Inside Scientology

by Janet Reitman

  Scientology means different things to different people; simultaneously its essential qualities remain hidden from public view. This combination of flexibility and mystery has allowed church leaders to turn Scientology into whatever they want it to be, depending on time period and need. In the sixty-plus years since it was founded, Scientology has changed its image over and over through a savvy marketing strategy that has presented the church as forever new and improved and, in some cases, as transformed altogether. At no time was this more obvious, or necessary, than during the late 1970s and early 1980s when, fresh from the ignominy of Operation Snow White, Scientology needed to rebrand itself almost entirely.

  The Scientology name had been tarnished by scandal. And the product, which had been continuously refreshed by Hubbard during his twenty-five years at the helm, was beginning to stagnate, thanks to the Founder's increasing isolation. But the packaging, church officials realized, could still be vibrant. Which is how it came to be that Scientology was suddenly reimagined as a self-help movement.

  The 1970s, as the conservative journalist David Frum points out, have often been overlooked in favor of the far more colorful, and seemingly more influential, 1960s. But as he notes in his book How We Got Here, an engrossing analysis of the 1970s, it was those "strange feverish years" following the sixties, the years when the bottom seemed to drop out of America, and indeed, out of many parts of the world, that transformed U.S. society into the branded, self-obsessed, confessional, technologically efficient, widely overconfident yet deeply vulnerable place it is today. "They were a time of unease and despair, punctuated by disaster," according to Frum.

  This was the culture the Church of Scientology found itself in after L. Ron Hubbard went into hiding and David Miscavige, having never experienced the "wog world" in any substantive way, began his ascent to power. Jeff Hawkins, who'd joined Scientology at the peak of its hippy-dippy era, was now charged, as head of strategic marketing, with selling the church to a new generation. With the approval of L. Ron Hubbard, and with the help of outside consultants, including a former creative executive from the ad agency Chiat/Day, Hawkins set about devising a strategy that would remove the word Scientology altogether from many promotions and replace it with what he and others saw as a safer substitute: Dianetics. This term, having died a quiet death in the 1950s, was unfamiliar to the population at large, making it the perfect name for a product that could be shaped to fit the current cultural moment and, Hawkins hoped, signify a new beginning for the movement.

  To sell this new Dianetics, which was still Scientology, but with different packaging, Hawkins and his marketing team conducted national surveys. They discovered that what had worked in the 1960s and early 1970s—promoting Hubbard's ideas as a form of spiritual enlightenment, or alternatively, as rebellion against the status quo—would not work in the go-go 1980s. What might capture potential converts, they found, was promoting the philosophy as a form of self-improvement and, for those in need of it, "recovery" from the various indulgences of the past. This fit neatly with the entire premise of Dianetics, which had always been marketed as a set of techniques to increase physical and psychological health, self-confidence, and success.

  The pitch Hawkins came up with, a promotion that would ultimately put the book Dianetics on the New York Times Best-Seller List, was "Invest in Yourself." The campaign kicked off in 1982. Over the next five or six years, as leaders were purged and longtime members departed Scientology in disillusionment, tens of thousands of new people were drawn into it through books on Dianetics, self-improvement seminars, and one-on-one evangelism. One of these new converts was a smart, assertive, impressionable young woman named Lisa McPherson.

  Lisa was the younger of two children raised by Jim McPherson, an insurance salesman, and his wife, Fannie, a homemaker. Born in Dallas, Texas, she grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the northeastern side of the city, where she was a popular, diligent student and a member of the drill team. Lisa was also pretty, with wavy light brown hair, a curvaceous figure, and a vivacity that typically made her the center of attention. Acquaintances recalled her as "fearless" when it came to making friends, a person who could start a conversation with anybody.

  Lisa's outward joie de vivre masked a host of insecurities, however. As the daughter of alcoholics, she had endured a rocky childhood. Her mother often took her first drink at ten in the morning and continued imbibing throughout the day: more than once, Lisa would come home from school to find her mother passed out, sometimes wearing only her underwear. "I hated her for always being a drunk," Lisa later wrote.* But she rarely confronted her mother for fear of what she might do. Fannie was prone to drunken rages. "She let loose on me, not spanking but hitting," Lisa wrote.

  This abuse also traumatized Lisa's older brother, Steve, who committed suicide when he was sixteen. Lisa, then fourteen, was devastated, and turned to sex and drugs to mask her anguish. Over the next several years, Lisa led an accomplished double life: maintaining a good-girl exterior while drinking, smoking pot, and, by her own admission, sleeping with virtually anyone who asked, including the husband in a family that employed her as a babysitter.

  After high school, Lisa, who'd decided to skip college, went to work as a customer service representative at the Southwestern Bell phone company, where her natural effervescence made her a hit with both clients and co-workers. But she was still troubled and soon became involved with Don Boss, the owner of a Dallas sheet metal shop. They'd met in 1979, when Lisa was nineteen and Boss thirty-five. One month after they met, the couple eloped.

  Boss was violent and a heavy drinker, and Lisa soon realized she'd made a mistake. "They had a real rocky time," recalled her childhood friend Carol Hawk. "He was very abusive and I think at one point he tried to kill her and that's when she decided to divorce him." Nine weeks after marrying, Lisa divorced Don, but he remained in her life. She found it impossible to completely break away from him, and in the spring of 1982, Lisa agreed to marry him again.

  It was around that time that one of Lisa's co-workers began to talk to her about Dianetics, describing it as a "tool to improve your life" and urging Lisa to try it. Lisa latched onto the proposal. "I don't know why," she wrote later. "I just knew something about Scientology could save me from the mess I was in."

  Lisa paid a visit to the Scientology organization in Dallas, then known as the Mission of the Southwest and also called the Center for Personal Enhancement. It was small, with just a few hundred members, but they were a young and enthusiastic bunch. Melanie Stokes, who ran the mission through 1981, had created a positive environment; she described the membership as "a big life-coaching group." Every night brought new prospects: friends of current members and random young people who'd found out about Scientology or Dianetics from a street recruiter.

  During the late 1970s and early 1980s in Dallas, Scientologist "volunteer ministers," as proselytizers were called, handed out Dianetics leaflets and free personality tests at clubs, on college campuses, and in hospitals. Steve Hall, a Dallas Scientologist who would later work at the church's International Base, first found out about Scientology from a flier handed to him at a Rolling Stones concert. Hall wound up joining and was a regular at the mission in the early 1980s. Unlike the more regimented atmosphere at the Scientology orgs, the mission fostered a spirit of fun and experimentation. Nights and weekends were its busiest hours; free lectures and auditing demonstrations occurred frequently as did larger events like the annual Halloween party, which featured dancing, live music, and "plenty of beer," according to Hall. Among those who joined the mission were several members of a local rock band, some businesspeople, a scientist, students from Southern Methodist University and other local colleges, and many other kids in their twenties who, as Hall recalled, "just came to hang out. It was a happening place."

  Lisa McPherson fit right in. "She was a ball of fun," said Greg Barnes, who was Lisa's registrar in Dallas. "She was funny, she was exuberant, she was excited, she was humble—she was
a great person." But Lisa was also unaware of what Scientology would require of her, he said. "Was she naive? No. But did she know what she was getting herself into? No way. None of us did."

  The path from neophyte to committed new member of the Church of Scientology is standard, beginning with the personality test, called the Oxford Capacity Analysis; its serious-sounding name has led some members to assert, mistakenly, that it was developed at Oxford University. Next comes an introductory lecture and auditing package to explain the basic principles behind Dianetics and Scientology. After that, prospective members with a drug history are required to undergo the Purification Rundown, the holistic detoxification program Hubbard created in 1979 to cleanse the body of impurities, leaving a person in a "clean" state that makes him or her more receptive to auditing.*

  In August 1982, Lisa, having passed through these preliminaries, arrived at the first stage of the so-called Bridge to Total Freedom: Life Repair, which is tailored to address whatever crucial difficulties a candidate for membership is having in life. Lisa's major difficulty—her "ruin"—was her relationship with her husband, which she hoped to improve. Lisa's church counselors saw things differently: they believed her best course would be to leave Don, who was skeptical of Scientology and suspicious of its costs.

  Barnes and other staff members laid out their case. What was best for Lisa, they said, was for her to stay in the church and handle the situation with her husband, who was quite clearly a Suppressive Person. To make sure that Lisa understood just what that term meant, Barnes sat her down with Scientology's Technical Dictionary to look up its definition, directing her to Hubbard's statement that a Suppressive Person would "automatically and immediately ... curve any betterment activity into something evil or bad." The implication was that Don Boss fell into this category, and what was truly dangerous, Lisa was told, was that being connected to such a person made her a Potential Trouble Source, or PTS, which was someone susceptible to all kinds of physical and psychological illnesses. To lead a happier life, Lisa would have to free herself from Boss's suppression—and any other suppressive forces in her life—by either changing his mind about Scientology or disconnecting from him altogether.

  Over the next several months, Lisa underwent a PTS Handling, a program Hubbard designed for members who are "roller coastering," or experiencing ups and downs or simply having doubts of one sort or another. She searched deep within herself to find her own flaws, and during the spring of 1982, she wrote extensive confessions—known as "overt/withhold write-ups." In these reports, she noted every sexual dalliance, flirtation, or "perverted" thought or act she'd ever committed, and with whom: pool boys, neighbors, friends of her brother's, a cousin of her husband's.

  Prompted by Greg Barnes, Lisa also wrote an affidavit attesting to Boss's criminal history. "I was never informed as to exactly what was said [to him]," Lisa later recalled. "[But] the next time he phoned [the mission], one of his crimes was read off to him and he never contacted the mission again." After a year of this work, Lisa disconnected from Don, and the couple divorced. "Lisa was in an abusive relationship and we basically helped her end it," said Barnes.

  Now liberated, Lisa was determined to follow the path toward self-improvement. Her first step was to enroll in a course whose purpose was to teach students how to study; according to her Scientologist friends, it would enable her to learn anything with ease. Lisa had always done well in school, but L. Ron Hubbard wrote that even the best students often didn't fully grasp what they were studying. They might find they'd read an entire page, or even an entire book chapter, without remembering it. They might suffer headaches or feel tired. While many people attributed this to boredom or distraction, Hubbard explained that all of these symptoms, and many others, were caused by three distinct blocks: the "lack of mass," or absence of physical examples to illustrate the subject being studied; "too steep a gradient," or moving to the next phase of study before the previous stage had been mastered, which could result in the feeling of being overwhelmed; and "the misunderstood word."

  Originally conceived of in the 1960s by Charles and Ava Berner, Scientologists and teachers in California, "study technology" was co-opted and launched by Hubbard as his own during a series of lectures he delivered at Saint Hill in 1964. Over the years, it would become Scientology's main form of indoctrination and a central facet of the church's ongoing strategy to use what, in a mainstream context, might seem valuable, or even progressive,* to draw people deeper into Scientology's alternative universe. It was based on three principles: students learn at their own pace, use physical examples—pictures, marbles, or clay models—to help work out complex concepts, and need to focus intensely on vocabulary, never skipping an unfamiliar word without looking it up in the dictionary. Anyone who wanted to move up the Bridge was required to master study technology, which was defined to Scientologists as a method of "learning how to learn."

  At the Dallas mission, students busied themselves with studying what seemed to be ordinary concepts like affinity or communication, and then with modeling them in clay, a process known as a "clay demo." To make sure they understood every word and concept they read, they were instructed in a process known as "word clearing," which entails relearning the definitions of even basic words, such as a or on. There are nine distinct types of word clearing, some done with an E-meter, some without; the most rigorous is called "Method 9," or M9. This required students to work with a partner, reading aloud from a book or, more often, from Hubbard's policies, in alternating paragraphs. Each time one partner blinked, twitched, yawned, or simply mispronounced a word, the other was required to stop, yell "Flunk!," and instruct the person to go back and find the word he or she didn't fully grasp, look it up, and then use it in sentences until the partner felt the confusion had been "cleared." Then the partners would resume reading aloud.

  Some critics of Scientology maintain that study tech, particularly its word-clearing and clay-demo processes, is harmful, as it essentially breaks down the entire semantic and thought structure of the individual, reducing a person to an almost childlike state. Lisa, however, loved her Scientology studies. She felt smarter, more competent. To her friends, she expressed a sense of being in control for the very first time in her life. Scientology was an adventure, and the people she met through the church were bright, friendly, easy to talk to, and united in the sense of being on a mission of self-discovery. "Nobody else that [Lisa] knew of with the exception of the woman that she worked with was involved in Scientology," said Carol Hawk. "Her family was not aware of what Scientology was ... and to be honest, I'm not sure Lisa was either. At that point, she was very young, and she was very excited about the process of learning about it, and feeling like she was doing something for herself."

  Lisa began spending long hours at the mission, forgoing personal pastimes like country-western dancing, once her favorite activity. She stopped drinking and smoking pot; she also left off attending parties and family functions. Her vocabulary changed. People were "terminals." Cars, houses, clothes, jewelry, and other physical or material goods were "MEST"—matter, energy, space, and time. A person with a positive attitude was "uptone." Someone who worked hard and did well was "upstat." She was a "thetan," and her life was not singular—she had lived many lifetimes, she informed her old friends.

  Lisa's odd behavior worried Hawk. "I would say, 'Who are these people, these auditors? They're not psychologists, they're not doctors ... what happens if you're in this auditing session and this person who has no formal training gets you to a place that you can't handle?"

  But Lisa was sanguine. "Oh, they know how to handle any kind of situation. They know exactly the right questions to ask."

  "It got to the point where we weren't really communicating because you are just kind of looking at her thinking, 'What are you talking about?'" Hawk recalled. One by one, friends drifted away. By 1984, virtually everyone left in Lisa McPherson's life was a Scientologist.

  Fannie McPherson, widowed in 1985, worried de
eply about her daughter's growing involvement with Scientology. A lifelong Baptist, Fannie, who'd stopped drinking and had joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1970s, had initially been thrilled when Lisa came home in 1982 and announced that she'd joined a church. But as she watched Lisa spend less and less time with her friends and family and more and more money on Scientology, her anxiety grew.

  Lisa, Fannie knew, fervently believed that L. Ron Hubbard was a savior. She wrote letters to the Founder. She referenced Hubbard's sayings on issues ranging from stress at work to more abstract notions such as "truth." Lisa tolerated no dissenting opinions, no criticism. She refused to read the newspapers or watch the news. When, in December 1985, CBS aired an episode of 60 Minutes that presented an investigative report on Scientology, featuring interviews with recent defectors from the church, Lisa said it was "entheta," or harmful to her spiritual well-being, and she declined to watch.

  The defectors featured on this broadcast, and in other stories like it, were for the most part people who'd joined Scientology in the 1960s as part of a spiritual quest, as Jeff Hawkins had. Lisa McPherson had come to Scientology out of desperation—she later said she'd joined the church to help her "get loose from the criminal psychotic I was connected to," Don Boss. "I think Lisa saw Scientology as her strength," said Carol Hawk. "She had done well there, she felt better. Whether there were any larger concepts of doing wonderful things for the world, I don't know ... but I know that she felt very strongly that it was what was going to make her whole."