Money, For Nothing
How Scientology Tries to Get in Your Head, and Your Wallet
Imagine a religion with no god.
Imagine that they promise you the ability to manipulate matter, to never get sick, to have control over space and time. Now imagine that the only way to get to this state of transcendence is by gradually paying your way.
Sound like a scam? To some it is. But to the scores of people worldwide who practice Scientology, it is a way of life.
Cult or Religion
The problem with talking about Scientology is that it’s very hard to define. The group is engaged in so many activities that labeling it as a cult or religion might not suffice.
Stephen Kent is a professor in the department of sociology at the University of Alberta and has written extensively on Scientology.
He noted that the concept of religion is fluid and that, technically, Scientology can be called a religion in the United States, as it has charitable status, but does not enjoy the same status in Canada.
“Generally, Scientology is a personality cult based around the teachings and writings of [science fiction author] L. Ron Hubbard,” said Kent. “It’s a multi-faceted organization, only one part of which is religious. It also has organizational aspects dealing with education, pseudo-drug counselling, pseudo-therapy, business management programs and so on. It’s a multi-dimensional, transnational organization […] At most levels, it comes across as a personal improvement organization.”
Much of the Hubbard’s writings dealt with how people’s demons hold them back. The only way to rid oneself of these demons is through techniques he invented, which you can learn through his books and courses—for a price.
Going to Church
I visited the church on Yonge Street in Toronto on a scorching day in August. The building was not very church-like, blending in with the numerous neighbouring office buildings. The only difference was the lettering just above the door. In big, bold letters it announced itself as “The Church of Scientology.”
The lobby was surprisingly drab for an organization whose most public faces are wealthy celebrities. There was a receptionist behind a desk, positioned in front of a bank of elevators. I was greeted by one of the red polo-shirt wearing staff members named Bill, a pleasant, relentlessly polite man in his 50s. He took me into a more stylish, well upholstered room, filled with books by Scientology’s founder, the late L. Ron Hubbard.
As we began to chat, I said that I had heard much about Scientology, and was curious to know more. Bill explained that Scientology was a belief system that he had adhered to for almost 30 years and that it had vastly improved his life. He mentioned that upon joining and being audited for the first time, he promptly completed a $30,000 business deal the next day—such was the power of Scientology to focus one’s mind.
Auditing, a central component of Scientology, is a procedure wherein a trained member of the church—an auditor—asks specific questions to another member— called a pre-clear—trying to find memories and experiences that the pre-clear has negative feelings about. The theory is that by repeatedly examining the pre-clears feelings towards these memories, their negative effects can be eliminated. It achieves the twin goals of gathering information on new recruits and indoctrinating them with the ethos of Scientology.
“During the auditing process, they’re getting exposed to Scientology’s belief systems and ethics,” said Kent. “And part of that involves being willing to never do anything to hurt the group.”
Bill was not hesitant to mention the importance of cultural and political power to Scientology. One of the first things he showed me was a book filled with pictures of all the Scientology churches in the world.
Given a prominent place was the Celebrity Center in Hollywood, a huge, castle-like building that is for the use of “artists, politicians, leaders of industry, sports figures and anyone with the power and vision to create a better world,” according to the Scientology website.
Bill told me that people in positions to influence culture were “very important” to Scientology, explaining that only through them could real change be brought into society as a whole. It’s a concept that has been a part of the religion from the very beginning.
Founded by Hubbard in 1952, the religion is based on the idea that in every person resides a timeless entity called a ‘thetan,’ which is very similar to the idea of the soul in other religions. Over time, thetans have become confused about their nature. Instead of existing in a purely metaphysical realm, they have grown attached to the physical world. Through Scientology, a person can get back to becoming an “operating thetan.” Once there, they are capable of controlling matter, energy, space and time. Spreading the idea that any person who joins the church can become an operating thetan has often fallen to celebrity spokespeople.
“Back in the 1950s, Hubbard realized that celebrities have high profiles in society so the idea was that if you get celebrity spokespersons, you would greatly enhance people’s curiosity and faith in the organization itself,” said Kent. “The group still uses celebrities to spread the message. Its use of celebrities has backfired to some degree because of the criticism, and you might say mockery, that has befallen Tom Cruise.”
While Cruise has garnered the most attention for the group via public declarations of his loyalty to the church and opposition to psychiatry, the vast majority of followers are average people without his financial resources and high profile. The church claims 8 million members worldwide, though critics say that this number is grossly inflated.
Regardless, the church recruits from every social bracket – provided you can pay for the books, courses and auditing sessions. As a university student with more than a bit of debt, I was curious to see how Bill would get me to join.
Your personality, in graph form
Mark Ebner is a blogger and author, specializing in investigating the seedy underside of Hollywood.
In 1996, on assignment for Spy Magazine, he went undercover in the Church of Scientology for 11 days, which he recounted in his article “Do You Want to Buy a Bridge?” Since then, he has been one of the church’s most outspoken critics. He was one of the advisers to South Park for their famed “Trapped in the Closet” episode, in which the Scientology version of how life came to earth is explained. During an e-mail interview, he didn’t mince words regarding his thoughts on recruitment at universities.
“Scientology recruiters are crafty, and the game plan and reasoning behind recruiting college students is insidious,” he said. “Students tend to be prized candidates for cult recruitment because they are often quite vulnerable and indecisive about what they want to do with their lives.”
While less polemic, Kent agreed that the confusion of early adulthood could leave a person vulnerable to recruitment.
“There are different strategies for different groups in the population,” he noted. “[The basic message is that they have] procedures that can take away blockages, preventing people from realizing their full potential.”
I explained to Bill that I had often had trouble figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Bill recommended that I take the free “personality test,” formally known as the Oxford Capacity Analysis. I agreed, and sat down with the questionnaire of 200 “agree/don’t know/disagree” questions.
“Are you ever ill at ease in the company of children?” was just one of the many bizarre questions. Once I had completed the form, I sat down with Bill to discuss the results.
Misery loves company
Illustrated on a graph were
ten personality points, each scored on a range from -100 to +100. While I scored decent marks on certainty, activeness and communication, I also scored very low on stability, happiness and nervousness. In terms of happiness, I scored a -90, the second lowest possible score.
According to the computer printout, I am “extremely dejected, depressed and unhappy. You look to the future with complete pessimism and lack of hope.” When I explained to Bill that I thought I was actually the opposite of that description, he explained that while I may seem happy, deep down I’m in a state of turmoil.
Kent said that the test has very little scientific basis, and is more of a recruiting tool than a personality test.
“The procedures that the church use in scoring [the test] come down to identifying issues the person has and that Scientology can fix,” he said. “So the bottom line is that the people scoring and helping the testee with the analysis are always supposed to say you have a problem, but Scientology can fix this.”
Kent noted that coming in and scoring well on the test with no knowledge of Scientology isn’t impossible, but is “very hard.”
After completing our analysis of the test, Bill implored me to buy a copy of Hubbard’s book The Problems of Work, and to sign up for an upcoming workshop called the Personal Efficiency Course. The course would cost $60 while the book is listed at $16 Canadian on the mail-in order form for Scientology materials Bill gave to me.
I explained that I couldn’t afford either at the moment, and was told not to worry, that I could pick a copy of the book at a local library. I asked if it would be available at the University of Toronto library.
“Umm, no. The universities don’t like us much,” he said with a noticeable grimace.
Of Classes and Cults
Scientology has garnered a bad reputation on campuses lately, especially since April, 2007, when the church dispatched members to engage in “grief counseling” on the Virginia Tech campus following the deaths of 32 students in the famous “Virginia Tech Massacre.”
Concordia itself saw a letter-writing campaign and protests from the anti-Scientology group called Anonymous, when the Citizens Commission on Human Rights—a group with strong ties to Scientology—put up an anti-psychiatry display in the library building in April 2009.
Despite the hostility, recruitment of students persists. According to Ebner, this is because students’ low status on the economic ladder makes them more likely to join the organization long-term.
“It may seem like recruiting starving students is not the ideal model for the cult of greed, but they recognize ‘raw meat’ (their term for new recruits, not mine) as big earners for the cult on a number of levels,” he said, noting that students often have easy access to loans, credit cards and parents as sources of money. If that fails, one way out is to sign up to volunteer for the organization, recruiting other students to the cause.
A Glimpse of Hope
As I prepared to walk out of the church, three hours after going in, Bill handed me some materials, mostly pamphlets promoting different Hubbard-penned books, as well as mail-order forms. I shook his hand and I casually mentioned that I was a big fan of South Park, and was curious as to whether Bill believes in aliens. He said that while he personally did not, he would not refute the now famous alien mythos associated with the church.
It’s hard to find a Scientologist, current or former, who will speak out against the teachings of Hubbard, even in an informal setting. There is a long history of the church taking action against critics, including Ebner, who was the victim of a smear campaign following the publication of his article. Kent listed several techniques used to silence criticism, including “homes being picketed […] agents going through trash, surveillance cameras, plants being sent to infiltrate critical organizations,” among many others. He described a recent case in Australia in which a former member-turned critic was run off the road by Scientology Security Personnel in an attempt to intimidate him into silence.
I had gone in hoping to find something redeeming, hoping that behind all the controversies, there was something that would actually help people. After walking out, I had nothing but half-truths and misleading information that contradicted all the research I had done.
No other religion charges such exorbitant amounts of money to discover the supposed secret of life. No other religion sues everybody who dares to criticize them. If Scientologists really want to help the world, they don’t need to explain thetans to us. The real question they need to answer is, what are they hiding?
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 08, published October 5, 2010.
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