Going Clear

Based on more than two hundred personal interviews and years of archival research, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) provides an in-depth probe of the inner workings of the Church of Scientology. Wright touches on the religion’s origins in the vision of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, its struggle for legitimate and legal acceptance, and its expansive and secret efforts to infiltrate the United States government. In doing so, the author ponders whether Scientology deserves the constitutional protections it has achieved, as well as what fundamentally makes a religion into a religion.

Wright focuses on the founder of the Church of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Toward the end of the 1940s, Hubbard was a college dropout who had turned to writing pulp fiction. Hubbard then became a heedless naval officer, described by one report as lacking the necessary characteristics of leadership, judgment, and cooperation.

As an ulcerous and gonorrhea-afflicted veteran, Hubbard developed a plan to breathe new life into his fledgling fortunes, believing there was money to be had in creating a new religion. The choice to pursue this profitable new enterprise, Wright suggests, was motivated more by tax and legal benefits reserved for religious organizations than spiritual inspiration.



Hubbard emerges as a serial cheater, abusive husband and father, and ideologue that felt the mental hospitals and jails in America were filled with inmates who had unsuccessfully been aborted by their mothers, who viewed them as a curse. Wright, however, also admires Hubbard’s American dynamism, his will-to-power ambition that is also evident in modern-day Scientologist and celebrity Tom Cruise.

Wright situates Scientology inside the realm of the “new religious movement” in America in the second half of the twentieth century, an era when unconventional religions collected followers seeking spiritual salvation not offered by mainstream churches. The book speaks to the way the line between objective reality and zealous speculation has always remained unclear when it comes to Scientology.

This, in part, is due to the strange eschatologies Hubbard devised, which involve Xenu, a despotic leader, as well as billions of thetans, spirit-like creatures who were relocated to Earth only to be plunged into volcanoes before they were killed by hydrogen bombs. Wright goes on to describe the religion’s esoteric cosmology, the auditing process that determines the state of being of inductees, and the Bridge to Total Freedom, which allows church members to gain eternal life.



The confusion surrounding Scientology also stems from the litigious bullying strategies of church members, who are capable of scaring off would-be investigators, suggests Wright. The Church of Scientology has reputed assets of roughly a billion dollars. However, although it claims to have eight million members worldwide, independent studies have revealed that only thirty thousand Americans classify themselves as Scientologists, which is less than half the number of Americans who identify as Rastafarian.

Among the revelations Wright uncovered through the course of his research is “the Hole,” a double-wide trailer parked at a resort in California and owned by the church. According to reports, forty or fifty people were housed at this location without furniture or beds. They ate leftovers and endured cold-water showers from a hose while they stood in groups. Stories about people being beaten and forced to divorce their spouses and endure mandatory “disconnections” are abundant.

Some children work for the church and do not go to school, in clear violation of state and federal labor laws. There is also the story of a Scientology executive who was assaulted by David Miscavige, Hubbard’s successor, and his minions and was forced to clean a bathroom floor using his tongue.



The conditions people have endured and continue to endure to be part of the Church of Scientology raise the question of why such individuals stayed with the church. One reason, says Wright, is clearly Stockholm syndrome, but other practical obstacles have stood in the way. Some individuals had joined the church as children and had signed “billion-year contracts” they felt they could not escape. Some did not have any friends or relatives, a mailing address, or a credit card. They essentially had nowhere else to go. If members asked to leave, they were informed that they were required to pay back an astronomical sum of $100,000 for classes they had supposedly signed up for.

Going Clear goes on to discuss how the church pursues celebrities, such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise. According to Wright, Cruise even allowed the church’s leaders to act as pimps for him, informing young women that they had been chosen for a “special program” that required them to break up with their boyfriends.

Although Wright portrays Scientology as part new age self-help and part get-rich-quick scheme, the author expresses sympathy for the individuals who have become members. While he acknowledges that members of a religion can choose to believe whatever they want, Wright adds that using the First Amendment protections afforded religions to falsify history, proliferate forgeries, and conceal human rights abuses is a different matter.