Inside Scientology

by Janet Reitman

  Of course there were some differences, she acknowledged. Like all Scientologists, Natalie saw herself as a thetan, and her physical, or "meat," body one of many she'd had on life's continuum. In the end, her body was unimportant. She lit a cigarette. She'd started smoking when she was eleven, she said, which she realized was "kind of bad," but then again, L. Ron Hubbard chain-smoked Kools for most of his life. "LRH never said we were supposed to be perfect."

  Natalie idolized Hubbard. I noticed that she often prefaced her sentences with the phrase "LRH says," and she could quote him, chapter and verse. But unlike many older Scientologists, who describe the Founder in almost godlike terms, Natalie saw Hubbard as simply "a brilliant person who came up with a fascinating technology, a lot of which is common sense." She spent a lot of her free time studying Hubbard's ideas, which, she explained, were primarily about learning how to take better control of one's life and handle problems in a rational way. "For me, Scientology is about finding out the 'why' for whatever it is you want to apply it to. But you have to find that out for yourself," she said, and quoted Hubbard: "What's true for you is what you observe to be true."

  Natalie was born in Arlington, Virginia, and spent her early life in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where her father, John Walet, ran the church's large organization on Dupont Circle. Natalie's mother, Emily, also worked at the D.C. Org, and as an only child, Natalie virtually grew up there. Despite her father's official-sounding title—he was the executive director—her parents were part of the church's rank and file, not Sea Org members, but paid staff who worked long hours. Loyal Scientologists, they were also independent. "My mother is very outspoken; she'll tell you exactly what she thinks," Natalie said, recalling one instance when Emily Walet staunchly defended a church member whom officials had wanted to declare suppressive—and prevailing. "That guy is still a Scientologist, in D.C., and doing really well," Natalie said. "There's a lot of pressure when you work in the org. I know my parents got in arguments with higher-ups from time to time. But if they saw something they felt was wrong, they said something."

  Scientology is an extremely doctrinaire faith, yet it does not necessarily produce robots. Natalie, an extremely poised and articulate teenager, was an example of just how independent some Scientologist kids can be. She explained it was due to the unique way Scientologist children are raised, which is in accordance with Hubbard's dictum that all people, regardless of age, be granted their own "beingness," or self-determinism. The Walets took this directive seriously and rarely yelled at or talked down to their daughter, unlike the parents of non-Scientologist kids she'd later meet. "I was never treated like a little kid, even when I was a little kid," she said, and thought about that for a minute. "I guess I never really felt like a little kid either," she added.

  Natalie began school, upon her own insistence, she said, when she was four, skipping kindergarten. She attended a private school, the Chesapeake Ability Academy in northern Virginia, which was run by Scientologists. There are nearly fifty such schools in the United States, and for those who can't afford them, scores of private tutoring programs to help Scientologist kids in public schools supplement their education with Hubbard's techniques. All are sponsored by Applied Scholastics, which licenses Hubbard's study technology to independent schools and tutors in the same manner that WISE licenses his management technology to independent businesses.

  Though they are not considered "parochial" (though they are tax-exempt), Scientology schools, according to the church's own literature, are meant to educate children into L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy, with larger goals in mind. "By educating a child into one's own beliefs, one gradually takes over a whole new generation of a country and can thus influence, in the long term, the development and growth of that country," stated a 1986 issue of Impact, the magazine published by the International Association of Scientologists. The Jesuits, for example, "were very successful at this strategy."

  Natalie never saw Chesapeake as "religious" in any way. "They just used study tech," she explained. The kids learned at their own pace; used physical examples—clay models, marbles, or diagrams—to help them work out complex concepts; and focused intensely on vocabulary, never skipping a word they didn't understand; instead, they looked it up in the dictionary. Natalie described this education as "awesome" because she was never allowed to just ignore things she did not fully comprehend. "If I got a ninety-eight on a test, they would go to that two percent I did wrong and help me figure it out." An intelligent and highly motivated girl, she stayed at Chesapeake through fifth grade and then transferred to a public middle school, where she was an accelerated student. At thirteen, she started high school.

  The next year, her parents moved to Dunedin, in part to be closer to Flag, but also, Natalie said, because Washington had become too expensive. For Natalie, it would prove to be both a social and spiritual awakening.

  The Walets arrived in the Clearwater area just two years after the Lisa McPherson criminal case had been thrown out, an event that had angered many people in the community. For the next several years, the case was kept alive as the McPherson family's civil lawsuit against the church continued,* and the public's resentment of Scientologists, or "Scienos," as many derisively called them, was palpable. Some twelve thousand Scientologists were living in or around Clearwater by the early 2000s, according to church estimates*—the greatest number in any city except Los Angeles. The Church of Scientology was one of the largest owners of property in Clearwater; half of their holdings were located in or around downtown Clearwater, where, in response to years of protests fomented by church critics, an extensive security system was installed. Some 150 surveillance cameras are posted on or around all buildings associated with Scientology, some disguised as streetlights or hidden inside lampposts, but most perched quite openly on rooftops and window ledges. Some cameras face in, toward the buildings themselves; others are aimed at the street.

  Natalie thought this was normal—"It's the twenty-first century; who doesn't have a security camera?"—but many other people found the cameras disconcerting. Scientologists, many locals complained, had "taken over" downtown; indeed, just a year before I met Natalie, the St. Petersburg Times had dubbed Clearwater, a city of more than 100,000 people, "Scientology's Town."

  Natalie's religion had never caused problems for her in Virginia—it had almost never come up among her friends and teachers in middle school, in fact. But at the public high school she began attending in Dunedin, some of her teachers advised her that certain faculty members might lower her grade if they knew she was a Scientologist. The parents of several of her classmates, upon learning of Natalie's faith, refused to allow her in their homes. Several even sent letters to one of her teachers, saying they didn't want her to have contact with their children at school.

  Kids asked Natalie if she was an alien. She didn't know what they were talking about. Like all Scientologists, Natalie had been instructed not to read about Scientology in any source except a Scientology-sponsored website or publication, and she believed that much of what was posted on the Internet or written in the newspapers about her religion was "entheta." Though the church might have insisted that the OT levels remain secret until its members had earned, and paid for, the right to have those mysteries revealed, the kids at school had no such restrictions and garnered more from a simple web search than Natalie would learn for years.

  Natalie was miserable. "I started hanging out with the wrong kids," she said, with a flick of her cigarette. "You know, the typical story." Yearning to fit in, she made friends with the drug crowd—"basically the only people who were nice to me"—and began smoking pot. Before long, she'd entered what she called a "pretty heavy drug phase" that would last for two years. "Looking back, I see it was an interesting experience," she said. "I'd taken a lot of things for granted because I'd lived in that bubble of Scientology—I didn't know anything else. But when I went to high school I started hanging out with these kids and seeing the way they lived and how different
their lives and families were from mine ... it blew me away."

  Some of Natalie's new friends came from broken or dysfunctional homes; others were underachievers and struggled in school. Natalie, who'd managed to do well in school despite partying on weekends, would look at them and think, God, this is so horrible. But what could she do? "These kids didn't know how to, you know, look up a word in a dictionary," she said. "They didn't know why they didn't understand things. They didn't know why they would fail tests." Some kids she knew had been diagnosed with ADD and took Ritalin or Adderall. "They would fail and fail, and they wouldn't pay attention in class because they didn't understand, and so they'd be prescribed these drugs. Meanwhile, nobody was actually helping them." (In one desperate effort to help a friend who was failing a science class, Natalie said she grabbed a dictionary and made her friend look up everything she didn't understand, which she said ultimately helped the girl pass that class, and several others.)

  Like that of many teenagers, her rebellion lasted only a few years. Drugs, she realized by her sixteenth birthday, were not only unhealthy, they were "counter-intentioned": Scientologists not only eschew mind-altering substances but cannot be audited if they have imbibed. They are also expected to maintain a high level of ethics, which, quite obviously, ruled out taking cocktails of pills and staying out all night. This is not who I am, she thought. Why am I doing this?

  She had no idea. With great trepidation, Natalie went to her father, a dedicated Scientologist for thirty years, and told him that she had a drug problem. Her dad's reaction, as she recalls it, was not atypical for Scientologists. "He just sat there and he looked at me. He didn't freak out. He didn't even ground me. Nothing. He just said, 'We are going to fix you.'"

  The next day, Natalie started the Purification Rundown. Every day for the next three weeks, she went to a local field auditing group that offered the program and spent up to five hours a day in the sauna, alternating lengthy sweat sessions with half-hour runs on the treadmill. The experience, as she recalled, was almost mystical, far more intense than any other detox program she'd ever heard of, and way beyond what friends experienced doing juice fasts or high colonics. "I used to feel like I could never see the real colors of the world because I was so dulled out," she told me. But during the Purification Rundown, she began to see things clearly, with almost psychedelic vividness. Afterward, Natalie felt renewed. "It was amazing how much better I felt. I could think faster, process things faster. I was more there."

  This was step one of Natalie's fix. The second phase was the Life Repair auditing program, which she did the summer after her junior year. It began with a complete purging of her transgressions, which Natalie found tremendously therapeutic; the entire package of auditing sessions similarly impressed her. "I had some really amazing revelations in auditing," she said. "I got a much clearer idea of who I actually was."

  By Christmas, she'd gotten rid of her drug-using friends, "disconnecting" from them in the way she felt L. Ron Hubbard intended: she'd realized they were bad influences and no longer wanted them in her life. She also began auditing in earnest, eager to ascend the Bridge to Total Freedom. She approached her Scientology study as a form of spiritual healing as well as self-help. "I really wanted to figure out why I had done some of the things I had done, and find answers for some of my problems, and I found them," she told me. That spring, she graduated with honors from high school.

  Now Natalie was preparing to go to college, though several of her Scientologist friends, and some Scientologist adults, including her boss at her summer job, thought it was unnecessary. What could a person learn that couldn't be picked up simply by studying L. Ron Hubbard? "I said excuse me, and I left," Natalie said, and she moved to a position with more supportive supervisors. "Keeping Scientology Working never says you shouldn't be educated in other things," Natalie said. "I mean, LRH obviously knew other things." Was he as educated as he claimed to be? Natalie confessed that she had gone on the Internet and read a bit about Hubbard's biography. She doubted the truth of everything she found there, but whatever his education had been, she liked what he said about learning. "I don't think LRH would be okay with people thinking that all you have to learn is Scientology." She referred to one of the Founder's statements, a personal favorite of hers: "One doesn't learn about life sitting in an ivory tower, thinking about it. One learns about life by being part of it."

  Natalie was determined to live Hubbard's words. Over the next few years, she would—at the University of Tampa she joined a sorority, majored in economics, and graduated summa cum laude in May 2010. Her world had broadened with each step out of the Scientology bubble, a development that her parents supported. And she continued to remain a dedicated Scientologist, perhaps even more dedicated, she said, because of her diverse experience. "One thing I've noticed," she said recently, "is that there are kids who've grown up in Scientology and have never really seen anything else. I think that bubble can be a problem."

  Kendra Wiseman grew up in Scientology's bubble in Los Angeles. A few years older than Natalie, she left the bubble—and Scientology—during her teens. Kendra is the daughter of two of the most prominent Scientologists in Los Angeles. Her father, a former president of the U.S. branch of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, is an outspoken anti-psychiatry activist, and her mother was one of Scientology's most successful FSMs during the 1990s. Kendra's uncle is another key Scientology figure: the president of Narconon International, which now operates more than 120 drug rehabilitation and education centers around the world.

  The church caters to Scientologists of this elite stature and they receive treatment much like that of celebrity members. Indeed, as "opinion leaders," which Hubbard defined as "any person important in their field," they are considered "celebrities" by the Scientology rank and file. Many of them have been in Scientology for decades, contributing steadily to most of its key campaigns. Because they are Scientology's most dedicated, great care is taken to ensure they have a positive, not a punitive, experience.

  In exchange for this treatment, all opinion leaders are expected to promote Scientology in the secular world, and many do by talking about the church to non-Scientologist acquaintances or business associates. But unlike the Hollywood celebrities, who often maintain independent social networks (according to the journalist Lawrence Wright, who has written about the screenwriter-director Paul Haggis for The New Yorker, some of Haggis's friends maintain they had no idea he was a Scientologist, despite his affiliation with the church of more than thirty years), Scientology opinion leaders, and their children, tend to live in a world rigidly focused on their faith. In Kendra's case, all of her childhood friends were Scientologists, as were her parents' friends, her uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins, and half brother. The dancing school she attended was run by a Scientologist, as were the stables where she took horseback riding lessons. The school she attended, the Delphi Academy in Los Angeles, is one of the most prestigious Applied Scholastics–backed schools in the country. During the summer, she enrolled in programs at the Celebrity Centre or another Los Angeles church, or at Flag, where her parents visited frequently. "I was in a completely isolated community," Kendra told me. "I had no contact with non-Scientologists—none. That kind of thing just didn't exist."

  And yet Kendra spent her childhood in one of the most diverse metropolitan regions of the United States. Kendra lived in a spacious home in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Glendale, and later in Burbank. Growing up there in the 1990s, Kendra had what she considered to be a typical suburban life. "I rode my bike, I used the computer, I watched TV, just like any other kid," she said. On weekends, she and her friends rented videos, shopped at the Glendale Galleria, ate at In-N-Out Burger, and went to the multiplex (Kendra was a diehard fan of The Lord of the Rings). No matter what day it was, they communicated via their pagers and chatted on AOL.

  But her everyday reality was Scientology and the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, whose framed portrait hung in her home, much as a Chr
istian family might display an image of Jesus Christ. Hubbard's maxims arose frequently in her family conversations and those of their friends, and his theories and policies affected every facet of their lives. When Kendra misbehaved, she was assigned a condition—"danger," for example—for which she would have to do amends, like cleaning her room. When she skinned her knee or bumped her head, Kendra's mother would give her a "contact assist," a holistic healing technique that involves repeatedly touching a wounded area of the body until it feels better. Like all Scientologist children, Kendra was raised to believe that, as a thetan, she had not only lived before, but had chosen her own body. "When I was little, my mom would tell me a story about how she was playing the piano one day when she was pregnant, and felt my thetan inhabit her," said Kendra. "She said there were lots of other thetans kind of hovering around, but I was strongest: I picked her." Kendra's family unfailingly followed church policy so that they would be "sessionable"; they stocked their home with vitamins, organic vegetables, and fruit and slept for at least eight hours every night, a prerequisite for auditing.

  Kendra's parents spent a part of each day auditing, hooked up to their own personal E-meters, which cost around $4,000 apiece. Because they were at the top of the Bridge to Total Freedom, they could "solo audit," or audit themselves. Kendra never knew what went on in her parents' auditing sessions, just that they would sequester themselves in a room and hang a little sign on the door reading IN SESSION. During these periods, Kendra would tiptoe around the house. "You weren't supposed to make a peep," she explained; according to Hubbard, disturbing someone's auditing session was not only damaging to that person's spiritual well-being but also was a suppressive act.