Scientology Is the McDonalds of Religions | Louis Theroux | Big Think

I remember first hearing about it from my uncle Peter who lives in Long Beach. When I visited him in L.A. for the first time, he told me about this religion that had been created by a sci-fi writer called L. Ron Hubbard, and that it was beloved of actors and celebrities, and that they used hard sales tactics. (These were all his allegations; I mean, I'm sure Scientology would deny it.) He mentioned that they were very secretive, and no one really knew what was going on inside.

In fact, he told me—I remember him saying, “You can go down and look at their base; they've got walls around it with spikes on, but the spikes don't face outward…the spikes face inward.” I thought all of this was sort of really appealing. I mean, my own sense of both the absurd and the macabre was massively piqued.

Scientology, to me, seems to be a kind of junction of so many quintessentially American qualities. You've got the celebrity dimension; you've got the fact that it's in Hollywood; you've got its sort of relation to the business world and its swash-buckling form of capitalism that we have in the U.S. where you find a need, and you market to it, and if the need doesn't exist, then you create the need.

To me, it's always very telling when you realize that basically McDonald's and Scientology came into existence at almost exactly the same time. Around about 1950, Dianetics was published, and the first McDonald's was established. Actually, as business models, they're rather similar in that they both work using a franchise system. To me, Scientology is selling the spiritual hamburgers, if you like.

But it’s this piquancy that's added to it because of the strangeness and humor that's wrapped around it—the bizarreness of the language and the ritual. The packaging is, to me, quite funny. At the heart of Scientology is a kind of contradiction: they want to spread the good news about Scientology and Dianetics.

They claim it’s a life-changing, life-saving system that allows you to be your best, and, in fact, more than that, it is our last, best hope for saving the planet from war, insanity, crime, intolerance, and so forth. But they also don't want to give up those secrets too easily either, because they would say you have to go through a certain path, and that takes a “Bridge to Total Freedom,” as they call it.

But actually, arguably it's because it's their business model to sell secrets. So the contradiction is, well, how do you market a secret? Unlike other religions that I can think of, Christianity—you can get a Bible; in any hotel room, you'll find one in the top drawer of your bedside table. And Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, all the major religions, as far as I'm aware, their sacred texts are freely available, and there aren’t a whole bunch of secrets, you know, origin stories or mysterious myths that you have to pay to learn.

“What's inside the box? What could it be?” They also regard outsiders, and particularly journalists, as enemies. To me, it's actually both a problem in as much as they're not giving access, but it's also massively appealing and tantalizing to be aggressively confronted and then turned away.

Unlike most religions that you think of as being sort of welcoming and ethical, in the normal way where they sort of invite you—“Come on in, film with us, we'll tell you what we do”—Scientology is constantly, it seems to me, kind of pushing you away and telling you that they don't want your coverage. That nothing you can say about them is going to be the truth.