Celebrities and Scientology

Kirstey Alley's recent brouhaha with The Today Show about whether Alley's new Organic Liaison diet program was a front for Scientology again makes me wonder how desperate some folks have to be desire something to fill a perceived spiritual void that they will believe some of the craziest nonsense ever invented (I highlight some of it here), and even donate money so they can become higher ranking members of the cult. Today, for instance, in writing story about the diet, noted that Alley donated $5 million to the organization about two years ago, giving her the Diamond Meritorious Award. Tom Cruise received the award in 2005 for donating $2 million. According to Wikipedia, among the ranks of other well-known celebrity Scientology members are: John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Catherine Bell, Nancy Cartwright, Beck, Jason Lee, Edgar Winter, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Anne Archer, Lisa Marie Presley, and opera singer Julia Migenes.

As it turns out, money really does by happiness and peace of mind, however strewn that path may be with sci-fi silliness. Here some other celebrities who have reported donated large sums to the church, along with their "awards:"

• Nancy Cartwright, 50, Patron Laureate Award: $10 million
• Kirstie Alley, 57, Diamond Meritorious Award: $5 million
• John Travolta, 53, Gold Meritorious Award: $1 million
• Kelly Preston, 45, Gold Meritorious Award: $1 million
• Priscilla Presley, 62, Patron Award: $50,000

Lay folks, as this New Yorker story reported about celebrity Scientologist, have to pay the piper for enlightenment as well:

An initial twelve-and-a-half-hour auditing session costs between six and seven hundred dollars, Greg LaClaire, a vice-president of Celebrity Centre, says. (Aspiring Scientologists can mitigate the expense by choosing to be audited by a fellow initiate rather than by a staff member.) In the Holiday 2007 Dianetics and Scientology catalogue, a deluxe Planetary Dissemination Edition E-Meter—billed as a “tool for Golden Age of Tech certainty,” to assist in “faster progress up The Bridge”—was offered, in “Diamond Blue,” for five thousand five hundred dollars.

Some, of course, have realized the falsities and possible abuses inside the church and have cried foul. This article relates some of their painful exoduses from the organization:

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years, in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a journey they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars for courses and counseling and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

Thus, Scientology isn't all that different than other religions in some regards: fantastical stories, claims that it produces inner peace and vanquishes internal and/or spiritual demons and driven by power and influence. Because it's human nature, celebrities can't necessarily be faulted so much for clambering after their spiritual selves in this way. But it's crushingly obvious that they, and to a lesser extent regular Joes fooled into the believing in the cult, like the family above, are purchasing their faith, similar to how fraternity and sorority members purchase their friends, both amounting to a deplorable and disingenuous business.