Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
By Lawrence Wright
Most readers will come to Going Clear, Lawrence Wright’s much-anticipated expose of Scientology, in search of two things: perfidy and celebrity. They won’t be disappointed.
Which is a shame, since Wright’s stated ambition is “to learn something about what might be called the process of belief.” He’s well qualified, the author not just of a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 study of al-Qaida, The Looming Tower, but also of a number of smaller, even intimate books about the experience of belief, including the minor classic Remembering Satan.
Going Clear begins in that close-up spirit with the early years of Paul Haggis, the screenwriter and former Scientologist who Wright profiled in the New Yorker. For a precious few pages, we’re allowed to encounter Scientology something like the young Haggis did: as a creed more modern, more sophisticated, more intelligent, more liberating than any he was likely to find in the blue-collar Ontario of his youth. It’s a kind of revelation.
Then comes Chapter Two, and L. Ron Hubbard, red-haired and big-mouthed, literally and figuratively, a relentless teller of tall tales. He lied about his naval record (abysmal), his education (no nuclear physicist, he), and his allegedly uncanny powers.
Before Scientology, there was Aleister Crowley, the English “magician” revered by generations of would-be wizards. When Hubbard and a friend tried to breed an Antichrist according to Crowley’s teachings, even Crowley rolled his eyes: “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Of course, Hubbard — “Source,” just “Source,” no “the,” of Scientology — didn’t really want Crowley’s approval. According to the Church of Scientology, he was undercover for “naval intelligence” on a mission that “broke up black magic in America.” Phew!
At times it’s possible to feel sympathy for pre-Scientology Hubbard. Here’s Hubbard writing for himself in what Wright calls a “disputed document” — in the sense that any questioning of Source’s stunning perfection is disputed — titled “Affirmations”: “You never illustrate your point with bogus stories. It is not necessary for you to lie to be amusing and witty.” And “You are radiant like sunlight.” And on a subject to which he returned many times: “You do not masturbate.”
It’d be pathetic if it weren’t for what followed, first the best-selling Dianetics and then the reconfiguration of Hubbard’s ideas according to the “religion angle,” as Hubbard described it. Wright notes that this apparent cynicism is a key text of “anti-Scientology narrative,” but he’s too smart to leave it at that, following Hubbard’s thinking through the rest of that particular letter to what sounds like not so much calculation as a begrudging recognition by Hubbard that the practices he’s proposing are, in fact, a religion.
We can’t conclusively answer the question of Hubbard’s sanity, or his access to revelation. What we do know is that he exercised the control he came to have over his followers with violence, terror, misogyny and caprice — methods and qualities, Wright argues, emulated by church elites thereafter.
There is much more of this — and, yes, celebrity stories — than there are insights into “the process of belief.” Why would anyone want to follow such a man? There are glimpses of his charisma in a chapter dedicated to Hubbard’s creation of the “Sea Org,” a mini-fleet of ships from which he ran Scientology for several years. He was, if nothing else, entertaining, drinking rum and Coke and telling stories about spaceships and sexy priestesses and epic battles.
His appointed “missionaries” would go in search of treasure he said he’d buried in past lives. They never found it, but that was OK. They were living a child’s pirate fantasy, with lots of grown-up sex in the bargain — until Hubbard cracked down, developing ever more sadistic punishments for dissidents, real and imagined.
Ultimately, the more interesting question than “Why would someone want to be a Scientologist?” — everybody has issues! — is “Why do so many of us care?” Why does this tiny religious movement inspire such fascination that it is the subject of not one but two blockbuster books in the past few years?
I should note that I was one of the back-cover blurbers on the last one, Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology; Lawrence Wright was the other. Given that between the two, Wright is the big foot, it was gracious of him to boost a competitor.
Then again, maybe he understood the market to be so wide open that competition doesn’t really apply. If only he’d taken that apparent truth as license to consider the bigger questions: What role does Scientology play in the American imagination? Why do we seem to need it to despise?