by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the first two episodes of The Ascent of Woman I watched the third episode of Leah Remini’s Arts
& Entertainment series Scientology and the Aftermath, her interviews with people who (like Remini
herself) were part of the Church of Scientology for decades until they finally
split with it and suffered, notably through the Church’s policy of
“disconnection” which requires that people still in the Church cut off all
contact with apostates — even apostates in their own family. Her interviewee
this time was Mary Kahn, who in 1973 was on her way to a drug party when she
ran into a recruiter for the Church of Scientology, who convinced her that
Scientology could offer her all the insights into herself she was hoping for
from drugs without the legal and health hazards. She got into the church
big-time and married a man named David she met in Scientology. They had two
sons, Michael and Sammy — Michael eventually left the church (and he’s the big
missing presence in this show — it’s not clear what happened to him, whether
he’s still alive or if Mary reconnected with him after she, too, left the
Church) but Sammy stayed in and faithfully “disconnected” from his mom, much to
her horror and continuing sorrow. In some ways the most compelling part of
Mary’s story was the extent to which Scientology never lets up on its financial
demands on you — once L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986 his successor as the church’s
head, David Miscavige, went through a major search of Hubbard’s writings
looking for “levels” beyond OT VII (OT stands for “Operating Thetan,”
Scientology-speak for someone who’s advanced up their “Bridge to Total Freedom”
and not only got clear of all their engrams, body thetans and other nasties
Scientology claims cause all your problems and which they can help you get rid
of … for, of course, a stiff price, but achieved such amazing powers as the
ability to defy gravity) that he could sell to willing Scientologists and keep
the income stream going. He apparently found — or was able to concoct — an OT
VIII, but Miscavige was disappointed that Hubbard hadn’t left behind any more
levels than that. No problem; the Church of Scientology now tells its
parishioners that there were “errors” in the previous editions of their
courses, and that means they have to spend thousands of dollars (on top of the
thousands they’ve already spent) to buy new editions of Hubbard’s books and they have to take the OT courses all over again.
Mary Kahn completed her first OT VIII in 1987 (the year after L. Ron Hubbard
died — or, in Scientology-speak, “dropped the body”) and it took her two weeks
to do the final course. When she was told she had to go through the whole set
of courses over again, she did OT VIII in 2009 and this time it took her two
months, and the whole thing was offered only on board a ship called the Freehold, not only so the Church could evade government
oversight (running things from ships was a strategy pioneered by Hubbard in the
1960’s because he wanted his operation to be free from any government’s
jurisdiction) but also so you’d be trapped there. In some respects Scientology
still has the aura of a cult — plenty of other cults pull the same stunts on
their adherents, including isolating them from the rest of humanity, making
them stay up all hours (apparently sleep deprivation makes you more susceptible
to conditioning of all sorts), making them read esoteric literature and
regurgitate its contents on demand, and essentially regimenting their lives
24/7. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, medical schools are run on the same
principle: you’re kept awake all hours, given huge amounts of literature to
read, and so overscheduled you can’t actually think about what you’re reading — let alone read anything
with a different point of view — with the idea being to turn you into a kind of
intelligent robot that will always
come to the same conclusions as your teachers.) She made a mildly critical
remark about the Church to her husband David — who, being a good Scientologist,
naturally reported her to church authorities — and she was told to come in for
a “sec check” in which she’d be “audited” with an E-meter, a sort of crude lie
detector that is basic to the Church of Scientology. (The Church used to claim
that this device could be useful in psychotherapy, but in the 1960’s the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration went after the Church for practicing medicine
without a license, and now E-meters can legally be manufactured and sold in the
U.S. but only if they carry a
plaque on them stating the disclaimer that they are offered only as devices for religious ritual, sort of like rosary
beads.) One point Remini hasn’t
mentioned in her show thus far is that, though “auditing” is like psychotherapy
in that the auditor asks questions designed to elicit intense responses in the
person being audited that are supposed to lead to breakthroughs that will
improve the mental health of the auditee, Scientologists being audited do not have the protection of doctor-patient
confidentiality psychiatric patients do — so the Church of Scientology has a
huge dossier of intimate personal information on every member that they can use at will, including (it’s
often alleged) blackmail to keep them in the church.
The third part of Scientology
and the Aftermath is often moving — though
the omission of any reference to the fate of Michael Kahn aside from a brief
reference to his having left the church before his parents did is a major flaw
— especially when David recalls being ordered by the Church to divorce his
wife, and him thinking he was about to do so until he did what Remini and the
viewers of this program (me, certainly) consider the right thing and chose his
wife and his marriage over this sick institution. Mary is also both moving and
chilling when she recalls her last encounter with the Church of Scientology —
they’d called her in for interrogation and she was willing to answer questions
but not to use the E-meter.
Instead she walked out of the interrogation room in the church’s headquarters
in Clearwater, Florida — fortunately her interrogator hadn’t locked it — only
to find that the back entrance she’d hoped to use to escape was locked and a Church member tried to block her way
from leaving, upon which she decided to walk out the front door and hope that the Church’s disinclination to
show its dark side in public would lead them to allow her to reach the sidewalk
in front of the building, whereupon if there were other people present (which,
fortunately for Mary, there were), they’d allow her to leave unmolested. I’ve
blown hot and cold on the Church of Scientology; sometimes I’ve regarded it as
an amusing but relatively harmless organization — their creation myth involving
the evil ruler Xenu, who destroyed all human life in volcanoes and then had to
deal with what to do about the remaining souls (he forced them to watch movies
for 36 hours dealing with God and the Devil, thereby persuading them that these
beings existed when good Scientologists know they don’t) is silly, but it’s not
much sillier than God impregnating a virgin so she could give birth to a child
who would grow up and die to save humanity from its sins, or an illiterate
desert guy receiving prophecies from the Angel Gabriel, or a failed farmer in
upstate New York in the 1830’s getting a book printed on gold tablets from a
celestial lending library and two magic stones he could use to translate the
“Reformed Egyptian” it was written in into English — but the more recent
literature shows it as a truly dark organization that has used its entrées into
the rich and powerful (a deliberate recruiting strategy on the part of L. Ron
Hubbard, who felt Jesus’s big mistake had been to reach out to people who had
no money instead of the 1-percenters who could have made him and his church
rich) for some really malevolent purposes.
