Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
BY Lawrence Wright
Introduction
Scientology plays an outsize role in the cast of new religions that have arisen in the twentieth century and survived into the twenty-first. The church won’t release official membership figures, but informally it claims 8 million members worldwide, a figure that is based on the number of people who have donated to the church. A recent ad claims that the church welcomes 4.4 million new people every year. And yet, according to a former spokesperson for the church, the International Association of Scientologists, an organization that church members are forcefully encouraged to join, has only about 30,000 members. The largest concentration, about 5,000, is in Los Angeles. A survey of American religious affiliations compiled in the Statistical Abstract of the United States estimates that only 25,000 Americans actually call themselves Scientologists. That’s less than half the number identifying themselves as Rastafarians.
Despite decades of declining membership and intermittent scandals that might have sunk other faiths, Scientology remains afloat, more than a quarter century after the death of its chimerical leader, L. Ron Hubbard. In part, its survival is due to colossal financial resources—about $1 billion in liquid assets, according to knowledgeable former members. Strictly in terms of cash reserves, that figure eclipses the holdings of most major world religions. Scientology’s wealth testifies to the avidity of its membership, relentless fund-raising, and the legacy of Hubbard’s copyrights to the thousand books and articles he published.
The church also claims about 12 million square feet of property around the world. Hollywood is the center of Scientology’s real-estate empire, with twenty-six properties valued at $400 million. The most recent addition to the church’s Hollywood portfolio is a television studio on Sunset Boulevard formerly owned by KCET, acquired in order to open a Scientology broadcasting center. In Clearwater, Florida, where Scientology maintains its spiritual headquarters, the church owns sixty-eight largely tax-exempt parcels of land, valued at $168 million. They include apartment buildings, hotels and motels, warehouses, schools, office buildings, a bank, and tracts of vacant land. The church often acquires landmark buildings near key locations, such as Music Row in Nashville, Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, and Times Square in New York City. A similar strategy governs the placement of Scientology’s holdings in other countries. Typically, these buildings are magnificently restored architectural treasures, lavishly appointed, even if the membership is negligible. The church owns a five-hundred-acre compound in Southern California and a cruise ship, the Freewinds, which is based in the Caribbean. The Church of Spiritual Technology, the branch of Scientology that owns the trademarks and copyrights to all church materials, including Hubbard’s immense body of popular fiction, maintains secret bases in several remote locations in at least three American states, where the founder’s works are stored in titanium canisters in nuclear-blast-resistant caverns. One of the vault locations, in Trementina, New Mexico, has an airstrip and two giant interlocking circles carved into the desert floor—a landmark for UFOs, some believe, or for Hubbard’s reincarnated spirit, when he chooses to return.
There are really three tiers of Scientologists. Public Scientologists constitute the majority of the membership. Many of them have their first exposure to the religion at a subway station or a shopping mall where they might take a free “stress test” or a personality inventory called “The Oxford Capacity Analysis” (there is no actual connection to Oxford University). On those occasions, potential recruits are likely to be told that they have problems that Scientology can resolve, and they are steered to a local church or mission for courses or therapy, which the church terms “auditing.” That’s as far as most new members go, but others begin a lengthy and expensive climb up the church’s spiritual ladder.
The mystique that surrounds the religion is owed mainly to the second tier of membership: a small number of Hollywood actors and other celebrities. To promote the idea that Scientology is a unique refuge for spiritually hungry movie stars, as well as a kind of factory for stardom, the church operates Celebrity Centres in Hollywood and several other entertainment hubs. Any Scientologist can take courses at Celebrity Centres; it’s part of the lure, that an ordinary member can envision being in classes with notable actors or musicians. In practice, the real celebrities have their own private entry and course rooms, and they rarely mix with the public—except for major contributors who are accorded the same heightened status. The total number of celebrities in the church is impossible to calculate, both because the term itself is so elastic and because some well-known personalities who have taken courses or auditing don’t wish to have their association known.
An ordinary public Scientologist can be inconspicuous. No one really needs to know his beliefs. Public members who quit the church seldom make a scene; they just quietly remove themselves and the community closes the circle behind them (although they are likely to be pursued by mail and phone solicitations for the rest of their lives). Celebrity members, on the other hand, are constantly being pressed to add their names to petitions, being showcased at workshops and galas, or having their photos posted over the logo “I’m a Scientologist.” Their fame greatly magnifies the influence of the church. They are deployed to advance the social agendas of the organization, including attacks on psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, and the promotion of Hubbard’s contested theories of education and drug rehabilitation. They become tied to Scientology’s banner, which makes it more difficult to break away if they should become disillusioned.