The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (6 page)

The next day I flew to the United States and battle commenced.

CHAPTER TWO

‘What do my socks have to do with spiritual freedom?’

T
here is something unearthly about the quality of the light in Clearwater, halfway down Florida’s thigh facing the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps it is the light which lured L Ron to appoint Clearwater as Scientology’s Mecca in the 1970s, when he tired of wandering the oceans of the world. It is to this small, sleepy coastal resort that Scientologists the world over come to study. Here, there are more members of the Church per head of population than anywhere else on the planet.

A word about the weather. Throughout our time in the United States in the spring of 2007 the weather was unremittingly glorious: clear, bright sunny days, not too hot. It never rained. This lack of drizzle weakens moral fibre.

It was the late Mr Hubbard’s birthday party, and Miscavige was speaking at a major event in a hall which seats 2,200 people. We went along and tried to get in, but were rebuffed, and left, but not before their CCTV cameras filmed us not getting in and then leaving. For the record – and perhaps I am being overly defensive because of what happened later in California – I was polite and correct throughout.

At Clearwater the next day we met our first two defectors from the Church who were willing to go on camera and talk openly about their experiences inside, Donna Shannon and Mike Henderson. Mole arranged that we film the couple in a country park, populated by raccoons, who took a mild interest in our conversation. By and large, the ex-members of the Church I’ve met are nice people: bright, funny, self-deprecating, keen to help. They are not dumb. What is extraordinary is what they endured in the name of something they believed in.

Mike is a gentle giant, six foot nine inches tall, a pilot and a sweet man. When we met, he still believed in some of Scientology’s teachings but had fallen out with the Church as an institution. Donna was an ‘out-out’, a vet and also a pilot with her own small plane and someone with real oompf about her: a feisty lady. She had been an ordinary or as they call it ‘public’ Scientologist but was so enamoured with the Church she was persuaded to sell her vet’s practice and moved with husband Mike to Clearwater. There, they entered the Church’s Holy Order, the Sea Org – Scientology’s version of monks and nuns, who give up worldly pleasures to better serve the organisation. Donna and Mike were based at FLAG, the name of the Church’s massive HQ in Clearwater, endeavouring to make the world ‘clear’. As a parishioner or ‘public’ Scientologist, Donna had worked in the outside world, coming in to the Church to study and pay her way up the varying levels to clear and beyond. As a member of staff at FLAG, she became, she said, their slave.

‘In the Sea Org, on staff,’ said Donna, ‘you are controlled by derision, ridicule, being screamed at the top of someone’s lungs right in your face. They train people how to scream at somebody and how to intimidate somebody and how to make them feel like dirt. It is called ripping your face off. You get right up in somebody’s face, nose to nose, and spittle flying out of your mouth, scream in their face.’

Can you scream back, I asked, foolishly? Remember this conversation took place a whole week before I did exactly that. The answer was no.

Mike Henderson gave me an illustration of life in the Sea Org: ‘One of the first weekends we were there, room inspection. And the Sea Org ethics officer comes in and inspects. And if you drawers aren’t in order, if your socks and your underwear aren’t stacked neatly, it is a flunk. And the first time this happened Donna just said right to the guy’s face “you have got to be fucking kidding me”. And I couldn’t believe she said that to him, but that’s Donna.’

He said that with awe.

Donna chipped in with a theological point of some force: ‘What do my socks have to do with spiritual freedom?’

At Saint Hill and Fitzroy Street, everything we had seen was immaculate and subtly expensive. Living conditions for the Sea Org, behind the scenes, were, they said, somewhat different.

‘Termites, roaches, stinky old carpets,’ listed Donna. ‘Bare light bulbs, holes in the wall. Mike put in tiles, fixed the holes in the wall, put in a new toilet that worked. He got the old leaky dishwasher taken out, all that stuff. We did $2,000 worth of work on that room so it would be liveable.’

At Saint Hill and Fitzroy Street in London, the food was exquisite, I droned on, beautiful women giving us tea and coffee. Everything top notch.

‘For the staff, if you are a single person you will live in a room with four, five, six other people of the same sex, all stacked up.’

If you transgress, you are punished, she said. ‘They made an example of someone. He had to run up all the stairs of the Fort Harrison Hotel, ten floors. So here you have a person in their fifties who is not really in great shape and they are running them up and down ten flights of stairs. It is a wonder somebody doesn’t drop dead.’

Mike chipped in: ‘One night Tom Cruise spoke for five minutes at a graduation. He was there on a break from OT7’ – Operating Thetan Level 7. ‘He gave his wins’ –
SciSpeak
for self-enhancement – ‘and that was it. Donna was in the audience. But I never saw it because we were busy running tables and chairs up the freight elevator till one o’clock in the morning. When you are on staff you see the other side of the Scientology.’ His disillusion was deep.

Donna ended up on the Estates Project Force, a kind of paramilitary boot camp. And that is where she met Tommy Davis, she said. Suddenly, one day, the ethics officers and some of the higher ups came storming out of that room with Tommy. ‘They had him by the ear or by the hair and they dragged him out and held him up in front of the class. They started screaming about what a liar and terrible person he was. They were just trying to ridicule and shame him in front of everybody else. Then they slammed him back in the room. And we were left thinking: what was that about?’

Tommy Davis and the Church deny these allegations, vehemently. The Church makes the counter-accusation that Donna sought to extort money from it by making up absurd claims of abuse, and that her attempts at extortion failed. Donna and Mike deny these claims.

Back in England, I had asked the three Church spokesmen, Tommy Davis, Mike Rinder and Bob ‘Fireman Bob’ Keenan, about what some say is the Church’s secret belief, that they are engaged in a trillion year war against a space alien Satan who has brainwashed humanity into believing he does not exist. His name is Lord Xenu. Is Xenu real, I asked. They all guffawed, incredulous at my incredulity. Clearly, Xenu was nonsense. Or was it?

What did the defectors think about Xenu? Mike was uneasy, and said that he had signed a bond agreeing not to talk about it. I found his reluctance to discuss Xenu both proper, for him, and strangely disturbing. It suggested to me that there was something in it that he did not want to talk about. Donna had signed the same bond but she now believes that she did so in some strange hypnotic state: ‘It is just a game to get money. I don’t think there is any more truth in it than if I declare a raccoon god. And I don’t feel that anything I signed there can bind me to anything, because I was lied to, I was conned. I think Scientology creates a form of insanity. You are hypnotised, you are brainwashed.’

On Xenu, Donna came out, guns blazing: ‘It’s all made up, utter space garbage.’

Stop there. Three members of the Church’s Holy Order, Tommy Davis, Mike Rinder and Bob Keenan had all denied the existence of Xenu; Mike had declined to discuss Xenu; Donna said, effectively, that it was bad science fiction. Who to believe?

The 1987 Panorama ‘
The Road to Total Freedom?
’ (available on YouTube) says followers of the Church of Scientology go through a series of levels to become an Operating Thetan. When you get to Operating Thetan Level III – OT3 – you cross through ‘The Wall of Fire’ and learn the great mystery at the heart of Scientology, that it is secretly engaged in an endless war against a space alien Satan. The 1987 Panorama depicted an animated cartoon treatment of Scientology’s core cosmology. Hubbard, the BBC reported, wrote that seventy five million years ago Lord Xenu, the head of the Galactic Confederacy, brought life-forms called Thetans to planet Earth and blew them up in volcanoes with hydrogen bombs. Humanity’s wretchedness is due to our being infected with the souls of the dead Thetans.

Ex-Scientologists maintain that Xenu is part of Scientology’s Holy Writ. They say the exploding volcano that illustrates L Ron’s great work, Dianetics, is a cunning reference to this great secret. They say that if you ask a Scientologist about Xenu, they can’t tell you because the truth could kill you. Sceptics who think the Church is a con trick are, in fact, brainwashed by Xenu. They are Suppressive Persons, to be feared and attacked. The Xenu thing is, to some, an extraordinarily powerful narrative that has consumed the lives of thousands and thousands of people. To others, it’s bad science fiction.

Panorama in 1987 depicted Xenu as a bald cove, boasting a sinister goatee, heavy black eyebrows and a silvery jacket with shoulder pads so sharp they could poke your eye out. Xenu looks like a cross between Emperor Ming The Merciless in
Flash Gordon
and The Hood in
Thunderbirds
. It looks like, er, bad science fiction.

The Xenu story, critics say, is only secret because it is a clever way of squeezing money out of people. They only learn the great secret after spending years studying and paying for Scientology’s lessons, which do not come cheap. The critics say this makes Scientology less like a religion and more like a lobster pot – in that you are tempted by theological bait but that it is not fully revealed to you until you have entered so deep you are well and truly trapped in the pot. Ex-Scientologists insist that that the believing Scientologists were lying to me, out of their own peculiar sense of necessity.

Perhaps Tommy, Mike Rinder and Fireman Bob had no choice. If you believe in Scientology and confirm Xenu to the uninitiated, you place them in grave danger.

Enter a Church – Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or Coptic – and they will tell you that they believe that ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.’ Enter a mosque and they will tell you: ‘Follow the teachings of the Prophet.’ Enter a synagogue: ‘Marry a nice Jewish girl/boy and don’t eat bacon sandwiches.’ Enter a Church of Scientology Org and no-one will tell you about the space alien Satan they’re fighting. Xenu is a logic bomb inside the Church of Scientology’s claim to be treated just like any other religion. A ‘religion’ that hides its core belief from the world is not a religion because a true religion must be open about itself to all. That is the essence of the British test set by the Charity Commissioners in London, and one the Church of Scientology fails.

Mike Henderson refused to discuss Xenu, whereas Donna was happy to spill the beans. Mike’s position was, in some ways, the more telling: he still felt under an unbreakable mental bond to a thing he no longer belonged to; and that bond over-rode his natural courtesy to explain Scientology to us. The split over Xenu between Donna and Mike seemed natural and honest and indicated at least the possibility that if a believing Scientologist denied Xenu to us they were doing so in the service of humanity’s higher good, and that trumps any obligation to tell anyone from the ordinary world the truth.

Truth to tell, my mind at that moment was stumbling towards the distant glimmer of this observation. The most striking thing back then was the chasm between the two camps: Xenu was nonsense, said the Church officials; Xenu was real but garbage, said Donna the heretic and, the Church says, extortionist. None of this is easy to get your head round.

Let’s think about it in a slightly different way. Remember this: ‘They peel them with their metal knives, boil them for twenty of their minutes, then they smash them all to bits’. The words of the spindly-bodied, big-headed, metallic-voiced cackling Smash Martians from the 1974 advert for instant mash potato in the UK. Imagine creating a religion out of the Smash Martians. As they are to earthlings, so adepts of the Church of Scientology are to simple, earthbound humanity. ‘They are clearly a most primitive people,’ as the Leader of the Smash Martians puts it. But imagine this: the Smash Martians are real, and the rest of us have been brainwashed into thinking they’re just a silly joke in an ad campaign. But really they are just a silly joke in an ad campaign and the people who believe in the Smash Martians are crazy. Try and hold both propositions in your head.

We moved on from the Church’s somewhat tricky cosmology to how people are treated inside the Sea Org. Donna set out the gap between the high theology of the ‘religion’ and the human reality. Sea Org members are encouraged to travel on buses from the accommodation to FLAG. The buses are ‘grossly overcrowded, just horrible, there is no room to sit. Now these are Sea Org members, Operating Thetans, these higher beings. When the bus comes, it suddenly turns into a madhouse, like a bunch of stray dogs they just go crazy clawing to get on the bus.’ If you don’t fight, you will miss the bus and get into trouble for being late, she said.

Mike said, ‘You have the smiley face experts who handle the celebrities. Tommy Davis is part of that crew, to make sure that Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, get the best treatment. They hold elevators for them, they never have to wait for anything. They get the top level of smiley face Scientology treatment. And the only time I ever saw that as a public Scientologist, was the more money I had available, or the higher the credit limit was on my credit cards, the more smiley face I got. And then I figured it out that the smiley face is dependent on your status as a celebrity, or how much money you are worth.’

Mike spent 34 years inside the Church. Why stay so long? ‘It becomes like a carrot attached to a donkey by a stick, out in front. You just keep chasing the carrot. And every time you take another two or three steps it costs you another hundred thousand dollars.’