KABUL, Afghanistan — The potential scope of the fallout from
the burning of several copies of the Koran by American military personnel this
week became chillingly clear on Thursday as a man in an Afghan Army uniform shot
and killed two American soldiers, while a crowd nearby protested the desecration
of the Muslim holy book.
In the third successive day of deadly violence over the Koran burning, seven
Afghans were killed in three provinces on Thursday and many more were injured,
most in skirmishes with Afghan security forces. The Afghan government, which had
responded slowly on the first day of protests, was in high gear on Thursday as
officials tried to tamp down emotions ahead of the Friday day of prayer. Western
and Afghan authorities feared that there could be emotional demonstrations after
the prayer that the Taliban and extremist elements would try to exploit.
Afghan officials quoted from a letter from President Obama in which he, among
other things, apologized for the Koran burning. For President Hamid Karzai, the
episode has fast become a political thicket. He and other government officials
share with the Afghan populace a visceral disgust for the way American soldiers
treated the holy book, but they recognize that violent protests could draw
lethal responses from the police or soldiers, setting off a cycle of violence.
Complicating matters is that some of Mr. Karzai’s allies in Parliament and
elsewhere, including former mujahedeen leaders, have openly encouraged people to
take to the streets and attack NATO forces. Mr. Karzai has not spoken out
against them publicly, but his government’s overall message on Thursday
suggested that he did not want more violence.
Mr. Karzai met with members of both houses of Parliament at the presidential
palace and urged them to help to try to contain the protests.
“The president said that ‘according to our investigation we have found that
American soldiers mistakenly insulted the Koran and we will accept their
apology,’ ” said Fatima Aziz, a lawmaker from Kunduz who attended the meeting.
“He said, ‘Whoever did this should be punished, and they should avoid its
repetition. Insulting holy books and religion is not acceptable at all.’ ”
Ms. Aziz, who said she wept when told of the Koran burning, also said Mr. Karzai
told Parliament members that the protesters’ violent response was “‘not proper.’
”
Ms. Aziz, along with many educated Afghans, some of whom registered their views
on Facebook, said she was dismayed by the exploitation of the incident for
political gain and accused Iran and Pakistan of behind-the-scenes manipulation.
Both countries would like to see the American military under pressure, and the
reaction to the Koran burning has accomplished that.
The Taliban released two statements on Thursday: one urged Afghans to attack
foreign troops and installations as well as Afghan forces who are defending
them, and the second urged Afghan security forces to turn their guns on their
NATO colleagues.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan calls on all the youth present in the
security apparatus of the Kabul regime to fulfill their religious and national
duty,” the statement said, “to repent for their past sins and to record their
names with gold in the history books of Islam and Afghanistan by turning their
guns on the foreign infidel invaders instead of their own people.”
Mohammed Salih Suljoqi, a lawmaker from Herat, said the episode “has been used
as a tool of propaganda.”
“The noble and pure emotions of our fellow countrymen are being misused by the
intelligence agencies of neighboring countries,” he said, adding that some
groups “are trying to destabilize the situation and lead the country into
chaos.”
“All these tragic incidents can spread a dark shadow and negatively impact the
relationship of Afghanistan and the United States,” Mr. Suljoqi said.
President Karzai’s office quoted from what it called a letter of apology from
Mr. Obama that was delivered Thursday by Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to signal to
the Afghan public that the United States understood the distress the episode had
caused.
In the letter, according to Mr. Karzai’s press office, Mr. Obama wrote: “I wish
to express my deep regret for the reported incident. I extend to you and the
Afghan people my sincere apologies.” Mr. Obama’s office would not release the
text of what it called a three-page letter on a “host of issues” between the two
countries, “several sentences of which relate to this issue.”
One of the Republican candidates for president, Newt Gingrich, issued a
statement that harshly criticized Mr. Obama for his apology, calling it an
“outrage.”
“It is Hamid Karzai who owes the American people an apology, not the other way
around,” the statement said.
Four Afghans were killed in confrontations with the police in Oruzgan Province
and one in Baghlan Province. In Nangarhar Province, two Afghans protesting the
Koran burning were shot to death outside an American base in Khogyani District,
said Mujib Rahman, the doctor on duty at the hospital in the district center.
It was unclear whether they were shot by Afghan soldiers or NATO troops, but a
NATO spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. James Williams, said NATO troops would shoot only if
they were in mortal danger, and the protesters did not constitute mortal danger.
About the same time as the protest and the shootings outside the base, an Afghan
Army soldier turned his gun on NATO soldiers at the base, according to other
protesters and elders. Two American soldiers were killed. Mr. Karzai and the
religious leaders and elders he had assigned to investigate how the Koran
burning came about released a statement calling for restraint by the Afghan
people and demanding that those responsible be tried swiftly.
“In view of the particular security situation in the country, we call on all our
Muslim citizens of Afghanistan to exercise self-restraint and extra vigilance in
dealing with the issue and avoid resorting to protests and demonstrations” that
could be used by extremist groups to incite violence, the statement said, adding
that NATO officials had “agreed that the perpetrators of the crime be brought to
justice as soon as possible” in an open trial.
A NATO inquiry into the burning continues, a spokesman said, adding that the
United States would take disciplinary action if “warranted.”
EGYPT’S final round of parliamentary elections won’t end until next week, but
the outcome is becoming clear. The Muslim Brotherhood will most likely win half
the lower house of Parliament, and more extreme Islamists will occupy a quarter.
Secular parties will be left with just 25 percent of the seats.
Islamism did not cause the Arab Spring. The region’s authoritarian governments
had simply failed to deliver on their promises. Though Arab authoritarianism had
a good run from the 1950s until the 1980s, economies eventually stagnated, debts
mounted and growing, well-educated populations saw the prosperous egalitarian
societies they had been promised receding over the horizon, aggrieving virtually
everyone, secularists and Islamists alike.
The last few weeks, however, have confirmed that a revolution’s consequences
need not follow from its causes. Rather than bringing secular revolutionaries to
power, the Arab Spring is producing flowers of a decidedly Islamist hue. More
unsettling to many, Islamists are winning fairly: religious parties are placing
first in free, open elections in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. So why are so many
Arabs voting for parties that seem politically regressive to Westerners?
The West’s own history furnishes an answer. From 1820 to 1850, Europe resembled
today’s Arab world in two ways. Both regions experienced historic and seemingly
contagious rebellions that swept from country to country. And in both cases,
frustrated people in many nations with relatively little in common rallied
around a single ideology — one not of their own making, but inherited from
previous generations of radicals.
In 19th-century Europe, that ideology was liberalism. It emerged in the late
18th century from the American, Dutch, Polish and especially French revolutions.
Whereas the chief political divide in society had long been between monarchs and
aristocrats, the revolutions drew a new line between the “old regime” of
monarchy, nobility and church, and the new commercial classes and small
landholders. For the latter group, it was the old regime that produced the
predatory taxes, bankrupt treasuries, corruption, perpetual wars and other
pathologies that dragged down their societies. The liberal solution was to
extend rights and liberties beyond the aristocracy, which had inherited them
from the Middle Ages.
Suppressing liberalism became the chief aim of absolutist regimes in Austria,
Russia and Prussia after they helped defeat France in 1815. Prince Klemens von
Metternich, Austria’s powerful chancellor, claimed that “English principles” of
liberty were foreign to the Continent. But networks of liberals — Italian
carbonari, Freemasons, English Radicals — continued to operate underground,
communicating across societies and providing a common language for dissent.
This helped lay the ideological groundwork for Spain’s liberal revolution in
1820. From there, revolts spread to Portugal, the Italian states of Naples and
Piedmont, and Greece. News of the Spanish revolution even spurred the adoption
of liberal constitutions in the nascent states of Gran Colombia, Argentina,
Uruguay, Peru and Mexico. Despite their varied grievances, in each case
liberalism served as a rallying point and political program on which the
malcontents could agree.
A decade later, in July 1830, a revolution toppled France’s conservative Bourbon
monarchy. Insurrection spread to Belgium, Switzerland, a number of German and
Italian states and Poland. Once again, a variety of complaints were distilled
into the rejection of the old regime and the acceptance of liberalism.
The revolutions of 1848 were more numerous and consequential but remarkably
similar to the earlier ones. Rebels with little in common — factory workers in
Paris, peasants in Ireland, artisans in Vienna — followed a script written in
the 1790s that was rehearsed continuously in the ensuing years across the
continent.
Today, rural and urban Arabs with widely varying cultures and histories are
showing that they share more than a deep frustration with despots and a demand
for dignity. Most, whether moderate or radical, or living in a monarchy or a
republic, share a common inherited language of dissent: Islamism.
Political Islam, especially the strict version practiced by Salafists in Egypt,
is thriving largely because it is tapping into ideological roots that were laid
down long before the revolts began. Invented in the 1920s by the Muslim
Brotherhood, kept alive by their many affiliates and offshoots, boosted by the
failures of Nasserism and Baathism, allegedly bankrolled by Saudi and Qatari
money, and inspired by the defiant example of revolutionary Iran, Islamism has
for years provided a coherent narrative about what ails Muslim societies and
where the cure lies. Far from rendering Islamism unnecessary, as some experts
forecast, the Arab Spring has increased its credibility; Islamists, after all,
have long condemned these corrupt regimes as destined to fail.
Liberalism in 19th-century Europe, and Islamism in the Arab world today, are
like channels dug by one generation of activists and kept open, sometimes
quietly, by future ones. When the storms of revolution arrive, whether in Europe
or the Middle East, the waters will find those channels. Islamism is winning out
because it is the deepest and widest channel into which today’s Arab discontent
can flow.
John M. Owen
IV, a professor of politics
at the University of Virginia,
is the author
of “The Clash of Ideas in World Politics:
October 9,
2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES McGRATH
HOUSTON —
Christopher Hitchens, probably the country’s most famous unbeliever, received
the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Atheist
Alliance of America here on Saturday. Mr. Hitchens was flattered by the honor,
he said a few days beforehand, but also a little abashed. “I think being an
atheist is something you are, not something you do,” he explained, adding: “I’m
not sure we need to be honored. We don’t need positive reinforcement. On the
other hand, we do need to stick up for ourselves, especially in a place like
Texas, where they have laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ
you can’t run for sheriff.”
Mr. Hitchens, a prolific essayist and the author of “God Is Not Great: How
Religion Poisons Everything,” discovered in June 2010 that he had Stage 4
esophageal cancer. He has lately curtailed his once busy schedule of public
appearances, but he made an exception for the Atheist Alliance — or “the Triple
A,” as he called it — partly because the occasion coincided almost to the day
with his move 30 years ago from his native England to the United States. He was
already in Houston, as it happened, because he had come here for treatment at
the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he has turned his 12th-floor room into a
temporary library and headquarters.
Mr. Hitchens is gaunt these days, no longer barrel-chested. His voice is softer
than it used to be, and for the second time since he began treatment, he has
lost most of his hair. Once such an enthusiastic smoker that he would light up
in the shower, he gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago. Even more
inconceivable to many of his friends, Mr. Hitchens, who used to thrive on
whiskey the way a bee thrives on nectar, hasn’t had a drink since July, when a
feeding tube was installed in his stomach. “That’s the most depressing aspect,”
he said. “The taste is gone. I don’t even want to. It’s incredible what you can
get used to.”
But in most other respects Mr. Hitchens is undiminished, preferring to see
himself as living with cancer, not dying from it. He still holds forth in
dazzlingly clever and erudite paragraphs, pausing only to catch a breath or let
a punch line resonate, and though he says his legendary productivity has fallen
off a little since his illness, he still writes faster than most people talk.
Last week he stayed up until 1 in the morning to finish an article for Vanity
Fair, working on a laptop on his bedside table.
Writing seems to come almost as naturally as speech does to Mr. Hitchens, and he
consciously associates the two. “If you can talk, you can write,” he said. “You
have to be careful to keep your speech as immaculate as possible. That’s what
I’m most afraid of. I’m terrified of losing my voice.” He added: “Writing is
something I do for a living, all right — it’s my livelihood. But it’s also my
life. I couldn’t live without it.”
Mr. Hitchens’s newest book, published last month, is “Arguably,” a
paving-stone-sized volume consisting mostly of essays finished since his last
big collection, “Love, Poverty and War,” which came out in 2004. The range of
subjects is typically Hitchensian. There are essays — miniature pamphlets,
almost — on political subjects and especially on the danger posed to the West by
Islamic terrorism and totalitarianism, a subject that has preoccupied Mr.
Hitchens since 2001. But there are just as many on literary figures; there’s a
paean to oral sex, and there are little rants about unruly wine waiters, clichés
and the misuse of “fuel” as a verb. The book’s epigraph is from Henry James’s
novel “The Ambassadors”: “Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” And in an
introduction Mr. Hitchens writes: “Some of these articles were written with the
full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and
exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected.”
In his hospital room he suggested that an awareness of mortality was useful for
a writer but ideally it should remain latent. “I try not to dwell on it,” he
said, “except that once in a while I say, O.K., I’m not going to make that joke,
I’m not going to go for that chortle. Or if I have to choose between two
subjects, I won’t choose the boring one.”
He added, talking about an essay on Philip Larkin that made it into “Arguably”:
“I knew the collection was going to come out even if I did not, and I was very
pleased when I finished that one, because of the way it ends: ‘Our
almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.’ I remember
thinking, if that’s the last piece I write, that will do me.” After a moment he
went on: “The influence of Larkin is much greater than I thought. He’s perfect
for people who are thinking about death. You’ve got that old-line Calvinist
pessimism and modern, acid cynicism — a very good combo. He’s not liking what he
sees, and not pretending to.”
His main regret at the moment, Mr. Hitchens said, was that while he was keeping
up with his many deadlines — for Slate, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair — he didn’t
have the energy to also work on a book. He had recently come up with some new
ideas about his hero, George Orwell, for example — among them that Orwell might
have had Asperger’s — and he said he ought to include them in a revised edition
of his 2002 book, “Why Orwell Matters.” He had also thought of writing a book
about dying. “It could be called ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting,’ ” he
said, laughing.
Turning serious, he said, “I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but
giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.” He added: “I don’t know
why I got so sick. Maybe it was the smokes, or maybe it’s genes. My father died
of the same thing. It’s pointless getting into remorse.”
On balance, he reflected, the past year has been a pretty good one. He won a
National Magazine Award, published “Arguably,” debated Tony Blair in front of a
huge audience and added two states to the list of those he has visited. “I lack
only the Dakotas and Nebraska,” he said, “though I may not get there unless
someone comes up with some ethanol-based cancer treatment in Omaha.”
Mr. Hitchens has an extensive support network that includes his wife, Carol
Blue, and his great friends James Fenton and Martin Amis. Mr. Amis is known for
being cool and acerbic, but as he kissed and embraced Mr. Hitchens last week,
visiting on the way to a literary festival in Mexico, his affection for his
friend was unmistakable. “Hitch’s buoyancy is amazing,” he said later. “He has
this great love of life, which I rather envy, because I think I may be deficient
in that respect. It’s an odd thing to say, but he’s almost like a Tibetan monk.
It’s as if he’d become religious.”
Saturday 23 April 2011
The Guardian
Lawrence Wright
This article appeared on p57
of the Weekend section of the Guardian
on Saturday 23 April 2011.
It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.24 BST
on Saturday 23 April 2011.
It was last modified at 00.24 BST
on Saturday 23 April 2011.
It was first published at 00.03 BST
on Saturday 23 April 2011.
On 19 August 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of
Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and
screenwriter Paul Haggis. "For 10 months now I have been writing to ask you to
make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of
San Diego," Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at
Scientology's San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition
supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that the state of California should
sanction marriage only "between a man and a woman". The proposition passed. As
Haggis saw it, the San Diego church's "public sponsorship of Proposition 8,
which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of
California – rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state –
is a stain on the integrity of our organisation and a stain on us personally.
Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us." Haggis
wrote, "Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent." He concluded, "I hereby
resign my membership in the Church of Scientology."
Haggis was prominent in both Scientology and Hollywood, two communities that
often converge. Although he is less famous than certain other Scientologists,
such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he had been in the organisation for nearly
35 years. Haggis wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, which won the
Oscar for Best Picture in 2004, and he wrote and directed Crash, which won Best
Picture the next year. Davis, too, is part of Hollywood society: his mother is
Anne Archer, who starred in Fatal Attraction and Patriot Games.
In previous correspondence with Davis, Haggis had demanded that the church
publicly renounce Proposition 8. "I feel strongly about this for a number of
reasons," he wrote. "You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay
sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many
occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and
then quote LRH in their defence." The initials stand for L Ron Hubbard, the
founder of Scientology, whose extensive writings and lectures form the church's
scripture. Haggis related a story about Katy, the youngest of three daughters
from his first marriage, who lost the friendship of a fellow Scientologist after
revealing that she was gay. The friend began warning others, "Katy is '1.1'."
The number refers to a sliding Tone Scale of emotional states that Hubbard
published in a 1951 book, The Science Of Survival. A person classified "1.1"
was, Hubbard said, "Covertly Hostile" – "the most dangerous and wicked level" –
and he noted that people in this state engaged in such things as casual sex,
sadism and homosexual activity. Hubbard's Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated
"homosexuality with being a pervert". (Such remarks don't appear in recent
editions of the book.)
In his resignation letter, Haggis explained to Davis that, for the first time,
he had explored outside perspectives on Scientology. He had read a recent exposé
in a Florida newspaper, the St Petersburg Times, which reported, among other
things, that senior executives in the church had been subjecting other
Scientologists to physical violence. Haggis said he felt "dumbstruck and
horrified", adding, "Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we
are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil-rights violations."
Online, Haggis came across an appearance that Davis had made on CNN in May 2008.
The presenter John Roberts asked Davis about the church's policy of
"disconnection", in which members are encouraged to separate themselves from
friends or family members who criticise Scientology. Davis responded, "There's
no such thing as disconnection as you're characterising it."
In his resignation letter, Haggis said, "We all know this policy exists." Haggis
reminded Davis that a few years earlier his wife had been ordered to disconnect
from her parents, "because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did
25 years ago when they resigned from the church". Haggis continued, "To see you
lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about?"
Haggis forwarded his resignation to more than 20 Scientologist friends,
including Archer, Travolta and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. "People
started calling me, saying, 'What's this letter Paul sent you?'" Davis says. A
St Petersburg Times exposé had inspired a fresh series of hostile reports on
Scientology, which has long been portrayed in the media as a cult. And, given
that some well-known Scientologist actors were rumoured to be closeted
homosexuals, Haggis's letter raised awkward questions about the church's
attitude toward homosexuality. Most important, Haggis wasn't an obscure
dissident; he was a celebrity, and the church, from its inception, has depended
on celebrities to lend it prestige. To Haggis's friends, his resignation from
the Church of Scientology felt like a very public act of betrayal. They were
surprised, angry and confused. "'Destroy the letter, resign quietly' – that's
what they all wanted," Haggis says.
Paul Haggis: 'I had such a lack of curiosity when I was in the church. It’s
stunning to me because I'm such a curious person.' Photograph: Rudy Waks/Corbis
Outline
Last March, I met Haggis, 57, in New York. He was in the editing phase of his
latest movie, The Next Three Days, a thriller starring Russell Crowe, and
preparing for two events later that week: a preview screening in New York and a
charitable trip to Haiti.
Haggis was born in 1953, and grew up in London, Ontario, where his father, Ted,
had a construction company. He decided at an early age to be a writer, but after
leaving school, he drifted, hanging out with hippies and drug dealers.
He fell in love with Diane Gettas, a nurse, and they began sharing a one-bedroom
apartment. One day in 1975, when he was 22, Haggis was walking to a record store
when a young man pressed a book into his hands. "You have a mind," the man said.
"This is the owner's manual." The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science Of
Mental Health, by L Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis
began reading it, Dianetics had sold about 2.5m copies. Today, according to the
church, that figure has reached more than 21m.
Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words "Church of
Scientology". He had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a
friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult
didn't bother him. In fact, he said, "it drew my interest. I tend to run toward
things I don't understand."
At the time, Haggis and Gettas were having arguments; the Scientologists told
him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. "It was pitched
to me as applied philosophy," Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together
and, shortly afterwards, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the
first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.
The Church of Scientology says its purpose is to transform individual lives and
the world. "A civilisation without insanity, without criminals and without war,
where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is
free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology," Hubbard wrote.
Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan – an immortal spiritual
being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that
Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as
"the source" of the religion.
In 1955, a year after the church's founding, a publication urged Scientologists
to cultivate celebrities: "It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if
prime communicators benefiting from it would mention it." At the end of the 60s,
the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now
satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las
Vegas and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in
Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era,
at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and
had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and
ambitious. The actor Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas
in 1970 to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for
cocaine. "Without Scientology, I would be dead," she has said.
In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high
school dropout, was making his first movie, The Devil's Rain, when an actor on
the set gave him a copy of Dianetics. "My career immediately took off," he told
a church publication. "Scientology put me into the big time." The testimonials
of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology
has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors "make it in the
industry".
Haggis and I travelled together to LA, where he was presenting The Next Three
Days to the studio. During the flight, I asked how high he had gone in
Scientology. "All the way to the top," he said. Since the early 80s, he had been
an Operating Thetan VII, which was the highest level available when he became
affiliated with the church. (In 1988, a new level, OT VIII, was introduced to
members; it required study at sea, and Haggis declined to pursue it.) He had
made his ascent by buying "intensives" – bundled hours of auditing, at a
discount rate. "It wasn't so expensive back then," he said.
David S Touretzky, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
has done extensive research on Scientology. (He is not a defector.) He estimates
that the coursework alone now costs nearly $300,000 and, with the additional
auditing and contributions expected of upper-level members, the cumulative cost
may exceed half a million dollars. (The church says there are no fixed fees,
adding, "Donations requested for 'courses' at the Church of Scientology begin at
$50 and could never possibly reach the amount suggested.")
Haggis and I spoke about some events that had stained the reputation of the
church while he was a member. For example, there was the death of Lisa
McPherson, a Scientologist who died after a mental breakdown, in 1995. She had
crashed a car in Clearwater, Florida – where Scientology has its spiritual
headquarters – and then stripped off her clothes and wandered naked down the
street. She was taken to hospital, but, in the company of several other
Scientologists, she checked out against doctors' advice. (The church considers
psychiatry an evil profession.) McPherson spent the next 17 days being subjected
to church remedies, such as doses of vitamins and attempts to feed her with a
turkey baster. She became comatose, and died of a pulmonary embolism before
church members finally brought her to the hospital. The medical examiner in the
case, Joan Wood, initially ruled that the cause of death was undetermined, but
she told a reporter, "This is the most severe case of dehydration I've ever
seen." The state of Florida filed charges against the church. In February 2000,
under withering questioning from experts hired by the church, Wood declared that
the death was "accidental". The charges were dropped and Wood resigned.
Haggis said that, at the time, he had chosen not to learn the details of
McPherson's death. "I had such a lack of curiosity when I was inside. It's
stunning to me, because I'm such a curious person." His life was comfortable, he
liked his circle of friends, and he didn't want to upset the balance. It was
also easy to dismiss people who quit the church. As Haggis put it, "There's
always disgruntled folks who say all sorts of things."
In 1977, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married and, shortly after, they drove to
Los Angeles, where he got a job moving furniture. In 1978, Gettas gave birth to
their first child, Alissa. Haggis was spending much of his time and money taking
advanced courses and being audited, which involved the use of an
electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The device, often compared in the press to a
polygraph, measures the bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when
a person answers questions posed by an auditor. ("Thoughts have a small amount
of mass," the church contends in a statement. "These are the changes measured.")
The Food and Drug Administration has compelled the church to declare that the
instrument has no curative powers and is ineffective in diagnosing or treating
disease.
Haggis found the E-Meter surprisingly responsive. The auditor often probed for
what Scientologists call "earlier similars". Haggis explained, "If you're having
a fight with your girlfriend, the auditor will ask, 'Can you remember an earlier
time when something like this happened?' And if you do, then he'll ask, 'What
about a time before that? And a time before that?'" Often, the process leads
participants to recall past lives.
Although Haggis never believed in reincarnation, "I did experience gains. I
think I did, in some ways, become a better person." Then again, he admitted, "I
tried to find ways to be a better husband, but I never really did. I was still
the selfish bastard I always was."
At night, Haggis wrote scripts on spec. He met Skip Press, another young writer
who was a Scientologist, and they started hanging out with other aspiring
writers and directors who were involved with Scientology. "We would meet at a
restaurant across from the Celebrity Centre called Two Dollar Bill's," Press
recalls. Haggis and a friend from this circle eventually got a job writing for
cartoons, including Scooby-Doo and Richie Rich.
By now, Haggis had begun advancing through the upper levels of Scientology. The
church defines an Operating Thetan as "one who can handle things without having
to use a body or physical means".
"The process of induction is so long and slow that you really do convince
yourself of the truth of some of these things that don't make sense," Haggis
told me. Although he refused to specify the contents of OT materials, on the
grounds that it offended Scientologists, he said, "If they'd sprung this stuff
on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right
away." But by the time Haggis approached the OT III material, he'd already been
through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church,
as was his sister, Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through
Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community and had invested
a lot of money in the programme. The incentive to believe was high.
The many discrepancies between L Ron Hubbard's legend and his life have
overshadowed the fact that he was a fascinating man. He was born in Tilden,
Nebraska, in 1911. In 1933, he married Margaret Grubb, whom he called Polly;
their first child, Lafayette, was born the following year. He visited Hollywood,
and began getting work as a screenwriter, but much of his energy was devoted to
publishing stories, often under pseudonyms, in pulp magazines such as Astounding
Science Fiction.
During the second world war, Hubbard served in the US navy. He later wrote that
he was gravely injured in battle and fully healed himself, using techniques that
became the foundation of Scientology. After the war, his marriage dissolved, and
he ended up in Los Angeles. He continued writing for the pulps, but he had
larger ambitions. He began codifying a system of self-betterment, and set up an
office where he tested his techniques on the actors, directors and writers he
encountered. He named his system Dianetics.
The book, Dianetics, appeared in May 1950 and spent 28 weeks on the New York
Times bestseller list. Dianetics purports to identify the source of
self-destructive behaviour – the "reactive mind", a kind of data bank that is
filled with traumatic memories called "engrams". The object of Dianetics is to
drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the
reactive mind, leaving a person "Clear".
Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a "precision science". He offered his findings to
the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, but
was spurned; he subsequently portrayed psychiatry and psychology as demonic
competitors. Scientists dismissed Hubbard's book, but hundreds of Dianetics
groups sprang up across the US and abroad. The Church of Scientology was
officially founded in Los Angeles in February 1954, by several devoted followers
of Hubbard's work.
In 1966, Hubbard – who by then had met and married another woman, Mary Sue Whipp
– set sail with a handful of Scientologists. The church says that being at sea
provided a "distraction-free environment", allowing Hubbard "to continue his
research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness". Within a year, he had
acquired several ocean-going vessels. He staffed the ships with volunteers, many
of them teenagers, who called themselves the Sea Organisation. Hubbard and his
followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous
lifetimes. (The church denies this.)
The Sea Org became the church's equivalent of a religious order. The group now
has 6,000 members, who perform tasks such as counselling, maintaining the
church's vast property holdings and publishing its official literature. Sea Org
initiates – some of whom are children – sign contracts for up to a billion years
of service. They get a small weekly stipend and receive free auditing and
coursework. Sea Org members can marry, but they must agree not to raise children
while in the organisation.
As Scientology grew, it was increasingly attacked. In 1963, the Los Angeles
Times called it a "pseudoscientific cult". The church attracted dozens of
lawsuits, largely from ex-parishioners. In 1980, Hubbard disappeared from public
view. Although there were rumours that he was dead, he was actually driving
around the Pacific Northwest in a motor home. He returned to writing science
fiction and produced a 10-volume work, Mission Earth, each volume of which was a
bestseller. In 1983, he settled quietly on a horse farm in Creston, California.
In 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult
court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim,
sought $25m for "infliction of emotional injury". He claimed he had been kept
for 18 hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, and deprived of
adequate sleep and food.
That October, the litigants filed OT III materials in court. Fifteen hundred
Scientologists crowded into the courthouse, trying to block access to the
documents. The church, which considers it sacrilegious for the uninitiated to
read its confidential scriptures, got a restraining order, but the Los Angeles
Times obtained a copy of the material and printed a summary.
"A major cause of mankind's problems began 75m years ago," the Times wrote, when
the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of 90
planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. "Then, as now, the
materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation." Xenu decided "to take
radical measures". Surplus beings were transported to volcanoes on Earth, and
bombed, "destroying the people but freeing their spirits – called Thetans –
which attached themselves to one another in clusters." The Times account
concluded, "When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep
perpetuating themselves."
The jury awarded Wollersheim $30m. (Eventually, an appellate court reduced the
judgment to $2.5m.) The secret OT III documents remained sealed, but the Times'
report had already circulated widely, and the church was met with derision all
over the world.
The current Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige. He was Tom Cruise's
best man when he married Katie Holmes in 2006. Photograph: Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Image
The other court challenge in 1985 involved Julie Christofferson-Titchbourne, a
defector who argued that the church had falsely claimed that Scientology would
improve her intelligence, and even her eyesight. In a courtroom in Portland, she
said that Hubbard had been portrayed to her as a nuclear physicist; in fact, he
had failed to graduate from George Washington University. As for Hubbard's claim
that he had cured himself of grave injuries in the second world war, the
plaintff's evidence indicated that he had never been wounded in battle.
Witnesses for the plaintiff testified that in one six-month period in 1982, the
church transferred millions of dollars to Hubbard through a Liberian
corporation. The church denied this, and said that Hubbard's income was
generated by his book sales.
The jury sided with Christofferson-Titchbourne, awarding her $39m.
Scientologists streamed into Portland to protest. They carried banners
advocating religious freedom and sang We Shall Overcome. Scientology
celebrities, including Travolta, showed up. Haggis, who was writing for the NBC
series The Facts Of Life at the time, came and was drafted to write speeches. "I
wasn't a celebrity – I was a lowly sitcom writer," he says. He stayed for four
days.
The judge declared a mistrial, saying that Christofferson-Titchbourne's lawyers
had presented prejudicial arguments. It was one of the greatest triumphs in
Scientology's history, and the church members who had gone to Portland felt an
enduring sense of kinship. (A year and a half later, the church settled with
Christofferson-Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.)
In 1986, Hubbard died, of a stroke, in his motor home. He was 74. Two weeks
later, Scientologists gathered in the Hollywood Palladium for a special
announcement. A young man, David Miscavige, stepped on to the stage. Short, trim
and muscular, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the
assembled Scientologists that for the past six years Hubbard had been
investigating new, higher OT levels. "He has now moved on to the next level,"
Miscavige said. "It's a level beyond anything any of us ever imagined. This
level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely
exterior from the body. Thus, at 20:00 hours, the 24 of January, AD 36" – that
is, 36 years after the publication of Dianetics – "L Ron Hubbard discarded the
body he had used in this lifetime." Miscavige began clapping, and led the crowd
in an ovation, shouting, "Hip hip hooray!"
Miscavige was a Scientology prodigy from the Philadelphia area. He claimed that,
growing up, he had been sickly and struggled with bad asthma; Dianetics
counselling had dramatically alleviated the symptoms. As he puts it, he
"experienced a miracle". He decided to devote his life to the religion. He had
gone Clear by the age of 15, and the next year he dropped out of high school to
join the Sea Org. He became an executive assistant to Hubbard, who gave him
special tutoring in photography and cinematography. When Hubbard went into
seclusion, in 1980, Miscavige was one of the few people who maintained close
contact with him. With Hubbard's death, the curtain rose on a man who was going
to impose his personality on an organisation facing its greatest test, the death
of its charismatic founder. Miscavige was 25 years old.
When Haggis finally reached the top of the Operating Thetan pyramid, he expected
that he would feel a sense of accomplishment, but he remained confused and
unsatisfied.
He was a workaholic, and as his career took off, he spent less and less time
with his family. He and his wife began a divorce battle that lasted nine years
and, in 1997, a court determined that Haggis should have full custody of the
children.
His daughters were resentful. "I didn't even know why he wanted us," Lauren
says. The girls demanded to be sent to boarding school, so Haggis enrolled them
at the Delphian School, which uses Hubbard's educational system, called Study
Tech. By the time she graduated, Lauren says, she had scarcely ever heard anyone
speak ill of Scientology.
Alissa found herself moving away from the church and did not speak to her father
for a number of years. When she was in her early 20s, she accepted the fact
that, like her sister Katy, she was gay.
In 1991, as his marriage was crumbling, Haggis went to a Fourth of July party at
the home of Scientologist friends. Deborah Rennard, who played JR's alluring
secretary on Dallas, was at the party. Rennard had grown up in a Scientology
household and joined the church herself at the age of 17. They became a couple,
and married in June, 1997. A son, James, was born the following year.
Despite his growing disillusionment with Scientology, Haggis raised a
significant amount of money for it, and made sizeable donations himself. The
Church of Scientology had recently gained tax-exempt status as a religious
institution, making donations, as well as the cost of auditing, tax-deductible.
(Church members had lodged more than 2,000 lawsuits against the Internal Revenue
Service, ensnaring the agency in litigation. As part of the settlement, the
church agreed to drop its legal campaign.)
Over the years, Haggis estimates, he spent more than $100,000 on courses and
auditing, and $300,000 on various Scientology initiatives. Rennard says she
spent about $150,000 on coursework. Haggis recalls that the demands for
donations never seemed to stop. "They used friends and any kind of pressure they
could apply," he says. "I gave them money just to keep them from calling and
hounding me."
Proposition 8 passed in November 2008. A few days after sending his resignation
letter to Tommy Davis in February 2009, Haggis came home from work to find nine
or 10 of his Scientology friends standing in his front yard. He invited them in
to talk and referred them to the exposé in the St Petersburg Times that had so
shaken him: The Truth Rundown. The first instalment had appeared in June 2009.
Haggis had learned from reading it that several of the church's top managers had
defected in despair. Marty Rathbun had once been inspector general of the
church's Religious Technology Centre, and had also overseen Scientology's
legal-defence strategy, reporting directly to Miscavige. Amy Scobee had been an
executive in the Celebrity Centre network. Mike Rinder had been the church's
spokesperson, the job now held by Davis. One by one, they had disappeared from
Scientology, and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask where they had gone.
The defectors told the newspaper that Miscavige was a serial abuser of his
staff. "The issue wasn't the physical pain of it," Rinder said. "It's the fact
that the domination you're getting – hit in the face, kicked – and you can't do
anything about it. If you did try, you'd be attacking the COB" – the chairman of
the board. Tom De Vocht, a defector who had been a manager at the Clearwater
spiritual centre, told the paper that he, too, had been beaten by Miscavige; he
said that from 2003 to 2005, he had witnessed Miscavige striking other staff
members as many as 100 times. Rathbun, Rinder and De Vocht all admitted that
they had engaged in physical violence themselves. "It had become the accepted
way of doing things," Rinder said. Scobee said that nobody challenged the abuse
because people were terrified of Miscavige. Their greatest fear was expulsion:
"You don't have any money. You don't have job experience. You don't have
anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you."
Much of the alleged abuse took place at the Gold Base, a Scientology outpost in
the desert 80 miles south-east of Los Angeles. Miscavige has an office there,
and for decades the base's location was unknown even to many church insiders.
According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected
Scientology leaders to instil aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said
that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning
him in 2004 to the Hole – a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base.
"There were between 80 and 100 people sentenced to the Hole at that time,"
Rathbun said in the declaration. "We were required to do group confessions all
day and all night."
The church claims that such stories are false: "There is not, and never has
been, any place of 'confinement'… nor is there anything in Church policy that
would allow such confinement."
According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that
everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would
be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses "were not
participants would have their marriages terminated". The St Petersburg Times
noted that Miscavige played Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on a boom box as the
church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case,
ripping a chair apart.
De Vocht, one of the participants, says the event lasted until 4am: "It got more
and more physical as the number of chairs went down." Many of the participants
had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards,
no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a driver's licence or a
passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the
game, Miscavige had aeroplane reservations made for them. He said that buses
were going to be leaving at 6am. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room
was nakedly clear.
Davis told me that a musical chairs episode did occur. He explained that
Miscavige had been away from the Gold Base for some time, and when he returned
he discovered that in his absence many jobs had been reassigned. The game was
meant to demonstrate that even seemingly small changes can be disruptive to an
organisation – underscoring an "administrative policy of the church". The rest
of the defectors' accounts, Davis told me, was "hoo-ha": "Chairs being ripped
apart, and people being threatened that they're going to be sent to far-flung
places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and they're going to force
their spouses – and on and on and on. I mean, it's just nuts!"
The church provided me with 11 statements from Scientologists, all of whom said
that Miscavige had never been violent. The church characterises Scobee, Rinder,
Rathbun, De Vocht and other defectors I spoke with as "discredited individuals"
who were demoted for incompetence or expelled for corruption; the defectors'
accounts are consistent only because they have "banded together to advance and
support each other's false 'stories'".
After reading the St Petersburg Times series, Haggis tracked down Marty Rathbun,
who says Haggis was shocked by their conversation. "The thing that was most
troubling to Paul was that I literally had to escape," Rathbun told me. (A few
nights after the musical chairs incident, he got on his motorcycle and waited
until a gate was opened for someone else; he sped out and didn't stop.) Haggis
called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One said he had escaped
from the Gold Base by driving his car through a wooden fence. Still others had
been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, "What kind
of organisation are we involved in where people just disappear?"
At his house, Haggis finished telling his friends what he had learned. "I
directed them to certain websites," he said, mentioning Exscientologykids.com.
The stories on the site, of children drafted into the Sea Org, appalled him.
"They were 10 years old, 12 years old, signing billion-year contracts – and
their parents go along with this?" Haggis told me. "Scrubbing pots, manual
labour – that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!"
Many Sea Org volunteers find themselves with no viable options for adulthood. If
they try to leave, the church presents them with a "freeloader tab" for all the
coursework and counselling they have received; the bill can amount to more than
$100,000. "Many of them actually pay it," Haggis said. "They leave, they're
ashamed of what they've done, they've got no money, no job history, they're
lost, they just disappear." In what seemed like a very unguarded comment, he
said, "I would gladly take down the church for that one thing."
The church says it adheres to "all child labour laws", and that minors can't
sign up without parental consent; the freeloader tabs are an "ecclesiastical
matter" and are not enforced through litigation.
Haggis's friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings. This would be
the last time most of them spoke to him.
In the days after, church officials and members came to his office, distracting
his producing partner, Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist. "Every day,
for hours, he would have conversations with them," Nozik told me.
"I listened to their point of view, but I didn't change my mind," Haggis says,
noting that the Scientology officials, "became more livid and irrational."
In October 2009, Rathbun called Haggis and asked if he could publish the
resignation letter on his blog. "You're a journalist, you don't need my
permission," Haggis said, although he asked Rathbun to excise parts relating to
Katy's homosexuality.
Haggis says he didn't think about the consequences of his decision: "I thought
it would show up on a couple of websites. I'm a writer, I'm not Lindsay Lohan."
Rathbun got 55,000 hits on his blog that afternoon. The next morning, the story
was in newspapers around the world.
At the time Haggis was doing his research, the FBI was conducting its own
investigation. Agents Tricia Whitehill and Valerie Venegas interviewed former
church and Sea Org members. One was Gary Morehead, who had been the head of
security at the Gold Base; he left the church in 1996. In February 2010, he told
Whitehill he had developed a "blow drill" to track down Sea Org members who left
Gold Base. In 13 years, he estimates, he and his security team brought more than
100 Sea Org members back to the base. When emotional, spiritual or psychological
pressure failed to work, Morehead says, physical force was sometimes used. (The
church says that blow drills do not exist.)
Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human
trafficking. The California penal code lists several indicators: signs of trauma
or fatigue; being afraid or unable to talk; owing a debt to one's employer.
Those conditions echo the testimony of many former Sea Org members.
Sea Org members who have "failed to fulfil their ecclesiastical
responsibilities" may be sent to one of the church's several Rehabilitation
Project Force locations. Defectors describe them as punitive re-education camps.
In California, there is one in Los Angeles; until 2005, there was one near the
Gold Base, at a place called Happy Valley. Bruce Hines, a defector turned
research physicist, says he was confined to RPF for six years, first in LA, then
in Happy Valley. He recalls that the properties were heavily guarded and that
anyone who tried to flee would be subjected to further punishment. "In 1995,
when I was put in RPF, there were 12 of us," Hines said. "At the high point, in
2000, there were about a 120." Some members have been in RPF for more than a
decade, doing manual labour and extensive spiritual work. (Davis says that Sea
Org members enter RPF by their own choosing and can leave at any time; the
manual labour maintains church facilities and instils "pride of
accomplishment".)
Defectors also talked to the FBI about Miscavige's luxurious lifestyle. The law
prohibits the head of a tax-exempt organisation from enjoying unusual perks or
compensation; it's called inurement. Davis refused to disclose how much money
Miscavige earns, and the church isn't required to do so, but Headley and other
defectors suggest that Miscavige lives more like a Hollywood star than like the
head of a religious organisation – flying on chartered jets and wearing
custom-made shoes. (The church denies this characterisation and "vigorously
objects to the suggestion that Church funds inure to the private benefit of Mr
Miscavige.") By contrast, Sea Org members typically receive $50 a week.
Last April, John Brousseau, who had been in the Sea Org for more than 30 years,
left the Gold Base and drove to south Texas to meet Marty Rathbun. He was
unhappy with Miscavige, his former brother-in-law, whom he considered
"detrimental to the goals of Scientology". At 5.30 one morning, he was leaving
his motel room when he heard footsteps behind him. It was Tommy Davis; he and 19
church members had tracked Brousseau down. Brousseau locked himself in his room
and called Rathbun, who alerted the police; Davis went home without Brousseau.
In a deposition given in July, Davis said no when asked if he had ever "followed
a Sea Organisation member that has blown [fled the church]". Under further
questioning, he insisted that he was only trying "to see a friend of mine".
Davis now calls Brousseau "a liar".
Brousseau says his defection caused anxiety, in part because he had worked on a
series of special projects for Tom Cruise. Cruise says he was introduced to the
church in 1986 by his first wife Mimi Rogers (she denies this), and Miscavige
has called him "the most dedicated Scientologist I know". When Cruise married
Katie Holmes in 2006, Miscavige was his best man.
In 2005, Miscavige showed Cruise a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he owned.
Brousseau recalls, "Cruise asked me, 'God, could you paint my bike like that?'"
Brousseau also says he helped customise a Ford Excursion SUV that Cruise owned.
"I was getting paid $50 a week," he recalls. "And I'm supposed to be working for
the betterment of mankind." Both Cruise's attorney and the church deny
Brousseau's account.
Miscavige's official title is chairman of the board of the Religious Technology
Centre, but he dominates the entire organisation. His word is absolute, and he
imposes his will even on some of the people closest to him. According to Rinder
and Brousseau, in June 2006, while Miscavige was away from the Gold Base, his
wife, Shelly, filled several job vacancies without her husband's permission.
Soon afterwards, she disappeared. Her current status is unknown. Davis told me,
"I definitely know where she is", but he wouldn't disclose where that is.
In late September, Davis and other church representatives met with me. In
response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over 48
binders of supporting material. Davis attacked the credibility of Scientology
defectors, whom he calls "bitter apostates". We discussed the allegations of
abuse lodged against Miscavige. "The only people who will corroborate are their
fellow apostates," Davis said. He produced affidavits from other Scientologists
refuting the accusations, and noted that the tales about Miscavige always hinged
on "inexplicable violent outbursts". Davis said, "One would think that if such a
thing occurred – which it most certainly did not – there'd have to be a reason."
I had wondered about these stories as well. While Rinder and Rathbun were in the
church, they had repeatedly claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless.
Then, after Rinder defected, he said Miscavige had beaten him 50 times. Rathbun
has confessed that in 1997 he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the
case of Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism. If these men
were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of
lying to destroy it? Davis later claimed that Rathbun is in fact trying to
overthrow Scientology's current leadership and take over the church. (Rathbun
now makes his living by providing Hubbard-inspired counselling to other
defectors, but says he has no desire to be part of a hierarchical organisation.
"Power corrupts," he says.)
Twelve other defectors told me that they had been beaten by Miscavige, or had
witnessed Miscavige beating other church staff members. Most of them, such as
John Peeler, noted that Miscavige's demeanour changed "like the snap of a
finger".
At the meeting, Davis and I also discussed Hubbard's war record. His voice
filling with emotion, he said that if it was true that Hubbard had not been
injured, then "the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures
were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore,
Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie." He
concluded, "The fact of the matter is that Mr Hubbard was a war hero."
After filing a request with the National Archives in St Louis, we obtained what
archivists assured us were Hubbard's complete military records – more than 900
pages. Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard's being wounded in
battle.
Since leaving the church, Haggis has been in therapy, which he has found
helpful. He has learned how much he blames others for his problems, especially
those who are closest to him. "I really wish I had found a good therapist when I
was 21," he said.
On 9 November, The Next Three Days premiered in Manhattan. After the screening,
I asked Haggis if he felt that he had finally left Scientology. "I feel much
more myself, but there's a sadness," he admitted. "If you identify yourself with
something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it
leaves a bit of space." He went on, "It's not really the sense of a loss of
community. Those people who walked away from me were never really my friends."
I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology.
"These people have long memories," he told me. "My bet is that, within two
years, you're going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it
has nothing to do with the church." He thought for a moment, then said, "I was
in a cult for 34 years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I
couldn't."
September 28, 2010
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also
deeply ignorant about religion.
Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned
more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible,
Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the
constitutional principles governing religion in public life.
On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly,
and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.
Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two
religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the
researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into
account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other
religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.
That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American
Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray
O’Hair.
“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious
people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack
of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
Among the topics covered in the survey were: Where was Jesus born? What is
Ramadan? Whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation? Which Biblical
figure led the exodus from Egypt? What religion is the Dalai Lama? Joseph Smith?
Mother Theresa? In most cases, the format was multiple choice.
The researchers said that the questionnaire was designed to represent a breadth
of knowledge about religion, but was not intended to be regarded as a list of
the most essential facts about the subject. Most of the questions were easy, but
a few were difficult enough to discern which respondents were highly
knowledgeable.
On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most
right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.
On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism,
the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.
One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans
wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public
schools.
An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents, asked whether public school teachers
are permitted to lead a class in prayer, correctly answered no.
But fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted “to
read from the Bible as an example of literature.” And only about one third knew
that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s
religions.
The survey’s authors concluded that there was “widespread confusion” about “the
line between teaching and preaching.”
Mr. Smith said the survey appeared to be the first comprehensive effort at
assessing the basic religious knowledge of Americans, so it is impossible to
tell whether they are more or less informed than in the past.
The phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish in May and June.
There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those
groups ranked.
Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the
essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these
findings:
¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man
who started the Protestant Reformation.
¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that
the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but
actually become the body and blood of Christ.
¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost
rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.
The question about Maimonides was the one that the fewest people answered
correctly. But 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon, and 82 percent knew
that Mother Theresa was Roman Catholic.
LODI, Calif. — When Karen Buchanan, an insurance claim worker and
self-described “free thinker and atheist,” first moved to this Central
California farming city three years ago, she started attending City Council
meetings to find out what was going on in local politics.
What she found, though, was surprising and upsetting, she said: each meeting
began with an invocation, often mentioning Jesus, sometimes asking attendees to
bow their heads, and periodically sprinkling in excerpts from the Bible.
“I was really uncomfortable,” Ms. Buchanan recalled. “There’s no reason to have
prayer. If the Council members need to pray, I’d think they could pray in quiet
before the meeting. Prayer isn’t city business.”
Perhaps not, but the Lodi City Council decided Wednesday night that it was
appropriate to pray before meetings as long as the prayers took place before the
opening gavel, and did not promote a specific religion or try to convert anyone.
Atheists are also invited to speak.
The Council’s vote, which was unanimous, was unlikely to satisfy either Ms.
Buchanan or the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which has sent letters of
complaint here and to a dozen or so other cities in an effort to excise religion
from the stately and sometimes stultifying business of local governance.
The group’s list includes the alliterative trio of Tracy, Turlock and Tehachapi
in California, Chesapeake, Va., Memphis; and Independence, Mo.
Annie Laurie Gaylor, a founder and president of the foundation, which claims
14,000 members, said her group had two issues with the prayer: separation of
church and state, and government efficiency.
“We would prefer that there were no prayer at all; it’s divisive and a waste a
time,” Ms. Gaylor said. The complaints and the equally vocal support for
pre-meeting prayer were heard Wednesday in a special meeting that drew some 500
people and did not begin with a public invocation.
Alice Alvarez Aguila, a private home worker came with family members and friends
from Lighthouse Mission, a Pentecostal church in Stockton, Calif., about 15
miles away.
“Why should they take the name of Jesus out of meetings when he shed his blood
on the cross for us?” she said.
Supporters of the Lodi prayer have found a national advocate in the Alliance
Defense Fund, a Christian legal group based in Arizona, which has sent letters
to thousands of city councils around the country in recent years, urging them to
keep their invocations and providing model prayer policies that they say do not
fall afoul of the law.
J. Michael Johnson, a senior legal counsel for the fund, accused the Freedom
From Religion Foundation of trying to “pick on these small-town governments and
trying to bully them into submission” adding that many legislative bodies pray
before taking up the agenda.
“It’s been an essential part of our heritage since the time of our nation’s
founding,” Mr. Johnson said, adding that it would only be “unconstitutional for
the government to tell them how to pray” or which God to pray for.
The prayers, he said, were “not an establishment of religion.”
Jesse H. Choper, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley,
said that the 1983 Supreme Court ruling in Marsh v. Chambers found that prayer
before public meetings was allowed if the prayers remained nonsectarian.
“What we do know is the use of God is not unacceptable,” Professor Choper said.
Since 2006, the official policy of the Lodi Council has been to have only
non-denominational invocations, something that had apparently been ignored by
pastors who appeared at meetings on many occasions, according to a chart on the
Freedom From Religion foundation Web site.
Ms. Gaylor said she was disappointed by the Council’s decision and believed that
legal action would eventually be necessary.
She also said that if there was a deity he probably was not much interested in
local politics. “He’d be stopping up his ears,” she said.
The answer to the problems of free speech
is always more free speech
Friday, 13 February 2009
The Independent
Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone – and in
response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who
published the article.
Here's how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the
United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job
of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to
free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition
of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job
description. Now, she has to report on "abuses of free expression" including
"defamation of religions and prophets." Instead of defending free speech, she
must now oppose it.
I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes –
have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths.
They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead,
they must be "respected" – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever
anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of
"adulterous" women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year
old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these
are "religious" issues, and it is "offensive" to talk about them.
This trend is not confined to the UN. It has spread deep into democratic
countries. Whenever I have reported on immoral acts by religious fanatics –
Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim – I am accused of "prejudice", and I am not
alone. But my only "prejudice" is in favour of individuals being able to choose
to live their lives, their way, without intimidation. That means choosing
religion, or rejecting it, as they wish, after hearing an honest, open argument.
A religious idea is just an idea somebody had a long time ago, and claimed to
have received from God. It does not have a different status to other ideas; it
is not surrounded by an electric fence none of us can pass.
That's why I wrote: "All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't
respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from
the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the
age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole
villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him. I don't respect the idea that
the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or
bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived
before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. When you demand "respect",
you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human
being to engage in that charade."
An Indian newspaper called The Statesman – one of the oldest and most venerable
dailies in the country – thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of
secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic
fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor,
and the publisher to be arrested – or worse. They brought Central Calcutta to a
standstill. A typical supporter of the riots, Abdus Subhan, said he was
"prepared to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the
Prophet" and I should be sent "to hell if he chooses not to respect any religion
or religious symbol? He has no liberty to vilify or blaspheme any religion or
its icons on grounds of freedom of speech."
Then, two days ago, the editor and publisher were indeed arrested. They have
been charged – in the world's largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly
guaranteeing a right to free speech – with "deliberately acting with malicious
intent to outrage religious feelings". I am told I too will be arrested if I go
to Calcutta.
What should an honest defender of free speech say in this position? Every word I
wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the
facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth – especially
in a democracy of a billion people riven with streaks of fanaticism from a
minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.
I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that
could lead to a rerun of India's hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but
rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their
critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as
everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want – as
long as I too have the right to respond.
It's worth going through the arguments put forward by the rioting
fundamentalists, because they will keep recurring in the twenty-first century as
secularism is assaulted again and again. They said I had upset "the harmony" of
India, and it could only be restored by my arrest. But this is a lop-sided
vision of "harmony". It would mean that religious fundamentalists are free to
say whatever they want – and the rest of us have to shut up and agree.
The protestors said I deliberately set out to "offend" them, and I am supposed
to say that, no, no offence was intended. But the honest truth is more
complicated. Offending fundamentalists isn't my goal – but if it is an
inevitable side-effect of defending human rights, so be it. If fanatics who
believe Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and gay people should
be killed are insulted by my arguments, I don't resile from it. Nothing worth
saying is inoffensive to everyone.
You do not have a right to be ring-fenced from offence. Every day, I am offended
– not least by ancient religious texts filled with hate-speech. But I am glad,
because I know that the price of taking offence is that I can give it too, if
that is where the facts lead me. But again, the protestors propose a lop-sided
world. They do not propose to stop voicing their own heinously offensive views
about women's rights or homosexuality, but we have to shut up and take it – or
we are the ones being "insulting".
It's also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these
protestors, because they too aren't going away. Already I have had e-mails and
bloggers saying I was "asking for it" by writing a "needlessly provocative"
article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a
reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take
a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article
defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or
kill me for it. Is there equivalence here?
The argument that I was "asking for it" seems a little like saying a woman
wearing a short skirt is "asking" to be raped. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote when
he received far, far worse threats simply for writing a novel (and a masterpiece
at that): "When Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he ‘know what
he was doing' and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen
Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the
murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn't
he been ‘asking for it'?" When fanatics threaten violence against people who
simply use words, you should not blame the victim.
These events are also a reminder of why it is so important to try to let the
oxygen of rationality into religious debates – and introduce doubt. Voltaire –
one of the great anti-clericalists – said: "Those who can make you believe
absurdities can make you commit atrocities." If you can be made to believe the
absurd notion that an invisible deity dictated The Eternal Unchanging Truth to a
specific person at a specific time in history and anyone who questions this is
Evil, then you can easily be made to demand the death of journalists and free
women and homosexuals who question that Truth. But if they have a moment of
doubt – if there is a single nagging question at the back of their minds – then
they are more likely to hesitate. That's why these ideas must be challenged at
their core, using words and reason.
But the fundamentalists are determined not to allow those rational ideas to be
heard – because at some level they know they will persuade for many people,
especially children and teenagers in the slow process of being indoctrinated.
If, after all the discussion and all the facts about how contradictory and
periodically vile their ‘holy' texts are, religious people still choose
fanatical faith, I passionately defend their right to articulate it. Free speech
is for the stupid and the wicked and the wrong – whether it is fanatics or the
racist Geert Wilders – just as much as for the rational and the right. All I say
is that they do not have the right to force it on other people or silence the
other side. In this respect, Wilders resembles the Islamists he professes to
despise: he wants to ban the Koran. Fine. Let him make his argument. He
discredits himself by speaking such ugly nonsense.
The solution to the problems of free speech – that sometimes people will say
terrible things – is always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don't like
what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people. The best
way to discredit a bad argument is to let people hear it. I recently interviewed
the pseudo-historian David Irving, and simply quoting his crazy arguments did
far more harm to him than any Austrian jail sentence for Holocaust Denial.
Please do not imagine that if you defend these rioters, you are defending
ordinary Muslims. If we allow fanatics to silence all questioning voices, the
primary victims today will be Muslim women, Muslim gay people, and the many good
and honourable Muslim men who support them. Imagine what Britain would look like
now if everybody who offered dissenting thoughts about Christianity in the
seventeenth century and since was intimidated into silence by the mobs and
tyrants who wanted to preserve the most literalist and fanatical readings of the
Bible. Imagine how women and gay people would live.
You can see this if you compare my experience to that of journalists living
under religious-Islamist regimes. Because generations of British people sought
to create a secular space, when I went to the police, they offered total
protection. When they go to the police, they are handed over to the fanatics –
or charged for their "crimes." They are people like Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the
young Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death for downloading a
report on women's rights. They are people like the staff of Zanan, one of Iran's
leading reform-minded women's magazines, who have been told they will be jailed
if they carry on publishing. They are people like the 27-year old Muslim blogger
Abdel Rahman who has been seized, jailed and tortured in Egypt for arguing for a
reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah law.
It would be a betrayal of them – and the tens of thousands of journalists like
them – to apologize for what I wrote. Yes, if we speak out now, there will be
turbulence and threats, and some people may get hurt. But if we fall silent – if
we leave the basic human values of free speech, feminism and gay rights
undefended in the face of violent religious mobs – then many, many more people
will be hurt in the long term. Today, we have to use our right to criticise
religion – or lose it.
And finally, If you are appalled by the erosion of secularism across the
world and want to do something about it, there are a number of organizations you
can join, volunteer for or donate to.
Even donating a few hours or a few pounds can really make a difference to
defending people subject to religious oppression – by providing them with legal
help, education materials, and lobbying for changes in the law.
Whenever a religious belief is criticised,
its adherents say they're victims of
'prejudice'
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
The Independent
The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the
world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to
doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by
belligerent demands that we "respect" religion. A historic marker has just been
passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed
to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him
on the side of the religious censors.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest
aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed
by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it
"Western", Robert Mugabe calls it "colonialist", and Dick Cheney calls it
"outdated". The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it – but
the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard
against which to check ourselves. Until now.
Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded
the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak
freely failed to "respect" the "unique sensitivities" of the religious, they
decided – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It
insisted that you can only speak within "the limits set by the shariah [law]. It
is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves
encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community".
In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the
reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no
equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the
Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.
Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN's Rapporteur on Human Rights has always
been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including
the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job
description be changed so he can seek out and condemn "abuses of free
expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets". The council agreed
– so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who
wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.
Anything which can be deemed "religious" is no longer allowed to be a subject of
discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of
the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the
stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate
stood up to announce discussion of shariah "will not happen" and "Islam will not
be crucified in this council" – and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course,
the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of
the UN are ordinary Muslims.
Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in
countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely
thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a
large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared
it was "un-Islamic" and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi
Arabia, the country's most senior government-approved cleric said it was
perfectly acceptable for old men to marry 10-year-old girls, and those who
disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year-old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman
was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not
enforce shariah.
To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim
culture? Those women's, those children's, this blogger's – or their oppressors'?
As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: "The ultimate aim of this effort
is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic
states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal
dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."
Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.
Underpinning these "reforms" is a notion seeping even into democratic societies
– that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief
is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of
"prejudice" – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.
All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that
a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't
respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex
with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews
because they wouldn't follow him.
I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the
Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect
the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as
woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there
is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species,
and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.
When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real
respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.
But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for
censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of
faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality.
If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide
emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can
correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.
But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult.
By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of
evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it,
based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact
that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of
revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It's easier to demand the source of
the pesky doubt be silenced.
But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is
based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the
price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set
aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.
Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To
the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it
dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by
religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea
disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak
freely.
On a morning of countless firsts in U.S. history, add this: Barack Obama's
inaugural speech is the first time a president has ever explicitly acknowledged
not only "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus" but non-believers as well.
"This inclusiveness is a signature moment in American inaugural history," says
David Domke, professor of communications at the University of Washington in
Seattle, who has analyzed religious language in seven decades of inaugural and
State of the Union addresses.
Obama's speech was "right in the middle" of recent presidents in the number of
references to God — more than Reagan, fewer than George W. Bush — according to
Domke's tally.
Even so, "You could hear beneath it all references to God-given promise,
God's calls on us, God's grace on us, and the frequent use of 'shall' in that
King James-ian English of the Bible and early translations of Jewish prayer
books," adds Marvin Kranz, an American history expert at the Library of Congress
before his retirement.
Yet in its rhetoric and references, and in Obama's "almost musical delivery," it
was thoroughly expressive of a black and Christian man, even as it stretched
wide to cover all Americans, says Eddie Glaude, professor of religion and
African-American studies at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J.
Obama stood on Scripture, paraphrasing Paul's words in I Corinthians 13:11 that
the time has come to "put away childish things."
"He spoke in the grandest of the black church tradition when he talked about
how, in the darkest of hours, you have to find the strength to see past the
opacity of your condition, to have vision when there's no light. I was moved by
his facial expressions, too: the biting of the lip, the furrow of the brow, the
momentary pauses so you have a sense of the gravitas of the situation," says
Glaude.
Glaude also notes that Obama's "refutation of the Bush era, right in front of
Bush," was firm but gracefully done, serving as "a wonderful model of civil
disagreement. (He was saying) we are all in need of the grace and the love of
God because these are some difficult days ahead indeed."
Obama also selected two powerful pastors to open and close Tuesday's ceremony,
and 19 clergy and religious leaders will speak at the National Prayer Service at
the National Cathedral.
California mega-church pastor Rick Warren, under fire from gay rights activists
for his stand against same-sex marriage, gave an inaugural invocation that began
with the Hebrew Shema, ("Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,")
and concluded with the Lord's Prayer. While Warren dedicated his own words to
Jesus, he didn't ask the millions of viewers to signify to evangelical faith
with an "amen."
