Scientology-- Joke's-On-You-Cult Or Dangerous Criminal Conspiracy?

Unlike the shady Church of Scientology, Republican Congressman Charles William Boustany, Jr of Lafayette, Louisiana has never been lampooned on South Park. He should be. The right-wing loon and ex-medical doctor drowning in malpractice suits, who was just reelected for the 4th time (running unopposed), once attempted to buy an English title of nobility. He shelled out $18,500 to a couple of hucksters hawking take Lordships to naive and grandiose Americans. Canadian film industry legend Paul Haggis shelled out a lot more to buy the Scientologistic equivalent of a lordship before he woke up and quit the fraudulent-- and very dangerous-- pseudo "church."

A winner of an Emmy (for thirtysomething), a Golden Globe (for Crash) and three Oscars (for Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and Letters From Iwo Jima, Haggis is an A-list screenwriter, director and producer. He was also an active member of the Scientology Cult for 35 years, leaving as an Operating Thetan VII (which costs between $300,000 and half a million dollars in "donations"-- a lot more than Lord Boustany paid for his fake title), because of an argument involving the cult's refusal to take a position against California's homophobic Proposition 8. Tuesday he told the Washington Post in regard to the insidious nature of the cult that "These people have long memories. My bet is that, within two years, you're going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church." And that brings us to the must-read new issue of The New Yorker, which broke the story about the acrimonious parting on the ways between Haggis and the powerful and dangerous cult that dominates Hollywood far more than the Catholic Church dominates the rest of L.A.

In L.A. you could drive around some areas and get the idea the Scientology Cult is as powerful here as Mormons are in Salt Lake City. I mean it. And they have a unique way of penetrating the entertainment business here. They put up open calls for actors to be in ads or films and then they badge them into joining the cult to get ahead in the Biz. But Haggis isn't from L.A. originally but from London, Ontario. He was on his way to a record store one day when a Scientology recruiter accosted him on the street.

“You have a mind,” the man said. “This is the owner’s manual.” The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, “Give me two dollars.” The book was “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, Dianetics had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million.

Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”

“Take me there,” Haggis said to Logan.

Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn’t bother him. In fact, he said, “it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don’t understand.” When he arrived at the church’s headquarters, he recalled, “it didn’t look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworth’s.”

At the time, Haggis and Gettas [his girlfriend] were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. “It was pitched to me as applied philosophy,” Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.

The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan—an immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as “the source” of the religion. Hubbard’s writings offer a “technology” of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides “the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality.” A church publication declares, “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.” Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. “As Scientologists in all walks of life will attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities.”

In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an affiliated publication urged Scientologists to cultivate celebrities: “It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it.” At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era, at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and ambitious. The actress Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas in 1970, during her sophomore year, to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for cocaine. “Without Scientology, I would be dead,” she has said.

In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, The Devil’s Rain, in Durango, Mexico, when an actress on the set gave him a copy of Dianetics. “My career immediately took off,” he told a church publication. “Scientology put me into the big time.” The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors “make it in the industry.”

...Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading Dianetics; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. “Most of Hollywood went through that class,” Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions “about life, people, and behavior,” and said that Katselas “said some things in class that were really smart.” Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. “I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works.’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”

Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology “recruited a ton of kids out of that school.” Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas’s tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. “You see a lot of people you know from TV,” Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. “When you started off, they weren’t really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse’s levels Scientology became more of a focus,” he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers... Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.

...[A]sked why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged Haggis said, “I identify with the underdog. I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”

...“There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something I’d never experienced—all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join.”

Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some people’s I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964.

...[Haggis:] “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.” But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material he’d already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the church’s claims. Haggis admits, “I was looking forward to enhanced abilities.” Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high.

Just like any other two-bit huckerism. Except this one has been spectacularly successful since it was first cooked up in 1952. Although the U.S., where there are around 25,000 believers, buys into it as a tax-exempt "religion," the cult is simply treated as another money-grubbing cult preying on the weak-minded in most of the world, including the U.K., France, Canada, Belgium, Israel, Mexico and Germany. It's pretty perfect for L.A. though, where the weak minded think the world revolves around them because they escaped whatever frozen hellhole they come from to the warm, balmy weather.