ENOUGH WITH THE SCIENTOLOGY FASCINATION /// Wouldn't the resources and time of journalists be better directed at the finances, earthly corruption, and raw power of the Catholic Church, an institution that wields influence incalculably greater than L. Ron Hubbard's itty-bitty religion?

I just finished Lawrence Wright's long and ambitious piece in this week's New Yorker on Scientology, and on writer/director Paul Haggis's recent break with the religion. As a magazine editor, I applaud Wright's impulse to do the story, and I'm kicking myself for not calling Haggis myself the day I heard of his defection from Scientology, back in the fall of 2009. Unlike me, Wright did call Haggis, and he's written an important piece. I will say that the resulting piece is by turns fascinating and boring, as the story of Haggis's experience of finding himself increasingly under the sway of what he would later come to describe as a cult is interspersed with a long recitation of what might be described as the liturgy of Scientology, which entails accounting for the history of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. This description of the founding myth of a religion that now claims eight million adherents worldwide is familiar to anyone who's been paying attention to the occasional long and ambitious pieces on Scientology that one enterprising journalist or other produces every few years or so. Quoting from Wright's piece:

"A major cause of mankind's problems began 75 million years ago," the Times wrote, when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of ninety planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. "Then, as now, the materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation." Xenu decided "to take radical measures." The documents explained that surplus beings were transported to volcanoes on Earth. "The documents state that H-bombs far more powerful than any in existence today were dropped on these volcanoes, destroying the people but freeing their spirits — called thetans — which attached themselves to one another in clusters." Those spirits were "trapped in a compound of frozen alcohol and glycol," then "implanted" with "the seed of aberrant behavior." The Times account concluded, "When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves."

The Times Wright mentions is the Los Angeles Times, which had gotten hold of a secret doctrinal scribbling left by Hubbard. Between the thetans and the volcanoes and the implantation of aberrant behavior and the dreaded Xenu, this is either a treatment for the worst movie ever made, or... it's your basic bewildering founding myth of any religion found anywhere on earth.

I mean, I grew up believing that every breath I drew sent a god-made-man named Jesus Christ writhing on the cross to which he had been nailed — an execution for which he had been sent to earth by his heavenly father thousands of years ago, so that he might die for my sins so that I might live. And yet I was born not innocent but complicit in this lynching, incomprehensibly having to apologize and atone for this barbarism for all my days and feel terrible about myself and all mankind. And not only that, but every day when I went to Mass, we would solemnly re-create this human sacrifice by drinking Christ's blood and eating his body in delicious wafer form. This was not an exercise in metaphor. As long as I shall live, I will never forget the look of spiritual transport on the face of my mother every time she received Communion. This was not a symbol of Christ's body; this was his body, through the miracle of transubstantiation. "You better believe it, boy," she'd say to me. And so I did. Oh, and then we'd wrap up each Mass by celebrating the fact — fact — that three days after Jesus had died, as any mere mortal would have after having been set up by your father and nailed to a cross by a mob, his spirit had risen on a cloud into heaven to rejoin the same god in the sky who had sent him on this errand in the first place.

Now, I ask you: Why is that story no less ridiculous than Hubbard's mumbo jumbo? Is it because we have invested it with the power and majesty of myth for a far longer period, giving it now the air of the ordinary, and because of the veneration of that myth by generation after generation of people whom we love, and who have power over our young minds as we were coming up? Because certainly, in the twenty-first century, the story I grew up believing is every bit as risible as all the Scientology nonsense that Wright dutifully details, as did Janet Reitman in Rolling Stone before him, as have dozens of very good journalists before her. I say this not to denigrate this area of inquiry in any way, for these are examples of good and even brave journalists doing their jobs, and covering a subject that has shown a ruthless willingness to sue reporters into submission. (And incidentally, I also say it not to denigrate the scores of ordinary people, such as my dear mother, who have reaped astonishing and tangible benefits from the simple act of belief.)

Rather, I mean here to instead ask a question: Why all the fuss over Scientology, when your resources and time might better be directed at the finances, earthly corruption, and raw power of, say, the Catholic Church, an institution that wields influence incalculably greater than Hubbard's itty-bitty religion?

For all of the well-documented creepiness and horrible secrecy and paranoia and the forced detention and reeducation of wayward members and the cult-like imperative to deny even the most obvious truths about the religion, Scientology, compared to the "great" religions, statistically doesn't even exist. Again, I quote from Wright's piece:

A survey of American religious affiliations, compiled in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, estimates that only twenty-five thousand Americans actually call themselves Scientologists. That's less than half the number who identify themselves as Rastafarians.

Obviously, any religion that cultivates "celebrity centres" for its elite members deserves a good whacking in the press every once in a while. And frankly, it is Scientology's A-list membership (as well as its state-of-the-art, police-state tactics for dealing with critics) that makes it an evergreen subject of fascination for the press. I understand this.

But it is an outsize attention that Scientology attracts, akin to routinely and pitilessly investigating Djibouti for its role in confecting the flawed intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq, rather than giving Dick Cheney a call.

Can not some of this journalistic industry be trained on the church of my birth, whose chief vicar, an infallible man, lives in a palace in the middle of his own city-state while still claiming a vow of poverty and a simple Christ-like existence? The same vicar who presided over revelations — long-known but secretly guarded, that many of his employees were criminals and child molesters — not with the mien of the keeper of his flock but rather with the ruthless demeanor of the CEO of a massive corporation lawyering up against the barrage of lawsuits to come? The same vicar who successfully claimed that his canonical law (whatever that is) superseded civil law when it came to prosecuting the despicable crimes perpetrated by his subordinates, which is the only thing that explains why so few priests are in prison — unless you count those being harbored at the Vatican. The same vicar who presides over a church which holds homosexuality as an abomination (ironically, the same position held by L. Ron Hubbard, this being Paul Haggis's reason for bolting).

As much good and necessary journalism as came out of the Catholic pedophilia scandal, it still has been just piecemeal and fragmentary compared to the monstrous size of this global crime. And when compared to the ink spilled over Scientology during the same period, the coverage of Rome shrinks even smaller.

As much as I applaud Lawrence Wright for his piece on Paul Haggis, and as much as I greatly admire Wright's work generally, I call for a moratorium on coverage of the Scientology creeps, for, say, five years. There are simply so many other, bigger creeps in the world who more richly deserve the scrutiny.

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