Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (59 page)

Meantime, Davis sent me a copy of a document that he said clearly confirmed Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the US 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 me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm
,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of the actual medals Hubbard supposedly won, but two of them weren’t even created until after Hubbard left active service.

There was a fire in
the St. Louis archives in 1973, which destroyed a number of documents, but Yvette returned with more than nine hundred pages of what the archivists insisted were Hubbard’s complete military records. 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 ankles.

There is a Notice of Separation in the official records, but it is not the one 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. 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.

The official Notice of Separation was signed by Lieutenant (jg) J. C.
Rhodes, who also signed Hubbard’s detachment paperwork. 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, asserted, “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 and
William Seibert, two longtime archivists at the St. Louis facility, examined the church’s document and pronounced it a forgery.
¹⁰

Eric Voelz additionally told
The New Yorker
, “The United States has never
handed out Purple Hearts with a palm.” He said that ditto marks, which are found on the document provided by the church, do not typically appear on forms of this kind. The font was also suspect,
since it was not consistent with the size or style of the times. Voelz had never heard of the “Marine Medal,” and he took issue with the “Br. & Dtch. Vict. Meds.” found on the church document, saying that medals awarded by foreign countries are not listed on a Notice of Separation, and that they were unlikely to have been awarded to an American in any case.

A few months after this meeting, Davis and
Feshbach stopped representing Scientology, even though they continued to be listed as the top spokespeople on the church website. Rumor from former members is that Davis blew
but was recovered and once again subjected to sec-checking. Then Feshbach became seriously ill. According to the church, they are on a leave of absence from the Sea Org for medical reasons. They are now living in Texas. When I last spoke to Davis, he said, “I think you should know my allegiances haven’t changed—at all.” He added: “I don’t have to answer your questions anymore.”

I
f Scientology is based on a lie, as
Tommy Davis’s formulation at the
New Yorker
meeting suggests, what does it say about the many people who believe in its doctrine or—like Davis and Feshbach—publicly defend and promote the organization and its practices?

Of course, no religion can prove that it is “true.” There are myths and miracles at the core of every great belief system that, if held up to the harsh light of a scholar or an investigative reporter, could easily be passed off as lies. Did Mohammed really ride into Heaven on the back of his legendary transport, the steed Buraq? Did Jesus’ disciples actually encounter their crucified leader after his burial? Were these miracles or visions or lies? Would the religions survive without them?

There is no question that a belief system can have positive, transformative effects on people’s lives. Many current and former Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses.

Hubbard once wrote that “the old religion
”—by which he meant Christianity—was based on “a very painful lie,” which was the idea of Heaven. “Yes, I’ve been to Heaven. And so have you,” he writes. “It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints—and electronic implantation equipment.” Heaven, he says, was built as an implant station
43 trillion years ago. “So there was a Heaven after all—which is why you are on this planet and were condemned never to be free again—until Scientology.” He went on: “What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to better man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell.”

One might compare Scientology with the
Church of Latter Day Saints, a new religion of the previous century. The founder of the movement,
Joseph Smith, claimed to have received a pair of golden plates from the angel Moroni in upstate New York in 1827, along with a pair of magical “seeing stones,” which allowed him to read the contents. Three years later, he published
The
Book of Mormon
, founding a movement that would provoke the worst outbreak of religious persecution in American history. Mormons were chased all across the country because of their practice of polygamy and their presumed heresy. Smith himself was murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. His beleaguered followers sought to escape the United States and establish a religious theocracy in the territory of Utah, which they called Zion. Mormons were so despised that there was a bill in Congress to exterminate them. And yet
Mormonism would evolve and go on to become one of the fastest-growing denominations in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, centuries. Members of the faith now openly run for president of the United States. In much of the world, this religion, which was once tormented because of its perceived anti-American values, is now thought of as being the most American of religions; indeed, that’s how many Mormons think of it as well. It is a measure not only of the religion’s success but also of the ability of a faith to adapt and change.

And yet Joseph Smith was plainly a liar. In answer to the charge of polygamy, he claimed he had only one wife, when he had already accumulated a harem. A strange but revealing episode occurred in 1835, when Smith purchased several Egyptian mummies from an itinerant merchant selling such curiosities. Inside the mummy cases were scrolls of papyrus, reduced to fragments, which Smith declared were the actual writings of the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Smith produced what he called a translation of the papyri, titled
The Book of Abraham
. It still forms a portion of Mormon doctrine. In America at the time, Egyptian was still thought to be indecipherable, but the Rosetta Stone had already been discovered, and
Jean-François
Champollion had successfully rendered the hieroglyphic language into French. In 1966, the Joseph Smith papyri were discovered in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was soon shown that the passages that Smith “translated” were common funerary documents with no reference to Abraham or Joseph whatsoever. This fraud has been
known for decades, but it has made little difference in the growth of the religion or the devotion of its adherents. Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.

The evolution of Scientology into a religion also resembles the progression of
Christian Science, the faith Tommy Davis was born into. Like Hubbard,
Mary Baker Eddy
, the founder of Christian Science, experimented with alternative ways of healing. Like Hubbard, she claimed to have been an invalid who cured herself; she, too, wrote a book based on her experience,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
, which became the basis for the founding of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. Far more than is the case with Scientology, Christian Science stands against mainstream medical practices, even though both organizations lay claim to being more “scientific” than religious. Many religions, including Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even Christianity—have known scorn and persecution. Some, like the
Shakers and the
Millerites, died out, but others, including Mormons and
Pentecostals, have elbowed their way into the crowded religious landscape of American society.

The practice of
disconnection, or shunning, is not unique to Scientology, nor is the longing for religious sanctuary. America itself was founded by true believers who separated themselves from their non-Puritan kinfolk by placing an ocean between them. New religious leaders continually appear, giving expression to unmet spiritual needs. There is a constant churning of spiritual movements and denominations all over the world, one that advances with freedom of expression. One must look at L. Ron Hubbard and the odyssey of his movement against this historical backdrop and the natural human yearning for transcendence and submission.

In the late 1970s, I lived for several months in an
Amish and
Mennonite community in central Pennsylvania, researching my first book.
¹
Their movement had been nearly annihilated in Europe, but in the 1720s they began taking refuge in William Penn’s colony, the “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania. Amish life has remained essentially unchanged since then, a kind of museum of eighteenth-century farm life. The adherents live sequestered lives, out of the drift of popular culture, on a kind of religious atoll. I was moved by the beauty and simplicity of their lives. The Amish see the Earth as God’s garden, and their duty is to tend it. The environment they surround themselves with is filled with a sense of peace and a purposeful orderliness. Individuality is sanded down to the point that one’s opinions are as similar to another’s as the approved shape of a bonnet or the regulation beard. Because fashion and novelty are outlawed, one feels comfortably encased in a timeless, unchanging vacuum. The enforced conformity dims the noise of diversity and the anxiety of uncertainty; one feels closer to eternity. One is also aware of the electrified fence of orthodoxy that surrounds and protects this Edenic paradise, and the expulsion that awaits those who doubt or question. Still, there is a kind of quiet majesty in the Amish culture—not because of their rejection of modernity, but because of their principled non-violence and their adherence to a way of living that tempers their fanaticism. The Amish suffer none of the social opprobrium that Scientologists must endure; indeed, they are generally treated like beloved endangered animals, coddled by their neighbors and smiled upon by society. And yet they are highly schismatic, willing to break off all relations with their dearest relatives on what would seem to an outsider to be an inane point of doctrine or even the question of whether one can allow eaves on a house or pictures on a wall.