Inside Scientology (55 page)

As it turned out, her parents had attended her wedding after all. Afterward, the family agreed to come to a sort of détente. Kendra would stop publicly voicing her opposition to church policies, which would make it easier for her parents to keep her in their lives. Both parties would maintain their own views, but they simply wouldn't talk about them. "I guess it's like don't ask, don't tell," Kendra told me. "We basically agreed that the only way it would work out was if we totally kept Scientology out of each other's lives."

If the Church of Scientology—not Scientology as a philosophy, but the church as an institution—is to survive, it will have to find a way to reconcile itself, and its policies, with people like Kendra Wiseman. Reform is not an idea that sat well with L. Ron Hubbard, who preached that Scientology was the only way out of the maze of the human condition, and, moreover, that its message and practices could be delivered only through Scientology organizations or individuals controlled by them and licensed to provide "100 percent standard tech." But reform may nonetheless be what is needed. "LRH's real mission was to teach people to look for themselves: into themselves, into others, into the world around them," said Dan Koon, who is one of a number of former Scientologists who believe that Hubbard's original philosophy differed vastly from the policies and ideology imposed by his organization. Because of this, Koon estimated that there may now be more people practicing Scientology outside the organized church than inside.

Those people have had to make a choice: should they speak out and be declared heretics or keep silent and maintain their ties with family and friends? It is a bitter and, for many, an impossible choice, and because of it, the Church of Scientology, controlled as it is by authoritarian and image-conscious leaders who appear to have invested far more in the look than the substance of the faith, may not, as its detractors predict, survive as it exists today.

I have no doubt, however, that for as long as people yearn for the answers to eternal questions, as well as to their own immediate problems, some vestiges of L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy will remain, provided the movement's second and third generations lead the way.

Natalie Walet, for instance, has stayed true to Scientology, and to the organized church. She is also applying to law schools. On her list: Stanford, Georgetown, Columbia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan. While she waits, she is living in Tampa, working as a waitress, and taking Scientology courses at Flag. "I go there every week," she says. "I love it there."

Which is not to say that Natalie is unaware of Scientology's problems. Like many young Scientologists, she has broken church rules and gone on the Internet to read the OT levels and peruse critical websites. Over the past years, she has read all the stories published in the
St. Petersburg Times
detailing the accounts of human rights violations at the Int Base. "I don't doubt that some of those things happened," she said. "I'm well aware of what it's like inside the Sea Org, and there is definitely truth to every bit of bad PR you hear."

On the other hand, she wondered, why did officials let this happen? "All the people who've come out and told the press these things were in a position to do something about it—to change things. Instead, they stood there and watched. Why? It's so beyond what the church—any church—should stand for."

She rejected the defectors' claims that the environment was too corrosive—too "cult-like," in the words of men like Jeff Hawkins and Tom De Vocht—for them to do anything more than take the abuse, and run. "If you know there's a problem, it's your responsibility to fix it—that's what LRH says," she noted. "When you look at the doctrine, it's not all that free-thinking, but the auditing is all
about
freedom of thought. If orders are coming down that you know are wrong, it's your responsibility as a Scientologist to handle them. So it really floors me that people saw DM doing this,
if
he did this, and didn't do anything. Shame on them for not fixing it."

It is a fairly revolutionary thing to say: to shame not only the defectors, but the loyalists; to admit that the overwhelmingly negative reports about Scientology are not all "lies," as Scientology has claimed; to muse on whether or not David Miscavige is guilty—and yet, to still love the church. "I don't look at COB and think he's my Jesus Christ and can never be wrong," said Natalie—though if one were to suggest that LRH did the things Miscavige is accused of doing, she added, "I'd think you're on drugs because I can't imagine a man who was as brilliant as he was, and who wrote what he did, being like that."

Hubbard, by all accounts,
was
to a degree "like that." But twenty-five years since his death, which is two years longer than Natalie has been alive, does it matter? Scientology, like all religions, accepts even grave imperfection as part of the human condition and, like all religions, seeks to transcend it. In Judaism, this is called justice. In Buddhism, it is called seeking nirvana. In Christianity, it is absolution from sin.

In Scientology, the route from flawed to faultless is called "going Clear." Natalie hasn't reached that point as yet; she hopes to. She also hopes the same for the church. "I am a Scientologist because when I read LRH, it helps me. So when I hear these terrible things, it makes me want to stand behind my organization that much more and change it. And I know so many young Scientologists who feel the same way. We are the going to be the new face of Scientology."

Some of these people, she noted, have gone into politics, or medicine. Natalie hopes to become a judge. There are some who've become management consultants. Others have joined the Sea Organization. "There are as many different kinds of Scientologist as there are different kinds of people," she said. "But you can only change things by changing the way people think or operate; by educating them." That, she believes, is something LRH would highly approve of. "I want to make sure Scientology is the best it can be, and that
we're
the organization
we
want it to be. It's my personal responsibility."

Secrecy and control are hallmarks of the Church of Scientology. Writing a book about such an organization thus poses myriad challenges to a journalist trying to construct a truthful narrative. Though the early history of Scientology has been documented, virtually no credible, unbiased books, scholarly or popular, have been written about the past twenty-five years of church history. Also, very few documents pertaining to this period have surfaced publicly because David Miscavige's orders and directives are almost always kept confidential, circulated only to officials at the International Base.

Sourcing for a book like this is particularly difficult, first, because the Church of Scientology harasses critics and defectors who speak about it, and second, because Scientology has a highly effective self-censorship mechanism, in that members must confess their transgressions prior to auditing. As journalists are, by L. Ron Hubbard's definition, "potential trouble sources," unauthorized contact with them is something to which a person would have to confess, and thus members who do speak to reporters almost always do so with the permission of the church.

For example, in 2005 I interviewed Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley in Clearwater, Florida; in both cases, Scientology's Office of Special Affairs provided them with equipment to record our conversation. In early 2006, I interviewed the actor Doug Dohring and several other young Scientologists in a conference room outfitted with recording devices at Scientology's Mother Church in Los Angeles. Every other Scientologist I have interviewed has been personally chaperoned by at least one and sometimes three church officials. The sole exception was Natalie Walet, who spoke to me freely, on the record, in person, on the telephone, and through e-mails dozens of times over the past few years. I applaud her courage and honesty.

Because of the Church of Scientology's history of harassing and discrediting its critics and defectors, the vast majority of people who leave the church do so quietly. This book began as a magazine assignment for
Rolling Stone
and could not have been completed without the help of a former Scientologist whom I have promised not to name but who has served as my Virgil since the earliest days of my reporting, painstakingly explaining not only Scientology's language, beliefs, practices, and moral codes, but also the mechanisms of control by which the church suppresses or discredits the words of its former members.

I felt it was imperative to this book's credibility that it be based largely on the accounts of "quiet defectors" such as my Virgil: people who had neither sued the church nor spoken publicly about their involvement with Scientology in any way. Finding the right individuals took months. Gaining their trust took just as long. And getting them to agree to go on the record was, in many cases, an almost Herculean task.

One cost of a book like this one is the time it takes to complete. Over the years I was reporting, a number of my sources, emboldened by the Internet, decided to become more public. These include Jeff Hawkins, Marc and Claire Headley, Nancy Many, Steve Hall, Kendra Wiseman, Mark Fisher, Amy Scobee, and several others who, since I first began talking to them, have posted their stories on the Internet and talked to other journalists; Many, Hawkins, Scobee, and Marc Headley have also self-published memoirs about their years in Scientology.

Though I would be remiss in not mentioning this, I must also stress that not a single one of these people had ever spoken publicly prior to my interviewing them, nor had any of them pursued legal action against the church or written a book. Except where specifically noted, all references to these people, their stories, and their quoted words come from my own interviews and conversations with them.

Every bit of information in this book has been checked and cross-checked with multiple sources, and where I have found discrepancies, I have erred on the side of caution and toned down certain accounts whose veracity I do not feel I can comfortably prove. While this book relies almost wholly on named sources, there were a few people who, fearing retribution against themselves and their family members still in Scientology, requested I give them pseudonyms or total anonymity. Those few cases are clearly identified. I am particularly grateful to the Church of Scientology officials who spent time with me during my first year of research. This book benefitted greatly from their tremendous help.

Piecing together the complex history of Scientology is extremely difficult, and I could not have done it without the tremendous expertise and research of others, whose work I will try to acknowledge here. The early history of Scientology has been documented in two highly critical books: Russell Miller's
Barefaced Messiah,
which remains the best and most comprehensive biography of L. Ron Hubbard, and Jon Atack's
A Piece of Blue Sky,
which offers a remarkably thorough insider account of the founding and development of the Scientology movement through the 1980s. Though biased, these books are nonetheless essential reading for anyone interested in Scientology, and taken together they supply excellent insight into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard and the creation of his church.

Helen O'Brien's
Dianetics in Limbo
is regarded as the seminal book on the early Dianetics movement, as is Dr. Joseph Winter's
A Doctor's Report on Dianetics
. Paulette Cooper's
The Scandal of Scientology
was one of the first journalistic examinations of Scientology and is particularly helpful in describing the movement in the 1960s, as are George Malko's
The Now Religion
and Stephen Kent's
From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam Era
. For a sociological analysis of Scientology, Roy Wallis's
The Road to Total Freedom
is invaluable for its objectivity, though it covers Scientology only through the 1970s; more recently, J. Gordon Melton's
The Church of Scientology
, Stephen Kent's
From Slogans to Mantras
and his numerous studies of Scientology's Rehabilitation Project Force, and James Lewis's collection of scholarly essays,
Scientology,
provide the best, and right now some of the only, academic writing on the movement. I also found tremendous insight and much-needed interpretation of the Church of Scientology's practices and protocols in Cyril Vosper's
The Mind Benders
and Margery Wakefield's
Understanding Scientology,
first published in 1991 by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, and later as an e-book (
www.religio.de/books/wakefield/us.html
).

David Halberstam's
The Fifties
and Stephen Whitfield's
The Culture of the Cold War
helped me understand the sociopolitical environment in which Scientology was born, as did Hugh Urban's excellent paper "Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America." I was hugely grateful to those who worked with L. Ron Hubbard who suggested I read Vance Packard's
The Hidden Persuaders
and Napoleon Hill's
Think and Grow Rich
to glean an understanding of the business psychology mindset of the 1950s and how that may have played into Hubbard's thinking. Scientology has been called by more than one critic the McDonald's of religion—I found this to be true, not only in terms of its real estate strategy but also in its overall franchising concept. To gain a better understanding of franchising, I found John F. Love's
McDonald's: Behind the Arches
to be a fascinating corporate study.

Phillip Jenkins's
Mystics and Messiahs
and Anthony Storr's
Feet of Clay
are excellent references on the development of cults and new religious movements, as well as the personality traits of gurus. I would have been lost without Jon Krakauer's
Under the Banner of Heaven,
which provided both inspiration and in many ways an ideal model for how to tell the story of a little-understood religious movement. George Pendle's
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons
was invaluable in providing research into the life of John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons and the culture of physics in southern California. For historical and sociological perspectives on the birth and development of Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century, my first and best resource was the journalist Carey McWilliams's
Southern California: An Island of the Land;
I also appreciated Mike Davis's
City of Quartz
and Kevin Starr's
The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s,
which devotes a chapter to Pasadena and Caltech.