My Afternoon In Scientology

By Chris Revelle | Miscellaneous | June 6, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | Miscellaneous | June 6, 2024 |

When I was a Sophomore in college, the TA running my section of an Anthropology class introduced the idea of participant observation. It was a method of observing the dynamics, patterns, and processes of a group in which the observer participates enough to blend in so that they can observe without inhibiting the activity. The TA told us to find a place of worship, perform a participant observation, and write a paper summarizing our findings. The TA seemed to anticipate an endless parade of same-y papers about the same sort of church services because he urged us all to surprise him.

I didn’t have to think for very long. I was going to the University of Maryland at the time, and as luck would have it, the founding church of Scientology was right around the corner in DC. Ironically, for an organization historically not a fan of queer folx, the church was located in DC’s posh/gay neighborhood DuPont Circle. Tales of terrorizing “suppressive people,” and the horrors of the Sea Org left me a little apprehensive. I enlisted a friend who graciously agreed to come with me. I figured that safety resided in numbers and that, if nothing else, having a second witness would be helpful.

When we arrived at the Church of Scientology, someone was standing by the doorway selling books. Research had told me that selling the books written by their founder L Ron Hubbard was one of the ways Scientology made money. To advance up the various levels of worship in Scientology, a faithful congregant would need to buy the books. I already had a sense of how much money had to do with achieving Scientological enlightenment.

The atrium was white marble and spare, with a shallow entryway with a hallway curving away from the door. Across from us were a pair of open double doors and a petite Australian woman who cheerfully greeted us. When she remarked she hadn’t seen us before, I had a sinking feeling that we were more conspicuous than we were meant to be for the assignment. All the same, when she offered us a tour of the offices nearby after the worship service, I readily said yes.

“One thing to keep in mind,” she said with a perfectly warm smile, “is that if you’re in here and want to leave, you have to tell us. If you feel like you can’t leave, it could be construed as kidnapping.” As my friend and I processed this casually tossed-off factoid, she ushered us into the worship space, and the doors closed behind us.

To my raised-Protestant eyes, the worship space was oddly familiar. Rows of chairs were arranged with an aisle broken through the center that led up to a lectern. Behind the lectern was a stained glass window that had, against all expectations, a depiction of the cross. A handful of people were milling around, dressed in what I would identify as very dated fashions as if they froze their wardrobes in time when Hubbard died in 1986. A woman with a flat-top hairstyle wearing a loudly turquoise, large-shouldered blazer is burned into my memory. The congregants were relatively few, maybe 10 in total in a room that could seat 50. Those who didn’t greet us directly smiled at us from across the room. We were fully conspicuous in this space, but the die was cast.

A woman in an electric red pantsuit strode over to the lectern and took her place as worship leader. Her permed blond hair was piled on top of her head. She began the service, and I was struck by how alike it was to the many Presbyterian services I attended when I was younger: there were community announcements, dates of future events, and even some call-and-response that recalled “peace be with you/and also with you.” There was a defensiveness to the tone and language the worship leader used to describe Scientology as if there was the unspoken assumption that it would all be received poorly. The unexpected cross, with little dovetail splits at the end of each arm, was finally explained: this was not a Christian cross, but a Scientological Cross. The 8 little dovetails were meant to signify different values: the individual self, sex/family/procreation, community/society, survival of humanity, life forms in general, the physical universe, spirits, and infinity. There were near-constant reminders that everyone has the freedom to believe what they wish to believe, a curious reassurance in the context of worship. Curiouser still, there were reminders nearly as often that belief wasn’t required to become a Scientologist. To be a practicing Scientologist, you didn’t need to believe everything they said, but you did have to pay. Perhaps it was a preemptive defense against disbelief of things like their wild creation myth, but when someone has to invest lots of time, energy, and money before they can know it, it shows where their priorities are.

As with any Protestant service, there was a sermon. The worship leader opened a book of Hubbard’s essays and read one aloud before expounding on it in a lecture on parenthood and affection. Physical affection from parent to child, Hubbard claimed, was a dicey proposition. He wrote that hugging a child was an attempt to change and mold them into a shape they did not take naturally. A parent may realize this mid-hug and pull away, leaving a child in a difficult no-win situation; a child will feel torn between their desire for freedom from their parent and their desire for their parents’ love. In this moment, the child becomes a future murderer, or a “blood-letter” as Scientological parlance had it. This ominous sermon, which didn’t explain an alternative to hugs so that one may rest assured they haven’t raised a killer, ended elliptically and as my friend and I side-eyed one another, the service wrapped up with an affirmation that we all had the right to believe what we wanted to believe.

The tour of the founding offices, across the street from the church, was a mini-museum to the myth of L Ron Hubbard. I say “myth” instead of “man” because virtually every claim they make about his life has been thoroughly debunked. The petite Australian woman from earlier was our enthusiastic tour guide and she told us of Hubbard’s status as a best-selling author (he wrote dime-pulps to little acclaim) and of his sparkling career in the Navy as a war hero (he was a reservist who briefly saw action). What especially fascinated me was how easily refuted all these claims were, and yet they stood as gospel for Scientologists. It seemed notable that his followers revered him as a great author of science fiction and yet couldn’t connect that to Scientology’s overtly sci-fantastical creation myth.

Then came the videos. There were a few, all somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes long, that sought to sell us on Scientology; a sizzle reel, essentially. One video outlined a sauna-based recovery treatment for 9/11 first responders where they could steam out the toxins they inhaled during the crisis, all paid for by Tom Cruise. Another video showed “empirical evidence” that Scientology was great for people, which amounted to a series of incomplete graphs labeled things like “happiness,” as if that’s a quantifiable thing that can be graphed. As a Sociology major, it had already been drilled into me that studies can’t quantify things like “happiness” directly, they can only quantify what people say.

“Have you seen Love, Actually?” our tour guide asked us. We had. “That young girl at the end singing Mariah Carrey, she’s one of us!” Scientology does love its firmament of stars. It made a lot of sense that a cult of personality would see celebrities as the ultimate assets, especially since many celebrities thrive on cults of personality already.

The last stop on our tour was the most enlightening. We were taken down into the basement where a working e-meter was stored. Scientology holds that psychology and psychiatry are inherently predatory disciplines and that all practitioners are sexual assailants looking to strike patients when they’re most vulnerable. So, instead of therapy, they have “auditing.” You see, because the alien overlord Xenu created the human race from constructed clone bodies animated by souls he harvested, the human soul lives many lives. These past life experiences manifest as thetans or shards of memory that are to blame for any mental-emotional health issues. The e-meter is meant to measure brain activity and according to Scientology, that activity would flood the whole body with electromagnetic pulses. So when an auditee is asked a question, the e-meter’s paddles held in the audtiee’s hands would theoretically communicate brain activity back to the meter and the auditor would have an idea of where to begin work.

Of course, I tried it. It was too tempting not to. I held the small cylindrical paddles in my hand and the guide asked a short series of broad, nebulous questions:

Has there ever been a time when you felt uncertain? Has there been a time when you did not know what your future would be? Have you ever believed something that other people disagreed with?

Who among us has led a perfectly certain, forward-thinking, agreeable life without a smidgen of doubt or friction? My skepticism deepened immediately and only more so when I cottoned onto their trick: the e-meter measured physical activity, not brain activity. The tightening or loosening of the grip, the slightest shift of a pinkie finger, the flexing of the palm, all of these made the meter fly to the maximum score.

“Ah, so those would be the places we’d start with you,” the guide said. She seemed pleased, like her point was proven. She was less thrilled when I simply cradled the paddles in my open palms and suddenly the meter’s readings were inert.

As we were led back upstairs and over to a guest book, which we signed with fake names, I wondered whether they could tell something was up with us. Our names (“Oliver O’Connell” “Joseph Magdalene”) were not exactly subtle. At the very least, my paper would not lack for surprise.