Janet Reitman, Inside
Scientology: The Story of America 's
Most Secretive Religion
Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology :
A History of a New Religion
Review by Jim Bennett
Of late, I have been pondering twentieth century California and the
fertile ground it offered for incubating and nurturing a wide variety of
religious movements in the twentieth century. Already, two of the books
reviewed in our still young Book of the Month describe various dimensions of
this religious fertility, especially in Southern
California : Matthew Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sun Belt. Conservative Protestant growth and innovation is an
important part the story of religion in California
over the last century, spanning from Holiness denominations such as the Church
of the Nazarene and the emergence of Pentecostalism to groups such as Calvary
Chapel and Vineyard Christian Fellowship that emerged in the second half of the
century.
But religious creativity in California also extended well beyond these
Christian denominations, suggesting a spiritual hothouse akin to that a hundred
years earlier along the Western edge of the Second Great Awakening. Many
twentieth century new religious movements, even if they did not start in
California, experienced significant growth by (re)locating in California, from
the Theosophist community in Point Loma, to David Berg's The Family, to Jim
Jones' People's Temple. As early as 1935, according to Philip Jenkins,
commentators were flagging southern California
as the epicenter of the "cult racket" (Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs, p. 11).
I was reminded of all this with the publication last summer
of two new books on Scientology, a tradition whose secrecy and defensiveness
has made it difficult for scholars to research and write about. Taken together,
Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) and Hugh Urban's, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), provide much useful information for those who teach—or would like
to teach—about Scientology and its contributions to the complexity of both the
region's and the nation's religious landscape.
Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and her book is an expansion of a March 2006 article
that appeared in that magazine. Her book is an engrossing and easy to read
journey through the history of Scientology, touching on enough of the popular
controversies—from questions about L. Ron Hubbard's background to Tom Cruise's
involvement and the motives and methods of current president David Miscavige—to
appeal to a popular audience. But Reitman goes well beneath the sensationalist headlines, myths, and rumors that shape
most people's impressions of Scientology. This is also a deeply researched
volume. Reitman has examined vast amounts of Scientology materials, taken time
to review what scholarly materials exist, as well as conducting extensive
interviews to paint a much broader picture of Scientology than previously
available. The details prove helpful for those seeking a deeper understanding
of how Scientology operates in its various organizations and orders. She also
illumines changes in the organization, especially as leadership shifted from
Hubbard to Miscavige, that have created a movement more isolated and secretive than
the organization's formative decades. The strength of the book rests in the
stories she tells and the narratives she reveals, many of them quite wrenching,
rather than offering radically new interpretive frameworks. Even as Reitman's
tone is more nuanced and her treatment and profile more even-handed than most
accounts, this book will not do much to counter popular skepticism about
Scientology.
Hugh Urban's TheChurch of Scientology takes a somewhat different approach, dealing with
larger theoretical questions that Scientology raises about the study of
religion in general and the definition of religion in the United States more
specifically. Aware of the challenges and repercussions of writing about
Scientology, Urban is less interested in the juicy controversies that Reitman
tackles than the scholarly questions that
frame his study. While Reitman calls Scientology "America 's Most Secretive
Religion" in her subtitle, it is Urban who is the expert on secrecy in
religion and brings his knowledge of esotericism as a category of comparative
religious studies to bear on his analysis of Scientology. Like Reitman, Urban moves
in a chronological fashion, tracing the emergence of Scientology as a religion
under Hubbard's guidance, with a strong emphasis on how Hubbard guided
Scientology into the category of religion even as that classification has
remained highly contested by many outsiders, both within and beyond the United
States (The IRS did not recognize Scientology as a religion entitled to
tax-exempt status until 1993).
Neither text argues that Scientology is specifically a
religion of the American West (clearly neither author shares our angst about
such questions!). Indeed, Scientology is not nor has it ever been a practice
exclusive to the American West. Nonetheless, in both accounts, the West is very
much present. Hubbard himself frames his own narrative largely around
experiences in the West, from an early childhood on the western plains and
claiming friendships with Native Americans, to naval service in the Pacific
that oriented his religious thinking towards religious traditions of the East.
Urban's account emphasizes the Cold War context out of which Scientology
emerged, a mindset and material reality which profoundly shaped the ethos of Southern California where defense contractors were among
the region's largest employers. For Hubbard, several of these interests fused
during the time he spent in the home of a Cal Tech Rocket Scientist who also
had a deep interest in the occult. Reitman likewise shows how heavily Hubbard
built his religion around the culture of celebrity that was Hollywood , a conflicted relationship that
remains at the center of popular conceptions of Scientology.
All of which is not try to force either of these immensely
useful volumes into categories where they do not fit. Still, especially as we
consider the last century of history of religion in the American West, these
volumes on the particular tradition of Scientology contribute to broader
conversations about critical issues that emerge in other stories of religion in
the American West. To offer just one example, the questions Urban raises
intersect in intriguing ways with those raised by Tisa Wenger's We Have a Religion about who gets to
define religion with what consequences. When attentiveness to religion in the
American West brings together such diverse experiences and books, surely we
know that we are in a space that is creating conversations worth having!
2 comments:
I was a 27 year religious order staffer (training officer, scribe, computer operations) of Scientology, and assisted Janet Reitman with networking and encouraging ex members to speak with her for her great article and book.
I've been much more less in touch with Urban, but am happy he covered so much ground in his book.
There is so much missing in both their books, that students and scholars looking for a good single volume on the basic spiritual tenets and practices, we just still don't have a good neutral primer on the two core spiritual practices of Scientology, even to this date.
Dr. Gordon Melton told me to read Harriet Whitehead's "Renunciation and Reformulation" 1987, Cornel Univ Press, and her book does a pretty good job of Scientology's "lower levels" tenets.
To date, and even with these two books on Scientology, we still haven't (neither Scientology itself, nor academics who've spent even years gazing at Scientology), and despite Roy Wallis' "The Road to Total Freedom" and Whitehead's "Renunciation and Reformulation" and now Hugh Urban's book, still we don't have a really accurate book that "tells it like it is" when it comes to Scientology's basic tenets. (Meaning Scientology's therapy lower levels, and Scientology's exorcism upper levels, neither of these zones are properly analyzed to date.)
In a nutshell Scientology is a therapy religion and exorcism religion (high volume exorcism to an unprecedented number of surplus souls being exorcised).
I'll gladly walk any young student scholar wanting to do the hard work to focus on the actual spiritual practices of Scientology, and lay them out, without all the irrelevant padding in most academic writings about Scientology's core spiritual practices.
The two latest books skipped really a knowledgeable description, level by level, of the Hubbard "Bridge to Total Freedom" which is currently most important in answering the question: What Is Scientology?
Chuck Beatty
ex Sea Org (1975-2003)
412-260-1170 call weekends please.
There are also 4 ex member books in recent years, from knowledgeable ex Sea Org staffers, and more coming out:
1) John Duignan "The Complex"
see Amazon
2) Marc Headley "Blown For Good"
see Amazon
3) Nancy Many "My Billion Year Contract"
see Amazon
4) Jefferson Hawkins "Counterfeit Dreams"
5) Amy Scobee "Scientology: Abuse at the Top"
Scholars and researchers have unfortunately not even been given any papers nor chapters in any books, laying out the religious order structures of Scientology, sufficient to even appreciate the positions of these ex member writers.
Nancy Many was Commodore's Staff Aide for Division 6. (No scholar nor researcher has yet bothered to even discuss the hierarchies history of the Scientology religious order, it's all virgin territory, thus no one even grasps Nancy's access to Hubbard's "traffic" and her responsibilities, the world is clueless about the behind the scenes details.)
Jeff was Marketing Exec Int, part of the "think tank" team, the "think tank" team of Scientology's religious order, scholars are oblivious to the Scientology movement's think tank history, except what I've tried to verbally tell the handful of new religion scholars I've been in touch with.
John Duignan was two echelons down from the "top" ranks, and worked at the "Complex" in LA, at a brief period with the "Complex" housed what is known as "middle management". John's book in any case is a must read for Scientology scholar true experts.
Amy Scobee was a Watchdog Committee Member for about a decade. The Watchdog Committee is one of the two top management councils of the movement, the second being the think tank. Amy's book is a must read.
I should have done a book, or chapter, of the history and layout in simple terms, of the management upper structures of Scientology, and if any young scholar wants to do that, I'll tell them where to get the info and introduce them to plenty of ex WDC (Watchdog Committee) and Exec Strata (think tank) ex members who'll be able to detail the history of these all important top two ocuncils of the movement.
Janet Reitman's book makes the point that Miscavige is sort of the Brigham Young of Scientology.
What I see is possibly her editors and fact checkers just weren't sufficiently interested in the full scene that Hubbard left the movement with, and at least in Hugh's book, he admits a lot more is there to cover.
Well, I'll open any doors I can to ex members, and guide any willing students wishing to take on the nitty gritty details of the voluminous existing info on Scientology.
And I'll introduce people to people, so we get all the people who knew Hubbard interviewed, before those people die and the firsthand Hubbard history is lost!
Chuck Beatty
ex Sea Org (1975-2003)
Pittsburgh, 412-260-1170 call weekends.
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