During my week-long “break” at the Religion Newswriters Association conference in Washington, D.C., I decided to visit a site of one of America’s more famous movements – Scientology. I was privy to a tour of Scientology’s founding church, located in L. Ron Hubbard’s house in the swank northwest quadrant of the city.
It’s more of a museum than a church. Most of the rooms in the four-story house are restored to look exactly as they did in 1955, when Hubbard founded the D.C. church. Everything is set up as though Hubbard could walk in any minute and get to work giving speeches and writing books, even though he died in 1986.
Scientology is known for its clandestine nature, and the many courses one has to take in order to learn the intricacies of their doctrine. For instance, take a look at the many books Hubbard authored about the personal path of Scientology – these are just the public ones – and the methods of auditing. (Of course, this doesn’t include his treatises on how to run an organization, which took up another shelf.)
And here is the chart listing the various stages that a Scientologist must go through to achieve “Total Freedom,” where one has control over the mind and body and is void of distractions:
They involve numerous audits, a term which Hubbard adopted from its root in the Latin “audire,” which means “to hear.” Auditing is a type of counseling central to Scientology, in which precise sets of questions and directions are posed to the auditee. Each auditing session has a specific goal, and in conjunction, auditing sessions and other programs help Scientologists up the ladder on the chart, to the final levels which can only be learned on the cruise ship owned by the church or in the main center.
In the center are quasi-emotional stages that the person goes through as he or she climbs the ranks, from the negative to the positive, such as 1 – Recognition, 2 – Communication, 3 – Perception, etc. I noticed that “Hope” gets a score of -2, which I found very poetic. It speaks to the passivity of hope, and while it can lead to great good, it isn’t an action which can create it in itself. (I know there are religious people who would disagree with me on this.) Perhaps it’s an American perspective in the vein of Benjamin Franklin’s “God helps those who help themselves,” but I think it’s a powerful sentiment.
But before I go a little deeper into Scientology, I’ll explain a bit about the life of L. Ron Hubbard, which the church showcases. The tour is extremely structured and scripted, but at the same time my tour guide, Monica Smith, was very charming and at ease. She allowed me whatever questions I had, and answered them patiently and to the best of her ability, with minimal evasion (I’ll get to that later).
The first room on the tour is a photo gallery of Hubbard’s early life, which contains one of the best quotes ever. Under a picture of Hubbard with his mother, Ledora May, is the caption “I’m just an old hen who birthed an eagle.”
His youth is murky, as there are claims by Scientologists that other groups claim to be invalid. I can’t claim to know which is religious posturing and which is simply part of the witch hunt against Scientologists. But I’ll list a few of the claims of Scientologist biographies here, many of which have counter-claims by some other person or organization.
Hubbard was born in Nebraska to a naval officer and a well-educated woman who home-schooled him. It is said that Hubbard could speak at an extremely young age, was welcomed into the local Blackfoot tribe, and became the youngest Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America at the time.
But it was later that the roots of Scientology took place in Hubbard’s mind. Hubbard was an A-grade world traveler, setting sail and hitting many parts of the world, thanks to an ability to sell his photographs and a rich grandfather. He lived for years in China, where he said he was made a lama priest and studied with Buddhist leaders. According to my guide, Hubbard saw Western and Eastern societies as two sided of the same coin. The West was industrious and capable, able to create marvels of agriculture, science, health, and organization. But it was spiritually lax. The Eastern traditions had mastered a way of connecting with the soul and the non-material realms, but people were dying in the streets, China had no infrastructure, and there was little regard for fellow human beings in the materal realm.
The museum then breezes through Hubbard’s education at George Washington University, where he studied engineering, and his service in the navy in World War II, which was not the highlight of his life and abilities.
But after the war, Scientology began to take form. Along with his immense career in sceince fiction novels, Hubbard first published work on “Dianetics” in 1949, which introduced the concept of auditing to take control of and eradicate painful episodes in a person’s consciousness. In a few years, Scientology would take flight, with the religion being started in 1952 and a series of churches opening in the next decades across the world.
Scientology, in my view, is a religion, and Hubbard himself expressed a similar sentiment many times. But some of the Scientologists I’ve interacted with have insisted that it’s not a religion, as some Buddhists also claim, but a way of life. In fact, Ms. Smith, my guide, said that Hubbard recognized the beauty of all religions, and believed that “if everyone truly followed a religion, then all of the world’s problems would be solved.”
The line between religion and practice is blurry, and dictionary definitions often do no good as real-world descriptors. But I include it as a religion because it involves past lives, explanations about how the world works that can’t be explained through contemporary science, and beings more powerful than humans.
Anyhow, Scientology spread quickly around the world, as people clamored for a way to have more control over their lives. A lot of this was due to the immense body of lectures and writings that Hubbard delivered from rooms such as these, still set up with the same equipment he used:
Scientologists believe that a lot of the ills in the the body are psycho-somatic, caused by stress and interference from spirit forces and remnants of past traumas. These problems keep humans from realizing their innate goodness and thereby trapped in a cycle of pain. Counseling through auditing can release this stress.
Sound similar to Buddhism? It is. Like Freud? That, too. Check out this quote from Hubbard:
“A Scientologist is one who controls persons, environments, and situations. … A Scientologist is first cousin to the Buddhist, a distant relative to the Taoist, a feudal enemy to the enslaving priest, and a bitter foe of the German, Viennese, and Russian defamers of man. … We are the people ending the cycle of homo sapiens and starting the cycle of a good Earth.”
In this, Hubbard reaffirms the cycle of rebirth in Buddhism, but stakes a stong opposition to the enslaving religions, which he categorized as denying humans the ability to think for themselves and force-feeding them doctrine.
And the reference to the Germans and Russians? It has nothing to do with WWII or the Cold War, but psychology, whose main thinkers often emanated from these areas. Hubbard studied, and had great reverence for, Sigmund Freud, which Hubbard believed opened up the study of the mind as a powerful force. But Hubbard said that subsequent movements in psychology bastardized this knowledge, becoming a source of many of the world’s ills, and dedicated his life and his church to stemming its influence.
I was privy to a “mini-audit” of sorts in the basement of the house, where there’s a wall with “e-meters,” which measure the levels of stress the body emits when thinking about traumatic events. This device measures changes in electrical resistance passing approximately 0.5 volts (so little you can’t feel it) through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like empty soup cans held by the auditee. Here is Smith in front of the wall of e-meters throughout the ages:
On the meter is a little dial that is supposed to move to the right when the body experiences stress. I am a very stressed-out person by nature, so as soon as I touched the tubes, the dial shot to the right, and she had to readjust it.
She asked me to think of different people in my life, and watch the dial. I thought of my roommate. It moved a little. I thought of my mother. It moved quite a bit. I thought of my father, and it was off the charts.
Then she asked me about my father. As a rule, I don’t keep secrets, and I answer almost everything that is put to me. So I explained that I haven’t spoken to my father in more than four years, and that I think our relationship is broken beyond repair.
Here I got the spiel. She said that Scientology could help me repair that relationship, or if it’s beyond repair, remove the trauma from my system. She encouraged me to get a real audit, and to come back to the church for more information.
(Before you write and say, “Of course you got the spiel, that’s what Scientologists do!”, realize that I also get spieled by Evangelicals, Hasids, Mormons, etc. every day. It’s what all people do, especially newer faith movements that want to spread their message. We just notice it more in people we are less likely to agree with, and a lot of people have a bone to pick with Scientology, justly or unjustly.)
I have one more photo, which I like. It’s of Hubbard’s old recording equipment, which he used to send his lectures across the world. Imagine the time it would take to make all these old reels! In the back is an old map of the world-wide location his office would send them to:
On the third floor is Hubbard’s office, which I was unfortunately not allowed to take pictures of. It’s too bad, as it was extremely surreal. It reminded my of my grandfather’s basement office (he was also an engineer), but if my grandfather has placed everything under plastic wrap for decades.
In many Scientology establishments, you will find an office for Hubbard, complete with a pad, a pen, and a full inkwell on the desk for him to write on. This being the original, it was no exception, and the pad was definitely the most interesting thing in the room. It boasted the slogan “Plan Ahea,” apparently running out of room for the “d”. It’s an old joke, but it really personified Hubbard for me more than any of the old photographs.
But the pad had to compete with many other artifacts in the painfully ecru art-deco room. There was a drum supposedly from the Khan dynasties, a Sanskrit book thousands of years old, and a gigantic globe the size of a wrecking ball. But alas, no photos.
Essentially that was my day with Scientology. I still don’t know too much about the faith, and I won’t know without either joining it or spending oodles of hours sifting through the fact and rumor.
On one hand, I understand why Scientology is so clandestine. It keeps an air of mystery about the faith, allows greater control of doctrine, and frees the church from the public eye. Fewer people would pay for audits if they could get all the information for free, especially in today’s buffet-style religious culture. With public sentiment turned against it, secrecy becomes a bulwark, a last defense from decimation.
But on the other hand, the secrecy adds to Scientology’s problems. No one not in the church knows what’s true and what’s not, and anyone with an internet connection can make up whatever they want about the church. The church has no way of fighting back except pulling in closer.
If the church were honest about its beliefs, even if means talking about aliens, past lives and many other things that make some people think they’re crazy, Scientology would become like any other religion. Because honestly, from the hypothetical perspective of someone who believes in only what they can see, how much weirder is Scientology than religions that have virgin births, burning bushes, wheels in the sky, eight-armed gods, or djinns?
But if Scientology were just another religion with all its teachings available at your local Barned and Nobles, it would be severely changed. For the better? Who knows. But it might get rid of all the weirdos in green masks who protest them all the time.
