Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief. By Lawrence Wright.Knopf; 448 pages; $28.95. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology. By John Sweeney.Silvertail Books; 336 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
WHAT draws people to Scientology? Outsiders are as baffled as followers are devoted. According to the church, L. Ron Hubbard, a navy hero of the second world war, rid the world of the need for psychiatry with concepts first shared in his bestselling 1950 book “Dianetics”. The religion claims to cure physical and mental illness through a process called an “audit”, whereby recipients answer questions while being hooked to a device called an “E-meter”. The church says practitioners are happy and peaceful; detractors are few and self-aggrandising. Tom Cruise, perhaps the world’s most famous Scientologist, says of David Miscavige, the church’s current leader, “I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more tolerant, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from [L. Ron Hubbard]. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders. I’ve met them all.”
Yet disaffected Scientologists, cult-awareness groups and now Lawrence Wright paint a different picture. Mr Wright, a writer for the New Yorker, won a Pulitzer prize for “The Looming Tower”, his book about the genesis of the September 11th 2001 attacks. In “Going Clear” Mr Wright scours government and legal archives and interviews dozens of former Scientologists, including high-ranking defectors, to tell another tale about the dark side of religious fanaticism.
Much of the attention paid to Scientology concentrates on its once-secret cosmology, exposed in a 1980s court case. Hubbard wrote that humans are really “thetans”, immortal souls from a distant Galactic Confederation, who were exiled to Earth by an evil overlord named Xenu. (Hubbard was also a prolific writer of pulp science fiction.) This stuff is easy to mock.
But Mr Wright’s narrative is nothing to laugh at. The church is secretive, prickly and litigious. Church leaders would not be interviewed; officials agreed merely to fact-check queries. Practising Scientologists largely stayed mum, though Terry Jastrow, a Hollywood producer, tells Mr Wright: “Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organisation ever.” As for former followers, many live in fear that their audit files will be used to smear them. They tell stories of hacked credit-card accounts, followed cars and visits from church leaders who try to lure them back. Many do indeed return.
Scientology seems expertly designed to lock people in, according to Mr Wright. Adherents pay piles of money to ascend the ranks and, they are told, gain incredible powers. They must cut all ties with “Suppressive Persons”—that is, those who oppose their faith. It is a sin to practise Scientology outside official channels and seeking psychotherapy is forbidden. Disloyal staff can be confined to the “Rehabilitation Project Force” (RPF), a church institution sealed from outside contact, where they wear filthy rags, eat table scraps and do hard labour for months or even years.
Mr Wright’s portrait of the beloved founder of Scientology is hardly flattering. Hubbard drank heavily, dabbled in drugs (“pinks and greys”, he once wrote) and grew increasingly paranoid. He used audits to ferret out internal critics and believed an international cabal of psychiatrists was hounding the church. He could be abusive; he hit a former wife in the face with a pistol for smiling in her sleep and he was estranged from his eldest son. Another son died in an apparent suicide. (He was probably gay; early Scientology was viciously homophobic.) But Hubbard was also charismatic enough to cultivate a devoted following. He remains revered by a church that expects him to return after “dropping his body” (followers do not say he died) in 1986.
What Mr Miscavige, his successor, lacks in charm, he makes up for in brute devotion, according to Mr Wright. The author spoke to 11 former members of the church who claim that the short but muscular Mr Miscavige physically beat them. Three confess to emulating him by beating others in turn. Given the church’s penchant for taking critics to court, Mr Wright dutifully punctuates each lurid story of abuse with the church’s side. For example: “He tried to turn away from the next blow, but Miscavige grabbed his neck and shoved him into the floor, pummeling and kicking him,” has the footnote, “the church denies that Miscavige has ever abused any members of the church.”
John Sweeney, a British journalist who has made two documentaries about Scientology for the BBC, is similarly cautious in his new book “Church of Fear”. More memoirish in tone, it gives a gripping account of his difficulties reporting on the religion as an outsider. He includes interviews with the religion’s critics, including defectors, and a penitent story about the moment when he notoriously lost his temper with church members, which became part of an official Scientology documentary about media persecution. Unfortunately the book is also full of clumsy lawyerly phrases that blunt the edge of his allegations—a sign of how the English legal system constrains reports on controversial and litigious people. (Mr Wright’s book is free of such handicaps and is not published in Britain.) It would be nice to know what Mr Sweeney was forced to leave out.
Mr Wright ensures that “Going Clear” is provocative, and not just to Scientologists. Who can say Scientology is not a “real” religion? The author compares L. Ron Hubbard to Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism. Smith, Mr Wright says, was a “liar”, claiming certain Egyptian papyri to be a story about Abraham before Egyptologists later proved otherwise. But today Mormonism is respectable; Mitt Romney, a devotee, nearly became America’s president. The alleged excesses of some of Scientology’s followers are not so unusual in a young, beleaguered faith.
Scientologists relish the comparison to traditional religions. Besieged by critics and sceptics, they often compare their hardships with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. But “real” or not, this faith has a dark streak, as chronicled by Mr Wright in this compelling and disturbing history.