Inside Scientology (53 page)

In many other ways, leaving Scientology has not been easy. During my visit to Clearwater, Mike and Donna took me to dinner at a waterfront restaurant just off the Memorial Causeway between Clearwater and Clearwater Beach, a resort community that is home to many Scientologists. Mike is a tall man, six foot six, with a loping gait that makes him hard to miss, even amid dozens of people. Shortly after we sat down, a couple and their teenage children were seated at the table next to us. Glancing over, they became visibly uncomfortable. The woman took out her cell phone and walked a few feet away. Her daughter began craning her neck, looking for the hostess.

"They're Scientologists," Donna whispered.

"Just wait," Mike said.

"Maybe we should go." Donna looked chagrined.

"No, let's see what they do." A few seconds later, the woman returned and everyone at her table got up and left. "Wow," Mike said. He looked around at the other well-dressed people eating on the patio. "I guess they know we're declared."

"But we haven't seen anything in writing," Donna protested. When Scientologists are formally excommunicated, a written declaration known as a "goldenrod" is issued, stating their crimes against the organization. It is printed on a piece of golden parchment and sent to both the member and his or her church, where it is often posted on the wall. The Hendersons had not received their goldenrod.

"Oh, we're definitely declared." Mike reminded his wife of another Scientologist friend they ran into at a local Dillard's department store. Upon seeing them, she'd turned and walked in the other direction. "If she walked away from us and wouldn't talk to us, then it's known among Scientologists in Clearwater that we're declared." Mike seemed regretful about this.

In their prior, flush life as OTs, Mike and Donna owned a Bellanca Viking airplane, which they sold to help recoup some of their financial losses. After dinner, Mike took me to the hangar where they had kept the plane. He'd repurposed it as a storeroom for a floor-to-ceiling assortment of boxes and stacking shelves filled with Scientology books, tapes, CDs, DVDs, E-meters, and other paraphernalia.

"This is probably one of the best collections ever put together," Mike said, handing me a leather-bound, gold-leaf-edged copy of
Dianetics.
He was selling it on eBay. "This is a special edition. You'd probably get a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty dollars for something like that." He picked up another book. "This is a transcript of a taped lecture that Hubbard gave on the
Apollo
in 1968." It forms the basis of Hubbard's book
Mission into Time,
in which Hubbard discussed his past life in ancient Greece. I opened the book, with its fraying dust jacket, and read the inscription:
We hope the reading of this book is only the first step of a personal voyage of discovery into the new and vital world religion of Scientology.

Mike reached over to a shelf and took down an emerald green Planetary Dissemination Meter, a special-edition E-meter that came in a silk bag embroidered with gold thread. "My wife owns five of these. Each one cost ten grand. And that isn't even the most expensive one." He lifted an E-meter plated in twenty-four-karat gold. "This one is worth twenty thousand dollars." Mike estimated that he was one of just one hundred people who owned a gold E-meter. He'd used it to audit body thetans—millions of them, he figured. But the exorcism and indeed the entire OT experience, he admitted, hadn't really worked.

"I've had to come to grips with the fact that, yes, I've raised a family, and yes, I've had a successful business and all that, but a lot of my energy and my impetus as a person was channeled toward Scientology," he said sadly. "It's been a real letdown, letting go of that. But I just couldn't keep lying to myself any longer."

He looked around in the hangar, where virtually everything was for sale. "Maybe at some point in human evolution, people will be able to do some things we can't do now, but you're not going to have the ability to use every ounce of your intelligence, and develop psychic powers, and be able to leave your body at will. And that's what we thought when we got into Scientology. We thought we were going to be able to do all these things that the yogis taught, that the maharaja talked about. Immortality. Real freedom. I wanted the certainty that I would live and die and live again, and remember everything, and be okay, forever."

Instead, Mike Henderson had doubts and fears, just like every other mortal. "I don't know what's in store for me down the road, but I know I won't get there with Scientology," he said, with resignation. "And after thirty-four years, and six hundred thousand dollars, that is the saddest thing I can say about my life."

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and their guests turned out to christen the new Church of Scientology of Los Angeles on Saturday, April 24, 2010. It was a crystal-clear afternoon, and for the believers who'd gathered at Scientology's West Coast headquarters on Sunset Boulevard—those people for whom the sixteen-foot, illuminated
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sign atop the landmark Cedars of Lebanon building is a testament to Scientology's claim of being the "fastest-growing religion of the twenty-first century"—here was the final manifestation of their hard work.

Amid the faceless commercial towers and stucco bungalows installed in this section of East Hollywood, Scientologists and a number of Los Angeles city officials, as well as the Los Angeles County sheriff, Lee Baca, a vocal supporter of Scientology's anti-drug program, gathered before an outdoor stage decorated, as all church functions are, with a huge portrait of L. Ron Hubbard. A dance troupe, attired in glittery top hats and tails, performed a routine. The band played "Hooray for Hollywood." Before the entrance to the new building—which, as everyone there knew, was actually the old building, with a multimillion-dollar facelift and a fresh coat of blue paint—bobbed an arc of blue and gold balloons. "Today marks a milestone step
in our planetary crusade to bring on our help on a truly global scale," said David Miscavige, looking out from the podium. Dressed in a sharp navy suit, he commended the Los Angeles Scientologist community for its dedication in creating this new Ideal Org, the fourth such organization to open in 2010 and the most historic, for here, in 1954, is where the first church of Scientology was born.

Now there are countless churches. From London to Nashville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—and also Quebec City, Brussels, Seattle, Pasadena, Mexico City, Madrid, Rome, and Johannesburg—Ideal Orgs have opened throughout the world over the past several years. By the end of 2011, according to the church's predictions, seventy new organizations will be opened or under construction from Atlanta to Battle Creek, Michigan, and from Caracas to Tel Aviv.

In Clearwater, the landmark Fort Harrison Hotel has been given a $40 million upgrade.
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Just next door, connected to the Fort Harrison by a glass-enclosed sky bridge, is a facility referred to as the "Mecca" or "Super Power" building, which is still, more than a decade since ground was broken for it, under construction.
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The Super Power building—named for a highly classified, and expensive, new rundown intended to enhance Scientologists' perceptions—is an enormous white Mediterranean revival–style edifice occupying a full square block of downtown Clearwater. The largest building in all of Pinellas County (church officials call it Scientology's "Sistine Chapel"), it stood as an empty shell for six years, while it underwent a number of redesigns. When it is finally completed, at an estimated cost of $90 million, the seven-story, 380,000-square-foot building will have 889 rooms, 142 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, a 1,140-seat dining room, an indoor running track and sculpture garden, and 2 Scientology museums. The crowning touch will be a two-story illuminated Scientology cross that, perched atop a fifteen-story tower, will shine across the city of Clearwater like a beacon.

What this says about the church, according to its leaders, is that Scientology is a growing, vital movement—far from the dying organization its detractors contend it has become. "It certainly creates this incredible illusion of success and expansion," conceded its onetime finance officer Mat Pesch. "But it's like the housing market of 2005—'Things have never looked better.'"

But behind this façade, say people like Pesch, members are fleeing the organization in droves. How many? "This is as hard to estimate as it is to count how many people are 'in' Scientology, as it depends entirely on your definition of 'in,'" said one former senior church official. Perhaps forty thousand people have contributed to the IAS, Mike Rinder and other ex-officials noted. But indeed millions—perhaps even Scientology's current figure of eleven million—may be counted as Scientologists if, as the church does, you include in that number everyone who has ever read a Hubbard book or signed up for an introductory service. I myself, having once bought a book on Dianetics and completed an auditing session, am by that measure a "Scientologist."

The truth, as I noted at the beginning of this book, is not an easy thing to discern when it comes to the Church of Scientology. One thing is clear, however: for all of the charges leveled against the church by its current defectors, similar, if not worse, allegations were leveled against it in the past.

Yet throughout its history, Scientology has shown a remarkable ability to both survive scandal and deflect many hard questions. For the church to do that today will be daunting, given the breadth of negative information about it available on the Internet. But it may not be impossible.

Over the past decade, the church has been notably proactive with regard to what was until recently a largely untapped market: African Americans. This happened thanks in part to the late musician Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist and passionate advocate of Hubbard's study technology, who started a number of small storefront tutoring programs to help inner-city youth. Early in 2000, Hayes met with Marty Rathbun, then the inspector general of the RTC, and proposed that the church consider a new financial strategy to make Scientology more affordable, and thus accessible, to the black community.

As Rathbun later wrote of the meeting, Hayes struck both
an idealistic and pragmatic note. If Scientology's management was averse to making Scientology affordable to poor people on a simple humanitarian level, then perhaps it might consider how such an investment might pay off. "All that is hip and cool comes from the black ghetto," he told Rathbun. From a marketing perspective, Scientology was "shooting itself in the foot" by ignoring the black community. "Help Black America," Hayes said, "and you help yourself."

Miscavige seized upon this idea—less for idealistic reasons than for the prospect of Scientology becoming "hip," according to Rathbun—and three years later announced plans to open two new Ideal Orgs: one in Harlem and another in the Inglewood section of South Central Los Angeles.

For the next half dozen years, Scientology greatly stepped up efforts to reach out to the black community, notably through its ministers, courting such prominent leaders as the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, who is the former head of the ten-thousand-member St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. At Flag in June 2010, the church sponsored the three-day Clear African Americans awards banquet and convention, which included a seminar on how to disseminate to African Americans and a session called "Religious Influence in Black Life and How to Help Religious People Reach for LRH Tech." Guest speakers included Alfreddie Johnson Jr., a Baptist minister and the founder and executive director of the World Literacy Crusade, a Scientology-backed tutoring program based in Compton, California, and Tony Muhammad from the Nation of Islam.

Louis Farrakhan, the founder of the Nation of Islam, was a recipient of a Scientology Friends of Mankind award in 2006, cosponsored by the Church of Scientology and Ebony Awakenings, an African American nonprofit organization with ties to the church. Since then, Farrakhan has become notably enamored of Hubbard's philosophies, promoting Scientology's drug awareness and literacy programs and embracing its management technology. The Nation of Islam now has a national and regional "org board." It has also held Dianetics training seminars for its followers. In August 2010, the Nation held one such seminar in Rosemont, Illinois, at which Farrakhan announced that this training would soon be mandatory for every leader of the Nation's U.S. and international operations.
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Farrakhan did not, however,
mention the key terms associated with the brand—
Scientology, Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard
—an irony for a church that has spent so much money and human capital promoting itself and its name. But Miscavige, nothing if not pragmatic, would surely approve this tactic if it served to drive up Scientology's enrollment statistics, just as he has appeared to endorse the quiet ways that Scientology-sponsored front organizations are now disseminating Scientology's message into society.

Over the past decade or so, Scientologists have forged bonds with state and local lawmakers in cities across the United States, some of whom may not be fully aware of the Scientology connection. One example is the church's close ties to the National Foundation of Women Legislators, which counts more than eight hundred members in state and federal government. Since the late 1990s, Scientologists have held key positions in the organization, which they have used to reach out to lawmakers on issues pertaining to drugs and social reform, notably psychiatry.