Trying to see inside the world of Scientology

Cleveland Plain Dealeer/July 12, 2005
By Frank Bentayou

A brash Hollywood actor with a boyish smile and slim tailored suits would not seem the first source ordinary folks seek out for psychiatric advice.

Yet who could miss Tom Cruise lately, swinging through the news, spinning off from movie promotion to set us straight about the motives of doctors who treat mental illness?

"Here's the problem. You don't know the history of psychiatry," the confident star told "Today" host Matt Lauer. "I do."

Cruise is a Scientologist. He and other supporters of a celebrity-rich religious organization that science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard launched in 1954 share a noisy antagonism toward mental- health physicians. Church members have referred to them as pseudo-scientists.

Cruise and fellow members say prescribing drugs for mental illness is spurious, even dangerous, and only enriches doctors and drug companies. Illnesses for which drugs are common therapy range from postpartum and other forms of depression to attention deficit disorder, bipolar disease and schizophrenia.

There's much more to Scientology than rejecting psychiatry. And the conflict (church members have picketed the American Psychiatric Association's meetings for years) offers an entry point into a group of which outsiders know little.

But conversations with insiders, religion scholars and others who deal with the church offer glimpses into Scientology's beliefs and practices.

Its main mission is to explain and help perfect humans and their behavior. A coherent (if offbeat) spiritual vision emerges from hundreds of Hubbard's written works and 3,000 recorded lectures explaining where people came from and how they can reach enlightenment.

In one sense, Scientology is an unusually tolerant religion that does not demand exclusivity nor stipulate a particular creator to whom members must pledge faith. As Cruise said in his "Today" interview, "It's like you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist, OK."

And as short as the church's history is -- 51 years -- it's rich.

Hubbard, who died in 1986 and whom church members refer to as L.R.H., veered from pulp science-fiction in the late 1940s and published "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" in 1950. That book and "Scientology," which four years later helped launch the religion, are available in 32 languages.

Clearing minds of encumbrances

Despite the popularity of Hubbard's teachings (leaders say people have bought 117 million copies of his works), few scholars closely study them.

They tend to list Scientology in a category of 20th-century American fringe religions, meaning their practices lie outside those of long-standing religions.

Sean McCloud, author and religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, prominently included Scientology in his book, "Making the American Religious Fringe."

And Durwood Smith, chairman of religious studies at Cleveland State University, said he considers Scientology "especially noteworthy even among the fringe religions, in that it brings in features of science fiction."

None of that has stopped growth. Some scholars estimate core membership at about 500,000; others estimate only one-tenth of that. The church claims 8 million devotees.

Deep in Hubbard's writings lies a striking assertion: that thetans, extraterrestrial spirits, colonized humans long ago. Correcting our flawed "reactive mind" and curing generations of pain and suffering absorbed since thetans arrived are the focus of church practices.

That means stripping back reactions to abuses suffered over thousands of years and urging people to get more in touch with the operating thetan within.

"For all practical purposes, this operating thetan is the soul," said J. Gordon Melton, author and religious studies researcher at University of California at Santa Barbara. He said Scientologists clear encumbrances through the signature church practice of auditing.

John Baker, executive director of the four-story Scientology Church in downtown Columbus (the closest church to Cleveland), said trained church auditors help members "clear their reactive minds of these encumbrances so they can reach the higher spiritual levels people are capable of."

For dedicated Scientologists, clearing ever-deeper encumbrances is a lifelong commitment. Audits grow more rigorous in the higher of eight levels of connection to the thetan.

Baker showed rooms filled with e-meters, electrical devices Hubbard created to help "preclears" (those burdened by pain and confusion) and auditors identify emotional roadblocks. Audits can be traumatic experiences, Baker said, advancing "preclear people" to the more- perfect nature "Scientology helps them achieve."

An e-meter looks like a 1950s version of a futuristic gadget, a metal box with switches and dials with wires to two shiny soup- can-size cylinders.

Preclears hold the cans and search within for ugly pictures and painful memories. An auditor keeps an electrical impulse buzzing in one wire, through the subject's body and out the other wire, then watches a meter on the face of the box. Readings, Baker said, show changes in the electrical conductivity of the body.

A person's "reactive mind is made of mental pictures," Baker said, which "actually change the mass of the body, changing its electrical resistance."

When the auditor sees such shifts reflected in an e-meter's dial, "he knows the preclear is coming up on something he's got to understand better, something he's got to work on."

Strong disdain toward psychiatry

Chicagoan Mary Anne Ahmad, a Scientology minister and director of public affairs for the church in Illinois, explained further: "We have these experiences where we just can't explain why we react the way we do."

Hubbard, she said, counseled followers to seek out pain and misunderstanding cluttering the mind then figure out where it came from. Some, Ahmad said, may have kicked around through many prior lives.

Will Bennett, 21, who works at the Columbus church, said he has been clearing for a year and a half. He likes the idea that he bears responsibility for what he tackles in audit sessions.

"An auditor," he explained, "doesn't interpret or invalidate anything. It's all based on the preclear's response and what he wants to deal with.

"I've reduced stress, especially in my chest," he said. "I used to feel acid coming up from my stomach. I never feel it now. It's not magical. It's about enhancing a person's spirituality. And," he added, "it's not about a chemical imbalance."

That's a reference to a popular notion of psychiatry, that some mental illness results from hormonal or other biochemical imbalances. Scientology, which blames pain on uncleared encumbrances, perhaps from past lives, rejects the idea.

Ahmad characterized the church as an underappreciated champion of unpopular causes. Since the beginning, she said, "we've been on the front lines of defining people's basic human rights," particularly with regard to "abuses of psychiatry."

The church took the lead in raising questions about overprescribing Ritalin to children, a controversial drug that psychiatrists said has helped hyperactive children settle down and learn. The church considers other psychoactive drugs superfluous, unproven and maybe dangerous.

Medicine mostly takes a different view. Nada Stotland, vice president of the American Psychiatric Association and a Chicago psychiatrist, let frustration over church criticism of her profession creep into her voice.

"It's not true, as they say, that psychiatry is not accepted by mainstream science," she said. "It is. But it's also clinical wisdom along with science. It's not physics. It's about people."

Stotland agreed that medical science, including psychiatry, has its dark past. Doctors used radical surgeries, locked inmates up, shocked them and prescribed unproven drugs.

"But history is always evolving," she said. "It's true of all medical science. We test practices, publish results so they're out there for others to pick apart. We build on our past."

Religious practices are not subject to the same scrutiny as those of science, Stotland said. Church antipathy continues to baffle her. She responds incredu lously that Scientologists have held doctors responsible for such horrible abuses.

Melton, who wrote "The Church of Scientology" as part of a series of studies of contemporary religions, examined sources of attacks on psychiatry. The dispute has deep roots, he thinks.

In the 1940s, at a time when Hubbard was hospitalized -- his illness is unclear -- Melton said, "he encountered lobotomy and shock therapy. He decided these were wrong."

Melton said "he came out antagonistic" to psychiatry and in the following years launched Scientology.

Quickly becomes target of criticism

From the beginning, the church generated controversy.

In the 1970s and '80s, its covert purchase of historic buildings in downtown Clearwater, Fla., where Scientology established a headquarters, alienated many residents there, according to Mary Farrell Bednarowski, professor of religious studies at United Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, who studied the Florida controversy.

The unexplained 1995 death of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist and psychiatric patient, while she was under church care in Clearwater generated ill will and endless headlines. Florida courts cleared Scientology of responsibility, and McPherson's estate and the church settled a wrongful-death lawsuit in 2004.

The church's tendency to share little about operations has given rise to suspicions.

"I think they have a pretty paranoid culture," Bednarowski said. "And they're litigious," suing critics and medical groups.

Ahmad said there's nothing sinister about lawsuits. "We have to stand up for what we believe."

A criticism the church aims at psychiatrists focuses on how much they make from patients. But Smith, who heads CSU's religious studies program, said Scientology auditors make out well, too, charging "astronomical prices for audits."

Neither Baker nor Ahmad would say exactly how much. And Baker said, "We help people find ways to cover the cost."

Melton said that in buying necessary books and tapes, enrolling in courses, paying for audits and making contributions, "young people at lower levels might pay out $1,000 or $1,500 a year."

Scientologists who move to the sixth, seventh, and eighth levels of operating thetans, or OT, as high as members can go, "easily spend tens of thousands of dollars a year, much more if they want to move fast," Melton said.

Critics have called Scientology less a religion than a commercial enterprise: Go through audits at whatever expense, take courses, then conduct audits yourself, collecting handsome fees.

A number of nations do not recognize Scientology as a church. The United States granted a tax-favored designation only after the 1993 settlement of a long series of court battles between Scientology and the Internal Revenue Service.

From his standpoint, Melton sees no good reason not to consider Scientology a church.

"It's a religion based on a rebuilt Gnostic myth," he said. "The spirit falls into a material world and runs into trouble because it forgot who it is."

The audit and courses, and what Baker calls "incredibly specific, intricate sets of guidelines L.R.H. set out for us," are Scientologists' road maps for getting in touch with the spirit.

But the spirit moves in mysterious ways. Following Cruise's TV appearances, reporters kept Stotland and the psychiatric association frantic with calls and interview requests. War between Scientology and psychiatry had become hot global news.

"But you know," Stotland said once her phone quieted, "there's something of a silver lining to all this. People are asking questions. And we are 100 percent for people asking questions."