The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  ‘We’re filming each other…’ I replied, unhelpfully.

  ‘So who’s staying here? I guess for the rest if you want to get a room… otherwise you might want to get going.’

  Tommy and Mike started backing off into the night: ‘That’s fine we don’t want to cause any trouble…’

  Tommy shook the police officer’s hand, and they were gone.

  The next morning we discovered that the Church was opening a new Org in Plant City, an hour’s drive east of Clearwater. We thought we would pop along and see the opening for ourselves. Scientology’s favourite colour is uranium yellow – and there was a sea of yellow bunting and tents and a lot of people milling around, none of whom would talk to us and one, two, three Scientology camera people who filmed us. After a knife-slash of time, a PR lady called Pat Harney found us. I wanted to go into the new Org and look around. Would that be possible?

  ‘No,’ Pat said firmly but sweetly, ‘but you can come over here with me.’

  Why no?

  ‘From all the reports I’ve heard, you haven’t exactly been very friendly.’

  I told her I was a pussycat. Nothing doing. After a fair while Mole’s face split into two halves, horizontally. I couldn’t work out why she was so happy, but she motioned behind my back. I turned around to see Tommy, looking extremely natty in dark sunglasses. He’d changed his tie, swapping the dark one he’d worn the previous night for a striped black and white number.

  ‘Hello Tommy!’ I squeaked. ‘How are you? I was just wondering where you were, and there you are, fantastic. How did you know we were here?’

  ‘I actually didn’t, we have the opening here so I was going to that.’

  ‘Very good,’ I replied. (By the way, if you shoot me in the foot, I would say: ‘Very good.’ It’s a phrase I use when I mean the exact opposite.)

  Yackety-yack, we went, yackety-yack. Tommy said that of course the Church would have offered us access to Plant City had we asked the previous night. I replied, words to the effect that it might have slipped my mind after he turned up at the hotel at midnight, and ‘that was rather…’

  …Clickerty-clack, clackerty-click. An enormously long goods train thundered by. What was odd was that both Tommy and I knew there was no point in saying anything to each other because the sound would be too poor quality for our respective audiences: for me, the BBC’s viewers, for Tommy, who knew? Clackerty-click… I’ve always wanted to stow away on an American goods train and see where I’d end up – Hoboken? Somewhere in Alaska? – but now wasn’t the time. Still, I cannot see a good trains in America without marvelling at the country’s immensity. Clickerty-clack, clickerty-clack, clickerty-clack, into the distance…

  ‘…creepy,’ I finished.

  ‘Not nearly as creepy,’ answered Tommy, as showing up at LRH’s birthday event and asking to interview the Leader.’

  Who is the creepiest? That is the question. We tossed that around for a bit. I mentioned their conditions for access, including no mention of the word ‘cult’. He called me: ‘disingenuous’, ‘shocking’ and ‘utterly unprofessional’. He talked about them being open; I challenged his attack on the meaning of words.

  ‘I have a real problem with your use of the English language,’ I said. ‘You say you are open and everywhere we go the doors are closed: “you are not coming in.” But what does happen is, we have another silent gentleman here filming us.’

  I pointed to a Scientology cameraman, doing exactly that. Tommy replied: ‘We are absolutely filming it because you don’t know how to conduct yourself. We are actually documenting your bias and all the things that you are doing. You are in violation of OfCom’ – the British agency that controls broadcasting standards – ‘and your broadcasting guidelines because of how you are conducting yourselves and the unprofessionalism and how rude it is. And we have a world wide religious movement, millions of members…’

  On and on we went, on and on. Donna and Mike, space aliens, the cult-word – I fired at him. Notoriety seekers, ignorance, bigotry – he fired back. The only worry was would we run out of tape? Would Bill’s battery run flat? We carried on clobbering each other like the Black Knight and his adversary in Monty Python And the Holy Grail. And then Tommy said something rather troubling.

  ‘Well, I give the little badge of honour for you. I know where you live.’

  ‘What do you mean you know where I live?’

  ‘Like I know where you reside as a person. Your… your basis of… I don’t know where your house is, no, I don’t know where your house is. I have no interest in knowing where your house is.’

  He seemed to be doubling back on what he had just said, as if he had said it to taunt me, then realised that it was a foolish own-goal.

  Did the Church of Scientology know where I lived? A few weeks later, after we had returned to London, one of my neighbours in Wimbledon, Anne Layther, told me that her 11-year-old son answered the door to a stranger. She described him to me as blond, very well-spoken Englishman, 5’7”, thin. He was carrying a rucksack and wearing a cap and struck Anne as ‘odd’. He said that he was looking for John Sweeney. Anne said she gestured vaguely that I lived in that direction. He said something like: ‘I’ve just come from there. Do you know if he’s away?’ He went away and returned ten minutes later, saying: ‘I’ve got a package for him.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Anne asked.

  A courier, he said, but he struck Anne as being not right, too posh, for that kind of job. He said the package was for ‘John Sweeney of the BBC.’ Anne offered to take the package for him but he said he needed to check with his boss. Anne went out to her back garden and called out to me. I came out into our back garden. I had been home the whole time, but the mystery courier with his package looking for me had never thought to knock on my door. How very odd.

  Back at Plant City, Tommy moved away from where I lived to what he called my partially unveiled attack on his religion, my disingenuousness and my twisting of what he was telling me.

  ‘It is wholly absurd,’ I replied. ‘The question is: is your organisation an honest and open organization? Can the word of the Church of Scientology be trusted? And the answer is well they are very strange. They are actually a little bit creepy because they come along to my hotel…’

  ‘I am creepy?’ asked Tommy, incredulous.

  ‘As I said…’

  ‘I am strange and creepy?’ Tommy’s incredulity thickened like gravy after stirring.

  ‘You came to my hotel at midnight, that’s creepy.’

  ‘People who sit down with you and talk to you about my religious belief is something like…’

  Ding-Ding, Round Nine.

  ‘But some people say,’ I said, ‘it is a sinister cult. Now L Ron Hubbard? Some people say he is a fantasist and a liar.’

  This got to Tommy. ‘I would just like…I would just like to, and I hope somebody is shooting this, OK, good…’

  We were heading for a video shoot-out in the OK Corral. I counted five cameras: Bill with his big camera, Mole with a second smaller one, just in case, and three separate Scientology cameras. I set out to list them: ‘To be fair, there is one camera from the BBC, one camera from your…’

  ‘Now you listen to me for a second,’ snapped Tommy, his anger rising by the second, his face etched with aggression, my face reflected in his dark glasses.

  ‘You have no right whatsoever to say what and what isn’t a religion. The constitution of the United States of America guarantees one’s right to practice and believe freely in this country. And the definition of religion is very clear, and it is not defined by John Sweeney. And for you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory, so offensive and so bigoted – and the reason you keep repeating it is because you wanted to get a reaction like you are getting right now. Well buddy, you got it, right here, right now. I am angry. Real angry.’

  We were nose to nose. Had I puckered my lips I could have kissed him. He announced that we were done.

&
nbsp; ‘We are not done,’ I said. From the age of five to ten I lived in Manchester. While riled, my vowel sounds flatten. ‘We are not done,’ I repeated, as if an extra on Coronation Street, up for a fight with Tony Gordon.

  ‘If you use that term one more time about my religion…’

  ‘We are not done because…’

  ‘I can’t be responsible for my actions…’

  ‘Now my friend it is your turn to listen to me. I am a British subject, not an American citizen and in my country we have freedom of speech. We have a freedom to speak and we have exercised that freedom for centuries. And, if people say to me that they think your…what you claim to be a religion is in fact a cult, I have a right to report that. I have got a right to report that Tommy…’

  He trotted away, past a road works thingy, and jogged across the main road. I lumbered after him, a rhinoceros picking up speed. He called me a bigot, four, five times. That bounced off the rhino’s hide. I was holding up, so far.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One man against the crowd

  That afternoon we headed back to Scientology town – Clearwater – to meet one man who stood apart from L Ron’s crowd. He was a fruitcake, a loner, a weirdo and a brave man, all rolled into one. His name was Shawn Lonsdale. Originally from New England, Shawn had been in the US Navy and while still a youngish man he had settled in Clearwater. Years before, he’d been caught by the police having consenting sex with men. Later, at a local council meeting, he had clashed with a Scientologist and suddenly they were on his case.

  People who don’t like Scientology leave Clearwater. For example, in the late nineties Patricia Greenway, the Vice President of the Totally Fun Company, an amusement park design firm, aired her reasons for the company quitting town: ‘The downtown area has taken on the look and feel of a military base. The presence of thousands of uniformed Scientologists and their “security police” swarming the downtown area is oppressive.’

  Shawn was different. He stayed, and took them on, single-handed, and that is, by itself, strange. He got himself a video camera and spent weeks filming Scientologists for a slot on the local cable TV network.

  ‘Cult Watch’ – Shawn’s show – is cult cult viewing, beyond surreal. What you see is fuzzy, muddy video. The production values are, in contrast to those of the Church, dire. The shots are wobbly, the focus soggy, the sound quality poor. But the content is weirdly gripping. You watch him filming them filming him, close-ups of his feet, then their camera, a big lens, a finger or two of the Scientology camera person, no sound apart from the whirr and odd click from the two cameras staring at each other, recording, recording, recording. This goes on for minute after minute after minute and every second that passes the tension notches up. There is no doubting Shawn’s dogged persistence, and the essential strangeness of what he was capturing. He got to film what we didn’t see when we went out filming with Donna and Mike: a robotic procession of white-shirted, dark tied young men and women marching from one Scientology base in downtown Clearwater to another, getting on and off buses. You see dozens and dozens of them. If they are studying to become Operating Thetans, they appear to be a very strange species of students. Everyone conforms. It is like watching not a student body but a hive. Creepy with a capital C.

  We tracked Shawn down to a rented apartment in a fly-blown part of town, decorated, if that is the right word, with a collection of green space alien dolls featuring their signature over-large, ovaloid eyeballs. He was a fit, lean, wiry man, slow speaking. He had a twinkle in his voice. We drove him downtown some blocks looking for a good place to film the interview and found a great spot on the top of a municipal car park. Behind us we had a view of the Fort Harrison hotel, one of their major complexes. That meant they had a view of us, but we didn’t care.

  When filming them, Shawn would stick up a cardboard sign on his white 1991 Oldsmobile: ‘OT I-VIII for free at xenu.net.’ That website tells the story of the space alien Satan for free. The Church might say that what Shawn did was blasphemous. Cynics might add that his sign could have cost the Church, if not millions, then several hundred thousand dollars, in lost fees, by short-circuiting the lengthy, step-by-step ascent to the state of grace where you can find out about the Emperor Ming The Merciless lookalike, Xenu. It should come as no surprise to realise that the Church did not like Shawn one little bit. Back in 2006, Ben Shaw, one of their spokesman, said: ‘He is crazy, utterly crazy. He has no redeeming value to anyone anywhere.’

  One simple rule of TV journalism: be scrupulously fair to people who make life difficult for you; and with the people who are happy to help you, knock them over the head with a cricket bat, or, probably better, the verbal equivalent thereof. So my opening question to Shawn did not beat about the bush.

  ‘You are a social outcast, a menace, a fruitcake, a nutter. Why would Scientology make those kinds of suggestions about you?’

  Pay attention to this question. It pops up later, a kind of a sonic boom boomerang.

  ‘The only thing I can fathom,’ replied Shawn, ‘is that it is their only hope of trying to embarrass me into stopping doing what I am doing. They try to paint you as crazy, as some sort of social outcast, if you will, so that nobody will listen to you, nobody will take you seriously. It is a common trend to do that.’

  Shawn explained his methodology: ‘I wanted to get their take on us. And the only way to do that, since nobody would talk to me or nobody would respond to any of my requests for interviews, was to just go up and start filming them. Their events, where they were coming and going, halls or classes down town which is the only time the public sees them. And they took serious offence.’

  How do they register that offence?

  ‘It is almost like they have a mind break. If there is something that they can’t handle effectively, something happens.’

  Shawn explained that he had been filming on the street for three weeks solid when a member of the Church approached him. Shawn said he started yelling obscenities, yelling that he was Nazi, asking him why he didn’t go to the Baptist church and call them all a bunch of ‘n’ words or the Jewish Temple and call them all a bunch of xxxx. He pushed Shawn, who shoved him back, and they ended up scuffling. That was the extreme, said Shawn. ‘Usually, it is just pushing or trying to get to the camera to stop you from filming or cursing at you and verbally assaulting you.’

  I asked him about the sign on his Oldsmobile.

  ‘Xenu.net is one of the websites which reveals a lot of their upper level doctrine, OT I-VIII [Operating Thetan, level 1 – 8] for free, which is their higher levels, which costs the majority of the money that you will find they charge within Scientology. And all those are on the internet for free. And those were on my car downtown. The various levels [that is, OTs of Scientology] would walk around across the campus down here and see that on the car and I was hoping that they would wonder why they were paying so much money for it when it is free on the internet.’

  They say these are confidential scriptures.

  ‘If it is out, deal with it. We had to deal with the bible being out. Others had to deal with the Koran, the Torah, everything is out. I don’t know why you would not want somebody to read a religious scripture of yours especially if it had anything good to say in it.’

  What had Scientology done to Shawn?

  ‘It is more or less what they haven’t done. I was followed continuously for two months, followed by private investigators, followed by several vehicles which I was later able to track back to Scientology owned vehicles. I was yelled at down town numerous times, threatened with death. Cursed at by children in the presence of their parents. I would have never thought that I could stumble upon a scene that was so dramatically absent of peace and goodwill. But then again that seems to be the modus operandi when it comes to doing something that the Church doesn’t like. They all band together and act that way towards you.’

  What about work?

  Shawn got a job in a real estate company but that did not last for long
. ‘My boss was called down to Fort Harrison’ – the Church’s main complex in Clearwater – ‘by Pat Harney’ – the PR lady who had blocked me that very morning from going into the Plant City Org – ‘in an effort to try to get me to reveal my motives or stop what I was doing, piecing together footage for the television programme. And almost immediately after that our business went south. I was asked to leave, it was a financial impossibility for me to be there. After that I went to unemployment. There were several calls made saying that I was making money off the books when I wasn’t. It was anonymous phone call after anonymous phone call, to every place where I turned in an application, there was always somebody calling with a threat.’ He gave what he said was an example: ‘“I saw this gentleman in your business filling out an application, I know him to be a religious bigot. I will not shop there, my friends will not shop there if I find out that you have hired this individual…” I am a pervert or I am a criminal, something of that nature.’

  Shawn said that when the anonymous caller was challenged, ‘there was never an answer, there was always a hang-up. And I don’t know too many business owners that want to deal with that type of thing. And when you haven’t been hired yet it is very easy to pass your application to the garbage bin. So…’

  Because you are trouble?

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘What happened to accommodation…’

  I stopped stone dead.

  An SUV had suddenly shot up onto the top level of the car park. The door opened and a man got out, in a natty suit, dark glasses, white shirt, black and white striped tie, followed by a cameraman, and started walking towards us. The eerily bright Clearwater light half-blinded me. It was like a scene from the film, The Matrix, when the Agents in their corporate suits close in on Neo. Not quite believing the evidence of my own eyes, I squinted…