In Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman meticulously documents the evolution of the sect from its roots in secular pop psych to its rebirth as a religion, through its tumultuous years on the high seas to its eventual colonization of Clearwater, Florida, and Hollywood.
The founder of Scientology was L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific pulp fiction writer and self-proclaimed adventurer with a flair for self-promotion. Reitman does a good job documenting Hubbard’s checkered early life. He would later claim to be a WW2 naval hero who healed his own battle wounds with the power of his mind. Reitman reveals that Hubbard’s service was undistinguished by his own admission.
Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950. The book was a smash hit. It sold over half a million copies in its first year and dianetics clubs sprung up around the country. TIME Magazine swiftly denounced dianetics as a cult.
Dianetics was a secular work of pop psychology, a kind of DIY therapy that readers could do with their friends at home. Its methods were modeled on the talk therapy of the day. Hubbard taught that traumatic experiences create psychic scars known as “engrams.” During auditing, the patient is said to uncover these repressed traumas and reexperiences them until they are no longer painful. In early editions of the book, Hubbard explicitly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Freud and Jung. This is ironic, given Scientology’s latter-day jihad against psychiatry.
Freud taught people to blame their mothers for screwing them up. Hubbard a new and bizarre twist on an old mysogynist theme. According to Dianetics, our mothers screw us up by trying to kill us before we’re even born: The worst prenatal trauma of all is attempted abortion, or AA, which was said to be epidemic. The average woman attempts to self-abort 20 to 30 times, often with knitting needles, Hubbard asserted.
In 1952, Hubbard reinvented his self-help philosophy as a religion he called Scientology. He had to. A wealthy donor owned the rights to Dianetics and Hubbard couldn’t make any more money until he rebranded with a fresh revelation. The e-meter and the notion of thetans were rolled out for the Scientology relaunch, Reitman explains.
Hubbard openly admitted to his followers that being a church was good for tax reasons. If auditing was a religious ritual, rather than a psychological treatment, lay auditors would be exempt from licensing laws governing mental health professionals. This was key because it was evident from early on that Scientology’s auditing methods could precipitate mental breakdowns in susceptible individuals.
Scientology is unique among religions in that its scriptures hold litigation to be a quasi-sacrament. Hubbard specifically exhorted his followers to use the legal system to harass Scientology’s critics. He argued that the legal harassment was an effective way to silence a critic. “If possible, of course, destroy him utterly,” Hubbard wrote.
In the 1960s, Hubbard the phony naval hero, founded his own pseudo-navy called Sea Org to keep Scientology out of reach of the law. Sea Org, they of the billion-year contract, became an aristocracy within Scientology.
Reitman describes how the current leadership of Scientology grew out of a cadre of teenagers that Hubbard surrounded himself with on the ship. Hubbard had a messenger corps of teenage girls in white shorts whose job it was to relay his messages to everyone on the ship, in his exact tone of voice. So, if Hubbard wanted to yell at a guy in the engine room, he’d send a teenage girl to curse the guy out, in Hubbard’s voice.
Scientology eventually reestablished itself on land, but to this day, devout Scientologists face considerable pressure to sign over their teenage children to serve Sea Org.
Reitman talks at length about Scientology’s advanced intelligence apparatus and the lengths to which the church has gone to harry into submission anyone or anything standing in its way, including the IRS. The story of how Scientology got to be tax-exempt, despite material flaws in the accounting it needed to qualify, is probably the most outrageous revelation in a book filled with outlandish information.
Reitman wisely resists the temptation to revel in the sheer weirdness of the tenets of Scientology. All religions believe weird things and new religions get picked on disproportionately. This book is more about the structure and behavior of Scientology as an organization than about Scientology as a theology. Reitman calls Scientology a religion, sidestepping the issue of whether it’s a cult. If you read the book, you’ll have all the evidence you need to make up your own mind.
Inside Scientology is a finely crafted work of investigative journalism and narrative history that deserves to be widely read. It would make a great skeptical stocking stuffer.
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