Speaking about Going Clear, Andrew O’Hehir a new Salon Q&A with Lawrence Wright. Many religions begin as bizarre cults and only survive if they can (mostly) shed the weirdness and stabilize, the sideshow far from the middle ring. Wright believes that could happen with Scientology. An excerpt:
Andrew O’Hehir:
You just said that you think this film could provoke a crisis that might help Scientology. I think it’s useful to point out, as you have done many times, that you did not actually set out to do a gotcha or an exposé.
Lawrence Wright:
Why bother? It’s the most stigmatized religion in America. An exposé, so what? But it is really interesting to understand why people are drawn in to the church. What do they get out of it and why do they stay? If you can understand that, in reference to a belief system that most people regard as very bizarre and has a reputation for being incredibly vindictive and litigious, then you might understand other social and religious and political movements that arise and take very good, kind, idealistic, intelligent, skeptical people and turn them into people they wouldn’t otherwise recognize.
Andrew O’Hehir:
The larger question here that you’re beginning to hint at is what makes a religion a religion? What does that word mean? The IRS has its own ideas, but …
Lawrence Wright:
Let’s start with the IRS because they’re the only agency empowered to make this distinction. It’s not exactly stocked full of theologians either. The way they determined that Scientology was a religion was to make a deal, because they were under legal siege of 2,400 lawsuits. Essentially, Scientology bludgeoned them into this tax exemption, which now denominates them as a religion. Previously, they were seen as a business enterprise and that’s the way they are seen in some European countries. Also, they are seen as a cult or a sect in Europe. But we call them a religion and I’m willing to accept that. It stretches the boundaries, clearly, but if you think of a religion having a set of scriptures – well L. Ron Hubbard still holds the Guinness record for the number of titles by a single author, as far as I know, more than 1,000. It’s a record that’s very hard to eclipse. Everything he wrote is considered a scripture by Scientology, even his novels.
Andrew O’Hehir:
Really? Battlefield Earth is a work of scripture?
Lawrence Wright:
Yes, it’s all scripture. It’s tax-exempt. There’s a huge body of work, not all of it fiction, having to do with ethics and psychology and so on that the church considers its literature. It functions as a community. Really, a religion is only separated from the rest of society by a circle of beliefs. So in that sense, sometimes the stranger the beliefs and the more exotic, the more bound together the community inside that circle is, and I think that’s true of Scientology. There is an origin story that may be a little bit bizarre, but bizarre beliefs are common in religion because religion is a belief in irrational things.•