HERE is a list of articles on this page following my statement of faith. ORIGINAL INTENT / THE GREAT DEBATE OF OUR SEASON /A NATION UNDER GOD / DEFENDING RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE: REMARKS ON THE MOSQUE NEAR GROUND ZERO BY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG / AT RAMADAN DINNER, OBAMA DEFENDS PLANS FOR GROUND ZERO MOSQUE / SARAH PALIN IS WRONG ABOUT JOHN F KENNEDY, RELIGION & POLITICS / A RELIGIOUS TEST ALL OUR POLITICAL CANDIDATES SHOULD TAKE /
I was raised in the Church, went to Sunday School and was confirmed in Grace United Methodist Church in Warren, PA. I was a member of that church until we moved to Scandia and then joined the Scandia Evangelical Covenant Church. I am a Christian, I believe in Jesus Christ as my personal savior, and though I am no saint I am a believer and do not fear death and meeting God for judgment because I am doing the best I can with his help and forgiveness. I believe the Bible is the Word of God, inspired by God, and my faith is expressed in the Apostle's Creed. Because of my faith I am a Christian Socialist politically, and believe in Christ's teachings in The Beatitudes and Matthew 25. I believe Christianity teaches social justice and liberation theology and non-violent civil disobedience and resistance. I strongly support the first amendment of our constitution separating Church and State and guaranteeing freedom of religion. I am thankful this nation is a Republic and not a theocracy and know God is not a Democrat or Republican or Christian Socialist or member of any political party. I do reject the claim made by some that this is a Christian nation, I believe if that were so we would not face the issues of racism, hate, hunger, homelessness, lack of health care, lack of education, unemployment, and pollution, just to name a few of the major issues we face. These would be issues, but not major issues in a Christian nation. I also reject the claim that the Founding Fathers created America as a Christian nation, based on their beliefs. History shows this to be not true, unfortunately for the majority of these men something had happened in their lives to turn them against religion. So I offer these articles from Mother Jones, not as a slap in the face to believers who want it to be true, but just to set the record straight. After all, if this was founded as a Christian nation wouldn't Jesus Christ, God and the Bible be mentioned somewhere in the constitution?
Religion, Politics and the President 19AUG10 from PEW Research Center
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OVERVIEW
A substantial and growing number of Americans say that Barack Obama is a Muslim, while the proportion saying he is a Christian has declined. More than a year and a half into his presidency, a plurality of the public says they do not know what religion Obama follows.
A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is. The survey was completed in early August, before Obama’s recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center.
The view that Obama is a Muslim is more widespread among his political opponents than among his backers. Roughly a third of conservative Republicans (34%) say Obama is a Muslim, as do 30% of those who disapprove of Obama’s job performance. But even among many of his supporters and allies, less than half now say Obama is a Christian. Among Democrats, for instance, 46% say Obama is a Christian, down from 55% in March 2009.
The belief that Obama is a Muslim has increased most sharply among Republicans
(up 14 points since 2009), especially conservative Republicans (up 16 points). But the number of independents who say Obama is a Muslim has also increased significantly
(up eight points). There has been little change in the number of Democrats who say Obama is a Muslim, but fewer Democrats today say he is a Christian (down nine points since 2009).
When asked how they learned about Obama’s religion in an open-ended question, 60% of those who say Obama is a Muslim cite the media. Among specific media sources, television (at 16%) is mentioned most frequently. About one-in-ten (11%) of those who say Obama is a Muslim say they learned of this through Obama’s own words and behavior.
Beliefs about Obama’s religion are closely linked to political judgments about him. Those who say he is a Muslim overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while a majority of those who think he is a Christian approve of the job Obama is doing. Those who are unsure about Obama’s religion are about evenly divided in their views of his performance.
The new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life – conducted July 21-Aug. 5 among 3,003 respondents reached on landlines and cell phones, and interviewed in both English and Spanish –finds that despite increasing uncertainty about Obama’s religion, the public generally says he handles his religious beliefs appropriately.
The public sees Obama as less influenced by religion compared with George W. Bush when he was president. Yet relatively small percentages say Obama mentions his faith too infrequently or that he relies too little on his religious beliefs when making policy decisions.
Currently, 41% say Obama relies on his religious beliefs “a great deal” (14%) or a “fair amount” (27%) when making policy decisions; in August 2004, 64% said Bush relied on his religious beliefs either a great deal (26%) or a fair amount (38%).
Nonetheless, as was the case with Bush, the public generally says that Obama relies on his religious beliefs the right amount when making policy decisions. Roughly half of Americans (48%) think that Obama relies on his beliefs the right amount when making policy, while 21% say he relies too little on his beliefs and 11% too much; in 2004, slightly more (53%) said Bush relied on his beliefs the right amount when making policy. In addition, about as many say Obama (53%) mentions his religious faith and prayer the right amount as said that about Bush (52%) in 2006, though far fewer say Obama mentions his faith too much (10% vs. 24% for Bush).
The survey also finds about half of the public (52%) says that churches should keep out of politics, while 43% say churches and other houses of worship should express their views on social and political questions. That is largely unchanged from 2008, but over the previous decade (from 1996 to 2006), narrow majorities had expressed support for churches’ involvement in political matters.
The decline since 2006 in the number saying that churches should speak out on social and political issues has been broad-based, including Democrats and Republicans and people from a variety of religious backgrounds. The percentage of black Protestants who say churches should speak out on political matters has dropped sharply, going from 69% in 2006 to 53% today.
Despite the growing opposition to political involvement on the part of churches, most people continue to say they want political leaders who are religious. About six-in-ten (61%) agree that it is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs. And as in previous surveys, a slight plurality (37%) says that in general there has been too little expression of religious faith and prayer by political leaders.
The survey also finds:
• The Republican Party continues to be more widely viewed as friendly toward religion than the Democratic Party. However, both parties are facing declines in the percentages saying they are friendly to religion.
• The religious landscape is far more favorable to Republicans than was the case as recently as 2008. Half of white non-Hispanic Catholics (50%) currently identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up nine points since 2008. Among religiously unaffiliated voters, who have been stalwart supporters of Democrats in recent elections, 29% currently identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up from 25% in 2008 (the proportion identifying as Democrats has fallen seven points since then). And 33% of Jewish voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up from 20% in 2008.
• Roughly six-in-ten people (58%) have heard of the “religious right,” while 41% are familiar with the “religious left.” Among those who have heard of the religious right and the religious left, sizable numbers express no opinion as to whether or not they generally agree or disagree with them.
NOTE: This report includes comparisons of opinions among different religious groups, which are based on a combination of religious tradition and race/ethnicity. The categories White evangelical Protestants, White mainline Protestants and White Catholics do not include Hispanics. Similarly, Black Protestants do not include Hispanics. Hispanic respondents can be of any race. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish.
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SECTION 1: OBAMA AND RELIGION
Obama’s Religious Beliefs
The share of Americans who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim – which held steady at between 11% and 12% from early 2008 through early 2009 – has jumped to 18%. There also has been a steep decline in the number of people who identify Obama as a Christian – 34% today, down from 48% in March 2009 and 51% in October 2008. A plurality (43%) now say they do not know what Obama’s religion is, up from 34% in 2009.
The view that Obama is a Muslim is highest among his political opponents (31% of Republicans and 30% of those who disapprove of his job performance express this view). It is lower among his supporters (10% among both Democrats and those who approve of his job performance). The share of Republicans who say Obama is a Muslim has nearly doubled over the past year and a half – from 17% to 31%.
Currently, about as many Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim (31%) as believe he is a Christian (27%); a plurality of Republicans (39%) say they do not know Obama’s religion. In March 2009, far more Republicans said Obama was a Christian (47%) than a Muslim (17%).
The impression that Obama is a Muslim is also more widespread today among independents – 18% say this today, up from 10% in 2009. There has been virtually no change in the share of Democrats who say Obama is a Muslim (10% today, 7% in 2009). But even among Democrats, fewer than half (46%) now identify his religion as Christian, down from 55% last year.
There is also a wide racial divide in the perception that Obama is a Muslim. The number of whites who believe this rose from 11% to 21% since March 2009, while there has been virtually no change in blacks’ views on this question (7% say Obama is Muslim today, compared with 6% in 2009). But both blacks and whites are less likely today to say Obama is a Christian.
Among religious groups, a higher proportion of white evangelical Protestants say Obama is a Muslim than any other religious group surveyed; 29% hold this view today, up from 20% in 2009. But the share of people saying Obama is a Muslim has increased across all religious groups. Indeed, both white mainline Protestants and white Catholics are roughly twice as likely today as in 2009 to say the president is a Muslim. And significantly fewer people in nearly all religious groups say Obama is a Christian than did so in 2009.
Obama, Bush and Religion
Obama is perceived as being much less reliant on his faith than was George W. Bush; a plurality (43%) says Obama is not very reliant on his religious beliefs in making policy decisions, compared with just 28% who said that about Bush in 2004.
While Obama is seen as less reliant on his religious beliefs than Bush, the public expresses roughly similar levels of satisfaction with Obama’s approach to religion as compared with his predecessor. Nearly half (48%) say Obama relies on his religious beliefs about the right amount when making policy decisions, and 53% say that Obama mentions his faith and prayer about the right amount. Roughly similar numbers said the same thing when asked in 2006 about Bush’s mentions of faith and prayer and in 2004 when asked about Bush’s reliance on religion in making policy decisions.
Substantial majorities of Democrats say Obama mentions his faith about the right amount (69%) and that he relies on it the right amount when making policy decisions (67%). This compares with just 34% of Republicans who say he mentions his faith the right amount and 26% who say he relies on his religious beliefs the right amount when making policy decisions. And higher proportions of white evangelical Protestants than other religious groups say Obama mentions his faith and prayer too little and relies on his beliefs too little when making policy.
In addition, views of Obama’s approach to religion are linked with perceptions of his own religious beliefs. Only about three-in-ten of those who think Obama is a Muslim say he mentions his faith the right amount (30%) and relies on his beliefs the right amount when making policy decisions (31%).
By comparison, large majorities of those who say he is a Christian say he mentions his faith the right amount and relies on his beliefs when making policy decisions the right amount (68%, 66% respectively).
The survey also finds some discomfort with the idea that Obama relies a great deal on his faith when making policy decisions, especially compared with Bush in 2004. Among those who say that Obama relies on his religion a great deal when making policy decisions, 50% say he relies on his beliefs the right amount while 39% say that Obama relies on his faith too much.
In 2004, by contrast, the balance of opinion was much more positive for Bush; 63% of those who said he relied on his beliefs when making policy said this was appropriate while 27% said he relied on his beliefs too much.
SECTION 2. RELIGION AND POLITICS
Religion’s Influence on Society and Government
Two-thirds of Americans (67%) currently say that religion is losing its influence
on American life, compared with 59% who said this in July 2006. More people now say religion’s influence is on the decline than at any time since 1994, when 69% of respondents in a Gallup poll said religion’s influence on American life was waning.
More people also say religion’s influence on government leaders, such as the president and members of Congress, is declining. Currently, 62% say that religion is losing its influence on government leaders, compared with 45% who said this in 2006.
The number saying that religion is losing influence on American life has increased most among Republicans, with 82% expressing this view, up 21 points since 2006. Similarly, 72% of Republicans now say that religion’s influence on government leaders is declining, up 20 points since 2006.
More independents also say that religion is losing its influence on American life (up nine points) and on government leaders (up 25 points). Among Democrats, the number saying that religion is losing influence on government leaders (52%) has increased nine points since 2006, but there has been no significant change in the number of Democrats saying religion’s influence on American society is declining (58% today vs. 60% in 2006).
Among religious groups, nearly eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants see religion’s influence decreasing on both American society (79%, up 20 points since 2006) and on government leaders (78%, up 20 points since 2006). Fewer white mainline Protestants and black Protestants say that religion’s influence is declining. Nearly three-quarters of white Catholics (74%) say that religion has a declining influence on American society, up 13 points since 2006, and 61% say that religion is losing its influence on government leaders, up 18 points since 2006.
As in the past, most of those who say that religion has less influence on American life see this as a bad thing; 53% of the total public says this is a bad thing while just 10% see it as a good thing. Similarly, 42% of the public says religion’s declining influence on government leaders is a bad thing while just 15% say it is a positive development.
Views of Churches’ Involvement in Politics
A narrow majority of Americans (52%) now say churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters while 43% say that houses of worship should express their views on day-to-day social and political questions.
These opinions are little changed since 2008, but in 2006 – and over the preceding decade – narrow majorities had expressed support for churches speaking out on social and political issues. Today’s attitudes are on par with results from 1968, when 53% said churches should keep out of politics and 40% said they should express their views.
The decline in support for churches and other houses of worship speaking out on social and political issues has been broad-based. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Catholics and white mainline Protestants are all less supportive of churches and other houses of worship speaking out on political issues.
The most dramatic changes in views on this question are seen among black Protestants (53% now say churches should speak out on political matters, compared with 69% in 2006) and people with less than a high school education (39% now say churches should speak out, down from 58% in 2006).
While most religious groups are less supportive of churches expressing their views on issues, there continue to be substantial differences on this measure. Majorities of white evangelical Protestants (56%) and black Protestants (53%) say churches should speak out on issues; far fewer white non-Hispanic Catholics (37%) or white mainline Protestants (35%) agree.
Republicans continue to be more supportive of churches and other houses of worship expressing their views compared with independents and Democrats. About half of Republicans (51%) favor churches speaking out, compared with 41% of independents and 39% of Democrats.
The survey also finds that Americans continue to overwhelmingly oppose churches and houses of worship endorsing specific candidates for public office. Fully 70% say churches should not come out in favor of candidates during political elections while just a quarter (24%) supports such endorsements. These opinions have changed little in recent years. More than half of every major religious group opposes such endorsements.
Most Say Lawmakers Should Be Religious
Though the public expresses reservations about churches’ involvement in politics, there is widespread agreement that politicians should be religious. Fully 61% say that is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs; just 34% disagree.
Majorities across all major religious groups – with the exception of the religiously unaffiliated – agree it is important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs. More than eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants (83%) express this view, as do roughly two-thirds of white non-Hispanic Catholics (66%) and white mainline Protestants (64%). And about seven-in-ten black Protestants (71%) say it is important that lawmakers have strong religious beliefs.
In contrast, by more than two-to-one (66% to 30%), the religiously unaffiliated disagree that it is important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs. Among atheists and agnostics, fully 85% say it is not important for congressional representatives to have strong religious beliefs.
The public continues to be divided about the level of religious expression among political leaders. Nearly four-in-ten (37%) say there has been too little expression of faith by political leaders; 29% say there has been too much, while 24% say political leaders speak on faith and prayer the right amount. These opinions have changed little in recent years.
Majorities of white evangelical Protestants (56%) and black Protestants (51%) say there has been too little expression of faith by political leaders. Only about three-in-ten white mainline Protestants (31%) and white Catholics (30%) agree.
The religiously unaffiliated continue to say there has been too much – rather than too little – expression of religious faith by political leaders. Fully 53% of the religiously unaffiliated say that politicians speak too much about faith and prayer.
Across all religious groups, roughly half (52%) of those who say they attend worship services weekly or more think politicians talk too little about their faith, compared with about one-third (32%) of those who attend services monthly or yearly and just 21% of those who seldom or never attend services.
Fewer See Parties as Friendly Toward Religion
A plurality of the public (43%) sees the Republican Party as generally friendly toward religion, while 28% say it is neutral and 14% say it is unfriendly. By comparison, just 26% say the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion; 41% say it is neutral and 19% say it is unfriendly.
The percentages saying each party is friendly to religion have declined over the past two years. In 2008, a narrow majority of the public (52%) said the Republican Party was friendly to religion; that percentage slipped to 48% last year and 43% in the current survey. There has been a comparable decline in the percentage saying the Democratic Party is friendly to religion – from 38% in 2008, to 29% in 2009 and 26% currently.
There is no political or religious group in which a majority views the Democratic Party as friendly to religion; even among Democrats themselves, just 42% say the party is friendly to religion, down slightly from last year (47%).
Most Republicans (57%) see the GOP as friendly to religion, which is little changed from last year (59%). However, the proportion of white evangelicals saying the Republican Party is friendly to religion has slipped, from 53% last year to 46% today.
The Religious Right and Left
A majority of Americans (58%) have heard a lot (25%) or a little (33%) about the “religious right,” or the Christian conservative movement. Fewer are familiar with the liberal or progressive religious movement sometimes known as the “religious left,” with 41% saying they have heard either a lot (10%) or a little (30%) about it.
About two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (66%) say they have heard at least a little about the religious right. That compares with 59% of white mainline Protestants, 55% of Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated, and 47% of black Protestants.
Among political groups, large majorities of both conservative Republicans (71%) and liberal Democrats (68%) say they have heard at least a little about the religious right, while fewer moderate and liberal Republicans (54%) and conservative and moderate Democrats (50%) have heard something about the movement.
Half of white evangelical Protestants (50%) say they have heard at least a little about the religious left. Among other religious groups,
significantly smaller proportions (ranging from 34% to 40%) say they know about the movement. Conservative Republicans are the only political group where as many as half (52%) say they are familiar with the religious left. Just 43% of liberal Democrats say they have heard a lot or a little about the movement.
Support for the conservative Christian movement is highest among conservative Republicans and white evangelical Protestants. More than four-in-ten conservative Republicans (41%) and 29% of white evangelicals say they agree with the conservative Christian movement. Just 4% and 6%, respectively, say they disagree with the movement.
By contrast, 45% of liberal Democrats disagree with the conservative Christian movement while just 2% agree. The religiously unaffiliated disagree with the Christian conservative movement by 30% to 3%.
Yet across all religious and political groups –regardless of their view of the movement – large percentages either have not heard of the conservative Christian movement or express no opinion of it. Majorities of conservative Republicans (55%) and white evangelicals (64%) have no opinion of the movement or have not heard of it; this also is the case among liberal Democrats (54%) and the religiously unaffiliated (66%).
Even fewer people have formed an opinion of the liberal or progressive religious movement; just 4% agree with this movement while 11% disagree. A quarter of the public (25%) expresses no opinion, while 59% have not heard about the progressive religious movement.
Of those who have an opinion on the movement, conservative Republicans (28% disagree) and white evangelicals (20%) express the highest rate of disagreement with the religious left. Liberal Democrats express the highest levels of support for the religious left, with 14% saying they agree with the movement.
SECTION 3: RELIGION AND THE 2010 ELECTIONS
Voting Intentions Divided
Voter preferences for the upcoming congressional elections remain closely divided, with 45% currently expressing support for the Democratic candidate in their district and 44% saying they back the Republican candidate. Opinions about the midterm have changed little since the start of the year; in four previous surveys this year, voters also were evenly divided.
Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly favor the Republican candidate in their district (by 67% to 23%). That is little changed from this point in the previous midterm campaign in 2006. (For a detailed comparison between current voting preferences and the 2006 midterm, see “Republicans Faring Better with Men, Whites, Independents and Seniors,” Aug. 10, 2010 http://people-press.org/report/643/ ).
Opinions are more evenly divided among white non-Hispanic Catholics and white mainline Protestants, but the GOP is running better among both groups than it did four years ago.
Religiously unaffiliated voters currently favor the Democrats over the Republicans by a 49%-36% margin. Among this group, those who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are largely loyal to the Democratic Party (64% favor Democrats, 27% favor Republicans). However, those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” are more evenly divided; 39% favor Republicans and 42% favor Democrats, with a large percentage (19%) saying they do not know how they will vote.
Black Protestants favor the Democrats by a wide margin. Fully 86% of black Protestants say they will vote Democratic, while just 7% say they will support the Republican candidate, which is little changed from this point in the 2006 campaign.
Registered voters who say they attend worship services weekly or more favor Republicans by a 12-point margin (51% vs. 39%), while those who say they attend services monthly or yearly are more evenly divided (43% favor Republicans, 47% favor Democrats). Voters who say they attend services seldom or never are 19 points more supportive of Democrats (53%) than Republicans (34%).
As the Pew Research Center noted in its Aug. 10 report, the Republican Party continues to hold an engagement advantage over the Democratic Party. More than half of Republicans (55%) say they have given a lot of thought to the election, compared with 37% of Democrats.
Among religious groups, about half of white evangelical Protestants (51%) have given a lot of thought to the election, as have 48% of white mainline Protestants and 45% of white Catholics. By contrast, just 36% of the religiously unaffiliated and 29% of black Protestants say they have given a lot of thought to the November election.
Despite these differences in how much voters have thought about the election, there is less variation in the proportions who say they are “absolutely certain” to vote in November. Overall, 70% of registered voters say they are absolutely certain to vote in the fall. Among religious groups, 76% of white non-Hispanic Catholics and 74% of white evangelical Protestants say they are certain to vote as do 67% of the religiously unaffiliated and 64% of black Protestants.
Three-quarters (75%) of those who say they attend worship services weekly or more say they are certain to vote, compared with two-thirds of those who say they attend monthly or yearly (68%) or attend seldom or never (66%).
Trends in Party Identification
Analysis of aggregated Pew Research Center surveys from 2006, 2008 and 2010 reveals that Republicans have made gains in the proportion who identify with the GOP or lean to the Republican Party. Overall, 47% of registered voters in 2010 Pew Research Center surveys identify with the Democratic Party or say they lean Democratic, while 43% are Republican or lean Republican. In 2008, 51% identified as Democrats and 39% as Republicans.
Half of white Catholics (50%) now identify themselves as Republican or lean toward the GOP, up nine points since 2008. Republicans also have made gains among Jewish voters; 33% now identify or lean Republican, up from 20% in 2008.
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ABOUT THE SURVEY
Results for this survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a national sample of 3,003 adults living in the continental United States, 18 years of age or older, from July 21-August 5, 2010 (2,002 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 1,001 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 431 who had no landline telephone). Both the landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/.
The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race/ethnicity, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2009 Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. The sample is also weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2009 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting.
The following table shows the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:
In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.
About the Projects
The survey is a joint effort of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Both organizations are sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and are projects of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. The Center’s purpose is to serve as a forum for ideas on the media and public policy through public opinion research. In this role it serves as an important information resource for political leaders, journalists, scholars, and public interest organizations.
All of the Center’s current survey results are made available free of charge.
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life seeks to promote a deeper understanding of issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. It studies public opinion, demographics and other important aspects of religion and public life in the U.S. and around the world. It also provides a neutral venue for discussions of timely issues through roundtables and briefings.
This report is a collaborative product based on the input and analysis of the following individuals:
Sarah Palin is wrong about John F. Kennedy, religion and politics
By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Friday, December 3, 2010; 6:00 PM
Sarah Palin has found a new opponent to debate: John F. Kennedy.
In her new book, "America by Heart," Palin objects to my uncle's famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he challenged the ministers - and the country - to judge him, a Catholic presidential candidate, by his views rather than his faith. "Contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president," Kennedy said. "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic."
Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that Kennedy's speech had "succeeded in the best possible way: It reconciled public service and religion without compromising either." Now, however, she says she has revisited the speech and changed her mind. She finds it "defensive . . . in tone and content" and is upset that Kennedy, rather than presenting a reconciliation of his private faith and his public role, had instead offered an "unequivocal divorce of the two."
Palin's argument seems to challenge a great American tradition, enshrined in the Constitution, stipulating that there be no religious test for public office. A careful reading of her book leads me to conclude that Palin wishes for precisely such a test. And she seems to think that she, and those who think like her, are qualified to judge who would pass and who would not.
If there is no religious test, then there is no need for a candidate's religious affiliation to be "reconciled." My uncle urged that religion be private, removed from politics, because he feared that making faith an arena for public contention would lead American politics into ill-disguised religious warfare, with candidates tempted to use faith to manipulate voters and demean their opponents.
Kennedy cited Thomas Jefferson to argue that, as part of the American tradition, it was essential to keep any semblance of a religious test out of the political realm. Best to judge candidates on their public records, their positions on war and peace, jobs, poverty, and health care. No one, Kennedy pointed out, asked those who died at the Alamo which church they belonged to.
But Palin insists on evaluating and acting as an authority on candidates' faith. She faults Kennedy for not "telling the country how his faith had enriched him." With that line, she proceeds down a path fraught with danger - precisely the path my uncle warned against when he said that a president's religious views should be "neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."
After all, a candidate's faith will matter most to those who believe that they have the right to serve as arbiters of that faith. Is it worthy? Is it deep? Is it reflected in a certain ideology?
Palin further criticizes Kennedy because, "rather than spelling out how faith groups had provided life-changing services and education to millions of Americans, he repeatedly objected to any government assistance to religious schools." She does not seem to appreciate that Kennedy was courageous in arguing that government funds should not be used in parochial schools, despite the temptation to please his constituents. Many Catholics would have liked the money. But he wisely thought that the use of public dollars in places where nuns explicitly proselytized would be unconstitutional. Tax money should not be used to persuade someone to join a religion.
As a contrast to Kennedy's speech, Palin cites former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's remarks during the 2008 Republican primary campaign, in which he spoke publicly of "how my own faith would inform my presidency, if I were elected." After paying lip service to the separation of church and state, Romney condemned unnamed enemies "intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism."
"There is one fundamental question about which I am often asked," Romney said. "What do I believe about Jesus Christ?" Romney, of course, is a Mormon. He answered the question, proclaiming that "Jesus Christ is the son of God."
Palin praises Romney for delivering a "thoughtful speech that eloquently and correctly described the role of faith in American public life." But if there should be no religious test in politics, then why should a candidate feel compelled to respond to misplaced questions about his belief in Jesus?
When George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, was a presidential candidate in 1968, he felt no such compulsion. Respect for the Constitution and the founders' belief in the separation of church and state suggests that those kinds of questions should not play a role in political campaigns.
Palin contends that Kennedy sought to "run away from religion." The truth is that my uncle knew quite well that what made America so special was its revolutionary assertion of freedom of religion. No nation on Earth had ever framed in law that faith should be of no interest to government officials. For centuries, European authorities had murdered and tortured those whose religious beliefs differed from their own.
To demand that citizens display their religious beliefs attacks the very foundation of our nation and undermines the precise reason that America is exceptional.
Palin's book makes clear just how dangerous her proposed path can be. Not only does she want people to reveal their beliefs, but she wants to sit in judgment of them if their views don't match her own. For instance, she criticizes Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), a Democrat and a faithful Catholic, for "talking the (God) talk but not walking the walk."
Who is Palin to say what God's "walk" is? Who anointed her our grand inquisitor?
This is a woman who also praises Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, even though Lincoln explicitly declared, "But let us judge not that we not be judged." The problem for those setting up a free-floating tribunal to evaluate faith is that, contrary to Lincoln, they are installing themselves as judges who can look into others' souls and assess their worthiness.
Kennedy did not and would not do that, but not because he was indifferent to faith. In fact, unlike Romney or Palin, in fealty to both his faith and the Constitution, he promised on that day in Houston that he would resign if his religion ever interfered with his duty as president.
My uncle was a man who had his faith tested. His brother and brother-in-law were killed in World War II, and his sister died in a plane crash soon after the war. He suffered from painful injuries inflicted during his Navy service when his PT boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. His God did not make life easy but did require a commitment to justice.
America's first and only Catholic president referred to God three times in his inaugural address and invoked the Bible's command to care for poor and the sick. Later in his presidency, he said, unequivocally, about civil rights: "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution."
Faith runs as a deep current through my family. Faith inspired my uncles' and my father's dedication to justice. My father, Robert F. Kennedy, on returning from apartheid-era South Africa in 1966, wrote a magazine article titled "Suppose God Is Black." And my uncle Teddy fought for health care for all Americans, even if in her book Palin presumes to judge that he took positions "directly at odds with his Catholic faith."
Teddy Kennedy believed that his stands were at one with his faith. He did disagree with the Roman Catholic hierarchy at times. But as we have seen, the hierarchy's positions can change, and in our church, we have an obligation to help bring about those changes. That may not be Palin's theology, but the glory of America is its support for those who would disagree - even on the most difficult and personal matters, such as religion.
John F. Kennedy knew that tearing down the wall separating church and state would tempt us toward self-righteousness and contempt for others. That is one reason he delivered his Houston speech.
Palin, for her part, argues that "morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious beliefs." That statement amounts to a wholesale attack on countless Americans, and no study or reasonable argument I have seen or heard would support such a blanket condemnation. For a person who claims to admire Lincoln, Palin curiously ignores his injunction that Americans, even those engaged in a Civil War, show "malice toward none, with charity for all."
Palin fails to understand the genius of our nation. The United States is one of the most vibrant religious countries on Earth precisely because of its religious freedom. When power and faith are entwined, faith loses. Power tends to obfuscate, corrupt and focus on temporal rather than eternal purposes.
Somehow Palin misses this. Perhaps she didn't read the full Houston speech; she certainly doesn't know it by heart. Or she may be appealing to a religious right that really seeks secular power. I don't know.
I am certain, however, that no American political leader should cavalierly - or out of political calculation - dismiss the hard-won ideal of religious freedom that is among our country's greatest gifts to the world. As John F. Kennedy said in Houston, that is the "kind of America I believe in."
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is a former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of "Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way."
For more on this topic, check out Damon Linker's "A religious test every candidate must pass."
A religious test all our political candidates should take
By Damon Linker
Sunday, September 19, 2010; B01
Fifty years ago, in the midst of his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, Sen. John F. Kennedy gave a speech to ease voters' concerns about his Catholic faith. Speaking in Houston, Kennedy emphasized that Article VI of the Constitution maintains that no "religious test" may keep a candidate from aspiring to political office. He went further, implying that his Catholicism should be off limits to public scrutiny. To treat a politician's religious beliefs as politically relevant was an affront to America's noblest civic traditions, he declared.
The speech was a huge success -- and not only because it helped Kennedy win. Its most enduring legacy was to persuade journalists, critics and citizens at large not to question the political implications of candidates' religious beliefs. While it was still acceptable to assess the dangers of generic "religion" in public life, evaluating particular faiths came to be viewed as bigotry.
No longer. Since the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, traditionalist believers have actively injected faith into the political realm, pushing public figures to place their religious convictions at the core of their civic identities and political campaigns. From Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, U.S. presidents have made overt -- and largely innocuous -- gestures toward satisfying this expectation.
Today, President Obama's religious beliefs are at the forefront of public debate. While Fox News personality Glenn Beck decries Obama's alleged left-leaning Christianity as "liberation theology," nearly a fifth of the country believes, mistakenly, that the president is a Muslim. It is tempting to stick with the old Kennedy argument and respond that the president's faith is irrelevant as well as off limits. But it is neither.
The battles over an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan and a Florida pastor's threat to burn the Koran on Sept. 11 underscore the relevance of political leaders' views on faith -- their own as well as others'. Instead of attempting the impossible task of abolishing faith from the political conversation, we need a new kind of religious test for our leaders. Unlike the tests proscribed by the Constitution, this one would not threaten to formally bar members of specific traditions from public office. But religious convictions do not always harmonize with the practice of democratic government, and allowing voters to explore the dissonance is legitimate.
Every religion is radically particular, with its own distinctive beliefs about God, human history and the world. These are specific, concrete claims -- about the status of the religious community in relation to other groups and to the nation as a whole, about the character of political and divine authority, about the place of prophecy in religious and political life, about the scope of human knowledge, about the providential role of God in human history, and about the moral and legal status of sex. Depending on where believers come down on such issues, their faith may or may not clash with the requirements of democratic politics. To help us make that determination, all candidates for high office should have to take the religious test, which would include the following questions:
How might the doctrines and practices of your religion conflict with the fulfillment of your official duties?
This question would be especially pertinent for evangelical Protestant candidates -- such as Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister -- who belong to faith traditions that emphasize transforming the world in the image of their beliefs. The Southern Baptist confession of faith asserts, for instance, that "all Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme . . . in human society." What would this mean for a Southern Baptist seeking to lead a nation that includes many millions of non-Christians?
Muslim candidates, meanwhile, should be asked to discuss their view of the proper place of sharia law in a religiously pluralistic society. Jewish candidates, too, should be questioned about their faith, as Sen. Joe Lieberman was during his 2000 campaign for the vice presidency, when he was asked to explain how he would negotiate the inevitable tension between the laws of religious observance (including the Sabbath) and serving the nation at its highest level.
How would you respond if your church issued an edict that clashed with the duties of your office?
This would apply primarily to candidates who belong to churches that make strong claims about the divine authority of their leaders. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, for example, has frequently asserted that the authority of the pope and bishops is binding in matters of faith and morals. As Sen. John F. Kerry learned during his 2004 presidential campaign, members of the hierarchy have begun to demand that Catholic politicians not only refrain from having abortions and encouraging women to procure them, but also work to outlaw the procedure -- even though the Supreme Court has declared it a constitutionally protected right, and even if the candidate's constituents are overwhelmingly pro-choice.
The dilemma faced by devout Mormon candidates is potentially greater. Mormons believe that the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a prophet of God, which seems to give his statements far greater weight than those of any earthly authority, including the president of the United States. In his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney skirted questions related to his Mormonism by playing down its theological distinctiveness. "The values that I have are the same values you will find in faiths across this country," Romney said in one debate. If he (or another Mormon) runs for the presidency in 2012 or beyond, he should explain how he would respond to a prophetic pronouncement that conflicted with his presidential duties.
What do you believe human beings can know about nature and history?
Many evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals believe in biblical inerrancy, which leads them to treat the findings of natural science (especially those of evolutionary biology) with suspicion. Many of these Christians also believe that God regularly intervenes in history, directing global events, guiding U.S. actions in the world for the sake of divine ends and perhaps even leading humanity toward an apocalyptic conflagration in the Middle East. Potential candidates who belong to churches associated with such thinking, such as the Pentecostal Sarah Palin, owe it to their fellow citizens to elaborate on their views of modern science and the U.S. role in the unfolding of the end times. Given the ominous implications of a person with strong eschatological convictions becoming the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, it would be profoundly irresponsible not to ask tough questions about the topic.
Do you believe the law should be used to impose and enforce religious views of sexual morality?
America's traditional religious consensus on sexual morality -- which supported laws against abortion and all forms of non-procreative sex, from masturbation to oral and anal sex, whether practiced by members of the same or different genders, inside or outside of marriage -- began to break down in the 1960s. The nation today is sharply divided between those whose views of sex are still grounded in the norms and customs of traditionalist religion and those who no longer feel bound by those norms and customs. Given this lack of consensus, the law has understandably retreated from enforcing religiously grounded views, leaving it up to individuals to decide how to regulate their sexual conduct.
The religious right hopes to reverse this retreat. That opens the troubling prospect of the state seeking to impose the sexual morals of some Americans on the nation as a whole. All candidates -- especially those who court the support of the religious right -- need to clarify where they stand on the issue. Above all, they need to indicate whether they believe it is possible or desirable to use the force of law to uphold a sexual morality affirmed by a fraction of the people.
Asking candidates about their faith should not be taken as a sign of anti-religious animus. On the contrary, this sort of questioning takes faith seriously -- certainly more seriously than most of our politicians and news media currently do. Candidates think they benefit from making a show of their faith, and journalists, aiming to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, usually allow them to leave their pronouncements at the level of platitudes. We need to go further.
Pastor Rick Warren's conversation with John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign was a move in the right direction, though Warren was such an anodyne interviewer that the candidates were permitted to speak mainly in bromides. Better, perhaps, would be a special presidential debate devoted to faith and morality, in which journalists and religious leaders would pose pointed questions about candidates' beliefs.
It matters quite a lot if, in the end, a politician's faith is merely an ecumenical expression of American civil religion -- or if, when taking the religious test, he forthrightly declares (as Kennedy did) that in the event of a clash between his spiritual and political allegiances, the Constitution would always come first. Those are the easy cases. In others -- when a politician denies the need to choose or explain, insisting simply that it's possible to marry his or her religious beliefs with democratic rule in a pluralistic society -- we need to dig deeper, to determine as best we can how the candidate is likely to think and act when the divergent demands of those two realms collide, as they inevitably will.
Obama's 2008 speech on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his own Christian faith and its complicated intersection with the wrenching story of race in America stands as a particularly eloquent example of how to take -- and pass -- the religious test. Obama resisted giving the speech, but many Americans learned something important about the man and his mind as they listened to him talk through some of life's deepest moral, political and spiritual questions. A political process that compelled candidates to engage regularly in such thinking about the tensions and links between faith and governance just might foster increased religious understanding -- which, these days, feels in short supply.
damon_linker@yahoo.com
Damon Linker, a contributing editor at the New Republic and a senior writing fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders."
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Davis, too, is part of Hollywood society; his mother is Anne Archer, who starred in “Fatal Attraction” and “Patriot Games,” among other films. Before becoming Scientology’s spokesperson, Davis was a senior vice-president of the church’s Celebrity Centre International network.
In previous correspondence with Davis, Haggis had demanded that the church publicly renounce Proposition 8. “I feel strongly about this for a number of reasons,” he wrote. “You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote L.R.H. in their defense.” The initials stand for L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, whose extensive writings and lectures form the church’s scripture. Haggis related a story about Katy, the youngest of three daughters from his first marriage, who lost the friendship of a fellow-Scientologist after revealing that she was gay. The friend began warning others, “Katy is ‘1.1.’ ” The number refers to a sliding Tone Scale of emotional states that Hubbard published in a 1951 book, “The Science of Survival.” A person classified “1.1” was, Hubbard said, “Covertly Hostile”—“the most dangerous and wicked level”—and he noted that people in this state engaged in such things as casual sex, sadism, and homosexual activity. Hubbard’s Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated “homosexuality with being a pervert.” (Such remarks don’t appear in recent editions of the book.)
In his resignation letter, Haggis explained to Davis that, for the first time, he had explored outside perspectives on Scientology. He had read a recent exposé in a Florida newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, which reported, among other things, that senior executives in the church had been subjecting other Scientologists to physical violence. Haggis said that he felt “dumbstruck and horrified,” adding, “Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil-rights violations.”
Online, Haggis came across an appearance that Davis had made on CNN, in May, 2008. The anchor John Roberts asked Davis about the church’s policy of “disconnection,” in which members are encouraged to separate themselves from friends or family members who criticize Scientology. Davis responded, “There’s no such thing as disconnection as you’re characterizing it. And certainly we have to understand—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts interjected.
“Scientology is a new religion,” Davis continued. “The majority of Scientologists in the world, they’re first generation. So their family members aren’t going to be Scientologists. . . . So, certainly, someone who is a Scientologist is going to respect their family members’ beliefs—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts said again.
“—and we consider family to be a building block of any society, so anything that’s characterized as disconnection or this kind of thing, it’s just not true. There isn’t any such policy.”
In his resignation letter, Haggis said, “We all know this policy exists. I didn’t have to search for verification—I didn’t have to look any further than my own home.” Haggis reminded Davis that, a few years earlier, his wife had been ordered to disconnect from her parents “because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church. . . . Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them.” Haggis continued, “To see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about?”
Haggis forwarded his resignation to more than twenty Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. “I felt if I sent it to my friends they’d be as horrified as I was, and they’d ask questions as well,” he says. “That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that I’d send a letter like that.”
Tommy Davis told me, “People started calling me, saying, ‘What’s this letter Paul sent you?’ ” The resignation letter had not circulated widely, but if it became public it would likely cause problems for the church. The St. Petersburg Times exposé had inspired a fresh series of hostile reports on Scientology, which has long been portrayed in the media as a cult. And, given that some well-known Scientologist actors were rumored to be closeted homosexuals, Haggis’s letter raised awkward questions about the church’s attitude toward homosexuality. Most important, Haggis wasn’t an obscure dissident; he was a celebrity, and the church, from its inception, has depended on celebrities to lend it prestige. In the past, Haggis had defended the religion; in 1997, he wrote a letter of protest after a French court ruled that a Scientology official was culpable in the suicide of a man who fell into debt after paying for church courses. “If this decision carries it sets a terrible precedent, in which no priest or minister will ever feel comfortable offering help and advice to those whose souls are tortured,” Haggis wrote. To Haggis’s friends, his resignation from the Church of Scientology felt like a very public act of betrayal. They were surprised, angry, and confused. “ ‘Destroy the letter, resign quietly’—that’s what they all wanted,” Haggis says.
While watching the edits, Haggis fielded calls from a plastic surgeon who was planning to go on the trip, and from a priest in Haiti, Father Rick Frechette, whose organization is the main beneficiary of Haggis’s charity. “Father Rick is a lot like me—a cynical optimist,” Haggis told me. He also said of himself, “I’m a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me.”
Haggis’s producing partner, Michael Nozik, says, “Paul likes to be contrarian. If everyone is moving left, he’ll feel the need to move right.” The actor Josh Brolin, who appeared in Haggis’s film “In the Valley of Elah” (2007), told me that Haggis “does things in extremes.” Haggis is an outspoken promoter of social justice, in the manner of Hollywood activists like Sean Penn and George Clooney. The actress Maria Bello describes him as self-deprecating and sarcastic, but also deeply compassionate. She recalls being with him in Haiti shortly after the earthquake; he was standing in the bed of a pickup truck, “with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a big smile on his face, and absolutely no fear.” Though Haggis is passionate about his work, he can be cool toward those who are closest to him. Lauren Haggis, the second daughter from his first marriage, said that he never connected with his children. “He’s emotionally not there,” she says. “That’s funny, because his scripts are full of emotion.”
In the editing room, Haggis felt the need for a cigarette, so we walked outside. He is ashamed of this habit, especially given that, in 2003, while directing “Crash,” he had a heart attack. After Haggis had emergency surgery, his doctor told him that it would be four or five months before he could work again: “It would be too much strain on your heart.” He replied, “Let me ask you how much stress you think I might be under as I’m sitting at home while another director is finishing my fucking film!” The doctor relented, but demanded that a nurse be on the set to monitor Haggis’s vital signs. Since then, Haggis has tried repeatedly to quit smoking. He had stopped before shooting “The Next Three Days,” but Russell Crowe was smoking, and that did him in. “There’s always a good excuse,” he admitted. Before his heart attack, he said, “I thought I was invincible.” He added, “I still do.”
Haggis had not spoken publicly about his resignation from Scientology. As we stood in a chill wind on Sixth Avenue, he was obviously uncomfortable discussing it, but he is a storyteller, and he eventually launched into a narrative.
Haggis wasn’t proud of his early years. “I was a bad kid,” he said. “I didn’t kill anybody. Not that I didn’t try.” He was born in 1953, and grew up in London, Ontario, a manufacturing town midway between Toronto and Detroit. His father, Ted, had a construction company there, which specialized in pouring concrete. His mother, Mary, a Catholic, sent Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass on Sundays—until she spotted their priest driving an expensive car. “God wants me to have a Cadillac,” the priest explained. Mary responded, “Then God doesn’t want us in your church anymore.”
Haggis decided at an early age to be a writer, and he made his own comic books. But he was such a poor student that his parents sent him to a strict boarding school, where the students were assigned cadet drills. He preferred to sit in his room reading Ramparts, the radical magazine from America—the place he longed to be. He committed repeated infractions, but he learned to pick locks so that he could sneak into the prefect’s office and eliminate his demerits.
After a year of this, his parents transferred him to a progressive boys’ school in Bracebridge, Ontario, where there was very little system to subvert. Haggis grew his curly blond hair to his shoulders. He discovered a mentor in his art teacher, Max Allen, who was politically radical and gay. Flouting Ontario’s strict censorship laws, Allen opened a theatre in Toronto that showed banned films; Haggis volunteered at the box office.
Haggis got caught forging a check, and he soon left school. He was drifting, hanging out with hippies and drug dealers. Two friends died from overdoses. “I had a gun pointed in my face a couple of times,” he recalls. He attended art school briefly, then quit; after taking some film classes at a community college, he dropped out of that as well. He began working in construction full time for his father. He also was the manager of a hundred-seat theatre that his father had created in an abandoned church. On Saturday nights, he set up a movie screen onstage, introducing himself and other film buffs to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” that in 1974 he decided to move to England, in order to become a fashion photographer, like the hero of the movie. That lasted less than a year.
Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with Diane Gettas, a nurse, and they began sharing a one-bedroom apartment. He was starting to get his life together, but he was haunted by something that his grandfather had said to him on his deathbed. “He was a janitor in a bowling alley,” Haggis told me. “He had left England because of some scandal we don’t know about. He died when I was twelve or thirteen. He looked terrible. He turned to me and said, ‘I’ve wasted my life. Don’t waste yours.’ ”
One day in 1975, when he was twenty-two, Haggis was walking to a record store. When he arrived at the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets, a young man pressed a book into his hands. “You have a mind,” the man said. “This is the owner’s manual.” The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, “Give me two dollars.” The book was “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, “Dianetics” had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million.
Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”
“Take me there,” Haggis said to Logan.
Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn’t bother him. In fact, he said, “it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don’t understand.” When he arrived at the church’s headquarters, he recalled, “it didn’t look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworth’s.”
At the time, Haggis and Gettas were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. “It was pitched to me as applied philosophy,” Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.
In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, “The Devil’s Rain,” in Durango, Mexico, when an actress on the set gave him a copy of “Dianetics.” “My career immediately took off,” he told a church publication. “Scientology put me into the big time.” The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors “make it in the industry.”
One of those actors, Josh Brolin, told me that, in a “moment of real desperation,” he visited the Celebrity Centre and received “auditing”—spiritual counselling. He quickly decided that Scientology wasn’t for him. But he still wonders what the religion does for celebrities like Cruise and Travolta: “Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?” This is the question that makes celebrities so crucial to the religion. And, clearly, there must be something rewarding if such notable people lend their names to a belief system that is widely scorned.
Brolin says that he once witnessed John Travolta practicing Scientology. Brolin was at a dinner party in Los Angeles with Travolta and Marlon Brando. Brando arrived with a cut on his leg, and explained that he had injured himself while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway. He was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology. Travolta touched Brando’s leg and Brando closed his eyes. “I watched this process going on—it was very physical,” Brolin recalls. “I was thinking, This is really fucking bizarre! Then, after ten minutes, Brando opens his eyes and says, ‘That really helped. I actually feel different!’ ” (Travolta, through a lawyer, called this account “pure fabrication.”)
Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading “Dianetics”; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. “Most of Hollywood went through that class,” Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series (“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”) that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions “about life, people, and behavior,” and said that Katselas “said some things in class that were really smart.” Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. “I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works.’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”
Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology “recruited a ton of kids out of that school.” Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas’s tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. “You see a lot of people you know from TV,” Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. “When you started off, they weren’t really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse’s levels Scientology became more of a focus,” he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers.
Not long after Gordon became a Scientologist, he was asked to serve as an “ethics officer” at the Playhouse, monitoring the progress of other students and counselling those who were having trouble. He was good at pinpointing students who were struggling. “It’s almost like picking out the wounded chicks,” he says. He sometimes urged a student to meet with the senior ethics officer at the Playhouse, a Scientologist who often recommended courses at the Celebrity Centre. “My job was to keep the students active and make sure they were not being suppressed,” Gordon says. In the rhetoric of Scientology, “suppressive persons”—or S.P.s—block an individual’s spiritual progress. Implicitly, the message to the students was that success awaited them if only they could sweep away the impediments to stardom, including S.P.s. Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.
Katselas died in 2008, and Scientology no longer has a connection with the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Anne Archer told me that the reputation of Katselas’s class as, in Gordon’s words, a “Scientology clearinghouse” is overblown. “His classes averaged about fifty or sixty people, and there would be maybe seven to ten people in it who would be Scientologists,” she says. But the list of Scientologists who have studied at the Playhouse is long—it includes Jenna Elfman, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jason Lee—and the many protégés Katselas left behind helped cement the relationship between Hollywood and the church.
I asked Haggis why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged. “I identify with the underdog,” he said. “I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”
During our conversations, we spoke about some events that had stained the reputation of the church while he was a member. For example, there was the death of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after a mental breakdown, in 1995. She had rear-ended a car in Clearwater, Florida—where Scientology has its spiritual headquarters—and then stripped off her clothes and wandered naked down the street. She was taken to a hospital, but, in the company of several other Scientologists, she checked out, against doctors’ advice. (The church considers psychiatry an evil profession.) McPherson spent the next seventeen days being subjected to church remedies, such as doses of vitamins and attempts to feed her with a turkey baster. She became comatose, and she died of a pulmonary embolism before church members finally brought her to the hospital. The medical examiner in the case, Joan Wood, initially ruled that the cause of death was undetermined, but she told a reporter, “This is the most severe case of dehydration I’ve ever seen.” The State of Florida filed charges against the church. In February, 2000, under withering questioning from experts hired by the church, Wood declared that the death was “accidental.” The charges were dropped and Wood resigned.
Haggis said that, at the time, he had chosen not to learn the details of McPherson’s death. “I had such a lack of curiosity when I was inside,” Haggis said. “It’s stunning to me, because I’m such a curious person.” He said that he had been “somewhere between uninterested in looking and afraid of looking.” His life was comfortable, he liked his circle of friends, and he didn’t want to upset the balance. It was also easy to dismiss people who quit the church. As he put it, “There’s always disgruntled folks who say all sorts of things.” He was now ashamed of this willed myopia, which, he noted, clashed with what he understood to be the ethic of Scientology: “Hubbard says that there is a relationship between knowledge, responsibility, and control, and as soon as you know something you have a responsibility to act. And, if you don’t, shame on you.”
Since resigning, Haggis had been wondering why it took him so long to leave. In an e-mail exchange, I noted that higher-level Scientologists are supposed to be free of neuroses and allergies, and resistant to the common cold. “Dianetics” also promises heightened powers of intelligence and perception. Haggis had told me that he fell far short of this goal. “Did you feel it was your fault?” I asked. Haggis responded that, because the auditing took place over a number of years, it was easy to believe that he might actually be smarter and wiser because of it, just as that might be true after years of therapy. “It is all so subjective, how is one supposed to know?” he wrote. “How does it feel to be smarter today than you were two months ago? . . . But yes, I always felt false.”
He noted that a Scientologist hearing this would feel, with some justification, that he had misled his auditors about his progress. But, after hundreds of hours of auditing sessions, he said, “I remember feeling I just wanted it over. I felt it wasn’t working, and figured that could be my fault, but did not want the hours of ‘repair auditing’ that they would tell me I needed to fix it. So I just went along, to my shame. I did what was easy . . . without asking them, or myself, any hard questions.”
Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some people’s I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964.
At the Manor Hotel, Haggis went “Clear.” The concept comes from “Dianetics”; it is where you start if you want to ascend to the upper peaks of Scientology. A person who becomes Clear is “adaptable to and able to change his environment,” Hubbard writes. “His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive.” Someone who is Clear is less susceptible to disease and is free of neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic illnesses. “The dianetic Clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.”
Going Clear “was not life-changing,” Haggis says. “It wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, my God, I can fly!’ ” At every level of advancement, he was encouraged to write a “success story” saying how effective his training had been. He had read many such stories by other Scientologists, and they felt “overly effusive, done in part to convince yourself, but also slanted toward giving somebody upstairs approval for you to go on to the next level.”
In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said that he wanted to be a writer. His father recalls, “I said, ‘Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and I’ll keep you on the payroll for a year.’ Paul said, ‘I think I’ll go to L.A., because it’s warmer.’ ”
Soon after this conversation, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Camaro and drove to Los Angeles, where he got a job moving furniture. He and Diane lived in an apartment with her brother, Gregg, and three other people. In 1978, Diane gave birth to their first child, Alissa. Haggis was spending much of his time and money taking advanced courses and being audited, which involved the use of an electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The device, often compared in the press to a polygraph, measures the bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when a person answers questions posed by an auditor. (“Thoughts have a small amount of mass,” the church contends in a statement. “These are the changes measured.”) In 1952, Hubbard said of the E-Meter, “It gives Man his first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows.” The Food and Drug Administration has compelled the church to declare that the instrument has no curative powers and is ineffective in diagnosing or treating disease.
During auditing, Haggis grasped a cylindrical electrode in each hand; when he first joined Scientology, the electrodes were empty soup cans. An imperceptible electrical charge ran from the meter through his body. The auditor asked systematic questions aimed at detecting sources of “spiritual distress.” Whenever Haggis gave an answer that prompted the E-Meter’s needle to jump, that subject became an area of concentration until the auditor was satisfied that Haggis was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience.
Haggis found the E-Meter surprisingly responsive. It seemed to gauge the kinds of thoughts he was having—whether they were angry or happy, or if he was hiding something. The auditor often probed for what Scientologists call “earlier similars.” Haggis explained, “If you’re having a fight with your girlfriend, the auditor will ask, ‘Can you remember an earlier time when something like this happened?’ And if you do then he’ll ask, ‘What about a time before that? And a time before that?’ ” Often, the process leads participants to recall past lives. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing one’s behavior.
Although Haggis never believed in reincarnation, he says, “I did experience gains. I would feel relief from arguments I’d had with my dad, things I’d done as a teen-ager that I didn’t feel good about. I think I did, in some ways, become a better person. I did develop more empathy for others.” Then again, he admitted, “I tried to find ways to be a better husband, but I never really did. I was still the selfish bastard I always was.”
Haggis was moving furniture during the day and taking photographs for church yearbooks on the weekends. At night, he wrote scripts on spec. He met Skip Press, another young writer who was a Scientologist. Press had read one of Haggis’s scripts—an episode of “Welcome Back, Kotter” that he was trying to get to the show’s star, John Travolta. Haggis and Press started hanging out with other aspiring writers and directors who were involved with Scientology. “We would meet at a restaurant across from the Celebrity Centre called Two Dollar Bill’s,” Press recalls. Chick Corea and other musicians associated with the church played there. Haggis and a friend from this circle eventually got a job writing for cartoons, including “Scooby-Doo” and “Richie Rich.”
By now, Haggis had begun advancing through the upper levels of Scientology. The church defines an Operating Thetan as “one who can handle things without having to use a body or physical means.” An editorial in a 1959 issue of the Scientology magazine Ability notes that “neither Lord Buddha nor Jesus Christ were O.T.s, according to the evidence. They were just a shade above Clear.” According to several copies of church documents that have been leaked online, Hubbard’s handwritten instructions for the first level list thirteen mental exercises that attune practitioners to their relationship with others, such as “Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down.” In the second level, Scientologists engage in exercises and visualizations that explore oppositional forces:
Laughter comes from the rear half and calm from the front half simultaneously. Then they reverse. It gives one a sensation of total disagreement. The trick is to conceive of both at the same time. This tends to knock one out.
Haggis didn’t have a strong reaction to the material, but then he wasn’t expecting anything too profound. Everyone knew that the big revelations resided in level O.T. III.
Hubbard called this level the Wall of Fire. He said, “The material involved in this sector is so vicious, that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it. . . . I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.” The O.T. III candidate is expected to free himself from being overwhelmed by the disembodied, emotionally wounded spirits that have been implanted inside his body. Bruce Hines, a former high-level Scientology auditor who is now a research physicist at the University of Colorado, explained to me, “Most of the upper levels are involved in exorcising these spirits.”
“The process of induction is so long and slow that you really do convince yourself of the truth of some of these things that don’t make sense,” Haggis told me. Although he refused to specify the contents of O.T. materials, on the ground that it offended Scientologists, he said, “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.” But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material he’d already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the church’s claims. Haggis admits, “I was looking forward to enhanced abilities.” Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high.
In the late seventies, the O.T. material was still quite secret. There was no Google, and Scientology’s confidential scriptures had not yet circulated, let alone been produced in court or parodied on “South Park.” “You were told that this information, if released, would cause serious damage to people,” Haggis told me.
Carrying an empty, locked briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the material was held. A supervisor then handed him a folder, which Haggis put in the briefcase. He entered a study room, where he finally got to examine the secret document—a couple of pages, in Hubbard’s bold scrawl. After a few minutes, he returned to the supervisor.
“I don’t understand,” Haggis said.
“Do you know the words?” the supervisor asked.
“I know the words, I just don’t understand.”
“Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested.
Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked the supervisor.
“No,” the supervisor responded. “It is what it is. Do the actions that are required.”
Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. “I sat with that for a while,” he says. But when he read it again he decided, “This is madness.”
In 1933, Hubbard married Margaret Grubb, whom he called Polly; their first child, Lafayette, was born the following year. He visited Hollywood, and began getting work as a screenwriter, very much as Paul Haggis did some forty years later. Hubbard worked on serials for Columbia Pictures, including one called “The Secret of Treasure Island.” But much of his energy was devoted to publishing stories, often under pseudonyms, in pulp magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction.
During the Second World War, Hubbard served in the U.S. Navy, and he later wrote that he was gravely injured in battle: “Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future. I was abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.” While languishing in a military hospital in Oakland, California, he said, he fully healed himself, using techniques that became the foundation of Scientology. “I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out,” he wrote in an essay titled “My Philosophy.” “And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.” In some editions of Hubbard’s book “The Fundamentals of Thought,” published in 1956, a note on the author says, “It is a matter of medical record that he has twice been pronounced dead.”
After the war, Hubbard’s marriage dissolved, and he moved to Pasadena, where he became the housemate of Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist who belonged to an occult society called the Ordo Templi Orientis. An atmosphere of hedonism pervaded the house; Parsons hosted gatherings involving “sex magick” rituals.
In a 1946 letter, Parsons described Hubbard: “He is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent.” Parsons then mentioned his wife’s sister, Betty Northrup, with whom he had been having an affair. “Although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.” One day, Hubbard and Northrup ran off together. In the official Scientology literature, it is claimed that Hubbard was assigned by naval intelligence to infiltrate Parsons’s occult group. “Hubbard broke up black magic in America,” the church said in a statement.
Hubbard and Northrup ended up in Los Angeles. He continued writing for the pulps, but he had larger ambitions. He began codifying a system of self-betterment, and set up an office near the corner of La Brea and Sunset, where he tested his techniques on the actors, directors, and writers he encountered. He named his system Dianetics.
The book “Dianetics” appeared in May, 1950, and spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Written in a bluff, quirky style and overrun with footnotes that do little to substantiate its findings, “Dianetics” purports to identify the source of self-destructive behavior—the “reactive mind,” a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called “engrams,” and that is the source of nightmares, insecurities, irrational fears, and psychosomatic illnesses. The object of Dianetics is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind, leaving a person “Clear.”
Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a “precision science.” He offered his findings to the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association but was spurned; he subsequently portrayed psychiatry and psychology as demonic competitors. He once wrote that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture and kill everyone they would do so.”
Scientists dismissed Hubbard’s book, but hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up across the U.S. and abroad. The Church of Scientology was officially founded in Los Angeles in February, 1954, by several devoted followers of Hubbard’s work.
In 1966, Hubbard—who by then had met and married another woman, Mary Sue Whipp—set sail with a handful of Scientologists. The church says that being at sea provided a “distraction-free environment,” allowing Hubbard “to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness.” Within a year, he had acquired several oceangoing vessels. He staffed the ships with volunteers, many of them teen-agers, who called themselves the Sea Organization. Hubbard and his followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous lifetimes. (The church denies this.) The defector Janis Grady, a former Sea Org member, told me, “I was on the bridge with him, sailing past Greek islands. There were crosses lining one island. He told me that under each cross is buried treasure.”
The Sea Org became the church’s equivalent of a religious order. The group now has six thousand members. They perform tasks such as counselling, maintaining the church’s vast property holdings, and publishing its official literature. Sea Org initiates—some of whom are children—sign contracts for up to a billion years of service. They get a small weekly stipend and receive free auditing and coursework. Sea Org members can marry, but they must agree not to raise children while in the organization.
As Scientology grew, it was increasingly attacked. In 1963, the Los Angeles Times called it a “pseudo-scientific cult.” The church attracted dozens of lawsuits, largely from ex-parishioners. In 1980, Hubbard disappeared from public view. Although there were rumors that he was dead, he was actually driving around the Pacific Northwest in a motor home. He returned to writing science fiction and produced a ten-volume work, “Mission Earth,” each volume of which was a best-seller. In 1983, he settled quietly on a horse farm in Creston, California.
Around that time, Paul Haggis received a message from the church about a film project. Hubbard had written a treatment for a script titled “Influencing the Planet” and, apparently, intended to direct it. The film was supposed to demonstrate the range of Hubbard’s efforts to improve civilization. With another Scientologist, Haggis completed a script, which he called “quite dreadful.” Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but no film by that name was ever released.
In 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought twenty-five million dollars for “infliction of emotional injury.” He claimed that he had been kept for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, and deprived of adequate sleep and food.
That October, the litigants filed O.T. III materials in court. Fifteen hundred Scientologists crowded into the courthouse, trying to block access to the documents. The church, which considers it sacrilegious for the uninitiated to read its confidential scriptures, got a restraining order, but the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the material and printed a summary. Suddenly, the secrets that had stunned Paul Haggis in a locked room were public knowledge.
“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 jury awarded Wollersheim thirty million dollars. (Eventually, an appellate court reduced the judgment to two and a half million.) The secret O.T. III documents remained sealed, but the Times’ report had already circulated widely, and the church was met with derision all over the world.
The other court challenge in 1985 involved Julie Christofferson-Titchbourne, a defector who argued that the church had falsely claimed that Scientology would improve her intelligence, and even her eyesight. In a courtroom in Portland, she said that Hubbard had been portrayed to her as a nuclear physicist; in fact, he had failed to graduate from George Washington University. As for Hubbard’s claim that he had cured himself of grave injuries in the Second World War, the plaintiff’s evidence indicated that he had never been wounded in battle. Witnesses for the plaintiff testified that, in one six-month period in 1982, the church had transferred millions of dollars to Hubbard through a Liberian corporation. The church denied this, and said that Hubbard’s income was generated by his book sales.
The jury sided with Christofferson-Titchbourne, awarding her thirty-nine million dollars. Scientologists streamed into Portland to protest. They carried banners advocating religious freedom and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Scientology celebrities, including John Travolta, showed up; Chick Corea played a concert in a public park. Haggis, who was writing for the NBC series “The Facts of Life” at the time, came and was drafted to write speeches. “I wasn’t a celebrity—I was a lowly sitcom writer,” he says. He stayed for four days.
The judge declared a mistrial, saying that Christofferson-Titchbourne’s lawyers had presented prejudicial arguments. It was one of the greatest triumphs in Scientology’s history, and the church members who had gone to Portland felt an enduring sense of kinship. (A year and a half later, the church settled with Christofferson-Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.)
In 1986, Hubbard died, of a stroke, in his motor home. He was seventy-four. Two weeks later, Scientologists gathered in the Hollywood Palladium for a special announcement. A young man, David Miscavige, stepped onto the stage. Short, trim, and muscular, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the assembled Scientologists that, for the past six years, Hubbard had been investigating new, higher O.T. levels. “He has now moved on to the next level,” Miscavige said. “It’s a level beyond anything any of us ever imagined. This level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body. Thus, at twenty-hundred hours, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36”—that is, thirty-six years after the publication of “Dianetics”—“L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime.” Miscavige began clapping, and led the crowd in an ovation, shouting, “Hip hip hooray!”
Miscavige was a Scientology prodigy from the Philadelphia area. He claimed that, growing up, he had been sickly, and struggled with bad asthma; Dianetics counselling had dramatically alleviated the symptoms. As he puts it, he “experienced a miracle.” He decided to devote his life to the religion. He had gone Clear by the age of fifteen, and the next year he dropped out of high school to join the Sea Org. He became an executive assistant to Hubbard, who gave him special tutoring in photography and cinematography. When Hubbard went into seclusion, in 1980, Miscavige was one of the few people who maintained close contact with him. With Hubbard’s death, the curtain rose on a man who was going to impose his personality on an organization facing its greatest test, the death of its charismatic founder. Miscavige was twenty-five years old.
Haggis told Celebrity that he had recently gone through the Purification Rundown, a program intended to eliminate body toxins that form a “biochemical barrier to spiritual well-being.” For an average of three weeks, participants undergo a lengthy daily regimen combining sauna visits, exercise, and huge doses of vitamins, especially niacin. According to a forthcoming book, “Inside Scientology,” by the journalist Janet Reitman, the sauna sessions can last up to five hours a day. In the interview, Haggis recalled being skeptical—“My idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettes”—but said that the Purification Rundown “was WONDERFUL.” He went on, “I really did feel more alert and more aware and more at ease—I wasn’t running in six directions to get something done, or bouncing off the walls when something went wrong.” Haggis mentioned that he had taken drugs when he was young. “Getting rid of all those residual toxins and medicines and drugs really had an effect,” he said. “After completing the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single chemical!” He recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, who at the time was seriously ill. He also persuaded a young writer on his staff to take the course, in order to wean herself from various medications. “She could tell Scientology worked by the example I set,” Haggis told the magazine. “That made me feel very good.”
Privately, he told me, he remained troubled by the church’s theology, which struck him as “intergalactic spirituality.” He was grateful, however, to have an auditor who was “really smart, sweet, thoughtful. I could always go to talk to him.” The confessionals were helpful. “It just felt better to get things off my chest.” Even after his incredulous reaction to O.T. III, he continued to “move up” the Bridge. He saw so many intelligent people on the path, and expected that his concerns would be addressed in future levels. He told himself, “Maybe there is something, and I’m just missing it.” He felt unsettled by the lack of irony among many fellow-Scientologists—an inability to laugh at themselves, which seemed at odds with the character of Hubbard himself. When Haggis felt doubts about the religion, he recalled 16-mm. films he had seen of Hubbard’s lectures from the fifties and sixties. “He had this amazing buoyancy,” Haggis says. “He had a deadpan humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, ‘Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something.’ ”
Haggis finally reached the top of the Operating Thetan pyramid. According to documents obtained by WikiLeaks, the activist group run by Julian Assange, the final exercise is: “Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body.”
Haggis expected that, as an O.T. VII, he would feel a sense of accomplishment, but he remained confused and unsatisfied. He thought that Hubbard was “brilliant in so many ways,” and that the failing must be his. At one point, he confided to a minister in the church that he didn’t think he should be a Scientologist. She told him, “There are all sorts of Scientologists,” just as there are all sorts of Jews and Christians, with varying levels of faith. The implication, Haggis said, was that he could “pick and choose” which tenets of Scientology to believe.
Haggis was a workaholic, and as his career took off he spent less and less time with his family. “He never got home till late at night or early in the morning,” his oldest daughter, Alissa, said. “All the time I ever spent with him was on the set.” Haggis frequently brought his daughters to work and assigned them odd jobs; Alissa earned her Directors Guild card when she was fifteen.
In 1987, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the creators of the new series “thirtysomething,” hired Haggis to write scripts. When I talked to them recently, Herskovitz recalled, “Paul walked in the door and said, ‘I love the fact that you guys are doing a show all about emotions. I don’t like talking about my emotions.’ ” In the show’s first season, one of Haggis’s scripts won an Emmy. Since he rarely discussed his religion, his bosses were surprised to learn of his affiliation. Herskovitz told me, “The thing about Paul is his particular sense of humor, which is ironic, self-deprecating—”
“And raw!” Zwick interjected.
“It’s not a sense of humor you often encounter among people who believe in Scientology,” Herskovitz continued. “His way of looking at life didn’t have that sort of straight-on, unambiguous, unambivalent view that so many Scientologists project.”
Observing Zwick and Herskovitz at work got Haggis interested in directing, and when the church asked him to make a thirty-second ad about Dianetics he seized the chance. He was determined to avoid the usual claim that Dianetics offered a triumphal march toward enlightenment. He shot a group of Scientologists talking about the practical ways that they had used Dianetics. “It was very naturalistic,” he recalls. Church authorities hated it. “They thought it looked like an A.A. meeting.” The spot never aired.
In 1992, he helped out on the pilot for “Walker, Texas Ranger,” a new series starring Chuck Norris. It ran for eight seasons and was broadcast in a hundred countries. Haggis was credited as a co-creator. “It was the most successful thing I ever did,” he says. “Two weeks of work. They never even used my script!”
With his growing accomplishments and wealth, Haggis became a bigger prize for the church. In 1988, Scientology sponsored a Dianetics car in the Indianapolis 500. David Miscavige was at the race. It was one of the few times that he and Haggis met. They sat near each other at a Scientology-sponsored dinner event before the race. “Paul takes no shit from anybody,” the organizer of the event recalled. Several times when Miscavige made some comment during the dinner, the organizer said, “Paul challenged him in a lighthearted way.” His tone was perceived as insufficiently deferential; afterward, Miscavige demanded to know why Haggis had been invited. (Miscavige declined requests to speak to me, and Tommy Davis says that Miscavige did not attend the event.) The organizer told me, “You have to understand: no one challenges David Miscavige.”
Lauren, the middle sister, initially struggled in school. “I was illiterate until I was eleven,” she told me. Somehow, that fact escaped her parents. “I assume it was because of the divorce,” she says.
When the divorce became final, in 1997, Haggis and Gettas were ordered by the court to undergo psychological evaluations—a procedure abhorred by Scientologists. The court then determined that Haggis should have full custody of the children.
His daughters were resentful. They had lived their entire lives with their mother. “I didn’t even know why he wanted us,” Lauren says. “I didn’t really know him.”
Haggis put his daughters in an ordinary private school, but that lasted only six months. The girls weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. At a regular school, they felt like outsiders. “The first thing I noticed that I did, that others didn’t, is the Contact,” Alissa told me, referring to a procedure the church calls Contact Assist. “If you hurt yourself, the first thing I and other Scientology kids do is go quiet.” Scientology preaches that, if you touch the wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and a sense of trauma fades.
The girls demanded to be sent to boarding school, so Haggis enrolled them at the Delphian School, in rural Oregon, which uses Hubbard’s Study Tech methods. The school, Lauren says, is “on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere.” She added, “I lived in a giant bubble. Everyone I knew was a Scientologist.”
For one course, she decided to write a paper about discrimination against various religions, including Scientology. “I wanted to see what the opposition was saying, so I went online,” she says. Another student turned her in to the school’s ethics committee. Information that doesn’t correspond to Scientology teachings is termed “entheta”—meaning confused or destructive thinking. Lauren agreed to stop doing research. “It was really easy not to look,” she says. By the time she graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had scarcely ever heard anyone speak ill of Scientology.
Alissa was a top student at Delphian, but she found herself moving away from the church. She still believed in some ideas promoted by Scientology, such as reincarnation, and she liked Hubbard’s educational techniques, but by the time she graduated she no longer defined herself as a Scientologist. Her reasoning was true to Hubbard’s philosophy. “A core concept in Scientology is: ‘Something isn’t true unless you find it true in your own life,’ ” she told me.
After starting boarding school, Alissa did not speak to her father for a number of years. She was angry about the divorce. Haggis mined the experience for the script of “Million Dollar Baby,” in which the lead character, played by Clint Eastwood, is haunted by his estrangement from his daughter.
“I’m very proud of Alissa for not talking to me,” Haggis told me, his eyes welling with tears. “Think what that takes.” It was the only time, in our many conversations, that he displayed such emotion.
Haggis and Alissa slowly resumed communication. When Alissa was in her early twenties, she accepted the fact that, like her sister Katy, she was gay. She recalls, “When I finally got the courage to come out to my dad, he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I knew that.’ ” Now, Alissa says, she and Haggis have a “working relationship.” As she puts it, “We do see each other for Thanksgiving and some meals.” Recently, Alissa, who is also a writer, has been collaborating on screenplays with her father. Haggis also gave her the role of a murderous drug addict in “The Next Three Days.”
Rennard, concerned about her husband’s spiritual doubts, suggested that he do some more study. She was having breakthroughs that sometimes led her to discover past lives. “There were images, feelings, and thoughts that I suddenly realized, That’s not here. I’m not in my body, I’m in another place,” she told me. For instance, she might be examining what the church calls a “contra-survival” action—“like the time I clobbered Paul or threw something at him. And I’d look for an earlier similar. Suddenly, I’d realize I was doing something negative, and I’d be in England in the eighteen-hundreds. I’d see myself harming this person. It was a fleeting glimpse at what I was doing then.” Examining these moments helped the emotional charge dissipate. “Paul would say, ‘Don’t you think you’re making this up?’ ” She wondered if that mattered. “If it changed me for the better, who cares?” she says. “When you are working on a scene as an actor, something similar happens. You get connected to a feeling from who knows where.”
Haggis and Rennard shared a house in Santa Monica, which soon became a hub for progressive political fund-raisers. Haggis lent his name to nearly any cause that espoused peace and justice: the Earth Communications Office, the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, the Center for the Advancement of Non-Violence. Despite his growing disillusionment with Scientology, he also raised a significant amount of money for it, and made sizable donations himself, appearing frequently on an honor roll of top contributors. The Church of Scientology had recently gained tax-exempt status as a religious institution, making donations, as well as the cost of auditing, tax-deductible. (Church members had lodged more than two thousand lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the agency in litigation. As part of the settlement, the church agreed to drop its legal campaign.)
Over the years, Haggis estimates, he spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on courses and auditing, and three hundred thousand dollars on various Scientology initiatives. Rennard says that she spent about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on coursework. Haggis recalls that the demands for donations never seemed to stop. “They used friends and any kind of pressure they could apply,” he says. “I gave them money just to keep them from calling and hounding me.”
Tommy Davis, at Cruise’s request, was allowed to erect a tent on the set of Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” where Scientology materials were distributed. That raised eyebrows in Hollywood. Haggis says that when he appeared on the set Spielberg pulled him aside. “It’s really remarkable to me that I’ve met all these Scientologists, and they seem like the nicest people,” Spielberg said. Haggis replied, “Yeah, we keep all the evil ones in a closet.” (Spielberg’s publicist says that Spielberg doesn’t recall the conversation.)
A few days later, Haggis says, he was summoned to the Celebrity Centre, where officials told him that Cruise was very upset. “It was a joke,” Haggis explained. Davis offers a different account. He says that Cruise mentioned the incident to him only “in passing,” but that he himself found the remark offensive. He confronted Haggis, who apologized profusely, asking that his contrition be relayed to “anyone who might have been offended.”
Davis has known Cruise since Davis was eighteen years old. They are close friends. The two men physically resemble each other, with long faces, strong jaws, and spiky haircuts. “I saw him hanging out with Tom Cruise after the Oscars,” Haggis recalls. “At the Vanity Fair party, they were let in the back door. They arrived on motorcycles, really cool ones, like Ducatis.” Cruise was also close to David Miscavige, and has said of him, “I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more tolerant, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from L.R.H. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders.”
In 2004, Cruise received a special Scientology award: the Freedom Medal of Valor. In a ceremony held in England, Miscavige called Cruise “the most dedicated Scientologist I know.” The ceremony was accompanied by a video interview with the star. Wearing a black turtleneck, and with the theme music from “Mission: Impossible” playing in the background, Cruise said, “Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them. So, for me, it really is K.S.W.”—initials that stand for “Keeping Scientology Working.” He went on, “That policy to me has really gone—phist!” He made a vigorous gesture with his hand. “Boy! There’s a time I went through and I said, ‘You know what? When I read it, you know, I just went poo! This is it!’ ” Later, when the video was posted on YouTube and viewed by millions who had no idea what he was talking about, Cruise came across as unhinged. He did not dispel this notion when, in 2005, during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he jumped up and down on a couch while declaring his love for the actress Katie Holmes. He and Holmes married in 2006, in Italy. David Miscavige was his best man.
Davis explained to Haggis that the church avoids taking overt political stands. He also felt that Haggis was exaggerating the impact of the San Diego endorsement. “It was one guy who somehow got it in his head it would be a neat idea and put Church of Scientology San Diego on the list,” Davis told me. “When I found out, I had it removed from the list.” Davis said that the individual who made the mistake—he didn’t divulge the name—had been “disciplined” for it. I asked what that meant. “He was sat down by a staff member of the local organization,” Davis explained. “He got sorted out.”
Davis told me that Haggis was mistaken about his daughter having been ostracized by Scientologists. Davis said that he had spoken to the friend who had allegedly abandoned Katy, and the friend had ended the relationship not because Katy was a lesbian but because Katy had lied about it. (Haggis, when informed of this account, laughed.)
As far as Davis was concerned, reprimanding the San Diego staff member was the end of the matter: “I said, ‘Paul, I’ve received no press inquiries. . . . If I were to make a statement on this, it would actually be more attention to the subject than if we leave it be.’ ”
Haggis refused to let the matter drop. “This is not a P.R. issue, it is a moral issue,” he wrote, in February, 2009. In the final note of this exchange, he conceded, “You were right: nothing happened—it didn’t flap—at least not very much. But I feel we shamed ourselves.”
Haggis sent this note six months before he resigned. Because he stopped complaining, Davis felt that the issue had been laid to rest. But, far from putting the matter behind him, Haggis began his investigation into the church. His inquiry, much of it conducted online, mirrored the actions of the lead character he was writing for “The Next Three Days”; the character, played by Russell Crowe, goes on the Internet to find a way to break his wife out of jail.
Haggis soon found on YouTube the video of Tommy Davis talking on CNN about disconnection. The practice of disconnection is not unique to Scientology. The Amish, for example, cut themselves off from apostates, including their own children; some Orthodox Jewish communities do the same. Rennard had disconnected from her parents twice. When she was a young child, her stepfather had got the family involved with Scientology. When she was in her twenties, and appearing on “Dallas,” her parents broke away from the church. Like many active members of Scientology, they had kept money in an account (in their case, twenty-five hundred dollars) for future courses they intended to take. Rennard’s mother took the money back. “That’s a huge deal for the church,” Rennard told me. She didn’t speak to her parents for several years, assuming that they had been declared Suppressive Persons.
In the early nineties, Rennard wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters; she was informed that she could talk to her parents again. A decade later, however, she went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and was told that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she had to confront her parents’ mistakes. The church recommended that she take a course called P.T.S./S.P., which stands for “Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons.” “That course took a year,” Rennard told me. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. “They put me on a program that took two years to complete,” she says. Still, nothing changed. If she failed to “handle” her parents, she would have to disconnect not only from them but also from everyone who spoke to them, including her siblings. “It was that, or else I had to give up being a Scientologist,” she says.
Rennard’s parents were among four hundred claimants in a lawsuit brought against Scientology by disaffected members in 1987; the case was thrown out of court the following year, for lack of evidence. To make amends, Rennard’s parents had to denounce the anti-Scientologist group and offer a “token” restitution. The church prescribes a seven-step course of rehabilitation, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into its good graces, which includes returning debts and making public declarations of error. Rennard told her parents that if they wanted to remain in contact with her they had to follow the church’s procedures. Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. “They really wanted to work it out with me,” she says.
But the church wasn’t satisfied. Rennard was told that if she maintained contact with her parents she would be labelled a “Potential Trouble Source”—a designation that would alienate her from the Scientology community and render her ineligible for further training. “It was clearly laid out for me,” she says. A senior official counselled her to agree to have her parents formally branded as S.P.s. “Until then, they won’t turn around and recognize their responsibilities,” he said. “O.K., fine,” Rennard said. “Go ahead and declare them. Maybe it’ll get better.” She was granted permission to begin upper-level coursework in Clearwater.
In August, 2006, a notice was posted at the Celebrity Centre declaring Rennard’s parents Suppressive Persons, saying that they had associated with “squirrels,” which in Scientology refers to people who have dropped out of the church but continue to practice unauthorized auditing. A month later, Rennard’s parents sent her a letter: “We tried to do what you asked, Deborah. We worked the whole months of July & Aug. on A-E.” They explained that they had paid the church the twenty-five hundred dollars. After all that, they continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s pamphlet “The Way to Happiness” to libraries; they had also been told to document the exchange with photographs. They had declined. “If this can’t be resolved, we will have to say Good-Bye to you & James will lose his Grand-Parents,” her mother wrote. “This is ridiculous.”
In April, 2007, Rennard’s parents sued for the right to visit their grandson. Rennard had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. She was summoned to a church mission in Santa Monica and shown a statement rescinding the ruling that her parents were S.P.s.
Tommy Davis sent me some policy statements that Hubbard had made about disconnection in 1965. “Anyone who rejects Scientology also rejects, knowingly or unknowingly, the protection and benefits of Scientology and the companionship of Scientologists,” Hubbard writes. In “Introduction to Scientology Ethics,” Hubbard defined disconnection as “a self-determined decision made by an individual that he is not going to be connected to another.”
Scientology defectors are full of tales of forcible family separations, which the church almost uniformly denies. Two former leaders in the church, Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, told me that families are sometimes broken apart. In their cases, their wives chose to stay in the church when they left. The wives, and the church, denounce Rathbun and Rinder as liars.
Jastrow asked Haggis, “Do you have any idea that what you might do might damage a lot of pretty wonderful people and your fellow-Scientologists?”
Haggis reminded the group that he had been with them at the 1985 “freedom march” in Portland. They all knew about his financial support of the church and the occasions when he had spoken out in its defense. Jastrow remembers Haggis saying, “I love Scientology.”
Archer had particular reason to feel aggrieved: Haggis’s letter had called her son a liar. “Paul was very sweet,” she says. “We didn’t talk about Tommy.” She understood that Haggis was upset about the way Proposition 8 had affected his gay daughters, but she didn’t think it was relevant to Scientology. “The church is not political,” she told me. “We all have tons of friends and relatives who are gay. . . . It’s not the church’s issue. I’ve introduced gay friends to Scientology.”
Isham was frustrated. “We weren’t breaking through to him,” he told me. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. “We share a common artistic sensibility,” Isham said. When he visited Abbey Road Studios, in England, to record the score that he had written for “In the Valley of Elah,” Haggis went along with him. Haggis wanted him to compose the score for “The Next Three Days.” Now their friendship was at risk. Isham used Scientology to analyze the situation. In his view, Haggis’s emotions at that moment ranked 1.1 on the Tone Scale—the state that is sometimes called Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—Isham hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. “This was an intellectual decision,” Isham said. “I decided I would be angry.”
“Paul, I’m pissed off,” Isham told Haggis. “There’s better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, there’s a complaint line.” Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit; certainly, going public was not helpful.
Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. When his friends finished, however, Haggis had his own set of grievances.
He referred them to the exposé in the St. Petersburg Times that had so shaken him: “The Truth Rundown.” The first installment had appeared in June, 2009. Haggis had learned from reading it that several of the church’s top managers had defected in despair. Marty Rathbun had once been inspector general of the church’s Religious Technology Center, which holds the trademarks of Scientology and Dianetics, and exists to “protect the public from misapplication of the technology.” Rathbun had also overseen Scientology’s legal-defense strategy, and reported directly to Miscavige. Amy Scobee had been an executive in the Celebrity Centre network. Mike Rinder had been the church’s spokesperson, the job now held by Tommy Davis. One by one, they had disappeared from Scientology, and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask where they had gone.
The defectors told the newspaper that Miscavige was a serial abuser of his staff. “The issue wasn’t the physical pain of it,” Rinder said. “It’s the fact that the domination you’re getting—hit in the face, kicked—and you can’t do anything about it. If you did try, you’d be attacking the C.O.B.”—the chairman of the board. Tom De Vocht, a defector who had been a manager at the Clearwater spiritual center, told the paper that he, too, had been beaten by Miscavige; he said that from 2003 to 2005 he had witnessed Miscavige striking other staff members as many as a hundred times. Rathbun, Rinder, and De Vocht all admitted that they had engaged in physical violence themselves. “It had become the accepted way of doing things,” Rinder said. Amy Scobee said that nobody challenged the abuse because people were terrified of Miscavige. Their greatest fear was expulsion: “You don’t have any money. You don’t have job experience. You don’t have anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you.”
Assessing the truthfulness of such inflammatory statements—made by people who deserted the church or were expelled—was a challenge for the newspaper, which has maintained a special focus on Scientology. (Clearwater is twenty miles northwest of downtown St. Petersburg.) In 1998, six years before he defected, Rathbun told the paper that he had never seen Miscavige hit anyone. Now he said, “That was the biggest lie I ever told you.” The reporters behind “The Truth Rundown,” Joe Childs and Thomas Tobin, interviewed each defector separately and videotaped many of the sessions. “It added a measure of confidence,” Childs told me. “Their stories just tracked.”
Much of the alleged abuse took place at the Gold Base, a Scientology outpost in the desert near Hemet, a town eighty miles southeast of Los Angeles. Miscavige has an office there, and the site features, among other things, movie studios and production facilities for the church’s many publications. For decades, the base’s location was unknown even to many church insiders. Haggis visited the Gold Base only once, in the early eighties, when he was about to direct his Scientology commercial. The landscape, he said, suggested a spa, “beautiful and restful,” but he found the atmosphere sterile and scary. Surrounded by a security fence, the base houses about eight hundred Sea Org members, in quarters that the church likens to those “in a convent or seminary, albeit much more comfortable.”
According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in 2004 to the Hole—a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. “There were between eighty and a hundred people sentenced to the Hole at that time,” Rathbun said, in the declaration. “We were required to do group confessions all day and all night.”
The church claims that such stories are false: “There is not, and never has been, any place of ‘confinement’ . . . nor is there anything in Church policy that would allow such confinement.”
According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses “were not participants would have their marriages terminated.” The St. Petersburg Times noted that Miscavige played Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a boom box as the church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case, ripping a chair apart.
Tom De Vocht, one of the participants, says that the event lasted until four in the morning: “It got more and more physical as the number of chairs went down.” Many of the participants had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a driver’s license or a passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear.
Tommy Davis told me that a musical-chairs episode did occur. He explained that Miscavige had been away from the Gold Base for some time, and when he returned he discovered that in his absence many jobs had been reassigned. The game was meant to demonstrate that even seemingly small changes can be disruptive to an organization—underscoring an “administrative policy of the church.” The rest of the defectors’ accounts, Davis told me, was “hoo-ha”: “Chairs being ripped apart, and people being threatened that they’re going to be sent to far-flung places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and they’re going to force their spouses—and on and on and on. I mean, it’s just nuts!”
Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org member and church executive who worked with Haggis on the rejected Dianetics ad campaign, told me that Miscavige had struck or beaten him on five occasions, the first time in 2002. “I had just written an infomercial,” he said. Miscavige summoned him to a meeting where a few dozen members were seated on one side of a table; Miscavige sat by himself on the other side. According to Hawkins, Miscavige began a tirade about the ad’s shortcomings. Hawkins recalls, “Without any warning, he jumped up onto the conference-room table and he launches himself at me. He knocks me back against a cubicle wall and starts battering my face.” The two men fell to the floor, Hawkins says, and their legs became entangled. “Let go of my legs!” Miscavige shouted. According to Hawkins, Miscavige then “stomped out of the room,” leaving Hawkins on the floor, shocked and bruised. The others did nothing to support him, he claims: “They were saying, ‘Get up! Get up!’ ”
I asked Hawkins why he hadn’t called the police. He reminded me that church members believe that Scientology holds the key to salvation: “Only by going through Scientology will you reach spiritual immortality. You can go from life to life to life without being cognizant of what is going on. If you don’t go through Scientology, you’re condemned to dying over and over again in ignorance and darkness, never knowing your true nature as a spirit. Nobody who is a believer wants to lose that.” Miscavige, Hawkins says, “holds the power of eternal life and death over you.”
Moreover, Scientologists are taught to handle internal conflicts within the church’s own justice system. Hawkins told me that if a Sea Org member sought outside help he would be punished, either by being declared a Suppressive Person or by being sent off to do manual labor, as Hawkins was made to do after Miscavige beat him. The church denies that Hawkins was mistreated, and notes that he has participated in protests organized by Anonymous, a “hacktivist” collective that has targeted Scientology. The group pugnaciously opposes censorship, and became hostile toward Scientology after the church invoked copyright claims in order to remove from the Internet the video of Tom Cruise extolling “K.S.W.” The church describes Anonymous as a “cyber-terrorist group”; last month, the F.B.I. raided the homes of three dozen members after Anonymous attacked the Web sites of corporations critical of WikiLeaks. (Two members of Anonymous have pleaded guilty to participating in a 2008 attack on a Scientology Web site.)
The church provided me with eleven statements from Scientologists, all of whom said that Miscavige had never been violent. One of them, Yael Lustgarten, said that she was present at the meeting with Hawkins and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. She claims that Hawkins made a mess of his presentation—“He smelled of body odor, he was unshaven, his voice tone was very low, and he could hardly be heard”—and was admonished to shape up. She says that Hawkins “wasn’t hit by anyone.” The defector Amy Scobee, however, says that she witnessed the attack—the two men had fallen into her cubicle. After the altercation, she says, “I gathered all the buttons from Jeff’s shirt and the change from his pockets and gave them back to him.”
The church characterizes Scobee, Rinder, Rathbun, Hawkins, De Vocht, Hines, and other defectors I spoke with as “discredited individuals,” who were demoted for incompetence or expelled for corruption; the defectors’ accounts are consistent only because they have “banded together to advance and support each other’s false ‘stories.’ ”
After reading the St. Petersburg Times series, Haggis tracked down Marty Rathbun, who was living on Corpus Christi Bay, in south Texas. Rathbun had been making ends meet by writing freelance articles for local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark.
Haggis complained that Davis hadn’t been honest with him about Scientology’s policies. “I said, ‘That’s not Tommy, he has no say,’ ” Rathbun told me. “Miscavige is a total micromanager. I explained the whole culture.” He says that Haggis was shocked by the conversation. “The thing that was most troubling to Paul was that I literally had to escape,” Rathbun told me. (A few nights after the musical-chairs incident, he got on his motorcycle and waited until a gate was opened for someone else; he sped out and didn’t stop for thirty miles.) Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his car—an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, “What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?”
Haggis responded, “Nobody tells me who I cast.” He looked at a lengthy video that Beghe had posted on the Internet, in which he denounces the church as “destructive and a ripoff.” Haggis thought that Beghe had “gone over the edge.” But he asked if they could talk.
The two men met at Patrick’s Roadhouse, a coffee shop on the beach in Pacific Palisades. Beghe was calmer than he had been in the video, which he called “a snapshot of me having been out only three months.” Even though Beghe had renounced the church, he continued to use Scientology methods when dealing with members and former members. “It’s almost like: ‘I can speak Chinese, I understand the culture,’ ” he explained to me. In several meetings with Haggis, he employed techniques based on what Hubbard labelled “Ethics Conditions.” These range from Confusion at the bottom and ascend through Treason, Enemy, Doubt, Liability, and Emergency, eventually leading to Power. “Each one of the conditions has a specific set of steps in a formula, and, once that formula is applied correctly, you will move up to the next-highest condition,” Beghe explained. “I assumed that Paul was in a condition of Doubt.”
Beghe joined Scientology in 1994. He told Haggis that, in the late nineties, he began having emotional problems, and the church recommended auditing and coursework. In retrospect, he felt that it had done no good. “I was paying money for them to fuck me up,” he said. “I spent about five or six hundred thousand dollars trying to get better, and I continued to get worse.” He says that when he finally decided to leave the church, in 2007, he told an official that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed. Beghe recalls telling the official, “You guys don’t have any policies to make up the damage.” He eventually suggested to the official that the church buy property and lease it to him at a negligible rate; the church now characterizes this as an attempt at extortion.
Beghe was reluctant to use the word “brainwashing”—“whatever the fuck that is”—but he did feel that his mind had been somehow taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.”
Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didn’t feel as deeply betrayed as Beghe did. “I didn’t feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought,” he told me. But, as he continued his investigation, he became increasingly disturbed. He read the church’s official rebuttal to the St. Petersburg Times series, in the Scientology magazine Freedom. It included an annotated transcript of conversations that had taken place between the reporters and representatives of the church, including Tommy Davis and his wife, Jessica Feshbach. In Freedom’s rendition of those conversations, the reporters’ sources were not named, perhaps to shield Scientologists from the shock of seeing familiar names publicly denouncing the organization. Rathbun was called “Kingpin” and Scobee “the Adulteress.”
At one point in the transcribed conversations, Davis reminded the reporters that Scobee had been expelled from the church leadership because of an affair. The reporters responded that she had denied having sexual contact outside her marriage. “That’s a lie,” Davis told them. Feshbach, who had a stack of documents, elaborated: “She has a written admission [of] each one of her instances of extramarital indiscretion. . . . I believe there were five.” When Haggis read this in Freedom, he presumed that the church had obtained its information from the declarations that members sometimes provide after auditing. Such confessions are supposed to be confidential. (Scientology denies that it obtained the information this way, and Davis produced an affidavit, signed by Scobee, in which she admits to having liaisons. Scobee denies committing adultery, and says that she did not write the affidavit; she says that she signed it in the hope of leaving the church on good terms, so that she could stay in touch with relatives.)
In his letter to Davis, Haggis said that he was worried that the church might look through his files to smear him, too. “Luckily, I have never held myself up to be anyone’s role model,” he wrote.
At his house, Haggis finished telling his friends what he had learned. He suggested that they should at least examine the evidence. “I directed them to certain Web sites,” he said, mentioning Exscientologykids.com, which was created by three young women who grew up in Scientology and subsequently left. Many stories on the site are from men and women who joined the Sea Org before turning eighteen. One of them was Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscavige’s niece, who joined when she was twelve. For Hill and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the Sea Org, leaving them especially ill-prepared, they say, for coping with life outside the church.
The stories Haggis found on the Internet of children drafted into the Sea Org appalled him. “They were ten years old, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this?” Haggis told me. “Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!” The stories of the Sea Org children reminded Haggis of child slaves he had seen in Haiti.
Many Sea Org volunteers find themselves with no viable options for adulthood. If they try to leave, the church presents them with a “freeloader tab” for all the coursework and counselling they have received; the bill can amount to more than a hundred thousand dollars. Payment is required in order to leave in good standing. “Many of them actually pay it,” Haggis said. “They leave, they’re ashamed of what they’ve done, they’ve got no money, no job history, they’re lost, they just disappear.” In what seemed like a very unguarded comment, he said, “I would gladly take down the church for that one thing.”
The church says that it adheres to “all child labor laws,” and that minors can’t sign up without parental consent; the freeloader tabs are an “ecclesiastical matter” and are not enforced through litigation.
Haggis’s friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings. “We all left no clearer than when we went in,” Archer said. Isham felt that there was still a possibility of getting Haggis “to behave himself.” He said that Haggis had agreed that “it wasn’t helping anyone” to continue distributing the letter, and had promised not to circulate it further. Unmentioned was the fact that this would be the last time most of them ever spoke to Haggis.
I asked Isham if he had taken Haggis’s advice and looked at the Web sites or the articles in the St. Petersburg Times. “I started to,” he said. “But it was like reading ‘Mein Kampf’ if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion.”
In the days after the friends visited Haggis’s home, church officials and members came to his office, distracting his colleagues, particularly his producing partner, Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist. “Every day, for hours, he would have conversations with them,” Nozik told me. It was August, 2009, and shooting for “The Next Three Days” was set to start in Pittsburgh at the end of the month; the office desperately needed Haggis’s attention. “But he felt a need to go through the process fully,” Nozik says. “He wanted to give them a full hearing.”
“I listened to their point of view, but I didn’t change my mind,” Haggis says, noting that the Scientology officials “became more livid and irrational.” He added, “I applied more Scientology in those meetings than they did.”
Davis and other church officials told Haggis that Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. Supposing that was true, Haggis said, why hadn’t Miscavige stopped it? Haggis recalls that, at one meeting, he told Davis and five other officials, “If someone in my organization is beating people, I would sure know about it. You think I would put up with it? And I’m not that good a person.” Haggis noted that, if the rumors of Miscavige’s violent temper were true, it proved that everyone is fallible. “Look at Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said, alluding to King’s sexual improprieties.
“How dare you compare Dave Miscavige with Martin Luther King!” one of the officials shouted. Haggis was shocked. “They thought that comparing Miscavige to Martin Luther King was debasing his character,” he says. “If they were trying to convince me that Scientology was not a cult, they did a very poor job of it.” (Davis says that King’s name never came up.)
In October, 2009, Marty Rathbun called Haggis and asked if he could publish the resignation letter on his blog. Rathbun had become an informal spokesperson for defectors who believed that the church had broken away from Hubbard’s original teachings. Haggis was in Pittsburgh, shooting his picture. “You’re a journalist, you don’t need my permission,” Haggis said, although he asked Rathbun to excise parts related to Katy’s homosexuality.
Haggis says that he didn’t think about the consequences of his decision: “I thought it would show up on a couple of Web sites. I’m a writer, I’m not Lindsay Lohan.” Rathbun got fifty-five thousand hits on his blog that afternoon. The next morning, the story was in newspapers around the world.
Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human trafficking. The laws regarding trafficking were built largely around forced prostitution, but they also pertain to slave labor. Under federal law, slavery is defined, in part, by the use of coercion, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological abuse. The California penal code lists several indicators that someone may be a victim of human trafficking: signs of trauma or fatigue; being afraid or unable to talk, because of censorship by others or security measures that prevent communication with others; working in one place without the freedom to move about; owing a debt to one’s employer; and not having control over identification documents. Those conditions echo the testimony of many former Sea Org members who lived at the Gold Base.
Sea Org members who have “failed to fulfill their ecclesiastical responsibilities” may be sent to one of the church’s several Rehabilitation Project Force locations. Defectors describe them as punitive reëducation camps. In California, there is one in Los Angeles; until 2005, there was one near the Gold Base, at a place called Happy Valley. Bruce Hines, the defector turned research physicist, says that he was confined to R.P.F. for six years, first in L.A., then in Happy Valley. He recalls that the properties were heavily guarded and that anyone who tried to flee would be tracked down and subjected to further punishment. “In 1995, when I was put in R.P.F., there were twelve of us,” Hines said. “At the high point, in 2000, there were about a hundred and twenty of us.” Some members have been in R.P.F. for more than a decade, doing manual labor and extensive spiritual work. (Davis says that Sea Org members enter R.P.F. by their own choosing and can leave at any time; the manual labor maintains church facilities and instills “pride of accomplishment.”)
In 2009, two former Sea Org members, Claire and Marc Headley, filed lawsuits against the church. They had both joined as children. Claire became a member of the Sea Org at the age of sixteen, and was assigned to the Gold Base. She says she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone where she was going, not even her mother, who was made to sign over guardianship. (Claire’s mother, who is still in the church, has issued a sworn statement denying that she lost contact with her daughter.) The security apparatus at the Gold Base intimidated Claire. “Even though I had been in Scientology pretty much all my life, this was a whole new world,” she told me. She says she was rarely allowed even a telephone call to her mother. “Every last trace of my life, as I knew it, was thrown away,” she said. “It was like living in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ ”
Claire met Marc Headley, also a teen-ager, soon after her arrival. “We had no ties to anyone not in Scientology,” Claire said. “It was a very closeted and controlled existence.” Marc says it was widely known around the base that he was one of the first people Tom Cruise audited. In Scientology, the auditor bears a significant responsibility for the progress of his subject. “If you audit somebody and that person leaves the organization, there’s only one person whose fault that is—the auditor,” Headley told me. (Cruise’s attorney says that Cruise doesn’t recall meeting Marc.) Claire and Marc fell in love, and married in 1992. She says that she was pressured by the church to have two abortions, because of a stipulation that Sea Org members can’t have children. The church denies that it pressures members to terminate pregnancies. Lucy James, a former Scientologist who had access to Sea Org personnel records, says that she knows of dozens of cases in which members were pressed to have abortions.
In 2005, Marc Headley says, he was punched by Miscavige during an argument. He and his wife quit. (The church calls Marc Headley dishonest, claiming that he kept seven hundred dollars in profits after being authorized to sell Scientology camera equipment; Headley says that shipping costs and other expenses account for the discrepancy.) In 2009, the Headleys filed their suits, which maintained that the working conditions at the Gold Base violated labor and human-trafficking laws. The church responded that the Headleys were ministers who had voluntarily submitted to the rigors of their calling, and that the First Amendment protected Scientology’s religious practices. The court agreed with this argument and dismissed the Headleys’ complaints, awarding the church forty thousand dollars in litigation costs. The court also indicated that the Headleys were technically free to leave the Gold Base. The Headleys have appealed the rulings.
Defectors also talked to the F.B.I. about Miscavige’s luxurious life style. The law prohibits the head of a tax-exempt organization from enjoying unusual perks or compensation; it’s called inurement. Tommy Davis refused to disclose how much money Miscavige earns, and the church isn’t required to do so, but Headley and other defectors suggest that Miscavige lives more like a Hollywood star than like the head of a religious organization—flying on chartered jets and wearing shoes custom-made in London. Claire Headley says that, when she was in Scientology, Miscavige had five stewards and two chefs at his disposal; he also had a large car collection, including a Saleen Mustang, similar to one owned by Cruise, and six motorcycles. (The church denies this characterization and “vigorously objects to the suggestion that Church funds inure to the private benefit of Mr. Miscavige.”)
Former Sea Org members report that Miscavige receives elaborate birthday and Christmas gifts from Scientology groups around the world. One year, he was given a Vyrus 985 C3 4V, a motorcycle with a retail price of seventy thousand dollars. “These gifts are tokens of love and respect for Mr. Miscavige,” Davis informed me.
By contrast, Sea Org members typically receive fifty dollars a week. Often, this stipend is docked for small infractions, such as failing to meet production quotas or skipping scripture-study sessions. According to Janela Webster, who was in the Sea Org for nineteen years before defecting, in 2006, it wasn’t unusual for a member to be paid as little as thirteen dollars a week.
I recently spoke with two sources in the F.B.I. who are close to the investigation. They assured me that the case remains open.
Brousseau says that his defection caused anxiety, in part because he had worked on a series of special projects for Tom Cruise. Brousseau maintained grounds and buildings at the Gold Base. He worked for fourteen months on the renovation of the Freewinds, the only ship left in Scientology’s fleet; he also says that he installed bars over the doors of the Hole, at the Gold Base, shortly after Rathbun escaped. (The church denies this.)
In 2005, Miscavige showed Cruise a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he owned. At Miscavige’s request, Brousseau had had the vehicle’s parts plated with brushed nickel and painted candy-apple red. Brousseau recalls, “Cruise asked me, ‘God, could you paint my bike like that?’ I looked at Miscavige, and Miscavige agreed.” Cruise brought in two motorcycles to be painted, a Triumph and a Honda Rune; the Honda had been given to him by Spielberg after the filming of “War of the Worlds.” “The Honda already had a custom paint job by the set designer,” Brousseau recalls. Each motorcycle had to be taken apart completely, and all the parts nickel-plated, before it was painted. (The church denies Brousseau’s account.)
Brousseau also says that he helped customize a Ford Excursion S.U.V. that Cruise owned, installing features such as handmade eucalyptus panelling. The customization job was presented to Tom Cruise as a gift from David Miscavige, he said. “I was getting paid fifty dollars a week,” he recalls. “And I’m supposed to be working for the betterment of mankind.” Several years ago, Brousseau says, he worked on the renovation of an airport hangar that Cruise maintains in Burbank. Sea Org members installed faux scaffolding, giant banners bearing the emblems of aircraft manufacturers, and a luxurious office that was fabricated at church facilities, then reassembled inside the hangar. Brousseau showed me dozens of photographs documenting his work for Cruise.
Both Cruise’s attorney and the church deny Brousseau’s account. Cruise’s attorney says that “the Church of Scientology has never expended any funds to the personal benefit of Mr. Cruise or provided him with free services.” Tommy Davis says that these projects were done by contractors, and that Brousseau acted merely as an adviser. He also says, “None of the Church staff involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honored to assist him. Whatever small economic benefit Mr. Cruise may have received from the assistance of Church staff pales in comparison to the benefits the Church has received from Mr. Cruise’s many years of volunteer efforts for the Church.” Yet this assistance may have involved many hours of unpaid labor on the part of Sea Org members.
Miscavige’s official title is chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, but he dominates the entire organization. His word is absolute, and he imposes his will even on some of the people closest to him. According to Rinder and Brousseau, in June, 2006, while Miscavige was away from the Gold Base, his wife, Shelly, filled several job vacancies without her husband’s permission. Soon afterward, she disappeared. Her current status is unknown. Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he won’t disclose where that is.
“This isn’t a creed,” Archer said. “These are basic natural laws of life.” She described Hubbard as “an engineer” who had codified human emotional states, in order to guide people to “feel a zest and a love for life.”
I asked them how the controversy surrounding Scientology had affected them. “It hasn’t touched me,” Archer said. “It’s not that I’m not aware of it.” She went on, “Scientology is growing. It’s in a hundred and sixty-five countries.”
“Translated into fifty languages!” Jastrow added. “It’s the fastest-growing religion.” He added, “Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organization ever.” He continued, “When you study the historical perspective of new faiths, historically, they’ve all been—”
“Attacked,” Archer said. “Look what happened to the—”
“The Christians,” Jastrow said, simultaneously. “Think of the Mormons and the Christian Scientists.”
We talked about the church’s focus on celebrities. “Hubbard recognized that if you really want to inspire a culture to have peace and greatness and harmony among men, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish,” Archer said. “And if he’s particularly well known he needs a place where he can be comfortable. Celebrity Centres provide that.” She blamed the press for concentrating too much on Scientology celebrities. Journalists, she said, “don’t write about the hundreds of thousands of other Scientologists—”
“Millions!”
“Millions of other Scientologists. They only write about four friggin’ people!”
The church won’t release official membership figures, but it informally claims eight million members worldwide. Davis says that the figure comes from the number of people throughout the world who have donated to the church. “There is no process of conversion, there is no baptism,” Davis told me. It was a simple decision: “Either you are or you aren’t.” 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.
Jastrow suggested that Scientology’s critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drugmakers, pharmacies—“all those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well.” He cited a recent article in USA Today which noted that an alarmingly high number of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had been hospitalized for mental illness. Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.”
Scientology has perpetuated Hubbard’s antagonism toward psychiatry. An organization that the church co-founded, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, maintains a permanent exhibit in Los Angeles called “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,” which argues that psychiatry contributed to the rise of Nazism and apartheid. The group is behind an effort “to help achieve legislative protections against abusive psychiatric treatment and drugging of children.” (Paul Haggis has hosted an event for the organization at his home. His defection from Scientology has not changed his view that “psychotropic drugs are overprescribed for children.”)
Jastrow, in his back yard, told me, “Scientology is going to be huge, and it’s going to help mankind right itself.” He asked me, “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?”
“That’s improving the civilization,” Archer added.
“Is there some other religion on the horizon that’s gonna help mankind?” he said. “Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where?”
That fall, Davis entered Columbia. He attended for a semester, then dropped out and joined the Sea Org. “I always wanted to do something that helped people,” Davis explained to me. “I didn’t think the world needed another doctor or lawyer.” Archer and Jastrow say that they were surprised by Tommy’s decision. “We were hoping he’d get his college education,” Jastrow said.
Davis became fiercely committed to the Sea Org. He got a tattoo on one arm of its logo—two palm fronds embracing a star, supposedly the emblem of the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. He began working at the Celebrity Centre, attending to young stars like Juliette Lewis, before taking on Tom Cruise. David Miscavige was impressed with Davis. Mike Rinder recalled, “Miscavige liked the fact that he was young and looked trendy and wore Armani suits.”
Paul Haggis remembers first meeting Davis at the Celebrity Centre in the early nineties. “He was a sweet and bright boy,” Haggis said.
Davis’s rise within Scientology was not without difficulty. In 2005, Davis was sent to Clearwater to participate in something called the Estates Project Force. He was there at the same time as Donna Shannon, a veterinarian who had become an O.T. VII before joining the Sea Org. She had thought that she was attending a kind of boot camp for new Sea Org members, and was surprised to see veterans like Davis. She says that Davis, “a pretty nice guy,” was subjected to extensive hazing. “He complained about scrubbing a Dumpster with a toothbrush till late at night,” she recalls. “Then he’d be up at six to do our laundry.” Only later did Shannon learn that Davis was Anne Archer’s son.
Shannon and Davis worked together for a while in Clearwater, maintaining the grounds. “I was supposedly supervising him,” Shannon says. “I was told to make him work really hard.” At one point, Shannon says, Davis borrowed about a hundred dollars from her because he didn’t have money for food.
One day, according to Shannon, she and Davis were taking the bus to a work project. She asked why he was in the E.P.F.
“I got busted,” Davis told her. Using Scientology jargon, he said, “I fucked up on Tom Cruise’s lines”—meaning that he had botched a project that Cruise was involved in. “I just want to do my stuff and get back on post.”
Shannon recalled that, suddenly, “it was like a veil went over his eyes, and he goes, ‘I already said too much.’ ”
Several months later, Davis paid her back the money. (Davis says that he does not recall meeting Shannon, has never scrubbed a Dumpster, and has never had a need to borrow money.)
Davis ascended to his role as spokesman in 2007. He has since become known for his aggressive defenses of the church. In 2007, the BBC began reporting an investigative story about Scientology. From the start, the BBC crew, led by John Sweeney, was shadowed by a Scientology film crew. Davis travelled across the U.S. to disrupt Sweeney’s interviews with Scientology dissidents. The two men had a number of confrontations. In an incident captured on video in Florida, Sweeney suggests that Scientology is “a sadistic cult.” Davis responds, “For you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory, so offensive, and so bigoted. And the reason you kept repeating it is because you wanted to get a reaction like you’re getting right now. Well, buddy, you got it! Right here, right now, I’m angry! Real angry!” The two men had another encounter that left Sweeney screaming as Davis goaded him—an incident so raw that Sweeney apologized to his viewers.
Shortly afterward, in March, 2007, Davis mysteriously disappeared. He was under considerable stress. According to Mike Rinder, Davis had told Sweeney that he reported to Miscavige every day, and that angered Miscavige, who wanted to be seen as focussed on spiritual matters, not public relations. According to Rinder, Davis “blew.” A few days later, he surfaced in Las Vegas. Davis was sent to Clearwater, where he was “security-checked” by Jessica Feshbach, a church stalwart. A security check involves seeking to gain a confession with an E-Meter, in order to rout out subversion. It can function as a powerful form of thought control.
Davis claims that he never fled the church and was not in Las Vegas. He did go to Clearwater. “I went to Florida and worked there for a year and took some time off,” he told me. “I did a lot of study, a lot of auditing.” He and Feshbach subsequently got married.
Davis now told me that he was “not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis.” I had come to Los Angeles specifically to talk to him, at a time he had chosen. I asked if he had been told not to talk to me. He said no.
Feshbach said that she had spoken to Mark Isham, whom I had interviewed the day before. “He talked to you about what are supposed to be our confidential scriptures.” Any discussion of the church’s secret doctrines was offensive, she said.
In my meeting with Isham, he asserted that Scientology was not a “faith-based religion.” I pointed out that, in Scientology’s upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham said that he wasn’t going to discuss the details of O.T. III. “In the wrong hands, it can hurt people,” he said.
“Everything I have to say about Paul, I’ve already said,” Davis told me. He agreed, however, to respond to written questions about the church.
In late September, Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, travelled to Manhattan to meet with me and six staff members of The New Yorker. In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet.
Davis, early in his presentation, attacked the credibility of Scientology defectors, whom he calls “bitter apostates.” He said, “They make up stories.” He cited Bryan Wilson, an Oxford sociologist, who has argued that testimony from the disaffected should be treated skeptically, noting, “The apostate is generally in need of self-justification. He seeks to reconstruct his own past to excuse his former affiliations and to blame those who were formerly his closest associates.”
Davis spoke about Gerry Armstrong, a former Scientology archivist who copied, without permission, many of the church’s files on Hubbard, and who settled in a fraud suit against the church in 1986. Davis charged that Armstrong had forged many of the documents that he later disseminated in order to discredit the church’s founder. He also alleged that Armstrong had spread rumors of a 1967 letter in which Hubbard told his wife that he was “drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and grays” while researching the Operating Thetan material. Davis also noted that, in 1984, Armstrong had been captured on videotape telling a friend, “I can create documents with relative ease. You know, I did for a living.” Davis’s decision to cite this evidence was curious—though the quote cast doubt on Armstrong’s ethics, it also suggested that forging documents had once been part of a Scientologist’s job.
Davis passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong “sitting naked” with a giant globe in his lap. “This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money,” Davis said. “He’s not a very sane person.”
Armstrong told me that, in the photo, he is actually wearing running shorts under the globe. The article is about his attempt to create a movement for people to “abandon the use of currency.” He said that he received eight hundred thousand dollars in the 1986 settlement and had given most of the money away. (The settlement prohibited Armstrong from talking about Scientology, a prohibition that he has ignored, and the church has won two breach-of-contract suits against him, including a five-hundred-thousand-dollar judgment in 2004.)
Davis also displayed photographs of what he said were bruises sustained by Mike Rinder’s former wife in 2010, after Rinder physically assaulted her in a Florida parking lot. (Rinder denies committing any violence. A sheriff’s report supports this.) Davis also showed a mug shot of Marty Rathbun in a jailhouse jumpsuit, after being arrested in New Orleans last July for public drunkenness. “Getting arrested for being drunk on the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse?” Davis cracked. “That’s like getting arrested for being a leper in a leper colony.” (Rathbun’s arrest has been expunged.) Claire and Marc Headley were “the most despicable people in the world”; Jeff Hawkins was “an inveterate liar.”
I asked how, if these people were so reprehensible, they had all arrived at such elevated positions in the church. “They weren’t like that when they were in those positions,” Davis responded. The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology’s ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested to Davis that Scientology didn’t seem to work if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, and embezzlers.
Scientology, Davis said, doesn’t pretend to be perfect, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. “I haven’t done things like that,” Davis said. “I haven’t suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, lied—contrary to what Paul Haggis says.” He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: “If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology . . . then why the hell did he stick around for thirty-five years?” He continued, “Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose?” Davis shook his head in disgust. “I think he’s the most hypocritical person in the world.”
We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged against Miscavige. “The only people who will corroborate are their fellow-apostates,” Davis said. He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting the accusations, and noted that the tales about Miscavige always hinged on “inexplicable violent outbursts.” Davis said, “One would think that if such a thing occurred—which it most certainly did not—there’d have to be a reason.”
I had wondered about these stories as well. While Rinder and Rathbun were in the church, they had repeatedly claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless. Then, after Rinder defected, he said that Miscavige had beaten him fifty times. Rathbun has confessed that, in 1997, he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the case of Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism. If these men were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of lying to destroy it? Davis later claimed that Rathbun is in fact trying to overthrow Scientology’s current leadership and take over the church. (Rathbun now makes his living by providing Hubbard-inspired counselling to other defectors, but he says that he has no desire to be part of a hierarchical organization. “Power corrupts,” he says.)
Twelve other defectors told me that they had been beaten by Miscavige, or had witnessed Miscavige beating other church staff members. Most of them, like John Peeler, noted that Miscavige’s demeanor changed “like the snap of a finger.” Others who never saw such violence spoke of their constant fear of the leader’s anger.
At the meeting, Davis brought up Jack Parsons’s black-magic society, which Hubbard had supposedly infiltrated. Davis said, “He was sent in there by Robert Heinlein”—the science-fiction writer—“who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time.” Davis said, “A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we’d never been able to before.” The book to which Davis was referring is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention in the book of Heinlein’s sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring, on the part of naval intelligence or any other organization. Patterson says that he looked into the matter, at the suggestion of Scientologists, but found nothing.
Davis and I discussed an assertion that Marty Rathbun had made to me about the O.T. III creation story—the galactic revelations that Haggis had deemed “madness.” While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun told me, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists skipped the O.T. III level. Miscavige shelved the idea, Rathbun told me. Davis called Rathbun’s story “libellous.” He explained that the cornerstone of Scientology was the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. “Mr. Hubbard’s material must be and is applied precisely as written,” Davis said. “It’s never altered. It’s never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology.”
But hadn’t certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard’s books been changed after his death?
Davis admitted that that was so, but he maintained that “the current editions are one-hundred-per-cent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.
“The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?” I asked.
“No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied.
“Somebody put the material in those—?”
“I can only imagine. . . . It wasn’t Mr. Hubbard,” Davis said, cutting me off.
“Who would’ve done it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t think it really matters,” Davis said. “The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyone’s sexual orientation. . . .”
“Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked.
“Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said.
After this exchange, I looked at some recent editions that the church had provided me with. On page 125 of “Dianetics,” a “sexual pervert” is defined as someone engaging in “homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc.” Apparently, the bigot’s handiwork was not fully excised.
At the meeting, Davis and I also discussed Hubbard’s war record. His voice filling with emotion, he said that, if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie.” He concluded, “The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.”
In the binders that Davis provided, there was a letter from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. The letter states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was “technically pronounced ‘fit for duty.’ ” This was the same period during which Hubbard claimed to have been blinded and lame. Davis had highlighted a passage: “Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected.” Davis added later that, according to Robert Heinlein, Hubbard’s ankles had suffered a “drumhead-type injury”; this can result, Davis explained, “when the ship is torpedoed or bombed.”
Davis acknowledged that some of Hubbard’s medical records did not appear to corroborate Hubbard’s version of events. But Scientology had culled other records that did confirm Hubbard’s story, including documents from the National Archives in St. Louis. The man who did the research, Davis said, was “Mr. X.”
Davis explained, “Anyone who saw ‘J.F.K.’ remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costner’s character goes and meets with a man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald Sutherland.” In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations. (Oliver Stone, who directed “J.F.K.,” says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the eighties, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology.
“We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis told me. “He actually solved the conundrum for us.” According to Davis, Prouty explained to the church representatives that, because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer. And, essentially, they create two sets.” He said, “Fletcher Prouty basically issued an affidavit saying L. Ron Hubbard’s records were sheep-dipped.” Prouty died in 2001.
Davis later sent me a copy of what he said was a document that confirmed Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the U.S. Naval Service,” dated December 6, 1945. The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote to me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of medals that Hubbard supposedly won. Two of the medals in the photograph weren’t even created until after Hubbard left active service.
After filing a request with the National Archives in St. Louis, The New Yorker obtained what archivists assured us were Hubbard’s complete military records—more than nine hundred pages. Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard’s being wounded in battle or breaking his feet. X-rays taken of Hubbard’s right shoulder and hip showed calcium deposits, but there was no evidence of any bone or joint disease in his ankle.
There is a “Notice of Separation” in the records, but it is not the one that Davis sent me. The differences in the two documents are telling. The St. Louis document indicates that Hubbard earned four medals for service, but they reflect no distinction or valor. In the church document, his job preference after the service is listed as “Studio (screen writing)”; in the official record, it is “uncertain.” The church document indicates, falsely, that Hubbard completed four years of college, obtaining a degree in civil engineering. The official document correctly notes two years of college and no degree.
On the church document, the commanding officer who signed off on Hubbard’s separation was “Howard D. Thompson, Lt. Cmdr.” The file contains a letter, from 2000, to another researcher, who had written for more information about Thompson. An analyst with the National Archives responded that the records of commissioned naval officers at that time had been reviewed, and “there was no Howard D. Thompson listed.”
The church, after being informed of these discrepancies, said, “Our expert on military records has advised us that, in his considered opinion, there is nothing in the Thompson notice that would lead him to question its validity.” Eric Voelz, an archivist who has worked at the St. Louis archive for three decades, looked at the document and pronounced it a forgery.
On November 9th, “The Next Three Days” premièred at the Ziegfeld Theatre, in Manhattan. Movie stars lined up on the red carpet as photographers fired away. Jason Beghe, who plays a detective in the film, was there. He told me that he had taken in a young man, Daniel Montalvo, who had recently blown. He was placed in the Cadet Org, a junior version of the Sea Org, at age five, and joined the Sea Org at eleven. “He’s never seen television,” Beghe said. “He doesn’t even know who Robert Redford is.”
After the screening, everyone drifted over to the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel. Haggis was in a corner receiving accolades from his friends when I found him. I asked him if he felt that he had finally left Scientology. “I feel much more myself, but there’s a sadness,” he admitted. “If you identify yourself with something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it leaves a bit of space.” He went on, “It’s not really the sense of a loss of community. Those people who walked away from me were never really my friends.” He understood how they felt about him, and why. “In Scientology, in the Ethics Conditions, as you go down from Normal through Doubt, then you get to Enemy, and, finally, near the bottom, there is Treason. What I did was a treasonous act.”
I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology. “These people have long memories,” he told me. “My bet is that, within two years, you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1Daj3ZXB8
SOJOURNERS WEEKLY WRAP: THE 10 BEST STORIES YOU MISSED THIS WEEK: What Happened to Social Reform Evangelicals?,The Burden of Safety Doesn't Lie With the Abused, Pete Buttigieg’s Vow to Cut the Deficit Is Fiscally Irresponsible, A Black, Female Pastor in 'The Amen Corner' Takes Center Stage, Help! We’re Trapped in Bill Barr’s Authoritarian Fantasy, The Sins and the Sacrament in the Soil, Reasons of the Heart - Collegeville Institute, Charles Murray Returns, Nodding to Caution but Still Courting Controversy, 'American Dirt' and the Problem with Good Intentions, How To Use Dating Apps Without Putting Your Privacy At Risk 14FEB20 /
The Supreme Court case that could push abortion out of reach & Defend reproductive rights today 11&14FEB20 /
Trump Defends School Prayer. Critics Say He's Got It All Wrong 16JAN20 /
Billy Graham Warned Against Mixing Politics And Religion 1FEB18 /
CHRISTIANITY TODAY: Trump Should Be Removed from Office & JIM WALLIS ON CT EDITORIAL: 'THIS IS A CRACK IN THE WALL OF WHITE EVANGELICAL SUPPORT' 20DEZ19 /
The Perverse Servility of Bill Barr & William Barr is unfit to be attorney general 11&12DEZ19 /
The Supreme Court Has Paved the Way for Christian Nationalism to Thrive & Rick Perry’s Belief That Trump was Chosen by God is Shared by Many in a Fast-Growing Christian Movement 5NOV19&2DEZ19 /
The *Actual* Persecution of Christians In Trump’s America 30JAN18 /
DOMINIONISM RISING: A THEOCRATIC MOVEMENT HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT 18AUG16 /
Sebastian Gorka: "The left has no idea how much more damage we can do to them as private citizens." & DOMINIONISM RISING: A THEOCRATIC MOVEMENT HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT 16OKT17 & 18AUG16 /
Trump Appellate Nominee Says Her Religion Supersedes the Constitution 11SEP17 /
Evangelical Christians are selling out faith for politics & Trump peddles religious ignorance & Hillary Clinton: Speaking to Methodist women feels like a ‘homecoming’ 23&22JUN16 & Hillary Clinton: Speaking to Methodist women feels like a ‘homecoming’ 26APR14 / Christian academy in Kansas notifies students they can be expelled for having a gay family member & more from DAILY KOS RECOMMENDED 23&24MAI16 / 5 Serious Questions I Have For Christians Who Support Donald Trump / Here’s the Best Article Ever on the Fact that Ted Cruz is Literally the First Openly Reconstructionist/Theocracy Candidate to Run for President & Ted Cruz’s campaign is fueled by a dominionist vision for America (COMMENTARY) 19&4FEB16 / The harrowing lives of Christians in the Middle East & Michael Gerson: Can Muslim lands learn to tolerate Christianity? 14AUG15&26DEZ13 / Is Your Theology A “Little Bit Off”? Here’s A Quick Test To See & Sermon on Grace, Dogs, and Sass-Mouthed Women 20&17AUG14 / Mosul's Christians Say Goodbye & Archbishop Nona: Muslims defend a church from depredations in Mosul 18&12JUN14 / A Short Quiz: How to Determine If Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened in Just 10 Quick Questions & The Long, Sordid History Of Discrimination Against Christians in America 5SEP12&27FEB14 / The Situation of Christians in the Middle East -- A Declaration of Concern 9SEP13 / Simply Red: The Con-Man Behind the Rightwing's Starbucks Cup Freak-Out & Starbucks' Red Cups and the Internet Outrage Machine 11&9NOV15 /I was raised in the Church, went to Sunday School and was confirmed in Grace United Methodist Church in Warren, PA. I was a member of that church until we moved to Scandia and then joined the Scandia Evangelical Covenant Church. I am a Christian, I believe in Jesus Christ as my personal savior, and though I am no saint I am a believer and do not fear death and meeting God for judgment because I am doing the best I can with his help and forgiveness. I believe the Bible is the Word of God, inspired by God, and my faith is expressed in the Apostle's Creed. Because of my faith I am a Christian Socialist politically, and believe in Christ's teachings in The Beatitudes and Matthew 25. I believe Christianity teaches social justice and liberation theology and non-violent civil disobedience and resistance. I strongly support the first amendment of our constitution separating Church and State and guaranteeing freedom of religion. I am thankful this nation is a Republic and not a theocracy and know God is not a Democrat or Republican or Christian Socialist or member of any political party. I do reject the claim made by some that this is a Christian nation, I believe if that were so we would not face the issues of racism, hate, hunger, homelessness, lack of health care, lack of education, unemployment, and pollution, just to name a few of the major issues we face. These would be issues, but not major issues in a Christian nation. I also reject the claim that the Founding Fathers created America as a Christian nation, based on their beliefs. History shows this to be not true, unfortunately for the majority of these men something had happened in their lives to turn them against religion. So I offer these articles from Mother Jones, not as a slap in the face to believers who want it to be true, but just to set the record straight. After all, if this was founded as a Christian nation wouldn't Jesus Christ, God and the Bible be mentioned somewhere in the constitution?
The Great Debate of Our Season
http://motherjones.com/politics/2005/12/great-debate-our-season
Introducing a Mother Jones special issue on the interplay of conservative Christianity and the U.S. government.
"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
THOSE WORDS, PENNED IN ARTICLE 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, are as succinct a statement as we have from the Founding Fathers on the role of religion in our government. Their authorship is ascribed variously to George Washington, under whom the treaty was negotiated, or to John Adams, under whom it took effect, or sometimes to Joel Barlow, U.S. consul to Algiers, friend of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and himself no stranger to the religious ferment of the era, having served as a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army. But the validity of the document transcends its authorship for a simple reason: it was ratified. It was debated in the U.S. Senate and signed into law by President Adams without a breath of controversy or complaint concerning its secular language, and so stands today as an official description of the founders' intent.
And it wouldn't stand a chance in the government of the country we've become.
The idea of America was always informed by the ideals of its religious citizens, expressed, often, in religious terms. But the genius of America was the establishment, by those same individuals, of the world’s first secular government. That government wasn't at odds with religion—even the separation of church and state might be construed as a policy extension of Jesus' admonition not to pray as the hypocrites do, in public. And many religious factions (among them the 19th-century evangelicals) lobbied for secular governance, to protect themselves from the tyranny of mainstream denominations. Yet some among the faithful, uncomfortable with America from the start, saw secularism as the nation's fatal flaw, instead of its core strength, and have fought to transform the United States into an expressly Judeo-Christian nation.
Recently, the inheritors of this viewpoint are prevailing. The measure of religion's intrusion into our government and politics can be found whenever the White House markets a Supreme Court candidate by flaunting her religious convictions and church affiliation, whenever liberal Democrat politicians ostentatiously genuflect to show they can be prayerful, too, whenever a FEMA website directs the public to contribute its hurricane-relief funds to a right-wing ministry. Kansas senator Sam Brownback, gearing up to run for president on a faith-based, antiabortion platform, calls the role of religion in government "the great debate of our season."
The religious right didn't come by this prominence by accident, by casually capturing (and capitalizing on) the desire of many Americans for a more meaningful and spiritual life, nor even by the simple tactic of wrapping itself in the purloined flag of the founders and in a misconstrued Constitution. They organized, crafting a far-flung and intricate network of political pulpits, media outlets, funding organs and think tanks, and integrating it into the political machinery of the Republican right. The religious right shares the conservatives’ will to power and also, more than previously, a conviction that it is obligated by destiny to remake the country in its image.
This issue of Mother Jones is dedicated to illuminating the interplay between conservative Christianity and the U.S. government. We regard the movement's history, chart its arteries of funding and influence, and locate its wellsprings of support and aspiration. And we also show how such national issues as Intelligent Design and the death penalty are being debated within the church. It’s been more than 200 years since the founders established the separation of church and state. The assault on that principle now under way promises to alter not only our form of government but our concept of religion as well.
Original Intent
http://motherjones.com/politics/2005/12/original-intent
Revisionist rhetoric notwithstanding, the founders left God out of the Constitution?and it wasn't an oversight.
When the Supreme Court, in one of its most important decisions of 2005, ordered two Kentucky counties to dismantle courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Court majority was wrong because the nation's historical practices clearly indicate that the Constitution permits "disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists."
The Constitution permits no such thing: It has nothing to say about God, gods, or any form of belief or nonbelief—apart from its absolute prohibition, in Article 6, against any religious test for public office and the First Amendment's familiar declaration that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." From reading Scalia, a Martian (or polytheist) might infer that the establishment clause actually concludes with the phrase "free exercise thereof—as long as the faithful worship one God whose eye is on the sparrow." The justice's impassioned dissent in McCreary County v. the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky is a revealing portrait of the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left.
The Constitution permits no such thing: It has nothing to say about God, gods, or any form of belief or nonbelief—apart from its absolute prohibition, in Article 6, against any religious test for public office and the First Amendment's familiar declaration that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." From reading Scalia, a Martian (or polytheist) might infer that the establishment clause actually concludes with the phrase "free exercise thereof—as long as the faithful worship one God whose eye is on the sparrow." The justice's impassioned dissent in McCreary County v. the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky is a revealing portrait of the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left.
For the 21st-century apostles of religious correctness, the godless Constitution—how could those framers have forgotten the most important three-letter word in the dictionary?—poses a formidable problem requiring the creation of tortuous historical fictions that include both subtle prevarication and bald-faced lies.
Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less than "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in the wreck."
The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic statement that "all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It is worth noting here that the Declaration was a bold and impassioned proclamation of liberty, while the Constitution was a blueprint for a real government, with all the caution about practical consequences (such as divisive squabbles about the precise nature of divine authority over earthly affairs) required of any blueprint.
Eighteenth-century theological conservatives lost the battle over the Constitution, and the pill remains equally bitter to their spiritual descendants. Every time I write an article mentioning the constitutional omission of God, I receive hundreds of identical emails calling me a liar (sometimes a godless liar), because the document is unmistakably dated "in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." That the religious right should fall back on a once-common manner of dating important papers—as unrevealing of religious intent as the use of B.C. and A.D.—demonstrates just how seriously it takes the enterprise of controlling the past in order to control the future.
The revisionist script goes something like this: The founders were devout men who based their new government on Christian teaching (the religiously correct invariably use the term "Judeo-Christian"); they were unconcerned about religious interference with government and cared only about government interference with religion; and, last but not least, there was no tension between secularism and religion in the nation's halcyon early decades, because everyone accepted God as the source of civic authority.
The first part of the script—the so-called devoutness of the founders— is least relevant to the current debate over religion in government. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, to name only a few, were prolific writers who contradicted themselves (and one another) almost as frequently as did the authors of the Bible. They certainly believed in some form of God or Providence, as Enlightenment rationalists preferred to call the deity, but that is all we can conclude with reasonable certainty. Jefferson's political opponents in the early 1800s were as mistaken to call him an atheist as his conservative modern rebaptizers are to claim him as a committed Christian. (For one thing, Jefferson emphatically rejected the idea that Jesus was divine and instead regarded him as a great but wholly human teacher of morality.) Adams' critics and admirers, then and now, have been equally misguided in their attempts to portray him as a man of orthodox faith.
What did distinguish the most important revolutionary leaders was a particularly adaptable combination of political and religious beliefs that included strong hostility toward all ecclesiastical hierarchies (the original 17th-century meaning of the lovely word "freethought"); the Enlightenment conviction that if God existed, he expected humans to rely on their own reason to conduct earthly affairs; and the assignment of faith to the sphere of private conscience rather than public duty. These convictions carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution.
Regardless of the framers' private beliefs about God, it is more important to look at their public actions in crafting the legal foundation for the new republic. (One might, with less pride, make the same observation about the founders' attitudes toward slavery; whatever they "truly" believed, what matters is that they signed off on a formula counting a slave as three-fifths of a man.) And here the right-wing script goes awry, for it cannot explain why, if the founders intended to base the government on Christianity or monotheism, they failed to spell out their intentions in the Constitution itself. There was certainly ample precedent for doing so, not only in the Articles of Confederation but in nearly every state constitution.
When the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule. The Massachusetts Constitution extended equal protection of the law, and the right to hold office, only to Protestant Christians (restrictions that infuriated Adams, the state's favorite son). New York granted political equality to Jews but not to Roman Catholics. Maryland, the home state of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave full civic rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. In Delaware, officeholders had to attest to their belief in the Holy Trinity. Those were the good old days.
Thanks to the strong influence of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia stood alone among the states in guaranteeing complete civic equality and religious freedom to all citizens. In 1786, Virginians rejected a proposal by Patrick Henry to provide public financing for the teaching of Christianity in schools and instead passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which ruled out tax support for religious instruction and religious tests for public office. Significantly, the new law was supported by a coalition of evangelicals, who—as a minority in a state dominated by Episcopalians—feared government interference with religion, and freethinking Enlightenment rationalists, who feared religious interference with government.
The influence of Virginia's law, enacted less than a year before the writing of the federal Constitution, cannot be overstated. The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."
In the McCreary case, Scalia objects to Justice John Paul Stevens' citation of Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, an impassioned polemic—condemning both religious meddling with government and government meddling with religion—that turned the tide in favor of Virginia's separation of church and state. Scalia disingenuously dismisses the reference because Memorial was written before the federal Constitution—as if Virginia's recent experience had nothing whatever to do with the deliberations of the framers in Philadelphia.
Confronted with the Constitution's silence on divine authority, revisionists repeatedly fall back on the specious argument that since everyone took God's omnipotence for granted in the 18th century, there was no need for the framers to make a special point of mentioning the deity. If that were true, there would have been no bitter debates in the states about the nonreligious language of the Constitution. Moreover, this line of reasoning is self-contradictory, coming as it does from a political/religious lobby that backs the appointment of "originalist" judges—those who insist that the Constitution can only mean exactly what it said at the time it was written. It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.
Equally ludicrous is the notion that there was no tension between religion and secularism before federal courts, in the 20th century, began to apply the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to states. The balancing act between secularism and religion, as old as the republic, originated as a creative tension—in contrast to the destructive power struggle that has developed in recent years. For several decades after the Revolution, many Americans saw no conflict between devout personal religious views and secular views of governmental responsibilities.
The degree to which a secular approach to government was accepted in early 19th-century America was demonstrated by Congress' refusal to abandon Sunday mail service, which it had mandated in 1810. The 1844 invention of the telegraph would eventually put an end to the commercial need for daily mail, but in the 1820s and '30s, business still depended on the government to keep the mails moving seven days a week. Nevertheless, powerful right-wing religious leaders waged an unceasing campaign against the sacrilege of Sunday mail, which some considered a more important moral issue than slavery. But evangelical Christians and freethinkers, who had joined together to write and ratify the godless Constitution, wanted no part of government sanction for a religious Sabbath.
In 1828, Congress referred the godly mess to the powerful Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. Its chairman was Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson—a general, a hero of the War of 1812, and a devout Baptist. Johnson's report to Congress uncompromisingly declared that any federal attempt to give preference to the Christian Sabbath would be unconstitutional. He reminded his fellow legislators of the religious persecutions and intolerance that had impelled their revolutionary predecessors to draw a firm line—"the line cannot be too strongly drawn"—between church and state. (So much for separation of church and state being a recently invented lie of the left.)
The report also noted that many Americans, Christian and non-Christian, observed the Sabbath not on Sunday but on Saturday, and that the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were designed to prevent the majority from dictating to minorities. Johnson emphasized that the Constitution "gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual than that of the whole community."
The founders themselves had varying ideas about how much distance to place between their own beliefs and their public roles. Washington saw nothing wrong with issuing presidential proclamations of thanks- giving to God; Jefferson considered such proclamations unconstitutional. Scalia predictably cites Washington's thanksgiving proclamations in support of Ten Commandments displays and dismisses Jefferson's position. In an amusing 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, Jefferson noted that even Connecticut—which had still not dropped religious restrictions in its state constitution—declared that "the laws of God shall be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them."
We cannot know what the founders would have thought about the "values issues" that are touchstones for cultural conservatives today—abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, the right to die—but we certainly can infer what Jefferson would have thought about claims that the Ten Commandments and the Bible are the foundation of American law. The religious right's attempt to rewrite the history of the nation's founding is not some abstract debate of concern only to constitutional scholars but an integral part of a larger assault on all secular public institutions. If the Constitution really were based on the Bible, for instance, how could there be a valid legal argument against teaching creationism in public school biology classes or adding Bible courses to public school curricula?
Custom, rather than law, is the basis of the most common arguments for breaching the wall between church and state. On the same day that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 majority, ordered the removal of Ten Commandments plaques from Kentucky courthouses, it allowed a Ten Commandments monument to remain on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol (also by a 5-4 margin). Justice Stephen G. Breyer was the swing vote. The chief rationale for the change in Breyer's vote—against the Commandments displays in Kentucky, for the monument in Texas—seems to have been that the Kentucky displays were only six years old, while the Texas monument had been in place for more than four decades without causing controversy. The suggestion that something must be constitutional if it has been around long enough plays neatly into the Christian right's version of history.
With John Roberts as chief justice and Sandra Day O'Connor—who generally sided with church-state separationists—in retirement, there is good reason to fear that the reconfigured Supreme Court will adhere closely to the religious right's history script. In 1991, as principal deputy solicitor general during the administration of George H.W. Bush, Roberts argued in favor of recognizing the nation's "religious heritage" in church-state cases—an opinion echoing Scalia's frequently expressed conviction that all just governments derive their authority from God. This is indeed "originalist" logic—the original document being not the Constitution but the Bible or, to be more precise, certain biblical passages upholding the divine right of kings.
Arguments relying on custom, bolstered by personal religious belief, have great potency when presented to a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history. In a 1998 survey by the National Constitution Center, only about one-third of teenagers knew that the Constitution begins with the words "We the People," so it is hardly surprising that college students at my lectures are often astonished to hear that the Constitution never mentions God.
Handed a tabula rasa by a public uneducated in civics, right-wing revisionists are free to ignore not only the strong anticlerical views of so many of the nation's first leaders but also their loathing of all entanglements between religion and government. "Oh! Lord!" Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. "Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would."
If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did—and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans. Here is the real history lesson, straight from the pens of the founders, that ought to be taught—and is too often ignored—in every American public school.
TRINITY
CHAPEL in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County is hardly the picture of a
revolutionary outpost. It’s a stylishly modern Church of God—a
denomination that, though conservative, is certainly mainstream.
Parishioners are drawn from a community whose average income is a
comfortable 35 percent above the national norm, whose tree-lined country
roads intersect McMansion subdivisions. If Norman Rockwell were
painting suburban sprawl, he’d likely pick Cobb County.
On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs and luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered inside the sanctuary. The church was host to Restore America, a rally to “celebrate faith and patriotism” sponsored by Christian publisher American Vision. In the lobby, neatly blue-blazered youths were hawking So Help Me God, Roy Moore’s account of his dethroning as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Tables were piled with textbooks for homeschoolers, tomes denouncing evolution, booklets waxing nostalgic for the antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants, who’d come to the conference from conservative churches around the region, would hear from Sadie Fields, president of Georgia’s Christian Coalition, and they’d sway in rhythm as country crooner Steve Vaus sang “We Must Take America Back.”
We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We've come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever - this is the freest City in the world. That's what makes New York special and different and strong.
Our doors are open to everyone - everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants - by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.
We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life and it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.
On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.
Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue - and they were turned down.
In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies - and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.
In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion - and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780's - St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.
This morning, the City's Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted not to extend landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.
The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right - and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question - should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.
The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves - and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans - if we said 'no' to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.
Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values - and play into our enemies' hands - if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists - and we should not stand for that.
For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime - as important a test - and it is critically important that we get it right.
On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked 'What God do you pray to?' 'What beliefs do you hold?'
The attack was an act of war - and our first responders defended not only our City but also our country and our Constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights - and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.
Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation - and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshiping at the site for the better part of a year, as is their right.
The local community board in Lower Manhattan voted overwhelming to support the proposal and if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.
Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure - and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God's love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest.
President Obama is right, those wishing to build this cultural center in NYC have the right to do so. Freedom of religion is one of the rights enshrined in our constitution. To deny the American Islamic community their rights is to make a mockery of the ultimate sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of American military service men and women who died defending the entire constitution, not just parts of it. They died so we can exercise our first amendment rights, including the freedom of religion, and all the other rights we enjoy as Americans. While leaders suffered the wrath of many Americans when slavery was abolished, and women got the right to vote,the military was desegregated and civil rights, voting rights and housing rights were made law, our nation emerged stronger and better because of the difficult decisions these leaders made. President Obama has made a very difficult decision, and has taken a very unpopular position, but it is one he had to make and take as president. All Americans will benefit from his statement today, and all Americans who love our country, and love the fact that freedom of religion is guaranteed in our Republic's constitution should support the presidents position on this issue.
By Michael D. Shear and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 13, 2010; 9:03 PM
President Obama on Friday forcefully joined the national debate over construction of an Islamic complex near New York's Ground Zero, telling guests at a White House dinner marking the holy month of Ramadan that opposing the project is at odds with American values.
"Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," Obama said, according to prepared remarks, at a White House iftar, the traditional breaking of the daily Ramadan fast.
"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances," he continued. "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."
Obama expressed sympathy for the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists purporting to act in the name of Islam. But he told the gathering that included Muslim and other religious leaders that blocking the mosque, as some leading Republicans have angrily demanded, would undermine the country's claim to respect the free practice of religious expression.
The president's statement puts him once again at the center of a cultural clash just as his party enters the final stretch of a difficult congressional campaign. Polls suggest that most Americans disagree with his position; a recent CNN poll found 68 percent opposed to building a mosque near the Sept. 11 site.
Obama, who has made repairing strained U.S. relations with the Islamic world a centerpiece of his presidency, had remained silent for months about the proposal to build the Muslim cultural complex in Lower Manhattan.
As proposed, the Islamic center, formally known as the Cordoba House, would rise 13 stories on land two blocks from the World Trade Center site. It would include a prayer room -- the mosque component of the project -- and "a Sept. 11 memorial and contemplation space." The nonprofit Cordoba Initiative bought the property for $4 million and plans to spend $100 million on the complex.
A New York City planning commission unanimously struck down the final barrier to the project on Aug. 3 by refusing to grant the building that now stands on the site protection as a historic landmark. The existing structure was damaged by debris in the Sept. 11 attacks.
But what began as a local zoning dispute evolved into a raucous national discussion.
A number of prominent Republicans joined some of the families of those killed on Sept. 11 in opposing the mosque, saying it would inappropriately celebrate the religion that al-Qaeda leaders say inspired the terrorist attacks.
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin asked the mosque's supporters in her Twitter feed last month: "Doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland?" Former House speaker Newt Gingrich in July called the mosque proposal a "test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites."
But Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is the project's sponsor, has promoted the center as a place to foster religious tolerance, Islamic heritage and healing. Rauf has been vilified by some GOP opponents of the mosque, but he was one of the loudest Muslim voices condemning the Sept. 11 attacks and was a frequent guest and adviser to former president George W. Bush during the last administration.
Those in favor of the complex received support from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in an emotional speech after the commission vote said that denying the mosque would leave Americans "untrue to the best part of ourselves." Speaking of the firefighters and police officers killed in the World Trade Center, Bloomberg added, "We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting."
In a statement, Bloomberg applauded Obama's remarks, calling them a "clarion defense of the freedom of religion."
Previously, the Obama administration had left the defense to Bloomberg and others, repeatedly calling the issue a local matter that the White House should not be involved in.
But on Friday, the president said America's message to the rest of the world must remain one of tolerance for religious beliefs. He called the country's "patchwork heritage" a strength even though such diversity can lead to disagreement. . "But time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, stay true to our core values, and emerge stronger for it," he said. "So it must be -- and will be -- today."
Obama made his remarks at a dinner with close to 100 guests s of Congress, diplomats, religious leaders, community activists and administration officials. The annual White House celebration, which dates back to a similar one 200 years ago hosted by Thomas Jefferson, took place in the State Dining Room.
While Obama spoke forcefully on the issue, he did so on a Friday evening with only a small pool of reporters present. The timing and venue guaranteed that his remarks would receive less immediate attention than they likely would have if he had delivered them in a more open forum on another day of the week.
Former President George W. Bush also attempted to make clear America is not at war with Islam, only with those who invoke the religion to further violent causes. But Bush's invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks, and the Iraq war after that, inflamed Muslim sentiment against the United States, as did his view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that many in the Arab Middle East viewed as biased toward Israel's position.
Obama took office pledging to repair that image among the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, particularly those in the strategically important Middle East. He has sought to do so with several high-profile international speeches, and by taking steps he says help bring American foreign policy in line with the nation's values.
In April 2009, during his first overseas trip as president, Obama told the Turkish parliament, "We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world -- including in my own country."
"The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans," said Obama, who spent some of his childhood in Indonesia. "Many other Americans have been enriched by Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know because I am one of them."
Two months later, he delivered his address to the Muslim world from Cairo University, calling the speech "A New Beginning." He again explicitly noted Islam's role in the United States, and the values he says protect its practice.
"Freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion," Obama said. "That is why there is a mosque in every state in our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That's why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it."
"So let there be no doubt," he continued, "Islam is a part of America."
Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less than "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in the wreck."
The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic statement that "all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It is worth noting here that the Declaration was a bold and impassioned proclamation of liberty, while the Constitution was a blueprint for a real government, with all the caution about practical consequences (such as divisive squabbles about the precise nature of divine authority over earthly affairs) required of any blueprint.
Eighteenth-century theological conservatives lost the battle over the Constitution, and the pill remains equally bitter to their spiritual descendants. Every time I write an article mentioning the constitutional omission of God, I receive hundreds of identical emails calling me a liar (sometimes a godless liar), because the document is unmistakably dated "in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." That the religious right should fall back on a once-common manner of dating important papers—as unrevealing of religious intent as the use of B.C. and A.D.—demonstrates just how seriously it takes the enterprise of controlling the past in order to control the future.
The revisionist script goes something like this: The founders were devout men who based their new government on Christian teaching (the religiously correct invariably use the term "Judeo-Christian"); they were unconcerned about religious interference with government and cared only about government interference with religion; and, last but not least, there was no tension between secularism and religion in the nation's halcyon early decades, because everyone accepted God as the source of civic authority.
The first part of the script—the so-called devoutness of the founders— is least relevant to the current debate over religion in government. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, to name only a few, were prolific writers who contradicted themselves (and one another) almost as frequently as did the authors of the Bible. They certainly believed in some form of God or Providence, as Enlightenment rationalists preferred to call the deity, but that is all we can conclude with reasonable certainty. Jefferson's political opponents in the early 1800s were as mistaken to call him an atheist as his conservative modern rebaptizers are to claim him as a committed Christian. (For one thing, Jefferson emphatically rejected the idea that Jesus was divine and instead regarded him as a great but wholly human teacher of morality.) Adams' critics and admirers, then and now, have been equally misguided in their attempts to portray him as a man of orthodox faith.
What did distinguish the most important revolutionary leaders was a particularly adaptable combination of political and religious beliefs that included strong hostility toward all ecclesiastical hierarchies (the original 17th-century meaning of the lovely word "freethought"); the Enlightenment conviction that if God existed, he expected humans to rely on their own reason to conduct earthly affairs; and the assignment of faith to the sphere of private conscience rather than public duty. These convictions carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution.
Regardless of the framers' private beliefs about God, it is more important to look at their public actions in crafting the legal foundation for the new republic. (One might, with less pride, make the same observation about the founders' attitudes toward slavery; whatever they "truly" believed, what matters is that they signed off on a formula counting a slave as three-fifths of a man.) And here the right-wing script goes awry, for it cannot explain why, if the founders intended to base the government on Christianity or monotheism, they failed to spell out their intentions in the Constitution itself. There was certainly ample precedent for doing so, not only in the Articles of Confederation but in nearly every state constitution.
When the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule. The Massachusetts Constitution extended equal protection of the law, and the right to hold office, only to Protestant Christians (restrictions that infuriated Adams, the state's favorite son). New York granted political equality to Jews but not to Roman Catholics. Maryland, the home state of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave full civic rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. In Delaware, officeholders had to attest to their belief in the Holy Trinity. Those were the good old days.
Thanks to the strong influence of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia stood alone among the states in guaranteeing complete civic equality and religious freedom to all citizens. In 1786, Virginians rejected a proposal by Patrick Henry to provide public financing for the teaching of Christianity in schools and instead passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which ruled out tax support for religious instruction and religious tests for public office. Significantly, the new law was supported by a coalition of evangelicals, who—as a minority in a state dominated by Episcopalians—feared government interference with religion, and freethinking Enlightenment rationalists, who feared religious interference with government.
The influence of Virginia's law, enacted less than a year before the writing of the federal Constitution, cannot be overstated. The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."
In the McCreary case, Scalia objects to Justice John Paul Stevens' citation of Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, an impassioned polemic—condemning both religious meddling with government and government meddling with religion—that turned the tide in favor of Virginia's separation of church and state. Scalia disingenuously dismisses the reference because Memorial was written before the federal Constitution—as if Virginia's recent experience had nothing whatever to do with the deliberations of the framers in Philadelphia.
Confronted with the Constitution's silence on divine authority, revisionists repeatedly fall back on the specious argument that since everyone took God's omnipotence for granted in the 18th century, there was no need for the framers to make a special point of mentioning the deity. If that were true, there would have been no bitter debates in the states about the nonreligious language of the Constitution. Moreover, this line of reasoning is self-contradictory, coming as it does from a political/religious lobby that backs the appointment of "originalist" judges—those who insist that the Constitution can only mean exactly what it said at the time it was written. It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.
Equally ludicrous is the notion that there was no tension between religion and secularism before federal courts, in the 20th century, began to apply the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to states. The balancing act between secularism and religion, as old as the republic, originated as a creative tension—in contrast to the destructive power struggle that has developed in recent years. For several decades after the Revolution, many Americans saw no conflict between devout personal religious views and secular views of governmental responsibilities.
The degree to which a secular approach to government was accepted in early 19th-century America was demonstrated by Congress' refusal to abandon Sunday mail service, which it had mandated in 1810. The 1844 invention of the telegraph would eventually put an end to the commercial need for daily mail, but in the 1820s and '30s, business still depended on the government to keep the mails moving seven days a week. Nevertheless, powerful right-wing religious leaders waged an unceasing campaign against the sacrilege of Sunday mail, which some considered a more important moral issue than slavery. But evangelical Christians and freethinkers, who had joined together to write and ratify the godless Constitution, wanted no part of government sanction for a religious Sabbath.
In 1828, Congress referred the godly mess to the powerful Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. Its chairman was Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson—a general, a hero of the War of 1812, and a devout Baptist. Johnson's report to Congress uncompromisingly declared that any federal attempt to give preference to the Christian Sabbath would be unconstitutional. He reminded his fellow legislators of the religious persecutions and intolerance that had impelled their revolutionary predecessors to draw a firm line—"the line cannot be too strongly drawn"—between church and state. (So much for separation of church and state being a recently invented lie of the left.)
The report also noted that many Americans, Christian and non-Christian, observed the Sabbath not on Sunday but on Saturday, and that the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were designed to prevent the majority from dictating to minorities. Johnson emphasized that the Constitution "gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual than that of the whole community."
The founders themselves had varying ideas about how much distance to place between their own beliefs and their public roles. Washington saw nothing wrong with issuing presidential proclamations of thanks- giving to God; Jefferson considered such proclamations unconstitutional. Scalia predictably cites Washington's thanksgiving proclamations in support of Ten Commandments displays and dismisses Jefferson's position. In an amusing 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, Jefferson noted that even Connecticut—which had still not dropped religious restrictions in its state constitution—declared that "the laws of God shall be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them."
We cannot know what the founders would have thought about the "values issues" that are touchstones for cultural conservatives today—abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, the right to die—but we certainly can infer what Jefferson would have thought about claims that the Ten Commandments and the Bible are the foundation of American law. The religious right's attempt to rewrite the history of the nation's founding is not some abstract debate of concern only to constitutional scholars but an integral part of a larger assault on all secular public institutions. If the Constitution really were based on the Bible, for instance, how could there be a valid legal argument against teaching creationism in public school biology classes or adding Bible courses to public school curricula?
Custom, rather than law, is the basis of the most common arguments for breaching the wall between church and state. On the same day that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 majority, ordered the removal of Ten Commandments plaques from Kentucky courthouses, it allowed a Ten Commandments monument to remain on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol (also by a 5-4 margin). Justice Stephen G. Breyer was the swing vote. The chief rationale for the change in Breyer's vote—against the Commandments displays in Kentucky, for the monument in Texas—seems to have been that the Kentucky displays were only six years old, while the Texas monument had been in place for more than four decades without causing controversy. The suggestion that something must be constitutional if it has been around long enough plays neatly into the Christian right's version of history.
With John Roberts as chief justice and Sandra Day O'Connor—who generally sided with church-state separationists—in retirement, there is good reason to fear that the reconfigured Supreme Court will adhere closely to the religious right's history script. In 1991, as principal deputy solicitor general during the administration of George H.W. Bush, Roberts argued in favor of recognizing the nation's "religious heritage" in church-state cases—an opinion echoing Scalia's frequently expressed conviction that all just governments derive their authority from God. This is indeed "originalist" logic—the original document being not the Constitution but the Bible or, to be more precise, certain biblical passages upholding the divine right of kings.
Arguments relying on custom, bolstered by personal religious belief, have great potency when presented to a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history. In a 1998 survey by the National Constitution Center, only about one-third of teenagers knew that the Constitution begins with the words "We the People," so it is hardly surprising that college students at my lectures are often astonished to hear that the Constitution never mentions God.
Handed a tabula rasa by a public uneducated in civics, right-wing revisionists are free to ignore not only the strong anticlerical views of so many of the nation's first leaders but also their loathing of all entanglements between religion and government. "Oh! Lord!" Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. "Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would."
If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did—and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans. Here is the real history lesson, straight from the pens of the founders, that ought to be taught—and is too often ignored—in every American public school.
A Nation Under God
Let others worry about the rapture: For the increasingly powerful Christian Reconstruction movement, the task is to establish the Kingdom of God right now?from the courthouse to the White House.
On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs and luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered inside the sanctuary. The church was host to Restore America, a rally to “celebrate faith and patriotism” sponsored by Christian publisher American Vision. In the lobby, neatly blue-blazered youths were hawking So Help Me God, Roy Moore’s account of his dethroning as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Tables were piled with textbooks for homeschoolers, tomes denouncing evolution, booklets waxing nostalgic for the antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants, who’d come to the conference from conservative churches around the region, would hear from Sadie Fields, president of Georgia’s Christian Coalition, and they’d sway in rhythm as country crooner Steve Vaus sang “We Must Take America Back.”
But
the marquee pitchman of the day was Moore. Ruggedly handsome, with the
military bearing he acquired at West Point, Moore has gained a rock-star
following on the Christian right—a Moses to lead the chosen from a
godless society. The judge has a stunning memory for long literary
passages and judicial opinions, and he chants them in the singsongy,
down-home style of Southern demagogues from Theo Bilbo to George
Wallace—“God” is “Gawud,” with an upward lilt. When he proclaimed that
“God is still sovereign, no matter what federal judges say,” the crowd
tittered and applauded. When he intoned that “there is no right to
sodomy in the Constitution,” they cheered. When he roared that unless
judges “acknowledge God,” they “should be impeached,” the righteous
noise shook the rafters.
It could have been nothing more than a half-hour rebel yell—except that Moore is more than the latest prophet of the religious right. He stands a good chance of being the next governor of Alabama; he’s also arguably the single most significant politician to owe his ascendancy to Christian Reconstruction—an obscure but increasingly potent theology whose top exponents hold that Christian crusaders must conquer and convert the world, by the sword if necessary, before Jesus will return.
Moore has never declared himself a Reconstructionist. But he is a frequent orator at gatherings whose organizers are part of the movement. The primary theologians, activists, and websites of Reconstruction laud him as a hero. Moore’s lawyer in the Ten Commandments fight, Herb Titus, is a Reconstructionist, as are many of his most vocal supporters, including Gary DeMar, the organizer of the Restore America rally and the head of American Vision, one of the most prolific publishers of the movement.
Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today. The movement’s founder, theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers—a number that includes many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades, from abortion to homeschooling.
Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists; Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably the Southern Baptists.
George W. Bush has called Reconstruction-influenced theoretician Marvin Olasky “compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker,” and Olasky served as one of the president’s key advisers on the creation of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bush also invited Reconstructionist Jack Hayford, a key figure in the Promise Keepers men’s group, to give the benediction at his first inaugural. Deposed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, though his office won’t comment on his religious views, governs with what he calls a “biblical worldview”—one of Reconstruction’s signature phrases. And, for conspiracy buffs, two heavy contributors to the Chalcedon Foundation—Reconstruction’s main think tank—are Howard Ahmanson and Nelson Bunker Hunt, both of whose families played key roles in financing electronic voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software. Ahmanson is also a major sponsor of ultraconservative politicians, including California state legislator and 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.
Yet for all its influence, Reconstruction is almost invisible to the media and secular society. Atlanta is ground zero for most Reconstruction activity—home office to DeMar’s publishing house and home district to movement prophet Larry McDonald, who served four terms in Congress in the 1970s and 1980s—but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done only one major article on the movement. The entire Lexis-Nexis database includes only 43 articles from all of the U.S. media that make reference to Reconstruction, and only a handful of those explore the movement. “A hundred years ago, newspapers published the sermons preachers preached on Sunday,” notes Ed Larson, a University of Georgia historian. “Everyone knew what the Baptists believed, or the Lutherans or the Presbyterians. That’s no longer the case. And it has worked to the benefit of Reconstructionists as they doggedly pursued their goal.”
Reconstructionists aren’t shy about what exactly it is they are pursuing: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise,” Gary North, a top Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.”
WITH HIS KHAKI PANTS and checkered shirts, Gary DeMar could be one of a million guys meeting weekly in men’s groups at churches around the country. Bright and articulate, he’s soft-spoken until he gets in front of a crowd. His publishing house distributes hundreds of tracts, more than 20 of them written by DeMar himself, with titles such as The Politically Incorrect Guides to Islam (and the Crusades), which promises “all the disturbing facts about Islam and its murderous hostility to the West,” and The Marketing of Evil, which covers everything “from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers.”
I first met DeMar 18 months ago at his church, Midway Presbyterian, in the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs, where he was teaching a class on government. During the session, a teenage homeschooler talked about how he had tried in a paper to prove that the family is a form of “Christian government.” “You don’t have to prove that,” DeMar gently chided, and then added, with more heat: “That’s established—established by God!” DeMar’s lecture focused on the “three governments”—family, church, and state—all of which, he told me, should be ruled by God-fearing men.
The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision. Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses). DeMar told me that among Reconstructionists he is considered something of a liberal, because he’d execute gays only if they were caught indulging in sodomy. “I’m happy to just drive them back into the closet,” he said.
In introducing Moore at the Trinity Chapel rally, DeMar told the crowd that he supports a “jurisdictional separation of church and state.” But he was not mounting a defense of the First Amendment so much as outlining an organizational distinction. In his book Liberty at Risk, DeMar writes that “the State cannot be neutral towards the Christian faith. Any obstacle that would jeopardize the preaching of the Word of God…must be opposed by civil government.”
Besides facilitating evangelism, Reconstructionists believe, government should largely be limited to building and maintaining roads, enforcing land-use contracts, and ensuring just weights and measures. Unions would not exist, and neither would unemployment benefits, Social Security, and environmental protection laws. Public schools would disappear; one of the movement’s great successes has been promoting homeschooling programs and publishing texts used by tens of thousands of homeschooling families. And, perhaps most importantly, the state is “God’s minister,” as DeMar puts it in Liberty at Risk, “taking vengeance out on those who do evil.” A major task for the government key Reconstructionists envision is fielding armies for conquest in the name of Jesus.
Reconstruction’s premises may fly in the face of mainstream Christianity, and some of its leaders’ beliefs would probably surprise even the movement’s own foot soldiers. But what has made the theology such an explosive addition to public life is not its dogma on individual issues so much as its trumpet call to action. This is a faith in which religion is not an influence on politics; it is politics.
FOR DECADES AFTER the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, Christian fundamentalists were almost invisible in civic discourse. Then, in 1981, a book by scholar Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, heralded a counterattack. America, Schaeffer argued, was careening into the abyss of humanistic secularism. Christians needed to take bold action to restore biblical principles and erase divisions between religion and civic life. To ignite the movement, Schaeffer mapped out a battle campaign—a crusade against abortion, which, he said, “would be worth spending much of our lifetimes to fight against.”
For years, the antiabortion movement had been mostly Catholic. Schaeffer understood that the cause had the potential to galvanize broad masses of Protestants. “Schaeffer made abortion an issue for Christians more than anyone else, and he commanded Christian soldiers to start marching,” says the University of Georgia’s Larson. Manifesto sold almost 250,000 copies the year after Ronald Reagan became president—a period when the nation was veering to the right after becoming exhausted from the social movements of the previous two decades.
If Schaeffer was Reconstruction’s John the Baptist, Rushdoony was its pope. Born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants, Rushdoony graduated from the University of California-Berkeley before becoming an ardent foe of secular education and the author of a series of texts that redefined conservative theology.
Rushdoony, who died in 2001, articulated a doctrine called “presuppositionalism.” All issues are religious in nature, he posited, and people don’t have the right or the ability to define for themselves what’s true; for that they must turn to a literal reading of the Bible. His defining tome, the 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, was published in 1973. But because of its extremism and overt racism—Rushdoony denied the Holocaust and defended segregation and slavery—Institutes and its author were largely ignored in mainstream circles until the movement launched by Schaeffer found its intellectual grounding in Rushdoony’s writings.
At the heart of Rushdoony’s argument were two biblical passages. Genesis 1:28 commands men to have “dominion” over “every living thing.” And in Matthew 28:18-20, the “Great Commission,” Jesus commands his followers to proselytize to the world. Thus was born dominion theology. (Not all dominionists are Reconstruction apostles—but the differences are a matter of theological finesse, and political strategies are largely indistinguishable.) Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God, and Satan seized dominion. Christian Reconstruction claims it has a reconstituted covenant with God and the right to a new dominion in his name.
In this worldview, the mandate for Christians is not just to live right or to help their neighbors: They are called upon to take over or eliminate the institutions of secular government.
This is what sets Reconstruction apart from the conventional Christian right and gives it a key advantage in organizing.
Traditionally, groups like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority were “premillennial”: They believed that humanity was inevitably headed for Armageddon, which would most likely arrive with a nuclear blast, whereupon Christ would appear in the Second Coming and set things right. “The debate was over whether Brezhnev was the Antichrist,” says the University of Georgia’s Larson.
Reconstruction’s alternative was “postmillennialism”: Christ would not return until the church had claimed dominion over government, and most of the world’s population had accepted the Reconstruction brand of Christianity. The postmillennial twist offered hope to the pious that they could change things—as long as they got organized. (Reconstructionists angrily denounce end-times visions like those of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series: If these are the Last Days, American Vision’s website points out, “then why bother trying to fix a broken world that is about to be thrown on the ash heap of history? Why concern ourselves with education, healthcare, the economy, or peace in the Mideast? Why polish brass on a sinking ship?”)
For premillennialists, Reconstruction’s revolutionary philosophy offered an opportunity to turbocharge the religious right. Most conservative churches opposed abortion, for example, but Reconstruction-influenced groups such as Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue were willing to field soldiers and take the fight to the enemy. This not only emboldened activists, it gave Reconstructionists a chance to spread their organizing message: If you want to do God’s work, this needs to be God’s nation.
Similarly, Baptist morality focused on personal choices, such as avoiding drinking. But Reconstructionists didn’t tell believers to shun sin. They said to conquer it, even if the price was jail or martyrdom. Paul Hill, the antiabortion activist executed two years ago for the 1994 murders of abortion clinic workers in Pensacola, Florida, had been a minister in the Reconstruction-dominated Presbyterian Church in America.
The old left—the Communist Party and its many splinters—used organizing tactics called popular fronts, in which people were recruited through specific causes into a
movement tacitly guided by the Party. Reconstruction has married those Leninist tactics to the causes of the right—abortion, evolution, gay marriage, school prayer. Gary North wrote in 1982, in an effort to reach Baptists,“We must use the doctrine of religious liberty…until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” Nowhere at the Restore America rally did anyone hoist a banner for Reconstruction; those attending came to develop a united front supporting such things as displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings. But they were also introduced—and recruited—to the broader program.
Reconstruction’s major impact has been through helping to found and guide cross-denominational and secular political organ-izations. The Council for National Policy—a group that holds meetings for right-wing leaders, once dubbed “the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of”—was founded in 1981 as a project of top John Birch Society figures (see “The Fountainhead”). Its members included Rushdoony, Gary North, Tim LaHaye, former Reagan aide Gary Bauer, and activist Paul Weyrich, who famously aimed to “overturn the present power structure of this country.”
Another group, the Coalition on Revival, brings together influential evangelicals to produce joint statements and theological white papers. North and DeMar are among the coalition’s most influential members; one of its founding documents is signed by 116 Christian right activists, including Rushdoony, mega-evangelist D. James Kennedy, and Roy Jones, a top staffer at the Republican Senatorial Committee.
When I last saw Gary DeMar, he was shepherding Roy Moore through a crowd of true believers at the Restore America rally. As they walked by, I asked Moore, “Do you favor a theocracy?” The judge turned and looked at me, shook his head, frowned, and walked away. But DeMar, in our interview, had already answered the question.
“All governments are theocracies,” he said. “We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.”
It could have been nothing more than a half-hour rebel yell—except that Moore is more than the latest prophet of the religious right. He stands a good chance of being the next governor of Alabama; he’s also arguably the single most significant politician to owe his ascendancy to Christian Reconstruction—an obscure but increasingly potent theology whose top exponents hold that Christian crusaders must conquer and convert the world, by the sword if necessary, before Jesus will return.
Moore has never declared himself a Reconstructionist. But he is a frequent orator at gatherings whose organizers are part of the movement. The primary theologians, activists, and websites of Reconstruction laud him as a hero. Moore’s lawyer in the Ten Commandments fight, Herb Titus, is a Reconstructionist, as are many of his most vocal supporters, including Gary DeMar, the organizer of the Restore America rally and the head of American Vision, one of the most prolific publishers of the movement.
Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today. The movement’s founder, theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers—a number that includes many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades, from abortion to homeschooling.
Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists; Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably the Southern Baptists.
George W. Bush has called Reconstruction-influenced theoretician Marvin Olasky “compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker,” and Olasky served as one of the president’s key advisers on the creation of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bush also invited Reconstructionist Jack Hayford, a key figure in the Promise Keepers men’s group, to give the benediction at his first inaugural. Deposed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, though his office won’t comment on his religious views, governs with what he calls a “biblical worldview”—one of Reconstruction’s signature phrases. And, for conspiracy buffs, two heavy contributors to the Chalcedon Foundation—Reconstruction’s main think tank—are Howard Ahmanson and Nelson Bunker Hunt, both of whose families played key roles in financing electronic voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software. Ahmanson is also a major sponsor of ultraconservative politicians, including California state legislator and 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.
Yet for all its influence, Reconstruction is almost invisible to the media and secular society. Atlanta is ground zero for most Reconstruction activity—home office to DeMar’s publishing house and home district to movement prophet Larry McDonald, who served four terms in Congress in the 1970s and 1980s—but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done only one major article on the movement. The entire Lexis-Nexis database includes only 43 articles from all of the U.S. media that make reference to Reconstruction, and only a handful of those explore the movement. “A hundred years ago, newspapers published the sermons preachers preached on Sunday,” notes Ed Larson, a University of Georgia historian. “Everyone knew what the Baptists believed, or the Lutherans or the Presbyterians. That’s no longer the case. And it has worked to the benefit of Reconstructionists as they doggedly pursued their goal.”
Reconstructionists aren’t shy about what exactly it is they are pursuing: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise,” Gary North, a top Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.”
WITH HIS KHAKI PANTS and checkered shirts, Gary DeMar could be one of a million guys meeting weekly in men’s groups at churches around the country. Bright and articulate, he’s soft-spoken until he gets in front of a crowd. His publishing house distributes hundreds of tracts, more than 20 of them written by DeMar himself, with titles such as The Politically Incorrect Guides to Islam (and the Crusades), which promises “all the disturbing facts about Islam and its murderous hostility to the West,” and The Marketing of Evil, which covers everything “from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers.”
I first met DeMar 18 months ago at his church, Midway Presbyterian, in the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs, where he was teaching a class on government. During the session, a teenage homeschooler talked about how he had tried in a paper to prove that the family is a form of “Christian government.” “You don’t have to prove that,” DeMar gently chided, and then added, with more heat: “That’s established—established by God!” DeMar’s lecture focused on the “three governments”—family, church, and state—all of which, he told me, should be ruled by God-fearing men.
The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision. Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses). DeMar told me that among Reconstructionists he is considered something of a liberal, because he’d execute gays only if they were caught indulging in sodomy. “I’m happy to just drive them back into the closet,” he said.
In introducing Moore at the Trinity Chapel rally, DeMar told the crowd that he supports a “jurisdictional separation of church and state.” But he was not mounting a defense of the First Amendment so much as outlining an organizational distinction. In his book Liberty at Risk, DeMar writes that “the State cannot be neutral towards the Christian faith. Any obstacle that would jeopardize the preaching of the Word of God…must be opposed by civil government.”
Besides facilitating evangelism, Reconstructionists believe, government should largely be limited to building and maintaining roads, enforcing land-use contracts, and ensuring just weights and measures. Unions would not exist, and neither would unemployment benefits, Social Security, and environmental protection laws. Public schools would disappear; one of the movement’s great successes has been promoting homeschooling programs and publishing texts used by tens of thousands of homeschooling families. And, perhaps most importantly, the state is “God’s minister,” as DeMar puts it in Liberty at Risk, “taking vengeance out on those who do evil.” A major task for the government key Reconstructionists envision is fielding armies for conquest in the name of Jesus.
Reconstruction’s premises may fly in the face of mainstream Christianity, and some of its leaders’ beliefs would probably surprise even the movement’s own foot soldiers. But what has made the theology such an explosive addition to public life is not its dogma on individual issues so much as its trumpet call to action. This is a faith in which religion is not an influence on politics; it is politics.
FOR DECADES AFTER the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, Christian fundamentalists were almost invisible in civic discourse. Then, in 1981, a book by scholar Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, heralded a counterattack. America, Schaeffer argued, was careening into the abyss of humanistic secularism. Christians needed to take bold action to restore biblical principles and erase divisions between religion and civic life. To ignite the movement, Schaeffer mapped out a battle campaign—a crusade against abortion, which, he said, “would be worth spending much of our lifetimes to fight against.”
For years, the antiabortion movement had been mostly Catholic. Schaeffer understood that the cause had the potential to galvanize broad masses of Protestants. “Schaeffer made abortion an issue for Christians more than anyone else, and he commanded Christian soldiers to start marching,” says the University of Georgia’s Larson. Manifesto sold almost 250,000 copies the year after Ronald Reagan became president—a period when the nation was veering to the right after becoming exhausted from the social movements of the previous two decades.
If Schaeffer was Reconstruction’s John the Baptist, Rushdoony was its pope. Born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants, Rushdoony graduated from the University of California-Berkeley before becoming an ardent foe of secular education and the author of a series of texts that redefined conservative theology.
Rushdoony, who died in 2001, articulated a doctrine called “presuppositionalism.” All issues are religious in nature, he posited, and people don’t have the right or the ability to define for themselves what’s true; for that they must turn to a literal reading of the Bible. His defining tome, the 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, was published in 1973. But because of its extremism and overt racism—Rushdoony denied the Holocaust and defended segregation and slavery—Institutes and its author were largely ignored in mainstream circles until the movement launched by Schaeffer found its intellectual grounding in Rushdoony’s writings.
At the heart of Rushdoony’s argument were two biblical passages. Genesis 1:28 commands men to have “dominion” over “every living thing.” And in Matthew 28:18-20, the “Great Commission,” Jesus commands his followers to proselytize to the world. Thus was born dominion theology. (Not all dominionists are Reconstruction apostles—but the differences are a matter of theological finesse, and political strategies are largely indistinguishable.) Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God, and Satan seized dominion. Christian Reconstruction claims it has a reconstituted covenant with God and the right to a new dominion in his name.
In this worldview, the mandate for Christians is not just to live right or to help their neighbors: They are called upon to take over or eliminate the institutions of secular government.
This is what sets Reconstruction apart from the conventional Christian right and gives it a key advantage in organizing.
Traditionally, groups like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority were “premillennial”: They believed that humanity was inevitably headed for Armageddon, which would most likely arrive with a nuclear blast, whereupon Christ would appear in the Second Coming and set things right. “The debate was over whether Brezhnev was the Antichrist,” says the University of Georgia’s Larson.
Reconstruction’s alternative was “postmillennialism”: Christ would not return until the church had claimed dominion over government, and most of the world’s population had accepted the Reconstruction brand of Christianity. The postmillennial twist offered hope to the pious that they could change things—as long as they got organized. (Reconstructionists angrily denounce end-times visions like those of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series: If these are the Last Days, American Vision’s website points out, “then why bother trying to fix a broken world that is about to be thrown on the ash heap of history? Why concern ourselves with education, healthcare, the economy, or peace in the Mideast? Why polish brass on a sinking ship?”)
For premillennialists, Reconstruction’s revolutionary philosophy offered an opportunity to turbocharge the religious right. Most conservative churches opposed abortion, for example, but Reconstruction-influenced groups such as Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue were willing to field soldiers and take the fight to the enemy. This not only emboldened activists, it gave Reconstructionists a chance to spread their organizing message: If you want to do God’s work, this needs to be God’s nation.
Similarly, Baptist morality focused on personal choices, such as avoiding drinking. But Reconstructionists didn’t tell believers to shun sin. They said to conquer it, even if the price was jail or martyrdom. Paul Hill, the antiabortion activist executed two years ago for the 1994 murders of abortion clinic workers in Pensacola, Florida, had been a minister in the Reconstruction-dominated Presbyterian Church in America.
The old left—the Communist Party and its many splinters—used organizing tactics called popular fronts, in which people were recruited through specific causes into a
movement tacitly guided by the Party. Reconstruction has married those Leninist tactics to the causes of the right—abortion, evolution, gay marriage, school prayer. Gary North wrote in 1982, in an effort to reach Baptists,“We must use the doctrine of religious liberty…until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” Nowhere at the Restore America rally did anyone hoist a banner for Reconstruction; those attending came to develop a united front supporting such things as displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings. But they were also introduced—and recruited—to the broader program.
Reconstruction’s major impact has been through helping to found and guide cross-denominational and secular political organ-izations. The Council for National Policy—a group that holds meetings for right-wing leaders, once dubbed “the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of”—was founded in 1981 as a project of top John Birch Society figures (see “The Fountainhead”). Its members included Rushdoony, Gary North, Tim LaHaye, former Reagan aide Gary Bauer, and activist Paul Weyrich, who famously aimed to “overturn the present power structure of this country.”
Another group, the Coalition on Revival, brings together influential evangelicals to produce joint statements and theological white papers. North and DeMar are among the coalition’s most influential members; one of its founding documents is signed by 116 Christian right activists, including Rushdoony, mega-evangelist D. James Kennedy, and Roy Jones, a top staffer at the Republican Senatorial Committee.
When I last saw Gary DeMar, he was shepherding Roy Moore through a crowd of true believers at the Restore America rally. As they walked by, I asked Moore, “Do you favor a theocracy?” The judge turned and looked at me, shook his head, frowned, and walked away. But DeMar, in our interview, had already answered the question.
“All governments are theocracies,” he said. “We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.”
Defending Religious Tolerance: Remarks on the Mosque Near Ground Zero
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-bloomberg/mayor-bloomberg-on-the-ne_b_669338.html
The following are New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's remarks as delivered on Governors Island.We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We've come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever - this is the freest City in the world. That's what makes New York special and different and strong.
Our doors are open to everyone - everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants - by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.
We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life and it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.
On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.
Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue - and they were turned down.
In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies - and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.
In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion - and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780's - St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.
This morning, the City's Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted not to extend landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.
The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right - and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question - should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.
The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves - and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans - if we said 'no' to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.
Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values - and play into our enemies' hands - if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists - and we should not stand for that.
For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime - as important a test - and it is critically important that we get it right.
On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked 'What God do you pray to?' 'What beliefs do you hold?'
The attack was an act of war - and our first responders defended not only our City but also our country and our Constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights - and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.
Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation - and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshiping at the site for the better part of a year, as is their right.
The local community board in Lower Manhattan voted overwhelming to support the proposal and if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.
Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure - and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God's love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest.
At Ramadan dinner, Obama defends plans for Ground Zero mosque 13AUG10
By Michael D. Shear and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 13, 2010; 9:03 PM
President Obama on Friday forcefully joined the national debate over construction of an Islamic complex near New York's Ground Zero, telling guests at a White House dinner marking the holy month of Ramadan that opposing the project is at odds with American values.
"Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," Obama said, according to prepared remarks, at a White House iftar, the traditional breaking of the daily Ramadan fast.
"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances," he continued. "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."
Obama expressed sympathy for the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists purporting to act in the name of Islam. But he told the gathering that included Muslim and other religious leaders that blocking the mosque, as some leading Republicans have angrily demanded, would undermine the country's claim to respect the free practice of religious expression.
The president's statement puts him once again at the center of a cultural clash just as his party enters the final stretch of a difficult congressional campaign. Polls suggest that most Americans disagree with his position; a recent CNN poll found 68 percent opposed to building a mosque near the Sept. 11 site.
Obama, who has made repairing strained U.S. relations with the Islamic world a centerpiece of his presidency, had remained silent for months about the proposal to build the Muslim cultural complex in Lower Manhattan.
As proposed, the Islamic center, formally known as the Cordoba House, would rise 13 stories on land two blocks from the World Trade Center site. It would include a prayer room -- the mosque component of the project -- and "a Sept. 11 memorial and contemplation space." The nonprofit Cordoba Initiative bought the property for $4 million and plans to spend $100 million on the complex.
A New York City planning commission unanimously struck down the final barrier to the project on Aug. 3 by refusing to grant the building that now stands on the site protection as a historic landmark. The existing structure was damaged by debris in the Sept. 11 attacks.
But what began as a local zoning dispute evolved into a raucous national discussion.
A number of prominent Republicans joined some of the families of those killed on Sept. 11 in opposing the mosque, saying it would inappropriately celebrate the religion that al-Qaeda leaders say inspired the terrorist attacks.
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin asked the mosque's supporters in her Twitter feed last month: "Doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland?" Former House speaker Newt Gingrich in July called the mosque proposal a "test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites."
But Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is the project's sponsor, has promoted the center as a place to foster religious tolerance, Islamic heritage and healing. Rauf has been vilified by some GOP opponents of the mosque, but he was one of the loudest Muslim voices condemning the Sept. 11 attacks and was a frequent guest and adviser to former president George W. Bush during the last administration.
Those in favor of the complex received support from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in an emotional speech after the commission vote said that denying the mosque would leave Americans "untrue to the best part of ourselves." Speaking of the firefighters and police officers killed in the World Trade Center, Bloomberg added, "We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting."
In a statement, Bloomberg applauded Obama's remarks, calling them a "clarion defense of the freedom of religion."
Previously, the Obama administration had left the defense to Bloomberg and others, repeatedly calling the issue a local matter that the White House should not be involved in.
But on Friday, the president said America's message to the rest of the world must remain one of tolerance for religious beliefs. He called the country's "patchwork heritage" a strength even though such diversity can lead to disagreement. . "But time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, stay true to our core values, and emerge stronger for it," he said. "So it must be -- and will be -- today."
Obama made his remarks at a dinner with close to 100 guests s of Congress, diplomats, religious leaders, community activists and administration officials. The annual White House celebration, which dates back to a similar one 200 years ago hosted by Thomas Jefferson, took place in the State Dining Room.
While Obama spoke forcefully on the issue, he did so on a Friday evening with only a small pool of reporters present. The timing and venue guaranteed that his remarks would receive less immediate attention than they likely would have if he had delivered them in a more open forum on another day of the week.
Former President George W. Bush also attempted to make clear America is not at war with Islam, only with those who invoke the religion to further violent causes. But Bush's invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks, and the Iraq war after that, inflamed Muslim sentiment against the United States, as did his view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that many in the Arab Middle East viewed as biased toward Israel's position.
Obama took office pledging to repair that image among the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, particularly those in the strategically important Middle East. He has sought to do so with several high-profile international speeches, and by taking steps he says help bring American foreign policy in line with the nation's values.
In April 2009, during his first overseas trip as president, Obama told the Turkish parliament, "We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world -- including in my own country."
"The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans," said Obama, who spent some of his childhood in Indonesia. "Many other Americans have been enriched by Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know because I am one of them."
Two months later, he delivered his address to the Muslim world from Cairo University, calling the speech "A New Beginning." He again explicitly noted Islam's role in the United States, and the values he says protect its practice.
"Freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion," Obama said. "That is why there is a mosque in every state in our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That's why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it."
"So let there be no doubt," he continued, "Islam is a part of America."
Religion, Politics and the President 19AUG10 from PEW Research Center
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OVERVIEW
A substantial and growing number of Americans say that Barack Obama is a Muslim, while the proportion saying he is a Christian has declined. More than a year and a half into his presidency, a plurality of the public says they do not know what religion Obama follows.
A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is. The survey was completed in early August, before Obama’s recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center.
The view that Obama is a Muslim is more widespread among his political opponents than among his backers. Roughly a third of conservative Republicans (34%) say Obama is a Muslim, as do 30% of those who disapprove of Obama’s job performance. But even among many of his supporters and allies, less than half now say Obama is a Christian. Among Democrats, for instance, 46% say Obama is a Christian, down from 55% in March 2009.
The belief that Obama is a Muslim has increased most sharply among Republicans
(up 14 points since 2009), especially conservative Republicans (up 16 points). But the number of independents who say Obama is a Muslim has also increased significantly
(up eight points). There has been little change in the number of Democrats who say Obama is a Muslim, but fewer Democrats today say he is a Christian (down nine points since 2009).
When asked how they learned about Obama’s religion in an open-ended question, 60% of those who say Obama is a Muslim cite the media. Among specific media sources, television (at 16%) is mentioned most frequently. About one-in-ten (11%) of those who say Obama is a Muslim say they learned of this through Obama’s own words and behavior.
Beliefs about Obama’s religion are closely linked to political judgments about him. Those who say he is a Muslim overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while a majority of those who think he is a Christian approve of the job Obama is doing. Those who are unsure about Obama’s religion are about evenly divided in their views of his performance.
The new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life – conducted July 21-Aug. 5 among 3,003 respondents reached on landlines and cell phones, and interviewed in both English and Spanish –finds that despite increasing uncertainty about Obama’s religion, the public generally says he handles his religious beliefs appropriately.
The public sees Obama as less influenced by religion compared with George W. Bush when he was president. Yet relatively small percentages say Obama mentions his faith too infrequently or that he relies too little on his religious beliefs when making policy decisions.
Currently, 41% say Obama relies on his religious beliefs “a great deal” (14%) or a “fair amount” (27%) when making policy decisions; in August 2004, 64% said Bush relied on his religious beliefs either a great deal (26%) or a fair amount (38%).
Nonetheless, as was the case with Bush, the public generally says that Obama relies on his religious beliefs the right amount when making policy decisions. Roughly half of Americans (48%) think that Obama relies on his beliefs the right amount when making policy, while 21% say he relies too little on his beliefs and 11% too much; in 2004, slightly more (53%) said Bush relied on his beliefs the right amount when making policy. In addition, about as many say Obama (53%) mentions his religious faith and prayer the right amount as said that about Bush (52%) in 2006, though far fewer say Obama mentions his faith too much (10% vs. 24% for Bush).
The survey also finds about half of the public (52%) says that churches should keep out of politics, while 43% say churches and other houses of worship should express their views on social and political questions. That is largely unchanged from 2008, but over the previous decade (from 1996 to 2006), narrow majorities had expressed support for churches’ involvement in political matters.
The decline since 2006 in the number saying that churches should speak out on social and political issues has been broad-based, including Democrats and Republicans and people from a variety of religious backgrounds. The percentage of black Protestants who say churches should speak out on political matters has dropped sharply, going from 69% in 2006 to 53% today.
Despite the growing opposition to political involvement on the part of churches, most people continue to say they want political leaders who are religious. About six-in-ten (61%) agree that it is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs. And as in previous surveys, a slight plurality (37%) says that in general there has been too little expression of religious faith and prayer by political leaders.
The survey also finds:
• The Republican Party continues to be more widely viewed as friendly toward religion than the Democratic Party. However, both parties are facing declines in the percentages saying they are friendly to religion.
• The religious landscape is far more favorable to Republicans than was the case as recently as 2008. Half of white non-Hispanic Catholics (50%) currently identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up nine points since 2008. Among religiously unaffiliated voters, who have been stalwart supporters of Democrats in recent elections, 29% currently identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up from 25% in 2008 (the proportion identifying as Democrats has fallen seven points since then). And 33% of Jewish voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up from 20% in 2008.
• Roughly six-in-ten people (58%) have heard of the “religious right,” while 41% are familiar with the “religious left.” Among those who have heard of the religious right and the religious left, sizable numbers express no opinion as to whether or not they generally agree or disagree with them.
NOTE: This report includes comparisons of opinions among different religious groups, which are based on a combination of religious tradition and race/ethnicity. The categories White evangelical Protestants, White mainline Protestants and White Catholics do not include Hispanics. Similarly, Black Protestants do not include Hispanics. Hispanic respondents can be of any race. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish.
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SECTION 1: OBAMA AND RELIGION
Obama’s Religious Beliefs
The share of Americans who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim – which held steady at between 11% and 12% from early 2008 through early 2009 – has jumped to 18%. There also has been a steep decline in the number of people who identify Obama as a Christian – 34% today, down from 48% in March 2009 and 51% in October 2008. A plurality (43%) now say they do not know what Obama’s religion is, up from 34% in 2009.
The view that Obama is a Muslim is highest among his political opponents (31% of Republicans and 30% of those who disapprove of his job performance express this view). It is lower among his supporters (10% among both Democrats and those who approve of his job performance). The share of Republicans who say Obama is a Muslim has nearly doubled over the past year and a half – from 17% to 31%.
Currently, about as many Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim (31%) as believe he is a Christian (27%); a plurality of Republicans (39%) say they do not know Obama’s religion. In March 2009, far more Republicans said Obama was a Christian (47%) than a Muslim (17%).
The impression that Obama is a Muslim is also more widespread today among independents – 18% say this today, up from 10% in 2009. There has been virtually no change in the share of Democrats who say Obama is a Muslim (10% today, 7% in 2009). But even among Democrats, fewer than half (46%) now identify his religion as Christian, down from 55% last year.
There is also a wide racial divide in the perception that Obama is a Muslim. The number of whites who believe this rose from 11% to 21% since March 2009, while there has been virtually no change in blacks’ views on this question (7% say Obama is Muslim today, compared with 6% in 2009). But both blacks and whites are less likely today to say Obama is a Christian.
Among religious groups, a higher proportion of white evangelical Protestants say Obama is a Muslim than any other religious group surveyed; 29% hold this view today, up from 20% in 2009. But the share of people saying Obama is a Muslim has increased across all religious groups. Indeed, both white mainline Protestants and white Catholics are roughly twice as likely today as in 2009 to say the president is a Muslim. And significantly fewer people in nearly all religious groups say Obama is a Christian than did so in 2009.
Obama, Bush and Religion
Obama is perceived as being much less reliant on his faith than was George W. Bush; a plurality (43%) says Obama is not very reliant on his religious beliefs in making policy decisions, compared with just 28% who said that about Bush in 2004.
While Obama is seen as less reliant on his religious beliefs than Bush, the public expresses roughly similar levels of satisfaction with Obama’s approach to religion as compared with his predecessor. Nearly half (48%) say Obama relies on his religious beliefs about the right amount when making policy decisions, and 53% say that Obama mentions his faith and prayer about the right amount. Roughly similar numbers said the same thing when asked in 2006 about Bush’s mentions of faith and prayer and in 2004 when asked about Bush’s reliance on religion in making policy decisions.
Substantial majorities of Democrats say Obama mentions his faith about the right amount (69%) and that he relies on it the right amount when making policy decisions (67%). This compares with just 34% of Republicans who say he mentions his faith the right amount and 26% who say he relies on his religious beliefs the right amount when making policy decisions. And higher proportions of white evangelical Protestants than other religious groups say Obama mentions his faith and prayer too little and relies on his beliefs too little when making policy.
In addition, views of Obama’s approach to religion are linked with perceptions of his own religious beliefs. Only about three-in-ten of those who think Obama is a Muslim say he mentions his faith the right amount (30%) and relies on his beliefs the right amount when making policy decisions (31%).
By comparison, large majorities of those who say he is a Christian say he mentions his faith the right amount and relies on his beliefs when making policy decisions the right amount (68%, 66% respectively).
The survey also finds some discomfort with the idea that Obama relies a great deal on his faith when making policy decisions, especially compared with Bush in 2004. Among those who say that Obama relies on his religion a great deal when making policy decisions, 50% say he relies on his beliefs the right amount while 39% say that Obama relies on his faith too much.
In 2004, by contrast, the balance of opinion was much more positive for Bush; 63% of those who said he relied on his beliefs when making policy said this was appropriate while 27% said he relied on his beliefs too much.
SECTION 2. RELIGION AND POLITICS
Religion’s Influence on Society and Government
Two-thirds of Americans (67%) currently say that religion is losing its influence
on American life, compared with 59% who said this in July 2006. More people now say religion’s influence is on the decline than at any time since 1994, when 69% of respondents in a Gallup poll said religion’s influence on American life was waning.
More people also say religion’s influence on government leaders, such as the president and members of Congress, is declining. Currently, 62% say that religion is losing its influence on government leaders, compared with 45% who said this in 2006.
The number saying that religion is losing influence on American life has increased most among Republicans, with 82% expressing this view, up 21 points since 2006. Similarly, 72% of Republicans now say that religion’s influence on government leaders is declining, up 20 points since 2006.
More independents also say that religion is losing its influence on American life (up nine points) and on government leaders (up 25 points). Among Democrats, the number saying that religion is losing influence on government leaders (52%) has increased nine points since 2006, but there has been no significant change in the number of Democrats saying religion’s influence on American society is declining (58% today vs. 60% in 2006).
Among religious groups, nearly eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants see religion’s influence decreasing on both American society (79%, up 20 points since 2006) and on government leaders (78%, up 20 points since 2006). Fewer white mainline Protestants and black Protestants say that religion’s influence is declining. Nearly three-quarters of white Catholics (74%) say that religion has a declining influence on American society, up 13 points since 2006, and 61% say that religion is losing its influence on government leaders, up 18 points since 2006.
As in the past, most of those who say that religion has less influence on American life see this as a bad thing; 53% of the total public says this is a bad thing while just 10% see it as a good thing. Similarly, 42% of the public says religion’s declining influence on government leaders is a bad thing while just 15% say it is a positive development.
Views of Churches’ Involvement in Politics
A narrow majority of Americans (52%) now say churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters while 43% say that houses of worship should express their views on day-to-day social and political questions.
These opinions are little changed since 2008, but in 2006 – and over the preceding decade – narrow majorities had expressed support for churches speaking out on social and political issues. Today’s attitudes are on par with results from 1968, when 53% said churches should keep out of politics and 40% said they should express their views.
The decline in support for churches and other houses of worship speaking out on social and political issues has been broad-based. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Catholics and white mainline Protestants are all less supportive of churches and other houses of worship speaking out on political issues.
The most dramatic changes in views on this question are seen among black Protestants (53% now say churches should speak out on political matters, compared with 69% in 2006) and people with less than a high school education (39% now say churches should speak out, down from 58% in 2006).
While most religious groups are less supportive of churches expressing their views on issues, there continue to be substantial differences on this measure. Majorities of white evangelical Protestants (56%) and black Protestants (53%) say churches should speak out on issues; far fewer white non-Hispanic Catholics (37%) or white mainline Protestants (35%) agree.
Republicans continue to be more supportive of churches and other houses of worship expressing their views compared with independents and Democrats. About half of Republicans (51%) favor churches speaking out, compared with 41% of independents and 39% of Democrats.
The survey also finds that Americans continue to overwhelmingly oppose churches and houses of worship endorsing specific candidates for public office. Fully 70% say churches should not come out in favor of candidates during political elections while just a quarter (24%) supports such endorsements. These opinions have changed little in recent years. More than half of every major religious group opposes such endorsements.
Most Say Lawmakers Should Be Religious
Though the public expresses reservations about churches’ involvement in politics, there is widespread agreement that politicians should be religious. Fully 61% say that is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs; just 34% disagree.
Majorities across all major religious groups – with the exception of the religiously unaffiliated – agree it is important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs. More than eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants (83%) express this view, as do roughly two-thirds of white non-Hispanic Catholics (66%) and white mainline Protestants (64%). And about seven-in-ten black Protestants (71%) say it is important that lawmakers have strong religious beliefs.
In contrast, by more than two-to-one (66% to 30%), the religiously unaffiliated disagree that it is important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs. Among atheists and agnostics, fully 85% say it is not important for congressional representatives to have strong religious beliefs.
The public continues to be divided about the level of religious expression among political leaders. Nearly four-in-ten (37%) say there has been too little expression of faith by political leaders; 29% say there has been too much, while 24% say political leaders speak on faith and prayer the right amount. These opinions have changed little in recent years.
Majorities of white evangelical Protestants (56%) and black Protestants (51%) say there has been too little expression of faith by political leaders. Only about three-in-ten white mainline Protestants (31%) and white Catholics (30%) agree.
The religiously unaffiliated continue to say there has been too much – rather than too little – expression of religious faith by political leaders. Fully 53% of the religiously unaffiliated say that politicians speak too much about faith and prayer.
Across all religious groups, roughly half (52%) of those who say they attend worship services weekly or more think politicians talk too little about their faith, compared with about one-third (32%) of those who attend services monthly or yearly and just 21% of those who seldom or never attend services.
Fewer See Parties as Friendly Toward Religion
A plurality of the public (43%) sees the Republican Party as generally friendly toward religion, while 28% say it is neutral and 14% say it is unfriendly. By comparison, just 26% say the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion; 41% say it is neutral and 19% say it is unfriendly.
The percentages saying each party is friendly to religion have declined over the past two years. In 2008, a narrow majority of the public (52%) said the Republican Party was friendly to religion; that percentage slipped to 48% last year and 43% in the current survey. There has been a comparable decline in the percentage saying the Democratic Party is friendly to religion – from 38% in 2008, to 29% in 2009 and 26% currently.
There is no political or religious group in which a majority views the Democratic Party as friendly to religion; even among Democrats themselves, just 42% say the party is friendly to religion, down slightly from last year (47%).
Most Republicans (57%) see the GOP as friendly to religion, which is little changed from last year (59%). However, the proportion of white evangelicals saying the Republican Party is friendly to religion has slipped, from 53% last year to 46% today.
The Religious Right and Left
A majority of Americans (58%) have heard a lot (25%) or a little (33%) about the “religious right,” or the Christian conservative movement. Fewer are familiar with the liberal or progressive religious movement sometimes known as the “religious left,” with 41% saying they have heard either a lot (10%) or a little (30%) about it.
About two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (66%) say they have heard at least a little about the religious right. That compares with 59% of white mainline Protestants, 55% of Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated, and 47% of black Protestants.
Among political groups, large majorities of both conservative Republicans (71%) and liberal Democrats (68%) say they have heard at least a little about the religious right, while fewer moderate and liberal Republicans (54%) and conservative and moderate Democrats (50%) have heard something about the movement.
Half of white evangelical Protestants (50%) say they have heard at least a little about the religious left. Among other religious groups,
significantly smaller proportions (ranging from 34% to 40%) say they know about the movement. Conservative Republicans are the only political group where as many as half (52%) say they are familiar with the religious left. Just 43% of liberal Democrats say they have heard a lot or a little about the movement.
Support for the conservative Christian movement is highest among conservative Republicans and white evangelical Protestants. More than four-in-ten conservative Republicans (41%) and 29% of white evangelicals say they agree with the conservative Christian movement. Just 4% and 6%, respectively, say they disagree with the movement.
By contrast, 45% of liberal Democrats disagree with the conservative Christian movement while just 2% agree. The religiously unaffiliated disagree with the Christian conservative movement by 30% to 3%.
Yet across all religious and political groups –regardless of their view of the movement – large percentages either have not heard of the conservative Christian movement or express no opinion of it. Majorities of conservative Republicans (55%) and white evangelicals (64%) have no opinion of the movement or have not heard of it; this also is the case among liberal Democrats (54%) and the religiously unaffiliated (66%).
Even fewer people have formed an opinion of the liberal or progressive religious movement; just 4% agree with this movement while 11% disagree. A quarter of the public (25%) expresses no opinion, while 59% have not heard about the progressive religious movement.
Of those who have an opinion on the movement, conservative Republicans (28% disagree) and white evangelicals (20%) express the highest rate of disagreement with the religious left. Liberal Democrats express the highest levels of support for the religious left, with 14% saying they agree with the movement.
SECTION 3: RELIGION AND THE 2010 ELECTIONS
Voting Intentions Divided
Voter preferences for the upcoming congressional elections remain closely divided, with 45% currently expressing support for the Democratic candidate in their district and 44% saying they back the Republican candidate. Opinions about the midterm have changed little since the start of the year; in four previous surveys this year, voters also were evenly divided.
Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly favor the Republican candidate in their district (by 67% to 23%). That is little changed from this point in the previous midterm campaign in 2006. (For a detailed comparison between current voting preferences and the 2006 midterm, see “Republicans Faring Better with Men, Whites, Independents and Seniors,” Aug. 10, 2010 http://people-press.org/report/643/ ).
Opinions are more evenly divided among white non-Hispanic Catholics and white mainline Protestants, but the GOP is running better among both groups than it did four years ago.
Religiously unaffiliated voters currently favor the Democrats over the Republicans by a 49%-36% margin. Among this group, those who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are largely loyal to the Democratic Party (64% favor Democrats, 27% favor Republicans). However, those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” are more evenly divided; 39% favor Republicans and 42% favor Democrats, with a large percentage (19%) saying they do not know how they will vote.
Black Protestants favor the Democrats by a wide margin. Fully 86% of black Protestants say they will vote Democratic, while just 7% say they will support the Republican candidate, which is little changed from this point in the 2006 campaign.
Registered voters who say they attend worship services weekly or more favor Republicans by a 12-point margin (51% vs. 39%), while those who say they attend services monthly or yearly are more evenly divided (43% favor Republicans, 47% favor Democrats). Voters who say they attend services seldom or never are 19 points more supportive of Democrats (53%) than Republicans (34%).
As the Pew Research Center noted in its Aug. 10 report, the Republican Party continues to hold an engagement advantage over the Democratic Party. More than half of Republicans (55%) say they have given a lot of thought to the election, compared with 37% of Democrats.
Among religious groups, about half of white evangelical Protestants (51%) have given a lot of thought to the election, as have 48% of white mainline Protestants and 45% of white Catholics. By contrast, just 36% of the religiously unaffiliated and 29% of black Protestants say they have given a lot of thought to the November election.
Despite these differences in how much voters have thought about the election, there is less variation in the proportions who say they are “absolutely certain” to vote in November. Overall, 70% of registered voters say they are absolutely certain to vote in the fall. Among religious groups, 76% of white non-Hispanic Catholics and 74% of white evangelical Protestants say they are certain to vote as do 67% of the religiously unaffiliated and 64% of black Protestants.
Three-quarters (75%) of those who say they attend worship services weekly or more say they are certain to vote, compared with two-thirds of those who say they attend monthly or yearly (68%) or attend seldom or never (66%).
Trends in Party Identification
Analysis of aggregated Pew Research Center surveys from 2006, 2008 and 2010 reveals that Republicans have made gains in the proportion who identify with the GOP or lean to the Republican Party. Overall, 47% of registered voters in 2010 Pew Research Center surveys identify with the Democratic Party or say they lean Democratic, while 43% are Republican or lean Republican. In 2008, 51% identified as Democrats and 39% as Republicans.
Half of white Catholics (50%) now identify themselves as Republican or lean toward the GOP, up nine points since 2008. Republicans also have made gains among Jewish voters; 33% now identify or lean Republican, up from 20% in 2008.
From: To:
ABOUT THE SURVEY
Results for this survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a national sample of 3,003 adults living in the continental United States, 18 years of age or older, from July 21-August 5, 2010 (2,002 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 1,001 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 431 who had no landline telephone). Both the landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/.
The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race/ethnicity, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2009 Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. The sample is also weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2009 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting.
The following table shows the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:
In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.
About the Projects
The survey is a joint effort of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Both organizations are sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and are projects of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. The Center’s purpose is to serve as a forum for ideas on the media and public policy through public opinion research. In this role it serves as an important information resource for political leaders, journalists, scholars, and public interest organizations.
All of the Center’s current survey results are made available free of charge.
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life seeks to promote a deeper understanding of issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. It studies public opinion, demographics and other important aspects of religion and public life in the U.S. and around the world. It also provides a neutral venue for discussions of timely issues through roundtables and briefings.
This report is a collaborative product based on the input and analysis of the following individuals:
Sarah Palin is wrong about John F. Kennedy, religion and politics
By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Friday, December 3, 2010; 6:00 PM
Sarah Palin has found a new opponent to debate: John F. Kennedy.
In her new book, "America by Heart," Palin objects to my uncle's famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he challenged the ministers - and the country - to judge him, a Catholic presidential candidate, by his views rather than his faith. "Contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president," Kennedy said. "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic."
Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that Kennedy's speech had "succeeded in the best possible way: It reconciled public service and religion without compromising either." Now, however, she says she has revisited the speech and changed her mind. She finds it "defensive . . . in tone and content" and is upset that Kennedy, rather than presenting a reconciliation of his private faith and his public role, had instead offered an "unequivocal divorce of the two."
Palin's argument seems to challenge a great American tradition, enshrined in the Constitution, stipulating that there be no religious test for public office. A careful reading of her book leads me to conclude that Palin wishes for precisely such a test. And she seems to think that she, and those who think like her, are qualified to judge who would pass and who would not.
If there is no religious test, then there is no need for a candidate's religious affiliation to be "reconciled." My uncle urged that religion be private, removed from politics, because he feared that making faith an arena for public contention would lead American politics into ill-disguised religious warfare, with candidates tempted to use faith to manipulate voters and demean their opponents.
Kennedy cited Thomas Jefferson to argue that, as part of the American tradition, it was essential to keep any semblance of a religious test out of the political realm. Best to judge candidates on their public records, their positions on war and peace, jobs, poverty, and health care. No one, Kennedy pointed out, asked those who died at the Alamo which church they belonged to.
But Palin insists on evaluating and acting as an authority on candidates' faith. She faults Kennedy for not "telling the country how his faith had enriched him." With that line, she proceeds down a path fraught with danger - precisely the path my uncle warned against when he said that a president's religious views should be "neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."
After all, a candidate's faith will matter most to those who believe that they have the right to serve as arbiters of that faith. Is it worthy? Is it deep? Is it reflected in a certain ideology?
Palin further criticizes Kennedy because, "rather than spelling out how faith groups had provided life-changing services and education to millions of Americans, he repeatedly objected to any government assistance to religious schools." She does not seem to appreciate that Kennedy was courageous in arguing that government funds should not be used in parochial schools, despite the temptation to please his constituents. Many Catholics would have liked the money. But he wisely thought that the use of public dollars in places where nuns explicitly proselytized would be unconstitutional. Tax money should not be used to persuade someone to join a religion.
As a contrast to Kennedy's speech, Palin cites former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's remarks during the 2008 Republican primary campaign, in which he spoke publicly of "how my own faith would inform my presidency, if I were elected." After paying lip service to the separation of church and state, Romney condemned unnamed enemies "intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism."
"There is one fundamental question about which I am often asked," Romney said. "What do I believe about Jesus Christ?" Romney, of course, is a Mormon. He answered the question, proclaiming that "Jesus Christ is the son of God."
Palin praises Romney for delivering a "thoughtful speech that eloquently and correctly described the role of faith in American public life." But if there should be no religious test in politics, then why should a candidate feel compelled to respond to misplaced questions about his belief in Jesus?
When George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, was a presidential candidate in 1968, he felt no such compulsion. Respect for the Constitution and the founders' belief in the separation of church and state suggests that those kinds of questions should not play a role in political campaigns.
Palin contends that Kennedy sought to "run away from religion." The truth is that my uncle knew quite well that what made America so special was its revolutionary assertion of freedom of religion. No nation on Earth had ever framed in law that faith should be of no interest to government officials. For centuries, European authorities had murdered and tortured those whose religious beliefs differed from their own.
To demand that citizens display their religious beliefs attacks the very foundation of our nation and undermines the precise reason that America is exceptional.
Palin's book makes clear just how dangerous her proposed path can be. Not only does she want people to reveal their beliefs, but she wants to sit in judgment of them if their views don't match her own. For instance, she criticizes Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), a Democrat and a faithful Catholic, for "talking the (God) talk but not walking the walk."
Who is Palin to say what God's "walk" is? Who anointed her our grand inquisitor?
This is a woman who also praises Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, even though Lincoln explicitly declared, "But let us judge not that we not be judged." The problem for those setting up a free-floating tribunal to evaluate faith is that, contrary to Lincoln, they are installing themselves as judges who can look into others' souls and assess their worthiness.
Kennedy did not and would not do that, but not because he was indifferent to faith. In fact, unlike Romney or Palin, in fealty to both his faith and the Constitution, he promised on that day in Houston that he would resign if his religion ever interfered with his duty as president.
My uncle was a man who had his faith tested. His brother and brother-in-law were killed in World War II, and his sister died in a plane crash soon after the war. He suffered from painful injuries inflicted during his Navy service when his PT boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. His God did not make life easy but did require a commitment to justice.
America's first and only Catholic president referred to God three times in his inaugural address and invoked the Bible's command to care for poor and the sick. Later in his presidency, he said, unequivocally, about civil rights: "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution."
Faith runs as a deep current through my family. Faith inspired my uncles' and my father's dedication to justice. My father, Robert F. Kennedy, on returning from apartheid-era South Africa in 1966, wrote a magazine article titled "Suppose God Is Black." And my uncle Teddy fought for health care for all Americans, even if in her book Palin presumes to judge that he took positions "directly at odds with his Catholic faith."
Teddy Kennedy believed that his stands were at one with his faith. He did disagree with the Roman Catholic hierarchy at times. But as we have seen, the hierarchy's positions can change, and in our church, we have an obligation to help bring about those changes. That may not be Palin's theology, but the glory of America is its support for those who would disagree - even on the most difficult and personal matters, such as religion.
John F. Kennedy knew that tearing down the wall separating church and state would tempt us toward self-righteousness and contempt for others. That is one reason he delivered his Houston speech.
Palin, for her part, argues that "morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious beliefs." That statement amounts to a wholesale attack on countless Americans, and no study or reasonable argument I have seen or heard would support such a blanket condemnation. For a person who claims to admire Lincoln, Palin curiously ignores his injunction that Americans, even those engaged in a Civil War, show "malice toward none, with charity for all."
Palin fails to understand the genius of our nation. The United States is one of the most vibrant religious countries on Earth precisely because of its religious freedom. When power and faith are entwined, faith loses. Power tends to obfuscate, corrupt and focus on temporal rather than eternal purposes.
Somehow Palin misses this. Perhaps she didn't read the full Houston speech; she certainly doesn't know it by heart. Or she may be appealing to a religious right that really seeks secular power. I don't know.
I am certain, however, that no American political leader should cavalierly - or out of political calculation - dismiss the hard-won ideal of religious freedom that is among our country's greatest gifts to the world. As John F. Kennedy said in Houston, that is the "kind of America I believe in."
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is a former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of "Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way."
For more on this topic, check out Damon Linker's "A religious test every candidate must pass."
A religious test all our political candidates should take
By Damon Linker
Sunday, September 19, 2010; B01
Fifty years ago, in the midst of his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, Sen. John F. Kennedy gave a speech to ease voters' concerns about his Catholic faith. Speaking in Houston, Kennedy emphasized that Article VI of the Constitution maintains that no "religious test" may keep a candidate from aspiring to political office. He went further, implying that his Catholicism should be off limits to public scrutiny. To treat a politician's religious beliefs as politically relevant was an affront to America's noblest civic traditions, he declared.
The speech was a huge success -- and not only because it helped Kennedy win. Its most enduring legacy was to persuade journalists, critics and citizens at large not to question the political implications of candidates' religious beliefs. While it was still acceptable to assess the dangers of generic "religion" in public life, evaluating particular faiths came to be viewed as bigotry.
No longer. Since the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, traditionalist believers have actively injected faith into the political realm, pushing public figures to place their religious convictions at the core of their civic identities and political campaigns. From Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, U.S. presidents have made overt -- and largely innocuous -- gestures toward satisfying this expectation.
Today, President Obama's religious beliefs are at the forefront of public debate. While Fox News personality Glenn Beck decries Obama's alleged left-leaning Christianity as "liberation theology," nearly a fifth of the country believes, mistakenly, that the president is a Muslim. It is tempting to stick with the old Kennedy argument and respond that the president's faith is irrelevant as well as off limits. But it is neither.
The battles over an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan and a Florida pastor's threat to burn the Koran on Sept. 11 underscore the relevance of political leaders' views on faith -- their own as well as others'. Instead of attempting the impossible task of abolishing faith from the political conversation, we need a new kind of religious test for our leaders. Unlike the tests proscribed by the Constitution, this one would not threaten to formally bar members of specific traditions from public office. But religious convictions do not always harmonize with the practice of democratic government, and allowing voters to explore the dissonance is legitimate.
Every religion is radically particular, with its own distinctive beliefs about God, human history and the world. These are specific, concrete claims -- about the status of the religious community in relation to other groups and to the nation as a whole, about the character of political and divine authority, about the place of prophecy in religious and political life, about the scope of human knowledge, about the providential role of God in human history, and about the moral and legal status of sex. Depending on where believers come down on such issues, their faith may or may not clash with the requirements of democratic politics. To help us make that determination, all candidates for high office should have to take the religious test, which would include the following questions:
How might the doctrines and practices of your religion conflict with the fulfillment of your official duties?
This question would be especially pertinent for evangelical Protestant candidates -- such as Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister -- who belong to faith traditions that emphasize transforming the world in the image of their beliefs. The Southern Baptist confession of faith asserts, for instance, that "all Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme . . . in human society." What would this mean for a Southern Baptist seeking to lead a nation that includes many millions of non-Christians?
Muslim candidates, meanwhile, should be asked to discuss their view of the proper place of sharia law in a religiously pluralistic society. Jewish candidates, too, should be questioned about their faith, as Sen. Joe Lieberman was during his 2000 campaign for the vice presidency, when he was asked to explain how he would negotiate the inevitable tension between the laws of religious observance (including the Sabbath) and serving the nation at its highest level.
How would you respond if your church issued an edict that clashed with the duties of your office?
This would apply primarily to candidates who belong to churches that make strong claims about the divine authority of their leaders. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, for example, has frequently asserted that the authority of the pope and bishops is binding in matters of faith and morals. As Sen. John F. Kerry learned during his 2004 presidential campaign, members of the hierarchy have begun to demand that Catholic politicians not only refrain from having abortions and encouraging women to procure them, but also work to outlaw the procedure -- even though the Supreme Court has declared it a constitutionally protected right, and even if the candidate's constituents are overwhelmingly pro-choice.
The dilemma faced by devout Mormon candidates is potentially greater. Mormons believe that the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a prophet of God, which seems to give his statements far greater weight than those of any earthly authority, including the president of the United States. In his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney skirted questions related to his Mormonism by playing down its theological distinctiveness. "The values that I have are the same values you will find in faiths across this country," Romney said in one debate. If he (or another Mormon) runs for the presidency in 2012 or beyond, he should explain how he would respond to a prophetic pronouncement that conflicted with his presidential duties.
What do you believe human beings can know about nature and history?
Many evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals believe in biblical inerrancy, which leads them to treat the findings of natural science (especially those of evolutionary biology) with suspicion. Many of these Christians also believe that God regularly intervenes in history, directing global events, guiding U.S. actions in the world for the sake of divine ends and perhaps even leading humanity toward an apocalyptic conflagration in the Middle East. Potential candidates who belong to churches associated with such thinking, such as the Pentecostal Sarah Palin, owe it to their fellow citizens to elaborate on their views of modern science and the U.S. role in the unfolding of the end times. Given the ominous implications of a person with strong eschatological convictions becoming the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, it would be profoundly irresponsible not to ask tough questions about the topic.
Do you believe the law should be used to impose and enforce religious views of sexual morality?
America's traditional religious consensus on sexual morality -- which supported laws against abortion and all forms of non-procreative sex, from masturbation to oral and anal sex, whether practiced by members of the same or different genders, inside or outside of marriage -- began to break down in the 1960s. The nation today is sharply divided between those whose views of sex are still grounded in the norms and customs of traditionalist religion and those who no longer feel bound by those norms and customs. Given this lack of consensus, the law has understandably retreated from enforcing religiously grounded views, leaving it up to individuals to decide how to regulate their sexual conduct.
The religious right hopes to reverse this retreat. That opens the troubling prospect of the state seeking to impose the sexual morals of some Americans on the nation as a whole. All candidates -- especially those who court the support of the religious right -- need to clarify where they stand on the issue. Above all, they need to indicate whether they believe it is possible or desirable to use the force of law to uphold a sexual morality affirmed by a fraction of the people.
Asking candidates about their faith should not be taken as a sign of anti-religious animus. On the contrary, this sort of questioning takes faith seriously -- certainly more seriously than most of our politicians and news media currently do. Candidates think they benefit from making a show of their faith, and journalists, aiming to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, usually allow them to leave their pronouncements at the level of platitudes. We need to go further.
Pastor Rick Warren's conversation with John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign was a move in the right direction, though Warren was such an anodyne interviewer that the candidates were permitted to speak mainly in bromides. Better, perhaps, would be a special presidential debate devoted to faith and morality, in which journalists and religious leaders would pose pointed questions about candidates' beliefs.
It matters quite a lot if, in the end, a politician's faith is merely an ecumenical expression of American civil religion -- or if, when taking the religious test, he forthrightly declares (as Kennedy did) that in the event of a clash between his spiritual and political allegiances, the Constitution would always come first. Those are the easy cases. In others -- when a politician denies the need to choose or explain, insisting simply that it's possible to marry his or her religious beliefs with democratic rule in a pluralistic society -- we need to dig deeper, to determine as best we can how the candidate is likely to think and act when the divergent demands of those two realms collide, as they inevitably will.
Obama's 2008 speech on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his own Christian faith and its complicated intersection with the wrenching story of race in America stands as a particularly eloquent example of how to take -- and pass -- the religious test. Obama resisted giving the speech, but many Americans learned something important about the man and his mind as they listened to him talk through some of life's deepest moral, political and spiritual questions. A political process that compelled candidates to engage regularly in such thinking about the tensions and links between faith and governance just might foster increased religious understanding -- which, these days, feels in short supply.
damon_linker@yahoo.com
Damon Linker, a contributing editor at the New Republic and a senior writing fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders."
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Asked how high he got in Scientology’s levels of study, Haggis said, “All the way to the top.” Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark
On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. “For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego,” Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at Scientology’s San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that the State of California should sanction marriage only “between a man and a woman.” The proposition passed. As Haggis saw it, the San Diego church’s “public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.” Haggis wrote, “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.” He concluded, “I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology.”
Haggis was prominent in both Scientology and Hollywood, two communities that often converge. Although he is less famous than certain other Scientologists, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he had been in the organization for nearly thirty-five years. Haggis wrote the screenplay for “Million Dollar Baby,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2004, and he wrote and directed “Crash,” which won Best Picture the next year—the only time in Academy history that that has happened. Davis, too, is part of Hollywood society; his mother is Anne Archer, who starred in “Fatal Attraction” and “Patriot Games,” among other films. Before becoming Scientology’s spokesperson, Davis was a senior vice-president of the church’s Celebrity Centre International network.
In previous correspondence with Davis, Haggis had demanded that the church publicly renounce Proposition 8. “I feel strongly about this for a number of reasons,” he wrote. “You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote L.R.H. in their defense.” The initials stand for L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, whose extensive writings and lectures form the church’s scripture. Haggis related a story about Katy, the youngest of three daughters from his first marriage, who lost the friendship of a fellow-Scientologist after revealing that she was gay. The friend began warning others, “Katy is ‘1.1.’ ” The number refers to a sliding Tone Scale of emotional states that Hubbard published in a 1951 book, “The Science of Survival.” A person classified “1.1” was, Hubbard said, “Covertly Hostile”—“the most dangerous and wicked level”—and he noted that people in this state engaged in such things as casual sex, sadism, and homosexual activity. Hubbard’s Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated “homosexuality with being a pervert.” (Such remarks don’t appear in recent editions of the book.)
In his resignation letter, Haggis explained to Davis that, for the first time, he had explored outside perspectives on Scientology. He had read a recent exposé in a Florida newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, which reported, among other things, that senior executives in the church had been subjecting other Scientologists to physical violence. Haggis said that he felt “dumbstruck and horrified,” adding, “Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil-rights violations.”
Online, Haggis came across an appearance that Davis had made on CNN, in May, 2008. The anchor John Roberts asked Davis about the church’s policy of “disconnection,” in which members are encouraged to separate themselves from friends or family members who criticize Scientology. Davis responded, “There’s no such thing as disconnection as you’re characterizing it. And certainly we have to understand—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts interjected.
“Scientology is a new religion,” Davis continued. “The majority of Scientologists in the world, they’re first generation. So their family members aren’t going to be Scientologists. . . . So, certainly, someone who is a Scientologist is going to respect their family members’ beliefs—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts said again.
“—and we consider family to be a building block of any society, so anything that’s characterized as disconnection or this kind of thing, it’s just not true. There isn’t any such policy.”
In his resignation letter, Haggis said, “We all know this policy exists. I didn’t have to search for verification—I didn’t have to look any further than my own home.” Haggis reminded Davis that, a few years earlier, his wife had been ordered to disconnect from her parents “because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church. . . . Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them.” Haggis continued, “To see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about?”
Haggis forwarded his resignation to more than twenty Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. “I felt if I sent it to my friends they’d be as horrified as I was, and they’d ask questions as well,” he says. “That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that I’d send a letter like that.”
Tommy Davis told me, “People started calling me, saying, ‘What’s this letter Paul sent you?’ ” The resignation letter had not circulated widely, but if it became public it would likely cause problems for the church. The St. Petersburg Times exposé had inspired a fresh series of hostile reports on Scientology, which has long been portrayed in the media as a cult. And, given that some well-known Scientologist actors were rumored to be closeted homosexuals, Haggis’s letter raised awkward questions about the church’s attitude toward homosexuality. Most important, Haggis wasn’t an obscure dissident; he was a celebrity, and the church, from its inception, has depended on celebrities to lend it prestige. In the past, Haggis had defended the religion; in 1997, he wrote a letter of protest after a French court ruled that a Scientology official was culpable in the suicide of a man who fell into debt after paying for church courses. “If this decision carries it sets a terrible precedent, in which no priest or minister will ever feel comfortable offering help and advice to those whose souls are tortured,” Haggis wrote. To Haggis’s friends, his resignation from the Church of Scientology felt like a very public act of betrayal. They were surprised, angry, and confused. “ ‘Destroy the letter, resign quietly’—that’s what they all wanted,” Haggis says.
Last March, I met Haggis in New York. He was in the editing phase of his latest movie, “The Next Three Days,” a thriller starring Russell Crowe, in an office in SoHo. He sat next to a window with drawn shades, as his younger sister Jo Francis, the film’s editor, showed him a round of cuts. Haggis wore jeans and a black T-shirt. He is bald, with a trim blond beard, pale-blue eyes, and a nose that was broken in a schoolyard fight. He always has several projects going at once, and there was a barely contained feeling of frenzy. He glanced repeatedly at his watch.
Haggis, who is fifty-seven, was preparing for two events later that week: a preview screening in New York and a trip to Haiti. He began doing charitable work in Haiti well before the 2010 earthquake, and he has raised millions of dollars for that country. He told me that he was planning to buy ten acres of land in Port-au-Prince for a new school, which he hoped to have open in the fall. (In fact, the school—the first to offer free secondary education to children from the city’s slums—opened in October.) In Hollywood, he is renowned for his ability to solicit money. The actor Ben Stiller, who has accompanied Haggis to Haiti, recalls that Haggis once raised four and a half million dollars in two hours. While watching the edits, Haggis fielded calls from a plastic surgeon who was planning to go on the trip, and from a priest in Haiti, Father Rick Frechette, whose organization is the main beneficiary of Haggis’s charity. “Father Rick is a lot like me—a cynical optimist,” Haggis told me. He also said of himself, “I’m a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me.”
Haggis’s producing partner, Michael Nozik, says, “Paul likes to be contrarian. If everyone is moving left, he’ll feel the need to move right.” The actor Josh Brolin, who appeared in Haggis’s film “In the Valley of Elah” (2007), told me that Haggis “does things in extremes.” Haggis is an outspoken promoter of social justice, in the manner of Hollywood activists like Sean Penn and George Clooney. The actress Maria Bello describes him as self-deprecating and sarcastic, but also deeply compassionate. She recalls being with him in Haiti shortly after the earthquake; he was standing in the bed of a pickup truck, “with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a big smile on his face, and absolutely no fear.” Though Haggis is passionate about his work, he can be cool toward those who are closest to him. Lauren Haggis, the second daughter from his first marriage, said that he never connected with his children. “He’s emotionally not there,” she says. “That’s funny, because his scripts are full of emotion.”
In the editing room, Haggis felt the need for a cigarette, so we walked outside. He is ashamed of this habit, especially given that, in 2003, while directing “Crash,” he had a heart attack. After Haggis had emergency surgery, his doctor told him that it would be four or five months before he could work again: “It would be too much strain on your heart.” He replied, “Let me ask you how much stress you think I might be under as I’m sitting at home while another director is finishing my fucking film!” The doctor relented, but demanded that a nurse be on the set to monitor Haggis’s vital signs. Since then, Haggis has tried repeatedly to quit smoking. He had stopped before shooting “The Next Three Days,” but Russell Crowe was smoking, and that did him in. “There’s always a good excuse,” he admitted. Before his heart attack, he said, “I thought I was invincible.” He added, “I still do.”
Haggis had not spoken publicly about his resignation from Scientology. As we stood in a chill wind on Sixth Avenue, he was obviously uncomfortable discussing it, but he is a storyteller, and he eventually launched into a narrative.
Haggis wasn’t proud of his early years. “I was a bad kid,” he said. “I didn’t kill anybody. Not that I didn’t try.” He was born in 1953, and grew up in London, Ontario, a manufacturing town midway between Toronto and Detroit. His father, Ted, had a construction company there, which specialized in pouring concrete. His mother, Mary, a Catholic, sent Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass on Sundays—until she spotted their priest driving an expensive car. “God wants me to have a Cadillac,” the priest explained. Mary responded, “Then God doesn’t want us in your church anymore.”
Haggis decided at an early age to be a writer, and he made his own comic books. But he was such a poor student that his parents sent him to a strict boarding school, where the students were assigned cadet drills. He preferred to sit in his room reading Ramparts, the radical magazine from America—the place he longed to be. He committed repeated infractions, but he learned to pick locks so that he could sneak into the prefect’s office and eliminate his demerits.
After a year of this, his parents transferred him to a progressive boys’ school in Bracebridge, Ontario, where there was very little system to subvert. Haggis grew his curly blond hair to his shoulders. He discovered a mentor in his art teacher, Max Allen, who was politically radical and gay. Flouting Ontario’s strict censorship laws, Allen opened a theatre in Toronto that showed banned films; Haggis volunteered at the box office.
Haggis got caught forging a check, and he soon left school. He was drifting, hanging out with hippies and drug dealers. Two friends died from overdoses. “I had a gun pointed in my face a couple of times,” he recalls. He attended art school briefly, then quit; after taking some film classes at a community college, he dropped out of that as well. He began working in construction full time for his father. He also was the manager of a hundred-seat theatre that his father had created in an abandoned church. On Saturday nights, he set up a movie screen onstage, introducing himself and other film buffs to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” that in 1974 he decided to move to England, in order to become a fashion photographer, like the hero of the movie. That lasted less than a year.
Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with Diane Gettas, a nurse, and they began sharing a one-bedroom apartment. He was starting to get his life together, but he was haunted by something that his grandfather had said to him on his deathbed. “He was a janitor in a bowling alley,” Haggis told me. “He had left England because of some scandal we don’t know about. He died when I was twelve or thirteen. He looked terrible. He turned to me and said, ‘I’ve wasted my life. Don’t waste yours.’ ”
One day in 1975, when he was twenty-two, Haggis was walking to a record store. When he arrived at the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets, a young man pressed a book into his hands. “You have a mind,” the man said. “This is the owner’s manual.” The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, “Give me two dollars.” The book was “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, “Dianetics” had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million.
Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”
“Take me there,” Haggis said to Logan.
Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn’t bother him. In fact, he said, “it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don’t understand.” When he arrived at the church’s headquarters, he recalled, “it didn’t look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworth’s.”
At the time, Haggis and Gettas were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. “It was pitched to me as applied philosophy,” Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.
The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan—an immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as “the source” of the religion. Hubbard’s writings offer a “technology” of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides “the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality.” A church publication declares, “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.” Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. “As Scientologists in all walks of life will attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities.”
In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an affiliated publication urged Scientologists to cultivate celebrities: “It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it.” At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era, at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and ambitious. The actress Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas in 1970, during her sophomore year, to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for cocaine. “Without Scientology, I would be dead,” she has said. In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, “The Devil’s Rain,” in Durango, Mexico, when an actress on the set gave him a copy of “Dianetics.” “My career immediately took off,” he told a church publication. “Scientology put me into the big time.” The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors “make it in the industry.”
One of those actors, Josh Brolin, told me that, in a “moment of real desperation,” he visited the Celebrity Centre and received “auditing”—spiritual counselling. He quickly decided that Scientology wasn’t for him. But he still wonders what the religion does for celebrities like Cruise and Travolta: “Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?” This is the question that makes celebrities so crucial to the religion. And, clearly, there must be something rewarding if such notable people lend their names to a belief system that is widely scorned.
Brolin says that he once witnessed John Travolta practicing Scientology. Brolin was at a dinner party in Los Angeles with Travolta and Marlon Brando. Brando arrived with a cut on his leg, and explained that he had injured himself while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway. He was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology. Travolta touched Brando’s leg and Brando closed his eyes. “I watched this process going on—it was very physical,” Brolin recalls. “I was thinking, This is really fucking bizarre! Then, after ten minutes, Brando opens his eyes and says, ‘That really helped. I actually feel different!’ ” (Travolta, through a lawyer, called this account “pure fabrication.”)
Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading “Dianetics”; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. “Most of Hollywood went through that class,” Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series (“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”) that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions “about life, people, and behavior,” and said that Katselas “said some things in class that were really smart.” Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. “I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works.’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”
Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology “recruited a ton of kids out of that school.” Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas’s tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. “You see a lot of people you know from TV,” Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. “When you started off, they weren’t really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse’s levels Scientology became more of a focus,” he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers.
Not long after Gordon became a Scientologist, he was asked to serve as an “ethics officer” at the Playhouse, monitoring the progress of other students and counselling those who were having trouble. He was good at pinpointing students who were struggling. “It’s almost like picking out the wounded chicks,” he says. He sometimes urged a student to meet with the senior ethics officer at the Playhouse, a Scientologist who often recommended courses at the Celebrity Centre. “My job was to keep the students active and make sure they were not being suppressed,” Gordon says. In the rhetoric of Scientology, “suppressive persons”—or S.P.s—block an individual’s spiritual progress. Implicitly, the message to the students was that success awaited them if only they could sweep away the impediments to stardom, including S.P.s. Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.
Katselas died in 2008, and Scientology no longer has a connection with the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Anne Archer told me that the reputation of Katselas’s class as, in Gordon’s words, a “Scientology clearinghouse” is overblown. “His classes averaged about fifty or sixty people, and there would be maybe seven to ten people in it who would be Scientologists,” she says. But the list of Scientologists who have studied at the Playhouse is long—it includes Jenna Elfman, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jason Lee—and the many protégés Katselas left behind helped cement the relationship between Hollywood and the church.
Haggis and I travelled together to L.A., where he was presenting “The Next Three Days” to the studio. During the flight, I asked him how high he had gone in Scientology. “All the way to the top,” he said. Since the early eighties, he had been an Operating Thetan VII, which was the highest level available when he became affiliated with the church. (In 1988, a new level, O.T. VIII, was introduced to members; it required study at sea, and Haggis declined to pursue it.) He had made his ascent by buying “intensives”—bundled hours of auditing, at a discount rate. “It wasn’t so expensive back then,” he said.
David S. Touretzky, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has done extensive research on Scientology. (He is not a defector.) He estimates that the coursework alone now costs nearly three hundred thousand dollars, and, with the additional auditing and contributions expected of upper-level members, the cumulative cost of the coursework may exceed half a million dollars. (The church says that there are no fixed fees, adding, “Donations requested for ‘courses’ at Church of Scientology begin at $50 and could never possibly reach the amount suggested.”)I asked Haggis why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged. “I identify with the underdog,” he said. “I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”
During our conversations, we spoke about some events that had stained the reputation of the church while he was a member. For example, there was the death of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after a mental breakdown, in 1995. She had rear-ended a car in Clearwater, Florida—where Scientology has its spiritual headquarters—and then stripped off her clothes and wandered naked down the street. She was taken to a hospital, but, in the company of several other Scientologists, she checked out, against doctors’ advice. (The church considers psychiatry an evil profession.) McPherson spent the next seventeen days being subjected to church remedies, such as doses of vitamins and attempts to feed her with a turkey baster. She became comatose, and she died of a pulmonary embolism before church members finally brought her to the hospital. The medical examiner in the case, Joan Wood, initially ruled that the cause of death was undetermined, but she told a reporter, “This is the most severe case of dehydration I’ve ever seen.” The State of Florida filed charges against the church. In February, 2000, under withering questioning from experts hired by the church, Wood declared that the death was “accidental.” The charges were dropped and Wood resigned.
Haggis said that, at the time, he had chosen not to learn the details of McPherson’s death. “I had such a lack of curiosity when I was inside,” Haggis said. “It’s stunning to me, because I’m such a curious person.” He said that he had been “somewhere between uninterested in looking and afraid of looking.” His life was comfortable, he liked his circle of friends, and he didn’t want to upset the balance. It was also easy to dismiss people who quit the church. As he put it, “There’s always disgruntled folks who say all sorts of things.” He was now ashamed of this willed myopia, which, he noted, clashed with what he understood to be the ethic of Scientology: “Hubbard says that there is a relationship between knowledge, responsibility, and control, and as soon as you know something you have a responsibility to act. And, if you don’t, shame on you.”
Since resigning, Haggis had been wondering why it took him so long to leave. In an e-mail exchange, I noted that higher-level Scientologists are supposed to be free of neuroses and allergies, and resistant to the common cold. “Dianetics” also promises heightened powers of intelligence and perception. Haggis had told me that he fell far short of this goal. “Did you feel it was your fault?” I asked. Haggis responded that, because the auditing took place over a number of years, it was easy to believe that he might actually be smarter and wiser because of it, just as that might be true after years of therapy. “It is all so subjective, how is one supposed to know?” he wrote. “How does it feel to be smarter today than you were two months ago? . . . But yes, I always felt false.”
He noted that a Scientologist hearing this would feel, with some justification, that he had misled his auditors about his progress. But, after hundreds of hours of auditing sessions, he said, “I remember feeling I just wanted it over. I felt it wasn’t working, and figured that could be my fault, but did not want the hours of ‘repair auditing’ that they would tell me I needed to fix it. So I just went along, to my shame. I did what was easy . . . without asking them, or myself, any hard questions.”
When Haggis first turned to Scientology, he considered himself an atheist. Scientology seemed to him less a religion than a set of useful principles for living. He mentioned the ARC Triangle; “ARC” stands for “Affinity, Reality, and Communication.” Affinity, in this formulation, means the emotional response that partners have toward each other; reality is the area of common agreement. Together, these contribute to the flow of communication. “The three parts together equal understanding,” Haggis said. “If you’re having a disagreement with someone, your affinity drops quickly. Your mutual reality is shattered. Your communication becomes more halted. You begin to talk over each other. There’s less and less understanding. But all you need to do is to raise one part of the triangle and you increase the others as well. I still use that.”
Some aspects of Scientology baffled him. He hadn’t been able to get through “Dianetics”: “I read about thirty pages. I thought it was impenetrable.” But much of the coursework gave him a feeling of accomplishment. He was soon commuting from London, Ontario, to Toronto to take more advanced courses, and, in 1976, he travelled to Los Angeles for the first time. He checked in at the old Chateau Élysée, on Franklin Avenue. Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into the flagship Celebrity Centre.) “I had a little apartment with a kitchen I could write in,” he recalls. “There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something I’d never experienced—all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join.” Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some people’s I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964.
At the Manor Hotel, Haggis went “Clear.” The concept comes from “Dianetics”; it is where you start if you want to ascend to the upper peaks of Scientology. A person who becomes Clear is “adaptable to and able to change his environment,” Hubbard writes. “His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive.” Someone who is Clear is less susceptible to disease and is free of neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic illnesses. “The dianetic Clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.”
Going Clear “was not life-changing,” Haggis says. “It wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, my God, I can fly!’ ” At every level of advancement, he was encouraged to write a “success story” saying how effective his training had been. He had read many such stories by other Scientologists, and they felt “overly effusive, done in part to convince yourself, but also slanted toward giving somebody upstairs approval for you to go on to the next level.”
In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said that he wanted to be a writer. His father recalls, “I said, ‘Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and I’ll keep you on the payroll for a year.’ Paul said, ‘I think I’ll go to L.A., because it’s warmer.’ ”
Soon after this conversation, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Camaro and drove to Los Angeles, where he got a job moving furniture. He and Diane lived in an apartment with her brother, Gregg, and three other people. In 1978, Diane gave birth to their first child, Alissa. Haggis was spending much of his time and money taking advanced courses and being audited, which involved the use of an electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The device, often compared in the press to a polygraph, measures the bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when a person answers questions posed by an auditor. (“Thoughts have a small amount of mass,” the church contends in a statement. “These are the changes measured.”) In 1952, Hubbard said of the E-Meter, “It gives Man his first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows.” The Food and Drug Administration has compelled the church to declare that the instrument has no curative powers and is ineffective in diagnosing or treating disease.
During auditing, Haggis grasped a cylindrical electrode in each hand; when he first joined Scientology, the electrodes were empty soup cans. An imperceptible electrical charge ran from the meter through his body. The auditor asked systematic questions aimed at detecting sources of “spiritual distress.” Whenever Haggis gave an answer that prompted the E-Meter’s needle to jump, that subject became an area of concentration until the auditor was satisfied that Haggis was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience.
Haggis found the E-Meter surprisingly responsive. It seemed to gauge the kinds of thoughts he was having—whether they were angry or happy, or if he was hiding something. The auditor often probed for what Scientologists call “earlier similars.” Haggis explained, “If you’re having a fight with your girlfriend, the auditor will ask, ‘Can you remember an earlier time when something like this happened?’ And if you do then he’ll ask, ‘What about a time before that? And a time before that?’ ” Often, the process leads participants to recall past lives. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing one’s behavior.
Although Haggis never believed in reincarnation, he says, “I did experience gains. I would feel relief from arguments I’d had with my dad, things I’d done as a teen-ager that I didn’t feel good about. I think I did, in some ways, become a better person. I did develop more empathy for others.” Then again, he admitted, “I tried to find ways to be a better husband, but I never really did. I was still the selfish bastard I always was.”
Haggis was moving furniture during the day and taking photographs for church yearbooks on the weekends. At night, he wrote scripts on spec. He met Skip Press, another young writer who was a Scientologist. Press had read one of Haggis’s scripts—an episode of “Welcome Back, Kotter” that he was trying to get to the show’s star, John Travolta. Haggis and Press started hanging out with other aspiring writers and directors who were involved with Scientology. “We would meet at a restaurant across from the Celebrity Centre called Two Dollar Bill’s,” Press recalls. Chick Corea and other musicians associated with the church played there. Haggis and a friend from this circle eventually got a job writing for cartoons, including “Scooby-Doo” and “Richie Rich.”
By now, Haggis had begun advancing through the upper levels of Scientology. The church defines an Operating Thetan as “one who can handle things without having to use a body or physical means.” An editorial in a 1959 issue of the Scientology magazine Ability notes that “neither Lord Buddha nor Jesus Christ were O.T.s, according to the evidence. They were just a shade above Clear.” According to several copies of church documents that have been leaked online, Hubbard’s handwritten instructions for the first level list thirteen mental exercises that attune practitioners to their relationship with others, such as “Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down.” In the second level, Scientologists engage in exercises and visualizations that explore oppositional forces:
Laughter comes from the rear half and calm from the front half simultaneously. Then they reverse. It gives one a sensation of total disagreement. The trick is to conceive of both at the same time. This tends to knock one out.
Hubbard called this level the Wall of Fire. He said, “The material involved in this sector is so vicious, that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it. . . . I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.” The O.T. III candidate is expected to free himself from being overwhelmed by the disembodied, emotionally wounded spirits that have been implanted inside his body. Bruce Hines, a former high-level Scientology auditor who is now a research physicist at the University of Colorado, explained to me, “Most of the upper levels are involved in exorcising these spirits.”
“The process of induction is so long and slow that you really do convince yourself of the truth of some of these things that don’t make sense,” Haggis told me. Although he refused to specify the contents of O.T. materials, on the ground that it offended Scientologists, he said, “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.” But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material he’d already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the church’s claims. Haggis admits, “I was looking forward to enhanced abilities.” Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high.
In the late seventies, the O.T. material was still quite secret. There was no Google, and Scientology’s confidential scriptures had not yet circulated, let alone been produced in court or parodied on “South Park.” “You were told that this information, if released, would cause serious damage to people,” Haggis told me.
Carrying an empty, locked briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the material was held. A supervisor then handed him a folder, which Haggis put in the briefcase. He entered a study room, where he finally got to examine the secret document—a couple of pages, in Hubbard’s bold scrawl. After a few minutes, he returned to the supervisor.
“I don’t understand,” Haggis said.
“Do you know the words?” the supervisor asked.
“I know the words, I just don’t understand.”
“Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested.
Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked the supervisor.
“No,” the supervisor responded. “It is what it is. Do the actions that are required.”
Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. “I sat with that for a while,” he says. But when he read it again he decided, “This is madness.”
The many discrepancies between L. Ron Hubbard’s legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he was a fascinating man: an explorer, a best-selling author, and the founder of one of the few new religious movements of the twentieth century to have survived into the twenty-first. There are several unauthorized Hubbard biographies—most notably, Russell Miller’s “Bare-Faced Messiah,” Jon Atack’s “A Piece of Blue Sky,” and Bent Corydon’s “L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?” All rely on stolen materials and the accounts of defectors, and the church claims that they present a false and fabricated picture of Hubbard’s life. For years, the church has had a contract with a biographer, Dan Sherman, to chronicle the founder’s life, but there is still no authorized book, and the church refused to let me talk to Sherman. (“He’s busy,” Davis told me.) The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character.
Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911. His father, a naval officer, was often away, and Hubbard spent part of his childhood on his grandparents’ ranch, in Montana. When his father got posted to Guam, in 1927, Hubbard made two trips to see him. According to Hubbard, on the second trip he continued on to Asia, where he visited the Buddhist lamaseries in the Western Hills of China, “watching monks meditate for weeks on end.” In 1933, Hubbard married Margaret Grubb, whom he called Polly; their first child, Lafayette, was born the following year. He visited Hollywood, and began getting work as a screenwriter, very much as Paul Haggis did some forty years later. Hubbard worked on serials for Columbia Pictures, including one called “The Secret of Treasure Island.” But much of his energy was devoted to publishing stories, often under pseudonyms, in pulp magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction.
During the Second World War, Hubbard served in the U.S. Navy, and he later wrote that he was gravely injured in battle: “Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future. I was abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.” While languishing in a military hospital in Oakland, California, he said, he fully healed himself, using techniques that became the foundation of Scientology. “I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out,” he wrote in an essay titled “My Philosophy.” “And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.” In some editions of Hubbard’s book “The Fundamentals of Thought,” published in 1956, a note on the author says, “It is a matter of medical record that he has twice been pronounced dead.”
After the war, Hubbard’s marriage dissolved, and he moved to Pasadena, where he became the housemate of Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist who belonged to an occult society called the Ordo Templi Orientis. An atmosphere of hedonism pervaded the house; Parsons hosted gatherings involving “sex magick” rituals.
In a 1946 letter, Parsons described Hubbard: “He is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent.” Parsons then mentioned his wife’s sister, Betty Northrup, with whom he had been having an affair. “Although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.” One day, Hubbard and Northrup ran off together. In the official Scientology literature, it is claimed that Hubbard was assigned by naval intelligence to infiltrate Parsons’s occult group. “Hubbard broke up black magic in America,” the church said in a statement.
Hubbard and Northrup ended up in Los Angeles. He continued writing for the pulps, but he had larger ambitions. He began codifying a system of self-betterment, and set up an office near the corner of La Brea and Sunset, where he tested his techniques on the actors, directors, and writers he encountered. He named his system Dianetics.
The book “Dianetics” appeared in May, 1950, and spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Written in a bluff, quirky style and overrun with footnotes that do little to substantiate its findings, “Dianetics” purports to identify the source of self-destructive behavior—the “reactive mind,” a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called “engrams,” and that is the source of nightmares, insecurities, irrational fears, and psychosomatic illnesses. The object of Dianetics is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind, leaving a person “Clear.”
Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a “precision science.” He offered his findings to the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association but was spurned; he subsequently portrayed psychiatry and psychology as demonic competitors. He once wrote that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture and kill everyone they would do so.”
Scientists dismissed Hubbard’s book, but hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up across the U.S. and abroad. The Church of Scientology was officially founded in Los Angeles in February, 1954, by several devoted followers of Hubbard’s work.
In 1966, Hubbard—who by then had met and married another woman, Mary Sue Whipp—set sail with a handful of Scientologists. The church says that being at sea provided a “distraction-free environment,” allowing Hubbard “to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness.” Within a year, he had acquired several oceangoing vessels. He staffed the ships with volunteers, many of them teen-agers, who called themselves the Sea Organization. Hubbard and his followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous lifetimes. (The church denies this.) The defector Janis Grady, a former Sea Org member, told me, “I was on the bridge with him, sailing past Greek islands. There were crosses lining one island. He told me that under each cross is buried treasure.”
The Sea Org became the church’s equivalent of a religious order. The group now has six thousand members. They perform tasks such as counselling, maintaining the church’s vast property holdings, and publishing its official literature. Sea Org initiates—some of whom are children—sign contracts for up to a billion years of service. They get a small weekly stipend and receive free auditing and coursework. Sea Org members can marry, but they must agree not to raise children while in the organization.
As Scientology grew, it was increasingly attacked. In 1963, the Los Angeles Times called it a “pseudo-scientific cult.” The church attracted dozens of lawsuits, largely from ex-parishioners. In 1980, Hubbard disappeared from public view. Although there were rumors that he was dead, he was actually driving around the Pacific Northwest in a motor home. He returned to writing science fiction and produced a ten-volume work, “Mission Earth,” each volume of which was a best-seller. In 1983, he settled quietly on a horse farm in Creston, California.
Around that time, Paul Haggis received a message from the church about a film project. Hubbard had written a treatment for a script titled “Influencing the Planet” and, apparently, intended to direct it. The film was supposed to demonstrate the range of Hubbard’s efforts to improve civilization. With another Scientologist, Haggis completed a script, which he called “quite dreadful.” Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but no film by that name was ever released.
In 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought twenty-five million dollars for “infliction of emotional injury.” He claimed that he had been kept for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, and deprived of adequate sleep and food.
That October, the litigants filed O.T. III materials in court. Fifteen hundred Scientologists crowded into the courthouse, trying to block access to the documents. The church, which considers it sacrilegious for the uninitiated to read its confidential scriptures, got a restraining order, but the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the material and printed a summary. Suddenly, the secrets that had stunned Paul Haggis in a locked room were public knowledge.
“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 jury awarded Wollersheim thirty million dollars. (Eventually, an appellate court reduced the judgment to two and a half million.) The secret O.T. III documents remained sealed, but the Times’ report had already circulated widely, and the church was met with derision all over the world.
The other court challenge in 1985 involved Julie Christofferson-Titchbourne, a defector who argued that the church had falsely claimed that Scientology would improve her intelligence, and even her eyesight. In a courtroom in Portland, she said that Hubbard had been portrayed to her as a nuclear physicist; in fact, he had failed to graduate from George Washington University. As for Hubbard’s claim that he had cured himself of grave injuries in the Second World War, the plaintiff’s evidence indicated that he had never been wounded in battle. Witnesses for the plaintiff testified that, in one six-month period in 1982, the church had transferred millions of dollars to Hubbard through a Liberian corporation. The church denied this, and said that Hubbard’s income was generated by his book sales.
The jury sided with Christofferson-Titchbourne, awarding her thirty-nine million dollars. Scientologists streamed into Portland to protest. They carried banners advocating religious freedom and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Scientology celebrities, including John Travolta, showed up; Chick Corea played a concert in a public park. Haggis, who was writing for the NBC series “The Facts of Life” at the time, came and was drafted to write speeches. “I wasn’t a celebrity—I was a lowly sitcom writer,” he says. He stayed for four days.
The judge declared a mistrial, saying that Christofferson-Titchbourne’s lawyers had presented prejudicial arguments. It was one of the greatest triumphs in Scientology’s history, and the church members who had gone to Portland felt an enduring sense of kinship. (A year and a half later, the church settled with Christofferson-Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.)
In 1986, Hubbard died, of a stroke, in his motor home. He was seventy-four. Two weeks later, Scientologists gathered in the Hollywood Palladium for a special announcement. A young man, David Miscavige, stepped onto the stage. Short, trim, and muscular, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the assembled Scientologists that, for the past six years, Hubbard had been investigating new, higher O.T. levels. “He has now moved on to the next level,” Miscavige said. “It’s a level beyond anything any of us ever imagined. This level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body. Thus, at twenty-hundred hours, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36”—that is, thirty-six years after the publication of “Dianetics”—“L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime.” Miscavige began clapping, and led the crowd in an ovation, shouting, “Hip hip hooray!”
Miscavige was a Scientology prodigy from the Philadelphia area. He claimed that, growing up, he had been sickly, and struggled with bad asthma; Dianetics counselling had dramatically alleviated the symptoms. As he puts it, he “experienced a miracle.” He decided to devote his life to the religion. He had gone Clear by the age of fifteen, and the next year he dropped out of high school to join the Sea Org. He became an executive assistant to Hubbard, who gave him special tutoring in photography and cinematography. When Hubbard went into seclusion, in 1980, Miscavige was one of the few people who maintained close contact with him. With Hubbard’s death, the curtain rose on a man who was going to impose his personality on an organization facing its greatest test, the death of its charismatic founder. Miscavige was twenty-five years old.
In 1986, Haggis appeared on the cover of the Scientology magazine Celebrity. The accompanying article lauded his rising influence in Hollywood. He had escaped the cartoon ghetto after selling a script to “The Love Boat.” He had climbed the ladder of network television, writing movies of the week and children’s shows before settling into sitcoms. He worked on “Diff’rent Strokes” and “One Day at a Time,” then became the executive producer of “The Facts of Life.” The magazine noted, “He is one of the few writers in Hollywood who has major credits in all genres: comedy, suspense, human drama, animation.”
In the article, Haggis said of Scientology, “What excited me about the technology was that you could actually handle life, and your problems, and not have them handle you.” He added, “I also liked the motto, ‘Scientology makes the able more able.’ ” He credited the church for improving his relationship with Gettas. “Instead of fighting (we did a lot of that before Scientology philosophy) we now talk things out, listen to each other and apply Scientology technology to our problems.” Haggis told Celebrity that he had recently gone through the Purification Rundown, a program intended to eliminate body toxins that form a “biochemical barrier to spiritual well-being.” For an average of three weeks, participants undergo a lengthy daily regimen combining sauna visits, exercise, and huge doses of vitamins, especially niacin. According to a forthcoming book, “Inside Scientology,” by the journalist Janet Reitman, the sauna sessions can last up to five hours a day. In the interview, Haggis recalled being skeptical—“My idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettes”—but said that the Purification Rundown “was WONDERFUL.” He went on, “I really did feel more alert and more aware and more at ease—I wasn’t running in six directions to get something done, or bouncing off the walls when something went wrong.” Haggis mentioned that he had taken drugs when he was young. “Getting rid of all those residual toxins and medicines and drugs really had an effect,” he said. “After completing the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single chemical!” He recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, who at the time was seriously ill. He also persuaded a young writer on his staff to take the course, in order to wean herself from various medications. “She could tell Scientology worked by the example I set,” Haggis told the magazine. “That made me feel very good.”
Privately, he told me, he remained troubled by the church’s theology, which struck him as “intergalactic spirituality.” He was grateful, however, to have an auditor who was “really smart, sweet, thoughtful. I could always go to talk to him.” The confessionals were helpful. “It just felt better to get things off my chest.” Even after his incredulous reaction to O.T. III, he continued to “move up” the Bridge. He saw so many intelligent people on the path, and expected that his concerns would be addressed in future levels. He told himself, “Maybe there is something, and I’m just missing it.” He felt unsettled by the lack of irony among many fellow-Scientologists—an inability to laugh at themselves, which seemed at odds with the character of Hubbard himself. When Haggis felt doubts about the religion, he recalled 16-mm. films he had seen of Hubbard’s lectures from the fifties and sixties. “He had this amazing buoyancy,” Haggis says. “He had a deadpan humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, ‘Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something.’ ”
Haggis finally reached the top of the Operating Thetan pyramid. According to documents obtained by WikiLeaks, the activist group run by Julian Assange, the final exercise is: “Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body.”
Haggis expected that, as an O.T. VII, he would feel a sense of accomplishment, but he remained confused and unsatisfied. He thought that Hubbard was “brilliant in so many ways,” and that the failing must be his. At one point, he confided to a minister in the church that he didn’t think he should be a Scientologist. She told him, “There are all sorts of Scientologists,” just as there are all sorts of Jews and Christians, with varying levels of faith. The implication, Haggis said, was that he could “pick and choose” which tenets of Scientology to believe.
Haggis was a workaholic, and as his career took off he spent less and less time with his family. “He never got home till late at night or early in the morning,” his oldest daughter, Alissa, said. “All the time I ever spent with him was on the set.” Haggis frequently brought his daughters to work and assigned them odd jobs; Alissa earned her Directors Guild card when she was fifteen.
In 1987, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the creators of the new series “thirtysomething,” hired Haggis to write scripts. When I talked to them recently, Herskovitz recalled, “Paul walked in the door and said, ‘I love the fact that you guys are doing a show all about emotions. I don’t like talking about my emotions.’ ” In the show’s first season, one of Haggis’s scripts won an Emmy. Since he rarely discussed his religion, his bosses were surprised to learn of his affiliation. Herskovitz told me, “The thing about Paul is his particular sense of humor, which is ironic, self-deprecating—”
“And raw!” Zwick interjected.
“It’s not a sense of humor you often encounter among people who believe in Scientology,” Herskovitz continued. “His way of looking at life didn’t have that sort of straight-on, unambiguous, unambivalent view that so many Scientologists project.”
Observing Zwick and Herskovitz at work got Haggis interested in directing, and when the church asked him to make a thirty-second ad about Dianetics he seized the chance. He was determined to avoid the usual claim that Dianetics offered a triumphal march toward enlightenment. He shot a group of Scientologists talking about the practical ways that they had used Dianetics. “It was very naturalistic,” he recalls. Church authorities hated it. “They thought it looked like an A.A. meeting.” The spot never aired.
In 1992, he helped out on the pilot for “Walker, Texas Ranger,” a new series starring Chuck Norris. It ran for eight seasons and was broadcast in a hundred countries. Haggis was credited as a co-creator. “It was the most successful thing I ever did,” he says. “Two weeks of work. They never even used my script!”
With his growing accomplishments and wealth, Haggis became a bigger prize for the church. In 1988, Scientology sponsored a Dianetics car in the Indianapolis 500. David Miscavige was at the race. It was one of the few times that he and Haggis met. They sat near each other at a Scientology-sponsored dinner event before the race. “Paul takes no shit from anybody,” the organizer of the event recalled. Several times when Miscavige made some comment during the dinner, the organizer said, “Paul challenged him in a lighthearted way.” His tone was perceived as insufficiently deferential; afterward, Miscavige demanded to know why Haggis had been invited. (Miscavige declined requests to speak to me, and Tommy Davis says that Miscavige did not attend the event.) The organizer told me, “You have to understand: no one challenges David Miscavige.”
Haggis’s marriage had long been troubled, and he and his wife were entering a final state of estrangement. One day, Haggis flew to New York with a casting director who was also a Scientologist. They shared a kiss. Haggis felt bad about it, and confessed to it during an “ethics” session. He was given instruction on how to fix the problem. It didn’t work. He had a series of liaisons, each of which he confessed. Yet, perhaps because of his fame, he was not made to atone for what Scientologists call “out ethics” behavior.
Haggis and Gettas began a divorce battle that lasted nine years. Their three girls lived with Gettas, visiting Haggis occasionally. Gettas enrolled them in private schools that used Hubbard’s educational system, which is called Study Tech. It is one of the more grounded systems that he developed. There are three central elements. One is the use of clay, or other materials, to help make difficult concepts less abstract. Alissa explains, “If I’m learning the idea of how an atom looks, I’d make an atom out of clay.” A second concept is making sure that students don’t face “too steep a gradient,” in Hubbard’s words. “The schools are set up so that you don’t go on to the next level until you completely understand the material,” Alissa says. The third element is the frequent use of a dictionary to eliminate misunderstandings. “It’s really important to understand the words you’re using.”Lauren, the middle sister, initially struggled in school. “I was illiterate until I was eleven,” she told me. Somehow, that fact escaped her parents. “I assume it was because of the divorce,” she says.
When the divorce became final, in 1997, Haggis and Gettas were ordered by the court to undergo psychological evaluations—a procedure abhorred by Scientologists. The court then determined that Haggis should have full custody of the children.
His daughters were resentful. They had lived their entire lives with their mother. “I didn’t even know why he wanted us,” Lauren says. “I didn’t really know him.”
Haggis put his daughters in an ordinary private school, but that lasted only six months. The girls weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. At a regular school, they felt like outsiders. “The first thing I noticed that I did, that others didn’t, is the Contact,” Alissa told me, referring to a procedure the church calls Contact Assist. “If you hurt yourself, the first thing I and other Scientology kids do is go quiet.” Scientology preaches that, if you touch the wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and a sense of trauma fades.
The girls demanded to be sent to boarding school, so Haggis enrolled them at the Delphian School, in rural Oregon, which uses Hubbard’s Study Tech methods. The school, Lauren says, is “on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere.” She added, “I lived in a giant bubble. Everyone I knew was a Scientologist.”
For one course, she decided to write a paper about discrimination against various religions, including Scientology. “I wanted to see what the opposition was saying, so I went online,” she says. Another student turned her in to the school’s ethics committee. Information that doesn’t correspond to Scientology teachings is termed “entheta”—meaning confused or destructive thinking. Lauren agreed to stop doing research. “It was really easy not to look,” she says. By the time she graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had scarcely ever heard anyone speak ill of Scientology.
Alissa was a top student at Delphian, but she found herself moving away from the church. She still believed in some ideas promoted by Scientology, such as reincarnation, and she liked Hubbard’s educational techniques, but by the time she graduated she no longer defined herself as a Scientologist. Her reasoning was true to Hubbard’s philosophy. “A core concept in Scientology is: ‘Something isn’t true unless you find it true in your own life,’ ” she told me.
After starting boarding school, Alissa did not speak to her father for a number of years. She was angry about the divorce. Haggis mined the experience for the script of “Million Dollar Baby,” in which the lead character, played by Clint Eastwood, is haunted by his estrangement from his daughter.
“I’m very proud of Alissa for not talking to me,” Haggis told me, his eyes welling with tears. “Think what that takes.” It was the only time, in our many conversations, that he displayed such emotion.
Haggis and Alissa slowly resumed communication. When Alissa was in her early twenties, she accepted the fact that, like her sister Katy, she was gay. She recalls, “When I finally got the courage to come out to my dad, he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I knew that.’ ” Now, Alissa says, she and Haggis have a “working relationship.” As she puts it, “We do see each other for Thanksgiving and some meals.” Recently, Alissa, who is also a writer, has been collaborating on screenplays with her father. Haggis also gave her the role of a murderous drug addict in “The Next Three Days.”
In 1991, as his marriage to Gettas was crumbling, Haggis went to a Fourth of July party at the home of Scientologist friends. Deborah Rennard, who played J.R.’s alluring secretary on “Dallas,” was at the party. Rennard had grown up in a Scientology household and joined the church herself at the age of seventeen. In her early twenties, she studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and fell in love with Milton Katselas. They had recently broken up, after a six-year romance.
“When I first met Paul, he said he was having a ‘crisis of faith,’ ” Rennard told me. “He said he’d raced up to the top of the Bridge on faith, but he hadn’t gotten what he expected.” Haggis admitted to her, “I don’t believe I’m a spiritual being. I actually am what you see.” They became a couple, and married in June, 1997, immediately after Haggis’s divorce from Gettas became final. A son, James, was born the following year. Rennard, concerned about her husband’s spiritual doubts, suggested that he do some more study. She was having breakthroughs that sometimes led her to discover past lives. “There were images, feelings, and thoughts that I suddenly realized, That’s not here. I’m not in my body, I’m in another place,” she told me. For instance, she might be examining what the church calls a “contra-survival” action—“like the time I clobbered Paul or threw something at him. And I’d look for an earlier similar. Suddenly, I’d realize I was doing something negative, and I’d be in England in the eighteen-hundreds. I’d see myself harming this person. It was a fleeting glimpse at what I was doing then.” Examining these moments helped the emotional charge dissipate. “Paul would say, ‘Don’t you think you’re making this up?’ ” She wondered if that mattered. “If it changed me for the better, who cares?” she says. “When you are working on a scene as an actor, something similar happens. You get connected to a feeling from who knows where.”
Haggis and Rennard shared a house in Santa Monica, which soon became a hub for progressive political fund-raisers. Haggis lent his name to nearly any cause that espoused peace and justice: the Earth Communications Office, the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, the Center for the Advancement of Non-Violence. Despite his growing disillusionment with Scientology, he also raised a significant amount of money for it, and made sizable donations himself, appearing frequently on an honor roll of top contributors. The Church of Scientology had recently gained tax-exempt status as a religious institution, making donations, as well as the cost of auditing, tax-deductible. (Church members had lodged more than two thousand lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the agency in litigation. As part of the settlement, the church agreed to drop its legal campaign.)
Over the years, Haggis estimates, he spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on courses and auditing, and three hundred thousand dollars on various Scientology initiatives. Rennard says that she spent about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on coursework. Haggis recalls that the demands for donations never seemed to stop. “They used friends and any kind of pressure they could apply,” he says. “I gave them money just to keep them from calling and hounding me.”
A decade ago, Haggis moved into feature films. He co-wrote the scripts for the two most recent James Bond films, “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace.” He claims that Scientology has not influenced his work—there are no evident references in his movies—but his scripts often do have an autobiographical element. “I’m not good at something unless it disturbs me,” he said. In “Million Dollar Baby,” he wrote about a boxing coach who pulls the plug on a paralyzed fighter. Haggis made a similar choice in real life with his best friend, who was brain dead from a staph infection. “They don’t die easily,” he said. “Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours.” Haggis likes to explore contradictions, making heroes into villains and vice versa, as with the racist cop in “Crash,” played by Matt Dillon, who molests a woman in one scene and saves her life in another. In “In the Valley of Elah,” Tommy Lee Jones plays a father trying to discover who murdered his son, a heroic soldier just returned from Iraq, only to learn that the sadism of the war had turned his son into a willing torturer.
In 2004, Haggis was rewriting “Flags of Our Fathers,” a drama about Iwo Jima, for Clint Eastwood to direct. (Haggis shared credit with William Broyles, Jr.) One day, Haggis and Eastwood visited the set of “War of the Worlds,” which Steven Spielberg was shooting with Tom Cruise. Haggis had met Cruise at a fund-raiser and, a second time, at the Celebrity Centre. Cruise says that he was introduced to the church in 1986 by his first wife, the actress Mimi Rogers. (Rogers denies this.) In 1992, he became the religion’s most famous member, telling Barbara Walters that Hubbard’s Study Tech methods had helped him overcome dyslexia. “He’s a major symbol of the church, and I think he takes that very seriously,” Haggis said. Tommy Davis, at Cruise’s request, was allowed to erect a tent on the set of Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” where Scientology materials were distributed. That raised eyebrows in Hollywood. Haggis says that when he appeared on the set Spielberg pulled him aside. “It’s really remarkable to me that I’ve met all these Scientologists, and they seem like the nicest people,” Spielberg said. Haggis replied, “Yeah, we keep all the evil ones in a closet.” (Spielberg’s publicist says that Spielberg doesn’t recall the conversation.)
A few days later, Haggis says, he was summoned to the Celebrity Centre, where officials told him that Cruise was very upset. “It was a joke,” Haggis explained. Davis offers a different account. He says that Cruise mentioned the incident to him only “in passing,” but that he himself found the remark offensive. He confronted Haggis, who apologized profusely, asking that his contrition be relayed to “anyone who might have been offended.”
Davis has known Cruise since Davis was eighteen years old. They are close friends. The two men physically resemble each other, with long faces, strong jaws, and spiky haircuts. “I saw him hanging out with Tom Cruise after the Oscars,” Haggis recalls. “At the Vanity Fair party, they were let in the back door. They arrived on motorcycles, really cool ones, like Ducatis.” Cruise was also close to David Miscavige, and has said of him, “I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more tolerant, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from L.R.H. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders.”
In 2004, Cruise received a special Scientology award: the Freedom Medal of Valor. In a ceremony held in England, Miscavige called Cruise “the most dedicated Scientologist I know.” The ceremony was accompanied by a video interview with the star. Wearing a black turtleneck, and with the theme music from “Mission: Impossible” playing in the background, Cruise said, “Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them. So, for me, it really is K.S.W.”—initials that stand for “Keeping Scientology Working.” He went on, “That policy to me has really gone—phist!” He made a vigorous gesture with his hand. “Boy! There’s a time I went through and I said, ‘You know what? When I read it, you know, I just went poo! This is it!’ ” Later, when the video was posted on YouTube and viewed by millions who had no idea what he was talking about, Cruise came across as unhinged. He did not dispel this notion when, in 2005, during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he jumped up and down on a couch while declaring his love for the actress Katie Holmes. He and Holmes married in 2006, in Italy. David Miscavige was his best man.
Proposition 8, the California initiative against gay marriage, passed in November, 2008. Haggis learned from his daughter Lauren of the San Diego chapter’s endorsement of it. He immediately sent Davis several e-mails, demanding that the church take a public stand opposing the ban on gay marriage. “I am going to an anti Prop 8 rally in a couple of hours,” he wrote on November 11th, after the election. “When can we expect the public statement?” In a response, Davis proposed sending a letter to the San Diego press, saying that the church had been “erroneously listed among the supporters of Proposition 8.”
“ ‘Erroneous’ doesn’t cut it,” Haggis responded. In another note, he remarked, “The church may have had the luxury of not taking a position on this issue before, but after taking a position, even erroneously, it can no longer stand neutral.” He demanded that the church openly declare that it supports gay rights. “Anything less won’t do.” Davis explained to Haggis that the church avoids taking overt political stands. He also felt that Haggis was exaggerating the impact of the San Diego endorsement. “It was one guy who somehow got it in his head it would be a neat idea and put Church of Scientology San Diego on the list,” Davis told me. “When I found out, I had it removed from the list.” Davis said that the individual who made the mistake—he didn’t divulge the name—had been “disciplined” for it. I asked what that meant. “He was sat down by a staff member of the local organization,” Davis explained. “He got sorted out.”
Davis told me that Haggis was mistaken about his daughter having been ostracized by Scientologists. Davis said that he had spoken to the friend who had allegedly abandoned Katy, and the friend had ended the relationship not because Katy was a lesbian but because Katy had lied about it. (Haggis, when informed of this account, laughed.)
As far as Davis was concerned, reprimanding the San Diego staff member was the end of the matter: “I said, ‘Paul, I’ve received no press inquiries. . . . If I were to make a statement on this, it would actually be more attention to the subject than if we leave it be.’ ”
Haggis refused to let the matter drop. “This is not a P.R. issue, it is a moral issue,” he wrote, in February, 2009. In the final note of this exchange, he conceded, “You were right: nothing happened—it didn’t flap—at least not very much. But I feel we shamed ourselves.”
Haggis sent this note six months before he resigned. Because he stopped complaining, Davis felt that the issue had been laid to rest. But, far from putting the matter behind him, Haggis began his investigation into the church. His inquiry, much of it conducted online, mirrored the actions of the lead character he was writing for “The Next Three Days”; the character, played by Russell Crowe, goes on the Internet to find a way to break his wife out of jail.
Haggis soon found on YouTube the video of Tommy Davis talking on CNN about disconnection. The practice of disconnection is not unique to Scientology. The Amish, for example, cut themselves off from apostates, including their own children; some Orthodox Jewish communities do the same. Rennard had disconnected from her parents twice. When she was a young child, her stepfather had got the family involved with Scientology. When she was in her twenties, and appearing on “Dallas,” her parents broke away from the church. Like many active members of Scientology, they had kept money in an account (in their case, twenty-five hundred dollars) for future courses they intended to take. Rennard’s mother took the money back. “That’s a huge deal for the church,” Rennard told me. She didn’t speak to her parents for several years, assuming that they had been declared Suppressive Persons.
In the early nineties, Rennard wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters; she was informed that she could talk to her parents again. A decade later, however, she went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and was told that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she had to confront her parents’ mistakes. The church recommended that she take a course called P.T.S./S.P., which stands for “Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons.” “That course took a year,” Rennard told me. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. “They put me on a program that took two years to complete,” she says. Still, nothing changed. If she failed to “handle” her parents, she would have to disconnect not only from them but also from everyone who spoke to them, including her siblings. “It was that, or else I had to give up being a Scientologist,” she says.
Rennard’s parents were among four hundred claimants in a lawsuit brought against Scientology by disaffected members in 1987; the case was thrown out of court the following year, for lack of evidence. To make amends, Rennard’s parents had to denounce the anti-Scientologist group and offer a “token” restitution. The church prescribes a seven-step course of rehabilitation, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into its good graces, which includes returning debts and making public declarations of error. Rennard told her parents that if they wanted to remain in contact with her they had to follow the church’s procedures. Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. “They really wanted to work it out with me,” she says.
But the church wasn’t satisfied. Rennard was told that if she maintained contact with her parents she would be labelled a “Potential Trouble Source”—a designation that would alienate her from the Scientology community and render her ineligible for further training. “It was clearly laid out for me,” she says. A senior official counselled her to agree to have her parents formally branded as S.P.s. “Until then, they won’t turn around and recognize their responsibilities,” he said. “O.K., fine,” Rennard said. “Go ahead and declare them. Maybe it’ll get better.” She was granted permission to begin upper-level coursework in Clearwater.
In August, 2006, a notice was posted at the Celebrity Centre declaring Rennard’s parents Suppressive Persons, saying that they had associated with “squirrels,” which in Scientology refers to people who have dropped out of the church but continue to practice unauthorized auditing. A month later, Rennard’s parents sent her a letter: “We tried to do what you asked, Deborah. We worked the whole months of July & Aug. on A-E.” They explained that they had paid the church the twenty-five hundred dollars. After all that, they continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s pamphlet “The Way to Happiness” to libraries; they had also been told to document the exchange with photographs. They had declined. “If this can’t be resolved, we will have to say Good-Bye to you & James will lose his Grand-Parents,” her mother wrote. “This is ridiculous.”
In April, 2007, Rennard’s parents sued for the right to visit their grandson. Rennard had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. She was summoned to a church mission in Santa Monica and shown a statement rescinding the ruling that her parents were S.P.s.
Tommy Davis sent me some policy statements that Hubbard had made about disconnection in 1965. “Anyone who rejects Scientology also rejects, knowingly or unknowingly, the protection and benefits of Scientology and the companionship of Scientologists,” Hubbard writes. In “Introduction to Scientology Ethics,” Hubbard defined disconnection as “a self-determined decision made by an individual that he is not going to be connected to another.”
Scientology defectors are full of tales of forcible family separations, which the church almost uniformly denies. Two former leaders in the church, Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, told me that families are sometimes broken apart. In their cases, their wives chose to stay in the church when they left. The wives, and the church, denounce Rathbun and Rinder as liars.
A few days after sending the resignation letter to Tommy Davis, Haggis came home from work to find nine or ten of his Scientology friends standing in his front yard. He invited them in to talk. Anne Archer was there with Terry Jastrow, her husband, an actor turned producer and director. “Paul had been such an ally,” Archer told me. “It was pretty painful. Everyone wanted to see if there could be some kind of resolution.” Mark Isham, an Emmy-winning composer who has scored films for Haggis, came with his wife, Donna. Sky Dayton, the EarthLink founder, was there, along with several other friends and a church representative Haggis didn’t know. His friends could have served as an advertisement for Scientology—they were wealthy high achievers with solid marriages, who embraced the idea that the church had given them a sense of well-being and the skills to excel.
Scientologists are trained to believe in their persuasive powers and the need to keep a positive frame of mind. But the mood in the room was downbeat and his friends’ questions were full of reproach. Jastrow asked Haggis, “Do you have any idea that what you might do might damage a lot of pretty wonderful people and your fellow-Scientologists?”
Haggis reminded the group that he had been with them at the 1985 “freedom march” in Portland. They all knew about his financial support of the church and the occasions when he had spoken out in its defense. Jastrow remembers Haggis saying, “I love Scientology.”
Archer had particular reason to feel aggrieved: Haggis’s letter had called her son a liar. “Paul was very sweet,” she says. “We didn’t talk about Tommy.” She understood that Haggis was upset about the way Proposition 8 had affected his gay daughters, but she didn’t think it was relevant to Scientology. “The church is not political,” she told me. “We all have tons of friends and relatives who are gay. . . . It’s not the church’s issue. I’ve introduced gay friends to Scientology.”
Isham was frustrated. “We weren’t breaking through to him,” he told me. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. “We share a common artistic sensibility,” Isham said. When he visited Abbey Road Studios, in England, to record the score that he had written for “In the Valley of Elah,” Haggis went along with him. Haggis wanted him to compose the score for “The Next Three Days.” Now their friendship was at risk. Isham used Scientology to analyze the situation. In his view, Haggis’s emotions at that moment ranked 1.1 on the Tone Scale—the state that is sometimes called Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—Isham hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. “This was an intellectual decision,” Isham said. “I decided I would be angry.”
“Paul, I’m pissed off,” Isham told Haggis. “There’s better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, there’s a complaint line.” Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit; certainly, going public was not helpful.
Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. When his friends finished, however, Haggis had his own set of grievances.
He referred them to the exposé in the St. Petersburg Times that had so shaken him: “The Truth Rundown.” The first installment had appeared in June, 2009. Haggis had learned from reading it that several of the church’s top managers had defected in despair. Marty Rathbun had once been inspector general of the church’s Religious Technology Center, which holds the trademarks of Scientology and Dianetics, and exists to “protect the public from misapplication of the technology.” Rathbun had also overseen Scientology’s legal-defense strategy, and reported directly to Miscavige. Amy Scobee had been an executive in the Celebrity Centre network. Mike Rinder had been the church’s spokesperson, the job now held by Tommy Davis. One by one, they had disappeared from Scientology, and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask where they had gone.
The defectors told the newspaper that Miscavige was a serial abuser of his staff. “The issue wasn’t the physical pain of it,” Rinder said. “It’s the fact that the domination you’re getting—hit in the face, kicked—and you can’t do anything about it. If you did try, you’d be attacking the C.O.B.”—the chairman of the board. Tom De Vocht, a defector who had been a manager at the Clearwater spiritual center, told the paper that he, too, had been beaten by Miscavige; he said that from 2003 to 2005 he had witnessed Miscavige striking other staff members as many as a hundred times. Rathbun, Rinder, and De Vocht all admitted that they had engaged in physical violence themselves. “It had become the accepted way of doing things,” Rinder said. Amy Scobee said that nobody challenged the abuse because people were terrified of Miscavige. Their greatest fear was expulsion: “You don’t have any money. You don’t have job experience. You don’t have anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you.”
Assessing the truthfulness of such inflammatory statements—made by people who deserted the church or were expelled—was a challenge for the newspaper, which has maintained a special focus on Scientology. (Clearwater is twenty miles northwest of downtown St. Petersburg.) In 1998, six years before he defected, Rathbun told the paper that he had never seen Miscavige hit anyone. Now he said, “That was the biggest lie I ever told you.” The reporters behind “The Truth Rundown,” Joe Childs and Thomas Tobin, interviewed each defector separately and videotaped many of the sessions. “It added a measure of confidence,” Childs told me. “Their stories just tracked.”
Much of the alleged abuse took place at the Gold Base, a Scientology outpost in the desert near Hemet, a town eighty miles southeast of Los Angeles. Miscavige has an office there, and the site features, among other things, movie studios and production facilities for the church’s many publications. For decades, the base’s location was unknown even to many church insiders. Haggis visited the Gold Base only once, in the early eighties, when he was about to direct his Scientology commercial. The landscape, he said, suggested a spa, “beautiful and restful,” but he found the atmosphere sterile and scary. Surrounded by a security fence, the base houses about eight hundred Sea Org members, in quarters that the church likens to those “in a convent or seminary, albeit much more comfortable.”
According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in 2004 to the Hole—a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. “There were between eighty and a hundred people sentenced to the Hole at that time,” Rathbun said, in the declaration. “We were required to do group confessions all day and all night.”
The church claims that such stories are false: “There is not, and never has been, any place of ‘confinement’ . . . nor is there anything in Church policy that would allow such confinement.”
According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses “were not participants would have their marriages terminated.” The St. Petersburg Times noted that Miscavige played Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a boom box as the church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case, ripping a chair apart.
Tom De Vocht, one of the participants, says that the event lasted until four in the morning: “It got more and more physical as the number of chairs went down.” Many of the participants had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a driver’s license or a passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear.
Tommy Davis told me that a musical-chairs episode did occur. He explained that Miscavige had been away from the Gold Base for some time, and when he returned he discovered that in his absence many jobs had been reassigned. The game was meant to demonstrate that even seemingly small changes can be disruptive to an organization—underscoring an “administrative policy of the church.” The rest of the defectors’ accounts, Davis told me, was “hoo-ha”: “Chairs being ripped apart, and people being threatened that they’re going to be sent to far-flung places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and they’re going to force their spouses—and on and on and on. I mean, it’s just nuts!”
Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org member and church executive who worked with Haggis on the rejected Dianetics ad campaign, told me that Miscavige had struck or beaten him on five occasions, the first time in 2002. “I had just written an infomercial,” he said. Miscavige summoned him to a meeting where a few dozen members were seated on one side of a table; Miscavige sat by himself on the other side. According to Hawkins, Miscavige began a tirade about the ad’s shortcomings. Hawkins recalls, “Without any warning, he jumped up onto the conference-room table and he launches himself at me. He knocks me back against a cubicle wall and starts battering my face.” The two men fell to the floor, Hawkins says, and their legs became entangled. “Let go of my legs!” Miscavige shouted. According to Hawkins, Miscavige then “stomped out of the room,” leaving Hawkins on the floor, shocked and bruised. The others did nothing to support him, he claims: “They were saying, ‘Get up! Get up!’ ”
I asked Hawkins why he hadn’t called the police. He reminded me that church members believe that Scientology holds the key to salvation: “Only by going through Scientology will you reach spiritual immortality. You can go from life to life to life without being cognizant of what is going on. If you don’t go through Scientology, you’re condemned to dying over and over again in ignorance and darkness, never knowing your true nature as a spirit. Nobody who is a believer wants to lose that.” Miscavige, Hawkins says, “holds the power of eternal life and death over you.”
Moreover, Scientologists are taught to handle internal conflicts within the church’s own justice system. Hawkins told me that if a Sea Org member sought outside help he would be punished, either by being declared a Suppressive Person or by being sent off to do manual labor, as Hawkins was made to do after Miscavige beat him. The church denies that Hawkins was mistreated, and notes that he has participated in protests organized by Anonymous, a “hacktivist” collective that has targeted Scientology. The group pugnaciously opposes censorship, and became hostile toward Scientology after the church invoked copyright claims in order to remove from the Internet the video of Tom Cruise extolling “K.S.W.” The church describes Anonymous as a “cyber-terrorist group”; last month, the F.B.I. raided the homes of three dozen members after Anonymous attacked the Web sites of corporations critical of WikiLeaks. (Two members of Anonymous have pleaded guilty to participating in a 2008 attack on a Scientology Web site.)
The church provided me with eleven statements from Scientologists, all of whom said that Miscavige had never been violent. One of them, Yael Lustgarten, said that she was present at the meeting with Hawkins and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. She claims that Hawkins made a mess of his presentation—“He smelled of body odor, he was unshaven, his voice tone was very low, and he could hardly be heard”—and was admonished to shape up. She says that Hawkins “wasn’t hit by anyone.” The defector Amy Scobee, however, says that she witnessed the attack—the two men had fallen into her cubicle. After the altercation, she says, “I gathered all the buttons from Jeff’s shirt and the change from his pockets and gave them back to him.”
The church characterizes Scobee, Rinder, Rathbun, Hawkins, De Vocht, Hines, and other defectors I spoke with as “discredited individuals,” who were demoted for incompetence or expelled for corruption; the defectors’ accounts are consistent only because they have “banded together to advance and support each other’s false ‘stories.’ ”
After reading the St. Petersburg Times series, Haggis tracked down Marty Rathbun, who was living on Corpus Christi Bay, in south Texas. Rathbun had been making ends meet by writing freelance articles for local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark.
Haggis complained that Davis hadn’t been honest with him about Scientology’s policies. “I said, ‘That’s not Tommy, he has no say,’ ” Rathbun told me. “Miscavige is a total micromanager. I explained the whole culture.” He says that Haggis was shocked by the conversation. “The thing that was most troubling to Paul was that I literally had to escape,” Rathbun told me. (A few nights after the musical-chairs incident, he got on his motorcycle and waited until a gate was opened for someone else; he sped out and didn’t stop for thirty miles.) Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his car—an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, “What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?”
When Haggis began casting for “The Next Three Days,” in the summer of 2009, he asked Jason Beghe to read for the part of a cop. Beghe was a gravel-voiced character actor who had played Demi Moore’s love interest in “G.I. Jane.” In the late nineties, Haggis had worked with Beghe on a CBS series, “Family Law.” Like so many others, Beghe had come to the church through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. In old promotional materials for the church, he is quoted as saying that Scientology is “a rocket ride to spiritual freedom.”
Beghe told Haggis, “You should know that I’m no longer in Scientology. Actually, I’m one of its most outspoken critics. The church would be very unhappy if you hire me.” Haggis responded, “Nobody tells me who I cast.” He looked at a lengthy video that Beghe had posted on the Internet, in which he denounces the church as “destructive and a ripoff.” Haggis thought that Beghe had “gone over the edge.” But he asked if they could talk.
The two men met at Patrick’s Roadhouse, a coffee shop on the beach in Pacific Palisades. Beghe was calmer than he had been in the video, which he called “a snapshot of me having been out only three months.” Even though Beghe had renounced the church, he continued to use Scientology methods when dealing with members and former members. “It’s almost like: ‘I can speak Chinese, I understand the culture,’ ” he explained to me. In several meetings with Haggis, he employed techniques based on what Hubbard labelled “Ethics Conditions.” These range from Confusion at the bottom and ascend through Treason, Enemy, Doubt, Liability, and Emergency, eventually leading to Power. “Each one of the conditions has a specific set of steps in a formula, and, once that formula is applied correctly, you will move up to the next-highest condition,” Beghe explained. “I assumed that Paul was in a condition of Doubt.”
Beghe joined Scientology in 1994. He told Haggis that, in the late nineties, he began having emotional problems, and the church recommended auditing and coursework. In retrospect, he felt that it had done no good. “I was paying money for them to fuck me up,” he said. “I spent about five or six hundred thousand dollars trying to get better, and I continued to get worse.” He says that when he finally decided to leave the church, in 2007, he told an official that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed. Beghe recalls telling the official, “You guys don’t have any policies to make up the damage.” He eventually suggested to the official that the church buy property and lease it to him at a negligible rate; the church now characterizes this as an attempt at extortion.
Beghe was reluctant to use the word “brainwashing”—“whatever the fuck that is”—but he did feel that his mind had been somehow taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.”
Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didn’t feel as deeply betrayed as Beghe did. “I didn’t feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought,” he told me. But, as he continued his investigation, he became increasingly disturbed. He read the church’s official rebuttal to the St. Petersburg Times series, in the Scientology magazine Freedom. It included an annotated transcript of conversations that had taken place between the reporters and representatives of the church, including Tommy Davis and his wife, Jessica Feshbach. In Freedom’s rendition of those conversations, the reporters’ sources were not named, perhaps to shield Scientologists from the shock of seeing familiar names publicly denouncing the organization. Rathbun was called “Kingpin” and Scobee “the Adulteress.”
At one point in the transcribed conversations, Davis reminded the reporters that Scobee had been expelled from the church leadership because of an affair. The reporters responded that she had denied having sexual contact outside her marriage. “That’s a lie,” Davis told them. Feshbach, who had a stack of documents, elaborated: “She has a written admission [of] each one of her instances of extramarital indiscretion. . . . I believe there were five.” When Haggis read this in Freedom, he presumed that the church had obtained its information from the declarations that members sometimes provide after auditing. Such confessions are supposed to be confidential. (Scientology denies that it obtained the information this way, and Davis produced an affidavit, signed by Scobee, in which she admits to having liaisons. Scobee denies committing adultery, and says that she did not write the affidavit; she says that she signed it in the hope of leaving the church on good terms, so that she could stay in touch with relatives.)
In his letter to Davis, Haggis said that he was worried that the church might look through his files to smear him, too. “Luckily, I have never held myself up to be anyone’s role model,” he wrote.
At his house, Haggis finished telling his friends what he had learned. He suggested that they should at least examine the evidence. “I directed them to certain Web sites,” he said, mentioning Exscientologykids.com, which was created by three young women who grew up in Scientology and subsequently left. Many stories on the site are from men and women who joined the Sea Org before turning eighteen. One of them was Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscavige’s niece, who joined when she was twelve. For Hill and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the Sea Org, leaving them especially ill-prepared, they say, for coping with life outside the church.
The stories Haggis found on the Internet of children drafted into the Sea Org appalled him. “They were ten years old, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this?” Haggis told me. “Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!” The stories of the Sea Org children reminded Haggis of child slaves he had seen in Haiti.
Many Sea Org volunteers find themselves with no viable options for adulthood. If they try to leave, the church presents them with a “freeloader tab” for all the coursework and counselling they have received; the bill can amount to more than a hundred thousand dollars. Payment is required in order to leave in good standing. “Many of them actually pay it,” Haggis said. “They leave, they’re ashamed of what they’ve done, they’ve got no money, no job history, they’re lost, they just disappear.” In what seemed like a very unguarded comment, he said, “I would gladly take down the church for that one thing.”
The church says that it adheres to “all child labor laws,” and that minors can’t sign up without parental consent; the freeloader tabs are an “ecclesiastical matter” and are not enforced through litigation.
Haggis’s friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings. “We all left no clearer than when we went in,” Archer said. Isham felt that there was still a possibility of getting Haggis “to behave himself.” He said that Haggis had agreed that “it wasn’t helping anyone” to continue distributing the letter, and had promised not to circulate it further. Unmentioned was the fact that this would be the last time most of them ever spoke to Haggis.
I asked Isham if he had taken Haggis’s advice and looked at the Web sites or the articles in the St. Petersburg Times. “I started to,” he said. “But it was like reading ‘Mein Kampf’ if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion.”
In the days after the friends visited Haggis’s home, church officials and members came to his office, distracting his colleagues, particularly his producing partner, Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist. “Every day, for hours, he would have conversations with them,” Nozik told me. It was August, 2009, and shooting for “The Next Three Days” was set to start in Pittsburgh at the end of the month; the office desperately needed Haggis’s attention. “But he felt a need to go through the process fully,” Nozik says. “He wanted to give them a full hearing.”
“I listened to their point of view, but I didn’t change my mind,” Haggis says, noting that the Scientology officials “became more livid and irrational.” He added, “I applied more Scientology in those meetings than they did.”
Davis and other church officials told Haggis that Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. Supposing that was true, Haggis said, why hadn’t Miscavige stopped it? Haggis recalls that, at one meeting, he told Davis and five other officials, “If someone in my organization is beating people, I would sure know about it. You think I would put up with it? And I’m not that good a person.” Haggis noted that, if the rumors of Miscavige’s violent temper were true, it proved that everyone is fallible. “Look at Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said, alluding to King’s sexual improprieties.
“How dare you compare Dave Miscavige with Martin Luther King!” one of the officials shouted. Haggis was shocked. “They thought that comparing Miscavige to Martin Luther King was debasing his character,” he says. “If they were trying to convince me that Scientology was not a cult, they did a very poor job of it.” (Davis says that King’s name never came up.)
In October, 2009, Marty Rathbun called Haggis and asked if he could publish the resignation letter on his blog. Rathbun had become an informal spokesperson for defectors who believed that the church had broken away from Hubbard’s original teachings. Haggis was in Pittsburgh, shooting his picture. “You’re a journalist, you don’t need my permission,” Haggis said, although he asked Rathbun to excise parts related to Katy’s homosexuality.
Haggis says that he didn’t think about the consequences of his decision: “I thought it would show up on a couple of Web sites. I’m a writer, I’m not Lindsay Lohan.” Rathbun got fifty-five thousand hits on his blog that afternoon. The next morning, the story was in newspapers around the world.
At the time Haggis was doing his research, the F.B.I. was conducting its own investigation. In December, 2009, Tricia Whitehill, a special agent from the Los Angeles office, flew to Florida to interview former members of the church in the F.B.I.’s office in downtown Clearwater, which happens to be directly across the street from Scientology’s spiritual headquarters. Tom De Vocht, who spoke with Whitehill, told me, “I understood that the investigation had been going on for quite a while.” He says Whitehill confided that she hadn’t told the local agents what the investigation was about, in case the office had been infiltrated. Amy Scobee spoke to the F.B.I. for two days. “They wanted a full download about the abuse,” she told me.
Whitehill and Valerie Venegas, the lead agent on the case, also interviewed former Sea Org members in California. One of them was Gary Morehead, who had been the head of security at the Gold Base; he left the church in 1996. In February, 2010, he spoke to Whitehill and told her that he had developed a “blow drill” to track down Sea Org members who left Gold Base. “We got wickedly good at it,” he says. In thirteen years, he estimates, he and his security team brought more than a hundred Sea Org members back to the base. When emotional, spiritual, or psychological pressure failed to work, Morehead says, physical force was sometimes used to bring escapees back. (The church says that blow drills do not exist.) Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human trafficking. The laws regarding trafficking were built largely around forced prostitution, but they also pertain to slave labor. Under federal law, slavery is defined, in part, by the use of coercion, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological abuse. The California penal code lists several indicators that someone may be a victim of human trafficking: signs of trauma or fatigue; being afraid or unable to talk, because of censorship by others or security measures that prevent communication with others; working in one place without the freedom to move about; owing a debt to one’s employer; and not having control over identification documents. Those conditions echo the testimony of many former Sea Org members who lived at the Gold Base.
Sea Org members who have “failed to fulfill their ecclesiastical responsibilities” may be sent to one of the church’s several Rehabilitation Project Force locations. Defectors describe them as punitive reëducation camps. In California, there is one in Los Angeles; until 2005, there was one near the Gold Base, at a place called Happy Valley. Bruce Hines, the defector turned research physicist, says that he was confined to R.P.F. for six years, first in L.A., then in Happy Valley. He recalls that the properties were heavily guarded and that anyone who tried to flee would be tracked down and subjected to further punishment. “In 1995, when I was put in R.P.F., there were twelve of us,” Hines said. “At the high point, in 2000, there were about a hundred and twenty of us.” Some members have been in R.P.F. for more than a decade, doing manual labor and extensive spiritual work. (Davis says that Sea Org members enter R.P.F. by their own choosing and can leave at any time; the manual labor maintains church facilities and instills “pride of accomplishment.”)
In 2009, two former Sea Org members, Claire and Marc Headley, filed lawsuits against the church. They had both joined as children. Claire became a member of the Sea Org at the age of sixteen, and was assigned to the Gold Base. She says she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone where she was going, not even her mother, who was made to sign over guardianship. (Claire’s mother, who is still in the church, has issued a sworn statement denying that she lost contact with her daughter.) The security apparatus at the Gold Base intimidated Claire. “Even though I had been in Scientology pretty much all my life, this was a whole new world,” she told me. She says she was rarely allowed even a telephone call to her mother. “Every last trace of my life, as I knew it, was thrown away,” she said. “It was like living in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ ”
Claire met Marc Headley, also a teen-ager, soon after her arrival. “We had no ties to anyone not in Scientology,” Claire said. “It was a very closeted and controlled existence.” Marc says it was widely known around the base that he was one of the first people Tom Cruise audited. In Scientology, the auditor bears a significant responsibility for the progress of his subject. “If you audit somebody and that person leaves the organization, there’s only one person whose fault that is—the auditor,” Headley told me. (Cruise’s attorney says that Cruise doesn’t recall meeting Marc.) Claire and Marc fell in love, and married in 1992. She says that she was pressured by the church to have two abortions, because of a stipulation that Sea Org members can’t have children. The church denies that it pressures members to terminate pregnancies. Lucy James, a former Scientologist who had access to Sea Org personnel records, says that she knows of dozens of cases in which members were pressed to have abortions.
In 2005, Marc Headley says, he was punched by Miscavige during an argument. He and his wife quit. (The church calls Marc Headley dishonest, claiming that he kept seven hundred dollars in profits after being authorized to sell Scientology camera equipment; Headley says that shipping costs and other expenses account for the discrepancy.) In 2009, the Headleys filed their suits, which maintained that the working conditions at the Gold Base violated labor and human-trafficking laws. The church responded that the Headleys were ministers who had voluntarily submitted to the rigors of their calling, and that the First Amendment protected Scientology’s religious practices. The court agreed with this argument and dismissed the Headleys’ complaints, awarding the church forty thousand dollars in litigation costs. The court also indicated that the Headleys were technically free to leave the Gold Base. The Headleys have appealed the rulings.
Defectors also talked to the F.B.I. about Miscavige’s luxurious life style. The law prohibits the head of a tax-exempt organization from enjoying unusual perks or compensation; it’s called inurement. Tommy Davis refused to disclose how much money Miscavige earns, and the church isn’t required to do so, but Headley and other defectors suggest that Miscavige lives more like a Hollywood star than like the head of a religious organization—flying on chartered jets and wearing shoes custom-made in London. Claire Headley says that, when she was in Scientology, Miscavige had five stewards and two chefs at his disposal; he also had a large car collection, including a Saleen Mustang, similar to one owned by Cruise, and six motorcycles. (The church denies this characterization and “vigorously objects to the suggestion that Church funds inure to the private benefit of Mr. Miscavige.”)
Former Sea Org members report that Miscavige receives elaborate birthday and Christmas gifts from Scientology groups around the world. One year, he was given a Vyrus 985 C3 4V, a motorcycle with a retail price of seventy thousand dollars. “These gifts are tokens of love and respect for Mr. Miscavige,” Davis informed me.
By contrast, Sea Org members typically receive fifty dollars a week. Often, this stipend is docked for small infractions, such as failing to meet production quotas or skipping scripture-study sessions. According to Janela Webster, who was in the Sea Org for nineteen years before defecting, in 2006, it wasn’t unusual for a member to be paid as little as thirteen dollars a week.
I recently spoke with two sources in the F.B.I. who are close to the investigation. They assured me that the case remains open.
Last April, John Brousseau, who had been in the Sea Org for more than thirty years, left the Gold Base. He was unhappy with Miscavige, his former brother-in-law, whom he considered “detrimental to the goals of Scientology.” He drove across the country, to south Texas, to meet Marty Rathbun. “I was there a couple of nights,” he says. At five-thirty one morning, he was leaving the motel room where he was staying, to get coffee, when he heard footsteps behind him. It was Tommy Davis; he and nineteen church members had tracked Brousseau down. Brousseau locked himself in his room and called Rathbun, who alerted the police; Davis went home without Brousseau.
In a deposition given in July, Davis said no when asked if he had ever “followed a Sea Organization member that has blown”—fled the church. Under further questioning, he admitted that he and an entourage had flown to Texas in a jet chartered by Scientology, and had shown up outside Brousseau’s motel room at dawn. But he insisted that he was only trying “to see a friend of mine.” Davis now calls Brousseau “a liar.”Brousseau says that his defection caused anxiety, in part because he had worked on a series of special projects for Tom Cruise. Brousseau maintained grounds and buildings at the Gold Base. He worked for fourteen months on the renovation of the Freewinds, the only ship left in Scientology’s fleet; he also says that he installed bars over the doors of the Hole, at the Gold Base, shortly after Rathbun escaped. (The church denies this.)
In 2005, Miscavige showed Cruise a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he owned. At Miscavige’s request, Brousseau had had the vehicle’s parts plated with brushed nickel and painted candy-apple red. Brousseau recalls, “Cruise asked me, ‘God, could you paint my bike like that?’ I looked at Miscavige, and Miscavige agreed.” Cruise brought in two motorcycles to be painted, a Triumph and a Honda Rune; the Honda had been given to him by Spielberg after the filming of “War of the Worlds.” “The Honda already had a custom paint job by the set designer,” Brousseau recalls. Each motorcycle had to be taken apart completely, and all the parts nickel-plated, before it was painted. (The church denies Brousseau’s account.)
Brousseau also says that he helped customize a Ford Excursion S.U.V. that Cruise owned, installing features such as handmade eucalyptus panelling. The customization job was presented to Tom Cruise as a gift from David Miscavige, he said. “I was getting paid fifty dollars a week,” he recalls. “And I’m supposed to be working for the betterment of mankind.” Several years ago, Brousseau says, he worked on the renovation of an airport hangar that Cruise maintains in Burbank. Sea Org members installed faux scaffolding, giant banners bearing the emblems of aircraft manufacturers, and a luxurious office that was fabricated at church facilities, then reassembled inside the hangar. Brousseau showed me dozens of photographs documenting his work for Cruise.
Both Cruise’s attorney and the church deny Brousseau’s account. Cruise’s attorney says that “the Church of Scientology has never expended any funds to the personal benefit of Mr. Cruise or provided him with free services.” Tommy Davis says that these projects were done by contractors, and that Brousseau acted merely as an adviser. He also says, “None of the Church staff involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honored to assist him. Whatever small economic benefit Mr. Cruise may have received from the assistance of Church staff pales in comparison to the benefits the Church has received from Mr. Cruise’s many years of volunteer efforts for the Church.” Yet this assistance may have involved many hours of unpaid labor on the part of Sea Org members.
Miscavige’s official title is chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, but he dominates the entire organization. His word is absolute, and he imposes his will even on some of the people closest to him. According to Rinder and Brousseau, in June, 2006, while Miscavige was away from the Gold Base, his wife, Shelly, filled several job vacancies without her husband’s permission. Soon afterward, she disappeared. Her current status is unknown. Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he won’t disclose where that is.
The garden behind Anne Archer and Terry Jastrow’s house, in Brentwood, is filled with olive trees and hummingbirds. A fountain gurgles beside the swimming pool. When I visited, last May, Jastrow told me about the first time he met Archer, in Milton Katselas’s class. “I saw this girl sitting next to Milton,” Jastrow recalled. “I said, ‘Who is that?’ ” There was a cool wind blowing in from the Pacific, and Archer drew a shawl around her.
“We were friends for about a year and a half before we ever had our first date,” Archer said. They were married in 1978. “Our relationship really works,” Jastrow said. “We attribute that essentially a hundred per cent to applying Scientology.” The two spoke of the techniques that had helped them, such as never being critical of the other and never interrupting. “This isn’t a creed,” Archer said. “These are basic natural laws of life.” She described Hubbard as “an engineer” who had codified human emotional states, in order to guide people to “feel a zest and a love for life.”
I asked them how the controversy surrounding Scientology had affected them. “It hasn’t touched me,” Archer said. “It’s not that I’m not aware of it.” She went on, “Scientology is growing. It’s in a hundred and sixty-five countries.”
“Translated into fifty languages!” Jastrow added. “It’s the fastest-growing religion.” He added, “Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organization ever.” He continued, “When you study the historical perspective of new faiths, historically, they’ve all been—”
“Attacked,” Archer said. “Look what happened to the—”
“The Christians,” Jastrow said, simultaneously. “Think of the Mormons and the Christian Scientists.”
We talked about the church’s focus on celebrities. “Hubbard recognized that if you really want to inspire a culture to have peace and greatness and harmony among men, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish,” Archer said. “And if he’s particularly well known he needs a place where he can be comfortable. Celebrity Centres provide that.” She blamed the press for concentrating too much on Scientology celebrities. Journalists, she said, “don’t write about the hundreds of thousands of other Scientologists—”
“Millions!”
“Millions of other Scientologists. They only write about four friggin’ people!”
The church won’t release official membership figures, but it informally claims eight million members worldwide. Davis says that the figure comes from the number of people throughout the world who have donated to the church. “There is no process of conversion, there is no baptism,” Davis told me. It was a simple decision: “Either you are or you aren’t.” 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.
Jastrow suggested that Scientology’s critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drugmakers, pharmacies—“all those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well.” He cited a recent article in USA Today which noted that an alarmingly high number of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had been hospitalized for mental illness. Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.”
Scientology has perpetuated Hubbard’s antagonism toward psychiatry. An organization that the church co-founded, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, maintains a permanent exhibit in Los Angeles called “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,” which argues that psychiatry contributed to the rise of Nazism and apartheid. The group is behind an effort “to help achieve legislative protections against abusive psychiatric treatment and drugging of children.” (Paul Haggis has hosted an event for the organization at his home. His defection from Scientology has not changed his view that “psychotropic drugs are overprescribed for children.”)
Jastrow, in his back yard, told me, “Scientology is going to be huge, and it’s going to help mankind right itself.” He asked me, “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?”
“That’s improving the civilization,” Archer added.
“Is there some other religion on the horizon that’s gonna help mankind?” he said. “Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where?”
Archer and Jastrow found their way into Scientology in the mid-seventies, but Tommy Davis was reared in Archer’s original faith, Christian Science. He never met L. Ron Hubbard. He was thirteen years old on January 24, 1986, the day Hubbard died. Although Davis grew up amid money and celebrity, he impressed people with his modesty and his idealism. Like Paul Haggis, Davis was first drawn to the church because of romantic problems. In 1996, he told Details that, when he was seventeen, he was having trouble with a girlfriend, and went to his mother for advice. Archer suggested that he go to the Celebrity Centre. After taking the Personal Values and Integrity course, Davis became a Scientologist.
In 1990, Davis was accepted at Columbia University. But, according to the defector John Peeler—who was then the secretary to Karen Hollander, the president of the Celebrity Centre—pressure was put on Davis to join the Sea Org. Hollander, Peeler says, wanted Tommy to be her personal assistant. “Karen felt that because of who his parents were, and the fact that he already had close friendships with other celebrities, he’d be a good fit,” Peeler said. “Whenever celebrities came in, there would be Anne Archer’s son.” At first, Davis resisted. “He wanted to go to college,” Peeler said. That fall, Davis entered Columbia. He attended for a semester, then dropped out and joined the Sea Org. “I always wanted to do something that helped people,” Davis explained to me. “I didn’t think the world needed another doctor or lawyer.” Archer and Jastrow say that they were surprised by Tommy’s decision. “We were hoping he’d get his college education,” Jastrow said.
Davis became fiercely committed to the Sea Org. He got a tattoo on one arm of its logo—two palm fronds embracing a star, supposedly the emblem of the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. He began working at the Celebrity Centre, attending to young stars like Juliette Lewis, before taking on Tom Cruise. David Miscavige was impressed with Davis. Mike Rinder recalled, “Miscavige liked the fact that he was young and looked trendy and wore Armani suits.”
Paul Haggis remembers first meeting Davis at the Celebrity Centre in the early nineties. “He was a sweet and bright boy,” Haggis said.
Davis’s rise within Scientology was not without difficulty. In 2005, Davis was sent to Clearwater to participate in something called the Estates Project Force. He was there at the same time as Donna Shannon, a veterinarian who had become an O.T. VII before joining the Sea Org. She had thought that she was attending a kind of boot camp for new Sea Org members, and was surprised to see veterans like Davis. She says that Davis, “a pretty nice guy,” was subjected to extensive hazing. “He complained about scrubbing a Dumpster with a toothbrush till late at night,” she recalls. “Then he’d be up at six to do our laundry.” Only later did Shannon learn that Davis was Anne Archer’s son.
Shannon and Davis worked together for a while in Clearwater, maintaining the grounds. “I was supposedly supervising him,” Shannon says. “I was told to make him work really hard.” At one point, Shannon says, Davis borrowed about a hundred dollars from her because he didn’t have money for food.
One day, according to Shannon, she and Davis were taking the bus to a work project. She asked why he was in the E.P.F.
“I got busted,” Davis told her. Using Scientology jargon, he said, “I fucked up on Tom Cruise’s lines”—meaning that he had botched a project that Cruise was involved in. “I just want to do my stuff and get back on post.”
Shannon recalled that, suddenly, “it was like a veil went over his eyes, and he goes, ‘I already said too much.’ ”
Several months later, Davis paid her back the money. (Davis says that he does not recall meeting Shannon, has never scrubbed a Dumpster, and has never had a need to borrow money.)
Davis ascended to his role as spokesman in 2007. He has since become known for his aggressive defenses of the church. In 2007, the BBC began reporting an investigative story about Scientology. From the start, the BBC crew, led by John Sweeney, was shadowed by a Scientology film crew. Davis travelled across the U.S. to disrupt Sweeney’s interviews with Scientology dissidents. The two men had a number of confrontations. In an incident captured on video in Florida, Sweeney suggests that Scientology is “a sadistic cult.” Davis responds, “For you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory, so offensive, and so bigoted. And the reason you kept repeating it is because you wanted to get a reaction like you’re getting right now. Well, buddy, you got it! Right here, right now, I’m angry! Real angry!” The two men had another encounter that left Sweeney screaming as Davis goaded him—an incident so raw that Sweeney apologized to his viewers.
Shortly afterward, in March, 2007, Davis mysteriously disappeared. He was under considerable stress. According to Mike Rinder, Davis had told Sweeney that he reported to Miscavige every day, and that angered Miscavige, who wanted to be seen as focussed on spiritual matters, not public relations. According to Rinder, Davis “blew.” A few days later, he surfaced in Las Vegas. Davis was sent to Clearwater, where he was “security-checked” by Jessica Feshbach, a church stalwart. A security check involves seeking to gain a confession with an E-Meter, in order to rout out subversion. It can function as a powerful form of thought control.
Davis claims that he never fled the church and was not in Las Vegas. He did go to Clearwater. “I went to Florida and worked there for a year and took some time off,” he told me. “I did a lot of study, a lot of auditing.” He and Feshbach subsequently got married.
When I first contacted Tommy Davis, last April, he expressed a reluctance to talk, saying that he had already spent a month responding to Paul Haggis. “It made little difference,” he said. “The last thing I’m interested in is dredging all this up again.” He kept putting me off, saying that he was too busy to get together, but he promised that we would meet when he was more available. In an e-mail, he said, “We should plan on spending at least a full day together as there is a lot I would want to show you.” We finally arranged to meet on Memorial Day weekend.
I flew to Los Angeles and waited for him to call. On Sunday at three o’clock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with Feshbach. We sat at a table on the patio. Davis has his mother’s sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit with a blue shirt. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her hair. Davis now told me that he was “not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis.” I had come to Los Angeles specifically to talk to him, at a time he had chosen. I asked if he had been told not to talk to me. He said no.
Feshbach said that she had spoken to Mark Isham, whom I had interviewed the day before. “He talked to you about what are supposed to be our confidential scriptures.” Any discussion of the church’s secret doctrines was offensive, she said.
In my meeting with Isham, he asserted that Scientology was not a “faith-based religion.” I pointed out that, in Scientology’s upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham said that he wasn’t going to discuss the details of O.T. III. “In the wrong hands, it can hurt people,” he said.
“Everything I have to say about Paul, I’ve already said,” Davis told me. He agreed, however, to respond to written questions about the church.
In late September, Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, travelled to Manhattan to meet with me and six staff members of The New Yorker. In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet.
Davis, early in his presentation, attacked the credibility of Scientology defectors, whom he calls “bitter apostates.” He said, “They make up stories.” He cited Bryan Wilson, an Oxford sociologist, who has argued that testimony from the disaffected should be treated skeptically, noting, “The apostate is generally in need of self-justification. He seeks to reconstruct his own past to excuse his former affiliations and to blame those who were formerly his closest associates.”
Davis spoke about Gerry Armstrong, a former Scientology archivist who copied, without permission, many of the church’s files on Hubbard, and who settled in a fraud suit against the church in 1986. Davis charged that Armstrong had forged many of the documents that he later disseminated in order to discredit the church’s founder. He also alleged that Armstrong had spread rumors of a 1967 letter in which Hubbard told his wife that he was “drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and grays” while researching the Operating Thetan material. Davis also noted that, in 1984, Armstrong had been captured on videotape telling a friend, “I can create documents with relative ease. You know, I did for a living.” Davis’s decision to cite this evidence was curious—though the quote cast doubt on Armstrong’s ethics, it also suggested that forging documents had once been part of a Scientologist’s job.
Davis passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong “sitting naked” with a giant globe in his lap. “This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money,” Davis said. “He’s not a very sane person.”
Armstrong told me that, in the photo, he is actually wearing running shorts under the globe. The article is about his attempt to create a movement for people to “abandon the use of currency.” He said that he received eight hundred thousand dollars in the 1986 settlement and had given most of the money away. (The settlement prohibited Armstrong from talking about Scientology, a prohibition that he has ignored, and the church has won two breach-of-contract suits against him, including a five-hundred-thousand-dollar judgment in 2004.)
Davis also displayed photographs of what he said were bruises sustained by Mike Rinder’s former wife in 2010, after Rinder physically assaulted her in a Florida parking lot. (Rinder denies committing any violence. A sheriff’s report supports this.) Davis also showed a mug shot of Marty Rathbun in a jailhouse jumpsuit, after being arrested in New Orleans last July for public drunkenness. “Getting arrested for being drunk on the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse?” Davis cracked. “That’s like getting arrested for being a leper in a leper colony.” (Rathbun’s arrest has been expunged.) Claire and Marc Headley were “the most despicable people in the world”; Jeff Hawkins was “an inveterate liar.”
I asked how, if these people were so reprehensible, they had all arrived at such elevated positions in the church. “They weren’t like that when they were in those positions,” Davis responded. The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology’s ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested to Davis that Scientology didn’t seem to work if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, and embezzlers.
Scientology, Davis said, doesn’t pretend to be perfect, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. “I haven’t done things like that,” Davis said. “I haven’t suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, lied—contrary to what Paul Haggis says.” He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: “If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology . . . then why the hell did he stick around for thirty-five years?” He continued, “Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose?” Davis shook his head in disgust. “I think he’s the most hypocritical person in the world.”
We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged against Miscavige. “The only people who will corroborate are their fellow-apostates,” Davis said. He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting the accusations, and noted that the tales about Miscavige always hinged on “inexplicable violent outbursts.” Davis said, “One would think that if such a thing occurred—which it most certainly did not—there’d have to be a reason.”
I had wondered about these stories as well. While Rinder and Rathbun were in the church, they had repeatedly claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless. Then, after Rinder defected, he said that Miscavige had beaten him fifty times. Rathbun has confessed that, in 1997, he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the case of Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism. If these men were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of lying to destroy it? Davis later claimed that Rathbun is in fact trying to overthrow Scientology’s current leadership and take over the church. (Rathbun now makes his living by providing Hubbard-inspired counselling to other defectors, but he says that he has no desire to be part of a hierarchical organization. “Power corrupts,” he says.)
Twelve other defectors told me that they had been beaten by Miscavige, or had witnessed Miscavige beating other church staff members. Most of them, like John Peeler, noted that Miscavige’s demeanor changed “like the snap of a finger.” Others who never saw such violence spoke of their constant fear of the leader’s anger.
At the meeting, Davis brought up Jack Parsons’s black-magic society, which Hubbard had supposedly infiltrated. Davis said, “He was sent in there by Robert Heinlein”—the science-fiction writer—“who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time.” Davis said, “A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we’d never been able to before.” The book to which Davis was referring is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention in the book of Heinlein’s sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring, on the part of naval intelligence or any other organization. Patterson says that he looked into the matter, at the suggestion of Scientologists, but found nothing.
Davis and I discussed an assertion that Marty Rathbun had made to me about the O.T. III creation story—the galactic revelations that Haggis had deemed “madness.” While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun told me, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists skipped the O.T. III level. Miscavige shelved the idea, Rathbun told me. Davis called Rathbun’s story “libellous.” He explained that the cornerstone of Scientology was the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. “Mr. Hubbard’s material must be and is applied precisely as written,” Davis said. “It’s never altered. It’s never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology.”
But hadn’t certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard’s books been changed after his death?
Davis admitted that that was so, but he maintained that “the current editions are one-hundred-per-cent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.
“The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?” I asked.
“No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied.
“Somebody put the material in those—?”
“I can only imagine. . . . It wasn’t Mr. Hubbard,” Davis said, cutting me off.
“Who would’ve done it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t think it really matters,” Davis said. “The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyone’s sexual orientation. . . .”
“Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked.
“Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said.
After this exchange, I looked at some recent editions that the church had provided me with. On page 125 of “Dianetics,” a “sexual pervert” is defined as someone engaging in “homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc.” Apparently, the bigot’s handiwork was not fully excised.
At the meeting, Davis and I also discussed Hubbard’s war record. His voice filling with emotion, he said that, if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie.” He concluded, “The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.”
In the binders that Davis provided, there was a letter from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. The letter states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was “technically pronounced ‘fit for duty.’ ” This was the same period during which Hubbard claimed to have been blinded and lame. Davis had highlighted a passage: “Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected.” Davis added later that, according to Robert Heinlein, Hubbard’s ankles had suffered a “drumhead-type injury”; this can result, Davis explained, “when the ship is torpedoed or bombed.”
Davis acknowledged that some of Hubbard’s medical records did not appear to corroborate Hubbard’s version of events. But Scientology had culled other records that did confirm Hubbard’s story, including documents from the National Archives in St. Louis. The man who did the research, Davis said, was “Mr. X.”
Davis explained, “Anyone who saw ‘J.F.K.’ remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costner’s character goes and meets with a man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald Sutherland.” In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations. (Oliver Stone, who directed “J.F.K.,” says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the eighties, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology.
“We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis told me. “He actually solved the conundrum for us.” According to Davis, Prouty explained to the church representatives that, because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer. And, essentially, they create two sets.” He said, “Fletcher Prouty basically issued an affidavit saying L. Ron Hubbard’s records were sheep-dipped.” Prouty died in 2001.
Davis later sent me a copy of what he said was a document that confirmed Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the U.S. Naval Service,” dated December 6, 1945. The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote to me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of medals that Hubbard supposedly won. Two of the medals in the photograph weren’t even created until after Hubbard left active service.
After filing a request with the National Archives in St. Louis, The New Yorker obtained what archivists assured us were Hubbard’s complete military records—more than nine hundred pages. Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard’s being wounded in battle or breaking his feet. X-rays taken of Hubbard’s right shoulder and hip showed calcium deposits, but there was no evidence of any bone or joint disease in his ankle.
There is a “Notice of Separation” in the records, but it is not the one that Davis sent me. The differences in the two documents are telling. The St. Louis document indicates that Hubbard earned four medals for service, but they reflect no distinction or valor. In the church document, his job preference after the service is listed as “Studio (screen writing)”; in the official record, it is “uncertain.” The church document indicates, falsely, that Hubbard completed four years of college, obtaining a degree in civil engineering. The official document correctly notes two years of college and no degree.
On the church document, the commanding officer who signed off on Hubbard’s separation was “Howard D. Thompson, Lt. Cmdr.” The file contains a letter, from 2000, to another researcher, who had written for more information about Thompson. An analyst with the National Archives responded that the records of commissioned naval officers at that time had been reviewed, and “there was no Howard D. Thompson listed.”
The church, after being informed of these discrepancies, said, “Our expert on military records has advised us that, in his considered opinion, there is nothing in the Thompson notice that would lead him to question its validity.” Eric Voelz, an archivist who has worked at the St. Louis archive for three decades, looked at the document and pronounced it a forgery.
Since leaving the church, Haggis has been in therapy, which he has found helpful. He’s learned how much he blames others for his problems, especially those who are closest to him. “I really wish I had found a good therapist when I was twenty-one,” he said. In Scientology, he always felt a subtle pressure to impress his auditor and then write up a glowing success story. Now, he said, “I’m not fooling myself that I’m a better man than I am.”
Recently, he and Rennard separated. They have moved to the same neighborhood in New York, so that they can share custody of their son. Rennard has also decided to leave the church. Both say that the divorce has nothing to do with their renunciation of Scientology.On November 9th, “The Next Three Days” premièred at the Ziegfeld Theatre, in Manhattan. Movie stars lined up on the red carpet as photographers fired away. Jason Beghe, who plays a detective in the film, was there. He told me that he had taken in a young man, Daniel Montalvo, who had recently blown. He was placed in the Cadet Org, a junior version of the Sea Org, at age five, and joined the Sea Org at eleven. “He’s never seen television,” Beghe said. “He doesn’t even know who Robert Redford is.”
After the screening, everyone drifted over to the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel. Haggis was in a corner receiving accolades from his friends when I found him. I asked him if he felt that he had finally left Scientology. “I feel much more myself, but there’s a sadness,” he admitted. “If you identify yourself with something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it leaves a bit of space.” He went on, “It’s not really the sense of a loss of community. Those people who walked away from me were never really my friends.” He understood how they felt about him, and why. “In Scientology, in the Ethics Conditions, as you go down from Normal through Doubt, then you get to Enemy, and, finally, near the bottom, there is Treason. What I did was a treasonous act.”
I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology. “These people have long memories,” he told me. “My bet is that, within two years, you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1Daj3ZXB8
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