Read The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology Online
Authors: John Sweeney
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology
THE CHURCH OF FEAR
JOHN SWEENEY
To my father, Leonard Sweeney.
‘Your next endless trillions of years and the whole agonized future of every man, woman and child on this planet depend on what you do here and now, with and in Scientology.’
- L Ron Hubbard.
‘Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you. Really. Fuck you. Period.’
- Tom Cruise.
‘Ours is often called an age of scepticism. Let us see whether this is not, on the contrary, an age of fatuous credulity.’
- CH Rolph.
CONTENTS
Chapter Two: What Do My Socks Have to Do With Spiritual Freedom?
Chapter Three: Ill-Met At Midnight
Chapter Four: One Man Against The Crowd
Chapter Five: Your Needle’s Floating, Tom
Chapter Six: This Is The Word of The Church of Scientology
Chapter Seven: Do I Look Brainwashed To You?
Chapter Eight: They Want You To Be Afraid
Chapter Nine: The Industry of Death
Chapter Ten: The Tethered Goat
Chapter Eleven: The Concrete Angel
Chapter Twelve: You Suck Cock On Hollywood Boulevard
Chapter Thirteen: Is There Anybody There?
Chapter Fourteen: Panorama Exposed
Chapter Seventeen: The Space Alien Cathedral
INTRODUCTION
W
elcome to the Church of Fear. Tom Cruise and John Travolta and a host of Hollywood’s finest will tell you that the Church of Scientology is a force for good, that it helps you communicate better, understand yourself more, become a more superior kind of being.
But beware: the Church is not what it seems. Go, for example, to the organisation’s recruiting centre on London’s Tottenham Court Road and you will see L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics in the window, illustrated by a volcano erupting red-hot rocks. That’s a subtle hint, some say, to the Church’s secret cosmology, its belief that man’s inhumanity to man is caused by a space alien Satan massacring space aliens in volcanoes 75 million years ago. The Church denies that, and much else.
Instantly, reader, you should be aware what the Church says of me: that I am a bigot and a liar, that I am psychotic. A member of the Church of Scientology has said on his blog: ‘John Sweeney is genuinely evil.’
I used to be a war reporter. From Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya to Zimbabwe I have been shelled, shot at, bombed, arrested, threatened and a Serb devotee of Slobodan Milosevic once stuck two sticks of dynamite up my nose. But never, ever, in all my times in all those wars have I felt under such harrowing psychological pressure as I did inside the brainwashing section of the Church of Scientology’s exhibition, ‘Psychiatry: The Industry of Death’ on Sunset Boulevard in LA in the spring of 2007.
I am not a timid man but I was afraid then and am afraid now, afraid of them and afraid of it. I fear that by even attempting to write this book I risk ruin. I am afraid of enormous legal bills breaking me and my family; afraid of not telling the whole truth, and letting down the ordinary, extraordinary people who have had the courage to get out and who have suffered so much because of the Church; afraid of letting down general readers because the book may be too faint-hearted, the story too legally constricted to understand. But if I write too bluntly, I fear the Church will strike me down. I have wrestled with those fears for five years.
Back in 2007 in the brainwashing section of their exhibition, I was afraid they were brainwashing me. I was afraid that I was about to lose my grip on reality and I lost my temper with a volcanic passion that still frightens me, that makes me wonder where it came from. I roared at Tommy Davis, a leading acolyte of the Church, close friend and, in a bad light, lookalike of its number one Hollywood apostle, Tom Cruise.
John Sweeney: No Tommy you stop there …
Tommy Davis: Brain washing! Brainwashing is a crime!
John Sweeney: You listen to me!
Tommy Davis: Brainwashing is a crime!
John Sweeney: YOU WERE NOT THERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVIEW. YOU WERE NOT THERE.’
The YouTube video of me losing it, released by the Church a few days before our BBC Panorama on the Church, went viral. If you add up the figures from the main sites I got seven million hits. And then a kicking from the global media.
In the United States, news shows fronted by Styrofoam-bouffant-haired presenters with names like Cindy and Scott raised eyebrows at my outburst. In Britain, the headline in Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World ran: ‘TV MAN IN A FURY: A Panorama reporter has shamed the BBC with a hysterical rant during an investigation into Scientology. Balding TV veteran John Sweeney flipped while interviewing Tommy Davis, son of actress Anne Archer. He screamed, sprayed spittle into Davis’s face and jabbed his index finger in a row over brainwashing.’ Charles Moore wrote in the Spectator: ‘If you want to see how BBC people can behave when they are feeling righteous, do watch John Sweeney of Panorama screaming dementedly at some members of the Church of Scientology (available on YouTube) when they objected to his interview techniques. He looks and sounds like a secret police interrogator.’
I apologised then and I apologise now. I was wrong. Civilised discourse is the engine oil of democracy and by losing it and doing an impression of an exploding tomato I let down the values I cherish. It was a propaganda gift from heaven to the Church.
But that was not the moment when I felt most crushed by the power and reach of this thing I fear. The worst moment was not being followed by creepy private eyes on the streets of Los Angeles; not being shouted at; not being called a bigot relentlessly by Tommy Davis, the son of the actress whose bunny got boiled in Fatal Attraction; not returning to our hotel in Florida to find the Church’s agents waiting for us at midnight; not the creepy strangers harassing us in the States; not the creepy stranger knocking on the door of my neighbour back in London; not the mystery person who appeared in the shrubbery at our wedding in a fort in Cornwall. No, it was none of those.
The worst moment came a couple of weeks after I had lost it in LA but before our documentary made air. I was walking out of White City tube station in west London, towards the grim Grey Lubyanka, the concrete cardboard box that then housed the office of the BBC Current Affairs department. My colleague Patrick Barrie got a call on his mobile. He listened, said a few words and then killed the call and gave me the strange news.
We’d just been to film a woman who counted herself a victim of the Church. The mother, let’s call her Betty, made us comfortable in the front room of her spotlessly clean house. She was elegant, house-proud, funny, sweet but her story was unbearably sad. Betty was a hard-working single mum, with two grown-up children, let’s call them Phil and Samantha. Phil had died a few years previously in an accident on Friday, the 13th. Every anniversary of that grim date Betty and Sam would meet up for a chat and a cry. If one or the other was away, they would get on the phone and mourn their loss.
Then Sam joined the Church of Scientology. Betty told me that her daughter – a beautiful, loving, kind, considerate woman – turned, she said, into a stranger, someone cold, unfeeling, hard. Her mum became worried beyond words, not just because Sam was spending so much time and money on the Church, but because it felt like she had mutated into an entirely different being. Sam ‘disconnected’ – it is a term of art in Scientology - from her mother: no contact, no phonecalls, no birthday cards, no Christmas cards, no Mother’s Day cards, but worst of all, no contact on the anniversary of Phil’s death. No Friday the 13th, no mourning of a dead son and brother.
Betty dared to visit the restaurant where Samantha worked because she missed her so. Sam didn’t ignore her mother. That was too weak a word. It was as if Betty did not exist. It was, Betty told me, horrible: ‘it kills me. Through the mirror I could see her turn round quickly and she said, “have I got thick written across my head?” I said, “no”, and she said, “you are not doing any favours coming in here with your innocent face” and I said, “I just like coming”, and she said, “I don’t want you in here.”
Betty walked away from her adored child. ‘I cried and thought, “this is my daughter… What am I going to do? How long is this going to go on?” Her mind, said Betty, ‘seems totally twisted and taken over and I can’t get through to her. They say it’s a religion. I don’t class it as a religion. In my opinion it’s a cult.
‘There is nothing religious about Scientology. How can this organisation who say or think they are religious, how can they hold their heads up when they do nothing but split families up, they break them up into pieces until there is nothing left? What can be religious or God-giving that turns a daughter away from her mother?’
Betty got hold of Sam’s new mobile number and rang her on her birthday. ‘She said, “hello” and I just said, “Hi, sweetheart, this is Mum just phoning to say Happy Birthday” and she put the phone down. How can you disconnect from your mum?’
Tom Cruise, the most famous Scientologist, says it has helped him. What did Betty make of that?
‘It doesn’t help. I remember the questionnaire Samantha had to fill in and the results were that she was lacking in confidence, that they could help with her personality. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Samantha. People would tell you she is the most bubbly, bouncy brilliant person. They just put the problem there, and say, “yes we can sort it out for you” but it’s not free. It’s all money.’
What did Betty think had happened to her daughter?
‘She has been hypnotised and brainwashed. It’s like a staring, a glare almost icy, fixed, hardly a blink and the eyes look larger than normal. It is a trance. That is the only way I can describe it. Samantha is a victim and she has been recruited into Scientology and she has been brainwashed. It is like Samantha is deep down inside and this cocoon is being made around her, and this totally different person is there now.’
Tom Cruise in a leaked video said: ‘I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist, and it’s something that you have to earn… Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and know absolutely that you can help them… When you drive past an accident… you know you have to do something about it because you know you’re the only one that can really help… So it’s our responsibility to educate, create the new reality.’
And then he chuckles.
What did Betty feel about the Church’s celebrities, Tom Cruise and John Travolta?
‘I almost feel sorry for them in a way because they are almost victims of it. They have been recruited in the same way.’
Betty said she still loved her daughter and hoped one day that she would get her back. ‘I want to give her a hug and I want to love her, I love her anyway, but love her properly, and I can’t because there is me, there is Samantha and there is Scientology in the middle. And I can’t seem to get her back. Her mind has been absolutely taken over and that is really, really frightening.’