A recent campaign in Dublin advertised courses run by the Scientology movement. Members past and present tell about their experiences of the organisation.
Does it bring the promised prosperity, intelligence and
freedom, or simply exploit the vulnerable?
‘WHEN JOB
SECURITY turns into insecurity,” ran a recent ad on the Dart, in Dublin,
“attend a course in Scientology.”
The accompanying photographs feature
men and women looking stressed or dejected.
The course advertised was in
“personal efficiency”, cost €45 and promised to “increase ability,
competence and lasting security at work”.
When the posters
appeared, complaints and defamatory graffiti materialised swiftly.
The
back-and-forth arguments about Scientology are constant: one side claims
they are exposing the truth; the other dismisses the detractors as
liars engaging in discriminatory behaviour.
Since forming, in
1953, Scientology has presented itself as an applied religious
philosophy that can bring prosperity, enhanced intelligence and
spiritual freedom.
The church’s founder, the late science-fiction writer
L Ron Hubbard, taught that people are immortal beings who have
forgotten their true nature.
Through a method of regressive
therapy known as auditing, practitioners aim to “clear” themselves of
traumatic memories known as “engrams”, which are carried over from past
lives and cause insecurities, irrational fears and psychosomatic
illnesses.
Scientology’s critics, however, see it as a money-making enterprise that exploits the vulnerable with cult-like practices.
This
weekend Scientology’s UK headquarters celebrated the centenary of
Hubbard’s birth with a gala event where celebrity members such as Tom
Cruise and John Travolta are expected – a measure of the religion’s
progress as the world’s fastest-growing religion.
Its opponents,
meanwhile, will gather at Scientology missions around the world, buoyed
by their belief the religion is struggling to survive in the face of
mounting criticism from former members.
Yet despite the fissure
between celebrity endorsements and controversial allegations,
Scientology still holds an appeal for people.
We spoke to past and
present practitioners to discover why they joined and why, in most
cases, they left.
John Duignan - Commanding officer, Scientology Missions International UK
John
Duignan’s 22 years as a Scientologist were bookended by mental
breakdown. After emigrating from Cork he was stopped in Stuttgart one
day in 1985 and persuaded to take a free personality test.
The results
indicated he desperately needed help, which he says was true. He had
felt vulnerable since his parents killed themselves, when he was 10.
Scientology seemed to offer a solution.
“I’ve realised I had quite
a messed-up childhood, which set me up for needing something like
that,” Duignan says.
“They were promising me fantastic things: to make
you permanently happy and healthy. For a depressed person that can be
quite appealing.”
Duignan says he was encouraged to take out bank
loans to pay for Scientology courses and disconnect from anyone critical
of the religion. Then something in him snapped.
“I was suicidal. I
haven’t been able to document this, but I feel it was induced in some
way. I came out of this breakdown as a fanatical Scientologist, and
that’s a fact. A mental filter had been broken. My ethos and culture was
based around my Irish Catholic upbringing, but that was completely
undermined. I now believed Scientology was the only way to save the
world.”
He began working at the Stuttgart mission in exchange for
course work and was later recruited to the Sea Organisation,
Scientology’s fraternal religious order. Its 6,000 members, some of whom
are children, sign billion-year commitment forms.
“It’s a
difficult organisation to leave,” says Duignan. “Everybody watches
everybody. All the bases have a perimeter of some form, and they are
locked, wired and under surveillance. If you wake up one night and
think, My God, what am I doing? you cannot walk out of the building.”
Working
16-hour days, 365 days a year, on Scientology operations in the US, the
UK, Africa, Canada and Australia, Duignan ascended the ranks.
“I had
become a real honorary bastard.”
The greater Duignan’s responsibilities,
the more trust he earned in his free time. He’d sneak away whenever
possible, doing independent voluntary work in deprived areas to see how
Scientology translated to the outside world. It didn’t stand up, he
believed.
Duignan began to develop doubts, believing the Scientology community was insular and rife with double standards.
The
church discourages independent inquiry on the grounds that it hampers
progress along the Bridge to Total Freedom, the religion’s ladder to
enlightenment.
Revelations are made progressively through courses, the
cost of which can add up to more than €300,000.
Many former
Scientologists cite their first delinquent internet search as a jarring
experience.
Duignan began reading “earth-shattering” accounts of former
members who had reached the top only to grow disillusioned, finding
troubling discrepancies between Hubbard’s church biography and his
medical and military records.
At 42, Duignan felt he should have
been married with children and a career. Instead he was “a ghost” with
no money, no qualifications or transferrable skills, no state
entitlements and no way of relating to “wogs” – non-Scientologists.
He
says he couldn’t simply walk away, or “blow”, in Scientology
terminology.
He had been on security operations to forcibly bring back
defectors and knew what to expect.
“I was on the run,” he says gently.
“I realised that psychologically I was not going to be able to keep this
up.”
Although Scientologists were staked outside his family home,
in Cork, Duignan managed to trick them into thinking he was in
Birmingham and made it clear that any attempts to bring him back would
be futile.
Four years on he says intensive counselling and the ability
to attend college as a mature student have helped him rebuild his life.
“That
was so crucial,” he says. “I was quite ignorant after 22 years; the
whole world outside of Scientology was scary. Even if I don’t get a job
after this I’ve still got a good education and a sense of hope.”
Mike Rinder - Former chief spokesman for Scientology and head of its office of special affairs
Not
long ago, when former members of Scientology spoke out it was Mike
Rinder’s job to deny, discredit and neutralise their claims, a process
known as “dead agenting”.
In 2007 that role involved following the
BBC reporter John Sweeney, who was then filming an edition of Panorama
about the religion.
Sweeney had been inquiring about allegations that
Scientology’s ecclesiastical leader, David Miscavige, had physically
assaulted people within the church.
Although Rinder ensured the
allegations were omitted from the programme, Miscavige believed he
should have stopped the edition from airing.
As punishment Rinder was
told to report for ditch- digging duty at Scientology’s UK base, in
Sussex.
Instead he disappeared.
“I literally walked out the door
with my briefcase, which was all I had,” he says. “I got a deluge of
messages on my BlackBerry. ‘Where are you? We need to talk. We need to
talk.’ I just ignored them all. They didn’t know where to find me.”
Rinder
believed Scientology had strayed from the church he had known since the
age of six, that it was being abused to make money and further the
power of Miscavige, who succeeded Hubbard after the writer’s death, in
1986.
Though Rinder still had faith in Scientology, he knew leaving
would mean excommunication from his family, who remain in the church,
and being automatically declared a “suppressive person”, an arcane
Scientology term indicating an enemy of Scientology or someone who
“opposes betterment activity”.
Asked how he would compare his life
before and after Scientology, Rinder goes silent. There’s a forced
hiccup-like sound that slowly, unnervingly breaks into laughter.
“That’s
a leading question,” he says firmly.
Rinder has spoken out only a
handful of times since defecting from Scientology, where he specialised
in handling journalists (who are not only “suppressive persons” but
also “merchants of chaos”).
After another pause he answers.
“Night and
day,” he says. “I went from incredible restrictions on what I could do,
say and think to no outside restrictions.”
He acknowledges that
not everyone finds the adjustment easy.
“I think probably the biggest
difficulty people have is getting out of their minds the ingrained
pattern of thinking about how to look at things,” he says.
“They become
infiltrated with this idea that you can’t criticise or do anything about
what’s happening internally.”
Now an independent Scientologist,
Rinder says he was required to issue categorical denials in order to
protect the name of Scientology.
“The problem is that there is no other
way you can seek to disprove something that’s true.”
As a result, he
says, deception and violence became the accepted ways of doing things
within the church.
“There are things I look back on that I am not proud
of, and those sorts of things are some of them.”
He does not
regret being a Scientologist, however, and still swears by its
teachings.
But there is something he wouldn’t hesitate to say to other
Scientologists, including his own family, given the opportunity: “Wake
up and smell the coffee.”
Gabrielle Wynne - Former staff member at the Scientology mission in Dublin
It
started with a social-studies assignment for college. Gabrielle Wynne
visited the Dublin Scientology mission, asked some questions and was
intrigued enough to do some introductory courses at home.
“I got a lot
from them. I thought, It can only get better from here.”
Within
months Wynne was asked to join the staff. But there was a problem: her
habit of contracting colds and flu was interpreted by her colleagues as a
symptom of being “suppressed”.
When asked if she was close to anyone
who might disagree with Scientology, she admitted her mother had
misgivings.
Wynne was urged to disconnect from her mother, but she
refused.
Instead she was told to write her mother a letter, which was
edited by the ethics officer, committing herself to the religion.
“She
just thought it was weird,” says Wynne. “Me and my mam can talk about
anything. She knew that wouldn’t be me.”
Learning and making
friends at the mission were enough to make Wynne overlook what she now
believes were warning signs, such as the day a colleague suggested she
exploit a friend’s insecurities to bring her in for auditing.
When she
asked why they weren’t reaching out to homeless people, she says, the
reply was, “Because they can’t afford it.”
Sitting in a cafe, the
bubbly 22-year-old says that she was promised a salary but that, in all
her time of cleaning, cold-calling, auditing others and pushing flyers
through letter boxes, there wasn’t one.
“I was handed a little envelope
with a €2 coin in it. I got my bus home that night and never got paid
anything else.”
Having already spent €3,000 on Scientology, Wynne
needed to work full time elsewhere, but leaving the staff meant being
billed for €1,000 in “freeloader debt”.
After mounting pressure to join Sea Organisation, take out bank loans and disconnect from her mother, Wynne left last summer.
She
felt lied to.
Initially they had assured her that people were never
urged to disconnect from friends or family, that it was “black PR”.
They
had also repeatedly denied the existence of what Wynne refers to as
“the Xenu thing”, part of a confidential scripture revealed at Operating
Thetan III level that Hubbard described as a space opera.
(Scientology
postulates that it can be fatal if discovered prematurely.)
Yet she had
seen a YouTube video of the church’s current spokesperson confirming it.
“There
were so many witnesses and ex-members sharing things. I thought, They
can’t all be lying. I was told they were all just suppressive people . .
. It was never Scientology. It was always everyone else’s problem.”
Pete Griffiths - Anti-Scientology protestor
Before
she began to have doubts Wynne would engage protestors in “friendly
arguments”, trying to convince them they had it wrong.
One of them was
Pete Griffiths, a burly 57-year-old who offers support to former
Scientologists. Sitting by Wynne’s side, he recalls his journey through
Scientology with self-deprecating panache.
Griffiths ran a mission
in Cumbria, in northern England, until his weekly figures petered out.
By the time he moved to Westport, in 1998, he planned to return to
Scientology once his children were grown and he could better afford it.
It wasn’t until he heard of a protest in 2008 that he looked into
Scientology online and had a “penny-dropping moment”.
“From 1987
to 2008 the thought control was all in place,” he says. “Then a lengthy
unravelling process began. I got so angry that I burned any Scientology
stuff I had lying around in a bonfire. I couldn’t look at it any more.
The sense of betrayal is just incredible. The clues are all there, but
you don’t see them.”
Griffiths maintains, like everyone
interviewed for this article, that Scientologists are generally good,
well-intentioned people who can’t detect flaws with how Scientology is
run.
People can believe whatever they want, he says, but they should
also feel free to criticise, research or articulate doubt. But nobody
can be talked out of Scientology, he adds.
“It has to come from them.”
And
so it was with Wynne, who now joins Griffiths and other former
Scientologists on the other side of Abbey Street during monthly protests
organised by the online activist group Anonymous, whose members the
church regards as cyberterrorists.
“The point of me protesting is
to say, ‘Remember me?’ ” she says. “I’m not a bad person. I’m just
asking, Why would you have to remortgage your house for a religion?
Religion should be free.”
John McGhee - Three years in Scientology
John
McGhee says the stigma surrounding Scientology piqued his interest.
If
it delivered the self-betterment it promised, he reasoned, it seemed
like a sound investment.
“I walked in off the street and said, ‘Give me
all you have.’ ”
Hunched over a table in a quiet pub, his eyebrows
framing an intense gaze, the 33-year-old embalmer spends 90 minutes
detailing every course, price and promise of his time in Scientology.
He
barely contains his frustration at what he sees as pay-as-you-go
revelations that lead nowhere.
“They say if it’s not working it’s
something you’re doing, and they put you in auditing for that at your
expense.”
McGhee admits there was an addictive quality to working
up the “Bridge to Total Freedom”, the movement’s series of steps to
enlightenment (see panel), so much so that he was prepared to ignore
things he didn’t agree with.
“At events or course completions they’d
stand up and applaud Hubbard’s picture. I could never do it. Even as I
went deeper into Scientology I never thought that was okay.”
Part
of the processing, McGhee says, included confessing “overts and
withholds” – sins and secrets – which are kept on file, while using an
electropsychometer.
“The e-meter works like a crude lie detector. They
can tell if you’re holding anything in, and they can get it out of you.”
He recalls TRs, or training regimes, where he had to stare into someone’s eyes for four hours.
“I went out of my head,” he says.
Then
there was an auditing session at which, he claims, a supervisor
chastised McGhee’s friend for analysing traumatic childhood events in
the presence of children.
“Firstly, there shouldn’t have been kids
there. But the disruption drove him into catatonia. From that night on
he changed. We went into a session the next day and the next day, but he
wasn’t coming out of it. They predicted he’d need four or five grand’s
worth [of life repair]. That was an eye-opener. They wouldn’t fix that
man. They left him in such a state because they wanted money first. He
couldn’t afford it. He’s still in that state to this day.”
McGhee
lost interest at that point.
By mid 2009 he had spent €10,500 and was
researching Scientology every night in dismay.
Recently he visited a
friend who allegedly paid €50,000 for his bridge after just a day as a
Scientologist, but there was nobody home.
The neighbour said he’d packed
up.
McGhee looked up to the box room and saw the same Hubbard lectures
that he had bought for €1,800 sitting on the shelf, and drew his own
conclusion.
Although he spent four nights and a day at the mission
every week, he couldn’t relate to the dedication required to spend
money he didn’t have.
McGhee claims he regularly lent cash to senior
members for food and was once accompanied to an ATM to prove he didn’t
have more.
He says the people around him were running up debts, losing
their temper and falling ill – the opposite of what he was promised.
But
he couldn’t get anyone to see it that way, he says, and eventually
stopped questioning it.
“They honestly believe they’re on to a
good thing and it’s more important than their children or mothers and
fathers. They think they can clear the planet of ‘reactive minds’, but
they can’t even do it in the mission. There are lads there 20 years
without a penny to their name who glorify Scientology. And I think, What
did it actually do for you?”
The Irish Scientology movement
Gerard
Ryan, spokesman for the Church of Scientology in Dublin, says the only
way to measure Scientology’s effectiveness is through a fundamental
tenet of L Ron Hubbard, its founder: what’s true for you is what you
observe to be true.
If you’re not seeing a return on something
you’re putting time and effort into, he says, of course you’re not going
to continue with it.
His wife, for example, tried a few courses and
decided it wasn’t for her.
“The vast majority of people who would
leave the church never really joined the church in the first place, ie
they come in, try it, it’s not for them and they go. That would be,
overwhelmingly, most people.”
Scientology was introduced to
Ireland when Hubbard established a Dublin mission, at 69 Merrion Square,
in 1958.
It was there that Hubbard, who would have turned 100 last
weekend, first delivered the personal-efficiency course that Scientology
recently began advertising on the Dart line.
The school closed in the early 1960s, but Scientology continued to be practised in Ireland.
In
1986 a Limerick man named John Keane began a mission from his home, and
by the early 1990s Scientology had established itself at a base on
Middle Abbey Street in Dublin.
Since then the faith has seen modest
growth in Ireland, says Ryan, with “only a few hundred Scientologists of
varying degrees of commitment”.
Ryan, who is now 52, found a second-hand copy of
Dianetics in London in the late 1980s. Its lessons aided his
architecture studies, he says, and later in his career helped him
maintain his integrity when unethical opportunities arose in the
construction industry.
But he has never attained “clear” status –
the fundamental goal in Scientology.
“I’ve been a bit of a laggard in
that respect,” he says with a laugh. “I spend most of my time studying
it. I’m more of a philosophical bent.”
Scientology’s utopian aim
is to “clear the planet”, a point at which everyone has cleared
themselves of “engrams”, the scars of painful events normally
inaccessible to the conscious mind.
The complexity and duration of
the training involved mean Irish Scientologists aiming to reach clear
status or above are required to travel to the UK or the US.
Twenty or 30
members have done this, Ryan says, though it would cost “many thousands
of euro” to reach the top level, Operating Thetan VIII, which must be
studied at sea.
One member to have achieved this status is 90-year-old Bernard Duffy, who was an original pupil of Hubbard in Dublin.
Although
Ryan says he understands “the broad thrust” of what the higher levels
involve, he can neither attest to the heightened abilities they are said
to induce, such as telepathy and out-of-body experiences, nor dispel
people’s misgivings with those teachings.
“What can I say? I don’t
know,” he says. “I’ve personally never witnessed any of these alleged
abilities. I can only go on my personal experience, and my personal
experience of Scientology is pretty good.”
He says Scientologists
who have reached the higher levels but struggle with health, finances
and temperament are not indictments of the religion’s tangible benefits.
“If
I see some OT” – that is, Operating Thetan, indicating a Scientologist
who has gone beyond the clear level – “some guy who’s gone up high on
the levels and they’re not doing well in life, from my experience that
tells me something is wrong. Something has gone awry there. I would
actually seek to help the guy.
“I don’t make decisions about my
life based on another person’s experience, because that’s a second-hand
decision. If I try something in Scientology and it doesn’t work, if it’s
bad or crap and everything else, I will make my decision based upon
that experience.”
The Dublin mission participates in a yearly
competition to increase square footage, called the birthday game, which
it won last year after moving to a bigger premises on Middle Abbey
Street.
The mission is also effectively in competition with
missions in the UK, India and Pakistan to submit “up stats” – rising
figures – every week, though Ryan admits they struggle to reach their
targets.
About 10 per cent of the Dublin mission’s income goes to the
Church of Scientology, which has been unsuccessful in its attempts to
obtain tax-free, charitable status in Ireland.
Ryan gives little
credence to criticism of Scientology, explaining that it tends to be
either “unbelievable garbage” or personnel issues.
“If every single
thing they say about us is true, which is a laugh, that would not be one
fraction of the things that, say, China is doing to human rights or the
Catholic Church did in Ireland.”
For Ryan the fact that
Scientology has grown “from zero to millions” in the face of opposition
over the past 60 years shows that it clearly holds value in some
people’s lives.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he says. “Some people
have tried it and it doesn’t work for them. That’s a fact. It’s quite
clearly worked for an awful lot more.”
In numbers
More than 50,000 people have taken Scientology's personality test in Dublin.
Scientology has more than 9,000 churches, missions and affiliated groups in 165 countries.
92
million books by L Ron Hubbard and lectures on Dianetics and
Scientology have been distributed in the past decade.
Three million of
those have been placed in more than 150,000 libraries in 192 countries
since July 2007.
Scientology's properties increased from about 520,000 sq m in 2004 to more than 1.1 million sq m in 2010.
The Scientology Volunteer Ministers programme has aided more than than 175 disaster-relief efforts worldwide.
Scientology supports drug-rehabilitation programmes in more than 45 countries.
Hubbard's works have been translated into 71 languages, a Guinness World Record.