Finally got around to reading The New Yorker’s compelling account of Paul Haggis’s defection from Scientology and of the astonishing success the church has had in recruiting megastars such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise.
My take: Cruise and Travolta embody the sorts of people who get pulled into this. Both, who achieved fame early in life, were nonetheless disadvantaged by relatively poor educations and underdeveloped psyches. In a nutshell, Scientology provided a grand narrative at a critical and vulnerable time in their lives. They’re both intelligent people who nonetheless lacked the critical faculties to withstand a hard sell.
The article is heart rending. I was previously aware of the beatings allegedly meted out by this horrid Miscavige character but not of the child labor issues – 10-year-old kids impressed at very young age into Sea Org, which apparently serves a role roughly analogous to the Jesuits.
Yet, a couple of things really struck me that I did not previously know: First, by some accounts, there may be as few as 25,000 practicing Scientologists in the United States, although the church claims 8 million members worldwide – apparently a rather specious claim at best. Second, Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard, claims to have built the movement from the insights he formulated while recovering from World War II combat wounds. As the article observes, this raises a huge challenge for modern-day apologists: There are no official military records providing clear proof of his war wounds, which could mean that this church is based on a lie, albeit a rather cleverly crafted one.
