Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
By Jenna Miscavige Hill, with Lisa Pulitzer
HarperCollins, 404pp, $24.99
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
By Lawrence Wright
Bantam Press, 400pp, $60 (HB)
PAUL Thomas Anderson's recent film The Master is transparently a critical portrait of the early years of the Church of Scientology under its strange founder Lafayette Ron Hubbard. It is 1950, the year Hubbard published his signature book Dianetics. Philip Seymour Hoffmann plays Lancaster Dodd, who sails around in a boat called Aletheia, practising a new form of talking cure called "processing" and recruiting volunteers on billion-year contracts, while bullying and abusing critics or questioners.
Hubbard sailed around in a ship called Apollo and did all these things. He called his talking cure “auditing”. Anderson's use of the name Aletheia, a Greek word meaning “truth'' or “disclosure” is presumably ironical. It was the word Heidegger used in Being and Time (1927) to define what he meant by “truth”.
Does Anderson mean us to understand that his film discloses the truth about Scientology? Or merely that the charlatan Dodd has the vast pretentiousness to proclaim, like many another religious figure or snake oil salesman, that he knows the truth about life, the universe and everything?
If you know only a little about Scientology, Beyond Belief will be an eye-opener. It is the memoir of Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of David Miscavige, the maestro who usurped power over the Church of Scientology after Hubbard died (or “dropped his body”, as Scientologists put it), in January 1986.
The manner in which Miscavige climbed through the ranks of Scientology and took over in the late 1980s bears an eerie similarity to the way in which Stalin rose as Lenin's lieutenant and then took over after Lenin had a fatal stroke and died. Hubbard also died of a stroke. Miscavige ousted Hubbard's presumptive heir, purged his lieutenants and declared his opponents Suppressive Persons (think "counter-revolutionaries").
Jenna Miscavige was in infancy at that point. Born into a family of Scientologists in 1984, she grew up indoctrinated into and totally controlled by the cult. She remained in its thrall until a few years ago. She finally fled from it and made common cause with many others who had done so. She now seeks to expose it for what she claims it is: in the words of Cynthia Kisser of the defunct Cult Awareness Network, “the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult” in modern America.
I write of the Cult Awareness Network being “defunct” because in the early 1990s a barrage of law suits drove it into bankruptcy. David Miscavige's Church of Scientology led the charge. The network's name and assets were then bought by a Scientologist and used to issue a brochure praising Scientology for its “good work”.
Having produced The Master, thinly fictionalising Hubbard, Hollywood should now make a major motion picture of Jenna Miscavige's story, because it is astounding. Again and again, reading it closely, I found myself appalled and fascinated by her first-hand account of the way Scientology entraps and manipulates its adherents. Also how very difficult they find it to escape the church's coercive machinations and the totalistic belief system it instils in them.
Exhibiting remarkable resilience and independence of moral judgment, the 18-year-old old Jenna finally rebelled against all that she claims to have experienced: mindless and unjust punishment, sleep deprivation, hard labour, isolation from her family, invasive interrogation and denial of the rights to date, marry or reproduce.
Only after she had escaped the clutches of Scientology did she learn to associate with people altogether independent of the organization, whom Scientologists call “Wogs”. “Through their eyes,” she writes, “I slowly learned how weird my upbringing had been.” She gained “an outsider's perspective on the Church” and came to see doctrines she had been taught all her life as “nothing but a complete suppression of free thought”.
She claims that her own experience was part of a systemic pattern. “To me,” she writes, “the Church is a dangerous organization whose beliefs allow it to commit crimes against humanity and violate basic human rights. It remains a mystery to me how, in our current society, this can go unchecked.” Once this became clear to her, she declares, “I felt an overwhelming need to do something.” That was the origin of her book.
But moving and damning as Jenna Miscavige Hill's memoir is, Lawrence Wright's forensic investigation and clinical dissection of the cult, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, is vastly more informative. He tells from its beginnings the story of the crank Hubbard who, having been a prolific writer of science fiction, decided to declare his fantasies true, in the early 1950s and founded a “religion”.
Jenna Miscavige gets only a single, passing mention in Wright's book. He shows, in ways to which she was completely oblivious while a member of the organisation, that it was already out of control long before she was born. It should have been hounded out of existence in the 1970s, but it has exhibited a disturbing tenacity. Wright shows us how it has fought to survive.
In 1971, Paulette Cooper, a student of comparative religion at Harvard and the daughter of Jewish parents who had perished in the Holocaust, published a book called The Scandal of Scientology. According to Wright, Cooper’s book attacked the absurd cosmology of Hubbard and quoting refugees from Scientology who testified to having been “financially defrauded and then harassed when they tried to speak out.” Wright relates that Cooper received death threats, was stalked, had her phone tapped, was sued 19 times, was defamed and harassed. She was financially ruined, depressed and professionally destroyed. She came close to committing suicide.
Paranoid and convinced that governments were out to get him, Hubbard in 1973 created a scheme for infiltrating government agencies, in the US and other countries. He called it Operation Snow White. Evidence of the extent of it was unearthed in 1977, when the FBI raided key Scientology buildings, seizing tens of thousands of documents. They discovered that 5000 Scientology agents had penetrated 136 government institutions around the world as spies for Hubbard. They also found a file labelled Operation Freakout, detailing the plot to destroy the unfortunate and courageous Paulette Cooper.
Having consolidated his totalitarian grip on Scientology by 1990, David Miscavige launched an all-out campaign to buttress the cult's defences. He engaged the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton to help disseminate his propaganda. He launched a huge campaign against the Cult Awareness Network and against Time magazine, which had published a cover story denouncing Scientology as a “cult of greed and power”.
Above all, Miscavige went to war with the Internal Revenue Service and won a stunning and disturbing victory. Hubbard's organisation had lost tax exempt status in 1967, when declared a commercial enterprise, not a religion. But it still refused to pay taxes and the bill accumulated, Wright tells us, to $US1 billion. Had it been collected, it might have broken Scientology's back. But this didn't happen.
Instead, Miscavige launched 200 law suits against the IRS in the name of Scientology's subsidiaries and another 2,300 in the name of individual Scientologists. He overwhelmed the IRS and it capitulated; settling for a mere $12.5 million in back taxes and the cessation of hostile litigation. In exchange, it conceded tax exempt status to all Scientology's subsidiary organisations. This gave the Church of Scientology financial advantages that Wright describes as perhaps “unique among religions in the United States”. Miscavige declared to his core staff, “The future is ours!”
Reading these books, I was reminded of the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram half a century ago, showing the disturbing extent to which many people will obey those they perceive to be authority figures. I was reminded of disturbing scenes of human submission to abuse in Nazi concentration camps recounted by Bruno Bettelheim in The Informed Heart. The problem of Scientology, I think, demonstrates that we need to rethink the rules governing religious freedom, in the name of basic civic order and human rights.
What Scientology has done in secrecy for decades is disturbingly comparable to what totalitarian regimes have done on a far larger and more violent scale. Its secret and fortified compound Gold Base in California embodies this disturbing character. Its own former head of security, Gary Morehead, told Wright that about a hundred people try to “escape” each year. Fortunately, as Jenna found, Scientology exists within a wider, freer society in which there are sources of refuge and redress. These two bracing books are proof of that. Read them and join the awareness network.