons,
a new religion born in America a century earlier, subjected
to the same ridicule and persecution the Scientologists complain
of, and now sufficiently mainstream that a member could run
for president of the U.S. without his religion being an
issue in the campaign. And while Scientology seems like a mix
of science fiction and pseudo-science, some very successful
people have found it an anchor for their lives and attribute
part of their achievement to it. The abuses documented here
are horrific, and the apparent callousness with which money is
extracted from believers to line the pockets of those at the
top is stunning, but then one can say as much of a number of
religions considered thoroughly respectable by many people.
I'm a great believer in the market. If Scientology didn't provide
something of value to those who believe in it, they wouldn't
have filled its coffers with more than a billion dollars (actually,
nobody knows the numbers: Scientology's finances are as obscure as
its doctrines). I'll bet the people running it will push the
off-putting weird stuff into the past, shed the abusive parts, and
morph into a religion people perceive as no more weird than the
Mormons. Just as being a pillar of the LDS church provides a leg
up in some communities in the Western U.S., Scientology will provide
an entrée into the world of Hollywood and media. And maybe
in 2112 a Scientologist will run for president of the Reunited
States and nobody will make an issue of it.
February 2013 